Can the Earth Heal?

"Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal...."

With that succinct declaration, the late 19th-century nature-writer John Muir put his own spin on what had become a conventional aphorism.  Specifically, the saying that "Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal," which had come from a poem by the Irish romantic poet Thomas Moore writing over half a century earlier.  Grammatically, Muir's substitution of the word "earth" for Moore's word "Heaven" was a simple matter.  But spiritually and theologically, that substitution leads us into complexities:  Does the Earth heal, and if so, how?

I remember as a child being shocked upon first hearing a particular Bible story about Jesus healing a blind man.  Having grown up in a church, I was accustomed to hearing stories about Jesus compassionately healing people, but this story was different.  As the narrative goes, Jesus "spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes."  (John 9:6).  Jesus's then telling the man to go wash his eyes with water from a pool did not reduce my shock, because I thought Jesus should be smarter than to put such an unsanitary substance as saliva mixed with dirt in a person's eyes.  Even as a child, I had learned not to touch my eyes when my hands were dirty.

Having now more knowledge about symbols in the culture the Bible comes from, I know that earth -- the ground -- was associated with the source of existence itself.  In one of the creation accounts in Genesis, "God formed man from the dust of the ground." (Gen. 2:7)  There is, therefore, the suggestion in the story of the blind man that Jesus's healing is also a creative act -- giving new life to the blind man!

Calypso orchid

John Muir's declaration that the earth can heal all our earthly sorrows gains added significance within his late 19th-century context.  Muir felt that too much of the Christianity of his time had become otherworldly and human-centered.  It often focused on the assurance that a person's individual soul would have a place in the afterlife, instead of rejoicing in the wonder and beauty of the natural world all around.  Muir himself had often experienced how his own spirit could be healed by immersing himself in Nature. One of those occasions occurred during an unsettled time in his life, when he had been traveling on foot for months across part of Canada, meeting very few people.  One day, after wading for hours through a swamp, exhausted and discouraged, he suddenly came upon, as he described it, "the rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants... a Calypso borealis."  The flower's beauty broke in upon him so unexpectedly that he sat down beside it and wept, relieving a greater burden than just that one day's exhaustion.

Today, there are many people who have also experienced how turning their attention to something in Nature can be restorative, even healing.  And it doesn't require wandering for days in wilderness.  Sometimes it comes in more ordinary settings.

~~~

Has there been, or is there, an occasion on which you are restored by Nature?

(The quote by Muir about the earth, written in 1872, is from John of the Mountains, 1938. p. 99.
The quote about the flower is from his letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr in 1866)

(The quote by Thomas Moore [1779-1852] is from his "Come, Ye Disconsolate.")

(The flower photo, by Walter Siegmund, is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Putting Flesh on the Bones

Is there any child who does not at some point become interested in dinosaurs?  Any of a number of things about them can intrigue children.  Such as the dinosaurs' often large size (compared to being so small oneself).  And the fact that dinosaurs inhabit a world that cannot be seen, but which children can enter using their imagination.

The first dinosaur statues
(at Crystal Palace Park)

Even the adults who in the first half of the 19th century discovered fossils from large dinosaurs had to use their imagination to try to surmise what the living creatures would have looked like.  Monsters was the first guess. And so one of Britain's leading fossil anatomists, Richard Owen, named the category Dinosauria from the Greek words deinos and sauros, i.e. "monstrous lizard."  A 19th-century London sculptor depicted dinosaurs as so obese and close to the ground that the poor animals could have barely moved.

For people who were children a century later, it was the 1940 Walt Disney movie Fantasia that helped imaginations put life into dinosaur bones, even if that movie was cartoon animation. Disney's cartoon artists, in creating the dinosaur-story segment, drew the animals' complex movements more like living reptiles.  (Rather than turning dinosaurs into clown-like stick figures, as have some marketers of dinosaur-shaped breakfast cereal and canned noodles for children.)

Despite that improvement the Disney studio made, it was still to some degree a projection of our own mental monsters upon those ancient skeletons.  That is because even in the 1800's, paleontologists had possessed fossil evidence indicating that some dinosaurs had resemblances to birds rather than being more lumbering reptiles.  During the 20th century, more and more scientific evidence -- such as birdlike hipbones and fossils with signs of feathers -- has led to a strong consensus of the close lineages of birds and dinosaurs.  The earliest bird-branch of evolution is more like an overlap with some dinosaurs, thus making birds today somewhat like dinosaur descendants.  One biologist explains:  "Biologically [dinosaurs] were perhaps more akin to today's birds and mammals, thus possibly explaining their great success."

Even when envisioned as being in a way reptilian, there is something to be said for dinosaurs. Nevertheless, the word "dinosaur" continues to be used sometimes to mean something extinct, a relic.  The science-writer Stephen Jay Gould complains about that usage:

"I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur in succumbing to progress.  Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium.  Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects,

 entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity."

That child playing with plastic toys could have told adults that there was something cool about dinosaurs.

