Not “Dead to the World”

Sleep.  It's a funny phenomenon -- funny in the sense of peculiar, as well as being an opportunity for levity on sitcoms.  Yet sleep is also an earnest matter.  It even links our lives on the evolutionary tree with other animals.

We humans get introduced quite early in life to sleep's being more than meets the eye.  More than one parent has had to deal with a young child's having nightmares. It is probably clearer to the parent how the disruptive dreams connect with some anxiety in the child's waking life.  In other instances, the child's nightmare can be marked by that strange other-worldly feeling we can be struck by upon remembering a dream on awaking.  One mother I know was told at breakfast by her pre-schooler that he had been chased by a giraffe. Fortunately, the mother, rather than reprimanding the child for lying, explained to her child that he had simply had a scary dream.

The phenomenon of sleep can also be scary to a child viewing it from the outside:  I remember as a child entering my mother's bedroom when she was napping so soundly that my mind almost became overtaken by the fear that she was dead.  The similarity between deep sleep and death adds another layer to the peculiarity of dreams, as well as providing material for literary pens.  In a time before modern medicine's ability to measure brain waves, Edgar Allan Poe took advantage of the frightening thought that a person might be declared dead when the person was just asleep.  Poe's story "The Premature Burial" is a gripping tale.

As we journey through life, learning about the world we live in, we also discover that many other animals sleep, and mammals clearly dream.  Those fishes in my childhood aquarium, sometimes hovering motionless, were probably sleeping (I was told), even though they had no eyelids to close to let me know they were sleeping.  It was easier to recognize that our pet dog was dreaming when, lying on its side, its legs began running, no doubt chasing something rather than being chased.

Contemporary scientists have been able to verify that dreaming can be a means for processing the preceding day's activities, even enhancing learning.  For example, a sleeping rat's brain undergoes the same activity it did when the rat was exploring a new maze the day before.

Despite sleep being essential to many animals' lives (and even to plants, in a way), the wisdom of our faith-traditions has adopted sleep as a symbol of something we should not be doing -- at least when we're awake!  The Buddha's title in Sanskrit indicates that he is for Buddhists the model of "the Awakened One."  As Christmas approaches, many Christians sing hymns containing reminders to stay alert, to "keep watch" like shepherds protecting their sheep.

However, remembering that marvelous ability of babies to sometimes sleep soundly amid hubbub, we can also wish all babies in the world the gift of being able to "sleep in heavenly peace."

~~~

Do you have a wish for the world about sleep or about watchfulness?

(The quoted hymn-line is from John Freeman Young's

 1863 translation of "Stille Nacht" ["Silent Night"], 1818 lyrics by Joseph Mohr.)

(The photograph of the artwork of the deer was made by Joachim Lutz, 

and is used under under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.)

Putting Flesh on the Bones

Is there any child who does not at some point become interested in dinosaurs?  Any of a number of things about them can intrigue children.  Such as the dinosaurs' often large size (compared to being so small oneself).  And the fact that dinosaurs inhabit a world that cannot be seen, but which children can enter using their imagination.

The first dinosaur statues
(at Crystal Palace Park)

Even the adults who in the first half of the 19th century discovered fossils from large dinosaurs had to use their imagination to try to surmise what the living creatures would have looked like.  Monsters was the first guess. And so one of Britain's leading fossil anatomists, Richard Owen, named the category Dinosauria from the Greek words deinos and sauros, i.e. "monstrous lizard."  A 19th-century London sculptor depicted dinosaurs as so obese and close to the ground that the poor animals could have barely moved.

For people who were children a century later, it was the 1940 Walt Disney movie Fantasia that helped imaginations put life into dinosaur bones, even if that movie was cartoon animation. Disney's cartoon artists, in creating the dinosaur-story segment, drew the animals' complex movements more like living reptiles.  (Rather than turning dinosaurs into clown-like stick figures, as have some marketers of dinosaur-shaped breakfast cereal and canned noodles for children.)

Despite that improvement the Disney studio made, it was still to some degree a projection of our own mental monsters upon those ancient skeletons.  That is because even in the 1800's, paleontologists had possessed fossil evidence indicating that some dinosaurs had resemblances to birds rather than being more lumbering reptiles.  During the 20th century, more and more scientific evidence -- such as birdlike hipbones and fossils with signs of feathers -- has led to a strong consensus of the close lineages of birds and dinosaurs.  The earliest bird-branch of evolution is more like an overlap with some dinosaurs, thus making birds today somewhat like dinosaur descendants.  One biologist explains:  "Biologically [dinosaurs] were perhaps more akin to today's birds and mammals, thus possibly explaining their great success."

Even when envisioned as being in a way reptilian, there is something to be said for dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the word "dinosaur" continues to be used sometimes to mean something extinct, a relic.  The science-writer Stephen Jay Gould complains about that usage:

"I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur in succumbing to progress.  Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium.  Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects,

 entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity."

That child playing with plastic toys could have told adults that there was something cool about dinosaurs.

~~~

Did you become interested in dinosaurs as a child?  What do you think about them now?

(The biologist's quote is by Gregory M. Erickson in

 Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 518.)

(The Gould quote is from his collection Dinosaurs in a Haystack, © 1995.  p. 50.)

(Both the statues photo by Jes from Melbourne and the sign photo by Jeremy Thompson

 are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)

Scattered Gifts

Have you ever had an old paperback begin to come apart at its spine, with some of the pages falling out?  What a mess!  It is especially a problem if the book is one you like to return to frequently.  (I resorted to putting one of my books in a plastic bag to prevent the loss of any of its loose pages.)

