by Malcolm Ritchie and Ed O’Donnelly
What our short film Mountains and Rivers, Grasses and Trees attempts to do, is express the interface between mind and the natural environment, and where the dichotomy of our relationship to Nature is transcended – where mind is realized and experienced as the environment itself. The figure of the Buddhist monk in our film represents this consciousness, and the poetry that can arise from it.
In the West, our naturalists, environmentalists, ecologists and conservationists are brought up and educated within a generally exclusively materialistic and reductionist, scientific and overly dualistic paradigm of reality, which prevents us from understanding and experiencing Nature as a realm of profound, sacred intelligence of which we are essentially a part, and with which we can actually commune and communicate in ways which are transcending and healing, through such paths as meditation and plant shamanism – ways which direct us away from a mind-set which is anthropocentric, to one which is ecocentric, and experiences and recognizes the planet as an holistic, interdependent process, with reciprocation as its tidal breath.