Years ago I heard Deepak Chopra in an interview. He said something I always remembered: it’s important to spend time outside every day, even if it’s just a few minutes, and look up.
I’ve thought many times about that comment. What is it about being outside and looking up that’s so important? Functionally speaking, what does it do? And I’ve thought other things, like this: all the world’s religious insights originated centuries ago. We have had no new insights in our time — rather, we continually search for something long since found. Too often we dismiss ancient wisdom, expressed in myth and folklore, as useless stories.
So I started thinking, maybe there’s a connection between spending more time under an open sky and religious experience and insight. Our alienation from nature blocks our vision. Our buildings and many wonderful services, our culture, literally obstruct our view.
Think of it: today, for many of us, if we never want to leave our homes, we don’t have to. All necessities, everything connected with our survival, can arrive in our homes with no effort from us: water, food, cooler air when its hot, warmer air when it’s cold. Even if we leave our homes for work or school, we simply exchange one controlled environment for another. Transit between those controlled environments is often via another moving but controlled environment, a car or bus or train.
Every one of those environments, whether a castle or a modest home or a vehicle of some kind, has a roof on top. Roofs are good — they provide shelter. But they also place a divide between us and the heavens. Today there is almost always a roof over our heads. Fewer and fewer people live in places and ways where they experience stretches of open sky even when outside. Shelter is important, indeed one of the necessities. At least according to Deepak Chopra, though, so is experiencing the outdoors. He points in particular to the vast expanse of the sky above us.
Long ago I discovered that for me, the best antidote to depression is direct engagement with my own survival. This means, having my hands in the earth growing food, or foraging for it, then preparing meals from whole foods for myself and my family. Collecting water from natural sources is something I’d add to that list. That’s not really practical for most of us today. And most of us don’t build our own shelters. These are all pre-urbanization tasks carried on outdoors under a vast and uninterrupted sky. I had unique opportunities in my life to do just that, and I took advantage of them to heal myself. Today most of us, including me, need a reminder: go outside. Look up.
So back to my questions: “What is it about being outside and looking up that’s so important? Functionally speaking, what does it do?”
I thought I might see what clues a Jewish blessing gives. I tried to find a blessing recited on looking up at the heavens. Interestingly, there aren’t any general blessings like this but rather on specific heavenly phenomena. There’s one on hearing thunder and seeing lightning, on seeing a comet, shooting star or meteor shower, for the new moon (Birkat HaHodesh), and for the sun (Birkat HaChamah).
The Torah and Jewish prayer often refer to “the heavens,” but Jewish blessings focus on specifics. We recite all these blessings outdoors while looking toward the heavens. These are all events of power and beauty. Sometimes it’s a terrible beauty from the human perspective, but it’s worthy of recognition for soothing regularity or sometimes frightening power and irregularity. One thing the heavens are not in the context of Jewish blessings is bland or inactive. They are a living, awe-inspiring force, pointing to the God who creates and animates them. Particularities within infinity.
What I feel when I look up
I think of the times I have gone outside and looked up, many of them when I was tilling large gardens out in the country or helping on a local farm. These moments brought me awareness of extraordinary beauty, or power. Occasionally they made me fearful as when a tornado approached or strong winds threatened the fragile security of my home. Jewish blessings in their specificity express this variability in my experience. I also remember lying under a tree, white clouds drifting overhead in the warmth of a bright summer day. Or sitting around a campfire under the stars at night. These times filled me with a sense of the vastness of being. Paradoxically I felt my place in it all, a feeling of connection that brought me deep calm and peace.
I never knew where the sense of vastness, even infinity, came from. My son reminds me there are not only stars in the heavens but living, breathing space between and supporting them. Could that be the “structure” of eternity: stars, each unique from the others as each bit of creation is unique from all others, all cradled in and connected by infinite space? As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “Every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the Big Bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago…stardust brought to life…” We are part of everything, and everything is part of us. This combination of infinite space and an interconnected web of being cradled within stirs awe, gratitude, humility and comfort. We need a constant awareness of both for mental, moral and spiritual health.
Now I know why it’s good to go outside and look up. These moments under the heavens remind me that I am a unique and important part of something vast. My being has meaning. I participate in and witness a vast, intricate, interconnected and beautiful unfolding of being cradled in endless space, in infinity. I am part of ehyeh asher ehyeh, I am who I am (or I will be who I will become), the words God spoke to Moses at the burning bush when Moses asked what he should tell the Israelites if they asked what god was sending Moses to them. (Exodus 3:14)
Without a deep and constant connection to the natural world, we have no insight into who we are, our reason for being. Looking at infinite space without awareness of our interconnected web within it is terrifying. Yet seeing only the stars and not the living space between them, we have no sense of place, of purpose. We can experience neither humility nor gratitude. Without looking up, without seeing both stars and space, or perhaps feeling the earth in our hands — and searching the heavens for what they tell us, we lose our moral foundation, based in the relationships that are all in a process of becoming within infinity.