My guest Carol Venolia says, “There’s much more to ‘not toxic’ than the absence of toxic chemicals!” She and I agree there is a whole other world beyond the toxic industrial life: the nurturing, nourishing, healing world of nature. Founder of Come Home to Nature website, Carol is an architect with a passion for reconnecting humans with the rest of life. She wrote the e-book Get Back to Nature without Leaving Home; coauthored Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House; wrote Healing Environments: Your Guide to Indoor Well-Being; penned the “Design for Life” column in Natural Home Magazine for 9 years; and has designed eco-homes, schools, healing centers, and eco-villages. Carol has been honored by The Green Economy Post as one of ten pioneering women in green design, and was named a Green Design Trailblazer by Natural Home Magazine. In this show we’ll be talking about how you can improve your general well-being by bringing elements of nature into your home. www.comehometonature.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Carol Venolia
Date of Broadcast: June 18, 2013
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And this is Toxic Free Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world. And even though there are toxic chemicals all around us, we can do something about them. We can remove them from our homes, remove them from our bodies, remove them from the marketplace and live in a non-toxic world.
Today is June 18th—Tuesday, June 18th 2003. And I’m here in Clearwater, Florida. And it just happens to be my birthday. And we’re going to have a very special show today because we’re going to talk about something slightly different, but very, very related to our toxic chemical exposures. And that is we’re going to talk about what’s on the other side of being toxic. When you stop using toxic chemicals, there’s more to life than simply being not toxic.
And my guest and I today both hold that viewpoint. And we’ve both have gone through similar transformations in our lives where we’ve become aware of the world of nature and how that can benefit our well-being.
Before I introduce my guest, I want to tell you about my own personal website on this subject which is LivingasNature.com. I have a blog where I write about my personal insights about being part of the natural world as my viewpoint of life rather than living in the industrial world.
And as I’m sitting here saying this, my kittens are banging on the cat door wanting to come in from the outside world into the inside world.
But I do want to say I have this story that, since I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days about my guest being on, and that we’re going to be discussing this subject, my kittens have been bringing nature indoors. They’ve been bringing me live grasshoppers in through the kitty door. And I have to kind of laugh at that this morning when I realized that, today, we’re going to be talking about coming home to nature and bringing nature into our lives.
My guest today is Carol Venolia. And she is the author of two books, one is Healing Environments and the other is Natural Remodeling for the Not So Green House. But she also now has a website called Come Home to Nature which is at ComeHometoNature.com. And she has a wonderful ebook called Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home.
And that’s what we’re going to be discussing today, how you can get back to nature without leaving home.
Carol, are you there?
CAROL VENOLIA: Hi, I’m here. I’m delighted to be on your birthday show. Happy birthday.
DEBRA: Thank you. And I’m delighted that you’re here. Carol and I have known each other for 26 years. We met in 1987 on the same week, I think it was, that I met Larry who I ended up marrying and who’s been my friend for 26 years, same length of time. She had just written her book, Healing Environments and sent me the manuscript, asking me if I would write the foreword—which I did, and that’s how we met. And we’ve been friends ever since.
We used to both live in Northern California. So we were close enough that we could each drive about an hour and meet in the middle and have dinners together and talk. We’ve had many discussions over the years about nature and had a lot of agreement on this subject.
So Carol, let’s start with your story about how you went from being an average industrialized person into having your incredible viewpoint about being part of nature.
CAROL VENOLIA: Well, it all started way back in the early ‘70s (I’ve just dated myself) when I decided I wanted to be an architect. But it also happened to be, I believe, the year of the first Earth Day. And there was a growing awareness of life all over the globe being interconnected and of our role in that wonderful dance. And I began to wonder, “Okay, we’ve got this wonderful web of life, seizing, pulsing dance of being life. What do buildings have to do with that?” I didn’t want to just populate the world with more buildings. I wanted to understand how do these fairly static things, these buildings and towns and cities that we create relate to the living world.
And so that was beginning of the journey that have lasted 40+ years, exploring that question.
