Home, Semi-Sweet Home

Teachers of writing might, for good reason, caution movie writers to use the concept of "home" cautiously. The problem is that it can easily lead to sentimentality – to an expression of emotion that seems overdone to the movie viewer.  If the opening scene of a movie depicts a family seated quietly in their living-room with a needlepoint of "Home, Sweet Home" on the wall above the fireplace, the viewer should be wary.  Unless that self-proclaimed label of domestic sweetness is tongue-in-cheek about the dysfunctional nature of the family beside the fireplace, we are likely to find the movie becoming saccharine.

Nevertheless, the concept of "home" can genuinely touch deep resonances within us if it is skillfully used by a poet.  The very word "home" can express a place of belonging we'd like to get back to, even if we've never quite been there.  Some of the best instances I've encountered of the use of "home" also speak to a relationship with Nature.

One poem that makes an explicit correlation (and which seems to portray an actual event in the poet's life) is written by Joseph Bruchac.  The poem has the unusual title of "Geese Flying over a Prison Sweat Lodge."  A session together in a sweat lodge (similar to a sauna) is one Native-American way of bonding socially and re-grounding spiritually.  In the incident this particular poem describes, however, being in the comforting interior space of the lodge ("inside our memories /  waiting to be born again") is contrasted with the imprisoning walls of prison life ("mortared stone / with razor wire on top").  Paradoxically, once enclosed within the set of walls of the sweat lodge, the prisoners find release through a contact with Nature they cannot even see.  That is because they hear "the cries of the geese... their touch deep as bone, / speaking words never written / That always mean home."

The "home" metaphor can be powerful (if deftly used) because it speaks not only to our inner resonances with the natural world but also to our loneliness and our fear of separation. I know of no better expression of the two elements together -- Nature and longing -- than in the following short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.  Interestingly, Rilke, like Bruchac, draws upon migrating birds' astounding homing instinct -- their urge to get home.

"Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner – what is it?

if not intensified sky,

hurled through with the birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming."

~~~

Do you have a way of getting back home spiritually?

(The Bruchac poem can be found in

 Native American Songs and Poems, ed. Brian Swann, © 1996.)

(The Rilke poem, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, is from

 Ahead of All Parting:  The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, © 1995.)

The Starry Sky

I most recently encountered the idea in F. C. Happold's Religious Faith and Twentieth-Century Man.  Like a number of other thoughtful Christian writers over the past half-century, Happold (a modern mystic ) has commented upon the contrast between the cosmology of Biblical times and the one provided by our contemporary astronomy.  These writers know that the Bible was not meant to be science.  Nevertheless, they raise the question of whether "modern man's" way of thinking about the world is now so different that we cannot respond spiritually in a way paralleling that of people several centuries ago.  They point out how we now have detailed scientific knowledge of the cosmos, and ask if the kind of religious sentiment felt by people centuries ago is not diminished in contrast.

But I wonder.  I recognize that there has been an immense change in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos... but still I wonder.  I wonder whether it is our increased knowledge of astronomy that poses the problem, or perhaps something else.  I wonder if the challenge doesn't come more from some side effects of our scientific technology.

In Biblical times, people did not know about light-years of distance, or about the millions of galaxies, or about an expanding universe.  Those people could, however, simply look up at the sky at night and see more stars than anyone could count.  The stars were to them as innumerable as the grains of sand upon the shore (Gen. 22:17).  And those people's response could be sacred awe.

Today, most people rarely have the same experience, but I do not think it is because our scientific knowledge is so much greater.  It is instead because our firsthand experience of the night sky is so limited.  When we today look up at the sky at night, we most likely see only a fraction of the number of stars Biblical man saw.  All the ambient city lights prevent us from seeing a black-velvet background of sky studded with stars beyond anyone's counting.

Even if there were not so many electric lights outside to interfere, would that mean there wouldn't still be another problem?  Wouldn't all our technological temptations (TV., computers, and cellphones) distract us?  Even when there are a fair number of stars visible, how often do you see people in U.S. cities pause from their activities to look up and survey the starry night sky?

time exposure of night sky

Even if I cannot see as many stars as I would like to, I still like to look up and see as many as I can -- and I find it so wondrous!  That is why I like to periodically leaf through my book of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems and read the opening lines of "The Starlight Night."  Those lines read:  

"Look at the stars!  look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!"

~~~

Do you have a favorite remembrance of having experienced the starry sky?

Degrees of Separation

"The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw -- and knew I saw -- 
all things in God, and God in all things.” 

 (Mechthild of Magdeburg, 13th cent.)

"They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them."

(The Bhagavad Gita, 3rd cent, B.C.E.)

In their origins, these quotations, are separated by centuries, by cultures, and by miles of geography.  But they are of the same spirit.  Not too long ago, I recalled these memorable lines because I experienced some difficult communication between myself and a friend, causing us to both feel painfully the inescapable differences in our perspectives.

Quotations similar to these can be found in all of the world's great faith-traditions.  Such reminders of a fundamental unity endure because we humans know all too well how easily two friends, two partners, or two family members can become alienated.  (Not to mention the persistent barriers of nationality, ethnicity, and culture.)

Diagram of 6 degrees of separation

Over the past several years, the phrase "six degrees of separation" has entered our vocabulary. The supposition behind that phrase is that, beginning with any person, a series of six connections of some sort can be drawn linking that person to any other person.  (For example: Am I only six degrees from a movie star, if I include the cities I've lived in, and include someone who went to the movie star's high school?)  I wonder if the popularity of trying to find such 6-link chains may come in part from our living in ever-larger cities, causing us to be surrounded by more and more strangers.

