120 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
who survived life in a concentration camp by finding meaning and
purpose despite heinous conditions and unimaginable loss.
As nature-based expressive artists, we have the capacity to
facilitate “ordinary magic” (Masten 2014) by promoting meaning,
manageability and understanding in our own lives and in the lives
of those with whom we work. A study by the second author of this
text, for example, revealed that pregnant and parenting women in
treatment for substance use disorders demonstrated statistically
significant gains in the strength of their sense of coherence after
an eight-week expressive arts group therapy intervention (Snyder
2014). The inherent properties and metaphors of the arts and of
nature mirror back our own resources and resilience. They help us
remember that we belong, that we matter and that we can manage
the storms of life, creating, shaping and reshaping our way forward.
The following personal, clinical and ecological stories animate the
power of a nature-based expressive arts approach for modeling and
promoting resilience.An ecological story
Appalachian professor Dr. Liz Rose shared the following story of eco-
renewal and resilience in an expressive arts retreat. Rose, a lover of
plants native to the Southern Appalachian mountains, was concerned
about the viability of the pink lady slipper, a flower that visually
embodies its name, due to the sickness and death of many hemlock
trees in the area where the flower makes its home. The wooly adelgid,
a small aphid-like insect, has threatened the health and sustainability
of hemlocks in our mountains for about a decade. On a walk during
the retreat Rose looked for the pink lady slipper under the hemlocks.
They were not there. Her concern and grief transformed into a sense
or wonder and praise, however, when she noticed that the flower
had danced its way to the shade of a nearby rhododendron. This
delicate, rare and endangered flower was adapting to change in its
environment, finding a new home when the old one was no longer
able to sustain life.