A Seed Deeply Lodged

I am sometimes surprised by which people have a love for Nature and a strong interest in it.  For example, of the many people I've had a chance over the years to chat with at the barbershop where I have my hair cut, I discovered a keen interest in Nature in the shoe-shine man.  Among all the people, both customers and barbers, I'm sure his income was the lowest.  And indeed, he has never enjoyed the benefits of Sierra Club outings or family trips to national parks.  Instead, his interest in Nature seems to have stemmed from fishing -- not for sport, but as the way his family put enough food on their table.

Despite that background, his appreciation of Nature is more than utilitarian, more than an interest in its practical value to himself.  He knows all sorts of facts about the animals of the rural landscape he came from before moving to the large city where he now makes a very modest income shining shoes.  To that knowledge he has added information he has gleaned from reading the National Geographic magazines that are a part of the barbershop's reading material.  He and I discovered our mutual interest in Nature when he noticed that I was sometimes browsing in the National Geographic's while I waited my turn.  Now, he alerts me when there is a new issue, digging for it himself among the large stock of periodicals while he tells me about one of the latest articles about Nature.

What intrigues me most about Nature-lovers I have encountered unexpectedly, including that shoe-shine man, is how their sense of the world they value extends far beyond the immediate sphere of their life.  My sister, another Nature-lover, became a biology teacher, filling her middle-school classroom with a variety of plant and animal species.  She says it might have been a sign that she was destined to be a biology teacher when, at the age of four, she accidentally sat on a bumblebee, and her first thought was not whether she would be stung, but instead, "Oh no, I hope I didn't hurt the bee!"

As I have reflected upon the character of these two people and other Nature-lovers I know, it seems to me that one quality they have in common is a humility.  In particular, a humility that manifests itself as an absence of any inappropriate amount of self-importance of themselves as a human being.  They do not over-elevate the human race.  Of course, there are many humble people who have little interest in Nature.  That means that something else is going on within the character of Nature-lovers.  I think that other element is that lively interest in a realm larger than our human sphere.  Their minds come to full attention when someone else tells of an unusual bird they've seen, or an article about animals in National Geographic.

Even though I cannot explain why one child will develop an enjoyment of Nature while another child living in the same setting will not, I do think what one little-known early 20th-century novelist wrote is true.  That writer, Mary Webb, wrote in her book The House in Dormer Forest:

"The love of nature is
 a passion for those in whom it once lodges:

  it cannot be removed."

~~~

Do you have a love for or a fascination with Nature?  Where do you think it came from?

(The Mary Webb quotation is from her novel

 The House in Dormer Forest, © 1921.)