And what I found very early on was that the subject of how do life and buildings relate divided itself into two topics—one being human indoor health, and the other being the impact of buildings on the ecosphere. And that division itself says something about our experience, because we get cut off from the natural world by these wonderful places we’ve created to live in.
I shouldn’t say “cut off” from the natural world. We are nature. And that is the biggest insight we’ve kind of lost track of.
DEBRA: Yeah, let’s just talk about that for a couple of minutes. I think that that for me was a huge thing. And it came out of my experience of finding myself being sensitive to toxic chemicals and having them make me sick and having to put attention in my home environment in a way that was beyond say interior decorating.
I mean how many people look at what’s going on in their home except for what color do I want my sofa to be. And I really had to look and see that my home environment was making me sick. And when I got to a point where I have examined every single thing in my home to see what was toxic and what wasn’t, I walked out my front door one day and suddenly realized that there was another environment out there. I know we’re laughing, but when you have that realization, it’s kind of stunning.
CAROL VENOLIA: Right!
Well, yes, it is funny that we’ve come to use the word “environment.” And when we say that word, we sort of immediately think of all the big scale problems—pollution and deforestation and so on. But environment is what surrounds you. And that can be right next to your skin or all the way to the whole planet.
DEBRA: Yes, I actually now think of my body as part of the environment because I don’t think of myself as being my body, I think of myself as a spiritual being. So my first environment is my body, and then there’s my home, and then there’s the rest of the world. But it’s all layers of environment. And it took me a long time to get to that viewpoint. I just remember that day when I walked out the door, and I went, “Oh, well here’s another environment that I now have to look at and see is it toxic or is it not toxic or what’s going on with it.” And even though I have been to summer camp a lot as a girl scout, I still haven’t really seen the environment. I thought of it as being separate.
We need to take a break. But we’ll talk about this more when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Carol Venolia.and we’re talking about nature and being part of it and how to reconnect with it, et cetera, et cetera. We’ll be back in a moment.
DEBRA: Hello again. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And it’s my birthday. And I’m here with architect, Carol Venolia. And we’re talking about nature and awareness of nature (or the lack thereof) in our culture today.
So, before the break, we were talking about how most people living in our industrialized world don’t consider themselves to be part of nature. So Carol, talk to us more about that.
CAROL VENOLIA: Okay! Well, let’s start with a simple statistic that a lot of people may have heard which is that, on average, Americans spend 91% or more of our time indoors. What that means is about half of the people spend more than 91% of their time indoors. And when we’re indoors, this is not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve created our homes so that we don’t have to be constantly subject to changes in weather and predators and all that kind of stuff. But we get this strange notion that life is about a thermostat and being able to completely control our environment which, in turns out, isn’t all that good for us (and we can come back to that). But it’s like buildings give us both a physical and a psychological message that we are separate from the rest of life and we get to control it. And we’ve seen some serious problems come out of that set of beliefs.
But maybe more importantly, let’s go back to this notion of toxics. When you look at what the human organism needs in order to thrive—you talked about that in your intro, we want to thrive in this world—not being poisoned is a really good first step.
DEBRA: It is!
CAROL VENOLIA: You want to deal with that. But there is so much more, as you’ve said, to being really alive, to feeling your vitality than not being poisoned. And it turns out, as I was doing the research for that first book that you participated in, Healing Environments, you look at light, color, sound, yes, indoor air quality, presence or absence of plants, symbolism, all kinds of factors affect our well-being. And we pretty much lost that sensibility.
And we are intimately connected with everything around us. There’s that famous quote from Winston Churchill, “We create our…”
DEBRA: “We create our houses, and then they create us,” or something like that.
CAROL VENOLIA: Yeah, they affect us, whatever. The idea is we create these environments and then they work on us. And it’s really helpful to start to become aware of that.
And even for people who are dealing with a really dangerous combination of their level of sensitivity and the level of toxicity around them, to begin looking at a lot of these other factors, what kind of light, what kind of color, what kind of sound, what kind of space, what kind of connection with the outdoors, what can kind of greenery would be good for them, that supports the healing process. All of that feeds our vitality and allows us to deal better with the challenges that are not so good for us.
