My guest today is Dana Simpson, co-author of Journeys: Healing Through Nature’s Wisdom. This inspiring book of essays and gorgeous nature photographs follows two women as they discover nature as a healing force. Dana was diagnosed with Lyme’s disease in 2012, nearly a decade after a tick bite during a summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. For years, she felt “unwell,” with symptoms of fatigue, depression, and chronic pain. A daily practice of gentle walks and writing inspired a dialogue with nature that gradually allowed her to understand and accept her condition. Dana attended Bryn Mawr, Harvard and Columbia, and holds master degrees in Urban Planning and Art History. She lives in Santa Barbara where she works in the nonprofit sector, and cares for a beautiful garden with her partner.  www.healingthroughnatureswisdom.com/

 

 

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Healing through Nature’s Wisdom

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Dana Simpson

Date of Broadcast: April 02, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free.

It’s Thursday, April 2nd. It’s a beautiful day here in Clearwater, Florida. I’m sitting here eating. I don’t know where you all are in different timezones. I know that people listen all over the world to this show, but my time zone is 12 noon and so it’s lunch time when I’m doing this show and I usually don’t eat, but today, I have to run out right after the show. Usually, I eat afterwards.

I made a salad this morning to take its picture for my food blog. It will be posted tomorrow. The salad has raw asparagus and cucumbers and celery and a little red onion for color in the plate. It’s so delicious. I have little olive oil and Himalayan peanut salt on it.

If you’ve never had raw asparagus, please. Your salad sounds delicious.  I am going to pick up some asparagus at the market today and just eat it because it’s crispy and cool and wet and sweet and it didn’t taste anything like what you probably think it tastes like. It’s just great in a salad or just eat it by itself or dip it in something that you’d like to dip it in. I want to encourage people to eat raw asparagus because I love it so much.

Anyway, what we’re talking about today is a little different. My guest today is a co-author of a book that is about – the two co-authors found healing in nature. They both had illnesses, long-term, ongoing illnesses, but they found comfort and healing by being out in nature and reconnecting with nature and understanding more about nature’s processes. The book is called Journeys: Healing through Nature’s Wisdom. They wrote a book. It’s full of their essays and gorgeous, gorgeous nature photography. It really gives you an idea that nature is there and embracing us as part of the whole.

My guest is Dana Simpson. We’ll be talking about her experience. Hi Dana.

DANA SIMPSON Good morning, Debra. Oh, I should say good afternoon.

DEBRA: Good afternoon, yes.

DANA SIMPSON I’m on the west coast.

DEBRA: You’re in California, right?

DANA SIMPSON I am, and we’re having a windy day today.

DEBRA: Oh, good. I love windy days.

DANA SIMPSON Boy! That’s something I’m going to look forward today in the market.

DEBRA: So tell us your story of what happened that led to writing the book.

DANA SIMPSON Thank you. I must say that it’s an event in my life that I never saw coming. I know people talk about things that are life changing. Meeting Karen Roberts was truly a life-changing moment. We were introduced by the headmaster of my middle school who I had reconnected with in a meditation class. When I heard his voice, my heart just leapt, so I just followed that. I called him up and we met and I told him about my experiences with Lyme disease.

He recently had met Karen actually in a parking lot. They just had started talking thinking that they had known each other. This was their first meeting! He realized that the two of us were very similar.

[00:04:49 inaudible due to transmission problems]

In 2002, I was on a summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and enjoying the beautiful landscape. I spent time hiking. Well, I shouldn’t say hiking, but walking the trails and enjoying the seashore and I was bit by a tick.

Fortunately, I discovered it. I did develop the bullseye rash, which we know is the telltale sign of Lyme. I was able to receive a short treatment of antibiotics, but it was a very short course. It was just about five days. Our knowledge of the treatment has expanded greatly and we know that it does require much more rigorous treatment upon detection.

