NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS 119
of poems flooded the internet. People sang in the streets. The New
York Philharmonic played Brahms’s Requiem at the Lincoln Center.
When Thich Nhat Hanh and his colleagues collected the bodies of
dead children in Vietnam, they sang. The arts are an affirmation that
life can go on despite unbearable horror.
In nature-based expressive arts we expand the idea of arts in
service of life to include the life of all beings and the Earth. This
I–thou relationship (Buber 1958) serves to maintain the awareness
of belonging to the community of Earth. Particularly when used
within contexts of ritual and ceremony, the arts become a way to
experience communitas , the common bond of humans with each
other in which each person is respected and honored. Nature-based
ceremony includes the Earth in this communal bond and celebrates
the sacredness of all life and nourishes the souls of persons and the
soul of the world. Viewed in this way, arts in the service of all life
serve as the bedrock of our resilience, which we explore in the
following section.
Stories of resilience
Ann Masten (2014) defines resilience as the capacity of a dynamic
system to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten the
functioning, viability or development of systems. This capacity is not
extraordinary, but normal “ordinary magic,” the title of her book.
This health promotion orientation aligns with Antonovsky’s (1979)
theory of salutogenesis, a coherent theoretical framework concerned
with identifying the origins of health rather than disease and in
promoting optimal wellbeing rather than remediating pathology
(Becker, Glascoff and Felts 2010). Intrigued by a subset of thriving
Holocaust survivors in a population he was studying, Antonovsky
(1979) discovered that the survivors shared the common view that life
is meaningful, manageable and comprehensible; what he referred to
as a strong sense of coherence. Antonovsky’s theory of salutogenesis
was supported by the lived experience of Victor Frankl (1959),