Immediate Lessons from Nature

What is our relationship with the natural world today? I fear that many of us don't have much of a relationship to our natural environment anymore. Collectively, we seem to know so little about the geography, geology, topography, flora, fauna, and history of the places in which we live. Some of us let the natural world slip by largely un-noticed, a vague prettiness to be visited on occasion. Others have lost contact amidst the great business of daily existence. Many have never really had a chance to know the land because they have been raised in large, urban environments.
Please excuse the long preamble -- what I want to get to is this: what lessons has nature taught you? For me, the great presence of the natural world has always been water. Lakes, oceans, and rivers have been places that I have loved deeply. Lately, I think about water all the time. I think about whitewater. I live near the largest man-made whitewater course in the world (class II - IV rapids). The course is made of poured concrete and deliberately placed rocks and gates, yet the water that flows through the course is as alive and natural as water anywhere else, so I am learning from the water.
One of the great gifts that the water is giving me is the joy of failure: it is teaching me to embrace failure as more than an unfortunate necessity. The water has taught me that the most sure and direct way to find what I want is through failure. In concrete terms, when I paddle the course trying to avoid getting flipped, I am paddling in fear, hoping to avoid failure (and possible injury). When I do this, I progress very slowly, and ironically, the stiffness of fear makes me more vulnerable to getting flipped. Other days, I paddle with the intention of getting mauled by the waves -- on the best days, this is something devoid of fear; it is instead an opportunity for a kind of intimacy with the movement of the water. On those days when I embrace failure, I work through weaknesses and progress very quickly. By embracing failure, one side-steps fear.

religion and higher education

Here's a theory I've been kicking around for a few weeks:

Religion and university education play enormous roles in shaping individuals. A strong religious background tends to create a certain type of person. A university education tends to create a different type of person. A combination of the two seems to create a third type of person. Finally, the absence of either tends to create yet another type of person.

How strong do you think these factors are in shaping a person's identity? If you believe that there is any truth to the basic idea, how would you characterize each of the categories I listed above -- I'm interested in seeing how other people's perceptions compare with my own.

I know this is very clumsy, but I just wanted to throw something out there to get the ball rolling.

how deep the rabbit hole goes

Welcome, friends. This is an experiment that I'm starting. What I'm envisioning is a kind of cyber-tea, a place where we can post serious ideas that we find in books or films or in our heads and talk about them. I just finished reading a novel called Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell. One of the central themes of the novel is the idea that we can only come close to reality by laying our personal perspectives side by side with those of others, because reality is complex and layered. That's what I would like to do here.

I would like to talk about God, politics, literature, psychology, and whatever else may pertain to the human experience and the search for truth. I'm inviting a select few friends to start this to see how it goes.

So, what's on your mind?