So yeah, I must say, at that point, I really did think that I was cured and I put it out of my mind. But then, symptoms started to appear – migrating pain, a great deal of fatigue. I was a graduate student at the time. I was doing a master’s and planning to continue into the PhD program, but I just became very weak. And really, I found myself more or less sort of falling out of life.

That period lasted for about ten years.

DEBRA: I understand what that’s like. Are you hearing me okay because you’re kind of cutting in and out to me? I’m not hearing everything that you’re saying. Are you hearing me?

DANA SIMPSON I’m sorry. I am hearing you. I am on a landline, yes. The connection seems fine at this end.

DEBRA: Okay, good. I just thought I’d check because yesterday, we were having some problems with my guest from Sweden just with the transmission.

So what I wanted to do is just say that regardless of whatever illness that our listeners may have, what we’re talking about today is nature as a human force no matter what your situation may be. My guest is talking about Lyme disease, but I know for me, when I was very sick from toxic chemical exposure, I had the same experience of turning to nature for healing – not the same individual experience that she had, but the same general experience of saying, “How do I get out of this? How do I stop being sick from toxic chemicals?” The answer for me was to go without in nature and to get out of the city, get out of the industrial world and go be in nature. It was profoundly life changing for me to do that. It was also profoundly life changing for Dana as I understand from her book.

So go on with your story.

DANA SIMPSON And basically, Karen has multiple sclerosis. So that’s her chronic and lifelong illness. But yes, I think for both Karen and I, she had been a very successful woman on Wall Street pursuing a career and on a life path that was pushing her forward every moment of the day. I, as well, had finished one graduate program and was moving forward into another graduate program. I was living in the head. I was excited about the future I saw, but very disconnected. I was disconnected from my body and I was certainly disconnected from my environment.

I was physically, extremely active, but I never took time to rest and repair and recover. That was really one of the first lessons that I’ve learned by reconnecting with nature. It gave me the opportunity to take pause. I think that was one of the first gifts that enabled me to assess my situation, to assess my physical situation, my mental situation and my environment.

And once I did that, it opened me to asking questions about my own nature. Interestingly, perhaps, as woman, perhaps just as a product of our culture and society. I hadn’t taken time to think about my internal world, my system and also, the complements in nature, watching a flowing river or stream, thinking about the wind.

In Chinese medicine, for example, the winds were used as a way to assess the pulse. And that was just one insight. I started thinking about the rhythms of nature, the seasons of nature and how that was also present in my own body. And I think that was a very slow process of seeking, but that was really what nature first gave me to – as I said, to kind of tune in to my own senses, which I think is what nature provides, an opportunity to see colors, to feel textures, to see patterns, to touch.

DEBRA: Yes. Yes, definitely. We need to go to break. During the break, the studio is going to call you again and see if we can get a better connection.

DANA SIMPSON Oh, very good.

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dana Simpson. She’s the co-author of Journeys: Healing through Nature’s Wisdom. We’re talking today about her experience with nature as a healing force. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. I was munching again on my delicious draw asparagus salad during the break. It was so good. I don’t often mention that I do have a food blog at ToxicFreeKitchen.com. I think there are no hyphens on that one. You can just go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com and go up to the menu and click on ‘Food’. It goes to my food blog. And tomorrow, this recipe and a picture of what I’m eating will be up by noon.

But we’re talking about nature today with my guest, Dana Simpson. She’s the co-author of Journeys: Healing through Nature’s Wisdom, an awareness of our connection with nature. I know for me that when I became aware of nature many years ago, one of the things that happened was that I wanted to eat actual food from nature, not food out of a package. There was a big shift for me around that in eating seasonally and locally. That’s one of the things that changed.

I’m so happy that we’re talking about this today, Dana because I know that I went through a similar shift that you’re talking about, living out in the natural world. I went and lived in a forest by myself in a little, tiny house for two years and it completely changed my orientation to life. You can see those similarities between our bodies, the body of our bodies and the body of the planet. They’re both systems, they both have flows going through them. Rivers of blood run through our bodies. It’s water. In our bodies, it’s blood, but it’s still a river. There’s bleeding going on and there’s organization going on, there’s eating and there’s waste and all the aspects of the system that go on. That bigger macrocosm is going on in the microcosm of our bodies. It’s so interesting to see.