~~~

Did you become interested in dinosaurs as a child?  What do you think about them now?

(The biologist's quote is by Gregory M. Erickson in

 Evolution:  The First Four Billion Years, ed. Michael Ruse, et al., © 2009.  p. 518.)

(The Gould quote is from his collection Dinosaurs in a Haystack, © 1995.  p. 50.)

(Both the statues photo by Jes from Melbourne and the sign photo by Jeremy Thompson

 are used under Creative Commons Attribution Generic licenses.)

Wild and Free?

Under other circumstances, I might not have given a second thought to the single word "free."  After all, it was used in a common type of statement:  In an anthology of nature-writing, Words for the Wild, the editor Ann Ronald introduced an essay by Loren Eiseley, saying, "Loren Eiseley's wilderness differs somewhat from others' in [this anthology], but it is no less the terrain of what is wild and what is free."  Somehow my mind paused, and I began to ask questions about what it means to be free, and what might lie behind the appeal of a freedom that wilderness seems to offer.

I say "seems to offer" because wilderness and wildness can be idealized.  A predator in the wild might appear "free" to us, but how "free" is the prey that is being chased?

Alexis de Tocqueville
(1850)

Today in the U.S., we often associate getting out into the open spaces of wilderness with freedom, but that has not always been the case.  When the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, eager to see the American wilderness, visited this nation in 1831, he concluded:  "In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the American themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature...."  The reason for such an American attitude at that time was primarily practical:  The hardship of merely surviving apart from the support-system of civilization made living "in the wild" anything but a pleasant getaway.  It would require the construction of mapped roads connecting towns, along with a change in attitudes, before Americans could resonate with Lord Byron's idea of "pleasure in the pathless woods."

We humans, like all living beings, depend upon other entities.  Despite that dependence, every living being -- if its life is able to reach a fullness -- must still obtain a type of freedom from something in its past.  A chick needs to hatch and leave its shell behind.  So also must adolescent humans find some separation from their parents.

That ambiguity regarding freedom can lead to human hypocrisy.  De Tocqueville made a wry observation about American society.  He said that when Americans are criticized for their behavior, they protest, "I have a right to do so" -- whereas when they see someone else doing something they do not like, they exclaim, "There ought to be a law!"

Paradoxically, we can find a kind of release, a kind of freedom, when we yield to some forms of dependence.  The bird finding the breakfast upon which its life depends is simultaneously gaining a temporary freedom from hunger.  And vice versa:  The being that is finding a new form of freedom is at the same time developing new relationships with new forms of dependence.  That young adult moving out of its parents' home now depends upon friends or a job to sustain the newfound freedom.

