Contemplating Attunement to Robins—An Experiment in Rewiring

December 10, 2023

Dear Reader,

In this winter’s iteration of Code Red, I am exploring a question that troubles me after two years of plowing the fields for local grassroots climate actions to take root and flourish. No longer is it necessary to convince most people in our community about the real threat of climate change, as it was just a few years ago.  While there has been fast growth in actions like installing heat pumps, solar arrays and buying electric cars, these two years have convinced me that we will need to do more than buy our way out of this trouble with the purchase of a leaf blower.  We will need to plow our fields deeper, to reconceptualize that field and our relationship to that field and all the crawling, creeping, singing life in that field.  We will need to find new ways to live upon those fields. 

Life can’t go on as usual because there’s absolutely nothing usual about this moment. But we have brains wired to see ourselves and the place where we live through the lens of old paradigms despite our understanding that these paradigms are no longer working.  I have a sense that many of you share my perception that the way we perceive nature—as separate from ourselves and ours to pillage—needs change. Fast.

Easy to say. Hard to do. 

How do we enable this new story to grow from someplace deep in the soil of ourselves: this is the question that shadows my activism work. Using the lens and language of my work in behavior change, I conclude that we need to rewire our brains for a new paradigm that is about interconnection and care for all beings. But how? 

“What fires together wires together,” writes Daniel J. Siegel, MD, in the Neurobiology of We. We create new relationships and new stories and new ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us, Siegel writes, by the repetition of sensory emotional experiences which build new neuropathways in the brain.  

So here I am, at the end of a long career spent creating new neuropathways for myself as well as for those people who knocked on my office door, contemplating how I can create new neuropathways in my old brain that result in behavior that brings less harm not only for myself but for the leafed and winged world.

At the beginning of my career as a therapist, I ran as fast as I could into therapy. I remember the day I decided I needed to “talk to someone.”  My supervisor at the clinic where I worked after I got my graduate degree in Social Work asked me what it was like for me when I felt depressed.  No one had ever asked me that question before.  I was raised in a family that prized independence and self-sufficiency.  “Go to your room and come out with a smile on your face,” was the directive for bad moods.

My therapist was a Black man from Jamaica with a lilting Jamaican accent. He was a kind, warm man whose tenth floor office in the Veteran’s Administration building in Chicago was, unlike him, desultory and cold.  I can only now wonder about him, a man raised, I suspect, not in this Western culture of sending kids to their room for the lack of a smile, but in a large extended kinship family that would have welcomed his low spirits with an embrace and perhaps a story shared about the parent or grandparent’s life. As I recall our sessions now, they feel like a warm hug for my low spirits, a distinctly rewired experience of interconnection that changed my neuropathways and my paradigm: if you feel low you can go towards someone, not be sent away. 

Now here I am at the end of that career looking for another door to knock on to discover how to deeply rewire my brain to be in attunement with the sensory information, the patterning, the paradigms of the natural world in order to save both myself and the air, water, forests, animals, plants who live here with me. 

As I have written in past essays, I am excited that one of the doors to this rewiring journey is right here in this place called home with its 10,000 year history of settlement by Native Americans who knew how to attune to all of the sights and sounds and smells of this place and did it so successfully that not only did they thrive, but so did the trees and the fish and the animals.  

Recently I learned that archeological digs out on the islands just beyond the lip of the shore a mile from my house reveal that some of those tribes, contrary to what I’d learned about everyone migrating upriver in winter, were, indeed, here in those cold months! 

The ecological knowledge of how to live in mutually supportive connection with this land was almost wiped out three hundred years ago thanks to settler colonialism which still flourishes as a paradigm in our brains, but thanks to the enormous resilience of the Native Americans, their knowledge is still with us, embodied in the stories and music which culture keepers like Dwayne Tomah are eager to share with us. I look forward to exploring some of those stories with you in the months ahead.

