Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

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Inside this clay jug

there are canyons and pine mountains,

and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!

All seven seas are inside,

hundreds of millions of stars ...

and the source of all water.

-- Kabir, 1480

With green summer grown high all around us, my spring column series on "the inner journey" should be nearing the last mile.

But that's impossible, I realized all spring, as current events, ancient philosophers, trails and acorns, mountain creeks and clouds all made clear: the "inner" and "outer" worlds are not only connected, their linking describes our function as human beings.

By "inner," of course, I don't mean inside buildings or even the human body. After all, where inside the changing cells of human anatomy would we locate awareness?

Nonlocal awareness is a common phenomenon. People who have temporarily "died," later to be revived, report looking down from above, observing medics working on them. They've accurately recounted resuscitation efforts, even described objects they noticed on hospital rooftops or window sills.

Cell biologist Bruce Lipton points out that researchers can measure the energy of human brainwaves outside the physical boundaries of a subject's brain and body.

Masaru Emoto, a Japanese health researcher and seeker of world peace featured on the "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" documentary's Web site, has photographed the remarkable variety of ice crystals formed in water exposed to human thoughts or music.

Water exposed to negative words or bombarded with belligerent, heavy-metal music yielded no crystalline formations. But water exposed to classical music or uplifting thoughts formed beautiful, snowflake-like structures.

With visible evidence that human thoughts affect their surroundings, Emoto believes the quality of people's "inner" life will prove key to "outer" peace on a global scale.

Likewise, I sense that the interior world of human beings will decide the fate of our outward environment -- not just because our species considers the Earth our personal possession, but because our thoughts are so potent.

Discover your connection

A recent "Annie's Mailbox" letter described the writer's attempt to stop inflicting workday stress on everyone at home. He'd made a habit of pausing, after reaching his driveway, to grasp a particular tree in the yard and imagine his anger being absorbed into the bark. He'd feel a wonderful relief and walk buoyantly into the house.

"But the tree died!" he wrote. In short order, it withered up and never revived. He figured this death could have happened to his family life, had the tree not absorbed his negativity.

Whether we believe our inner thoughts can affect them or not, trees -- and all landscapes -- clearly affect human thought. Cognitive development researchers say that a child's potential of intelligence gets awakened not by computer monitors but outer stimuli -- wind and stars, meadows and creeks, crawling and running, toad song and butterflies, blackberries and snow.

Robert Baden-Powell intuitively understood this. Long before such research, he rounded up the listless, cigarette-smoking teenagers leaning in London doorways and organized the first Boy Scout troops, leading them into the countryside to study wildlife and tracking, astronomy and trailblazing.

Their awakening to the outer landscape, he somehow knew, was waking up their interior life -- which would in turn help them serve the outer world.

John Muir's accounts of hiking down to the Gulf, out West or around the Alaskan wilderness, reveal this same inner-outer dynamic. Had Muir not developed a rich interior life of poetry, philosophy and imagination, the outer landscape might have seemed to him nothing more than an underutilized commercial resource.

Instead, he recognized "scripture" in the rocks and God's beauty in the giant trees -- which in turn so invigorated his inner thoughts and words, they led to the protection of Yosemite Valley and engendered the conservation movement in America.

It was not a new connection. The ancient Hebrews, Africans, American Indians and pre-industrial Europeans did not see outer and inner as separate, but believed the interior human heart altered even the weather.

I will admit to a similarly primitive outlook. So when the Navajos and African village elders and Alabama preachers were trying last summer to revive ancient traditions of praying for rain, it struck me not as insane, but late. Why had it taken so long for us to remember this connection between the two worlds?

Of course, praying for rain while continuing to denude the planet would amount to insanity. But inner gratitude for water and life might not only affect a surrounding energy circuitry we cannot yet detect, but also guide us to create landscapes conducive to rain and life -- urban forests; cherry trees, blueberry bushes and woods instead of lawn and asphalt.

At least, that's the landscape my students imagined on a recent walk through town. Just picturing it "out there" inspired our inner hopes.

Liza Field's column runs twice a month in Extra.