The great mystics, such as the Christian Mechthild of Magdeburg and the author of that quote from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, see the world in a somewhat different way:  They say that if we see more deeply into reality, the number of degrees of separation is zero!

Here is where the critics of mysticism (whether religious or secular critics) are easily confused. Critics frequently dismiss mysticism by saying that mystics are impractical and out of touch with everyday reality.  If taken literally, a mystics claim that all is "one" seems obviously false.  For, after all, I can see with my eyes that there are two people right in front of me.  The mystics, however, lived lives just as real and practical as other people.  The difference was that they came to perceive a hidden unity that made the forms of separation shallow in comparison.

all a part of one universe
(16th-century drawing)

Modern science has put a new twist on this age-old dispute between the mystical and the commonplace viewpoints. Modern science, with its narrative of how our universe was born and evolved to us today, draws an actual, physical chain of links connecting everything  -- alienated people, animals, plants, and the inanimate.  As the contemporary Christian writer Matthew Fox explains:  " [The] very elements of which we are composed were in fact prepared billions of years ago in the stars themselves."

~~~

Do you have some way of handling alienation between you and someone else when it occurs?

(The Mechthild quote is taken from Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg, ed. Sue Woodruff, © 1982.  p. 42.)
(The passage [2:55] from The Bhagavad Gita is from the translation of Eknath Easwaran, © 1985.)

(The map of the universe by Thomas Digges is in the Public Domain because it is over 70 yrs. old.)

Of Cattle and Cows

Most children in the U.S. today have few opportunities to see sizable animals other than their pets without going to a zoo. However, one way we city folk do get a glimpse of non-zoo animals is by taking a drive in the countryside.  Of all the animals we can spot through a car window at 65 mph, the most likely are cattle and cows.  Although in terms of domesticated animals raised for food worldwide, goats do outnumber bovine, it is these larger, lumbering cattle and cows that dominate in the U.S.  Unfortunately, they usually get mentioned in the news media only when a controversy arises about the slaughter of cattle for beef.  Whether I choose vegetarianism or not, I would like to claim equal time for reflecting upon them with gratitude.  Especially time to reflect upon milk.

It was indeed the dairy cows we saw more often when I grew up in Wisconsin  At that time, containers of Borden's milk were conspicuously adorned with the face of "Elsie the Cow."  It was a cartoon drawing of Elsie smiling broadly, so happy was she to provide us her milk.  Today, Elsie is much less noticeable on the carton.   All the brands of milk other than Borden's in one grocery store I've checked had no picture of a cow on the container.  Also, Carnation no longer tells us their milk comes from cows.  ("Contented cows," they used to say.)  You might think that the milk was synthesized by humans.

Krishna and milk-maidens with cow

It is in regard to this matter of milk and gratitude that one of the biggest misunderstandings between faith-traditions has occurred.  Our English language contains the phrase "sacred cow," meaning something that is protected unreasonably and illogically.  The phrase has its origins in a Western colonial attitude that looked upon the poorer people of India as being stupid for not slaughtering the cows, even when people were near starvation.  Westerners interpreted the taboo on killing cows as a misguided Hindu obstacle to advancement.  The truth was that Indians down through the centuries knew better.  If slaughtered, the cows would have been only a fleeting source of food (and not a convenient one without refrigeration).  Kept alive, the cow provided a life-giving stream of milk for years (as well as providing dung, which, when dried, was burned for fuel, thus preventing deforestation in an arid landscape).

Other cultural misunderstandings about milk have continued into the present.  Children have been encouraged to drink milk without an exception for lactose-intolerant children.  Those who have suffered most have been children of African-American descent because a genetic ability to digest cow's milk evolved in Europeans but not in people of Africa, where the landscape was not appropriate for fat dairy cows.

from The Seventh Seal

Nevertheless, it was a great shift in human history 8,000 years ago when people domesticated animals for milk, also leading to the development of nourishing yogurts and cheese.  In Ingmar Bergman's otherwise dark, existential movie The Seventh Seal, when the hero drinks from a restorative bowl of milk, sunlight reflected from the milk brightens his face.  Not a bad symbol, even though Elsie did not make it into the credits.

~~~

Are there ways you try to remain grateful for the food you eat?  What are those ways?

(The movie still from The Seventh Seal,

 © 1957 by A. B. Svensk Films, is used through Fair Use.)

Leaves Old and New

Having always been quite nearsighted, I could not appreciate trees as easily as I could appreciate leaves.  I could not readily identify which species a tree was from a distance, the way my parents could.  Nor could I see detail in the distant treetops.  But I could look at a leaf closely, even hold it in my hand, and feel its texture.

I am still fascinated by the shapes of leaves.  Not just the variety, but the way that each one looks like something else.  What child has not noticed the resemblance between a maple leaf and their own hand, even fitting their hand upon it?  Another leaf I examine (from what tree I do not know) looks like a spear.  Still another leaf has the outline of a scoop.  And the stiff, large leaf of the southern magnolia tree seems perfectly designed for fanning oneself during a hot southern summer.

To the botanist, the shape of the leaf tells a story about its tree having evolved to flourish in a particular environment.  Even without knowing the details about such variations, I can be amazed to know that it is within those thin leaves that plants magically convert carbon dioxide and water into solid material, thus enabling the plant to grow.  Green leaves are truly miniature factories powered by the sun.

I am fascinated not only by the shapes of leaves but also by their colors.  How many shades of green can there be?  Even more fascinating are the turnings of color as autumn comes.  Like an alarm clock that has gone off, the shock of seeing some trees no longer green can wake us up to the approaching winter.  The change in foliage can even make us think about our own use of time, and whether our time might be short.

