Reflecting about Fences and Walls

The word "wall" has frequently appeared in political news over the past several years. Less quoted have been the poet Robert Frost's lines: "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense."  Even beyond those lines, there are subtler and more complex thoughts in his poem "Mending Wall" -- making the following article on this website (published almost six years ago) still relevant.

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I have lost count of how many times I've heard a particular line from a Robert Frost poem quoted, but quoted in a way that misrepresents it.  The line is:  "Good fences make good neighbors."  People who quote that line get the words right but usually take it out of context. Taken by itself, the line makes it sound as if Frost is saying it is good to construct some sort of wall between people.  However, in the poem, that line comes not from the lips of the speaker of the poem, but instead from the speaker's neighbor.  And the thoughts of the speaker -- quite opposite to the quoted line -- are:  "Something there is that doesn't love a wall...."  The judgment against the neighbor is reinforced by the speaker's saying that the wall-loving neighbor "moves in darkness."

As with many of Frost's poems, physical objects (in this case, the wall) are symbols for something larger, something about human psychology or interpersonal relationships.  Frost's favorite objects to employ in this way are those from Nature. Birch trees, stars, and tiny bugs all make appearances on Robert Frost's poetic stage.  Despite that symbolic role Nature often plays in Frost's poems, the features of Nature he uses are not just poetic devices.  Although the poet's main concern is humans, he is also interested in a right attitude toward Nature. There is thus in the poems an actual connection between humans and Nature, not an artificial linking.  In Frost's poems, Nature, when viewed in the right way, is frequently able to be a real guide for human behavior.  Nature can be a true reference point.  It has lessons to teach.

For example, in the poem "Mending Wall" that frequently quoted line appears when the speaker pinpoints Nature -- in the form of expanding, frozen ground -- as the cause of the wall's continually falling apart:

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,..."

The wall made of piled boulders, if it is to be maintained, requires mending every year not because it was poorly built but because it defied Nature.  The neighbor ("in darkness") seems to not be recognizing Nature's teaching that even the relatively solid earth will change.  Nature is not only a source of order but also a source of the undoing of order.

The contemporary Christian John Haught, from a theological perspective, raises a similar question.  Citing Biblical passages such as God saying, "See, I am making all things new," (Rev. 21:5, NRSV), Haught asks:  "Why should we think of God principally as a 'designer?'  Isn't God also the source of novelty?  And doesn't the introduction of novelty inevitably disrupt perfect design?"

