Oliver Sacks in Psychological and Physiological Consols of Nature – The Marginalian
“I work like a gardener,” wrote the great painter Joan Miró when he reflected on the proper pace of creative work. It is no coincidence that Virginia Woolf had her fascinating epiphany about what it means to be an artist while walking among the flower beds in a garden in St. Ives. Indeed, gardening – even being in a garden – is nothing less than a triumph of resistance to the merciless race of modern life, which is too focused on production at the expense of creativity, understanding, rationality; a reminder that we are creatures covered in a vast web of life, where, as the great naturalist John Muir noted long ago, “when we try to pick out anything for itself, we find it attached to everything else in the universe”; returning to what is most noble, meaning most natural, to us. There is something deeply human in listening to the rustling of a tree's new leaves, in watching a bee blossom, kneeling in the carpet of soil to make a hole for a seedling, shaking off a startled caterpillar or two along the way. Walt Whitman knew this when he measured what makes life worthwhile while recovering from a stroke: “After you have exhausted all that there is in business, politics, society, love, and so on—you have found that none of these satisfy, or wear forever—what is left? the seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
Those incomparable rewards, both mental and physical, are what the beloved neuroscientist and author is all about Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) explores in a lovely short story titled “Why We Need Gardens,” available at Everything Is in Its Place: First Love and Last Tales (public library) – the amazing posthumous collection that gave us Sacks on the life-changing power of libraries. You write:
As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; As a doctor, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. We have all had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or endless desert, walking along a river or ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves at the same time calm and refreshed, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physical conditions in individual and social life is fundamental and extensive. In forty years of clinical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmacological “therapy” to be most valuable for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardening.
Having lived and worked in New York City for 50 years – a city “sometimes tolerable … only for its gardens” – Sacks recounts seeing the effects of nature on his patients with neurological disorders: A man with Tourette's Syndrome, suffering from speech and touch difficulties in an urban environment, grows symptom-free while walking; an elderly woman with Parkinson's disease, who often finds herself frozen in one place, can not only start moving in the garden easily but climbs up and down rocks without assistance; a few people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer's disease, who cannot remember how to perform basic civilized tasks like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when they are given seedlings and placed in front of a flower bed. Sacks show:
I can't say exactly how nature calms and organizes the effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing power of nature and gardens, even for those with severe mental disabilities. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medicine.
More than half a century after the great marine biologist and environmental pioneer Rachel Carson asserted that “in us there is a profound response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Sacks adds:
Clearly, nature calls out to us for something deeper. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an integral part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact, manage, and tend to nature, is also deeply embedded in us. The role nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people who work long hours in windowless offices, for those who live in urban areas without access to green spaces, for children in urban schools, or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature's qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and emotional. I have no doubt that they show profound changes in the physiology of the brain, and perhaps even its structure.
Fill this piece of deliciousness completely Everything Is in Its Place with environmentalist Michael McCarthy on nature and happiness, pioneering conservationist and Wilderness Act author Mardy Murie on nature and human nature, and bryologist and Native American storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer on the garden and the secret to happiness, then revisiting Oliver Sacks on nature and the interconnectedness of the universe, the building blocks of his essential life identity, the three key elements of his remarkable life, his wonderful creation.