In the author O. Henry's amusing story "The Cop and the Anthem," a dead leaf falling into the lap of the main character, a hobo, signals to him that he needs to make a change in his living arrangements in order to make it through the winter.  That warning, coupled with the moving chords of church music that waft outdoors, inspire the hobo to make a good change in his life -- "to turn over a new leaf," as we say.

As fall continues and winter gets even closer, the leaves we see on the ground change colors even more, becoming mottled, creating a quilt of yellows, browns, reds, and even purples.  The leaves are then ready to be recycled into the earth, to become the substance of plants and trees yet again.  The leaves also "turn over a new leaf."

With the passage of time, I am also probably reprocessing things from my past into my future, shedding some things as a way of growing new leaves.  But it is harder for me to see those changes happening in me than it is for me to observe the changes in leaves.  In leaves, I see life and change made manifest.

~~~

Do you have memories about leaves?  How do you experience your life changing with the cycle of a year?

Trees, Time, and Passing By

Trees rarely make the front page.  That did happen, however, in 2004 when Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her Green Belt Movement begun in Kenya.  Knowing a bit about ecology, I was not surprised to hear about the physical side effects that resulted from that movement's planting trees, such as cleaner streams due to reduced soil erosion.  What intrigued me more were the intangible benefits those trees brought.  For example, friendships between Kenyan women developed because, as they made their daily trips in the hot sun carrying water, they stopped to converse in the shade of trees.

As I have reflected about trees in general, I've concluded that the most enduring intangible benefits trees bring derive from the way they serve as tabernacles of time.  Many species of trees can have life spans longer than ours can ever reach.  Trees, therefore, help families and communities hold onto life-giving memories from generation to generation.  That role trees can serve is made explicit in these lines from the early 20th-century poet Stephen Vincent Benet as he describes Richmond, Virginia:

"The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people,

Family trees that remember your grandfather's name."

In Sequoia Natl. Park in California, I stretched my neck far back to look up at a tree that was young and growing long before Jesus was born.  Such pine trees and sequoias help us transcend our normal sense of time.  We usually think of time in terms of human generations, but that is subjective and human-centered. The 20th-century American Buddhist poet Gary Snyder speaks to the relativity of time scales in this way:

"As the crickets' soft autumn hum

is to us,

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills."

Compared to many long-living species of trees, we humans are just passing by.  We are to them passers-by in time, similar to the way we pass by a tree beside the sidewalk or walking path. In countries where people do not get virtually all their food from the grocery story, people can also be more aware of the other, tangible benefits those trees provide.  The Hindu Upadesa Tarangini brings together those tangible benefits with trees' intangible reminder that we are passers-by in the following benediction placed upon a tree:

"Oh tree!  You are standing on the path.  Live for a long time and be happy, because with your blossoms the cuckoo is happy, and with your pollen the bumblebees are happy, and passers by are happy with your fruits.  So live long!"

~~~

Is there any tree in particular that you remember? What is your memory of it?

(The Snyder poem is taken from

Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker, et al., © 1997.)

(The Hindu blessing is taken from Hinduism and Ecology,
 by Ranchor Prime, © 1992.)

“Talk to the Animals” ?

Despite the peculiar style of drawings in the Doctor Dolittle books, and oddities in their plots, there is one thread throughout the series of books that remains appealing:  Namely, the notion of talking to the animals. The 1967 movie version starring Rex Harrison also left us with the catchy song-version of the idea, simply titled "Talk to the Animals."  Most people who have sung that song probably do not realize that the concept has ancient roots.

For example, based on statements in the Old Testament that King Solomon knew much about Nature (I Kings 4:33), a legend developed that Solomon could also talk to animals.  As retold poetically by Rudyard Kipling a century ago:  "There was never a King like Solomon, / Not since the world began; / But Solomon talked to a butterfly / As a man would talk to a man."

Christian art contains countless depictions of St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds.  St. Francis's gentleness, however, is also portrayed through the other side of the coin:  Namely, that he was also adept at listening to animals.  In one story, Francis is asked by the people in the town of Gubbio to help them deal with a wolf that has been harassing them.  After going into the woods to converse with the wolf, Francis returns with a message:  The wolf has agreed to leave you alone -- but only if you feed it!

Those two St. Francis stories -- his preaching to the birds and his listening to the Gubbio wolf -- raise a question:  Which do we value more, talking or listening?  Within our human societies, we often elevate people who we remember as being great leaders by quoting things they have said.  In contrast, in conversation between friends, we appreciate someone who is a good listener. Speaking and listening can be complementary within human societies.  However, it strikes me that our relationship with the non-human realm we call "Nature" is different.  Animals cannot understand our talk the way a human can.  We have better chances of accomplishing something if we listen to Nature.

Since the rise of the modern technology, there have been new means of listening to things in Nature.  The recorded calls of humpback whales are now recognizable to people who have never seen a whale.  There are numerous relaxation CD's available with bird songs interwoven with gentle music.  Usually, though, such CD's are used as background music.  I know myself how relaxing they can be.  But a more challenging task than relaxing is stopping what I am doing and listening to Nature itself for awhile.

Beneath all this matter of talking and listening lies an unspoken desire for communion with the non-human realm.  The native American Luther Standing Bear said that "so close did some of the Lakotas come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.”  A "common" tongue -- similar to the verb "to commune"!  Not an easy thing. And yet, not impossible.

~~

Does the idea of "listening" to Nature suggest something to you?  If so, what?

(The Kipling  quote is from the Just So Stories, 
by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1902.)
(The Doctor Dolittle movie poster is by Tom Chantrell, and is used through Fair Use.)