The Italian poet Dante (1265-1321) turns that loose-page nightmare on its head in the climax of his trilogy The Divine Comedy.  He draws upon the classic "book of Nature" metaphor in the Western tradition, which was a way of expressing how the natural world can be an opening into the Divine, a revelation about God.  Dante imaginatively scatters the "pages" of Nature's book.  He does so as an analogy to the way that there are wonders of Nature scattered all about us wherever we go.  He then brings the pages together, providing us this vision:

"In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume,

 that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe: 

...as though fused together in such a way

 that what I tell is but a simple light."

That this is no loose-page nightmare but instead a wonderful vision is underscored by this verse being in the part of his trilogy that is entitled Paradiso -- Paradise.

   Dante holding his own book,
The Divine Comedy,
with vision over his shoulder
   

Even though references to the "Book of Nature" are common in Christianity before the Scientific Revolution, the references to that metaphor are usually somewhat prosaic.  In contrast, in this passage, Dante opens up the metaphor with a grand poetic flourish, like the swirl of the brush on an artist's canvas.  The picture he paints of pages "dispersed... throughout the universe" is so evocative that I can easily see myself, as if in a dream, walking about in a world in which there are large, ornate pages scattered about on the ground.  As I slowly walk, I thoughtfully pick up one page after another, eager to read what is written there.  In real life, if the pages of that book I keep in a plastic bag were blown about by the wind, I would be alarmed.  But turning Dante's vision into a beautiful dream allows me to see the imagery of scattered pages in a different light.  And see the world in a different way.

Dante's imagery also resonates with the way children sometimes spontaneously collect objects from Nature.  One of the "leaves" of Dante's "volume" might be actual leaves from a tree, scattered upon the ground.  Or the child might delight in a found feather,, especially if it is colorful.  Even a rock, plain by contrast, might have something interesting in its shape.  So many objects to discover in this world of countless objects!  It is as if the child who gathers those things together, bringing them home, is somehow desiring to integrate diverse experiences into the whole of their growing life.

Dante points to another way in which the countless things we encounter in the natural world are united:  They are "bound by love in one single volume."  With that single poetic stroke, he draws upon what has been a central concept in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  Namely, that the key to understanding Ultimate Reality is to see the world we live in as if it were full of delightful gifts from One who loves us.

~~~

Are there some threads by which you make sense of your experiences of the world?

(The quote is from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, 

 [La Divina Commedia, 1321], Paradise, XXXIII, 85-90.)

(The portrait of Dante by Bronzino is  in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Friendly Competition by Fahrenheit

The United States is positioned on latitudes that stretch from semitropical climates in the south to winter temperatures in the north that approach those of Russia.  That wide range within a single nation with one main language allows for some friendly competition during winters and summers. When winter extremes hit more northern states, those who live in balmier climates can tweet, email, or phone their northern friends, bragging about relatively comfortable environments.  Of course, the danger is that come next summer, those in the north will get their revenge by communicating long-distance about their refreshingly cool nighttime temperatures while those in the south are baking.  Another way to try to gain advantage in this friendly game is for me to turn my own weather extreme to my advantage by bragging about the hardship I am enduring!

 "Various Meteorological Phenomena" (1856)

Comparing weather notes in some fashion is nothing new.  The 18th-century British lexicographer Samuel Johnson observed:  "When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather."  Our modern means of communication, however, allow us to share simultaneous but dissimilar experiences of weather, all within our single nation.

Behind the extremes of winter and summer lies a larger truth about life on planet Earth.  Namely, that species on this planet have evolved so as to be able to usually live within such extremes.  Even more broadly, some scientists have put forward the "anthropic principle" as a way of pointing to a kind of "fine-tuning" of certain characteristics of the universe that match the conditions necessary for life.  Such as the forces that make possible certain chemical elements in the universe.  The extremes of weather and the extremes of what various species can tolerate are, however, one place we can observe directly a "fit" between life and its environments.

We humans, with our complex cultures, tool-making, and accumulation of knowledge have stretched our natural limits.  We have found ways to dress ourselves for extreme colds, and invented ways to artificially warm or cool our burrows.

We might ask though: Can we also extend ourselves spiritually to encompass the extremes that press in upon our lives?  The friendly game of contrasting temperatures sometimes needs to be set aside.  When the extremes of weather bring injury, or even death, we need to shift to another mode, remembering the religious leader Paul's reminder to "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep."

Thus, the extremes we endure can call us to rise above a concern centered just upon ourselves, recognizing that the element of unfortunate chance can strike any life.  Rising above a narrow self-concern can be something like rising above this planet's surface to see all of it as a whole. The Saudi Arabian astronaut Prince Sulatan Bin Salmon Al-Saud described his experience with fellow astronauts this way:

"The first day or so, we all pointed to our countries.

The third or fourth day,
 we were pointing to our continents.

By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth."

~~~

How do you deal with the shifting seasons psychologically or spiritually?

(The quote by Samuel Johnson [1709-1784] is taken from

 Bloomsbury Treasury of Quotations, ed. John Dainith, © 1994, p. 763.)

(The quote by Paul is from Christianity's New Testament, Romans 12:15 [NRSV].)

(The Prince Al-Saud quote is from Weather: How It Works and Why It Matters by Arthur Upgren, p. 42.)