DEBRA: I’ve really found in my life that the more I can recognize in various different ways—and remember, all of you listening, as you’re listening to Carol and I, we’ve been exploring this subject for 30 years, each of us, or more. And so it wasn’t like we just woke up one day and we know everything that we know today. And you can learn a lot about what we know by visiting each of our webistes—ComeHometoNature.com for Carol and LivingasNature.com for me.
But one of the things I want to make sure that I mention is that a large part of becoming aware that we’re part of nature is simply observing nature. And I remember a moment that was one of those defining moments of change where I had started to become aware that there was time beyond clocks and calendars and that there was a time in nature that was governed by the sun, moon and stars and the changing positions of them and that our year, the seasons, is because the earth is moving around the sun, and the sun is at different angles and changes, and the different weather are all governed by the sun.
But the moon establishes the month, the “moon-th.” And I thought, “Oh, I’m going to start knowing when it’s the new moon and the first quarter moon and the full moon and the last quarter moon. And my first thought after I decided I wanted to do that was I better get a book that tells me when it’s the new moon and the full moon.
And that was so indicative of what my mindset was like, that if I wanted to know something about nature, I better go get a book about it and get somebody else’s second-hand information instead of me looking at the sky and seeing where the moon is.
And that was actually one of the first things that I did, was to just look at the sky every night and see where the moon is. And I found out that, sometimes, you have to look in the sky during the day because sometimes the moon is visible at night, and sometimes it’s visible during the day. And that helps you know where it is in the cycle.
And so, just that act of observing something or going for a walk and looking around every day and seeing how your environment is different from day to day—
I read something once about a man who took a picture of the same spot outside in nature at the same time and could see them how it was changing throughout the year.
But we don’t even look at nature. And that’s, I think, one of the most amazing things, is how out of touch we are.
CAROL VENOLIA: And I’d like to add a piece to that, which is, given that we are nature, yes, absolutely, the powers of observation of what’s around us is something that many of us have lost. And it’s profound when you start to just take a moment and tune in.
But also, at the same time, tune in to what’s going on with your body, especially your senses. If you just sit down or stand for a minute from time to time and tune in—close your eyes first. It’s helpful because we tend to be very visual—tune in to what you’re hearing, tune in to what you’re smelling, and tune in to what you feel on your skin, and then you could open your eyes and instead of looking for information, just kind of look around and see what are the colors, how is the light falling, and what’s the shape of the space you’re in, you will probably be very surprised and profoundly effective.
And then, you very naturally start to make that connection between what your body is feeling and perceiving and what’s around you. And then, that sense of separation just disappears.
DEBRA: I totally agree. There’s so much more to talk about here. We need to take a break. But we’ll be right back after these messages. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And we’re talking with architect Carol Venolia. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. And my guest today is Carol Venolia, architect, and creator of the website, ComeHometoNature.com. She has a wonderful book, an ebook called Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home. And it’s about bringing nature into your home experience.
She was talking earlier about how buildings put a separation between us and the natural world and that that’s a good thing in that it protects us from things like weather and predators and, in our world today, burglars and other “dangers” of the outside world, but it also separates us from the experience of being in nature.
And before we hear more from Carol, I just want to comment that, in my own personal process about feeling more like I’m part of nature, I know that I went through a time when I just became more aware of nature in my every day surroundings, such as I’m sitting at a desk made from an oak tree, and it also has, along the edges, a wood called purple heart which is purple. And so instead of just looking at the desk and seeing “I’m sitting at a desk,” I look at the desk and see a tree. This is a tree that went into making this desk and maybe several trees and the skill of a human being that cared about making this piece of furniture.
I can look around at my house and see that what everything is made of here is—here’s a pencil holder made of stone. I have to look around and sometimes acknowledge, well, there’s plastic, and that’s made from petroleum. But most of the time—you know, like I’m feeling the cotton, the soft cotton against my skin and tasting the peppermint oil in my toothpaste.