“Music, ‘Arabian nights,’ and Darwin”

It is sometimes the small, unexpected details that catch my eye when I am reading history or biography.  So it was when I was reading part of Gertrude Himmelfarb's book Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution.  I have read a number of books about the response to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.  But my attention was caught by what the British novelist George Eliot wrote in her diary on the evening of the very day Darwin's revolutionary book was published.  Describing how she had occupied herself that very evening, Eliot wrote:  "music, 'Arabian nights,' and Darwin."  What a combination of evening activities and reading before turning into bed!

George Eliot

George Eliot (a woman who wrote under that pseudonym) is most known for her somewhat psychological novels.  But she was also part of a movement of intellectuals who could no longer find credible the church's theological descriptions of the world.  To many such intellectuals, the church's theological concepts could no longer illuminate life.

When I was in college, I read an English translation made by George Eliot of Feuerbach's difficult book The Essence of Christianity, which was part of those 19th-century struggles. Feuerbach maintained that statements about God were actually just projections of human beings' own ideal image of themselves.

However, when I think of George Eliot's writings, what comes to mind are not those difficult religious struggles of the 19th century, but instead a coincidental conjunction I once experienced between Nature and Eliot's novel Silus Marner.

My high-school English class was reading together part of the novel in class.  Our English class was held in one of the wood, portable buildings that had been set up because the student body had grown larger than the main brick building.  Most students did not like having a class in one of those wood "shacks," but I did.  I liked the way the shacks (without air-conditioning) had windows on both sides of the classroom, thus allowing more air and sunlight to flow in.

On the particular day I remember, we were reading a passage in which the outcast Silus Marner experiences what seems to him a miracle.  While he is in a catatonic state, a small child with radiant golden hair crawls into his house through the open door, thus seeming to Silus to appear suddenly when he awakes.  He feels as if he has been graced with a gift from God upon seeing the child, which seemed to have a wonderful glow about it.

Although I knew the scene was contrived, the beauty of that scene seemed to stand out even more brightly to me because, as we read it, I was so aware of the sunlight right there at that moment, shining beautifully into our classroom.

~~~

Have you read a novel or story in which a scene was uncannily real to you?  Why?

(The painting of Eliot is in the public domain

because its copyright has expired.)

Desert – Spelled with One “s”

The first time I ever entered a desert, there was snow on the ground.  Needless to say, I was surprised.  Probably like many other people, I had associated deserts with the near absence of rain.  I had even heard about a book entitled The Land of Little Rain, which is an early example of American nature writing about a desert region.  Admittedly, what I encountered on my trip was not rainfall but snow.  However, the precipitation's being frozen made it even more surprising because I had also associated deserts with high temperatures.  Nor could high altitude account for the snow, because we were very close to sea level.  My surprise was even greater because I had lived for many years in a southern U.S. city where it snowed only once every ten years -- and I had come even further south to get to the desert.

The next surprise after the snow was that the desert's ground was not sand, but instead more like a gravel parking lot.  My third surprise was how fascinating were the variety of plants -- much more than cacti!  And I was struck by the desert's open vastness.

As I've thought about it, I've decided it is appropriate that I should have been disconcerted by the desert. Deserts, after all, were not designed to meet our human needs, nor even perhaps our expectations.  That is why in the Bible, the desert, or the wilderness, stands as a reminder that God neither created everything for humans, nor does God do everything for the sake of humans. Nevertheless, wilderness is seen as having its own value to God apart from any utilitarian value to humans.  As one verse puts it, " [God] has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain... on the desert, which is empty of human life."  (Job 38:25-26, NRSV).

Although the desert's being a counter to human-centeredness has been the primary lesson spiritual writers have taken from wilderness, there is also a more subtle lesson there.  That lesson comes from how severe landscapes are somehow able to bring forth a kind of growth in us as well, a kind of growth that lush settings cannot induce.  The contemporary Christian writer Kathleen Norris, in reflecting upon another type of sparse landscape wrote:  "A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky.... [W]hat seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state."

This "opening" effect seems to occur in part because the vastness and quietness of the desert can evoke a stillness within us when we are on such landscapes.  A quiet reverence.  The opening of something new within us can also occur as we become more aware.  Each creosote bush or small juniper tree surprisingly sprouting in a terrain that at first seemed barren can make us more attentive.  Deserts may be short on rain, but they have their own world of life, both plant and animal.  Deserts may be short on precipitation, but they have had for humans many lessons to tell.

~~~

Have you ever taken a vacation to a desert?  If so, which one?  What impressed you most about it?

(The Norris quotation is from

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris, © 1993.)

Humane Beauty, Japanese Style

Water.  Stone.  Plants.  Wood.  With those four simple building blocks, the Japanese create traditional Japanese gardens.  Although using only four basic elements, they create a multitude of beautiful effects.  As they create those gardens (a tradition that dates back a thousand years), they provide what could be a course in the principles of aesthetics.  The gardens also provide what could be considered a lesson in our human relationship to Nature.

A basic principle of beauty -- any kind of beauty -- is that it brings into harmony what might be otherwise experienced as being conflicting.  As you stroll through a Japanese garden, you indeed experience a peace, a harmony, even as your eyes are filled with a variety of contrasting textures and shapes:  Stone path, soft grass.  Trickling water, hard rock.  Carved wood bridge, straight pine tree.  Great overhanging willow tree, a tiny splay of small stones.

The plants, walkways, bridges, pools of water, and occasional benches or buildings are arranged not only to provide a heightened experience of picturesque effects, but also so as to slow you down as you stroll through the garden.  I have had the pleasure of visiting a half-dozen Japanese gardens in the U.S.  I admire what the landscape designers have accomplished, even when the moisture and moss that are a feature in gardens in Japan are not available due to a drier climate.