The real trick is learning which features of Nature to cite when.  When, as guidance, do I cite the stable features of Nature, and when do I cite the changing ones?  I need to have knowledge not only of the non-human sphere of Nature but also of the human sphere -- understanding how we are both similar and dissimilar to the rest of the natural world.  Knowing how to interpret the world thus calls for growing in wisdom.

~~~

Is there any way you try to be guided by Nature?  Any way you are inspired by it?

(The Haught quote is from Responses to 101 Questions

 on God and Evolution by John F. Haught.  © 2001.  p. 87.)

(The entire Robert Frost poem can be read at this external link:  "Mending Wall.")

Being Forgiving about the “Little Things”

It seemed at first like such a little thing.  But as I listened further to the brief segment on radio (and later read the transcript), the seemingly small bit of news grew in significance and importance. The news story's title announced that "New York City's Public Libraries Abolish Fines on Overdue Materials."

The news moderator, inquiring about the mechanics of the new plan, asked the inevitable question:  Aren't fines necessary to get people to bring books back to the library/? The answer was "No."  As Tony Marx, president of the New York Public Library system, explained:

"It turns out late fees for books don't work. They don't bring the books back.
 Almost all the books come back anyway because people respect that if they are treated
 with respect and trust, they respond in kind."

Here, the brief news story about one city's libraries seemed to be turning into a much larger moral lesson.

Not that New York's library system was advocating total suspension of human responsibility:  A person would still have to pay for any books that were lost.  Nevertheless, besides abolishing any future late-fees, all library-card holders' accounts were being cleared of any accumulated late-fees.  That was because the library administrators recognized that accounts that had been blocked because of late-fees "are vastly disproportionately in the poorest neighborhoods.  And that's exactly where we need people using the library."  The news segment now seemed to be turning into a Biblical parable involving the tendency of human societies to become out of balance -- making the rich richer and the poor poorer, unless some correctives in behavior were regularly made.

Dennis Walcott, the president of Queens Public Library (part of New York City's public libraries) added a final comment that shifted the little news story into an even higher gear, turning it into something like a prophetic vision of hope.  Of the library's aim with its new rules to get especially the younger back into libraries, he declared:

"That's the goal, to have our children participate in the American Dream.

And the American Dream is through our libraries."

Not penalizing people so as to hold them responsible for little mistakes can seem "unnatural," as we might say.  But is it really so unnatural?  Is a mother's loving tolerance of her toddler's weaknesses really unnatural? Is it really against her nature?

And what about that larger, non-human realm of Nature that our lives are a part of?  Nature can seem to be totally unforgiving when hurricanes come.  But hurricanes hit a specific area of land only a few days out of the many days of the year.  On most days, Nature displays more regular, sustaining rhythms that could be called "forgiving."

In the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, Jesus presents to his disciples what must be one of the most difficult of his instructions.  He tells them to "love your enemies."  And what does Jesus put forward to inspire his disciples in such a difficult challenge (a challenge even harder than forgiving people's ordinary mistakes)?  Does Jesus point to some very noble person around him?  No. Does he point to himself?  No, not even that.  Instead, he points to the reliable rising of the sun every morning, saying that we should be inspired by our "Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good."  The sun regularly rises, despite all humans' mistakes of the previous day (even if it was just being ashamed to return a late library book).  Thus it is that Jesus encourages his disciples to turn their attention to the non-human sphere -- Nature -- that they might deepen their appreciation of God, and thereby be inspired to be more loving.

~ ~ ~

(Do you see any qualities in Nature that  you think we humans should emulate?)

(Quotations by the librarians are from radio segment "New York City's Public Libraries
 Abolish Fines on Overdue Materials," on National Public Radio's Morning Edition show of Oct. 7, 2021.)
(The Biblical verses cited are Matthew 5:44a & 45a [NRSV].)

Rachel Carson wrote that "There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter."  So it is that we can be revived by the first signs of the return of fall -- whether it be the turning of color  in some leaves or the first drop in temperature.  The  recurring character of fall makes the following article, which was first published in Wisdom in Leaves in 2013, just as relevant today.

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Having always been quite nearsighted, I could not appreciate trees as easily as I could appreciate leaves.  I could not readily identify which species a tree was from a distance, the way my parents could.  Nor could I see detail in the distant treetops.  But I could look at a leaf closely, even hold it in my hand, and feel its texture.

I am still fascinated by the shapes of leaves.  Not just the variety, but the way that each one looks like something else.  What child has not noticed the resemblance between a maple leaf and their own hand, even fitting their hand upon it?  Another leaf I examine (from what tree I do not know) looks like a spear.  Still another leaf has the outline of a scoop.  And the stiff, large leaf of the southern magnolia tree seems perfectly designed for fanning oneself during a hot southern summer.

To the botanist, the shape of the leaf tells a story about its tree having evolved to flourish in a particular environment.  Even without knowing the details about such variations, I can be amazed to know that it is within those thin leaves that plants magically convert carbon dioxide and water into solid material, thus enabling the plant to grow.  Green leaves are truly miniature factories powered by the sun.

I am fascinated not only by the shapes of leaves but also by their colors.  How many shades of green can there be?  Even more fascinating are the turnings of color as autumn comes.  Like an alarm clock that has gone off, the shock of seeing some trees no longer green can wake us up to the approaching winter.  The change in foliage can even make us think about our own use of time, and whether our time might be short.

In the author O. Henry's amusing story "The Cop and the Anthem," a dead leaf falling into the lap of the main character, a hobo, signals to him that he needs to make a change in his living arrangements in order to make it through the winter.  That warning, coupled with the moving chords of church music that waft outdoors, inspire the hobo to make a good change in his life -- "to turn over a new leaf," as we say.

As fall continues and winter gets even closer, the leaves we see on the ground change colors even more, becoming mottled, creating a quilt of yellows, browns, reds, and even purples.  The leaves are then ready to be recycled into the earth, to become the substance of plants and trees yet again.  The leaves also "turn over a new leaf."

With the passage of time, I am also probably reprocessing things from my past into my future, shedding some things as a way of growing new leaves.  But it is harder for me to see those changes happening in me than it is for me to observe the changes in leaves.  In leaves, I see life and change made manifest.

