A Crocus in the Snow

It is a classic subject for nature photographers:  a vividly purple flower
 in the midst of white snow. Why is that image appealing to us?

Part of its appeal comes from its aesthetic beauty -- so much so that it demonstrates what have long been held to be some of the identifying characteristics of beauty.  One of those is that beauty is created when some features that might otherwise be experienced as being in conflict are instead held together in harmony.  In this case, the intensity of purple contrasts with the absence of color in the snow; yet the two are held in harmony.  The contemporary professor of religion Steven R. Guthrie, explaining this aspect of classical Western thought regarding beauty, writes that, "In Plato's dialogues... harmony in this sense is not uniformity or unanimity but the beauty that emerges from different elements in right relationship.... It is, in Dante's words, 'an order' from 'things disparate.' "

Most people like the image of the crocus in the snow.  That favorable emotional response points to another aspect that the Western philosophical and theological traditions have identified as being a characteristic of beauty.  Namely, that something beautiful creates a resonance within us that is pleasing.  In that regard, Guthrie explains that " [Thomas] Aquinas draws our attention to the immediate impression that beautiful things make upon our senses."

In the case of the crocus in the snow, however, those who find the image beautiful are often responding to more than the aesthetic beauty of purple against white.  A purple blotch on a white background would not elicit the same emotions that the flower does.  What also resonates within us in the case of the crocus, even if unconsciously, is the contrast between the new life of the emerging flower and the surrounding cold snow of winter -- the season in which most plants die back.  This additional form of contrast is also a dimension of the image's beauty that is pleasing to us.  Not only is the tension between purple and white held together, but life and death are held together in a moment of harmony when the crocus emerges out of the snow.  The 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, in his poem praising God, expressed how the crocus stands out from other plants around it.  He wrote:

"The laurels with the winter strive;

The crocus burnishes alive

     Upon the snow-clad earth."

The moment of plant-nativity displayed by the crocus can thus evoke within us that enduring quality of hope that sustains our human existence.  Gandhi once wrote:

"I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds
 all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates.... And is this power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.
 Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light."

It is through our human capacity to not only resonate when experiencing aesthetic beauty but also respond to symbols that we can open ourselves to the transcendent dimension of reality.  The crocus in the snow reveals to us more than the survival capability of a specific flower.  It points to the Ultimate Ground of all existence.  And in that Ground are the "flower-bulbs" and "seeds" of all that can be.  There is an Indian saying that:

"All the flowers of all the tomorrows
 are in the seeds of today."

The real challenge can be spotting those "seeds" and nurturing them.  Sometimes we cannot even see them at all.  But even when we cannot perceive them, we can hope, and like Gandhi we can have faith that they are there despite being hidden beneath the snow.

~ ~ ~

(What do you hope for?  Can you see any way you might contribute to that future growth of something good?)

(The Steven R. Guthrie quotation is from his book Creator Spirit:
 The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human, © 2011. pp. 201-202 & 205.)

(The lines by Christopher Smart are from "A Song to David,"
 taken from Encompassing Nature, ed. Robert M. Torrance, © 1998, p. 1015.)

(The Gandhi quotation is from his Young India, 11-10-28, as quoted in Gleanings from
 the writings of Mahatma Gandhi bearing on God, God-Realization and the Godly way, ed. R. K. Prabhu.)

Knowing Water

All of us have known water since before our earliest memories of anything.  Maybe that first taste of water was from a nippled bottle, maybe from a small cup.  But we encountered water long before we could have thought about it.  Water is basic.

Despite its being so basic, there are many ways that we know water.  Thus there are many ways -- all valid -- of answering the question, "What is water?"  And they demonstrate the variety of ways we know this world.

On a beginning chemistry exam, if I am asked what water is, I know to answer that water is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen -- H2O.  I understand water chemically as I understand that formula, along with knowing what a molecule is.  But that is a very abstract type of knowledge.  Long before modern chemistry, humans knew what water is when they were refreshed by drinking it or bathing with it.

Writers of the Bible knew those immediate ways of knowing water.  They also knew how those ways of knowing water are not confined to the human race but are also experienced by other

animals. The writers of the Bible knew how experiencing water’s life-giving properties could open a person to remembering and re-encountering God.  As a typical psalm of creation, Psalm 104 (1--11a, NRSV), puts it, speaking to God:

"You make springs gush forth in the valleys;

they flow between the hills,

giving drink to every wild animal."