Swimming with Hippos

When I first heard about swimming with hippos, it evoked in my mind an animated-cartoon image of a child playfully floating in colorful, bubbly water.  The cartoonists would probably make the hippo bubble-shaped too -- chubby and cute, with tiny ears that would excitedly spin.  After my imagination got back down to Earth, I thought that it might not be that nice having potentially smelly hippos (maybe dirty too?) in the water in which people were swimming. But that was not how some people in Africa experienced it.  To them, having hippos in their swimming and bathing water was a true lifesaver.

I understood how that could be when I read about an experience described by C. Dean Freudenberger.  The people in Africa who swam and bathed in the river began to lose some hippos when the animals were shot by soldiers for food.  Without the usual hippo population feeding on marsh grasses and reeds, those plant populations exploded, trapping more silt, and thus slowing the water's flow a the edges of the river.  In that altered environment, snails flourished -- along with parasites called liver flukes, which need snails for part of their life cycles.  Sadly, humans are another part of the life cycle of liver flukes (Schistosomiasis). People began dying, ultimately due to the deaths of life-saving hippos in the water in which they bathed.

I know this environmental story is one of many.  To me, though, there was an added poignancy as I pictured in my mind the relative sizes of the three creatures involved:  Microscopic fluke, human, and hippopotamus so huge it could be fangerous to people, but in this case was an ally against the tiny.

Reading Freudenberger's account made me remember seeing a mother hippo in a zoo with her baby, half-immersed in water.  I was struck by the massive solidity of their bodies.  Even the creature people were calling "the baby" seemed too large for the man-made pond.  And it seemed that a pond the size of Africa would be the right size for the mother.

Those solders in  Freudenberger's story were not the first people to have hunted hippos.  Most Biblical scholars think the Behemoth described in God's speech to Job in the Old Testament is a hippopotamus.  In that part of the narrative in the Hebrew Bible, God mentions the way hippos were hunted with harpoons.  God is not, however, interested in giving any hunting lesson. Instead, God seems to be trying to lift Job out of his self-centered perspective on himself.  God does so by describing such animals as the awe-inspiring hippo:

"Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass like an ox. 

 Its strength is in its loins, and its power in the muscles of its belly....

 It is the first of the great acts of God -- only its Maker can approach it with the sword.

 For the mountains yield food for it where all the wild animals play.

 Under the lotus plants it lies, in the covert of the reeds and in the marsh.

 The lotus trees cover it for shade; the willows of the wadi surround it.

 Even if the river is turbulent, it is not frightened"

~~~

Is there a particular animal you find awe-inspiring or humbling? Which one?

(Freudenberger's account about the hippos is related by

Calvin B. DeWitt in DeWitt's Song of a Scientist, © 2012.  p. 224,.)

(The Bible passage quoted is Job 40:15-16, 19-23a [NRSV] © 1989.)

Being an Animal, for Awhile

Over the course of my lifetime, there has been an increase in the number of Halloween costumes that are gory.  I am not a professional psychologist, but I would speculate that the increase in bloody, gruesome depictions has something to do with the increase in experiences of random violence (broadcast over TV) and truly violent movies.  Perhaps wearing a gory costume helps some children and youth face their inability to prevent random violence. Nevertheless, I would like to put in my vote for another type of costuming:  Animal masks and costumes.

What am I?

Of course, there are still some non-gory costumes among the trick-or-treaters who ring my doorbell.  An occasional princess. Or a cowboy.  Nevertheless, I think some animal costumes could add some variety and sparkle to trick-or-treating.  Even a simple animal mask might provide a psychological channel for children in their learning to adjust to the world and their own emotions.  As Paul Shepard writes:  "Putting [a mask] on and taking it off is a becoming.... The principle which they embody is like the assertion 'I am a young man, but I am also a frog' or 'I am a maiden, yet I am also a bird,' a way of saying 'I am both physical and spiritual, animal and human, good and bad.' "

Most every parent who has purchased or checked out of a library some children's books has encountered this uncanny ability of small children to identify with animal characters.  In children's stories, as also in many folktales, animal characters are both similar and dissimilar to the real animals they pretend to represent.  And they are both similar and dissimilar to our human selves.

"Bye, Baby Bunting"
from
  Denslow's Mother Goose

Somehow, an animal enables a child to name -- and thus perhaps unconsciously address -- their multiple emotions.  The complex emotions of human adults can be baffling to a small child (and sometimes inscrutable even to a teenager).  In contrast, a children's book's depictions of animals, even though oversimplified compared to the real animals they are derived from, help children to begin to name their emotions. For example:  I sometimes feel hungry like a bear.  I sometimes feel happy like a singing bird.

Paul Shepard, who was quoted above, is actually an ecologist, although of an unusual type.  He has studied and explored not so much our actions upon the environment as the reverse: the effects of the natural world upon humans, our psychology, and cultures.  Sometimes, as in the matter of humans' use of masks, those effects are subtle and too often overlooked.

There is another side of the coin to this matter of our identifying with animals, even if that identification simplifies the animal's nature.  Namely, that we can have an ambiguous response to most animals.  Not only do I experience myself as both "good and bad,"  but I can experience most animals as either good or bad, both beneficial to me and a possible danger to me.  Is that perhaps the way I can also experience many a human being?

~~~

As a child, did you ever wear an animal costume?  Do you ever feel  like any animal?

(The Shepard quote is from The Others, © 1996.   pp. 131-132.)

