16

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRoNiCLE

OCTOBER 2, 1998

Harmony In Food, Drink, Art & Entertainment

Ba

OCTOBER EVENTS

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BOOKS

Feel the warm caress of

nature, even in the city

Wild Communion

Experiencing Peace in Nature by Ruth Baetz Hazelden; $14.00

Reviewed by Gerry Proffett

A warm breeze flutters the leaves overhead and kisses your cheek. Are you soaking it in or worrying about work? Whether you have half an hour in a local park or a week in the wilderness, you may need some help getting the deep rejuvenation you need.

This is perhaps the ideal time to pick up a copy of Wild Communion: Experiencing Peace in Nature, lesbian writer and therapist Ruth Baetz's most recent effort, a delightfully practical guide to achieving personal harmony in natural surroundings.

During a recent Sunday brunch over chamomile tea and fresh scones, she told of the creative development of her book, as well as of the relevance the work has to the lesbian and gay community of which she is a part.

What the book essentially became after this reorganization is a how-to manual describing the various ways of experiencing the kind of blissful peace that only the earth's native settings can afford. Baetz carefully takes the reader through the steps of reaching a mental place in which this peace is possible, then explores the many techniques to go about achieving that peace. In doing so, she pays particular attention to the daunting aspects of today's typical urban lifestyle: its hectic pace, its many distractions, and, perhaps most difficult to overcome, its fear and loathing of spending "nonproductive" time outdoors.

Baetz tackles these issues one by one, using an ingeniously logical structure in which each successive chapter delineates a specific technique that can be used by those in search of natural communion. Sprinkled liberally throughout these chapters are her journal entries. The use of these is also inge-

WILD COMMUNION

Raised in Chicago, a selfdescribed "city-slicker" whose early brushes with nature were either harrowing (she remembers the terror of a childhood locust plague), playfully alien (hunkered down in a shelter during weather watches, she envisioned a tornado as a bucking bronco-like circus ride), or simply nonexistent (often, the closest she got to the "great outdoors" was a baseball diamond), Ruth decided on her 33rd birthday to experiment: She took her first solo car-camping trip, heading to the Canadian Rockies, where she experienced a feeling of bliss that was off her "internal Richter scale."

RUTH BAETZ

"In the Canadian Rockies,” she writes in Wild Communion, “joy and life-shaking realizations erupted within me daily... All I had to do was get myself to a private spot by a wildflower meadow or a glacial pond and some unnamed vibrant energy would wash through me."

Once back in less natural surroundings, Baetz soon became frustrated by her inability to recreate this grand experience, so she began drawing on the psychotherapy, hypnotherapy and deep relaxation techniques she used in her private practice. She recorded the resulting meetings of mind and nature in prolific journal entries, which form a sort of backbone to the book.

"I shared my journal entries with friends," she says, “and they loved them and encouraged me to turn them into a book. When I sent the book manuscript to an agent, she told me I needed to organize the material into a more logical structure."

nious, for whenever Baetz needs to underscore a specific technique or discovery, she inserts a journal pas-

sage that describes just how and when she first began using such a technique or made such a discovery. Adding to the logical, pragmatic structure of the book is the inclusion of end-of-chapter lists summarizing its main points.

And lest a reader become skeptical of the book's main thesis that a healthy, spiritual relationship with nature is something that everyone should, out of necessity, cultivate-Baetz, as a result of her many years contemplating the matter, is able to illustrate the validity of her points with a stunningly wide array of quotes from an equally wide array of sources.

Wild Communion contains the wise words of Thoreau, Emerson, John Muir, Rachel Carson (to whom the book is dedicated), Luther Burbank, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra, James Michener, passages from the Bible and other spiritual texts, and even a quote from Al Gore's 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.

There are reasons, Baetz explains, that Wild Communion is of particular relevance to lesbian and gay readers. "Sometimes I think we need nature more than heterosexuals do," she says. "I work with lots of lesbians who have broken relationships with their families or who don't have much of a human support system when they are coming out or when crises strike. Nature's comfort and wisdom and support are always there. We may have been judged or shamed. In nature we can feel sacred and accepted and okay again." ▼

Gerry Proffett is a staff writer for the Seattle Gay News.

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