I remember one of my early realizations was to understand that when I breathe in, when my body breathes in, I’m breathing in oxygen, which is produced by trees and plants. And when I exhale, I’m exhaling carbon dioxide, which is what plants eat. They need our carbon dioxide. And then they transform it into oxygen so that we then can breathe the oxygen that we need.

Just to see this beautiful exchange that goes on, how the plants are creating the very air we breathe, just to see those kinds of things really made me see all the interconnection. It really changed me from living in an industrial world to living in nature and seeing myself as a being of nature like a tree or an animal that were in the natural world. And then the industrial world is just kind of this other thing.

DANA SIMPSON That’s a breathtaking description, yes.

DEBRA: Thank you. Thank you. It really was. It was a shift for me out of the industrial world. Even though I still buy things at the stores and I have a computer and I’m using industrial everything to have this conversation, my awareness and my heart is in the natural world. And that’s why I appreciate so much what you’ve done.

DANA SIMPSON Well, thank you, thank you. Both Karen and I were discussing our healing journeys and the inner journey that complimented our process. It has been, as I said, just very life changing to get the affirmation in our connection and in our ability to share our stories first with each other.

We began with an email communication. So in writing to one another, we realized that we had this book that we wanted to present and share. Karen has traveled… for many years with an incredible photographer. She turned to photography as one way to sort of develop a new form of expression and creativity in her life. So we were able to capture images from incredible places including a few trips that I’ve taken in the last year as well.

I must say, hiking is a completely [00:18:42 inaudible due to transmission problems] begun to explore and enjoy. And one of the great gifts I received each time I take a hike is I’m reminded that I can choose the path I take. That’s been something, to be able to set aside the expectations we place on ourselves and to choose where we’re going to take ourselves that particular moment and day and to accept if we choose, perhaps, to sit and be still or if we choose to be more active. How we want to move through nature can then guide us in how we move through the world.

I appreciate what you’ve said about creating mindful choices that integrate everything from how you eat to the water you drink to the mattress you sleep on, to create an environment that is healthful and health-giving.

DEBRA: And I think about that. My mattress that I sleep on, it’s from a company called Shepard’s Stream. I’ve had it for a number of years. So I moved here in Florida for I think 13 years now, 14 years. And so the mattress I got when I was in California is even older than that, but it’s still like new.

But the thing was that it was made. The sheep produced the wool and it was made into a mattress within an hour’s drive of my house. I could go visit the sheet. I slept one time in the work room where the mattress was made. I could go meet the makers of it. I really am aware when I lie down at night that I’m sleeping on sheep, the wool of sheep and I know what their environment is like. That’s a whole different awareness.

When you sleep on a polyurethane foam mattress, what you’re sleeping on crude oil and we don’t even have those awarenesses for the most part.

I can look around on my desk and I can see I have this wooden desk and it’s oak and I know what an oak tree looks like. It’s trimmed with purple heart wood. I don’t know what that looks like, but I know it’s a tree. That’s the kind of process that happens in my mind nowadays.

We need to go to break again, but when we come back, I’d like you to tell us a story from your book. So during the break, you can consider which one you’d like to tell. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dana Simpson, author of Journeys: Healing through Nature’s Wisdom. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dana Simpson. She’s the co-author of the book, Journeys; Healing through Nature’s Wisdom. You can go to her website at HealingthroughNaturesWisdom.com.

So Dana, tell us a little bit about the book, what’s in it, how it’s organized and then tell us the story from it.

DANA SIMPSON: Yes! So our book is a collection of essays intended to be uplifting and inspiring. Karen and I talk about our process with our illness, but more importantly, we’ve tried in each of our essays to share a moment of joy that we experienced on one of our travels.