We can know more about water as we come to know it through our religious traditions. As a Christian, I understand religiously what water is in several ways:  By attending baptisms. By singing hymns and hearing scriptures containing the word “thirst.”  And by joining with other people of faith to see that homeless people are provided water.  Christianity and Judaism are not unique in their integration of the theme of water into their theological reflections.  In the Islamic tradition, the Qur’an (Koran) states:

"In the water that Allah sends down from the clouds and quickens therewith
the earth after its death and scatters therein all kind of beasts,
and in... the clouds pressed into service between the heaven and the earth,
are indeed Signs for a people who understand."

Scientists, in their own way, know which planets might have had forms of life by finding indications that the planet has had water -- water being essential for life.  If I pause to reflect upon water, which I often take for granted, I can re-discovery my commonality with all of life.  A commonality not just in needing water, but also a commonality in yearning, longing, and striving. Also, it is through a recognition of types of striving in other kinds of living beings (animals and plants) that we intuit that they are alive too.

Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is set in a town in a tropical jungle. In a memorable scene, the protagonists' encounter with a new form of water becomes an encounter of a miraculous kind.  A gypsy opens a chest, revealing to the protagonist and his father José Arcadio "an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars."  José  Arcadio ventures a guess as to what it might be:

" ' It's the largest diamond in the world.'

'No,' the gypsy countered. 'It's ice.' "

~ ~ ~

(Can you recall a particular occasion when you had no water handy, and recall how it felt to take that first drink when you were so thirsty?)

(Qur’an quotation is from sura 26, trans. Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, quoted in Matthew Fox's One River, Many Wells, p. 38.)

(Quotation from Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, © 1970, p. 18.)

(Photographs are in the Public Domain.)

Halloween, and Civilizing Nature

Although I cannot remember her name, I remember hearing on the radio several years ago an Asian-American woman relating her immigrant family’s first encounter with Halloween.  As they experienced it, one evening in October, an unknown child knocked at their door.  And, as best they could understand it through the language barrier, the child was wanting something sweet to eat.  Although not having made any preparations for this unexpected visitor, the family did their best to satisfy the child's seeming hunger because they knew from their own background in Asia the dangers of malnutrition and starvation.

But within the hour, another child came to the door of the family's home!  And then still another child, again asking for something to eat.  The family, having soon exhausted their supply of sweets, went to their refrigerator to get more food, but had only some pickled cucumber to give to the child, which they did.  Hearing this story, I could not help but laugh as I imagined the expression of a trick-or-treating child being given pickled cucumber instead of a Snickers bar.

This anecdote, besides providing humor, gives some insight into aspects of our human nature.  Our current-day Halloween has mostly lost any real threat that children will perform some practical joke against us (some "trick") if we do not provide a treat as requested.  The Halloween tradition has evolved into the form of giving candy to unknown children to match their preference for sweets.  And with that act of giving, we extend ourselves beyond our human tendencies to hoard for ourselves, or to share primarily with those closest to us, such as our own family.  Halloween thus embodies a suppression of some aspects of our human nature (selfishness) coupled with the encouragement of other aspects of our human nature (compassion for others).

Even in its earlier manifestation that included real tricks, Halloween embodied a channeling and civilizing of potentially troublesome aspects of human nature.  Namely, the danger of children acting out their powerlessness and frustration by destroying something adults own.  Instead of such destructiveness, on one night each year, children (if they did so anonymously) were allowed to perform practical jokes against adults, such as rubbing soap on a house's windows.  That sort of channeling of childhood powerlessness into tricks has been mostly dropped from the celebration.  The gifts of candy are now usually freely given to any child who rings the doorbell.

There is much argument today about what is our "human nature."  And the choices are often presented in terms of opposites.  This is nothing new.  Three centuries ago, Alexander Pope wrote of humans:

"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,...

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;"

It does not require much reflection to realize we have sometimes unjustly indicted animals ("beasts") for seeming faults that we possess as humans.  Nevertheless, Pope's point about the tension within our human natures still stands.  On Halloween night, some children do play the role of the "beast" within them by costuming themselves as monsters. And we adults aim to act out the more generous nature within us by giving candy.

Maybe there also lies waiting at the heart of Halloween a deeper mystery that we might know if we could develop a reverence within ourselves.  That reverence would be woven through with humility, because it would be the act of adults (with all their powers) leaning down to children in an act of giving.  The result could be an experience of self-transcendence.  A century ago, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore captured the wonder of such a loving act in one of what he called his "song offerings."

Rabindranath Tagore

"When I bring sweet things to your greedy hands,
 I know why there is honey in the cup of the flower
 and why fruits are secretly filled with sweet juice -- 

when I bring sweet things to your greedy hands....