A few days ago, I knocked on the door of a Zoom group hosted by another influential Indigenous thinker, Darcia Narvaez, PhD, author of The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities.  When I introduced myself to the group, I told them I was interested in finding ways to rewire my brain so that I could attune to nature as a child would to its mother or caregivers.  Dr. Narvaez recommended I read the work of Jon Young who was mentored from an early age as a naturalist and tracker in a Native American tradition.

To my delight, a quick search revealed that Jon Young’s book, What the Robin Knows, was quietly waiting for me on a shelf at Sherman’s Bookstore.  I rushed uptown and purchased a copy which sits beside me now. Fortunately, for all the robins have fled to Florida, his book instructs on how to attune not only to the robin but to the junco, one of whom, with her pale-yellow beak and white tail feathers, is just now on the ground outside my window hungrily gobbling up fallen birdseed. 

I encourage any of you who wonder how to begin to wire your brain to this kind of sensory attunement to listen to Young’s short Ted Talk which he begins with these words, “A long time ago, the lions ate a lot of us.”  That he tells us, is the oldest story on earth, a story which hardwires us with all the necessary gear to survive the jaws of the lion: with keen hearing and eyesight and sense of smell and sensory integration neural connections, including those lovely cells called mirror neurons, which wire us for empathy.  Why didn’t the lions eat all of us and wipe us out? asks Young. Because, he says, we built threads and ropes of neuronal pathways which allowed us to survive. 

Now in this time of planetary crisis we are facing another lion: this time a lion of our own creation and we must reawaken our ancient connections to nature by building bonds of empathy and understanding.  And this, he says, can be done by careful observation over time which strengthens these ropes of connection otherwise known as our neuronal pathways.  Or, as Dr. Siegel would say, “What wires together, fires together.” 

Observe, he writes in the book, What the Robin Knows, the habits of the junco, or the jay or the cardinal, learn when the feathered fluff you are watching is scared, when it feels safe, where it nests, what it eats. Ask where the birds sleep? Observe the landscape around your junco, the way it interacts with other birds or squirrels or a cat.  Wonder about its friends and its home territory.  All the while, watch your body: what is it feeling? 

If you live in Maine, you know that today and tomorrow will bring temperatures well above normal, with high winds and flooding. On Monday the temperature will reach 55.  Today it will reach 52.  Go outside and ask a junco or a white pine or a squirrel how they are doing today.  Are they confused, are they worried about their future?  I heard a story yesterday about a cow getting stuck in the mud at Wolfe Neck Farm, the mud so thick it needed to be pulled out.   

My sit spot early this morning.

Young suggests we find what he calls a sit spot, a place where you are comfortable and can return again and again.  “Use owl eyes to open your peripheral vision, let your eyes softly gaze across the full view of the landscape, notice movements out of the corners of your eyes—branches moving in the wind, birds flying by, and animals walking.”

Open your deer ears, he says, “Send your hearing out in one direction at a time—first to the left, then to the right, then behind you, and up and down. Listen for the quietest sounds, keep track of the direction and distance of the origin of the sound.”

Then to further wire up your experience, Young suggests his readers use a journal and write answers to some of these questions: What did I observe?  What is this telling me? What is this teaching me? How is this helping me? How is it helping me to help others?

I confess there is a voice saying, “Kathleen, there are thousands of people in Dubai trying to solve this problem through science and negotiation, there are people working on storing carbon deep underground, there is a terrible war going on in the Middle East, a heartbreaking problem with homelessness in Portland and you are sitting in the quiet of your winter garden watching juncos? Are you NUTS?”

Nevertheless, I believe in this experiment.  I believe I am not going to develop real empathy and attunement for the needs of the ecosystems that support me unless I change my brain in a fundamental way, like I did when I threw myself into therapy years ago after I realized how unprepared I was, not only for the work of my profession, but for relationships, deep relationships of mutual care. 

I hope some of you reading this will join me this week in this experiment and share your experience with us in the comments section. I hope you find some joy and peace in this experiment, though sitting outside in Maine in the warm spring-like temperatures the next few days will feel eerily wrong, out of tune and out of time. All the more reason to start to rewire!!