Besides providing numerous lessons in aesthetics, my experiences in exploring Japanese gardens has led me to musings about our human relationships with Nature.  Certainly, designers of Japanese gardens and the people who frequent them display a love for Nature.  Nevertheless, the effects are clearly contrived, even when they are designed to feel natural.  There is not a weed anywhere (even though the hard-working people who maintain the garden are usually out of sight).  Because of this cultivated character, it seems to me that Japanese gardens can speak only partway to our human relationship with Nature.  They certainly cannot speak to our relationship with wilderness -- which by definition is land not cultivated for human use.  There is little sense of the otherness of Nature, or of its value in its own right, apart from human enjoyment.  Nor is there much of the predatory component within Nature.  (Even the koi fish are like giant pet goldfish, with food dispensers in some gardens so that human visitors can feed them.)

Despite those limitations, I would prefer that Nature be loved in this way than not at all.  Also, it would be wonderful if every U.S. city had a Japanese garden as a place for rest and renewal in the often hard and often stressful urban landscape.

In the final analysis, though, Japanese gardens are not a complete home for humans, but are instead places for us to occasionally visit.  They are a refined home for the cultivated koi.  If I had any doubt about that, it was removed by the sign on one garden's fish-food dispenser by the koi pond.  It read:  "Please don't feed the squirrels or other wildlife."

~~~

Have you ever visited a Japanese garden?  What do you remember about it?

The “Seven-Year” Insect Itch

Of all non-human forms of Nature that many people in the U.S. encounter, there is one form that may be the oddest.  Some people consider the species to be just noisemakers.  Other people find the "background music" they make somehow relaxing.  (Maybe they're an acquired taste.) Whatever you think of them, they are the Cicadidae family, or cicadas.

When I first moved to the southern U.S. and encountered these insects, a few southerners called them "locusts." But that is a misnomer.  Cicadas do not come in Biblical-type plagues sweeping across the sky.  Cicadas don't congregate in those kind of numbers, nor do they travel far.  In fact, they are more of home-bodies, their entire life journey extending not much further than down the height of tree and back up again.

The adult form, which makes that controversial drone, looks like a giant green fly that has bulked up.  However, despite the inescapable summer sound of cicadas in the South, we humans rarely get a close look at the adults with their large delicate wings folded back over the body.  What we can get a close look at is the shell-like remnant of the nymphs that preceded the adults.  Rather than emerging from a cocoon, the adult emerges out of the exoskeleton of a wingless kind of brown "bug," which is left behind on the bark of a tree.

When several such remnants are on a single tree, they demonstrate visually the life story of the cicada.  All the nymphs' empty shells will be oriented away from the ground they left behind and will be marching upward (where the adults went to mate and lay eggs).  The nymphs make this short trek partway toward the treetops after having lived underground, frequently for 13 years.  (Sometimes the cicadas are called "seven-year cicadas," but that number "7" probably comes form our biblical heritage, seven being in the Bible a symbol of completion.)

It is this long life underground that makes the cicadas so odd.  We may think that a cicada population is being reborn every summer, but what we see are in most species the offspring of adults who laid eggs several years ago. There are actually multiple synchronized populations of cicadas, each set waiting for its turn to appear.

This could be real inspiration for a science-fiction story.  Imagine a planet on which there are ten sets of people -- each set looking exactly like each other set.  Only one set at a time appears out of a subterranean hiding place.  But our Star Trek crew who has landed on the planet does not know there are multiple sets of people.  As a result, the Star Trek crew becomes totally baffled in trying to deal with the planet's inhabitants.  It would be bizarre, and yet this is happening with the cicadas on our planet Earth!

~~~

Looking back upon your own life, is there something you now see as having taken years to come to fruition and completion?

Eternity Carried Within

Mention the name Marie Curie, and the image that immediately comes to my mind is the interior of an old-style, dimly-lit chemistry laboratory, with glass flasks, dark countertops, and drawers. (There have to be drawers so that Marie Curie's mentor Antoine Becquerel can make his crucial discovery of how uranium can make an image on a photographic plate even when shut in a drawer away from sunlight.)

It was because of my mental picture of an enclosed, interior space that I was surprised by a quotation which, if unattributed, would have made me think instead of the outdoors.  Curie wrote:  "All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child."  Of course, from her perspective as a physical chemist, Curie would have thought of her investigation of the radioactivity of different rocks as being part of an investigation of "nature," that is, the natural world.  Her wording, however, particularly "All my life" and "rejoice like a child," made me recall the way other writers have expressed how observing and remembering Nature has been an enduring source of rejuvenation.

Wilfred Owen, who was a soldier in World War I, turned his poet's pen to the task of conveying the horrors of a war touted as being a glorious war to end all wars.  As a result, his poems, are predominantly somber in tone.  In one poem, however, a terribly ill patient lying in an army hospital is "helped by the yellow may-flowers by his head."  Indeed, countless patients in hospitals have been given a lift by the bright colors of flowers, which, being natural, speak without words to the value and wonder of each life, even though each life passes.

Marie Curie's statement suggests to me that her ability to rejoice because of Nature was something she carried within herself throughout her life.  That idea of an inner source of strength from loving Nature is the very idea Rachel Carson put forward over half a century later.  In The Sense of Wonder, Carson wrote:  "I should ask [as] a gift to each child in the world... a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial."

That quotation in particular has made me reflect upon what might make a love of Nature so enduringly beneficial.  For one thing, if a person develops the ability to view the world with a childlike sense of wonder and delight, that ability can remain youth-giving.  Carson also points to the artificiality of too many human activities. They cannot satisfy the way the naturalness of Nature can.  We cannot feel at home in our world if the world around is made too sterile.