~~~

Do you have memories about leaves?  How do you experience your life changing with the cycle of a year?

(The Carson quotation is from her talk “A Statement of Belief,” quoted in Paul Brooks's book
  The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work, © 1972, 1989.)

 

More than Just an Art Critic

John Ruskin. He is usually identified as being an "art critic," such as in this typical entry from a dictionary:  "Ruskin, John. 1819-1900. British writer and art critic who considered a great painting to be one that conveys great ideas to the viewer.  His works include Modern Painters (1843-1860)."

John Ruskin,
self-portrait, 1861

But Ruskin thought about much more than art.  He even reflected deeply upon intellectual issues related to religion during the 19th century, during which he lived. It was a rapidly-changing, confusing time to many people in England.

The emergence of historically-oriented academic fields such as geology and paleontology had raised questions about the Bible's truth, which was being approached with a new, historical mindset (rather than symbolically or spiritually, as had been traditional).  Those sciences were revealing the Earth's age to be vastly older than traditionally imagined.  Ruskin confessed to a friend:

"If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them
                                                 at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

For the first couple centuries after the rise of modern science in the 1600's, it had been hoped that scientific discoveries about the natural world would add new, overwhelming evidence to how Nature had been designed by a good, benevolent Creator.  But Ruskin was aware of the drawbacks in that approach because of the ambiguity of Nature.  Calling upon readers to view the natural world with a keen eye (the way they might examine a painting), he first lays out an idyllic scene:

"It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern.... The autumn sun, low but clear, shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them,
 rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock."

But then, his camera-like eye pans slightly to the right:

"Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcase [carcass] of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding through
 the skin, raven-torn."

Ruskin (writing even before the after-effects of Darwin's Origin of Species) forces us to see the disturbing ambiguity of Nature: That which was death to the ewe is life to the ravens.

Despite Nature's not being able to be a straightforward moral guide to us, Ruskin does not think we should lose the compassionate capabilities of the human heart -- as demonstrated by the sympathetic manner in which he describes the next things his observant eye falls upon:

"I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog -- a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving. I know them, and I know the dog's ribs also, which are nearly as bare as the dead ewe's."                                                                 

These passages show how Ruskin viewed the face of Nature as being illuminative and yet turbulent.  Those qualities of Nature are also expressed in the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, which Ruskin greatly admired.

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(Is there a way you view the presence of disturbing features in Nature and yet still derive inspiration from it?)

(The dictionary entry is from The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition, © 1992.)
(Ruskin's statement about Bible verses was made in his letter of May 24, 1851 to Henry Acland.)
(Ruskin's descriptions of scenes in the natural world are from the 1860 edition of his Modern Painters, )

Being Inspired Even at a Distance

The Covid pandemic that began in 2020 put a kink in many people's usual plans for summer vacations, even in 2021, when vaccines were available for most adults in the U.S.  Life had changed, turning many in-person gatherings into virtual gatherings.  Adults had to depend more upon their memories of firsthand experiences they once had. And children needed to rely more on second-hand knowledge and their imaginations.  As I reflected on that situation, the following Wisdom in Leaves article, published four years previously, seemed particularly relevant.  It was titled "Hearing the Sea in a Shell."

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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 ways you restore contact and communion with those who are not physically present?

(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.)

There's More to Penn and His Pen

A child's learning involves being able to identify things. (Spoon. Ball.)  And it involves being able to recognize recurring patterns.  (That ball and spoon both go down when pushed off the edge of the table.)  However, that wonderful human ability to identify things and discern recurring patterns has a drawback: It easily results in our simplified classifying and stereotyping of people.

Not only do we easily group people by race or ethnic background, we also classify historical personages by what they are most famous for.  For example, one person becomes "a scientist" in the historical record, even though that "scientist" might have most enjoyed playing with their children. Or, another famous person becomes "a singer," even though that "singer" might have most enjoyed tinkering with old clocks.

