Mental Health as a Vision of Ecological Safety | Part 10
- John P. Flynt, PhD
- Oct 31, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 10, 2023
Safety in Rituals of Mental Health
Performance and Meaning
Wulf’s performance includes slides she shows of herself standing before Chimborazo. It includes her stories of Humboldt. On the stage, talking about her writing adventure, she is engaged in the second part of ritual discovery. She is on a stage, talking about Humbolt, sowing slides, reading quotes, reflecting on her feelings, delighting her audience. But then Humboldt also stood on a stage and talked about his experiences in the same way, bringing insight and inspiration. The common path is ritual discovery.
Both authors on stages and perform, and in this case, one performance leads to another. Wulf finds a form of performance that she characterizes as involving something like a chaotic collection of information. The gathering takes different forms. One form has already been touched on in Humboldt’s approach to visualizing the unity of nature through visual strata based on altitude and climate.
Another approach to layering becomes evident in Humboldt’s approach to organizing the information he offers during his performances. Fascinated by this, Wulf made this a key moment of The Invention of Nature. She emphasized that Humboldt’s narrative performance has features that are analogous to his vision of nature. At the heart of this activity is the interrelatedness of everything. Wulf describes the outcome in this way:
Humboldt’s preparatory notes reveal how his mind worked, branching out from one idea to the next… When the page was full, he filled up countless more small pieces of paper with his tiny handwriting, and then glued them all on to his notes…. As he went along, he placed bits of paper on top of each other, some buried completely under the new layers, while other could be folded out with little sketches, statistics, references, and reminders. (Wulf, IN, 229)
Such performance follows burst of awareness and meaning that the ritual discovery brings. It is an openness of the system that is brought into awareness in a burse of energy made possibly by safety. The feeling of safety marks interpersonal neurobiological state that emerges from the complex interplay of neurotransmitters. A flood of associations and realizations that serve to bring everything available for conscious inclusion comes into play. Since the brain a complex neurological system (85 billion neurons and trillions of dendritic connections), its healthiest state is both open and oriented toward maximum interaction. It has evolved to bring unsurpassed meaning to life.
Much of Humboldt’s performance emerged from the data he collected in South America. This was the most highly visible path between ritual and performance in his life. There is parallel activity with Wulf, who gathered a vast store of data in the research she conducted over decades in gardening, nature, and her research and emulation of Humbolt. The outcomes are fulgurating, original. and transformative.
If you consider the chaos metaphor and the vision of nature as a unified system, a path to understanding ecological systems emerges. The works of the two authors extend and merge each other.
2023 © John P Flynt, PhD | Your Horizon Counseling