When I bring to you coloured toys, my child,
 I understand why there is such a play of colours on clouds,
 on water, and why flowers are painted in tints -- 

when I give coloured toys to you, my child."

~ ~ ~

(How do you think we might nurture the human qualities Tagore expresses, even if we do not have children of our own?)

(The Pope quotation is from Essay on Man, II, 1.)

(The Tagore quotation is from his book Gitanjali, © 1913, no. 62.)

(All the photos are in the Public Domain.)

Spuds: Not Something to Spit At

They rarely make it into the news.  Potatoes, that is.  Not as colorful or as flavorful as their cousin the sweet potato, the common "Idaho potato," as we call it, needs to be dolled up with sour cream and bacon bits before it becomes appealing to our sensation-desiring tastes.

The only occasion during my lifetime that the potato made front-page news was when an over-confident vice-presidential candidate made a photo appearance at an elementary school.  Potatoes fared better than the candidate, however, who tried to correct a boy's spelling of "potato" -- when it was the boy's spelling that was correct.

Even if news reporters rarely find potatoes newsworthy, a young painter with a heart intensely responsive to the poor did:  Vincent van Gogh, in his 1885 painting "The Potato Eaters," captured the somewhat sad nobility of a poor family sharing a meal of plain potatoes.

In the quite contrasting economic situation of U.S. in its post-W.W.II baby-boom, some potatoes became disposable items, so cheap that they could be turned into toys and then tossed away.  "Mr. Potato Head" (the first toy to be advertised on the new medium of television) was a simple assortment of plastic feet, ears, eyes, and other body-parts that could be stuck into a passive potato.  What a simple toy compared to today's electronic games!  And yet, it was a toy that made room for a child's imagination and for play between children (especially after Mrs. Potato Head came along).

There is a long ancestral story behind today's potatoes.  The lowly potato plant prefers high altitudes, its native place having been the western mountain range of the Americas, especially in what is today Peru and Colombia.  Discovered by Spanish conquistadores, it was carried across the Atlantic in the 16th century.  Once it reached Europe, it worked its way northward from the Mediterranean countries, eventually reaching the British Isles.  In the following century, it returned to America, but this time to the eastern coast of North America, carried there by the Puritans.  As European-Americans carried it further westward, the now thoroughly domesticated potato came full- circle, meeting in Wyoming some of it close relatives who were natives.

Despite the ways potatoes have thus served humankind, they usually make an appearance in history books by their absence. Namely, the Irish famine of 1845 and 1846.  When the potato first came to Ireland a couple centuries before, the tubers, growing underground, had the advantage of being hidden from the sight of marauding British who wanted to destroy the Irish people's crops.  But in the mid 1840's, a blight devastated the usual harvest of potatoes, which the Irish had come to depend upon as their staple crop, their essential form of produce.  A Catholic priest, Father Mathew captured the plight and observed:

"In many places the wretched people
were seated on the fences of their gardens,...
wailing bitterly [over] the destruction
 that had left them foodless."

A million Irish emigrated to America.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from the humble potato.  Potatoes are so knobbly that the standard reminder to grocery shoppers is that there is no "perfect" potato.  So is it with us humans, with our moles, birthmarks, and other physical imperfections.

Also, our media today force us to live in a society that spotlights celebrities.  But few of us can be a celebrity.  Adolescents and young adults can especially feel unworthy because they have not accomplished something "big."  Nevertheless, like the potato that has served as a staple crop, it is the common people -- those who ring the cash-registers, tend the kids, and pick up the garbage -- who serve as the foundation of society.  There is a beauty in that.

~ ~ ~

(Has the long history of the potato made you think anything about our lives today?)

(The quotation by the priest is taken from The Origins of Fruit and Vegetables by Jonathan Roberts, © 2001, p. 192.)
(The first photo is in the Public Domain. The second is used by Fair Use.)

Gift about Life on a Deathbed

What would you want to be given as a gift if you were not likely to live much longer?  Of course, if in pain, medicine to alleviate that suffering would be welcome.  But in this instance, the bedridden man -- Charles Darwin -- had learned to live with a chronic illness through most of his adult life (even during his most fruitful years of scientific research and writing).  So, what turned out to be a welcome gift was a book to read.  And the book was on Darwin's favorite subject:  Nature.