One historical figure in early North American history has become indelibly linked to the state of Pennsylvania:  William Penn, whose last name is the first part of that state's name.  There is a bit of irony here, because even after getting the king of England's permission to establish a colony in the "New World," William Penn spent more years in Germany and England than in the future U.S.  Because most education in the U.S. today is secularized, American-history textbooks classify the man as a political leader.  Books on the history of Christianity, in contrast, classify him as a leader of a religious movement, the Quakers.  As a result of such classifications, neither type of textbook is likely to tell the reader about Penn's thoughts and writings about Nature.

William Penn's enjoyment of Nature is demonstrated by the name he had preferred for the colony he founded in 1691: "Sylvania," meaning "forest" in Latin.  It is from the same Latin root for "Sylvania" that we get the little-used English word "sylvan," meaning related to wooded areas.  (It was King Charles II who stuck "Penn" on the front end of the colony's name in honor of William Penn's father, an admiral.)

Even though on national holidays such as the Fourth of July, patriotic Pennsylvanians might focus only on William Penn's interest in founding a colony, that man's appreciation of Nature is revealed in words like these that flowed from his pen:

"The world is certainly a great and stately volume of natural things, 
and may be styled the hieroglyphics of a better one, 
But, alas, how very few leaves of it do we seriously turn over!
... The country is both the philosopher’s garden and his library, 
in which he reads and contemplates 
The power, wisdom and goodness of God."

With those words in Penn's book "Some Fruits of Solitude," he is sharing in a long tradition within Christianity of viewing the natural world  as a revelatory "Book of Nature" that supplements and complements another book, the Bible.

Artists' portraits of Penn and his fellow 17th and 18th-century Quakers frequently portray them wearing their distinctive flat-topped black hats as an aid to picture-viewers in identifying them as being Quakers.  (The Quaker Oats Company has stated that one such portrait on their trademarked cereal boxes is not William Penn, as they once claimed, but is just a generic Quaker.)  Those flat-topped hats with two projections to the side look out of fashion today.

But perhaps not out of fashion might be William Penn's additional thought that,"It would go a long way to caution and direct people in their use of the world" if "they were better studied" in the natural world as revealing the Divine.  He continues: 

"For how could man find the confidence to abuse it,
While they should see the Great Creator stare them in the face, 
in all and every part thereof?"

~ ~ ~

(Is there any way that you feel you "see the Great Creator" in Nature?)

(Both quotations are from William Penn's book "Some Fruits of Solitude" [1682, 1693], capitalization modernized.)

Sunsets and Time

 How do you bring a successful TV series to an end before it is canceled or, perhaps even worse, before it loses its glow?  That was the challenge the PBS producers of the Inspector Morse mystery series had to deal with.  The grumpy, somewhat elderly detective Morse had warmed his way into so many viewer's hearts that the writers had to figure out an acceptable way of having him die in the last show, rather than leaving viewers hanging with an open-ended story line.  But how could the death be handled delicately?  Interestingly, part of the writers solution was to use a touching scene at sunset (days before Morse's demise) to reflect upon the meaning of human mortality.

Sunsets have on a number of occasions been a means for writers to touch on the challenge of perishability.  And also to touch on truths about time -- for, after all, nothing can stop that incorrigible movement of the sun in the sky, day after day.  Sometimes the sunset metaphor can be pessimistic.  Such as when the late-19th-century writer H.G. Wells, in his book The Time Machine, has his lead character journey to the years 802,701 and beyond.  There he encounters a dystopian world and "the sunset of mankind."

But to me it is in a way ironical that a sunset should become the metaphor for a dark vision of the future.  Even though it is true that sunsets proceed the darkness of night, I have found that when people do have an emotional reaction to sunsets, they almost invariably find them to be beautiful.  That is noteworthy because we live in an age in which we often dismiss beauty as being something merely subjective—something merely "in the eye of the beholder."  However, the writer Crispin Sartwell points out regarding our judgments about beauty that:

"Though different persons can of course differ in particular judgments,
 it is also obvious that our judgments coincide to a remarkable extent:
 it would be odd or perverse for any person to deny that
 a perfect rose or a dramatic sunset was beautiful."

What did Sartwell choose as one of his two examples to demonstrate that judgments of beauty are not merely subjective?  A sunset!