Self-actualizing is an ever-ongoing combination of freedom and ties, ties and freedom, all in motion.  We might employ that word "wild" in a slang sense by remarking upon what a "wild and crazy" kind of life it is to exist on this planet!

~~~

What do you think the purpose of freedom should be?  Can you give an example?

(The Ronald quote is from Words for the Wild, ed. Ann Ronald.  © 1987.  p. 237.)

(The Tocqueville quote is from his Democracy in America, as quoted in
Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash, © 1982.  p. 23.)

(The quote by Lord Byron is from his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto IV, st. 178. [1817].)

Bears: Too Much and Too Little Like Us

The history of humans and bears has been a love-hate relationship.  Or to put it in a more historical order, a hate-love story, because it has taken time for our fear and hatred of bears to subside and our fondness for them to grow.  In past centuries, bears were nearly expunged from the Mideast, Europe, and the U.S.  Today, polar bears on notecards tug at our hearts, trying to persuade us to preserve their homes.  From fear to love.

Given that order of events, it interests me that a child's first encounter with bears usually comes in a loving, not a hateful way. Our societies may have had a hard time coming to delight in bears, but a child can delight in them early in life upon first being read "Goldilocks and the Three Bears."  As a child's reading level advances, bears can be stepping stones -- from Paddington Bear to Winnie the Pooh to Smokey the Bear with his instructions.  (If, as a young adult or adult, a person makes their way into Tolstoy's War and Peace, that person even encounters a young pet bear being among the guests at a drunken party Pierre attends.)

Despite our childhood intimacy with fictional bears (all the way down to teddy bears), real bears in the wild prefer to keep their distance from humans.  Bears prefer running away over attacking. Thus, one of the greatest delights of tourists in national parks is having the good luck of sighting a bear (safely, of course).  I remember my wife and I sitting eating lunch on a gentle wooded slope in Sequoia National Park when a brown bear quickly passed us, running over the hilltop to keep its distance from people on the other side, paying no attention to my wife and me.  We were also lucky in seeing a grizzly bear in Yellowstone when we were on a somewhat remote trail.  Almost beyond our range of sight, we watched the grizzly through binoculars.  It was standing watching us, keeping its distance, evaluating I am sure whether we were going to leave the trail and come closer.

That standing pose and their taillessness are reasons people have thought bears to be like people.  The native American Mewuk even have a story about bears "dancing."  The bear-human resemblance has, however, sometimes been an endangerment to bears' freedom, such as when they have been pressed into service riding bicycles in circuses.  Even today, people too easily think they understand a bear's emotions, even though bears' facial expressions are not like our own.  Such misreadings have resulted in injury when bears have been approached.  National park rangers exile any bear that hurts a person.  We protect them by keeping our distance.

An inordinate fear of bears in Western culture led for centuries to the cruel entertainment of bear-baiting, in which dogs were set upon a chained bear to attack it  In the 19th century in the U.S., the nature writer John Muir appealed for compassion for bears.  He did so by pointing out additional similarities to us:  "Bears are made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters.  A bear's days are warmed by the same sun, his dwellings are overdomed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and ebbs with heart-pulsings like ours, and was poured from the same First Fountain."

~~~

Do you have any memories of a real bear?  What about a bear in a book, or a stuffed toy?

(The Muir quote [1871] is taken from

 A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, © 1992.  139:22.)

(The first two pictures are in the Public Domain because their copyrights have expired.)

(The last picture is by A. N. Komarov and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license)

A Strange Word for a Strange World

The first time I was in a national park, I didn't know I was.  During that family vacation, I was elementary-school age, and I don't recall my parents every saying we were going to the "national park," or even to "the park."  Instead, we were going to see "the cave" or "Mammoth Cave."  Even though that famous cave is in a national park, I don't recall our having explored any landscape above ground (other than the gift shop and restaurant).

Mammoth Cave

I also believe it was during that family vacation that I first encountered the word "mammoth."  Today in the U.S., we rarely employ that word as an adjective, preferring "huge," "immense," or "gigantic."  Perhaps at the age I was, I had heard the word "mammoth" used as a noun to talk about woolly "mammoths" (based on the Russian name for those extinct animals first discovered in Siberia).  But I have no recollection of knowing about those creatures at that time either.  Because of my unfamiliarity with that strange word with three "m's" in it, the phrase "Mammoth Cave" did not sound like a description of the cave's size, but instead seemed to be a distinctive proper name, just like the name "Kentucky" for the state we were headed to.