Aristotle,
in an
old Latin translation

The gift, from William Ogle, was his new translation of a work by Aristotle titled The Parts of Animals.  That ancient Greek scientist's collection of observations about animals would have been of particular interest to Darwin.  Even though Aristotle's way of doing science was not grounded in the experimental methods of modern science, Aristotle's collection of investigations about animals had been part of the corpus of Western education for centuries.  Aristotle recognized the temptation researchers might have of not investigating animals they might consider useless, ugly, or even disgusting.  Therefore, in the book Darwin had received, Aristotle cautioned:

"For this reason we should not be childishly disgusted at the examination of the less valuable animals.
For in all natural things there is something marvelous."

Those words would have gone straight to Darwin's heart because they mirrored his own endless fascination with Nature's intricacies (something Darwin had commented on in the eloquent closing passage of his own book Origin of Species).

Thanks to the rapid growth of the railway system in England during the 19th century, frequent correspondence by mail had become a mainstay of life among many Brits, and Darwin had throughout his career relied upon a network of correspondents (some of whom became good friends) in order to ground his scientific studies.  Darwin always wrote cordially, expressing his appreciation.  And now, he did so again, expressing how even near the end of his own life he was grateful for the new perspective the gift of a book had provided.  Darwin wrote to Ogle, who had sent him the book:

"From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was.  Linnaeus and Cuvier

 [two pivotal 18th-century biologists] have been my two gods... 

but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle."

William Ogle, upon receiving Darwin's letter with its complimentary remark about Aristotle, wrote back, saying:

"Thank you for your kind and eulogistic letter re [Aristotle's book].
It gave me much pleasure.  I am glad also to have added a third person to your gods."