I’ve shared with you, Karen has travelled extensively with Tim Hauf who’s an incredibly acclaimed photographer. So the images of the landscape are meant really to be a journey as well as the written word.

My travels have been much closer to my home in Santa Barbara. I’m blessed to live in a beautiful natural environment. And speaking of your earlier comment about living in the industrial world, I had been living in New York City and desperately needed to get out of that environment as well.

One of the stories in the book is actually just about traveling to Ojai. Ojai is a very special, small community just south of Santa Barbara. It’s considered a spiritual place. Have you been there, Debra?

DEBRA: I’ve been to Ojai and I actually has a story about being in Ojai. There’s a restaurant there. I’ve forgotten the name of it, but you probably know what it is. It’s a pretty famous restaurant. They had this delicious pea soup. Do you know which one I’m talking about?

DANA SIMPSON I must say my trips were often just to my doctor’s office, but it sounds delicious. I have to find it.

DEBRA: Sometimes, I go to restaurants where it’s just a revelation the way they prepare the food. I just am so aware of all food being living creatures, plants or animals. It’s all life. And so when I get something that’s so incredibly prepared, that it really honors, enhances and celebrates, that the preparation really enhances the nature of the food – and this is one of those experiences. It was just this pea soup that just was amazing. And it was in Ojai. That’s what I remember about it.

DANA SIMPSON Wonderful, wonderful.

DEBRA: And you see, to me, that is really honoring nature in our daily lives. It is honoring nature in our daily lives.

DANA SIMPSON How we prepare our food, yes, yes. I have the great honor to be a caretaker of a wonderful garden. I must say, growing our own vegetables and having my hands in the dirt, in the earth, that was also something as I started just spending more time outdoors. I was visiting a park in Sta. Barbara frequently and I realized I wanted to give my service.

I think that’s another lesson that nature often stirs in us. It opens our heart to how we want to be in the world. And so I started asking myself, “What can I do?” At that moment, I didn’t know what tomorrow would look like, but I knew in that moment, I just wanted to start to touch the earth again. I remember taking my shoes off in this park, walking, just feeling the contact again.

And one of the essays actually does share with you what it was like when I took my shoes off and started to feel my body move again and feel the earth and feel that connection. Part of it was inspired by taking some Tai Chi classes at that moment, but it just was opening up a whole new channel, a rooted channel.

And in that park, I also started thinking, “Maybe I can be of help,” so I volunteered. Once a week, I would go down there and help garden. Doing that for my community also helped me start to think more about what I could do in the world in a professional way as well.

DEBRA: One of the things that I learned from nature was to think beyond myself.

DANA SIMPSON Yes!

DEBRA: I think that in the industrial paradigm, we think so much about me and we don’t think about where anything comes from. We think that things come from the store. We think that our survival is based on earning money. It’s all about, “How can I survive?”

One of the first things I got from nature was my survival is dependent on nature. Where does all the things from the store come from? Well, they come from nature. If we don’t have the raw materials to make all those things, we don’t have the things. If we don’t protect those environments, if we don’t regenerate our soil, if we don’t do those things, we don’t have anything that supports our own bodies.

And so our life is totally dependent on the integrity of the whole planet and of our local ecosystems. And until you realize that that ecosystem is there, that you’re living in an ecosystem, until that you conceive that nature is there, the planet is there, that there’s a cosmos, until you can be aware of that, you can’t possibly feel connected to it.

The first thing is just being aware that it’s there. I had so much attention on, “How was I going to earn money? What am I going to buy next? What’s playing at the local movie theatre?” that I wasn’t even looking at nature. It wasn’t until I actually went out in nature that [inaudible 00:33:21].

DANA SIMPSON Well, your experience with the forest is just so beautiful. I was reading an article recently about research coming out of Japan on ‘forest bathing’ as they have titled it and just the benefits of immersing ourselves in that green view, in that air, in that environment.

