“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.)

Stepping In... to Step Deeper into the World

 I have met more than one person who very much likes StoryCorps stories, a brief weekly spot on Public Radio's Friday news programs.  The StoryCorps project traveled around the U.S. for years, recording ordinary Americans as they told about pivotal events in their life journeys. Many of what is shared is poignant.  When I take pen to paper to write my own thoughts about a wider world and reading, there is one particular StoryCorps spot that comes to mind.  As I imagine the experience in my mind, it also has to do with Nature.

A woman explained to StoryCorps how a bookmobile became a life-changing experience for her.  As a little girl, she lived with her family in Native American migrant-worker camp.  Traveling so frequently, the girl was not allowed to have books, because they would have been too heavy to move.  But then one day, when the girl was 12, a traveling library (a bookmobile) stopped on its periodic rounds where the family was currently living.  And the girl was invited to step in.

As the now grown woman explained her childhood experience, when first told she could take home a book from the mobile, she wondered what was the catch.  Being told there was none other than returning the book in two weeks, she began to devour books.  And her having stepped (at first hesitantly) into the bookmobile made it possible for her to step into a whole new world. Or perhaps I should say "worlds," because the girl's selections ranged from volcanoes to dinosaurs.

"The Journey" (1903)
by
Elizabeth Shippen Green

The child's stepping into that vehicle filled with books reminded me how each book can become for us a vehicle by which we step into the mind, and maybe the emotions of the author of that book. By so doing, we expand our world, even bringing hope to some corner of our lives where it previously could not be seen.  As the woman explained to StoryCorps, because of those books, "By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps.... I believed I could find a place in it.  And I did."

I am humbled by this story.  Although the family I grew up in was decidedly middle-class, we had a couple of filled bookcases in our house; and my mother periodically purchased an additional book so that our home library might grow as I grew.  I am also humbled because I know that it is upon the often hard lives of migrant workers that I depend for life when I purchase fruits or vegetables at the grocery store.

This woman's story came back to my mind during the COVID pandemic. Many of us had to step back into our homes in order to protect ourselves or others -- even when we would have preferred to go about freely. We turned to electronic means of communication to try to satisfy that human desire to learn and connect with more than our individual lives. Those methods were less satisfying than the "real thing." Nevertheless, the confinement of our circumstances could make us more aware of how much we needed each other, and how much other people depended upon us..

~~~

How have books widened your world?  Has there been a critical experience in your life that has made your life richer than it otherwise would have been?

(The quotation is from "Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline

 For A Young Migrant Worker," by NPR Staff, May 30, 2014, and is used here under Fair Use.)
(The illustration by Green is 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.)

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.)

Stepping In... to Step Out into the World

I have met more than one person who very much likes StoryCorps stories, a brief weekly spot on Public Radio's Friday news programs.  The StoryCorps project traveled around the U.S. for years, recording ordinary Americans as they told about pivotal events in their life journeys. Many of what is shared is poignant.  When I take pen to paper to write my own thoughts about a wider world and reading, there is one particular StoryCorps spot that comes to mind.  As I imagine the experience in my mind, it also has to do with Nature.

A woman explained to StoryCorps how a bookmobile became a life-changing experience for her.  As a little girl, she lived with her family in Native American migrant-worker camp.  Traveling so frequently, the girl was not allowed to have books, because they would have been too heavy to move.  But then one day, when the girl was 12, a traveling library (a bookmobile) stopped on its periodic rounds where the family was currently living.  And the girl was invited to step in.

As the now grown woman explained her childhood experience, when first told she could take home a book from the mobile, she wondered what was the catch.  Being told there was none other than returning the book in two weeks, she began to devour books.  And her having stepped (at first hesitantly) into the bookmobile made it possible for her to step into a whole new world. Or perhaps I should say "worlds," because the girl's selections ranged from volcanoes to dinosaurs.

"The Journey" (1903)
by
Elizabeth Shippen Green

The child's stepping into that vehicle filled with books reminded me how each book can become for us a vehicle by which we step into the mind, and maybe the emotions of the author of that book. By so doing, we expand our world, even bringing hope to some corner of our lives where it previously could not be seen.  As the woman explained to StoryCorps, because of those books, "By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps.... I believed I could find a place in it.  And I did."

I am humbled by this story.  Although the family I grew up in was decidedly middle-class, we had a couple of filled bookcases in our house; and my mother periodically purchased an additional book so that our home library might grow as I grew.  I am also humbled because I know that it is upon the often hard lives of migrant workers that I depend for life when I purchase fruits or vegetables at the grocery store.

The StoryCorps project is a radio broadcast, and so I have to provide pictures for the stories with my imagination.  To complete this moving human story, I must picture two things in the background to that bookmobile:  The countless people who wrote those traveling books.  And rows and rows of growing fruits and vegetables -- a hard-earned gift from Nature.