Nevertheless, our urbanized and technologized lives make it harder to enjoy sunsets.  Buildings can block our view.  And prime-time TV draws us indoors to watch an electronic screen rather than look out a window.

Beyond its beautiful colors, there is something else we might gain from watching a sunset.  In our modern, technologized lives, time has become mathematical -- broken up into smaller and smaller measured units.  Even though today's clocks (being more often electronic instead of mechanical) no longer produce the sound of "tick, tock, tick, tock," they still measure off the seconds.  Almost every computer carries a mathematical representation of the current time in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.  But the mathematical model for time is artificial because we do not actually experience time as equal tiny units.  Instead, we experience events that have a duration. If we did not experience duration, we would not be able to hear the melody of a line of music; we would hear only separate notes. If we did not experience duration, we would not be able to make sense of a spoken sentence; we would hear only isolated words one after another.

Thus it is that watching a sunset, besides slowing us down, can bring us back to the way that our lives are a part of the natural world.  For, as the environmental and spiritual writer Bill McKibben wrote:

"The most fascinating thing about dusk 
  is the lack of demarcation.

 It’s one long smooth transition."

~ ~ ~

(Do you remember watching a sunset?  When?  Where?  What was it like?)

(The quotation by Sartwell is from his entry on “Beauty” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. © 2016. pp. 1 & 2.)(The quotation by McKibben is from his book The Age of Missing Information, © 1992, p. 148.)

The Sounds of Morning

In a modern city in the U.S., the most quiet time is probably around 4:00 a.m.  At that hour, even most of the night-lifers have gone home (bars having in many cities closed around 2:00); and the alarm clocks of most workers have not yet rung.  Virtually the only sound is the faint background hum coming from an interstate or other highway.

But soon, -- even before the first hint of light in the sky -- come the first sounds of morning. Perhaps a car engine being started.  Or maybe a truck making its early deliveries to a grocery store or cafe.  If the windows of our homes are open, we might hear fainter sounds, such as a TV in another house being turned on to catch the morning weather and traffic report.

Even by 5:00 a.m., however, there still might not be any sounds from non-human life.  Rarely anymore is there the crow of a rooster in any U.S. city or suburb.  During the night, there might have been the twittering of a half-asleep pigeon.  But most birds will wait until the first hint of daylight on the horizon before calling out to see if its companions are awake.

Because I am very nearsighted, even during the daytime I have a hard time identifying birds by sight when they are at a distance, especially when they are partly obscured by the foliage of trees.  And so I especially enjoy the rich birdsong of morning.  Even without being able to see the birds, I can recognize a number of species by sound, and be thankful that the birds I am familiar with in my neighborhood have made it safely through the night.

Besides being a time for awakening, daybreak is a time for healing.  In the New Testament, Jesus on several occasions points to things in Nature as signs of the constancy of God’s love for the world. And, when providing an example of how we should love both our neighbors and our enemies alike, Jesus points not to some human being but to the sun -- saying that God “causes his sun to rise on the bad as well as the good.” (Matthew 5:45, NJB).  Jesus thus evokes an an image of an expansiveness of love wrapping around the Earth to its farthest bounds.

With the new glow the sunrise brings, often tinged with faint pink and blue, it can indeed call for a change of spirit.  A Native American prayer designed for being used at sunrise says:

"You, whose day it is,
make it beautiful.
Get out your rainbow colors,
so it will be beautiful."

Sunrise is thus a time for healing, forgiving, and awakening to the discovery of a new day.

Daybreak is thereby also a time for hoping.  It is a time when we can wake from any troubled dreams of the previous night, when we struggled on a subconscious level with the tumult of the day before.  Morning can be a time when we can be enlivened by our "dreams" in a different meaning of that word. The 20th-century poet Langston Hughes, a black man, readily knew tumult. But he encouraged his readers by writing:

"Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly." 

Daybreak can be a time in which even birds can wake to a newly spirited day.

~ ~ ~ 

(Do you remember any particular occasions soon after sunrise that brought you a feeling of grace? When and where did that occur?)

(The Native American prayer is a traditional Nootka song to bring fair weather.
It is quoted in Every Part of this Earth is Sacred:
Native American Voices in Praise of Nature, edited by Jana Stone, © 1984.)
(The Langston Hughes quotation is from his poem "Dreams," from
The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, © 2002.)

