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.)

The Painted Morning Sky

"You, whose day it is, make it beautiful.

Get out your rainbow colors

so it will be beautiful."

                                 -- A Nootka morning prayer

I think this prayer could be the universal wish of humankind at morning.  Not specifically that the sky at sunrise be beautifully colored, but that the coming day be a good one (especially if yesterday went terrible).

This Nootka prayer seems to me, however, to be a prayer not merely for good fortune in the new day, but actually for a beautifully colored sunrise.  Several decades ago, when I learned some techniques of photography (before today's digital cameras), I learned how sunrises are usually softer in color, and have more pink and blue light, in contrast with the fiery reds and oranges of sunsets.  The Nootka prayer could thus be heard as a wish for a beautiful pastel-colored sky at dawn.

I would like to catch a bit of that pastel softness and harmony and take it into myself for the day.

There also seems to me to be in the Nootka prayer the suggestion that each new day carries within itself new divine promise.

Frequently when I suggest the idea that God can be known through Nature, the response I get from many people is, "But Nature can be violent!"  (I must admit I do have to bite my tongue a bit and avoid responding, "You think Nature can be violent -- did you watch the TV news last night to see what people have been doing?")

However, just as we learn how to discern the Spirit of God at work in human society, so also might we learn to discern things about God as we observe, contemplate, and learn how to interpret what Christianity often called the "book of Nature."

For example, in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus wants to point to some place where we have experienced the most demanding kind of behavior -- the challenge to"Love your enemies" -- Jesus does not turn to any saintly human beings. Instead, Jesus points to our experience of something inanimate in Nature:  the reliable sun, saying, "your Father in heaven... makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5: 44-45).  That is an example of discerning a deeper reality, God's faithfulness, in the natural rising of the sun.  Similar to the way the Nootka verse seems to rejoice with its prayer offered to God as the sun rises.

The rising of the sun is the most frequent of the reliable cycles of Nature in which we place the cycles of our own lives.

~~~

What can noticing Nature bring to your day?