You can just become aware of all these plants and animals and minerals that are right here in your own home. And then, that wall that separates us from nature starts falling apart.
That was such a special thing when I went through that. I wanted to share that with you.
CAROL VENOLIA: That’s lovely. I feel like I’m right there with you.
DEBRA: Oh, thank you.
CAROL VENOLIA: And I’d like to say something about your desk and your pencil holder. If you touch that desk, even if it’s got—I don’t know what kind of finish is on the wood—you’re feeling something very different than if you were touching a laminate desk, for example. And the same with that pencil holder.
But even without touching, just looking at the grain of the wood, the two different kinds of wood, your eye—whether you’re conscious of it or not—are getting to explore. Your eyes are getting to move around and follow and say, “Hmmm… oh, look at how that goes.”
That is what I call sensory nutrition. Imagine, instead, you had that laminate desk, and maybe it’s black plastic or something, not a lot for your eye to engage. That might seem like an aesthetic difference, but it’s actually a deep biological soul-felt difference. You extend that to your other senses, and you realize that many of our indoor environments and the objects that we have around us are not very nourishing on the sensory level.
And that then becomes part of the way we become a little more dead all the time. Whereas if we can have things around us that engage us, patterns that let the eye follow and go somewhere and wonder, whether we’re conscious of it or not, changes in air movement, in temperature, gentle changes in sounds, rich textures of sounds, all those things are sensory nutrition that’s every bit as important as the nutrition that we take in through our mouth.
DEBRA: I totally agree with that. And one of the things that I discovered early on about nature is that, in nature, everything is different. There’s variation and variety. No two snowflakes are alie. And no two fingerprints are alike. Everything is different. No two apples are alike.
And so if I eat a processed food, it always tastes the same, tastes the same, tastes the same. And that’s what industrialism is about, everything being exactly the same. And in nature, you find very quickly that everything is different.
Even when I started to look at time—I followed a sundial one day against the clock. I found that the hours as they showed up against the sundial were not 60 minutes. They all average out to 60 minutes. But when the sun is moving, it’s dividing the day in these other kinds of parts.
And I just found that continuously throughout nature. It’s this incredibly rich variety, yet it all comes together.
And so it really is a world that is almost the exact opposite of industrialism. And so when we live in the industrial world, and all of our attention is on the industrial world, we start acting like machines instead of human beings.
We really are human beings born of the natural world. That’s part of our make-up and what makes us healthy physically, mentally and spirituality. We’ve lost so much of that. We just don’t even have a clue as a culture. We’re totally oriented now—almost totally oriented—to the industrial ways of doing things.
And I think that’s a great loss and something that I personally want to be doing things to reverse. I’m not saying that we should eliminate industrialism entirely, but we need to remember who we are, what we are.
CAROL VENOLIA: And one of the ways to remember is if you ask someone where are you when you feel at your best, when you feel truly alive, they will almost always describe some place far from buildings and cities, some place as wild as possible.
And what does that tell us?
But part of my point with Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home is that the wilderness and living in a building is just different. You don’t have to sacrifice all of that. But you can, through some really simple measures, bring a lot of that experience of variety that you were just talking about, complexity, gentle change. These are all attributes of the living world.
You can have those in your daily lives—whether it’s indoors or by just stepping out the door. You can have it in your garden.
Maybe there’s a nice park down the road that you just don’t think to give yourself time to go to. There are a lot of ways to experience being nature and loving nature in day to day life. And the first step is to believe that a) it’s powerful and b) you deserve it and you have to do it, you need it.
And then, after that, there are some very simple habit changes that don’t even require money or changing your environment—one of which is (unless you’re living in one of the most hostile places in the world) just to get outdoors more often.
DEBRA: Or just open your window.
CAROL VENOLIA: Yeah, yeah, that too, for sure. But I had a client who, once I started asking her, “What’s around you that could be supporting of you?”, it turns out she has this great yard that feels like a nature paradise, and she never spent time there. So, my big job was to get out there every day.
DEBRA: Yeah.