Creatures of Habit

Each morning, as dawn comes, the birds in my suburban neighborhood begin their calls back and forth, re-establishing contact with others of their species.  Each morning, once it is fully daylight, the squirrels begin their intricate descent to the deck in my backyard, where they will search for breakfast in the leaves or nearby grass.  All those animals have their morning habits, just as I do with my routine of coffee, radio, and reading.  All of our seemingly mechanical behavior is prompted by something even more regular -- the clock-like rising of the sun.  Therein lies a story of the universe, with its complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

Our contemporary U.S. culture, in which new products and discoveries are continually publicized, tends to elevate change.  We are frequently exhorted not to get stuck in a rut. When I was growing up, I often heard people say that we should not be "creatures of habit." The very use of the word "creatures" in that label (rather than saying "people") underscored that habits were something mindless -- something we humans should rise above.  (No one noticed the irony that people were habitually exhorting others not to be creatures of habit.)

The 20th-century Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, a master of tragicomedy, said through one of his characters that "Habit is a great deadener."

Despite habits so often being considered something that we should break, no society could long exist without them.  That insight was made by the late 19th-century psychologist William James, who wrote:

"Habit is... the enormous fly-wheel of society, 

its most precious conservative agent.... 

 It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life 

from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. 

It keeps the fisherman 

and the deck-hand 

at sea through the winter."

The morning routines of the birds, squirrels, and myself were all triggered by the "habitual" rising of the sun. With the rise of Newtonian science in the 17th century, scientists tended to say that bodies such as our sun obeyed "natural laws" with their mathematical regularity. Today, scientists still search for underlying regularities in the world, but much less often use the phrase "laws," which was clearly a term borrowed from human society. We even know that the apparent movement of the old sun through our sky, which once seemed absolutely mechanical in its seeming clock-like movement , is not absolute, because the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing over time. Thus it is that even the sun in our sky cannot be absolutely unchanging in its habits.  It even has unpredictable flares in the fires on its surface.  Even the sun is a complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

We live in a world of both underlying order and underlying novelty.  And, I bet even those birds and squirrels -- with all their alertness along with their regularity -- would also make adjustments in their behavior if something new and potentially significant entered the routine of their day.

~~~

Do you have a routine, intentional or not, that adds something valuable to your life?

(The Beckett quote is from Waiting for Godot, III. © 1952, trans. 1954.)

(The James quote is taken from Psychology, Briefer Course, by William James, © 1892.  p. 143.)

(Both the photo and the illustration are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.)

Doing Without a Brain, or Just a Little One

My musings on this matter of the size or absence of brains began when I was confirming another fact with a retired biology teacher.  I had been wanting to make sure my description of the size of tiny coral animals was correct.  Although I had not requested the additional information, my adviser added:  "The coral are invertebrates, like sea anemones.  They have no brains."  It sounded like just the setup line for a joke by a late-night TV comedian (particularly if our elected officials had done something seemingly nonsensical earlier in the week).

Another brainless invertebrate,
a freshwater sponge

Nevertheless, my adviser on biology had simply been making the factual observation that corals, sea anemones, and other invertebrates such as sea sponges make do without a spinal cord or brain.  They do quite well without such "extras."  Sea anemones, being much larger than the nearly microscopic coral animals, are easier candidates for observation if you have a chance to watch a saltwater aquarium.  They have a mouth on top, surrounded by numerous paralyzing tentacles that detour passing food into the mouth.  The creatures, although continuously hungry, seem quite content in having no brain.  Although we humans might think that having brains is a "no brainer," evolution tells us brains are not really necessary for being a plant or even an animal.

Besides that TV-comedian joke about some people apparently not having a brain, another derisive brain-related joke is to call some person a "bird brain."  Here again, birds -- as well as many other small vertebrates -- seem quite capable of getting along with a quite small brain and skull compared to the human race.

On one occasion, I was pitted brain-to-brain against a creature of sparrow-sized brain, and I lost the competition.  My challenger had been a bat.  I was standing on a second-story balcony in the early evening, at the balcony's rail, looking out upon the open grounds before me.  In literally less than a second, a bat flew straight at my face.  Even though the whole incident happened in an instant, I was able afterward to clearly remember seeing the rapidly flying bat no more than two feet in front of my face -- and aimed right at me.  But then, the miraculous occurred:  The bat, securely guided by it's sonar system that I could not hear, instantaneously made a sharp left turn, thus preventing a collision.  I could never have been able to react that quickly.  But its tiny brain did.

We need not stop with the example of a bat's brain if we want examples of forms of intelligence packaged in a small size.  In his poem "A Considerable Speck," Robert Frost observes the behavior of a nearly microscopic "mite" (as he calls it) on a sheet of white paper on his desk. Watching the tiny animal's response to the movements of his writing pen. Frost drolly concludes:

"Plainly with an intelligence I dealt....

I have a mind myself and recognize

Mind when I meet with it in any guise

No one can know how glad I am to find

On any sheet the least display of mind."

~~~

Is there a non-human species you admire?  What species is that?  Why do you admire it?

(The excerpt from the Frost poem is taken from

"A Considerable Speck" in Complete Poems of Robert Frost, © 1967.)

Awarded Second Place

Aristotle, Theophrastus,
 and Strato discuss biology

It's not easy being a second-stringer.  Especially today -- when being a celebrity is so highly rated -- those who have done well but are not "tops" easily fall into the great hall of the virtually forgotten.  One such scientist was named Theophrastus, and he lived in ancient Greece from about 372 to 287 B.C.E.  He was a pupil of Aristotle, and easily falls into that great man's shadow.  Anyone with a college-level education should know the name "Aristotle."  Few are even expected to learn the name "Theophrastus."  And yet, Theophrastus was called the "father of botany" by Linnaeus, the 18th-century scientist who developed modern biology's system for classifying species.