Being Strengthened by Spring

The COVID pandemic beginning in 2020 brought so many types of losses. Losses of such things as:  Family members, friends, and acquaintances.  The ability to move about among people in public with ease and safety.  Gathering in indoor worship spaces to be inspired by beautiful music and words.  The relaxing conviviality of dining in restaurants while chatting with friends.

We can gain strength by naming those losses.  We can also be strengthened by turning our attention to the continuity of the cycles of Nature.  Such as spring's flowers -- which were the focus of the following article, first published in 2015.

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The painter Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "A flower is relatively small."  And yet she depicted them as being enormous!  Her easily identifiable paintings of flowers, which were one of her favorite subjects later in her career, often depict a single, huge, brightly-colored flower spilling over the edges of the canvas.  One of O'Keeffe's flowers can cover a hundred times its square-area in real life.  A biologist could easily appreciate that out-of-scale depiction, although for biological rather than aesthetic reasons.  After all the flower was a revolution in the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Green plants with photosynthesizing chlorophyll did exist on our planet before there were flowers.  However, it could take those conifers over a year to produce seeds snugly nested in cones.  One revolution flowers brought (when they evolved 100 million years ago) was the ability to release a seed in only a month.  That was an explosion in reproductive capability. That flower-explosion also brought about a revolution in the prehistoric world of animals.  As flowers evolved into different shapes, the insect world evolved simultaneously, new insects being adapted to take advantage of new food-source shapes.  In turn, bird and mammal species found new food in the flowers, seeds, and insects, thus putting competitive pressure on the older species of dinosaurs.

Today, understandably, few people are thinking about such significant events in the history of planet Earth when they purchase or pick a flower.  Flowers can be an earnest business for commercial flower-growers and florists.  But it is a flower's enjoyable color, fragrance, and shape that capture an average person's attention.

True, flowers do sometimes become a part of solemn ceremonies.  A wreath of flowers can soften the hard edge of a coffin, thus soothing the hearts of the bereaved.  Despite the flower's fragility, symbolizing the transitoriness of life, its reproductive associations bring a hint of life into the acceptance of death.

More frequently, however, flowers shout out "life!"  The humorist Mark Twain made the earnest observation that "Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole."  Over a century later, men wear boutonnieres much less often. But the symbolic tie between flowers and restored life endures.  All the way down to anti-war demonstrators inserting flowers into phalanxed soldiers' rifle barrels.

With their colorful intensity and their message of new life, specific flowers have gained a role as a prominent symbol in many of the world's faith-traditions:  The lily of Easter resurrection in Christianity. The lotus of life-giving tranquility in Buddhism. And the light-giving Golden Flower in Taoism.

For the billions of bees and other insects who search for food each day, flowers are a serious business.  But for most people, flowers are just plain fun!

~~~

Where do you encounter flowers?  Do you have any favorites?  What do they express?

Still One Sun and One Moon

The poem by Amanda Gorman that she read during the presidential inauguration in January of 2021 evoked my memories of other inauguration poets.  The following thoughts -- which I wrote five-and-a-half years ago -- still seem relevant. Perhaps poets' reflections are of more lasting value than much of  today's tweets.

~ ~ ~

The reading of a poem by a designated poet has now become a regular part of U.S. presidential inauguration ceremonies. The first reading was at the inauguration of JFK in 1961.  The already well-known and highly esteemed poet Robert Frost brought a copy of his new poem "Dedication" to read.  No inaugural poet has had to face the elements and imperfect technology the way Frost did.  I remember watching on TV. Frost stood at a podium where an electrical fire had been put out; a bitterly cold wind rattled the sheets of paper he held; and the intense sun blinded his eyes.  The sun won out.  And so, unable to read further, Frost finished by reciting from memory an older poem, "The Gift Outright."

Over the past decade or so, inaugural poets have been less known, but that has not meant that their poems, usually written for the occasion, have been forgotten.  I remember in particular there having been quite of bit of favorable comment about the poem "One Today" read by Richard Blanco at the Obama inauguration in 2013.  The comments about the poem afterwards on radio and TV showed how it had been especially accessible and meaningful to many.  In his poem, Blanco employed the opening image of "one sun" rising in the eastern U.S. and moving across the continent to depict and tie together the varied lives of people as they awoke and arose to their day's regular activities.  Occasionally, a specific detail added depth to the more general descriptions:

"My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,

...on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives --

to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did...."

The poem continued the theme of unity by using the phrases "one sky" and "one moon."

That modern poem came back to my mind when I recently read, of all things, an 8th-century Buddhist stanza.  It was by Yung-chia Ta-shih, and goes like this:

"One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures,

One Reality, all comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.

The one Moon reflects itself whenever there is a sheet of water,

And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one Moon."

Even when I was in early elementary school, and read introductory books about astronomy, scientists knew that the planets of our own solar system varied in whether they had one moon, no moon, or more than one.  Astronomers' inventory of our universe is now so vast that we have numerous examples of the variety of moons that orbit about each planet in many planetary systems.  We also now know that other planetary systems sometimes have not a single star but a star system at their center.

If our own solar system did have more than one sun, or if our Earth had more than one moon, I would hope we would still have poets to remind us that we are all ultimately one people.  And also have poets to at times stretch our minds a little farther, by reminding us that all Life on this planet is ultimately One Life.