~~~

How have books widened your world?  Has there been a critical experience in your life that has made your life richer than it otherwise would have been?

(The quotation is from "Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline

 For A Young Migrant Worker," by NPR Staff, May 30, 2014, and is used here under Fair Use.)
(The illustration by Green is in the Public 'Domain.)

The Up-Flight of Birds

English translation
of Le Petit Prince

"... for his escape he took advantage of

  the migration of a flock of wild birds."

With that imaginative explanation, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tells how his title character in The Little Prince made his escape from the isolation of his own tiny planet to come to the planet Earth. That 1943 children's book weds that statement with Saint-Exupéry's charming drawing in which the little prince grips a cluster of strings that shoot up to eleven birds flying upward, lifting him off the ground -- in the way a cluster of helium-filled balloons might.  Even though the tiny planet and tethered birds are fanciful, the author's imagery takes advantage of something many people have seen in the real world:  The instant and virtually simultaneous flight up from the ground of a small flock of birds.

Birds in flight are not easy to capture convincingly with a camera.  Capturing a virtually simultaneous liftoff from the ground effectively is even harder.   If the shutter speed is too slow, the birds in the photograph will be only a blur, obscuring the gracefulness of their wings.  If the shutter is clicked prematurely, the birds will appear too close to the ground, seemingly leaden, as if they were having a hard time getting aloft.  The camera will not have captured that exhilarating burst of energy in which birds spray upward and outward.

So critical to many birds has been this ability to take to flight instantly as a group that it has been reinforced in some species with instinctive alarm cries.  In the case of white-winged doves, evolution has taken such group-protection to a higher level in two ways. First, white patches on the doves' wings flash when they take flight, thus adding a visual alarm.  Moreover, the white-winged doves need not cry vocally, because the doves' sudden flight upward causes their very wings to give off a sharp, twittering warning-sound made by the air passing through the feathers.

Some mornings on which I was driving to work, following my routine path that some days felt like a rut, I would occasionally see such a liftoff of social birds such as pigeons or grackles. Their sudden energy would give my own spirit a lift.

In a mysterious way, the up-flight of birds intersects with something that seems to be instinctive about our human nature.  Namely, that our own facial expressions and bodily bearings droop when we are discouraged, but then lift up when our spirits become encouraged.

There is something deeper here than individual human psychology. There is something here about being able to open ourselves to greater possibilities that lie unseen in this world.  This deeper level, for example, is evidenced by the way the facial and bodily bearings of "down" and "up" are employed in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament).  When Cain is discouraged by the inequalities of human fortune, God intervenes as if to try to prevent vengeance, asking Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?" (Genesis 4:6, NRSV).  In many of the Biblical books, people are exhorted to lift up their heads.  And lift up their eyes.

~~~

Are there any ways birds lift your spirit?  How does looking up and about restore you?

(The Saint-Exupéry quote is from his The Little Prince, trans. from the French by Katherine Woods, © 1943.  p. 2.)

(The photo of the cover of The Little Prince is used under Fair Use.)

(The photo Pigeons is by Danko Durbić.)

Being and Becoming

Personally, I've never been hard-nosed about New Year's resolutions.  Although the first of the year does allow me an opportunity to reflect a bit more about my weaknesses and my abilities, I have always had a hard time carrying with me a fixed list of goals throughout an entire year. Even if I could write down a "to-become" list that would remain workable through the course of 12 months, I would probably forget where I put that piece of paper before the year was over.

Part of the difficulty is that it is impossible to predict what circumstances will arise in the months ahead.  True, I can resolve to head into each day with a certain re-fortified spirit toward life, but I cannot always know what challenges I am going to have to respond to.  The late 20th-century poet Wendell Berry wrote about the contingencies of even a single day's outing that...

"The chances change and make a new way."

It can be scary thinking about this unpredictability of life. 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...."

Faith-traditions place markers along the road of life to support us in our development:  Such as baptism, first Bible, and Bar Mitzvah.  Our faith-traditions also encourage us onward 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."

So too can our understanding of the Divine grow with us as we grow -- in both our being and our becoming.

~~~

Has your life ever taken an unpredicted path in a way that turned out to be fulfilling?

(The Berry line is from his poem "Traveling at Home," © 1988.)

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

Scattered Gifts

Have you ever had an old paperback begin to come apart at its spine, with some of the pages falling out?  What a mess!  It is especially a problem if the book is one you like to return to frequently.  (I resorted to putting one of my books in a plastic bag to prevent the loss of any of its loose pages.)

The Italian poet Dante (1265-1321) turns that loose-page nightmare on its head in the climax of his trilogy The Divine Comedy.  He draws upon the classic "book of Nature" metaphor in the Western tradition, which was a way of expressing how the natural world can be an opening into the Divine, a revelation about God.  Dante imaginatively scatters the "pages" of Nature's book.  He does so as an analogy to the way that there are wonders of Nature scattered all about us wherever we go.  He then brings the pages together, providing us this vision:

"In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume,

 that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe: 

...as though fused together in such a way

 that what I tell is but a simple light."