CAROL VENOLIA: And it really helped.
DEBRA: We need to take another break, but we’ll be back. And after this, we’ll talk about Carol’s book, Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. And my guest today is Carol Venolia. And her website is ComeHometoNature.com. We’ll be back in a minute.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m here with my guest, Carol Venolia. She’s the founder of Come Home to Nature, ComeHometoNature.com, and the author of Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home.
Carol, let’s tell everybody about this book because I find it delightful. I found it to be right in alignment with ideas that I came to myself in my life. But you’ve arranged it in a way that is really wonderful because you’re not just telling people what’s going on or telling the reader what’s going on. You’re also asking them to look and see what their own personal experience is.
So, tell us more about the book.
CAROL VENOLIA: Okay. Well, really, the book is a workbook. It’s got information, but it also takes the reader by the hand and says, “Now try this. Now ask yourself this. Now reflect on this. Now notice how you feel.” And there are places for them to fill in stuff.
And the whole idea is that another thing about this industrialized culture is we tend to think there’s one right answer and there’s one right thing to do. “Just tell me and I’ll do it.” And in fact, the whole world of getting in touch with your own complex nature and what you need from your surroundings and getting it for yourself can be very individual.
And so, I can’t just tell somebody, “Here’s what to do,” whether I’m working with a client or it’s someone reading this book and working through it. The first step is for them to tune into their uniqueness, their own body, how their body responds to a place, what their body longs for, the experiences that they’ve had in wilder environment, what kind of nature gets to you the most. Are you just wild and crazy about birds, or is it more plants, or all of the above?
So, this book really guides people through the process first of finding out who are you as a natural being in your surroundings.
And then, the main point of this book, Get Back to Nature Without Leaving Home is to introduce these very simple steps.
These are the things anybody should be able to do fairly easily with little or no expense. There are more complicated steps later if you want to remodel your home or your yard. But these are the ones you can just do.
So they include things like, I mean the impact of being able to see greenery is huge! There have been studies that show that green views from a hospital room allow people to heal faster, get out of the hospital faster, use fewer painkillers and just generally feel better about the healing process. Workers with greenery are more efficient and have fewer errors and even have lower blood pressure. So hey, that can help in your daily life at home too, especially if you have a home office.
DEBRA: I can’t live in a house where I can’t see the green outside. And in fact, I do work at home. And so whenever I’m looking for a place to live, I’m always looking for expansive greenery. And where I live right now have about 20 feet of windows that open onto my backyard where I have a whole oak. I actually live in an oak grove of old oak trees. And so I have all these under-story azaleas and under-story trees. I can look out the window and see cardinals and blue jays and mocking birds. I saw a snake the other day climbing up one of my plants. I’ve got orchids and all kinds of things.
And so, all I have to do is look up from my computer and I’ve got this whole, as you were talking about, variety of stuff to look at and natural light coming in.
And if I just had a wall here and I couldn’t look outside and have this window on nature, I just wouldn’t be able to be in the house. I’d have to go outside.
CAROL VENOLIA: Well, and let’s say there are probably readers who are thinking, “Well, nice for you, girl. I live in a city.” Window plants, if you can open the window, you can put a window box there. You can grow stuff that’s just right there on the window. And then, house plants, a single potted plant in a windowless office has been found to make a huge difference in satisfaction and worker effectiveness.
DEBRA: But I need to tell you, talking about living in a city, I realized just as you were saying this, it’s not that I need to look at the greenery, it’s that I need to have there a window so that I can see what’s going on outside. And I had the pleasure of living for three months at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco right under Coit Tower. And there was no greenery outside my window, but there were clouds. There was sunlight and there were clouds. I was up in the sky. And birds would fly by.
And my bed faced that window. And I could just lie in bed! I’d wake up in the morning, and I’d just watch the clouds. It was the connection with nature that was important.
CAROL VENOLIA: Absolutely! And actually, there are a number of things in what you just said. If we can be awakened by the morning sun—it doesn’t have to be at sunrise—that’s actually very good for setting all of our biological cycles into harmony with each other. And that’s a huge subject… but just looking out the window.