Since that time of my childhood, I have been a tourist in a half-dozen other caves with less descriptive names.  What has stayed with me most in my memory is the otherworldliness of the experience.  (It has been similar to the experience of going into a dark movie theater and becoming so lost in the world of the movie that when I emerged back into daylight I had forgotten what day it was, and even what time of day.)  Some of that strangeness of caves has come from the fascinating, but in a way bizarre rock formations, often accentuated by man-made lights. More than those things, there has been the otherworldliness of actually being beneath the ground that had seemed so solid when I was above it.

Over a half-century before I entered Mammoth Cave as a boy, the early nature-writer John Burroughs (1837-1921) wrote eloquently about his own experience in that very same cave.  He emphasized the strangeness of the place by explaining how even blind people found it so:  "The blind seem as much impressed by it as those who have their sight....  They get some idea of the spaciousness when words are uttered....  When no word is spoken, the silence is of a kind never experienced on the surface of the earth, it is so profound and abysmal."

Burroughs then penetrates more deeply into the otherworldliness by pointing to its similarity to the dead being underground:  "I... said to myself, the darkness and the silence of their last resting-place is like this....  No vicissitudes of earth, no changes of seasons, no sound of storm or thunder penetrate here; winter and summer, day and night, peace or war, it is all one; a world beyond the reach of change...."

Burroughs' words made me even gladder that we humans have evolved so as to be suited to living upon this green Earth's surface, not confined inside it.

~~~

If you have ever been in a cave, what was it like being there and coming back out?

(The Burroughs quotes are from Riverby [1894] by John Burroughs.)

(The photo inside Mammoth Cave is by Daniel Schwen,

 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Seeing an Unseen Isle

Our contemporary ability to record audio and visual can easily make us think of memories as being like a video recording, perhaps with sound.  The manner in which our brains remember is, however, more complex and more subtle than that.  I think the early 19th-century writer Johann Goethe was perceptive in concluding that our memories coalesce around particular events and places.  Many poets have taken advantage of their own feelings that coalesce around a particular place in Nature they experienced.

William Butler Yeats

One of the most popular of such poems has been "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).  The short twelve-line poem begins simply enough with the poet seemingly saying he will be taking a trip to an island on a lake:

"I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree..."

There follows a short, picturesque description of the place it seems Yeats will be going to.  However, as the poem comes to an end, we realize that Yeats is only going to the island in his memory as a way of getting relief from the unappealing city he is now in:

"I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core."

Yeats confirmed this interpretation of his poem many years later when he replied to a letter from schoolgirls.  He explained that he wrote the poem when he was "very homesick in London."  His poetic evocation of a place he remembered resonated with readers who had never even seen Yeats beloved isle.  There was appeal in such lines as:

"And I shall have some peace there,
 for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning
 to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer,
 and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings."

In English, the word "remember" suggests a type of restoring, a type of being re-joined with something larger that a person is a part of:  We re-member.  As we recollect, we re-collect the broken parts of ourselves, bringing that collection of pieces back together.  To remember can be a way of putting together the pieces of our spirits, our best selves.  Yeats's remembering an isle was to him restorative.

Interestingly, on another occasion Yeats explained that his yearning for such a place began when he was young and his father read him Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's description of the place where he lived near Walden pond appealed to the young Yeats.

Thus we have a second kind of coalescence:  We have a network tying together Thoreau's evocative  description of Walden, Yeats's yearning, Yeats's coalesced memory, and the reader's own evoked imagination.  And that coalescence is expanded every time new readers are moved by "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," feeling themselves being made whole again as a place they have never seen emerges in their own imaginations.

~~~

Is there a place you were once at that you can remember in a restorative way?

(The quote from Yeats's letter, dated 30 Nov. 1922, is taken from

A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by A. Norman Jeffares, © 1968.  p. 33.)
(The portrait of Yeats by Sargent is in the  public domain, the copyright term being the life of the artist plus 80 years.) 

