Winged Flashes of Light and Insight

I can't remember the first time I saw a butterfly, but I do remember what my earliest impressions of them were.  Over the years, I have gradually learned more about butterflies, and with each step in learning, my thoughts about them have changed.  So also have butterflies been part of my changed thoughts about life itself.

A flash of bright, moving color in the sun.  That is my earliest recollection of a butterfly.  Even today, in the latter years of my adulthood, that is what first catches my eye.  It does seem to be an experience tuned to capture the interest of a young child:  The movement. The bright colors, something little kids seem to enjoy no matter whether it comes in butterflies or a box of crayons.  But nothing can quite duplicate a butterfly's tantalizing lure.  "Come and see me up close," it seems to say as it pauses on a flower not so far away.  But then it is off again, the direction it takes shifting unpredictably.  A beautiful combination of fragility and energy, a butterfly seems to be perfectly designed to encourage children to delight in life.

Like all children of elementary-school age, I soon learned about the connection between caterpillar and butterfly.  Even though the transitional state between the two was first described to me as a "cocoon," rather than the technically precise name of "chrysalis," I learned about the marvelous life cycles of these most beautiful insects:  Egg, larva (caterpillar), chrysalis, winged adult.  At some point I encountered how this almost unbelievable metamorphosis out of a dead-looking chrysalis has been a ready-made symbol for resurrection and rebirth.  The promise of new life and possibilities, even when death seems to have brought everything to an end.

In more recent years, I have become intrigued by some additional scientific facts about these insects. Specifically, that the winged butterfly -- which we tend to think of as being the point of all this metamorphosis -- actually lives an average of only two weeks.  Moreover, in the wild, only one percent of individuals make it through the whole cycle in all its stages.  I remember a man whose son was born with a genetic illness that meant the boy was destined to live only into latter teens unless he could get successful marrow and liver transplants.  The family struggled over the course of years, stretching out the life of a boy whose biological life did not naturally stretch into adulthood.  After the son died at college age, the father said that the most comforting words any person said to him were, "Your son's life was not wasted."  This, then is the latest lesson the butterflies carry for me, if I remember how short the lives of all winged butterflies actually are. Who would want to declare their lives a waste?

Perhaps a butterfly in flight can lead us to even another insight.  Eighty years before the theologian Paul Tillich's book titled The Eternal Now made that phrase famous, the nature-mystic Richard Jefferies described an experience he had outdoors:

"It is eternity now.  I am in the midst of it.  It is about me in the sunshine;

 I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air.

  Nothing has to come; it is now.  Now is eternity."

~~~

Do you have any special recollection about butterflies?  What do you like about them?

(The Jefferies quote is from his book The Story of My Heart [1883].  Chap. 3.)
(The photo of the chrysalis is by "Pollinator at the English language Wikipedia,"
 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Clearly, Before Chickens

Back when most Western painters were into realism, one classic challenge in learning how to paint was to depict nothing but a white egg resting on a white surface.  That challenge prevented novice painters from easily relying upon a contrast of colors between the egg and its background to depict dimensionality.  Instead, the painter had to represent the subtlest gradations from whites to near-whites to the lightest of grays made by sunlight as it faded around the eggs curvature.  Not to mention the subtle texture of the egg's surface.  I think it was an exercise fitting for an egg, which feels like a wondrous, beautifully polished stone when held in the hand.

We encounter eggs as food early in our lives, and they can come packaged with learning.  What elementary-school child has not at some point encountered the riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"  Even when not yet old enough to engage in abstract thinking, a child can taste of that impossible mental task of thinking back into an infinite regress of time.

One side-benefit of our modern knowledge about the evolution of life on this planet is that we can now answer the chicken-or-egg riddle definitively, although the answer might seem like cheating to some. Clearly, there were eggs before there were chickens -- reptile eggs, that is. (Not to mention the eggs without shells laid by nearly countless species of fish.)  Evolutionary biologists estimate that reptiles, with their ability to lay land-worthy eggs, have been on this planet twice as long as any birds.

ancient Egyptian god Ptah
creating cosmos as egg
on pottery wheel

Perceiving the potentiality that lies within eggs, faith-traditions in ancient times used the egg as a symbol for the cosmos.  In our highly secularized western societies, most people (even some ministers I have known) think of an Easter-egg hunt as just springtime fun.  But those Easter eggs (as well as rabbits, a prolific type) entered Christianity as symbols of new life.  Even today, a large porcelain egg or an ostrich egg hangs in some Coptic churches and mosques as a sign of rebirth and hope.

A peculiarity of chicken eggs many city-dwellers do not know about is that even though chicks come from eggs, hens can lay eggs without being fertilized by a rooster.  That seems counter-intuitive, given that the evolutionary value of fertilized eggs has been that of producing offspring.  Nevertheless, virtually all the chicken eggs marketed by grocers today in Western societies are infertile.  (In his early adulthood, Gandhi, staying in England, abstained from eating eggs so as to not take animal life -- until he was informed that those chicken eggs he was being offered could never have developed into a chick.)

Today, in watching nature shows on TV, I can experience something even more marvelous than being able to eat eggs while eating vegetarian.  I can watch as mother tortoises and other turtles use their clumsy-looking hind legs to dig a pit in the sand.  Then, out of their bodies emerge beautiful white ovals, looking so much like those familiar eggs we all know firsthand.  As part of a long line of reptiles, that mother turtles' usually private ritual dates back over 300 million years.

