Cycles and Rhythms

Day and night. That must be the most common cycle we humans experience.  That dramatic contrast between light and dark has also encouraged the evolution of different species of animals to occupy the shifting scenes of day and night.

The next most common natural cycle on Earth is that of the annual seasons as our planet tips back and forth on its axis in relation to the sun.  In some places, that alternation is primarily between dry and wet seasons.  Familiar to more people are the seasons of summer, fall, winter and spring.  It is the plants that primarily mirror that cycle with their dramatic annual changes.

The sun's cycles of days and the Earth's cycle of seasons come together to make our secular calendar of one solar year.  So where did the months come from?  They are derived from the less obvious cycle of the moon -- from new moon, through crescent shapes, and into a full moon.  That cycle takes 29 to 30 days.  People who live their lives at the ocean's edge have been more familiar with that cycle because they have had to adjust to the rhythm of the tides, which are caused primarily by the moon's gravitational pull.  Other cultures have found it valuable in other ways to keep an eye on the moon with its luminous glow, so different than the sun's heat.  One town in Japan has arranged the placement of residential plots so that each house can have an inspiring window-view of the rising, full moon.

So where did those seven-day weeks on our calendar come from?  That number seven is different:  There is no cycle of celestial bodies visible to the naked eye that completes its cycle at the number seven.  Nevertheless, there seems to be a human need to periodically take a break from the mere repetition of day and night, work and sleep.  Having nothing but that daily cycle can get monotonous.  People got a sample of that monotony when the coronavirus pandemic forced people who could work at home to do so.  Gone were the weekly cycles from Monday to Thank-Goodness-it's-Friday.  Also gone was weekend revitalization through sports, eating at a restaurant, and worship services.  Each day became tiringly the same.

Cycles can be comforting, but one rhythm alone in our lives can become oppressive.  In 1930, the dictator Joseph Stalin chopped off the two-day weekend from the Soviet calendar.  He was attempting to increase the nation's productivity by creating a five-day week filled only with work, and with no weekend-break.  How confining that would have been!

Down through history, various numbers have been tried by varying cultures for breaking up life into weeks.  The number of days has ranged from five to ten.  The seven-day week of today's secular calendar was established by Jewish people in ancient times as being six days of work followed by the Sabbath.  On that Sabbath, there was a mandated pause from work, commerce, and trying to get-ahead of other people financially.  As the 20th-century psychoanalyst Erich Fromm put it in the title of one of his books, the Sabbath was aimed at being a shift of mode from "To Have" to "To Be."  Similar to the way that the number seven transcends the natural cycles, the Sabbath was designed to transcend humans' easy habits.  It was an opportunity to bask in the grace of the world, and experience God's grace more deeply.

Not that the Sabbath meant getting away from experiencing Nature.  To the contrary, it can be the opportunity to experience the renewing power of Nature more fully.  Oppressors have known that power too, and have tried to keep the oppressed away from Nature.  In George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, the imprisoned Joan of Arc points to her being separated from Nature as evidence of her captors' evil character.  She says to them:

"It is not the bread and water I fear.... But to shut me from the light of the sky and
 the sight of the fields and flowers... and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God....  without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil,
 and that mine is of God."

~ ~ ~

(When and how have you found renewal through Nature?)

(The quotation is from Shaw's Saint Joan, Scene IV.)
(The picture of the Earth is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Looking Up to Trees

Down the block from the house where my wife grew up, there is a modest but nice park.  There is only a little bit of playground equipment.  Instead the park is mostly a place for kids to run and adults to walk beneath the tall, very old trees.

One evening near sunset, I strolled alone into the park, and found myself for some reason pausing before one of the trees.  With no one else around to make me feel embarrassed, I felt a desire to unhurriedly contemplate the tree.  At first I saw up close the rough texture of its bark and the pockmarks from where life's diseases had left scars.  Despite those signs of the tree's vulnerability, I was next struck by the tree's massiveness.  It's height and solidity.  I thought about how the tree had endured countless nights, standing there unattended through wind, rain, and dangerous lightning.

I found myself not only looking up at the tree in its immense height, but also looking up to the tree for its virtues.

To some people, it might seem strange to turn to trees to look for virtues to inspire.  But Tennessee Williams, in his play The Night of the Iguana, turned to a tree for guidance on the distinctly human challenge of facing one's mortality.  In that play (superbly adapted into a movie), a middle-aged spinster artist is traveling through Mexico with her 97-year old grandfather, who is a poet.  The two are broke, trying to hang on by her drawing portraits of tourists and by his recitation of poems for tips.