And living by the ocean, I spent many, many mornings at the beach.  Often, I was too tired and in too much pain to walk, but just by sitting by the seashore and beginning to contemplate footprints, beginning to think about the tides and the shells and then asking myself, as you’ve explained, “Where has this water been? Where is it going? What are these broader cycles that support and sustain the earth?”

And interstingly, at the same time that I was asking these questions, I was asking about, “How do I support my body?” I really hadn’t done that. I just had always assumed that I push myself physically.

So yes, the awareness to ask about my food sources and then learning about integrative medicine and other options for healing.

DEBRA: This is so beautiful. I’m so glad you’re on so that we could talk about this today.

DANA SIMPSON Thank you.

DEBRA: We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dana Simpson. She’s the co-author of Journeys: Healing through Nature’s Wisdom. Her website is HealingthroughNaturesWisdom.com. As with all shows, they all get archived. I’m also making transcripts now. We’ll have some of the photos from the Journeys book on her show page at ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com coming up next week. Make sure you take a look at those. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =

DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Dana Simpson, co-author of Journeys: Healing through Nature’s Wisdom and her website is HealingthroughNaturesWisdom.com.

So Dana, let’s talk about some things that our listeners can do in their everyday lives to reconnect with nature. I want to tell a little story about an experience that I had many years ago when I wrote an essay about those called ‘seeing nature’, which was even published in a book.

What I want to say is that when I first met my husband, we were walking down the street in San Francisco in the financial district. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to this financial district, but it’s skyscrapers. It’s like New York. You look up and it’s very tall buildings and you just see this little piece of sky and it’s very cold because not much sun comes down in those spaces.

And so we were walking down the street and all of a sudden, he said, “Did you see that bird? What bird is that?” I had no idea that there was any nature there. I was looking at the cement, I was looking at the architecture, I was looking at the shop windows and he was looking at the birds.

I realized that he has like nature vision. We see things selectively. He sees nature no matter where we are, he’s going to feel the wind, he’s going to see the sunbeams, he’s going to look at the bird.

He recently did a cross-country trip. I said to him, “Well, how was your trip?” and he said, “Oh, I saw a flock of deer in Texas.” He didn’t say, “I went to a museum.” He said, “I saw a flock of deer.”

DANA SIMPSON Wow! He’s a gift.

DEBRA: He is. This is just the way he is. This was a whole new way of seeing the world for me.

I started to looking at things that way as well. One of the things that I occasionally do is take my cellphone – I hate to say this – take my cellphone when I go for a walk. I particularly look for things that I think are unique and seasonal along my path that I’m walking and I’ll take a picture of that.

Now that I know how bad cellphones are – I mean, really bad that you don’t even want to carry them anywhere near you – I think a better suggestion would be for me to mentally take a picture of something, to remember that this flower is in bloom. I can carry a little sketchbook or something.

Instead of walking blindly down the road, to see things, to see individual things, that makes nature more alive for me, just to be aware that it’s there as I’m going through life.

DANA SIMPSON That’s beautiful. That’s just beautiful. It makes me think also of when I was trying to listen to myself in a new way, trying to really hear my inner voice in a new way through this process especially when I was undiagnosed for so long and doctors were just puzzled by me and left me feeling so alone and I did start to meditate.

I remember sitting in this old house with a group of people who made this commitment to gather once a week and just making that commitment to each other. I remember I needed that feeling as I was trying to feel my own humanity again really.

I remember we sat in the silence and I heard an owl. I’ll never forget that meditation. Just being silent opens up this opportunity to connect with nature and in any moment of our day. Giving ourselves that quiet time when we turn off our computers and our cellphones and such is so vital.

I’ve been lucky in the sense that I must say, I don’t carry a cellphone and I’ve made a choice to try to live in as present a way as possible. But I know taking the time to remove those distractions will often open you to sounds and beings that you may not have realized that you’re sharing this space with and this journey with every minute of our day.

And yes, observation, I think that was one of the great gifts that I found. Through observation of nature, it opened this wonderful door to asking questions.