There is also the element of love.  As I cultivate a love for Nature, I cultivate an ability to love things that are unlike me, many of which have no immediate benefit to me.  I thus gain a form of self-transcendence.  I know of one church that put a twist on the more familiar Christian phrase "eternal life" by coining the slogan "love eternally."  Loving Nature can be a way of carrying within oneself a love to the very end of one's life.

~~~

Has there been a way that observing or remembering Nature has been of benefit to you?

(The Marie Curie quote is from Pierre Curie, by Marie Curie,

 as translated by Charlotte Kellogg and Vernon Lyman Kellogg, © 1923. p. 162.)

The Wilfred Owen poem referred to is "Conscious," in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.)

(The Carson quote is from The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson, © 1956.)

The Message of Water

Over the past few years, there have been two words frequently heard in national news reports: The words "flood" and "drought."  Less frequently heard has been an integrally related word that has religious connotations:  The word "water."

The words "flood" and "drought" speak of fears.  The word "water" speaks of life.  (I wonder if we, in our frequently urbanized lives, would appreciate Nature more if the news media more often talked about water itself.)

As I said, water has religious associations, and they are rich.  As examples from the Bible: Water is the very source of life, is associated with the water of birth (and of being re-born through baptism), is a symbol of fertility, and is a means of cleansing, both physically and symbolically.

In only the first four chapters (about one-fifth) of the New Testament's Gospel of John, the word "water" appears sixteen times, thus demonstrating its power as a theological symbol.  A few decades ago in the U.S., when the northern and southern branches of the Presbyterian Church re-united, the baptism liturgy became inordinately lengthy because there were so many Biblical references to water that both branches of the church (with their separate liturgical wordings) wanted preserved.

In the most famous book from Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, water becomes an important feminine symbol of the unnameable Ultimate.  The ironical ability of water to change even stone over time also turns water into a metaphor for ideal human behavior.  Such as in this passage:

"Nothing in this world seems softer and more yielding than water,

but nothing can compare with water

for defeating the hard and strong."

                              -- Tao Te Ching (Chap. 78)

In our lives and society today, do we know where the rivers and bayous that wind around and through our cities run?  Can we trace their paths in our minds?

The Hindu tradition contains in the Rig Veda a prayer that is perhaps the oldest written prayer in the world.  The prayer uses the cycle of water back to the sea in order speak to the unity and purpose of all of life:

"May the thread of my song

be not cut

before my life merges

into the sea of love."

~~~

Where do you see water in the world around you?  What is it like?  What is the water doing?

(The passage from the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu,

 is my own rendering based on several translations.)

(The Rig Veda translation is adapted from that of Eknath Easwaran, in God Makes the Rivers to Flow, © 1991.)

Light Blue

Light blue is not a color you are likely to find among the life-giving produce in the grocery store. You'll find many shades of green:  lettuces, spinach, and green beans.  Do you like yellow?  If so, you'll find bananas, squash, and corn to add to your color palette.  A range of reddish tones is also available, from apples to plums to tomatoes.  I wish you luck, however, if you want to find produce that is light blue.  (The closest you might get is that peculiar sheen that clouds the dark blue of blueberries.)

Despite this oddity of evolution, I've decided that light blue (the kind we see in a luminescent blue sky) might be one of the most nourishing of colors.  What got me to thinking this way was not looking at the sky (although I do enjoying doing so) but singing and listening to the words of a hymn sung to the tune of Sibelius's "Finlandia."

Even though that tune's name makes it sound like the national anthem of Finland, and even though it's opening line also makes it sound like a national anthem, the hymn we sang was written by a hymn-writer named Lloyd Stone in 1934.  Titled "This Is My Song," it was a very appropriate part of the worship service.  Nevertheless, even though it does begin as a prayer ("O God"), it quickly turns to thoughts of nationhood:

"This is my home, the country where my heart is.

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine."

The danger that my love for my own country might turn into nationalistic self-centeredness is tempered, however, by the wider awareness of the next two lines:

"... other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine."

The next verse is where the role Nature -- as well as the color light blue -- come into play. My own emotion of love leads naturally to my feeling that the things I love have to be what is most wonderful.  That characteristic of passion is allowed for with the first lines of the next verse:

"My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine;"

But immediately, any tendency towards provincialism is countered by the expansiveness of that blue sky.  The next two lines ring with the wonderful recognition that:

"... other lands have sunlight too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine."

Yes, we, in each of our countries of the world, have our own species of plants, our own forms of produce. Different species and varieties have been developed for different soils and different climates.  But none of us can claim that the sky is exclusively ours.