Darwin died only three days after Ogle sent off his letter.  But Ogle's, Darwin's, and Aristotle's lives had all become tied together through a chain of correspondence.  And also through a mutual fascination with the forms of animal life in which Aristotle had found "something marvelous."

~~~

Are there any animals you find particularly fascinating?  Which ones?

(All of the quotations are taken from the "Aristotle" entry by James G. Lennox in

Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 427.)
(The images are in the public domain.)

A Better Question about Beauty

If anywhere today the matter of beauty comes up for discussion, almost inevitably someone asks, "Is beauty just in the eye of the beholder?"  (Sometimes, that question will be simply implied by someone repeating the stock phrase that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder.")  In our heavily scientific age, that phrase -- "eye of the beholder" -- casts a cloud of suspicion over beauty.  Modern science seeks empirical observations that can be made by multiple scientists.  In contrast, two people observing the same object can disagree about whether that object is beautiful.  And so, there is an air of suspicion about whether beauty is "really out there" or is just something our minds project upon the world.  Beauty is not easily nailed down.

Philosophers today spin in circles asking questions about beauty.  And most modern theologians usually don't even address the matter.  Meanwhile, ordinary people throughout the world make beauty a part of their lives.  And find beauty in Nature, and are inspired by it.  They pick flowers and make art.  They listen to birds and create songs.  They are not fooled by philosophical questions.  The contemporary writer Elaine Scarry makes a critical point:

" [Beauty] seems to incite, even to require the act of replication.... It makes us draw it,
 take photographs of it, or describe it to other people."

Perhaps we would get deeper into appreciating and understanding beauty if instead of the usual question about "eye of the beholder" we asked why beauty entrances us.  And why we humans are drawn toward imitating it.

Another stock phrase that can be a stifling cliche is that "beauty is only skin-deep."  Admittedly, that phrase can remind us that we can be misled by some person's superficial beauty.  But the phrase "skin-deep" can discourage us from looking more deeply into the nature of beauty's power upon us -- including it's ability to bring us closer to our best true selves.  And its ability to draw us closer to the Divine.

Before modern times, the eighteenth-century Christian theologian Jonathan Edwards believed that beauty was an essential part of his experience of God, who was revealed through the natural world.  He wrote:

"When we are delighted with flowery meadows and
 gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that
 we only see the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ ... his love and purity."

A few contemporary theologians are beginning to wake up to the fact that in modern times their field of theology has neglected the topic of beauty.  One such writer is the contemporary religion professor Frank Burch Brown.  He emphasizes that:

"Aesthetic experience is a pervasive factor in our sense of the sacred,
  [and] in our delight in creation."

Asking the more productive question about beauty -- the one about our desire to replicate beauty -- is not just an academic matter.  It is a critical matter because we are confronted daily with so much ugliness.  Especially in the way humans often behave toward one another.  Everything from terrorists to ugly internet comments.  That gives us even greater reason to cultivate forms of beauty.

Beauty is not just something we perceive (or don't perceive).  It can also be something we do. A person can display beauty through loving and giving.  When we create beauty, and when we act in beautiful ways, we align our lives with the natural beauty in the world.  And thus transform ourselves.

~ ~ ~

What experiences of beauty in Nature linger in your memory?

(The Elaine Scarry quotation is taken from her book On Beauty and Being Just, © 1999, p. 3.)

(The Edwards quotation is taken from Open Secret by Alister E. McGrath, © 2009, p. 284.)

(The Frank Burch Brown quotation by is from “Aesthetics” in the New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology,
 Donald W. Musser & Joseph L. Price, eds. © 2003. pp. 19 & 21.)
(Both pictures are in the public domain.)

As Busy as... You Know What

Melissographia (1625)

Our contemporary academic fields chop our one world into many pieces.  We classify a matter as falling within the area of history or biology or religion.  But such categorization can obscure the wholeness of our complex lives.  I was reminded of that drawback when I read the news story about three beehives of honeybees having survived the terrible fire in Notre-dame Cathedral in 2019. As the beehives on the roof had been part of a project to restore Paris's  population of critical pollinators, was the news story about environmentalism?  Or was it a story about biology because it testified to bees' natural durability?  Or, given the centuries-long history of that cathedral -- involving religious, political, and secular events -- does the bee story fall within the category of "history"?

Even within our category of "history," we create sub-categories.  And textbooks on the history of Christianity will be employed more often by religion professors than by the history department.  That sidelining of church history in our secular age means that the historical contributions of the church to preserving bees might go overlooked.  But monks and other church employees whose names have been forgotten cultivated bees for both tasty honey and the tallow to make church candles.  The environmental writer Paul Shepard informs us that:

"In Wittenburg, Germany, before the [Protestant] Reformation, some churches used 35,000 pounds of wax a year. On Candlemas Eve, hives were decked with ribbon and a song...beginning, ' Bees awake.' [was] sung as people carried wax candles,"

Bees have also navigated their way into the field of literary lore.  Many a Sherlockian enthusiast knows that Sherlock Holmes dreamed of eventually leaving stimulating London to retire to the English countryside -- where he would enjoy taking care of honeybee hives.