(Yeats's poem can be read in its entirety at this external link:  "The Lake Isle of Innisfree.")

Touched by Turtles

In the first part of a longer essay, the science writer Loren Eiseley tells a touching story about when he was a child.  He and a friend of his own age were walking across a high railroad trestle, something they were forbidden to do lest a train come when they were on the bridge.

As Eiseley described the experience, "One could look fearfully down... at the shallows and ripples in the shining water some 50 feet below.... From the abutment of the bridge we gazed down upon the water and saw among the pebbles the shape of an animal we knew only from picture books -- a turtle...."

I was a bit surprised by the next event:  "We scrambled down..."   When I began that sentence, I thought the boys' guilt at being on the forbidden trestle had overtaken them.  The remainder of the sentence, however, revealed that was not the reason:  "We scrambled down the embankment to observe [the turtle] more closely."  At this point, I was touched because it seemed that the boys' delight in another living being had been strong enough to overcome the adventure of trestle crossing.  That was true in a way, but the following sentence brought a darker atmosphere to Eiseley 's story:  "I saw that the turtle, whose beautiful markings shown in the afternoon sun, was not alive.... The reason for his death was plain.  [S]omeone engaged in idle practice with a repeating rifle had stitched a row of bullet holes across the turtle's carapace."

Reading this account, my emotions shifting, I was carried on a sequence from childhood adventure, to feeling the attraction of life, to a sobering realization of the potential dangerousness of humankind.  I felt as if I had been carried on a journey somewhat paralleling the course of U.S. attitudes toward turtles in my own lifetime.

The first turtle I saw as a child was one of the small turtles (only 2 to 3 inches in diameter) once frequently sold in pet stores.  They are less common now because we have learned that they are vulnerable to disease as pets, and thus do not live long.  Today, TV is educating people about the need to protect sea turtles' nesting grounds.  Those campaigns draw upon our human ability to be touched by the cuteness of newly-hatched baby turtles racing to the sea.  People even assist turtle infants in the race.

In many cultures, turtles have frequently represented stability, wisdom (because of the longevity of some species), and patience.  It is that last quality -- especially in the form of dogged persistence -- that shows up in the many variations of Aesop's fable "The Tortoise and the Hare." That fable teaches us that if we persist at working toward a goal, we can "win the race," as long as we don't get cocky like the hare.

In the final part of Loren Eiseley's childhood recollection,  he tells how his father guided him toward a more mature thinking that could incorporate an awareness of human destructiveness. Today in the U.S., we can wonder if our now greater concern for the environment and our growing love for Nature will be dogged enough to catch up with the destructiveness of our previous habits.  Or will the "hare" instead win because it had a head start?

~~~

Have you seen turtles or tortoises in the wild?  Where?  What were they like to you?

(The Eiseley quote is from "The Cosmic Orphan" by Loren Eiseley,

in the Propaedia to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, © 1977.  p. 206)

Blaming the “Brutes”

Social power has always been problematic.  It can be used for good or used for ill.  (That story is as old as Adam and Eve.)  In the West today, many people have become increasingly aware of how social hierarchies have been one avenue through which social power has been misused -- such as slaveholder over slave, and men over women.  There have also been hierarchies that have fostered condescension toward animals (or even worse, their abuse).

Frequently in the U.S. and England, such condescension came in the form of applying the word "brutes" to other mammals, whether wild or domesticated.  And it is no coincidence that definitions of the word "brute" include not only "an animal; a beast," but also "a brutal, crude, or insensitive person." As one of countless examples, the 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley made the following parallel:  "To degrade Humane Kind [humankind] to a level with Brute Beasts."  Even the 19th-century nature-writer Henry David Thoreau, who we today think of as being enlightened for his time wrote:  "None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter.”

This long-standing tendency to condescend to both animals and people lower on the hierarchy continued into the twentieth century, even if it sometimes became less obvious.  I chanced upon an example when I was reading, of all things, Michael Downing's history of the U.S.'s struggles over daylight saving time.  In the early 20th century, after legislation required an annual time-shift, The Nation magazine reported that "the ceremony of putting forward the clack has passed... without friction save for a growl from the farmer who anticipates trouble with his hired hand and his cow."  What caught my attention about that depiction was that the word "growl" -- a word usually used for the sound some non-human animals make --  was applied to a human being.  And, the two kinds of beings lowest in the hierarchy (the "cow" and the "hired hand") are blamed.

But farmers were the main opponents for a reason:  Even if they got up an hour earlier, that did not mean the cow's milk-giving had made any adjustment in its natural rhythms.  Moreover, what that statement by The Nation did not explain was that it was not just those underlings who objected to the time change.  But the underlings get blamed.

Today, our still expanding knowledge from the science of ecology has made it harder to think of our relationships with animals as their being on rungs below us on a vertical ladder. Instead, we -- humans and non-humans -- are related through multiple strands of a web.  Not just in the milk we drink and the food we eat, but also in cycles of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorus. Moreover, we humans are more dependent upon other species of life than most of them are dependent upon us.  We could not live without many of them, whereas most other species could do quite well without us.

As our ecological awareness expands, maybe we can also come to be more aware of our dependence upon people who are lower than us on the social scale.  And more sensitive to their needs as well.