Intermittently throughout the play, the now nearly deaf and nearly blind grandfather repeats the opening lines of a poem he has been working on but has been unable to complete:

"How calmly does the orange branch

Observe the sky begin to blanch..."

The play's climax is expressed poetically through the grandfather finally having completed his
poem mentally, which he then recites while his granddaughter transcribes it.  The completed poem expresses how the tree, even though it lives "without a prayer" (unlike humans), nonetheless shows "no betrayal of despair" in the face of its future:

grandfather reciting poem
in The Night of the Iguana

"Sometime while night obscures the tree...

A second history will commence.

...the broken stem

The plummeting to earth...."

This return to the earth is:

"An intercourse not well designed

For beings of a golden kind."

It is instead " [a] bargaining with mist and mould."

And yet, despite that altered future, the living tree still holds its head high.  So much so that the soon-to-die grandfather looks up to the tree, expressing in the final stanza of the poem his desire to live like it:

"O Courage, could you not as well

Select a second place to dwell,

Not only in that golden tree

But in the frightened heart of me?"

~~~

Are there any qualities of trees that you would like to share in?

(The poem quoted is recited by Nonno in The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, © 1961.  Act. 3.)

(The movie-still from The Night of the Iguana [1964], directed by John Huston, is used under Fair Use.)

(The full poem by Tennessee Williams, in print and read by a different actor, is at this external link:  "How calmly does....")

Animal Attire, Fashionable or Not

In the latter third of the 20th century, as awareness grew about how many mammal species might be headed toward extinction, campaigns against the purchasing and wearing of furs emerged.  Such campaigns have helped increase consciousness about the very real danger of species extinction.  The campaigns, however, have sometimes led to stereotypes about the views of people in previous centuries, when animal furs and skins were more often used for clothing.

helping a bear
get warm

Our current fur controversies can easily lead us to associating the wearing of furs for clothing with being less appreciative of animals.  But in previous centuries, that was not always the case. Sometimes the reverse was true.  For example, in the early 1700's, a time in which there were no synthetic furs, Alexander Pope (1688-1744) reminded his readers to humbly remember that:

"... Nature's children all divide her care;

The fur that warms a monarch, warm'd a bear."

Indeed, as we go back further in the history of Western civilization, we often find a greater awareness and appreciation of our human dependence on animals to protect our vulnerable human bodies.  In Shakespeare's King Lear, the king comes upon a man who is without the usual protection of clothing, and turns that person into an object lesson, telling his own companions:  "Consider him well."  Then, speaking to the pitiable man, the king says, "Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool."  The king then reminds us all that, "... unaccommodated [unclothed] man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal..."

The origins of the very first human attire are lost in pre-history.  That inability to name the inventor of clothing, along with an appreciation of clothing, could even lead to understanding clothing as being a gift from God.  That perspective appears in the Adam-and-Eve story in the Bible's book of Genesis.  Ashamed after having disobeyed God, the two archetypal humans try to conceal themselves:  "They sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves."  (Gen. 3:7, NRSV)  This was probably a laugh-line to an audience who would have been well aware how scratchy fig leaves would be.  God, although announcing the sad consequences of humans' trying to be like gods, then extends grace to the helpless humans in the form of more suitable attire:  "And the LORD God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them." (Gen. 3:21, NRSV)

bear tracks in snow

An appreciation of animal attire can also expand to a wonder at the ways animals themselves are "attired."  A half-century before Pope reminded the monarch that a bear had been warmed by the fur he also wore, the naturalist John Ray (1627-1705) marveled at the appropriate variations in the protective covering of different species.  Ray did not yet have Darwin's explanation for how such variations had come about through the natural process of evolution.  Nevertheless, Ray marveled not only at the fur covering some mammals, but also at the insulating blubber of fish in cold waters, and the warming down some birds are attired with.

~~~

Do you notice any changes in Nature as winter comes?  How do you prepare for it?

(The quote by Alexander Pope is from

An Essay on Man, 1733-34, Epistle III.)

(The excerpt from King Lear is from Act III, scene iv, 195.)
(The children's illustration is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Light from the Woods

Anyone who has seen a play by Anton Chekhov may well have felt that the characters were living in a locked room. Not a locked room of a murder-mystery, in which one of the characters must be the murderer.  Instead, a psychologically locked room, in which Chekhov's characters voice their failed dreams, never achieved projects, and unfulfilled desires.  In one play in particular, however, Uncle Vanya, a beautiful green illumination occasionally shines into the psychologically somber atmosphere.  It is the emerald light of a forest.  And it tells us something about Nature and the human spirit.