~~~

Is there some way you try to come back to an awareness of our unity amidst differences?

(The Japanese print is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

(The Buddhist verse is taken from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, © 1945, p. 8.)
(The 2013 poem "One Today" by Richard Blanco can be read at this external link:  "One Today".)

“Turning the Page” on a Year

When each New Year arrives, many of us hang up a new wall-calendar or insert a new set of pages in our day-timers.  And we sometimes make a resolution to behave differently, perhaps employing a book-related metaphor to describe the hoped-for change:  We say we are going to "turn over a new leaf" (the pages of books sometimes being called its "leaves").  Or we say we are going to "close the chapter" on something we wish to leave in the past.  Especially when the passing year was filled with trouble (as 2020 was with its COVID pandemic), we might say we are eager to "close the book" on the year gone by. 

But with that last example, we can understand the limitations of such metaphors:  A challenge such as a viral pandemic does not come to an end because we have labeled one particular day the end of a calendar year.  And even those processes in our lives that bring good things are continuous flows.  They are less like the flipped pages of a book and more like the slow advancement of a scroll.  Bringing about changes in human affairs is even better described as being like nurturing a green shoot, which in time becomes a larger plant.

Fortunately, we have been at this process of becoming since the day we were born.  We have a lot of practice with it because becoming is built into our biological nature.  As the neurobiologist Steven Rose explains:

Every living creature is in constant flux, always at the same time both being and becoming.... A newborn infant has a suckling reflex; within a matter of months
the developing infant begins to chew her food....
The paradox of development is that a baby has to be at the same time
  a competent suckler and to transform herself into a competent chewer. 

To be, therefore, and to become....

Our faith-traditions encourage us onward into unknown territory by reminding us that the ultimate Source of Life is also the very Ground of our Being that remains beneath us, supporting us even as we sometimes stumble.

Interestingly, the idea that even God cannot predict exactly what will be and what will be demanded in our engagement with the Divine is expressed in a pivotal story in the Christian Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible).  In Exodus 3:12-14, Moses, after being given a challenging long-term assignment by God, is promised by God, "I will be with you."  Nevertheless, Moses tries to gain more control over the situation by requesting to be told God's name.  Moses wants more control over the future than even God can promise.  And so, God provides to Moses the open-ended enigmatic reply, "I AM WHO I AM."  Translators sometimes add a footnote to this verse in order to express that God will be with Moses in both "being" and "becoming" -- just like that baby who both suckles and chews.  Such footnotes explain that what God has said could also be translated as "I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE," or even "I WILL BECOME WHAT I WILL BECOME."

Even though ending a year cannot be an abrupt endpoint the way a book's chapter can be, maybe there can be value in a New-Year resolve to foster a new spirit that might lead to something better --  even if we can now only glimpse what that green shoot will become.

  ~ ~ ~ 

Is there a new shoot emerging that you would like to help cultivate?

(The Rose quote is from his chapter in Alas, Poor Darwin,
ed. by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, © 2000. p. 310.)