When our spirits and souls need to be nourished by a wider vision and a wider love for other nations, light blue might be the color we need.  We may not be able to remember the words to "This Is My Song." But we can remember the spirit of its words each opportunity we have to notice that the sky is a luminescent light blue.

~~~

What helps you counter our human tendency toward provincialism?

You can read the song's entire lyrics at this external link: "This Is My Song."

Getting Wisdom from Mountains

When I think back to my American history classes in public school, I think that mountains got mentioned mostly as something challenging to be crossed.  First, there was European-Americans' discovery of the Cumberland Gap through the Appalachian Mountains.  Later, there was Lewis and Clark's challenge of getting over the immense Rockies if they were going to reach the Pacific Coast.

Today, when I browse in the works of a number of Chinese writers, I find them mentioning mountains more as a means for growing in wisdom.  True, the contrast might come from a difference in genre (literature contrasted with history).  But maybe there is also a difference between East and West.

Li Po

More than once do mountains raise their head in the poetry of the 8th-century Li Po, a romantic lover of simple life and fellowship.  My favorite is the deceptively simple four-line poem entitled "The Ching-ting Mountain":

"Flocks of birds have flown high and away;

A solitary drift of cloud, too, has gone, wandering on.

And I sit alone with the Ching-ting Peak, towering beyond.

We never grow tired of each other, the mountain and I."

Li Po's saying he sat alone with a mountain made me recall an Oriental painting on a book jacket for an anthology of writers about Nature.  The painting depicted a boy, seated in the branch of a tree, his back to the viewer, looking at a not too distant mountain.  What might I see as I look through that boy's eyes?

Several years back, my wife saw a film in which she got a good look at the great mountains of China, and she was surprised to discover that they do actually rise up, and up, and up -- just the way they do in traditional Chinese paintings.  Until then, she always thought the painters had been exaggerating for artistic effect.

In Chinese landscape paintings, mountains are frequently dominant. The early 20th-century writer Lin Yutang, who emigrated from China to the U.S., made an insightful observation about the smallness of the human figures in contrast to the mountains.  He wrote: "Nature... if it can cure nothing else... can cure man of megalomania... That is why Chinese paintings always paint human figures so small in a landscape."

My wife and I have had the joy of visiting the U.S. national parks that straddle the Rocky Mountains:  Rocky Mt. Natl. Park and Glacier Natl. Park.  When I recall those trips, I remember our driving the winding roads built by venturesome and hard-working laborers, thus allowing tourists today to venture in a way Lewis and Clark never could have.  I remember taking photographs from a number of lookout points.  The sights were beautiful.  However, if I struggle for words to state succinctly my impression of the mountains, almost comically I can come up only with the word "big."   Yet, I would not mind, like Li Po, having a chance to just sit for a while and contemplate a mountain.

~~~

Have your traveled in mountains?  What were your impressions?

(The Li Po poem, trans. by Shigeyoshi Obata, is from The Works of Li Po, by Obata, © 1922.)

(The Lin Yutang quotation is fromThe Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang, © 1937.)

(The drawing of Li Po is in the Public Domain, its copyright having expired.)

Humans a Part of Nature... But...

On a recent morning, when I stopped outdoors just before daybreak, I thought for a moment that I was in a painting by the 20th-century painter René Magritte.  No, it was not one of his more obviously surrealistic paintings, such as those in which men in bowler hats float across the sky, or a window frame encloses a brick wall.  Instead, it was as if I were in one of his more subtle paintings that merge reality and unreality in the way they portray a house between trees with the sky and clouds above.

At first, the painting appears perfectly realistic, until you realize the clever way Magritte has played with light.  Part of the front of the house is illuminated by an artificial light near the door, in just the way it would appear at night.  But above, the sky is light blue, just as if it were day.  It's neither night nor day but impossibly both!

That illusion is so similar to the light I saw as I stepped outside just before daybreak.  What first caught my eye were the white clouds above the house across the street, along with a couple stars visible above the clouds in the night sky.  As I turned my head upward, I saw that the same very white clouds formed a ring all around me, a nearby treetop blocking only a small part of my view of them.  Straight above me was a large opening in the white clouds, revealing the dark night sky with a few more stars visible.

But how could this be?  If the sky told me it was night, how could the clouds be so white?  The reason was that they were illuminated by all the artificial lights of city, which I could not see directly.  Just like Magritte's painting, what appeared to be totally natural was, in fact, a fusion of the natural and the artificial.

To me, this experience stands as a metaphor of who we human beings are in relationship to the natural world:  Our human lives are part of both natural processes and our humanly-created cultures.  We are in one way a part of Nature, and in another way not.  In trying to describe who we are, drawing upon our contemporary scientific knowledge about biological and cultural evolution, some contemporary writers are increasingly using the word "emergent."  We humans, relying so much upon our cultural artifacts, are an emergent species.

Another metaphor that proves helpful to me in understanding our human emergence is that of a strikingly colored flower on the tip of the stem of a plant.  Just like the colorful flower, we stand out as something different, even though we would die if we were cut off from the plant.

Back in the 2nd century, the Christian theologian Irenaeus also spoke about human emergence, without confining God's spirit to the human realm.  Irenaeus  wrote:  "God sleeps in a stone, dreams in a flower, moves in an animal, and wakes in man."

No individual human could survive without either Nature or human culture.  That is our dilemma. Maybe we can make it our joy.

~~~

In what ways do you think we are more than a part of Nature?  In what ways a part of Nature?

(The detail from the Magritte painting "The Empire of Light,"

 © 1950 Museum of Modern Art, is used here through Fair Use.)

The Harmony of Feathers

Even since I was a boy, I've picked up feathers.  I do not go about intentionally trying to find them, nor do I have any large or scientifically-arranged collection.  But ever since I was a child, I've had the habit of picking up that occasional feather I've come across on the ground.  In a way, it seemed to me such a waste to leave such a polished finished product just lying on the ground, unappreciated.  In another way, possessing a feather felt a bit like having a talisman because it seemed to be like a free and lucky find.

Humans have appreciated the beauty of birds' feathers since before recorded history.  Both native Americans and some Pacific cultures incorporated feathers into their ritual dress.  As I examine even a single one of my relatively simple feathers from a Blue Jay or Mockingbird, I can see why:  The feather's combination of rigidity and softness to the touch.  The feather's simple elegance of design with a striking contrast of colors.

Walt Whitman

Thinking about this matter of found feathers, the phrase that comes to my mind is "designedly dropped."  It's a phrase Walt Whitman uses as he reflects on the wonder of a handful of grass brought to him by a child who asks the child's perennial question, "What is this?"  Whitman, confessing to the reader that he cannot say ultimately what grass is (so wondrous it seems), contents himself with imaginative musings about what this natural object from the Creator might be.  This is where Whitman likens the Nature-object to God's initialed handkerchief "designedly dropped,  /  Bearing the owner's name... that we may see and remark, and say Whose?"

To me, this mystery of feathers (or of a blade of grass) goes right to the heart of our spiritual relation to Nature.  There is a paradox:  I know that God did not intentionally drop that feather on the path along which I was about to walk so that I might find it.  And I know that the symmetrical tidiness of the rows of thin branches projecting from a feather's stem was not created so that I might marvel.  Nor were the colored designs created in order that I might enjoy their beauty.

Nevertheless, our human brains and cultures evolved so that we might engage the world in a way that unites our minds and hearts with the fascinating features of the world.  I think one hymn writer spoke to this when that hymnist wrote of "the mystic harmony linking sense to sound and sight."