After Aristotle died, Theophrastus led the school Aristotle had created, continuing to teach not only botany but also zoology, physiology, physics, ethics, and the history of culture.  Today, we'd need a separate professor for each of those subjects, but Theophrastus strengthened the sense of unity among those various subject areas.  The school actually reached its peak attendance during his leadership.

Although Theophrastus wrote several books as a way of deepening education, the ones that had the most lasting influence were those about botany, such as Natural History of Plants and Reasons for Vegetable Growth.  He classified almost 500 plants, not just as an abstract subject, but also relating it to human cultivation, grafting, and propagation.  Even though Theophrastus is mostly forgotten today, some current scientific terminology still shows traces of the names he used for flowers and their parts.

It seems to me that it is not only Theophrastus who falls into an easily forgotten second place.  Plants do too.  On television nature documentaries, IMAX movies, and save-the-species campaigns, it is animals, not plants, that get most of the attention.  A panda is so much more cuddly than any plant (especially more than poison ivy).  In contrast, a lion is a better model than a plant for a child's nice stuffed toy (even though the lion is a predator that kills other mammals that we adore).

Part of the reason for this discrimination against plants obviously lies in animals' being much more animated -- the very basis for our word "animal."  That difference cannot be overcome even by time-lapse photography, which can make flowers at least appear to unfold, and plants appear to grow as fast as animals actually move.

Despite the second place that plants get in our attention, we and all animals depend in some way upon them, such as the oxygen for breathing that green plants give off.  In the late 19th century, the American biologist Asa Gray paid a tribute to plants in the opening pages of a botany book he wrote for young people.  Gray was himself a second-stringer among advocates for Darwin's theory of evolution, taking second place to Thomas Huxley.  Nevertheless, Gray knew the importance of plants, writing:

"The clothing of the earth with plants and flowers --
at once so beautiful and so useful, so essential to all animal life --
is one of the very ways in which [God] takes care of his creatures."

~~~

Has any houseplant, shrub, vine, or tree played a particular role in your life?  What?

(The Gray quote is in his Botany for Young People [1872]

 as quoted in Song of a Scientist by Calvin B. DeWitt, © 2004.  p. 21.)

(The photo of the three teachers is in the public domain, being a reproduction of art whose copyright has expired.)

Filling a Life with Light

I recently checked out of the public library three small books that were old and heavily worn, even though they had probably not been used much in recent years.  Even beyond their contents, the books were fascinating, what with their now antiquated card-pockets and check-out cards.  (One of the volumes, a 1905 book even bore on its title page an impress revealing that it once had been in the Colored Carnage Library, now thankfully gone as an emblem of the U.S's officially segregated past.)  All three books, published between 1905 and 1927, were collections of poems by a man who loved God and loved Nature.

His name was Henry van Dyke (1852-1933).  Even though his poetry broke away from a heavier style (such as that of Longfellow) by using more variation in the lengths of lines, Van Dyke's poetry is of a rhymed style that is no longer popular.  And yet, there are things to commend about his work and life.  His prose narrative "The Story of the Other Wise Man" has been given some modern adaptations.

His 1907 hymn "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" has also endured, being still in some current hymnals.  I think one reason, besides its exuberant alliterations and vivid imagery, is that its content transcends many theological differences.  I would even suggest that much of its content can transcend boundaries of faith-traditions in its awe-filled spiritual experience in Nature. Such as:  "Field and forest, vale and mountain, Flowery meadow, flashing sea, / Chanting bird and flowing fountain, Call us to rejoice in Thee."

I think my Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature identified the style of living that lay behind the potential universality of those hymn lyrics.  That reference book explains that Van Dyke engaged in a "lifelong attempt to fuse religion and practical, everyday living in a keen personal enjoyment of life."  Given his profession as a religious leader, things could have turned out otherwise.  But something guided him away from parochialism even as a minister at Brick Presbyterian Church in New York.

I find a wideness of spirit even in his early poems.  Scanning the tables of contents in those three old library books, there is one poem in all three books whose title stands out for its expressiveness:  "God of the Open Air."  In that multi-page 1904 poem, Van Dyke conveys his heartfelt religious devotion.  But I think he does so in a way that can transcend religious divisions -- particularly because he conveys his devotion to a God that is found beyond the walls of any sanctuary, synagogue, temple, or mosque:  "To thee I turn, to thee I make my prayer, / God of the open air."  In the poem's closing lines, Van Dyke echoes the famous appeal of Goethe on his deathbed for "Mehr licht!" ("More light!").  Van Dyke proclaims that upon dying:

"Let me not creep

Into some darkened room and hide

From all that makes the world so bright and dear;

But throw the windows wide

To welcome in the light."

~~~

Is there a way that Nature adds an exuberance to your life?  When and how?

(The hymn lyrics are taken from The Presbyterian Hymnal, © 1990. #464.)

(The description of Van Dyke's religious aim is from

Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, © 1991.  p. 1084.)