~~~

Do you have any childhood memories about Easter eggs, other eggs, chicks, or chickens?

The “House” that Nature Built

When I was in high-school, one area of curriculum being offered was called "home economics." Although the classes included household budget, they were primarily such things as cooking and sewing.  (Mostly girls attended.)  That recollection of the label "home economics" came back to me recently as I read about some of the history behind modern ecology -- history dating back 150 to 350 years.

illustration from
one of Haeckel's book

The key to understanding the matter is a single Greek word oikos, which means "house."  Although the fundamental ideas behind ecology developed over centuries as scientific knowledge grew, the term "ecology" was coined in 1866 by the prominent German biologist Ernst Haeckel.  To put what he did in English, a prefix derived from oikos was attached to the suffix "-logy" which means scientific study (as in bio-logy).  Thus, eco-logy looked at all of Nature as being a large "house" full of interrelationships that science was in the process of discovering.

That "-logy" suffix was a significant choice because it was a shift from a term scientists had been using in the preceding two centuries.  (Here's where those high-school classes about a woman's taking care of a home comes in.)  Before Haeckel, it was common for Europeans studying Nature to speak of the "economy" of the natural world.  We can see in "economy" the same "eco-" prefix as in "ecology." But "economy" has a different suffix, from nomos.  It is also from Greek, but means "management."  Thus, "eco-nomy" refers to the management of some type of "house" (à la "home economics" classes).

In the case of the "economy" of Nature, however, the "house" is not a building constituted by humans.  Nor are the humans the main managers.  In the worldview of scientists in the 1600's and 1700's, Nature by itself was seen as having an "economy," that is, a set of efficient, purposeful interrelationships.  This is why, for example, the 18th-century biologist Linnaeus was able to write:

"By the Oeconomy [i.e., Economy] of Nature,

 we understand the all-wise disposition of the Creator

 in relation to natural things,

 by which they are fitted to produce general ends [i.e., purposes]

 and reciprocal uses."

Over two-and-a-half centuries after Linnaeus -- who pioneered modern biological classification -- our current scientific knowledge and understanding of Nature's diversity and complexity has exploded.  Our increasing awareness of the wildness of Nature -- its resistance to being entirely domesticated or even subdued by our attempts at "management" -- has even raised questions about whether any "house" metaphor is accurate.

