Running Brooks and Books

Books in running brooks?  If that metaphor were taken too literally, it would not make sense, because the two don't mix well.  After all, books don't do well in water, whether from a running brook or from the tap.  Any book-lover who has been caught in the rain while carrying a book, or has spilled coffee upon a volume in their collection, knows that paper once wet is never the same again.

Nevertheless, water and books were brought together figuratively by Shakespeare when he wrote that our life...

 "finds tongues in trees,
books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones."

Those words are probably the most quoted lines from the play As You Like It, and I think that is because they express so poetically one of the enduring urges of humankind:  Namely, to learn about the world and ourselves by turning our attention to Nature.

That urge was once more often emphasized in Christianity, before modern western Christianity became narrowed down in its focus to primarily the human sphere.  Nor was reading the "Book of Nature," as it was called, usually considered a diminishment of the value of scripture, because Nature and the Bible were considered complementary sources of inspiration.  As one example, the highly influential 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that "Revelation comes in two volumes, the Bible and Nature."

Today, we in the U.S. have more books than we could ever read, and a good number of them are devotional or theological books.  For me, however, it is not just religious books but also fiction or science that sparks a thought that leads to my spiritual reflections.

No matter what the written source, there is a reviving spiritual chemistry I can barely explain in this pulling together of what humans have expressed in books with my observations and knowledge of Nature.  (Similar, I think, to the way that Shakespeare's writings reveal the inspiration he found in both the books he read and Nature.)

Not that the "messages" I find from this chemistry are always immediately obvious by looking at Nature or the words on a printed page.  Instead, it is in musing upon the two together that my memories and emotions and inner voices arise.  My catching sight of something that intrigues me comes as I rummage through Nature's foliage (as Darwin did) and through the leaves of books.

There is one other advantage to remembering the "Book of Nature," especially because we live more and more in an inter-faith world.  Nature is inherently ecumenical.  As the contemporary Christian writer Matthew Fox put it:

No forest, no moon, no ocean, no field,
can be labeled "Buddhist" or "Jewish" or "Muslim" or "Christian."

~~~

Is there a place in Nature you like to return to?  Is there a favorite book you return to?

(The quotation by Matthew Fox is from

One River, Many Wells, © 2000.)