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.)