(Van Dyke's full poem can be read at this external link:  "God of the Open Air")

An Ill Wind and My Spirit

It was a late summer.  There were more clouds than typical for a summer day, but that felt good because it gave relief from the hot summer sun.  What felt even better was a breeze that brushed across my face, bringing the promise of a respite from the summer heat we had endured for weeks.  "Maybe we'll get a cooling rain," I thought.  My slight elation at the change in weather was, however, kept in bounds by a larger awareness.  Namely, I knew that the pleasant shift in weather I was experiencing was the result of a distant hurricane that was coming ashore farther away, bringing destruction upon other people.

The soothing breeze that brushed my face thus raises the question of how I should think and feel about those things in Nature that bring both good and bad.  That tiny breeze raises spiritual and theological questions far beyond its small size.  To my way of thinking, the most distasteful responses to a hurricane during the past few years have been by people who claimed that God steered the hurricane away from them in response to their prayers.  Those people were thinking only of themselves, and seem to have had little concern about the other people who would be hurt by a re-directed hurricane.  Nor do such comments display an awareness of a long tradition of theological thought about the matter.

A less selfish response does not require more scientific understanding of storms.  It only requires a "compassionate heart," to use a Buddhist phrase.  A wiser and more  open-hearted response to tragedy was modeled by Jesus after a tower fell, killing people.  Even without a knowledge of Newtonian physics, Jesus knew that natural disasters do not injure just bad people, and that they do not spare just good people.  Challenging his listeners to join him in that enlightened response, he asked rhetorically,  "Those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them -- do you think that they were worse offenders...?  No, I tell you." (Luke 13:4-5, NRSV).  Jesus's reminder to us that "bad things can happen to good people," as we say today, echoes that same insight form the Jewish tradition's book of Job in the Bible. Job's suffering from natural forces was not a punishment.

Although in English we have separate words for "wind" and "spirit," in the Bible's original languages, the two are the same word.  We might think "wind-spirit." That equivalence can remind me when that light wind touches my face, to ask myself what my own spirit is like, especially when I know of the dangerous hurricane further away.

y

There is another side of the coin to this matter of the uncertainties of the natural world -- the fact that natural forces can bring both damaging winds and needed rain.  I easily notice when bad luck befalls me.  In contrast, I easily overlook all the ways I have been helped by good things that were just as much beyond my control. The light wind that brushes my face can, therefore, widen my awareness even further.  The double meaning of wind-spirit can remind me to remember a larger spirit of unseen forces that support my life.  A native American Ojibwe song put it this way:

"Sometimes I go about pitying myself,

But all the while

I am being carried by great winds across the sky."

~~~

Is there a way you have come to think about the uncontrollable uncertainties of life?

Famous Pump-handle, Overlooked Friendship

drawing titled
“Death’s Dispensary”

It is one of those legends of modern science that is usually told in a way that obscures almost as much as it reveals.  Like this:                          A terrible cholera epidemic is terrorizing London in 1854. The physician John Snow, defying the prevailing medical thinking, hypothesizes that the epidemic is caused not by foul air but by contaminated water.  He scientifically marks on a map the instances of cholera, and the instances are like arrows pointing to a public well on Broad Street at the intersection of Cambridge St. Snow removes the pump-handle, rendering the well useless.  And the number of cases of cholera, which had been surging, plummets.  Sure enough, the well's water was being polluted by fecal sewage.

Historians of science, however, point to many distortions in such a depiction.  Just to start with, people in the London neighborhood knew of many individuals who had drunk from the Broad Street pump but had not become ill.  Also, the statistics about cholera victims that John Snow gathered did not point like unquestionable evidence to that pump.  There were many anomalies.  Some families farther from that pump and near sources of clean water had still died.  And other people who worked at a brewery one block from the Broad Street pump were spared.  Snow had to laboriously search out explanations for each anomaly.  (Such as that the brewery workers were provided malt liquor by their employers, and so drank little water.)

The myth-like depiction also misrepresents the removal of the pump handle and what happened afterward.  Snow did not remove the handle himself:  He got the prompt cooperation of an only initially reluctant Board of Governors.  And even after its removal, the decline in cholera was not clear-cut proof because -- as Snow himself admitted -- the terrible wave of cholera had already begun to decline.  Nor had Snow scientifically surveyed the survivors as a scientific control.

Also, those opponents of Snow who held to the traditional view that vapors in the air were the suspect had a decent argument.  London's air was notoriously foul.  A few decades earlier, the poet Percy Shelley had written that, “Hell is a city much like London,” and the city's situation was hardly better in 1854.

The contemporary writer Steven Johnson, in his fascinating book The Ghost Map, points to a perhaps even more significant distortion:

"There is a kind of mythology that stories like this one tend inevitably to drift toward:
the lone genius shaking off the chains of conventional wisdom....
  [But] intellectual breakthroughs [are] rarely the isolated genius
 having a eureka moment alone in the lab."

In this regard, the physician John Snow stood on the shoulders of centuries of awareness that human sewage had to be sequestered and removed (as demonstrated by the sewage systems of even ancient Rome).  Also, for his mapping, Snow used death statistics that were continuously compiled by the city demographer William Farr.

Henry Whitehead

Even more likely to be overlooked is an Anglican minister, Henry Whitehead, who worked out of a church four blocks from the pump, and who had an intimate knowledge of people in the overcrowded slum -- including the survivors.  Thus were a clergyman's ministry and a scientist's research brought together.  The author Johnson explains how Whitehead and Snow, as they joined their investigations, developed "a quiet but profound friendship."

~ ~ ~

Have you known any religiously devoted people who minister to others with medical care?

(The quotation by Percy Bysshe Shelley is from “Peter Bell the Third,” 1819.)
(The Steven Johnson quotation is from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's  Most Terrifying Epidemic --
and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, © 2006, pp. 144, 149 & 181.)

Moving and Memories

Have you ever woken out of a dream in which you had been in a place where you previously lived?  Such dreams are not uncommon.  They were also the framework drawn upon by Marcel Proust to begin his masterwork novel Remembrance of Things Past.  The author tells of how, sometimes dozing in and out of sleep, he would awake disoriented, not sure at first where he was.  He easily imagined for a moment that he was in a childhood or other earlier bedroom. As Proust wrote, "When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years."

Such dreams fascinate me because they express so well how making sense of new experiences and challenges involves placing them within the context of something we already know.  New situations, particularly demanding ones, can be disorienting, just as Proust was momentarily disoriented.  Drawing upon abilities we already possess can help us orient ourselves in less familiar situations -- just as the dream of a familiar room and walls reveals our subconscious's drawing upon something deeply rooted within us.

Thinking back upon our lives, if we have lived in more then one location, we can recall times of transition that entailed moving.  Some moves can be exhilarating; others can be frightening. Leaving for college can be an exciting, hopeful time despite its uncertainties.  Being forced to move because of divorce is inevitably stressful, the atmosphere of a failed marriage suffocating for the time any joy that once was.

Reflecting upon this matter of moving leads me to thoughts of those non-human animals that must make frequent moves.  Twice a year, thousands of wildebeests make a mass migration covering many miles of East Africa.  Annual migrations by bird species, usually north and south, are an integral part of their lives.  Historians have sometimes employed the world "migration" to describe the movement of groups of people as they relocated, but those human "migrations" are in most cases once-in-a-lifetime, in contrast with the demand that instinct places upon such animal species every single year.  Nevertheless, in that instinct lies salvation, protecting the species against too severe weather, and offering the hope of food ahead.

I wonder if animals who migrate have dreams of previous homes.  I do know that researchers in laboratories have been able to detect through brain waves that rats dream about a new task they were challenged with the day before.  Birds are not as biologically close to us as such mammals, but might they also be dreaming of flying when their wings flutter while asleep?

Ecologists speak of "niches" in which species have evolved, finding their place in a life-giving way.  Human beings, try to find their place spiritually in relation to a Higher Truth or Power. Thousands of years ago, one ancient Hebrew, going to the temple for spiritual reorientation, looked up and was encouraged to see that the temple had also provided niches in its walls for nesting birds:

"How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD....

Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,

 where she may lay her young."