Twice in the play, the light glimmers through the voice of Dr. Astrov, a physician who every year has planted new forests.  Some of his lines seem to display remarkable foreknowledge of our current environmental challenges, especially given that the play was published in 1897.  For example, in Act I:

"The forests diminish year after year, rivers dry up,

 wildlife is coming to an end, the climate is spoiled...."

Astrov is able to express the beauty of forests, but only a very personal and individual way:

"When I plant a young birch and then see its leaves turn green

 and the way it sways in the wind, my soul is filled with pride...."

When he describes the human relationship to the forests in more communal terms, he is able to describe it only in a distancing or critical way because he is discouraged.  He quickly bores his distracted listener in Act III when he lays out on a table his series of maps charting the receding size of the forests over many years.  Also, his depiction of any combined life of humans and forests is only grim:

"What we have here is a degeneration, the result of a downhill struggle for existence....

 And so [man] destroys everything and never thinks about tomorrow...."

Thus, even though Astrov has nobly devoted much time and money to trying to sustain the forest, he cannot sustain a vision that will inspire other people.  Nevertheless, the green illumination that merely glimmers through him flares more brightly through another character, Sonya.  This is partly because she loves Astrov, but also because she is able to feel more loving toward all people. She is able to tenderly express a beautiful vision of how Astrov's reforestation work can be transformative:

"He says that the forests glorify our earth,

 they teach a person the meaning of beauty and kindle a spirit of majesty.

 The forests make the climate less severe.  In countries where the climate is mild,

 less energy is spent in the struggle with nature, and so there we find a gentler,

 more understanding person.  There too people are beautiful, pliant, and responsive;

their speech is elegant, and their movements are graceful."

Anton Chekhov

What does the playwright Chekhov himself think about these matters?  We have a solid clue in that he gives to Sonya the final words in the play -- the most beautiful and loving speech in the entire play.  We also have a more subtle clue in that the name "Sonya" is a Russian variant of the name "Sophia," which means Wisdom.

~~~

Do you know someone in whom the love of nature shines? Can you describe their spirit?

(The quotations from Uncle Vanya  by Anton Chekhov,

are from Anton Chekhov's Plays, translated by Eugene K. Bristow, © 1977.)

(A most accessible adaptation of the play is the movie version Vanya on 42nd Street.)

Are Ravens Spooky?

A fair number of people have heard the memorable line, "Quoth the Raven 'Nevermore.' "  In the poem by Edgar Allan Poe that line comes from, the raven is given the role of bringing the message that a long-lost hope will have to stay long lost forever.  A haunting remembrance of past events hangs over Poe's narrator in the poem. In contrast, ravens have in Western culture usually been considered to bring a message about the future -- particularly an omen of death. Thus it is that in Shakespeare's play Macbeth, Lady Macbeth says:

"The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan..."

Such a death-connection comes not just from ravens' being black (the absence of light usually being in Christianity a symbol of separation from God).  The stronger linking of that bird with death most certainly developed because ravens sometimes feast on dead carcasses.

Easily mistaken for their cousins crows (both in the same Corvidae family), ravens have larger, stockier beaks, which can given them a patrician air.  Ravens are larger in size too, which, along with their feeding on carcasses, may have led people to conclude that they had big appetites.  Thus it is that our words "ravenous" and "raven" come from the same root.

Scavenging the dead is just one source of food for ravens.  Their diets are varied (from insects to birds' eggs to our household scraps) because they are enterprising and intelligent.  As my Audubon guide explains, the raven "seems to apply reasoning in situations entirely new to it. Its 'insight' behavior at least matches that of a dog."  Their intelligence extends even to their ability to distinguish between individual members of other species and between individual humans. Ravens readily learn which individuals they need to fear and which ones they do not, and are even able to establish at a distance if a human is carrying a shotgun.

It is probably because of that intelligence, along with their playfulness, that native Americans of the West Coast adopted the raven as a symbol upon which they projected human qualities, both good and questionable.  Among such mythological stories are tales of Raven creating the world and acting cleverly, but also tales of  Raven acting in sneaky and foolish ways.

I remember once watching at length a raven that had established itself at a panoramic lookout point in the Rocky Mountains.  It was also, not by coincidence, a place where sandwiches were sold to the tourists who could enjoy the outdoor seating.  The raven had the best of both worlds:  Easy pickings on any food that was not closely guarded, and the bird's natural home in the form of the vast, sweeping downward slope of the canyon. And, unlike us humans, the raven had no trouble taking off into flight at a moment's notice, floating as light as air, on dramatic outstretched wings.

~~~

Do you have any recollections about ravens or their cousins crows, both with their distinctive "caws"?

(Poe's poem can be read at this external link:  "The Raven.")

(The Shakespeare lines are from Macbeth, Act I, Scene 5.)

