We are losing contact with the natural world. It’s been a slow and steady drip that has lulled us into a state of disconnect. My awareness was heightened to this fact back in 2008 when I first watched the movie Wall-E, a computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar for Walt Disney Studios. It follows a trash compactor robot (Wall-E) in a deserted world, left to clean a largely abandoned city. However, he is visited by a probe sent by the Axiom ship, whom he falls in love with and pursues across the galaxy. This is not the part of the film though that left a powerful impression.
It’s the year 2805 and earth has long since been abandoned and covered in garbage. A mega-corporation, Buy-N-Large has relocated the remaining humans 700 years earlier to a voyaging giant Starliner known as the Axiom. Here people barely resemble what we know as humans today. They have become obese and feeble due to microgravity and an automated lifestyle. People no longer walk, they are carted around everywhere by hovercraft that resemble sophisticated flying lawn chairs. All the while they are attended to by every type of robot imaginable that bring their food, change their clothes and even pick them up and put them back on the hovercraft if they happen to fall off. The humans' artificial lifestyle on the Axiom has separated them from nature, making them "slaves of both technology and their own base appetites, and have lost what makes them human". The movie is really quite funny, until you realize that it may just be an accurate prediction of the future; then it’s not so funny.
Fast forward a mere ten years and I am looking around seeing what is starting to look very much like what I saw in this 2008 movie. In a recent article I stumbled on entitled, “The Great Indoors: Today’s Screen-Hungry Kids Have Little Interest In Being Outside” there are numerous interesting findings from a study of 2000 British parents and children. Here are a few of them:
· Survey shows that 40% of parents have to force their video-gamer children to leave the house
· Average child spends just seven hours a week outside, but more than twice that amount playing video games
· Activities preferred over playing outside include gaming, watching TV, surfing the web, and listening to music. And believe it or not, 10% responded that homework was also preferred over playing outside.
· Four in ten British adolescents have never gone camping, nearly half have never built a fort, and more than half have never climbed a tree.
· Only a third of kids said they were even open to visiting a local garden or park.
This of course was a British study, but is there anyone who doesn’t believe the problem is equal or greater in the United States? And it’s not just the kids! Just today, an article was released entitled, “Time Flies: U. S. Adults Now Spend Nearly Half A Day Interacting With Media”. The article is based on information gathered Nielson, American adults spend over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media. Of course, media consists of multiple platforms such as, live TV, DVD/Blu-Ray Devices, Internet, Time-Shifted TV, Game Console, App/Web Smartphone, Radio, Internet connected devices and App/Web on a tablet.
What does this all mean for our future? I have my opinions, which I will not share here, but I will say that from a Shamanic world view, the greater our separation from the natural world the higher our chances of imbalance, illness and confusion. Nature heals. It can speak to us, it can calm us, and it reminds of us of our interconnection. It is not lost on me that I am communicating with your now through digital media. Which also speaks to another important Shamanic concept, polarities. Light and dark, strong and weak, sweet and bitter, clarity and confusion. All things have a shadow side. It is in these shadows that challenges lurk, lessons are learned and additionally, we can get lost. The digital age has been both a blessing and a curse. Beware of the shadow side of it or anything for that matter that severs your connection the natural world; which I believe is a conduit to our ultimate source of being.
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