Reciprocity-- It's Only Natural

bait balls

gaggles of geese

algae and fungus

lichen and granite

algae and coral

coral and parrot fish

moose and wolves

mother and child

aster and goldenrod



When you stop and think about it, everything in this world is in a relationship of reciprocity.

The school of horse eye jack swim in concert, the individual safer en masse, cooperating to avoid the hungry sword fish. The geese fly farther in formation as they rotate from point to flank of the flying wedge. Algae and fungus live in such reciprocity, that we think of the two as one:  lichen. One giving food, and the other returning habitat. Together, they break down rock, which eventually contributes to the dirt that feeds the plants that feed the animals that feed us.



Parrot fish poop beautiful white sand, which we love under our toes in Florida, but they also eat the over growth of algae on corals when that plant runs amok to nearly strangle its friend the coral polyp-- still more reciprocity. Mother nurses child. And what does child give? The child offers its helplessness and dependence and the pleasure of this bond elicits the production of oxytocin in the brains of both mother and babe, bonding them even more surely one to another. The child grows up safely to advance her species and one day have her own baby perhaps. In contemporary, social reciprocity, we parents hope our children will grow up to be the stewards of ourselves and the future too.



Reciprocity is everywhere, as we learn from naturalists like Katy Konrad, when they connect us to the web of life (what we called "the food chain" in my own youth). The wolf and the moose highlight essential reciprocity. In the right balance, wolf picks off weak or diseased moose, keeping genetics in check. The wolf eats and its own genetic line is tested by the challenge of bringing down the giant. We are not plants, producing our own food from sunlight, we must consume, of course. We do not necessarily equate such elemental reciprocity with social and emotional skill or growth. But consider the aster and the goldenrod.



Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer asked a question when she applied to forestry school as an 18-year-old undergrad:  Why are the aster and the goldenrod so beautiful together? The university accepted Robin, but they suggested that she should take her question to the art department. Robin entered the forestry program, despite feeling embarrassed by the initial reaction of the scientific community there. Good thing she stuck with botany. As it turns out, goldenrod and aster are more beautiful together for a very good reason. Together, their blooms striking vibrant notes on opposite ends of the color spectrum, they attract more pollinators by virtue of the attractive composition they create. The beauty of reciprocity is external, and intrinsic.



Today, I visited a Camp Fire club at an affordable housing community in Saint Louis Park. I watched as the kids ran and played together. One child fell and scraped her knee. An adult facilitator came to her aid, kneeling by her side, speaking to her quietly and calmly. Next, a peer approached and knelt too. She looked into the face of her crying friend, making eye contact, asking questions. Both children leaned against the adult, and the friends hugged, the elder peer planting an absent kiss on the head of her crying friend. These three people together formed a scaffolding of social and emotional learning. Communication and empathy in action. The children learning care and comfort from the action of the adult. The older child easily practicing a gesture of comfort that had likely been extended to her and learned from parents again and again; she grows her own confidence through the capable care of her younger friend. The younger child learns resilience and grit through that care. With some help, the girl gets up and the game goes on, trust following in its wake-- each brain and heart physically better off for the acts of compassion given and received. So simple, but so wonderfully complicated and related.

Like the aster and the goldenrod, we are more beautiful, and healthier together. As Vygotsky pointed out long ago, children learn and grow better together. Social scaffolding affords us the practice for effective interaction, insurance for a more peaceful and productive society.

So humans, like the rest of the natural world, practice reciprocity. And we also reciprocate with the natural world. Consider our relationship to food. Here is the opportunity to practice true reciprocity. We give the earth adequate care and it gives us healthy food to eat. Trees? They take up our carbon dioxide and give us oxygen, food, medicine, shelter and fuel (perhaps this relationship is a bit lopsided). It is natural and beneficial to practice reciprocity with each other, and the earth we share. Just one more reason that nature is the best catalyst for human development.

Nature: Connecting is the Cure

Consider This:  Connecting with nature could cure cancer.

New research, just published in JAMA, points to the cancer resisting qualities of a gene called “p53.” Humans have one p53. Elephants have 20 copies of p53. And guess what? Elephants very, very rarely get cancer. 

Just imagine if the kids who grew up to study elephants in the wild never went outside! No p53 discovery. Our future is out there.

unplugging and connecting at Camp Tanadoona

7.5 hours a day in front of an electronic screen-- that's the average for American kids. Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that the average 3-year-old can identify way more than 100 corporate logos. Guess how many plants most kids can identify? 10. 

The world is a big, complicated beautiful place. With less than 5% of the worlds' oceans explored, we can only begin to imagine what the next generation will discover. And their discoveries might just cure what ails us. 

comb jelly:  a cure for dementia?