(The quote re. intelligence is from The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Western Region, © 1977, p. 686.)

Mad Over the Moon

A continuing story in the news over the past several years has been about some people being a bit mad over the moon.  Mad -- angry, that is -- over the decision not to try to send astronauts to the moon again, or even set up a colony there.  The anger has, admirably, been expressed with civility, but the underlying feelings of disappointment and frustration are detectable

It is with a different sense of the word "mad" that people down through history have been mad over the moon:   "Mad" in the sense of enthusiastic about it and adoring it.  Poets, playwrights, and songwriters have frequently either been enamored by the moon or had a crush on it.  People today know the line "Shine on, shine on, harvest moon," even if they can't sing the rest of the song.  As well as the phrase "by the light of the silvery moon" from another love song.  In Hinduism, one symbolic expression of God's love for the human race are classic paintings in which Krishna meets the delighted milkmaids under the light of the moon.

"Violinist in the Moonlight"
 by Hans Thoma

Not that the moon has always been associated with faithfulness.  In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, in a moonlit setting, Romeo is on the verge of swearing by the moon to express his love to Juliet.  But she replies, "Oh, swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb."  Despite such occasional misgivings, the human race has usually found the moon to be a model of reliability in its recurring phases from new moon to full.  The nearly monthly period of the phases have, understandably, been associated with a woman's menstrual periods.  That feminine association emerged, along with a sense of the moonlight's softness compared to the intense male sun.

Thanks to modern science, we know, however, that the moon is not that soft in its power of gravity, being the primary force making the tides, which in turn stimulate the ocean-shore life of birds and mollusks and more.  The writer Jeffrey Sobosan makes an interesting juxtaposition of our scientific and romantic attachments to the moon.  Reflecting upon the countless bodies in our galaxy, he writes that the moon is "the only one on which human feet have walked," but is also the "best known of our companions in the universe."

A grandmother I know tells me a story about her four-year-old granddaughter.  The two of them were sitting outside at night in the backyard, something they had hardly ever done.  The grandmother pointed up at the bright white ball in the dark sky, and told the child, "Look, that's the moon."  The four-year-old replied," Da moon? Will it fall?"  Oh, that I could more often have such a childlike sense of wonder and discovery!  Oh, that I might be mad about the moon, that it might enable me to more intensely love this world.

~~~

Have you looked at the moon recently?  When?  What was it like?

(The quotation by Jeffrey G. Sobosan is from

Romancing the Universe, © 1999.  p. 10.)

Running Brooks and Books

Books in running brooks?  If that metaphor were taken too literally, it would not make sense, because the two don't mix well.  After all, books don't do well in water, whether from a running brook or from the tap.  Any book-lover who has been caught in the rain while carrying a book, or has spilled coffee upon a volume in their collection, knows that paper once wet is never the same again.

Nevertheless, water and books were brought together figuratively by Shakespeare when he wrote that our life...

 "finds tongues in trees,
books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones."

Those words are probably the most quoted lines from the play As You Like It, and I think that is because they express so poetically one of the enduring urges of humankind:  Namely, to learn about the world and ourselves by turning our attention to Nature.

That urge was once more often emphasized in Christianity, before modern western Christianity became narrowed down in its focus to primarily the human sphere.  Nor was reading the "Book of Nature," as it was called, usually considered a diminishment of the value of scripture, because Nature and the Bible were considered complementary sources of inspiration.  As one example, the highly influential 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that "Revelation comes in two volumes, the Bible and Nature."

Today, we in the U.S. have more books than we could ever read, and a good number of them are devotional or theological books.  For me, however, it is not just religious books but also fiction or science that sparks a thought that leads to my spiritual reflections.

No matter what the written source, there is a reviving spiritual chemistry I can barely explain in this pulling together of what humans have expressed in books with my observations and knowledge of Nature.  (Similar, I think, to the way that Shakespeare's writings reveal the inspiration he found in both the books he read and Nature.)

Not that the "messages" I find from this chemistry are always immediately obvious by looking at Nature or the words on a printed page.  Instead, it is in musing upon the two together that my memories and emotions and inner voices arise.  My catching sight of something that intrigues me comes as I rummage through Nature's foliage (as Darwin did) and through the leaves of books.

There is one other advantage to remembering the "Book of Nature," especially because we live more and more in an inter-faith world.  Nature is inherently ecumenical.  As the contemporary Christian writer Matthew Fox put it:

No forest, no moon, no ocean, no field,
can be labeled "Buddhist" or "Jewish" or "Muslim" or "Christian."

~~~

Is there a place in Nature you like to return to?  Is there a favorite book you return to?

(The quotation by Matthew Fox is from

One River, Many Wells, © 2000.)