I am very closely connected with nature – plants, animals, and children. So are most Highly Sensitive adults and children. Remember that feeling of being at peace, with the wind on your skin and being absorbed in green? I live on a farm with rescue donkeys, cats and geese and grow my own food, collect rainwater and notice the daily and seasonal changes.

My philosophy is really just a simple state of connected being. I get up with the sun, eat when I’m hungry, take care of the beings around me when its needed, rest when I’m tired and respond to my environment.  I follow the inherent laws of nature that are given by science and the cosmos. There is timeless wisdom in the way that all living beings grow, evolve and die. I am actively part of this experience, and not separate. I observe that everything alive is self-healing, and that health is innate given the right conditions. I also observe that children are born with a particular essence and qualities that can grow and be developed over time if encouraged. To help children thrive, teachers and parents can learn to drop their idea of what an education should be, and look at who this child is and could become if they are given attention to support their natural curiosity and interests. As responsible adults are all called to clear up our emotional baggage and not pass it on. Self-responsibility is crucial. 

If we reverse climate change and manage to find ways to live in balance with nature so species can regenerate and forests can flourish we may have a chance at survival. This is why I support HS people and especially parents of HS children. We matter. Our natural tendencies can lead the way towards a sane and interconnected, balanced way of living in balance with our planet.

A New Agriculture for living small and beautiful

Most people don´t realise that we only have 50 years of topsoil left for agriculture. I live on an organic farm that I built. I plant my own food and experiment with permaculture and cycles of fertilization by my ducks and donkeys. This is my direct contribution to human survival. Current chemical agriculture with large-scale mono-crop planting is destroying the topsoil and leaving it infertile. Scientists have discovered that using regenerative multi-crop local agriculture we could fix so much carbon from the atmosphere that climate change could be fully reversed in as little as 20 years. But the old system needs to stop completely. This means industry has to go local and everyone needs to be involved in taking responsibility for their own food. It’s really not hard to produce what I need to eat in a very natural, local, and balanced way. Most families could manage. It’s one viable solution. There are many. We need to act.

I don´t want to get into how and why discussions here. To anyone who has done a bit of research and exploration, what I have just said is obvious. Many are moving towards off-grid self-sustainable living instinctively and for good reason, and others have started growing food on windowsills and in allotments. There are many ways to get creative about food.

Growing local, repairing and recycling and getting away from extreme materialsim will all contribute to regenerating our environment.  We don´t need all the stuff that we buy. I’m not being puritan and also not trying to spoil anyone’s fun. In fact, children love learning how to grow their own vegetables! If we want to survive we need to scale back and live with essentials, so that we can stop doing and demanding things that wreck our living world. It really is that simple. I studied and worked as an anthropologist and lived with several indigenous peoples. In my experience, modern life is actually less ¨advanced¨ and much more disconnected and fragmented. Indigenous peoples are normally aware of the state of their environment, and of how the other people are faring locally. They know they depend on both to survive. If we continue to make our living environment uninhabitable for birds and mammals, and forests the ecosystems will collapse and we won’t have any food. We have to take individual responsibility and stop feeding the industrial systems that are killing us. Only then will there be collective change. And increased digitalisation is not the answer. It’s likely to take us further from ourselves.

How do we get there?

One option is that some of us model a connected responsible way of living that children can copy as an example.

Any large-scale change begins with a few dedicated individuals. Nobody can actively hurt something they feel connected with. It’s just not in human nature. I see the solution to humanity´s rift with and destruction of nature as very simple. Part of it is realising we don´t need all this stuff and activity that is being sold to us by the media as ¨success´. But many people need to get back into their bodies, in touch with sensation and feeling and experiencing their own aliveness directly. Because then they immediately realise what is important and what isn´t. There are several ways this can happen:

• one is to spend more time in nature walking, gardening and growing food so that you begin to learn and observe, sense and feel.
• Another way is to practice sensing the body and working on your inner connection directly. Yoga, dance, meditation, bodywork, etc. help
• Both together create rapid change and reconnection.