~~~

As a child, did you collect any objects from Nature?  Do you do so now?

(The lines from the hymn are from
  "For the Beauty of the Earth," lyrics by Folliott Sandford Pierpoint, 1864.)

(Portrait of Walt Whitman is in public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Being Sensitive or Not

"Don't be so sensitive!"  It's something that many a parent has told a child in order to deal with injured emotions.  It is for the very same reason that children are taught the verse, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

What got me to reflecting upon this matter of sensitivity, however, was not any incident involving a child's tenderness.  Instead, I got to thinking about this matter because of a tiny fern-like plant, the Mimosa roemeriana.  It's common name is, in fact, the "sensitive briar," and it is indeed quite sensitive.

When I was growing up, the children in my neighborhood would sometimes keep a lookout for the plant growing snug against the ground, hidden in the grass at the edge of the driveway.  If its pink puffball of a bloom was not present, it could remain camouflaged from our sight in the grass.  But what delighted us was not that pink ball, but the plant's sensitivity to touch.  Even just touching the leaf lightly with a small twig could make the rows of leaflets on each side of the center spine fold in against each other.

We were never able to figure out how long it was before the leaflets would re-open. However, there is one thing I have figured out from my study of this world:  It is not just humans and the sensitive briar that are sensitive.  Every animal, plant, fungi, algae, and bacteria upon this planet is.

Buddhism employs the word "sentient" (from a similar Latin root as "sensitive") to help cultivate a compassion not just for humans but for all animals.  That's a worthy endeavor, especially because too much of Western Christianity has narrowed down its focus to the human sphere.

Nevertheless, even plants, fungi, algae, and bacteria are sensitive in their own way in that they are responsive to stimuli from outside their bodies.  Although the relatively quick responsiveness of insect-eating plants such as the Venus's-flytrap is visible to our naked eye, all plants are changing their metabolism and growth patterns as the sun shifts and the water level changes. And we humans are learning the hard way how even bacteria species adapt to the warfare of our antibiotics.

Indeed, if any species of life had not been sensitive to its environment, it would not have evolved into the species it is today.  It is as if at the inception of each species, Evolution had commanded, "Be sensitive!"

~~~

How do you try to find a middle ground between being overly sensitive and not sensitive enough?

(The green artwork is licensed under a Creative Commons

 Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license by Ade McO-Campbell.)

Of Warps and Wefts and Life

"Everything's connected" -- it has now become a maxim, almost a cliché.  Connected, yes, but how?  That's the harder question.  (Not to mention the challenge of deciding and learning how to behave as if everything is connected.)  One of the most common of metaphors is the "web of life," but I have my reservations about it, as I shall explain.

Although many people today have now heard of the phrase the "web of life," few people know that it was coined way back in 1914 by a Scottish biologist, J. Arthur Thompson.  Like many other phrases of our contemporary environmental vocabulary, it took some time before it worked its way into the general vocabulary.  The  choice of that word "web" has proved quite useful in conveying an image of the multiple interconnections of Nature, rather than a simple chain of cause and effect.  For example, in some biology textbooks, the phrase "food webs" has become preferred over the more familiar "food chains," as a way of conveying that digestible substances do not follow a simple linear path, but instead create multiple interconnections among plants and animals.

I have just one reservation about that standard word "web," however:  It has an association with spiders!  And everybody knows how repellent spiders can be to many people, not just to Little Miss Muffet (even though only a few kinds of spiders are potentially dangerous). Because ecologists and environmentalists would like to cultivate in more people a love of Nature, I wonder if risking mental associations with spider bites and sticky cobwebs and haunted houses is the best idea.

male lesser masked weaver

More appealing than "web" I think, is another metaphor -- the "fabric of life."  That metaphor can convey the image of a protective cloth, even a beautifully woven one. Recently, I was reminded of the weaving metaphor for interconnectedness when I saw pictures of the weaverbirds of Africa.  Those skillful birds actually weave thin strips torn from grass to create a nest that protects their young against sun and snakes.  One species of weaverbirds even constructs a nest that is elegantly spherical.  Certainly an association with cute birds is more appealing than an association with spiders!

The metaphor of "fabric" has other advantages.   It can also convey the image of a cloth being torn, the connecting threads being broken by human carelessness, with the fabric unraveling as a result.  That was the way Rachel Carson employed the metaphor when, in Silent Spring, she warned about the indiscriminate overuse of pesticides.  She wrote:  "As crude a weapon as the cave man's club... has been hurled against the fabric of life."

Moreover, the "fabric" metaphor can be adapted to refer to the work of finding a new pattern for human living that will strengthen the living systems of the Earth.  That was the very imagery that was employed by a group of feminist ecological writers.  The subtitle of their book was The Emergence of Ecofeminism.  And the book's title? Reweaving the World.

~~~

Do the metaphors of fabric and of weaving convey anything to you?

(The quotation by Carson is from

 Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, © 1962.)
(Both photographs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses. 
The bird photograph by Dick Daniels, http://carolinabirds.org
The fabric by Cochas, Peru, 2008.)