~~~

Which animals or people "beneath you," which you depend upon, come to your mind?

(The Berkeley quote is from Alciphron [1732], I. i. xiii. 48.)

(The Thoreau quote is from Walden [1854], Chap. 1:  "Economy.")

(The  quote from The Nation, April, 1919, is in Spring Forward, by Michael Downing.  © 2005 . p. 22.)

Of Slugs and Slime and Snails

The 20th-century naturalist Gerald Durrell wrote that one of his earliest recollections as a child was of when he and his caretaker were walking along a dirt road in India.  The earthen road was wet from rain.  As he explains, he saw "two huge khaki-colored slugs brought out by the rain.... I remember squatting down and watching them, enraptured, seeing them slide over the earth without any legs to propel them.... To me, they were not only fascinating but, in their own way, as pretty as [an Indian woman] in her beautiful sari."

Durrell's adult caretaker was alarmed, pulling Durrell away from the "filthy" things. Understandably, even though it aids their locomotion, the sliminess of slugs and snails can be a turnoff to us.  But if we are self-reflective, I think we might conclude that such a repugnance comes from a natural concern about mucous discharged from our own bodies.  We should not blame the little animals for that.

Although both slugs and snail are in the same class of gastropods (having a single foot-pad beneath them for locomotion), snails have an edge on engaging practically-minded adults.  Snails, besides being candidates as food (which we delicately call "escargot"), have aesthetically pleasing spiral shells, sometimes used for jewelry.

sea slugs ("nudibranches")

Meanwhile, as we humans eat our escargot and make jewelry, in the deep ocean, cousins of the land-species live their own ocean lives.  The parallel to our land slugs are called either sea slugs or nudibranches, some of which are highly colorful.  Those marine slugs and snails speak of the ancestry of gastropods going back half a billion years.

Although in our everyday life we usually encounter a lone garden snail or garden slug here or there, some species can live in great concentrations in their usually hidden world.  I remember a biology teacher on a field trip probing into the continually damp ground on a river embankment. He wanted to show us what he thought might be the greatest concentration of snail's possible -- tiny ones, less than 1/4-inch in diameter, crowded "shoulder to shoulder," if it could be said that snails have shoulders.

Am I the only child who, when first seeing a slug, thought that it must be a snail that had somehow lost its shell? Am I the only child who felt a concern for the slug, which looked terribly vulnerable without a protective "house" on its back into which it could retreat for safety?  I cannot believe I am the only child who had such thoughts.