There is one thing our environmental problems have shown us, however:  As the 20th-century eco-theologian Sallie McFague puts it, in order for humankind to live sustainably in Nature, we need to learn this planet's "house rules."

~~~

What is the world of Nature (the non-human world) like to you?

(The Linnaeus quote is from his "The Oeconomy of Nature," 1749,

as quoted in Nature's Economy by Donald Worseter, © 1994, p. 37.)

(The illustration from Haeckel's book is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Getting “the Combo”

You can hardly order an entree at a fast-food restaurant without being asked if you wouldn't prefer "the combo."  Especially in Western faith-traditions, which possess central books of scripture, there once was another type of "combo" that was both appealing and enduring: Namely, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. They were viewed as being complementary sources for inspiration and guidance.  As just one example, Christopher Bamford writes regarding Celtic Christianity:  "Though ascetic... the Irish monks were hostile to neither learning nor nature and practiced greatly the contemplation of both of these."

Eglwys Pabo
Sant Llanbabo church

In one Celtic poem, we can readily hear the poet's love of natural sounds, with that loving perception creating its own kind of scripture:

"Over my head the woodland wall

Rises; the ousel sings to me;

Above my booklet lined for words

The woodland birds shake out their glee....

God keep me still!  for here I write

A scripture bright in great woods now."

Sometimes, Nature could be so appealing a "book" that it competed for attention with a book of psalms or other devotional book.  One poem by a monk describes how the sound of a bird calls the monk out of his room (customarily called his "cell"), thus making it impossible to continue reading his printed book indoors:

"Learned in music sings the lark,

I leave my cell to listen;

His open beak spills music, hark!

Where Heaven's bright cloudlets glisten.

And so I'll sing my morning psalm

That God bright Heaven may give me."

I myself think that all classrooms should have windows to make the experience of learning more refreshing.  Sometimes, however, even the view through the window can be a distraction.  I remember one congenial professor of religion being asked by a pupil at the beginning of class if we might move outside under the trees in the warm spring weather.  Although sympathetic, the professor replied (probably wisely) that if we did so, he would not be able to keep our attentions on the day's lesson.  We had to settle for the window.

I know full well how Nature, when it is congenial, can overpower the attraction of a book -- even for a book-lover such as myself. Sometimes in college, when the weather was lightly warm, I would find an isolated spot on a grassy slope behind one of the buildings. Lying on the grass, reading some assigned book, before long I would find myself falling asleep, overtaken by the peacefulness of my surroundings.  Perhaps the "combo" of Nature and a book is just too much to devour both simultaneously.  Perhaps we do better taking each one in turn, alternating between them, being nourished as our hearts and minds metabolize the ingredients of both.

~~~

Have you ever taken a book on a trip to the beach, a park, the woods, or mountains?

(All quotations are from Celtic Christianity:  Ecology and Holiness

by William Parker Marsh and Christopher Bamford, © 1982. [spelling Americanized]  p. 21, p. 22.)

(Photo of church by Alan Fryer used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)

Healing and Being a Whole

I hate being sick.  One of the best feelings in life is that of getting beyond an illness -- feeling again that solidity of life within oneself, even when not yet fully back to original strength.

Most people hate being sick.  Offhand, the only instances I think of in which illness is preferred are when a person is unconsciously trying to heal a larger psychological pain. Such as a child wanting to stay sick at home out of a fear of school.  Or an invalid wanting the psychological support of a family member.  Most people prefer physical wellness.  Therein lies a wonderful mystery of how organisms have evolved so as to make whole what is broken apart.

One of the most fascinating lessons biology students learn is how the bodies of organisms fight off injury microscopically -- similar to how a colony of individuals might fight off an invading army. One example is the way blood platelets barricade a break in the blood vessel's wall with their bodies and fibers, while white blood cells race to the site of invasive infection, attacking the alien bacteria. Microscopes reveal such cellular processes to be fascinatingly similar to how social insects respond to an invader's damaging the structure of their home. The two processes are so eerily alike that it can lead one to wonder where the line between an organism and a colony should be drawn.  The science-writer Lewis Thomas puts it eloquently:

" [B]ees and termites and social wasps... seem to live two kinds of lives:  they are individuals, going about the day's business without much evidence of thought for tomorrow,
and they are at the same time component parts, cellular elements, in the huge, writhing,
ruminating organism of the Hill, the nest, the hive."

The commonality between healing and rebuilding a whole is also revealed in the origins of certain English words.  The word "whole" is derived from the Middle English hole, meaning "unharmed."  The words "whole" and "heal" both trace back to the "kailo" constellation of Germanic/Old English roots.  These word-origins show how even before microscopes, people could feel within themselves how getting well again was like being made whole.

Despite healing, we humans are mortals, something we also share with other living beings on this planet.  Even as our faith-traditions elevate us toward higher values, they remind us of our commonality with other mortal forms of life.  For example, the Buddhist Jataka stories tell animal-related tales with reminders about compassion for animals, remembering their continuity with the Buddha and humans.  In the Christian Bible (most of which is shared with Judaism), the word "mortals" is used 88 times to emphasize how both humans and animals are mortal beings (a notable contrast to the merely 4 times humans are described as being made "in the image of God").

We are mortals, and so sometimes no cure for an illness can be found. Even without a cure, however, there can still be a kind of healing in the sense of feeling not cut off -- feeling a part of a larger, beloved, sacred whole. Therein lies another word in that root constellation "kalio":  The Old English halig means "holy."

~~~

Have you found a way to be more whole by being a part of a larger whole?  How?

(The Thomas quote is from his essay "On Societies as Organisms"

 in The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas, © 1974.  p. 12.)