That this is no loose-page nightmare but instead a wonderful vision is underscored by this verse being in the part of his trilogy that is entitled Paradiso -- Paradise.

   Dante holding his own book,
The Divine Comedy,
with vision over his shoulder
   

Even though references to the "Book of Nature" are common in Christianity before the Scientific Revolution, the references to that metaphor are usually somewhat prosaic.  In contrast, in this passage, Dante opens up the metaphor with a grand poetic flourish, like the swirl of the brush on an artist's canvas.  The picture he paints of pages "dispersed... throughout the universe" is so evocative that I can easily see myself, as if in a dream, walking about in a world in which there are large, ornate pages scattered about on the ground.  As I slowly walk, I thoughtfully pick up one page after another, eager to read what is written there.  In real life, if the pages of that book I keep in a plastic bag were blown about by the wind, I would be alarmed.  But turning Dante's vision into a beautiful dream allows me to see the imagery of scattered pages in a different light.  And see the world in a different way.

Dante's imagery also resonates with the way children sometimes spontaneously collect objects from Nature.  One of the "leaves" of Dante's "volume" might be actual leaves from a tree, scattered upon the ground.  Or the child might delight in a found feather,, especially if it is colorful.  Even a rock, plain by contrast, might have something interesting in its shape.  So many objects to discover in this world of countless objects!  It is as if the child who gathers those things together, bringing them home, is somehow desiring to integrate diverse experiences into the whole of their growing life.

Dante points to another way in which the countless things we encounter in the natural world are united:  They are "bound by love in one single volume."  With that single poetic stroke, he draws upon what has been a central concept in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  Namely, that the key to understanding Ultimate Reality is to see the world we live in as if it were full of delightful gifts from One who loves us.

~~~

Are there some threads by which you make sense of your experiences of the world?

(The quote is from Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, 

 [La Divina Commedia, 1321], Paradise, XXXIII, 85-90.)

(The portrait of Dante by Bronzino is  in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Being an Animal, for Awhile

Over the course of my lifetime, there has been an increase in the number of Halloween costumes that are gory.  I am not a professional psychologist, but I would speculate that the increase in bloody, gruesome depictions has something to do with the increase in experiences of random violence (broadcast over TV) and truly violent movies.  Perhaps wearing a gory costume helps some children and youth face their inability to prevent random violence. Nevertheless, I would like to put in my vote for another type of costuming:  Animal masks and costumes.

What am I?

Of course, there are still some non-gory costumes among the trick-or-treaters who ring my doorbell.  An occasional princess. Or a cowboy.  Nevertheless, I think some animal costumes could add some variety and sparkle to trick-or-treating.  Even a simple animal mask might provide a psychological channel for children in their learning to adjust to the world and their own emotions.  As Paul Shepard writes:  "Putting [a mask] on and taking it off is a becoming.... The principle which they embody is like the assertion 'I am a young man, but I am also a frog' or 'I am a maiden, yet I am also a bird,' a way of saying 'I am both physical and spiritual, animal and human, good and bad.' "

Most every parent who has purchased or checked out of a library some children's books has encountered this uncanny ability of small children to identify with animal characters.  In children's stories, as also in many folktales, animal characters are both similar and dissimilar to the real animals they pretend to represent.  And they are both similar and dissimilar to our human selves.

"Bye, Baby Bunting"
from
  Denslow's Mother Goose

Somehow, an animal enables a child to name -- and thus perhaps unconsciously address -- their multiple emotions.  The complex emotions of human adults can be baffling to a small child (and sometimes inscrutable even to a teenager).  In contrast, a children's book's depictions of animals, even though oversimplified compared to the real animals they are derived from, help children to begin to name their emotions. For example:  I sometimes feel hungry like a bear.  I sometimes feel happy like a singing bird.

Paul Shepard, who was quoted above, is actually an ecologist, although of an unusual type.  He has studied and explored not so much our actions upon the environment as the reverse: the effects of the natural world upon humans, our psychology, and cultures.  Sometimes, as in the matter of humans' use of masks, those effects are subtle and too often overlooked.

There is another side of the coin to this matter of our identifying with animals, even if that identification simplifies the animal's nature.  Namely, that we can have an ambiguous response to most animals.  Not only do I experience myself as both "good and bad,"  but I can experience most animals as either good or bad, both beneficial to me and a possible danger to me.  Is that perhaps the way I can also experience many a human being?

~~~

As a child, did you ever wear an animal costume?  Do you ever feel  like any animal?

(The Shepard quote is from The Others, © 1996.   pp. 131-132.)