~~~

Have you ever made a move that entailed not just relocation but also growth?

(The Proust quote is from the opening chapter, "Overture," of the first book, Swann's Way,

 in Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 opus, trans by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, © 1928.)

(The quotation about the temple niches is from the Hebrew Bible [Christian New Testament], Psalm 84:1, 3 [NRSV])
(Photo of wildebeests, by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.)

Wild and Free?

Under other circumstances, I might not have given a second thought to the single word "free."  After all, it was used in a common type of statement:  In an anthology of nature-writing, Words for the Wild, the editor Ann Ronald introduced an essay by Loren Eiseley, saying, "Loren Eiseley's wilderness differs somewhat from others' in [this anthology], but it is no less the terrain of what is wild and what is free."  Somehow my mind paused, and I began to ask questions about what it means to be free, and what might lie behind the appeal of a freedom that wilderness seems to offer.

I say "seems to offer" because wilderness and wildness can be idealized.  A predator in the wild might appear "free" to us, but how "free" is the prey that is being chased?

Alexis de Tocqueville
(1850)

Today in the U.S., we often associate getting out into the open spaces of wilderness with freedom, but that has not always been the case.  When the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, eager to see the American wilderness, visited this nation in 1831, he concluded:  "In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the American themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature...."  The reason for such an American attitude at that time was primarily practical:  The hardship of merely surviving apart from the support-system of civilization made living "in the wild" anything but a pleasant getaway.  It would require the construction of mapped roads connecting towns, along with a change in attitudes, before Americans could resonate with Lord Byron's idea of "pleasure in the pathless woods."

We humans, like all living beings, depend upon other entities.  Despite that dependence, every living being -- if its life is able to reach a fullness -- must still obtain a type of freedom from something in its past.  A chick needs to hatch and leave its shell behind.  So also must adolescent humans find some separation from their parents.

That ambiguity regarding freedom can lead to human hypocrisy.  De Tocqueville made a wry observation about American society.  He said that when Americans are criticized for their behavior, they protest, "I have a right to do so" -- whereas when they see someone else doing something they do not like, they exclaim, "There ought to be a law!"

Paradoxically, we can find a kind of release, a kind of freedom, when we yield to some forms of dependence.  The bird finding the breakfast upon which its life depends is simultaneously gaining a temporary freedom from hunger.  And vice versa:  The being that is finding a new form of freedom is at the same time developing new relationships with new forms of dependence.  That young adult moving out of its parents' home now depends upon friends or a job to sustain the newfound freedom.