Do the Right Thing: Respond

Tri, Camp Fire teen & healthy choice champ

The field of youth development research puts a lot of stock in decision-making skills. Youth-serving organizations seek to help kids grow the ability to make healthy decisions. This emphasis on decision-making pre-dates youth development work as we now know it. Most cultures have rules and mores that guide social behavior. From the Bible to the Golden Rule, to Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on jumbo sized soft drinks, to the Constitution of the United States, guidance for good decisions that are healthy for the individual and society abound. It’s worth noting, though, that the act of making a decision is empowering for youth and teens. Consider the practice of gratitude as explained by Ted Talk sensation, Benedictine Monk and nonagenarian, Brother David Steindl-Rast.

decision-making at Camp Tanadoona

Rast suggests that we can be grateful for this moment. Does he mean that we have to be grateful for everything, including war, disease or famine? No. He means that we can be grateful for this moment, this opportunity to take a closer look at life, even war, and we can respond. Responding is way different than reacting. Think of your knee when the doc bangs on it with that funny little pink hammer. That’s a reflex, a reaction you cannot control. A healthy decision, is a thoughtful mindful choice, a response to what might be a really challenging stimulus.

targeting self-control

Let’s say your daughter witnesses the bullying of a peer in the school bathroom. If she punches the bully in the nose, or turns on her heel and walks away, she is reacting. We think of this as impulsive behavior, and it often looks like an instant, physical reaction:  fight or flight. That’s our amygdala again, over-riding your humanity. 

If, instead, your daughter responds to the situation, making a healthy choice, well that's arguably a lot harder. Youth development professionals, teachers and parents know that responding takes practice, and even years of coaching. If you are a parent, you may remember how hard it was to teach your toddler to share--responding takes lots of practice.

sharing fun and friendship at Camp Fire Club

Rast identifies a process for practicing gratitude and I think it is very similar to the problem-solving strategies educators, youth development mentors and parents encourage. Rast says, “Stop. Look. Go!” He means be aware, take a closer look and consider, then act or make your choice. 

No guidance counselor or youth facilitator will encourage your daughter to ignore bullying. In fact, any principled youth professional will tell a kid frankly that if they bystand without intervening in some fashion, they are accessory to the fact, empowering the bully and tacitly enforcing the behavior. The social contract, the Golden Rule if you will, makes healthy choice the imperative. Do the right thing. Acknowledge and act:  speak up, help the victim and recruit a higher power to intervene. Stop, look, go.

I am pretty sure that practicing gratitude and making healthy choices can be the hardest work on earth. We are individually and collectively challenged to find a way to be grateful for this moment, and to choose a response, instead of a reaction, every day. The risks of simply reacting to challenges are great. 

feeling the power on Lake Minnewashta

Inequity, prejudice, violence and poverty have the potential to deprive kids of power, but helping them discover self-control and healthy decision-making, can turn reaction into response, even saving lives. Drug addiction, teen pregnancy and crime can be reactions to challenging circumstances, but when kids grow decision-making skills, they can strive to choose a healthy response to each challenge.

To learn more about how Camp Fire empowers kids to respond, investigate some of our healthy choice allies: The Search Institute, Allina Health and Wakanheza Project.

                                                               

Nature and the Virtue of Perplexity

the wonder of Fibonacci numbers

How does my cat purr?

Why do sunflowers, seashells and pinecones grow in a predictable sequence of numbers?

How come elephants don’t get cancer?

Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “the beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”

Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before!”

Nature offers us the opportunity to stop, look and wonder. We can choose to move on, carrying that sense of wonder with us, which may drive us to investigate, research or try to solve the great riddles of life, like cancer, bioluminescence or purring. But nature provides a special opportunity to stop and look, to wonder. Some, like Stephen Batchelor, argue that the act of wondering helps us practice mindfulness as we embrace the exquisite tension of not knowing. The idea is that wonder, surprise and perplexity actually define human existence, and that when we fail to be surprised by violence, or the sun rising, we cease to fully live (see Heschel). I assert that wondering empowers people, children in particular. 



To be in the habit of wondering, of not knowing, is to maintain an attitude of curiosity, to feel the power of seeking and questioning.  Asking, Why? gave us penicillin, airplanes, telephones, refrigeration. Wondering why enables us exercise the power of the mind, to pursue ideas and perhaps take action. Wonder is a powerful choice for any child, driving personal development, and common human endeavor. I defy you to name a human innovation that did not begin with a question. And the majority of those questions originate in nature, they find their birth in the moment of human response to natural phenomenon. How does the sparrow fly? Why is ice ice? What is that moon made of?