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.)

Eternity Carried Within

Mention the name Marie Curie, and the image that immediately comes to my mind is the interior of an old-style, dimly-lit chemistry laboratory, with glass flasks, dark countertops, and drawers. (There have to be drawers so that Marie Curie's mentor Antoine Becquerel can make his crucial discovery of how uranium can make an image on a photographic plate even when shut in a drawer away from sunlight.)

It was because of my mental picture of an enclosed, interior space that I was surprised by a quotation which, if unattributed, would have made me think instead of the outdoors.  Curie wrote:  "All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child."  Of course, from her perspective as a physical chemist, Curie would have thought of her investigation of the radioactivity of different rocks as being part of an investigation of "nature," that is, the natural world.  Her wording, however, particularly "All my life" and "rejoice like a child," made me recall the way other writers have expressed how observing and remembering Nature has been an enduring source of rejuvenation.

Wilfred Owen, who was a soldier in World War I, turned his poet's pen to the task of conveying the horrors of a war touted as being a glorious war to end all wars.  As a result, his poems, are predominantly somber in tone.  In one poem, however, a terribly ill patient lying in an army hospital is "helped by the yellow may-flowers by his head."  Indeed, countless patients in hospitals have been given a lift by the bright colors of flowers, which, being natural, speak without words to the value and wonder of each life, even though each life passes.

Marie Curie's statement suggests to me that her ability to rejoice because of Nature was something she carried within herself throughout her life.  That idea of an inner source of strength from loving Nature is the very idea Rachel Carson put forward over half a century later.  In The Sense of Wonder, Carson wrote:  "I should ask [as] a gift to each child in the world... a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial."

That quotation in particular has made me reflect upon what might make a love of Nature so enduringly beneficial.  For one thing, if a person develops the ability to view the world with a childlike sense of wonder and delight, that ability can remain youth-giving.  Carson also points to the artificiality of too many human activities. They cannot satisfy the way the naturalness of Nature can.  We cannot feel at home in our world if the world around is made too sterile.

There is also the element of love.  As I cultivate a love for Nature, I cultivate an ability to love things that are unlike me, many of which have no immediate benefit to me.  I thus gain a form of self-transcendence.  I know of one church that put a twist on the more familiar Christian phrase "eternal life" by coining the slogan "love eternally."  Loving Nature can be a way of carrying within oneself a love to the very end of one's life.

~~~

Has there been a way that observing or remembering Nature has been of benefit to you?

(The Marie Curie quote is from Pierre Curie, by Marie Curie,

 as translated by Charlotte Kellogg and Vernon Lyman Kellogg, © 1923. p. 162.)

The Wilfred Owen poem referred to is "Conscious," in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.)

(The Carson quote is from The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson, © 1956.)

Being Sensitive or Not

"Don't be so sensitive!"  It's something that many a parent has told a child in order to deal with injured emotions.  It is for the very same reason that children are taught the verse, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

What got me to reflecting upon this matter of sensitivity, however, was not any incident involving a child's tenderness.  Instead, I got to thinking about this matter because of a tiny fern-like plant, the Mimosa roemeriana.  It's common name is, in fact, the "sensitive briar," and it is indeed quite sensitive.

When I was growing up, the children in my neighborhood would sometimes keep a lookout for the plant growing snug against the ground, hidden in the grass at the edge of the driveway.  If its pink puffball of a bloom was not present, it could remain camouflaged from our sight in the grass.  But what delighted us was not that pink ball, but the plant's sensitivity to touch.  Even just touching the leaf lightly with a small twig could make the rows of leaflets on each side of the center spine fold in against each other.

We were never able to figure out how long it was before the leaflets would re-open. However, there is one thing I have figured out from my study of this world:  It is not just humans and the sensitive briar that are sensitive.  Every animal, plant, fungi, algae, and bacteria upon this planet is.

Buddhism employs the word "sentient" (from a similar Latin root as "sensitive") to help cultivate a compassion not just for humans but for all animals.  That's a worthy endeavor, especially because too much of Western Christianity has narrowed down its focus to the human sphere.

Nevertheless, even plants, fungi, algae, and bacteria are sensitive in their own way in that they are responsive to stimuli from outside their bodies.  Although the relatively quick responsiveness of insect-eating plants such as the Venus's-flytrap is visible to our naked eye, all plants are changing their metabolism and growth patterns as the sun shifts and the water level changes. And we humans are learning the hard way how even bacteria species adapt to the warfare of our antibiotics.

Indeed, if any species of life had not been sensitive to its environment, it would not have evolved into the species it is today.  It is as if at the inception of each species, Evolution had commanded, "Be sensitive!"

~~~

How do you try to find a middle ground between being overly sensitive and not sensitive enough?

(The green artwork is licensed under a Creative Commons

 Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license by Ade McO-Campbell.)