Self-actualizing is an ever-ongoing combination of freedom and ties, ties and freedom, all in motion.  We might employ that word "wild" in a slang sense by remarking upon what a "wild and crazy" kind of life it is to exist on this planet!

~~~

What do you think the purpose of freedom should be?  Can you give an example?

(The Ronald quote is from Words for the Wild, ed. Ann Ronald.  © 1987.  p. 237.)

(The Tocqueville quote is from his Democracy in America, as quoted in
Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash, © 1982.  p. 23.)

(The quote by Lord Byron is from his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto IV, st. 178. [1817].)

Bears: Too Much and Too Little Like Us

The history of humans and bears has been a love-hate relationship.  Or to put it in a more historical order, a hate-love story, because it has taken time for our fear and hatred of bears to subside and our fondness for them to grow.  In past centuries, bears were nearly expunged from the Mideast, Europe, and the U.S.  Today, polar bears on notecards tug at our hearts, trying to persuade us to preserve their homes.  From fear to love.

Given that order of events, it interests me that a child's first encounter with bears usually comes in a loving, not a hateful way. Our societies may have had a hard time coming to delight in bears, but a child can delight in them early in life upon first being read "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."  As a child's reading level advances, bears can be stepping stones -- from Paddington Bear to Winnie the Pooh to Smokey the Bear with his instructions.  (If, as a young adult or adult, a person makes their way into Tolstoy's War and Peace, that person even encounters a young pet bear being among the guests at a drunken party Pierre attends.)

Despite our childhood intimacy with fictional bears (all the way down to teddy bears), real bears in the wild prefer to keep their distance from humans.  Bears prefer running away over attacking. Thus, one of the greatest delights of tourists in national parks is having the good luck of sighting a bear (safely, of course).  I remember my wife and I sitting eating lunch on a gentle wooded slope in Sequoia National Park when a brown bear quickly passed us, running over the hilltop to keep its distance from people on the other side, paying no attention to my wife and me.  We were also lucky in seeing a grizzly bear in Yellowstone when we were on a somewhat remote trail.  Almost beyond our range of sight, we watched the grizzly through binoculars.  It was standing watching us, keeping its distance, evaluating I am sure whether we were going to leave the trail and come closer.

That standing pose and their taillessness are reasons people have thought bears to be like people.  The native American Mewuk even have a story about bears "dancing."  The bear-human resemblance has, however, sometimes been an endangerment to bears' freedom, such as when they have been pressed into service riding bicycles in circuses.  Even today, people too easily think they understand a bear's emotions, even though bears' facial expressions are not like our own.  Such misreadings have resulted in injury when bears have been approached.  National park rangers exile any bear that hurts a person.  We protect them by keeping our distance.

An inordinate fear of bears in Western culture led for centuries to the cruel entertainment of bear-baiting, in which dogs were set upon a chained bear to attack it  In the 19th century in the U.S., the nature writer John Muir appealed for compassion for bears.  He did so by pointing out additional similarities to us:  "Bears are made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters.  A bear's days are warmed by the same sun, his dwellings are overdomed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and ebbs with heart-pulsings like ours, and was poured from the same First Fountain."

~~~

Do you have any memories of a real bear?  What about a bear in a book, or a stuffed toy?

(The Muir quote [1871] is taken from

 A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, © 1992.  139:22.)

(The first two pictures are in the Public Domain because their copyrights have expired.)

(The last picture is by A. N. Komarov and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license)

Hearing the Sea in a Shell

It is an experience every child should have for the first time:  Holding a large shell to one's ear and hearing the sound of "the sea" supposedly still in the shell. How many parents or grandparents have initiated their child or grandchild to seashore wonders by instructing the child to "hear the ocean" in that way?  How many children have smiled upon first hearing the sound a large seashell makes, imagining for a moment they really heard the sea?  I recognize that an acoustical scientist could give a good, detailed explanation for the perhaps puzzling effect.  But I am more interested in how that experience can be an opening to how we and all things are part of a larger whole.  That is the very matter the poet William Wordsworth explored in his long poem The Excursion.

Even though the sea-in-seashell symbol could be a good literary opening, it appears in the middle of Wordsworth's poem when, in his memory, he sees himself as a boy:

"A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract

Of inland ground, applying to his ear

The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;

To which, in silence hushed, his very soul

Listened intensely; and his countenance soon

Brightened with joy; for from within were heard

Murmurings, whereby the monitor [the shell] expressed

Mysterious union with its native sea."

In the very next line, Wordsworth opens up the metaphor of how -- if we orient ourselves properly -- we can "hear" in the natural world intimations ("Murmurings") of a larger, deeper reality:  "Even such a shell the universe itself / Is to the ear of Faith...."  Moreover, Wordsworth later addresses his words to a larger divine Spirit that includes all of our own spirits, just "as the sea her waves."

The magic of children innocently believing (at least for a moment) they are hearing the sea in a shell derives from a child's wonderful delight in first discovering the world.  And so, a stanza early in the poem began with the statement "Such was the Boy."

oil portrait of
William Wordsworth
by Benjamin Haydon

Even though we adults cannot actually return to our childhoods, Wordsworth expresses how, even in old age, our memory can restore to us some of our original exaltation. That ability of memory to recreate something not physically present is similar to the seashell's ability to recreate the physical ocean, which is not physically present:

"If the dear faculty of sight should fail,

Still, it may be allowed me to remember

What visionary powers of eye and soul

In youth were mine; when, stationed on the top

Of some huge hill -- expectant, I beheld

The sun rise up, from distant climes returned....

... my spirit was entranced

With joy exalted to beatitude...."

~~~

Are there some particular experiences in Nature that allows your spirit to feel how it is included as part of some larger Spirit of life and of the universe?

(The two large excerpts are from Book IV, "Despondency Corrected" of The Excursion [1814]

That full section of the book-like poem can be read at this external link:  The Excursion, Book IV.)