82 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
humans, have at some level the capability of ordering. Our ways of
ordering our lives help us to survive and to make meaning of life, and
they also can constrict understanding and limit the recognition of
alternative possibilities. Culture plays an important role in ordering
to provide meaning in a given phenomenon. In other words, we act
in accordance with how we perceive and frame or define a situation.
Language systems are a primary ordering system for human beings
(Eberhart 2014) and are usually elaborated with stories. Language has
a special potency of reducing complexity by categorizing experience
so that we can meet and experience the world. However, language
also can limit understanding. Western languages impose a linear
causality in thinking because they order thought in a linear way.
Artistic forms do not have this limitation of linearity and thus can
convey experience in nonlinear ways. Forms in nature also display a
variety of circular and branching patterns.Metaphors of wholeness: The story of Gaia
Native Americans refer to Mother Earth. The indigenous peoples
of South America speak of Pachamama. In the late 1960s British
scientist James Lovelock (1995, 2000, 2001, 2009) studied the
chemical balances of our atmosphere and discovered that they
are maintained within the narrow limits necessary for life by
self-regulating processes. The entire planet is a self-regulating,
synergistic and complex system. These are the hallmarks of a living
system. Lovelock developed what he called the Gaia hypothesis, and
later the Gaia Theory, proposing that the Earth’s biosphere interacts
with the atmosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere to create planetary
conditions that support life.
It is interesting that Lovelock did not call this hypothesis the
“hypothesis of self-regulative processes of the biosphere,” which
might have made it more respectable to his fellow scientists. Instead,
on the advice of his friend, novelist William Golding, he called his
theory Gaia for the early Greek goddess of the Earth, thus catching
people’s poetic imagination and offering a new metaphor for