We also need to reserve a page in the mathematics textbook for bee geometry.  That is because the distinctive six-sided perimeter around each cell of honeycomb fits the greatest number of those tiny compartments into a hive.  It requires some higher mathematics to prove that an equivalent number of eight-sided cells would require greater space.  How do the bees "know" to go for hexagons? What pressures drive them?  To answer that puzzle, we would also need specialists in animal behavior.  And maybe a physicist too.

Bees also show up in the field of genetics.  Forget the familiar picture of two sexes coming together to create offspring with a 50-50 chance of being male or female.  In the peculiar world of honeybees, only the queen lays eggs, the numerous worker bees are undeveloped females, and the very few males that exist come from unfertilized eggs!

Bees have also buzzed their way into art books.  The complicated clash of circumstances and
personalities that occurred between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII is too often misrepresented

 as a stereotyped battle of truth vs. ignorance.  But if we follow the path of bees, we would find that before their conflict, Urban had praised Galileo's scientific writings and was a promoter of the arts and architecture.  Urban was from the Barberini family, whose signature symbol was bees.  A triad of bees mark many buildings in Roman built under that Pope's patronage; and golden bees grace Urban's tomb.

So numerous have been bees interconnections with the human race that we could develop a course titled "Honeybee History."  But then we'd have to argue over whether it should be handled by the history, biology, or environmental studies department.  Any professors up for co-teaching an interdisciplinary course?

~ ~ ~

Specialization suits bees quite well. Do you think it suits humans?

(The Paul Shepard quotation is from his book The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, © 1996, p. 124.)

Is there a Purpose for a Porpoise?

"Being put under water is fine for fish but bad for zebras."

Mary Midgley

That example, presented by the philosopher Mary Midgley, was such an unexpected scenario that it brought a smile to my face.  Although humorous, what she states is obviously true once it is stated.  And that was her intent -- to provide an example so obvious that it would support a more general point.  As she put it before giving her zebra example:

"Our own planet...is full of organisms,
beings which all steadily pursue
their own characteristic ways of life,
beings that can only be understood by grasping
the distinctive thing that each of them
is trying to be and do."

And behind that statement (which could be demonstrated by taking a tour of a zoo) lay Midgley's even broader philosophical point:

          "It is obvious that our own planet...is riddled with purpose."

Why was Mary Midgley having to jump through so many argumentative hoops (such as imagining zebras under water) in order to support her main point that there was purpose on our planet, and therefore purpose to be found in the universe?  It was because so many scientists with high media-profiles over the past few decades have been claiming that the world is without purpose.  One of the most quoted of such claims has been that of the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote:

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

The whole problem can be traced back to the limitations our modern form of science placed upon itself as it began to develop in the 17th century: In order to obtain objective information that was clear and precise, it set out to exclude questions about value, meaning, and purpose.  The consequence is that if you more and more view the world solely through the lens of science’s knowledge, the world can easily come to look as if there is no purpose in it.  Similarly, it can come to look as if the world contains no values, consisting of only those objective facts science extracts from it.  But again, as Midgley points out:

"Value, in fact, is not an extra feature pasted onto the facts by human observers. 
It is a real emergent property of situations in the world. 
Each kind of organism acts according to its own values,...
the characteristic pattern of needs and capacities which determines its direction."

How many pieces?

What can make an overall pattern hard to discern is that there is such a multitude of entities in the world, each with its own capacities and direction.  Even though science can provide us fascinating and sometimes useful information about the world, we have to enlarge our vision beyond the limitations of science to perceive the larger patterns of the world.  We need more than scientific facts.  We also need a philosophical or spiritual vision that discerns a larger pattern in which facts and values coalesce, allowing meaning to emerge.

Another philosopher, Max Oelschlaeger, provides an example, writing:

"By using the telescope, Galileo’s eyes gathered additional light,
and the telescopic image itself was magnified, thus extending his mental vision....
What he lost was the sweeping field of view of the naked eye astronomy....
And perhaps, in his intense concentration,
he lost also the sounds and smells of the night
and the awareness of himself as a conscious man
beholding a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle."

~ ~ ~

(Do you have a way of "stepping back" to gain a broader, more meaningful perspective on our world?)

(The quotations by Mary Midgley are from "Why The Idea Of Purpose Won't Go Away,"
originally published in Philosophy, Oct., 2011. pp. 558 & 559.)

(The quotation by Richard Dawkins is from River Out of Eden, © 1995. p. 155.)

(The quotation by Max Oelschlaeger is from The Idea of Wilderness, © 1991. p. 78.)

Waste Not, Want Not

It's hard not to make jokes about it . But many of the jokes cannot be repeated on this website, given the respectful tone toward readers it aims to maintain.  We do have a high-sounding word for those low jokes: "scatological."  Yes, I'm talking about feces, manure, dung.

Perhaps a courteous way to begin to talk about it—especially in a website about Nature—is to talk about dung beetles.  When observing them, the comedy, instead of being scatological, can become lighthearted.  And, indeed, it is hard not to make jokes about dung beetles once you know that the oversized ball they comically struggle to take home is made out of manure.  When the manure the dung beetle locates is rolled in the usually sandy soil in which the beetle lives, it usually becomes a perfect sphere, sometimes larger in diameter than the beetle in length. As if to add another gag to its comic act, the beetle will often walk on its forelimbs, pushing the ball backwards with its rear legs.

