Below you will find an excerpt from Chapter One, entitled Nature’s Way, of the new book, The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities by Darcia Narvaez and G.A. Bradshaw.
The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities
CHAPTER ONE: NATURE’S WAY
Webbed feet planted on the Antarctic ice, a father bends down to tend his son. High in the canopies of the Amazon, nestlings raise their beaks to join the family chorus. Under the heat of the African sun, trunks of mother and aunts reach out to help the newborn stand. Below the sparkle of Atlantic waves, a baby Whale glides alongside his mother. Large or small, land-born or water-born, they are immersed in love. Their hearts beat with the same song that has been passed down generation after generation, lessons from the mother of them all, Nature. These melodies are faint in our human lives today. Heavy from forgetfulness, hearts and minds have grown weary and brittle. How do we recover this reverential song of wellness? When we relearn, rejoice, and rejoin Nature’s way.
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In the dazzle of Nature’s extraordinary diversity, it’s easy to overlook how similar we are. Even though humans and other Animals look different on the outside, inside—beneath the fur, fins, feathers, scales, and skin—we are very much alike, including our brains. Animals ranging from the giant Sperm Whale and the tuxedoed Penguins to the ancient African Elephant and the astonishing Octopus share with humans brain structures and processes that give us capacities for consciousness, thinking, feeling, loving, and dreaming. We also share a common system for raising our young: the evolved nest.
Evolved nests are developmental systems tailored to nurture psychological, social, and physical needs in a species-unique manner. “Nests” don’t always look like the cupped constructions of twigs and branches that many Birds make. The African Elephant evolved nest is a social and ecological environment centered around the natal family—mothers, aunts, cousins, sisters, and brothers—who form a nucleus of care. The same goes for Sperm Whales. Their evolved nests are shaped by the folds of ocean currents and a matrilineal family that nurtures young Whales’ minds and bodies in the ways of their watery home.
Every species’ nest has been perfected through evolution to optimize health and well-being, starting from conception through adulthood. Each is a tried-and-true system validated over millions of years. The more an Animal and their young mesh with the natural surroundings, the better chance they have to thrive. The same goes for humans. We and our children do best in conditions like those in which we evolved as a species.
Today’s culture of cars, manufactured houses, and technology in which most children are immersed, however, is a far cry from our evolutionary roots. As Jean Liedloff discovered, the gap between how our ancestors lived and how we live today has generated issues and symptoms in our youth and society that are absent in cultures that retain humanity’s natural heritage. The poor mental and physical states of industrialized humans might be widespread, but they are in no way “normal” relative to our Nature-based human ancestry.
Jean Liedloff was a fashionable socialite living in the rarefied circles of New York and Paris of the 1950s until one day, on impulse, she joined an expedition to the jungles of Venezuela in search of diamonds. It was a decision that took an unexpected twist, transforming her very core, and leading her to write the landmark book The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost.
During multiple visits over two and a half years, Liedloff lived among the Amazonian Ye’kuana, who took in this stranger from a strange land to partake in their everyday lives. At first, Liedloff was both enthralled and appalled—enthralled by Nature’s beauty and appalled by village life. With disbelief, she observed the cumbersome and difficult ways that the community seemed to function. She couldn’t understand how women made their way down a tricky, slippery mountainside to collect water from a stream, not just once but several times a day, all the while balancing babies on their hips or backs.
In Liedloff’s opinion, there must be a better way. She thought the entire enterprise was unnecessarily dangerous, tiresome, and inefficient. This was the purpose, she reasoned, of modern progress—to improve upon the way things were done in the past. More startling was the difference between her struggles fetching water, washing clothes, and cooking cassava and how the Ye’kuana women undertook the same work. They were graceful and gracious, showing pleasure and enjoyment in their work together, however difficult. Liedloff found it all perplexing. Then she had a revelation that broke through what she later realized were culturally conditioned perceptions. It opened her eyes to an entirely new view of life.
One morning, watching her European friends and Ye’kuana men dragging a heavy dugout canoe up the river bank, Liedloff was shocked at the contrast. “Here before me were several men engaged in a single task,” she reflected later. “Two, the Italians, were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything, and cursing nonstop.” On the other hand, the Ye’kuana men “were laughing at the unwieldiness of the canoe, making a game of the battle, relaxed between pushes, laughing at their own scrapes and especially amused when the canoe, as it wobbled forward, pinned one, then another, underneath it.… All were doing the same work, all were experiencing the strain and pain. There was no difference in our situations except we had been conditioned by our culture to believe that such a combination of circumstances constituted an unquestionable low on the scale of well-being and were quite unaware that we had any option in the matter.” The Ye’kuana men, she went on to recount, “were in a particular merry state of mind, reveling in the comradery.… Each forward move was for them a little victory.”
Liedloff had also started to notice how she had changed. Much to her surprise, she “flourished.” Her body became lither, her mind clearer, and her mood lighter. Life was happier. Relative to their North American and European counterparts, the Ye’kuana emerged as exemplars of excellent mental and physical health. They worked hard, but there was no trace of the systemic social decay that ravages modern society: illness, addictions, child abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.
Notably, the Ye’kuana lived intimately interconnected with the fabric of the natural world. Instead of trying to reshape the land to fit some abstract ideal, their lives aligned with Nature’s contours and practices. Amazonian Animals, Plants, and humans thrived, water was clean and fresh, no one was homeless, and there was a deep sense of belonging. Nature was not viewed as a counterforce to be reckoned with, but a river of change in which all life participated.
The Ye’kuana lived within Nature’s gift economy, where food and care are shared in response to another’s need rather than being withheld as a means of control. Food, time, and attention were freely shared. Haunani-Kay Trask describes how a similar ethic existed in the Hawai’ian Islands (before being supplanted by the European paradigm of exchange), where giving is performed in order to receive: “Before the coming of colonization, Native society was a familial relationship organized by tribes or chiefdoms in which the necessities of life—land, water, food, collective identity and support—were available to everyone.”
What impressed Liedloff the most was how this philosophy carried through to childcare. Confident in children’s inner guidance, the community provided support as needed, such as breastfeeding and suckling on request. Amazonian babies were loved unconditionally. Compared to what Liedloff observed in the United States and Europe, Ye’kuana babies hardly cried, and their patterns of eating and sleeping were not dictated to them. They were taken in-arms wherever everyone else went, and they were carried and cuddled in contact with their mothers, family, and other community members, with the freedom to roam and play without adult interference.
All of these observations agree with those from a long line of formalized studies of Nature-based cultures by anthropologists such as Barry Hewlett, Melvin Konner, Michael Lamb, Richard B. Lee, Margaret Mead, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Liedloff came to call this human-Nature spooning an example of the ancient continuum. She maintained that to cultivate the health and well-being embodied by the Ye’kuana, and what she experienced herself, humans need to bring their lives back into alignment with Nature and the habits of our ancestors—to reorient from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. According to Tewa educator Gregory Cajete, this understanding of human nature “embraces the inherent creativity of nature as the foundation for both knowledge and action” and maintains “dynamic balance and harmony with all relationships.”
Watch “The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children”
Reposted from Kindred Media.