We still don’t really understand how or why cats purr. Amazing, but true. We have not begun to catalog whole regions of this earth—to date we have explored less than 5% of the earth’s oceans. Less than 5%! We haven’t even begun to understand the potential of our own genetic code. We are the tips of very large icebergs. And icebergs are the tips of our wondering about our climate, and our history actually. Take a walk and look, smell, see or feel any one thing—I guarantee it has the potential to inspire a question that can lead to a whole universe of questions. And speaking of the universe…

When children routinely experience nature, they are developing curiosity and the potential to ask their own questions. Hands-on experiences with the basic stuff of life—dirt, air, water—engage infants in questions they seek to answer with their bodies, and their minds follow. Experience is implicit learning, and later it becomes explicit, as children develop language and theories. Splashing in a puddle provides hands-on lessons about what the heck water is. Later on, in school, the experience is carried forward when the child is asked to apply language and “fact” to those experiences—now they can name the physical properties of water. But it all starts with a moment of water, when the child was immersed, literally, in the moment (and this is a hands-on experience that begins in the womb!).

The best by-product of wonder, is that it engages the whole child, or the entire adult, in a moment apart from the regrets of the past and anxieties of the future. The moment of wonder creates a space amidst the “noise” of daily life. When we ask, Why? we stop and look.  Eventually we go, and perhaps we carry a question forward bearing it through inquiry to discovery. It follows then that in wonder, there is always hope.

Camp Fire Minnesota recognizes the power of wonder and works to connect every child with nature.

Sparking Compassion

Not "in the moment," but in this moment.

My friend and Camp Fire collaborators, Grit Youngquist and Darleen Simmons of Ramsey County Public Health and the Wakanheza Project recently pointed out an important distinction about mindfulness. 

Living in "the moment" is a concept, sometimes fogged by an air of fleeting carelessness, as if we are not taking into account the future repercussions of our current actions. Living in the moment sometimes implies that you are acting on a whim. But living in this moment means that you are right here, present, not distracted by regrets about the past or anxieties about the future. This moment is now and it quickly becomes history. To live in this moment is to strive to be aware of right now. But why live in this moment?

How many of us see the sun rise and the sun set each day? What happens when you set your intention to witness a complete sunset?

I remember watching the sun set, as if for the first time, when our twins were babies. We were coming out of a very long winter, and I had loaded the critters into the car for a drive because they were fussy and sleepless and I was at the end of my mama rope.

We drove over the crest of a hill and there it was:  the sun! A blaze of orange fading, fading before my eyes. A blink and then a haze of peach and violet radiating up and deep indigo falling down from the heavens. Deeper and deeper went the color. The car behind me honked, and I was off.

Driving down the road, I felt a new sense of calm. Today, I can recall that feeling of familiarity and connection, like seeing an old friend again. The kids were in their car seats--happy or unhappy--but there we were and it was ok.

The girls did finally fall asleep, and from that twilight on, I felt like I had emerged in the world again. I was still tired and worn out by baby raising, but I was back in the game somehow.

James Doty, Standord neurologist and brain surgeon, studies the connection between mindfulness practice and the brain and he is calling for an "age of compassion." I recently heard Doty chat about his memoir, Into the Magic Shop, on Krista Tippet's On Being. Their conversation was like that sunset, it put me back on my feet somehow. Here is the big takeaway:

Turns out that our brains are "plastic"-- the more we practice something, the more it physically changes our brain and its habits. Whether our response to stimulus is healthy or unhealthy, the brain is a creature of habit and it defaults to the stuff we usually do. This has a snowball effect, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are bullied, or usually get into fights, your brain, thanks to evolution, defaults to fear or defensiveness. As a consequence, your amygdala--seat of your "fight or flight" response grows. It actually enlarges, physically. Our brain reacts in such a situation, as James Doty's did.

Young James answered violence and discrimination with physical fighting and delinquency. Here is where we come to the heart of the matter:  it is how we choose to answer violence, discrimination and intolerance that makes the difference. Whether we react or respond makes a difference, changing our brains, our health and our communities.

Remember Charleston? The relatives of the victims offered Dylann Roof forgiveness. These people, who had lost everything, forgave Dylann directly and very publicly:

"...when several relatives of the nine people slain inside Charleston's historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church appeared in court and addressed Roof. The family members of the dead told Roof, a professed white supremacist, of their pain and anguish. But they also said they would forgive him. "I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you," a daughter of one victim said. "We have no room for hating, so we have to forgive," said the sister of another. "I pray God on your soul."

Matt Schiavenza, The Atlantic

Why did the grieving relatives choose forgiveness when Governor Nikki Haley said that the state would see the death penalty? How could they find and choose compassion when Dylann's own uncle said he would be the one to "push the button" and personally execute his nephew?

Neuroscience research reveals the power of compassion to increase the health of the human brain and body. And it is easier to forgive, if openness is your habit, if you have taught your brain to default to compassion. Meditation, prayer, yoga, outdoor recreation, smiling-- these acts all put you in this moment, increasing our awareness of ourselves and our relationship to others and the earth. Forgiveness, then, is an act of self-empowerment as it improves the physical health of the brain and the heart.