There is, however, a seriousness of purpose behind the act.  The aim of the beetle's often difficult struggle is to get the ball into a burrow, where the beetle's eggs laid into the sphere will incubate in the decomposing heat of the manure. That choice of a material for a nursery also means that there will be ready-made food right at the mouths of the larvae once they hatch.

It is so fascinating for naturalists (or Nature lovers) to watch the dung beetle's maneuvering that they inspired the classic opening essay in Jean-Henri Fabre's ten-volume book on entomology, the study of insects.  He wrote of a group of them:

"What excitement over a single patch of Cow-dung! 
Never did adventurers hurrying from
the four corners of the earth
display such eagerness
in working a Californian claim."

Now that I've coyly talked about insects, I can return to my more delicate subject.  Viewed from a wider perspective than the several square yards a dung beetle inhabits, the matter of manure takes on larger implications.  Life on this finite planet could not exist if one species' waste did not become another species' raw material.  Moreover, the long-term quality of human civilization will depend in part upon how adept we become at recycling what we would have otherwise considered to be just trash or waste.

Given the critical nature of caring about where things go once we think we have gotten rid of them, the content of that beetle's prized ball might not be a bad place to begin our reflections. We humans, for good reason, do not talk too much about what we flush down the toilet. (One TV talk-show host in the early days of television even got disciplined for making a joke about what was demurely called a "water closet.")  Nevertheless, much could be revealed about the practical challenges of building a human civilization if we examined how humans have dealt with such waste.  Although I've never encountered a copy of the book, I do know that the nonfiction writer Lawrence Wright has written a book titled Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet.

house in Tibet with manure-brick wall

People who have economically poorer lives in traditional cultures live out the meaning of "Waste not, want not."  In some societies, animal dung is even shaped into bricks, dried in the sun, and used as fuel.  Or even to make houses!  Mind you, I'm not suggesting that such a method of house-construction be widely adopted.  But such ingenious uses of even the most distasteful waste (as that little beetle knows) can help remind us that Nature is the Great Recycler. And it must be.

~ ~ ~

Have these reflections lead you to any thoughts about life?

(The quotation by Fabre is from his Souvenirs Entomologiques.)

Undisturbing Bedtime Reading

Among writers' names, theirs are two of the most famous to people in the U.S. -- Mark Twain and Charles Darwin.  But how differently they are thought of:  Twain as the grandfatherly humorist; Darwin as the trouble-causing scientist.  When I was in elementary school, my grandmother was displeased that my school was named after the horror-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, but quite pleased when I moved to an elementary school named after the grandfatherly Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens).  And we all know that any proposal to name a school after Charles Darwin would evoke controversy.

The writers Twain and Darwin are also known for different genres of writing --  fiction and nonfiction.  Different also are the ways that Nature is a part of their writings.  Twain, even when writing about his experiences as a young man on the Mississippi, turned them into tall tales about the adventures of people.  In contrast, even Darwin's reminiscences of his journey on the Beagle are strengthened by his scientist's eye for observation of Nature by itself, apart from people.

Despite their many differences, their lives as writers intersected (even if indirectly) in an entertaining incident related by Mark Twain in one of his public presentations.  Twain tells first how he felt flattered when the president of Harvard College, Charles Eliot, who had visited Darwin, told Twain:

"Do you know that there is one room in Darwin's house,
his bedroom, where the housemaid
is never allowed to touch two things?
One is a plant he is growing
and studying while it grows....
The other some books that lie on the night table
at the head of his bed. They are your books,
Mr. Clemens, and Mr. Darwin reads them every night
to lull him to sleep."

What a compliment Twain felt it was to know, as he put it, that "a brain teeming with bugs and squirming things like Darwin's" was reading the American humorists' books.

But Twain's inflated ego was punctured by a subsequent event that Twain also relates.  He tells how, after Darwin died, Twain was visited by the Rev. Joseph Twichell, who he describes as "my oldest friend -- and dearest enemy on occasion."  Twichell had been reading Darwin's Life and Letters, and opened it to show Twain a passage apparently explaining more fully why Twain's books were on that night table.   As Twain tells it:

"Twichell ... said, 'Here, look at this letter from Mr. Darwin to Sir Joseph Hooker.'
What Darwin said -- I give the idea and not the very words -- was this:
I do not know whether I ought to have devoted my whole life to these drudgeries
in natural history and the other sciences [because]
while I may have gained in one way I have lost in another.
Once I had a fine perception and appreciation of high literature,
but in me that quality is atrophied.  'That was the reason,' said Mr. Twichell,
'he was reading your books.' "

It looks as if in this case, it was Darwin who had the last laugh.  Or did he?  It was Twain who was able to tell of the incidents, and thereby laugh at himself.

~ ~ ~

Do you have bedtime reading that helps you let go of the cares of the day?  What is it?

(The incident and quotations are taken from What about Darwin?,
edited by Thomas F. Glick, © 2010, pp. 439-441. [emphasis added])

Another Word for Love

"Love."  Among four-letter words in the English language, it is one of the most spoken (and most sung).

Sculpture by Robert Indiana,
 in Manhattan

Students of the New Testament are often taught that the Greek language has more than one word translatable as "love."  The Greek word eros is often used for sexual love but is more generally the experience of falling in love.  A second word, philia, expresses the fondness that can develop between people, as in friendships.  A third Greek word, agape, was less specific in the Hellenistic world, thus enabling New-Testament writers to sometimes use it in developing a concept of self-giving love.  Over time, Christianity used that word agape for emphasizing our ultimate experience -- that of knowing God's loving orientation toward the world.

