Ticino river. Photo by Maria Giulia Marini.
Natural intelligence is one of the multiple intelligences proposed by psychologist Howard Gardner, along with the better-known ones such as logical-cognitive, linguistic, visual-spatial, and other lesser-known ones such as intrapersonal, interpersonal, kinesthetic, musical, ethical, and existential. According to this quality, Intelligent is the person who knows how to live with nature, loving it, respecting it, and knowing it.
What does an issue dedicated to nature have to do with a journal dedicated to narrative medicine?
From the narratives of patients with both physical illnesses and mental distress, the therapeutic power of Nature emerges extraordinarily. In the lines of their ‘today’, there are the little things such as tending to the flowers on a city balcony, cultivating a vegetable garden, painting nature itself, walking and strolling in built-up areas or preferably in the countryside, having a pet, a dog, a cat – it is called Pet Therapy.
Many depressed people have also emerged in this way from that dark evil invisible to other ‘humans’ who dismiss their ‘darling?’ with rude phrases such as ‘you are lazy,’ ‘these are excuses,’ ‘these are not real illnesses’. Perhaps cats and dogs are bearers of the affection and respect that many humans do not know how to feel in the face of being sick. They know when to approach and greet you and when to return to their habitat, showing their intelligence, compared to a society that does not want to see ills of the soul, and denies them, perhaps because it is primarily responsible for this continuous social pressure that pushes for stereotypes of beauty and perfection (nature is marvelously imperfect), for wealth, for hyperbolic abilities, for immortality.
The counter-song to this culture of pressing is vocalized by nature: when one receives an ‘uncertain’ ‘heavy’ diagnosis, one raises one’s eyes, searching for the window to look at the sky. A very ancient gesture inherited from our Sapiens or Neanderthal ancestors: it was an act of prayer with eyes turned up to the sky by day and looking at the stars or searching for the moon by night.
The doctor sometimes doesn’t know, doesn’t understand, and asks “Are you following me? I just told you that…’: it happens. The doctor is in his/her logical, contemporary role and world and wants to make sure the patient understands, the patient has stopped listening and has travelled through time, invoking the God of Sun or the All Stars. “Love that moves the sun and the other stars”. Then the patient came back here in the present to inquire what can or cannot be done to cure himself. But if there had not been that estrangement towards the sky, the gaze could not have become brave and ready to face the situation of illness. Nature comes out as the coping factor in small everyday stories.
What about the Nature of the Body? The ‘natural’ fragments animate the narratives of patients and family members, and even doctors, and point to a lot of nature in food, sleep, movement, knowing how to listen to one’s body and how to stop or proceed. Those with Natural Intelligence know when to sleep, can sense their fever, know their energy level, and can look up at the horizon, and look behind the constructions of the Anthropocene. A swallow swoops in at dusk, a sparrow comes to peck at crumbs on the windowsill next to the bed of a person admitted to the hospice for her last days of life. This makes nature a pervasive factor that embraces and nourishes us: natural intelligence is to be aware that we are immersed in this in a single ecosystem that our Istituto Superiore della Sanità has called One Health, which brings together human beings, animals and the entire planet, with its plant and animal world, its climate, its geographical location in our solar system, galaxy and universe.
Is the natural ecosystem all ‘good’? Not at all, violence is made of the alternation of life and death, of the abandonment of animals born prematurely, of catastrophes that eradicate all forms of life. Leopardi writes well about it, calling nature a stepmother:
O nature, nature
Why do you not then render
What you promise then?
It is nature that took Silvia away at too young an age, a flower that blossomed and fell before Summer.
Generally, the alternation of the cycle of the seasons offers a nature in growth, full of AUXINS and Chlorophyll (the substances that make plants lush and green), then of transmutation, with the Xanthophylls of autumn coloring the leaves from green to yellow until the loss of winter, symbolically identified as an old man in ancient culture who must then die. And he must die – in some traditions he will be beheaded – to make room for the new generation of girls forming spring. And so in cycles.
Those terrible limits that Leopardi saw in ‘stepmotherly nature’ can be reconfigured into other philosophies that are more conciliatory, compassionate, and more helpful in healing. Let us consider the limit as a neutral condition, without giving it such a negative meaning: it is just that our society is sometimes too unrealistic (aware of the laws of nature) and too ideologized and mythomaniacal (Prometheus unchained, unleashed and not “chained”), with access to all technological possibilities, until it will be Artificial Intelligence – whose first ancestor was the discovery of fire given by Prometheus – that will render Sapiens himself useless.
We know, the World Health Organization’s own declaration defines well-being as a complete state of psycho-physical and social well-being: well, let us agree on how many years of longevity we mortal beings are ‘entitled’ to. If we want to counter the ineluctable ageing of the body of the mind, how can we accept the limitation without making ourselves potentially infantile and ridiculous with the desire to take the place of the gods?
From Eastern philosophies and religions, we learn that funeral rites in Tibet and Nepal are performed by feeding the corpse to vultures ‘the scavengers’ or by burning it and scattering the ashes on the fields as fertilizer to nourish the earth. The ashes in the wind symbolize the beauty of impermanence, the medicine against the boredom of eternity: we read it in the wise narratives of the seriously ill or in the very old who feel that the stalk of their leaf is about to fall off: they prepare themselves for the blowing of the wind, they do not wish to be over-medicated, they want to be left in peace, they no longer have to prove themselves by undergoing yet another therapeutic treatment (again, Progeny of Prometheus Unleashed- Unchained). In these lines I also thank Prometheus because it is thanks to him that we have learnt to warm ourselves at night, to stop panicking in the cold, to cook (Levi Strauss’ demarcation between raw and cooked). Of course, he saw ahead, but we Sapiens were not so strategic and ethical in using everything that came and goes from progress, nor in respecting the laws of nature.
I won’t touch the subject of climate change, of our inability to orient ourselves because we don’t know where South and North are, the naming of plants and animals, partly because we have reduced their biodiversity, partly because today it is more important to be smart in video games since tomorrow you will be a great creator of artificial intelligence. Nor am I talking about naturopathy or related specialties such as stones and talismans that everyone is entitled to believe in: the placebo effect is wonderful, it works and it lasts.
I remember – and forgive my personal digression – my father who had been to Sweden for six months as a boy between autumn and winter: ‘nature knows what it is doing, in those dark months the white snow acts as a lamp and illuminates all things’.