Doty asserts that when we respond with compassion and openness, instead of fear or "tribalism" (fear or hate of the other), our brains respond in very tangible ways. Harvard and Mass General Hospital research reveals a direct correlation between compassion and health. When, for instance, we consider a murderer, like Dylann, as a person and try to understand how a baby grew up to be a killer, we change our brains for the better, improving our own health. When we make the compassionate choice, we shrink the size of our amygdala, grow our pre-frontal cortex and activate our vagus nerve. In fact, the research of Doty and others demonstrates that simply intending to be inclusive and tolerant, activates your pre-frontal cortex. Dr. Dacher Keltner of the Greater Good Scinece Center researches the impact of compassion on our vagus nerve. This is compelling stuff:

"Vagus is Latin for "wandering," and the vagus nerve starts at the top of the spinal cord and wanders through your body, through muscles in your neck that help you nod your head and orient your gaze toward other people and vocalize. It then drops down and helps coordinate the interaction between your breathing and your heart rate, then goes into the spleen and liver, where it controls a lot of digestive processes.

Recent studies suggest the vagus nerve is related to a stronger immune system response and regulates your inflammation response to disease. Ths makes the vagus nerve one of the great mind-body nexuses in the human nervous system. Every time you take a deep breath, your heart rate slows down. You see baseball pitchers do this on the mound-- they breathe out to calm down...

In our lab, we show participants photos of suffering and distress and find that these images activate the vagus nerve. We've also found that if somebody tells you about a sad experience...your vagus nerve fires. If they tell you an inspiring story, their vagus nerve fires. The more you feel compassion, the stronger the vagus nerve response.

We also show our undergraduates images intended to inspire pride--like Berkeley's Sather Gate or the school mascot--and we find that the more pride they fee, the weaker the vagus nerve response. And that really astounds me. This result tells us that when you feel a strong vagus nerve response, you are feeling common humanity with many different groups. When we're encouraged to feel strong identification with just our own group and not others, the vagus nerve dims."

Dr. Dacher Keltner

So compassionate and communal thinking and feeling strengthens the physical connection between brain and heart, reduces inflammation, mitigates stress and improves the body's ability to cope with infection and disease. The brain communicates with the heart! Think of all the imagery and philosophy over the centuries that references the heart as the seat of knowledge, enlightenment and truth.

An open mind can physically=an open heart.

Practicing mindfulness and increasing your awareness of your place in the world, living in this moment, helps your brain default to compassion. At Camp Fire, we call this practice "life balance" and we call the compassionate choice the "healthy choice."

Life balance activities empower kids and teens to respond to the world and its challenges in appropriate and healthy ways. We acknowledge the mountain of research that demonstrates the positive power of healthy eating, meditation, prayer,yoga, outdoor recreation and even smiling. Life balance activities are our curriculum for developing life skills that keep kids on track.

As our friends Grit and Darleen point out, life skills directly address and seek to prevent violence, teen pregnancy, drug addiction and poverty. Life skills equal public health.

The Pope's Encyclical and Darwin's theory of "sympathy" are just two examples of deep thinking on the global impacts of compassion. If compassion is a prescription for individual health, it is also a prescription for stewardship and care of the earth. When we give to the earth, it gives back, right? Doctors now prescribe walks in the park as clinical treatment for obesity, depression, ADD, near-sightedness and more. We take that walk in the park, we feel better, and we feel more connected and sympathetic towards the earth, increasing our compassion for it, leading, I hope to greater care for it.

And, at Camp Fire Minnesota, we know that compassion, life skills and healthy choices go one big step further. Compassionate and communal thinking is not just a benefit for people. Here on earth, we don't live in a human silo, we share the earth. Our own healthy choices benefit the natural world. If the individual is part of humanity, and humanity is part of the greater eco-sytem, then acts of compassion are acts of greater stewardship. Food that is good for us, for instance, is raised ethically and with minimal pesticides. Clean air and water are essential to human health, and when we keep the air and water clean for us, we make a healthy choice for the rest of the planet too. Stewardship is a two-way street.

Vanishing polar bears. War. Terrorism and its many forms. Poverty.

One of our partners in healthy choices for kids, Allina Health, has drawn our attention to the fact that teens are too stressed out-- do we wonder why? The American Heart Association reports epidemic childhood obesity and diabetes. Our kids spend nearly 8 hours a day in front of an electronic screen. Staggering, scary stuff. Instead of fighting or fleeing, I suggest that we address war, disease, bias, tribalism, intolerance and stress every day by setting the intention to connect to compassion. Forgive. Listen. Smile at a stranger. Speak words of encouragement. Turn off the television and dance. Stop and pick up a piece of garbage. Try to answer anger with an act of kindness. Bear witness to injustice and speak your mind and heart. Mentor a kid. Take a deep breath. Take a walk. Stop and watch the sun set.