The Greek language, however, also contains another world for love: storge.  It is used to speak of instinctual affection, one example being that of a mother for her child.  Christian writers today sometimes delineate the first three Greek words but make no mention of storge.  (An exception is C.S. Lewis, who in his book The Four Loves writes that "the human loves can be glorious images of Divine love.").  We should not underestimate the power of storge.

Although by using words, we can distinguish between this variety of meanings of the word "love," we can see especially in human relationships how the forms of love overlap:  Two people can love each other in more than one way.  Nevertheless, by possessing that fourth word -- storge -- we can explore better our relationships to non-human animals.

That fourth form of love, not usually mentioned by teachers of New-Testament Greek, is nevertheless implied at times in the Bible.  Being an instinctive response to the feelings of another living being, storge extends to our human affection for animals, which can evoke our care for them.  For example, in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy (25:4, NRSV), farmers are instructed, "You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain," thus emphasizing that the ox gets hungry too.  And one verse in the book of Proverbs (12:10a, NRSV) states that people who live rightly "know the needs of their animals."

Victorian painting
by Joshua Reynolds

The treatment of animals down through European history is a long, complex story, not reducible to modern enlightenment overcoming medieval darkness.  Nevertheless, especially in England in the 1800’s, the movement of people into cities and the emergence of a middle class with some leisure hours meant that more people kept pets. That dog or cat, rather than being a working animal in the barn, would be kept right beside a person, even on the person’s lap, making it easier for the person to experience the animal’s emotions as being like their own.  In her Jubilee address in 1887, Queen Victoria (a dog owner) spoke of her "real pleasure [in] the growth of more human feelings towards the lower animals."  The contemporary writer Richard D. Ryder spotlights one major cause of that change:

"Was not the growing interest in animal protection also an effect of the increasing stability of society and the extension of affluence?  Never before had so many felt economically and
socially secure. They could afford to show some compassion for the underprivileged,
both human and nonhuman."

An additional advantage of having a word for animal-affection is that it can enable us to recognize that quality between animals of the same species -- not just among mammals, but also, for example, in parent birds' bonds with their offspring. Love is indeed a many-splendored thing!

~ ~ ~

As a child, did you have any pets that helped you learn how to care for others?

(The quotation by Lewis is from The Four Loves, © 1960, p. 9.)

(The quotation by Ryder is from his Animal Revolution, © 1989, p. 152.)

(Love is a Many-Splendored Thing was the title of a 1955 movie and song.
The phrase "many-splendored thing" dates back at least to a 1913 poem by James Kenneth Stephen.)
(Both photographs are in the public domain.)

The Moving Moon

Even though it was a fairly detailed book on science and scientists during the Middle Ages, one paragraph took me back to something delightful I had experienced as a child.  The historian James Hannam writes:

"Children are often convinced that the moon is following them
 when they are travelling by car.  This is because, however far the car moves,
 the direction and size of the moon do not change at all.
 In comparison, all nearby everyday objects move across our field of vision
 as we approach and then pass them."

I remember that marvelous experience of watching the moon travel alongside us as I rode in the back seat of my parents' car.  (Although I did not tell them about it because it was such a wonderful secret!)

Even when I did not view that moving moon out of the side-window of a traveling car, I was sometimes moved by the moon's luminescence.  What a unique light it gave off, especially when full -- often a white light without being cold or piercing.  Like that light, our Earth's moon is one of a kind among our natural experiences here on Earth.

tides on an island

The moon affects us in other ways.  The moon's gravitational pull is the main cause of the movement of tides on shores.  Even ancient people noticed the harmony between the moon's returning to the sky and the height of tides.  But in the 17th century, when Galileo was trying to find proof that the Earth moved, he came up with the notion that the Earth's movements might instead be their cause.  The astronomer Johannes Kepler suggested to Galileo that the moon was indeed what caused tides, but Galileo dismissed the idea of an invisible force at a distance, and would not be budged from his own incorrect tide-theory.  Galileo even included in his famous book Dialogue his notion that the Earth's movement sloshed the tides about, even though other scientists pointed out that his hypothesis would result in only a single daily tide at spring, whereas two spring tides had been observed.

The moon is almost an inflection of the verb "to move":  The moon moves in its orbit, it is continuously moving the tides, and our hearts have been moved by it.

In this age of astronauts, we have reached the moon, but has the sight of the rising moon reached us?  The astronauts found the moon to be dry, gray, and dusty.  From here on Earth, it is beautiful and luminescent -- white, golden, or orange.

Even in our modern cities, in which light-pollution renders most stars invisible, we can often see the moon if we just look up.  With the constant barrage of news and advertising we are subjected to in our modern, technological societies, the days can go by in a blur of information and disinformation.  Perhaps we should pause some early mornings or evenings, look up at the moon, and be calmed by a recollection of its constancy, even with its changing faces.

~~~

Can you think of anything that -- like the moon -- remains constant even as it assumes different phases or forms?

(The quotation by Hannam is from The Genesis of Science:
How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, © 2011, p. 274.)

(The first photo is by SeanMcClean; the second by さかおり. Both used under Creative Commons
 Attribution-Share- Alike licenses.)