Louie Schwartzberg – Hidden Miracles

 

Because as I’ve inspired you with the beauty of the forest, and you want to protect what you love, how can you then, throw away gobs of paper without recycling because you don’t want more trees to be cut down for the purpose of making paper.

 

So, that’s, I think, how you change worldview, and I’m trying to do it with beauty. I think beauty is the–for me is that magical molecule that I’d like to, you know, share with everybody that gets people to be more compassionate, more present and develop a deeper sense of gratitude.

 

Christopher Buck:  You did a series dedicated to gratitude, called Gratitude Revealed. What inspired you to do that?

 

Louie Schwartzberg:  Well, it’s kind of interesting. You know, what inspired me to do the series was that we did a gratitude video with nature and people, imagery, cut to Brother David Steindl-Rast’s beautiful poem about gratitude. And I had no idea if it would take off, but it went viral. And it’s gotten, I don’t know, 13, 14 million views.

 

I got a grant from the Templeton Foundation, where we looked at what I thought were the building blocks of gratitude like forgiveness, focus, courage, mindfulness, wonder, connection, purpose, energy, generosity, patience, happiness, curiosity, love. And those were all building blocks for me, my point of view of those are building blocks of gratitude.

 

And so, what does gratitude have to do with nature, you might be asking, right, because all these things are kind of more in the human space, in the human consciousness space. But, what I’ve discovered is, when you experience beauty and beauty open up the door into the divine that makes you present. And when you become present, you observe the bee pollinating that flower, and all of a sudden, you’re grateful for something that you weren’t even aware of before, that intricate relationship of what that bee is doing on that flower.

 

And that appreciation of gratitude deepens your soul, and it brings you kind of full circle into wanting to respect and protect nature. So, for me, it’s something that comes and that goes full circle.

 

Christopher Buck:  It all goes back to being one.

 

Louie Schwartzberg:  Yeah, it does. So, you get the idea that it’s all connected, and nature really shows you that it’s all connected. When you say it’s, all connected, that can sound very new age, and people can be skeptical or cynical. But, my God, Western science now has proved it’s all connected. I’m working on this film called Fantastic Fungi with Paul Stamets. The underground, the root structure of budding mushrooms is an internet shared economy on the ground that connects trees and plants. They’re sharing nutrients, information. And it shows that they’re all communicating with one another. It is all connected. The forest isn’t just a bunch of trees. The forest is one giant ecosystem that enables each other to flourish.

 

Christopher Buck:  When you get into Creation and you start looking at it, how incredibly intricate and involved and diverse it is amazing, it’s mind-boggling when you think about it. And it’s so easy for us to disconnect from it and forget that.

 

Louie Schwartzberg:  In the last couple hundred years, we’ve become disconnected. You know, we were used to living on the land, and we’ve gone through the Industrial Revolution and now the Information Revolution, and, we’re disconnected from nature. And that’s part of our dilemma now, problem. We’re being disconnected from nature. We’re disconnected from the foundation of life.

 

We wouldn’t have these environmental issues if we weren’t–if we had a connection to nature. You don’t poison the water you drink out of. You don’t poison the air you breathe. You don’t poison the soil that grows your food. Indigenous people understood that. Farmers understood that. People who lived in the land, on the land in connection with nature would never pollute or damage the foundation of their life support systems, right, because it’s all about survival, too. Why would you do that?

 

But, now, we’re not conscious that we’re connected to all of those. And if we destroy the air, the water, the rivers, the forests, we think that you know, well, that’s just too bad. A pretty national park just disappeared. It’s way bigger than that.

 

Christopher Buck:  That is scary when you think about how much we’ve destroyed as a species in such a little amount of time.

 

Louie Schwartzberg: Yeah, well, but we can turn it around. And that’s why the work you’re doing, is so important because we have the answers. We’ve got the scientific answers. We’ve got the solutions at our fingertips. We know what to do. If we ate less meat, eliminate factory farming, grow organic, stop using pesticides, I mean, more solar panels. I mean, it’s obvious all the things we need to do, and why aren’t we doing it? Well, it’s a shift in consciousness that we need, right?

 

Christopher Buck:  That’s right. And that’s why the work you do is so valuable.

 

Louie Schwartzberg: We’re all trying to get out the word, again, you can’t tell people like it’s a to-do list, do recycle. We need to shift their perspective to protect; what I’m trying to do is, have people protect what they fall in love with, and I give you the beauty because beauty’s always been nature’s tool for survival to motivate life to reproduce, to motive you to protect what you love, including your children. That’s why all kids are cute, and puppies are cute, kittens are cute, babies are cute, we’re hard-wired to want, we like to flourish, and I think beauty is kind of the score that orchestrates all of it.

 

Christopher Buck:  That’s a fascinating perspective. I think you’re spot on.

 

Louie Schwartzberg:  Thank you.

 

Christopher Buck:  You’ve got another work that’s coming up in the future called Changing of the Gods. Could you share a little bit about that before we wrap up the interview?

 

Louie Schwartzberg:  Sure. Still working on that with my partner Kenny Ausubel, who is the Founder of Bioneers.org. It’s a great organization that looks at indigenous knowledge, respect for women, and the environment. It’s great, they have a conference every fall up in the Bay Area.

 

But, Changing the Gods is based on the book by Rick Tarnas, who spent over a decade looking at the relationship between, basically the archetypes as reflected in astrology and major shifts in consciousness that have occurred in Western civilization. So, for example, every time Uranus and Pluto have been in conjunction or opposite each other in certain positions, which you can track, we’ve had these major shifts of consciousness on the planet.

 

That’s currently happening right now, and the last time they were in that position was during the ’60s. Keep on going back in time all the way to the French Revolution and Copernicus.

So, every time there’s been a major shift in worldview, the planets have been in a certain position. So, it’s not that the planets are having a direct effect on us as much as, throughout history, we’ve had these archetypes. So, whether it’s guys like Karl Jung or the Greeks or Joseph Campbell, they’ve all talked about how these archetypes have shaped our consciousness. And perhaps, these archetypes exist throughout the universe.

 

Christopher Buck:  It is an interesting point. In my past life, I was an engineer, and I was very left brained and didn’t, you know, think much of astrology and the like. But, as I have grown, I’ve realized just how is a whole ‘another world that actually impacts us.  I’ve grown to dread, for instance, when Mercury retrograde comes along.

 

Louie Schwartzberg: Exactly. Well, and again, you know, science is all about pattern recognition, or even awareness. As an artist, it’s about pattern recognition. It’s what I do. It’s observation, and then observation leads to wonder and awe.

And so, the planets are just another pattern that we can observe, and many cultures have been more tuned than we are regarding observing those patterns and seeing, what’s the meaning.

The meaning, I think, is one of the elements that’s out there in the universe. There’s the matter, there’s energy, and I think there’s meaning.

 

And so, we’re all searching for that meaning. You look everywhere, from the stars to what’s under the rock. And for me, as a visual artist, I can look at the patterns of the mycelium in the ground and go, my God, it looks just like the network system of the capillaries in my body or the neurons in my brain or, you know, the galaxies. They all look the same, the same networking of pattern.

 

You know, that lets me know that, hey, everything’s connected, but that there seems to be an overriding intelligence that seems to permeate the universe. And that’s been said for thousands of years, I think.

 

Christopher Buck: Louis, thank you very much. I could keep you for hours asking you about your work, but I know that’s not possible.

 

Louie Schwartzberg:  All right, well, this was great.

 

Connect with Louie Schwartzberg and his work at https://movingart.com