And I did start to study botany a little bit.

DEBRA: Yes, so did I!

DANA SIMPSON Oh, good, good. Yes!

DEBRA: You see the plants are there. There’s something there besides something made by a human.

DANA SIMPSON Exactly!

DEBRA: A plant is there and it’s alive. It’s a being with a body. You want to know more about them. You want to know what their names are, you want to know how they function just like you want to get to know a friend.

DANA SIMPSON It is, yes. That’s a beautiful way to put it. And as I was learning more about the systems as well, I also discovered really natural essences, plant essences, Bach Flower Remedies as one example and just was able to look at my emotions and then looking at the plants and looking at remedies.

I remember taking oak, for instance, for a period of time. I was so taken by that because I realized that the oak tree was speaking to me and I was spending time with a particular oak tree because it just felt so grounded and rooted. And then I realized I was taking this essence and what emotions it was helping me work through at that time.

So again, the connection was just amazing.

DEBRA: It is pretty amazing! It was pretty amazing. Wow! We’ve only got five minutes left. Doesn’t that go by fast?

DANA SIMPSON It does!

DEBRA: We’ve only got five minute left, so I want to make sure that you get to say whatever it is you want to say to make sure that you get your whole message communicated here.

DANA SIMPSON Well Debra, you’ve just shared so much today. I just have so enjoyed this conversation, thank you.

DEBRA: You’re welcome.

DANA SIMPSON Thank you. And I did want to share with you and your audience that I know that your incredible personal commitment to educating us about toxins was definitely part of my healing as well. The doctor who diagnosed me in Ojai was a doctor of environmental medicine and genetics. He taught me about food allergies. He taught me about heavy metals. I had very high heavy metal loads just from, I think, living for a very short period of time in some major cities. But just a few years had been enough exposure to lead and other heavy metals that.

I went through chelation treatment. I also benefited greatly from infrared sauna treatments and I did choose to do a cleanse. I continue to do juice cleanses, but I did it a fairly intensive cleanse, about 21 days and I must say it completely returned me to water. I realized that the taste of water is just divine.

DEBRA: It is! It is! I agree with you, I agree with you. And without going off to a whole other story, it was actually water that got me into wanting to be aware of nature. I went to Mt. Shasta and I drank water out of a spring in Mt. Shasta and it tasted so different than any water I’ve ever had. It felt so different in my body I just cried. I cried when I drank that water because I said, “This is the water I should be drinking. Why are we not drinking it? Where has this world gone that we’re not all drinking this water?” And that’s what started my journey into nature, drinking water.

DANA SIMPSON Ah, yes! Well, water has a vibration, I agree. There was a moment of great sadness when I realized that I had turned away, that I was drinking sodas and caffeine. I had certain addictions that were pushing my body to the point of depletion.

Going through the cleanse process was profound. And I think that yes, the toxins we carry in our bodies, even when we think we’re living in a way that’s very clean, it’s something that we need to do to support our health.

I appreciate so much that you encourage everyone to look at not only what they put in their body, but look at the things that they surround themselves with and how that interacts with our cells, this very fragile system that we have to care for, our beautiful body. We need to be very mindful of that. And feel so honored to have this to carry us through this world.

DEBRA: Well, I totally agree with that. I especially want to emphasized what you’ve just said about caring for our bodies. I think in our culture, it’s very common to just push our bodies and neglect our bodies and then we get sick and we go, “What happened? What happened?” not realizing that it’s our own lack of care.

So I’m going to end on that note because we’ve only got about 30 seconds left before the music comes on and I don’t want to cut you off. But thank you so much. Your book is beautiful. I’ll just give your website again. The name of the book is Journeys: Healing through Nature’s Wisdom. You can go to HealingthroughNaturesWisdom.com and see some photographs from the book and order it there.

Again, thank you so much, Dana for being with me today. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!

DANA SIMPSON Thank you, Debra.

DEBRA: Thank you.