See, there’s this classic thing about students looking out the windows in classrooms, that this is a bad thing. They even created windowless schools. It turns out there’s studies that show that gazing out the window improves student performance.
You and I are not surprised by this.
DEBRA: No, we are not.
CAROL VENOLIA: And just relying more on what architects call “daylighting,” which means sunshine coming through the window actually has tremendous effects on health and productivity. One of the simple solutions I recommend to people is look at where the sun is shining into your house and consider just moving your furniture, so you don’t need electric lighting as much and your body is essentially getting massaged by the changing sunlight throughout the day.
You may have to deal with glare issues. That’s just a little thing you can cope with. But if you can just get your desk, your reading chair, whatever, closer to the window, so that you’re getting more sunlight indoors, it’s affecting you directly, that can make a profound difference in your life as well as what you see by looking out the window.
DEBRA: You know, having cats in the house—I haven’t had a cat in a few years, but now I have these two kittens—I was noticing again as I’ve noticed before that cats sit in the sun. They’ll go find that one spot where the sun is shining in the window, and that’s where they’ll go sit. As uncomfortable as it might be, that’s where they sit.
And we need that connection with the sun. We have this industrial idea that sunlight will cause cancer. And so we stay out of the sun. But we need sun. We need wind. We need rain. We need all these things to be part of our lives. And they can be a part of our homes.
So, tell us more so that the listeners get an idea of what’s in the book. Let’s just take one item.
You talk about being more in tune with the seasons. And I have my attention on the fact that Saturday is summer solstice. And I always celebrate summer solstice and winter’s solstice and the spring equinox and the fall equinox because they’re very, very different seasons and different things are going on in the natural world.
I think a lot of people celebrate winter solstice now—not as many as could. But summer solstice doesn’t get the same kind of attention. And yet I think that summer solstice, that’s when the earth is most alive (at least in our hemisphere, in the northern hemisphere, I know. In the southern hemisphere, it’s opposite). Here in the northern hemisphere, this is the peak of the sun’s energy and the peak of plants flourishing and all these different kinds of things.
And I just think that we should take time when these points occur, like summer solstice, to celebrate, remember to celebrate the powers of nature and the resources of nature and what nature is giving to us, what is the sun contributing to our lives.
I know for myself, I have a friend, Linda, and on the solstices and the equinoxes, we always go and do something together outdoors. We’re going to the botanical gardens and having lunch on Saturday. And our botanical gardens, they have a edible plants exhibit. And we’re going to go see what edible plants we can put in our gardens right here where we live.
And I just really encourage people to do something to acknowledge the change of seasons. What do you think about that, Carol?
CAROL VENOLIA: Well, I think acknowledging season changes is fabulous! There are a lot of wonderful ways to do it. In addition, there’s a very tangible, biological effect. Light is a stimulant. We don’t always think about that. Sunlight stimulates our bodies and our body’s system. It gives us energy. So, what do we have at the summer solstice? We have the greatest amount of sunlight in a day that we have for the entire year.
Summer is about being physical, about being out in that sun, about being active. And the sun seeds that activity by giving us energy.
In fact, people who live in more northern latitudes like Alaska, Scandinavia and so on, can be almost manic during the summer. They’re so keyed up by all that sun.
And for us to feel in our bodies and honor the changes the seasons bring is also really crucial to our vitality. We love being active. We’re a very yang culture. And so this summer energy is great. But then to also let go off it when fall and winter come and let ourselves rest.
That cycle of the year happens in our bodies as much as around the planet. And it’s crucial to our well-being to honor all parts of that cycle.
DEBRA: Yes, I found that too.
Well, unfortunately, we actually only have a few seconds left. So I’ll say thank you, Carol, so much for being with me. And I hope to have you on again. There’s so much more that we could talk about.
And again, Carol’s website is ComeHometoNature.com. And my website for this show is ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com.
If you have enjoyed this show, please tell your friends. Please join me again. And please listen to all the shows on the archives. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio.
