“What life in itself can do”

For as many years as my wife and I have had a backyard, we've had squirrels in it.  Among the entertainments I indulge in (reading, viewing a few PBS shows), watching those squirrels through my window rates high up on my list.  My wife and I keep a large dish of water on a low stand outside on the deck so that birds will always have water.  That water brings doves and sparrows and blue jays.  It also occasionally brings a neighborhood cat that sometimes lies beside the dish, I suppose dreaming that the birds will return (as if they could not see a cat lying there).  The squirrels also take an interest in that water dish.  But my hunch is that they would come out of their strong curiosity, even if we never put out water.

The squirrels rarely approach the deck directly.  (Only once or twice have I seen one cautiously come across the lawn.)  Instead, they navigate a series of trampolines and trapezes that even the creator of Cirque du Soleil would be envious of.  My first clue that a squirrel will be approaching is when a branch of the fruit tree near the back fence suddenly bends down and springs back up. That isolated movement in a backyard otherwise motionless alerts me to the drama that is about to unfold. The next step of the squirrel's journey is farther up the fruit tree, even if the squirrel's final destination is the deck on the ground further away.  After ascending the fruit tree's branches like a trapeze artist climbing toward the top of a circus tent, the squirrel will leap across into an even larger Chinese elm.  Then it will negotiate along the elm's scaffolding in preparation for a bit of high-wire performance:  a leap onto the power line that slants downward from the telephone pole to our house.  After briefly balancing on the high-wire, it is onward to a second elm tree right beside the deck.  The final piece of circus acrobatics is a descent down the trunk of that elm tree, not as a human might, but instead going down head first.

Audubon print

That final reverse-position stunt is made possible by a feature of anatomy that would make the cat envious.  Namely, evolution has gifted squirrels with the ability to position two claws toward the rear, making them able to hang onto a tree trunk even when head downward in order to watch out for predators on the ground.  It is the absence of such an ability in cats that explains cats getting "stuck" in trees -- able to safely climb up but not safely down. You will never hear about someone having to get a ladder to rescue a squirrel out of a tree.

The agility of squirrels exemplified in that squirrel's complex navigation to our deck is what makes squirrels the bane of people who have bird-feeders.  It also encourages human inventiveness in struggling to build a squirrel-proof feeder:  A never-ending escalation of two kinds of ingenuity.

As for me, as I watch out my window, I feel not only entertained but also enlivened by the experience.  On a day that seems drab or too challenging, the squirrels' antics give me a bit of extra life.  I think the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart knew something about this when he said that if he were in a desert with no other human around, he "would like to have at least a living animal at my side to comfort me."  He said it would comfort him because, as he put it:

"This is what life in itself can do."

~~~

Have you ever enjoyed just sitting and watching an animal "do its own thing"?  When?

(The Eckhart quoted can be found in the theologian

Sallie McFague's book The Body of God, © 1993, p. 98.)

A Plant that Lost Its Social Status

When I was a child, there were two things my mother was most likely to comment upon when she looked out the window into our backyard.  One was when she spotted a cardinal, a hopeful sign that cardinals might be nesting nearby.  The second thing she would frequently comment upon was when she noticed a new bright dandelion flower that seemed to have suddenly appeared in the grass.  The cardinals would never allow me to approach and look at them close up.  But the dandelion flowers would.

My sister, the neighborhood kids, and I would take greater delight in the puffball that would later appear from such a flower.  The ball seemed like a toy (of a kind that no human could have ever constructed).  We were fascinated by its perfectly spherical shape made of delicate hairs so lightly attached that we could blow them off the stem.  As we watched the hairs with their tiny seeds float away, seemingly carefree in the breeze, we children had no concern at all that we might have been increasing the labor of some adults trying to weed their lawns.

The dandelion flower's ability to release to the lightest breeze its feathered seeds (as many as 50 per flower) is part of the larger story of how the dandelion has spread across the planet Earth.  The other key to understanding dandelion history is realizing that for most of its history the dandelion was not considered to be a weed. Instead, it was thought to be one of the most important and versatile gifts that Nature provided to humankind.

Going back just a little over a century, we can get one clue to the dandelion's usefulness in an 1888 U.S. Formulary of medicine.  A full 12 of the 435 prescriptions listed included an ingredient from the dandelion plant.  Although the dandelion-human connection had begun centuries earlier in Europe, by 1800 the plant had reached the Pacific coast of the U.S.  The plant had been carried westward by European pioneers and by winds propelling its puffball's seeds.  (It would eventually get to Japan.)

Over the past few decades, many writers on spirituality have been excited to discover the rich tradition of prayers and thought of the Celtic Christians.  Researchers have also found in Celtic history many references to dandelions, an indication of the roles the plant played in culture throughout Europe.  Its primary uses were as a diuretic and as a vegetable.  Because of its deeply-notched leaves, the plant (which had an ancestry of many millions of years behind it) was honored with the name "dandelion" from the Old French words for "lion's teeth."

detail of painting
by Richard Mauch, 1921

The dandelion's involvement with human society is demonstrated in its being mentioned in literature as diverse as that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thoreau, George Eliot, and Beatrix Potter. By the 20th century, however, medicines and diets had changed, and dandelion greens came to be eaten mostly by the poor who had to stretch their food budget with a free, found vegetable. In the U.S. and some other countries, the dandelion has now mostly returned to its former life as a vagabond, blown about by the wind.

~~~

Do you have any memories about dandelions?

(The photograph of the yellow flower is by Arcanewizard

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)