Finding Oneness in Nature, Living Together in Place: A Study of the Chapel Gardens

• In Event: Touching Sources, Indwelling Each Other: Deepening and Expanding the Efforts of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Abstract

Natural settings give us an opportunity to look at ourselves and the human and nonhuman world
in new ways. This paper explores how spending time in nature can deepen human relationships
with other individuals and nonhuman beings. By being present in our natural surroundings, and
by allowing ourselves to connect intimately with what is around us, we bridge the gaps in
difference that can occur in human-made environments. The specific setting is the gardens
associated with a multifaith chapel on a public university campus. One garden focuses on an
inward journey through the feature of a labyrinth; another garden focuses on the outward
journey, specifically through the practice of listening and communication. Campus community
members – students, faculty, and staff – make use of these venues to ground themselves and
inter-be each other.
The theory of placefulness centers on being attentive to our actual surroundings; we are
grounded in the place where we are physically existing and are maintaining distance from the
virtual world accessed through laptops and phones (Odell, 2019). We and the other beings in our
physical space possess a “shared sensory reality” (Abram, 1997); we are breathing the same air,
smelling the same atmosphere, and hearing the same background noises. A human is sitting in
the same space as an ant, albeit taking up much more room. This shared sensory reality does not
happen when we are communicating through Zoom calls, watching friends in TikTok posts, or
looking at videos of birds building a nest (Hanna, 2016). Moreover, the concept of placefulness
takes into account history and ecology; we are living in a space with a particular history and with
a particular set of environmental relationships that have grown up over time. This paper will
look at how placefulness, specifically in a natural setting, can foster a bridge connecting various
human and nonhuman identities. By being present in nature, we indeed become present and
indwell together, human with human, human with flowering plant, human with caterpillar.
This concept of finding Oneness in a natural setting will be researched in several ways.
Community journals located under the garden benches will be studied during a month-long
period, seeking entries that relate to writers’ relationship with nature and with other
humans. Members of the campus community will be invited to have a conversation with the
Chapel manager about experiences in the garden relating to their relationships with other humans
and with nature; up to five of these conversations will be coded. Combined, the journal entries
and conversations will provide an informed basis for exploring the subject of finding connections
from one being to another in a natural setting.
We are living in fractured times, a world in which our human differences predominate, a world
in which humans seem separated from nature – but a roadmap to greater understanding is still
faintly there if we look for it. That roadmap takes us to places in nature, where we can see, hear,
smell, and feel – and begin to understand one another again beyond our different ways of being.

Author

• Denise L. McHugh, University of Maryland