Placing that childhood recollection of mine beside Durrell's childhood recollection, I see similarities in the caring about something and in the finding something to be wondrous.  My caring, and Durrell's wonder.  Both having an element of child-fullness.  Maybe wonder, like caring, comes more from the heart than from the head.

~~~

Do you have any childhood or adult recollections of slugs or snails?  What are they?

(The Durrell quote is from The Amateur Naturalist by Gerald Durrell, © 1982.  p. 9.)

(Photo of blue nudibranches is by Alexander R. Jenner; that of the brown slug by Guttorm Flatabø [user:dittaeva].

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licenses.)

Animals Emerging Out of Darkness

Tens of thousands of years ago, human beings would have sat around fires after dark, listening to storytellers.  Occasionally their eyes would have followed sparks rising upward in the fire's heat -- bright sparks joining the stars against the darkness of the night sky.  I imagine that while looking up into the night sky and listening to the storyteller, their minds would have begun to see shapes -- constellations -- emerging out of the myriad stars:  Images of animals and of people.  There, a bear!  And there, a scorpion!

An immense time later, in the 9th century C.E., a man named Jahiz (or "al-Jahiz") described a different way that animals emerged out of darkness.  Jahiz wrote about how he and Bedouin travelers camping in the desert at night had repeatedly observed a series of animals coming out of the surrounding darkness.  First came the flying insects, drawn into the campfire's circle of light.  Then, looking for food as well as warmth, came lizards, mice, snakes, and even foxes. Sometimes as many as seventy different kinds of animals would emerge on a single night.

 
from The Book of Animals

Jahiz collected such accounts and spun them together with stories, other observations of animals, and philosophical reflections in his Book of Animals.  It was more than an inventory of those animals that emerged out of the darkness.  What also emerged into the awareness of the Bedouins and Jahiz was how the animals seemed to form a hierarchy from tiny to large, and how the animals' lives were tied together with multiple interrelationships. Jahiz (being also a writer of philosophy and theology) added to that awareness his answer to some Bedouins' question of why the Creator had made noxious creatures.  Jahiz explained to his companions in the desert (and to his readers) that:  "Each species constitutes a food for another species....  Divine Wisdom has decreed that some species are the source of food for others, and some species are the cause of death for others."

Orpheus and the Beasts

Constellations emerging into focus. Real animals coming out of the darkness.  So also have animals emerged into the lives, culture, consciousness, and imagination of human beings.  That emergence occurred in a transformative way in the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, when animals were domesticated for food and labor. There was also another form of emergence as animals became part of humans' mythologies, legends, fables, and proverbs.

In the 20th century, as our societies became more urban, animals often faded into the background, often forgotten except for when we took outings to the zoo or to national parks. Today, however, I think animals might be re-emerging into our human consciousness in a new way.  As we watch TV shows such as Nature and National Geographic, we learn about more of life's immense diversity -- the number of species being almost as innumerable as stars in the night sky.  Also, we are trying to bring into sharper focus how we might be caretakers for threatened species so that they will not become extinct, like stars extinguished into darkness.

~~~

Are there occasions on which you think of animals?  What are those occasions?

(The Jahiz quote is from his Living Beings,

as quoted in Darwin's Ghosts by Rebecca Stoat, © 2012, p. 53.)
(The page from the Arabic book is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.) 

Not in Jest

I am not a seer.  Nevertheless, I can predict one news story that will assuredly be on my radio every April 2nd:  There will be a news story explaining how some other news story the preceding day was only an April Fool's hoax.  The inevitability of that post-April-Fool's story makes me want to not believe anything I hear on any April 1st.  It seems it might be safer to just wait twenty-four hours until everything gets sorted out.

But life won't wait for everything to be cleared up.  There are too many things I have to accept as if they were true, or I would be paralyzed.  Even stepping out my front door in the morning, I have to assume the ground will support me the way it did the day before.

These thoughts came to me after I was struck by the similarity between two quotations, even though their authors never met.  The first quotation is from Islam's primary scripture, the Qur'an (Koran).  In this passage, God (using the royal plural) tells us:

"Know that We did not create the heavens and the earth,

 and all that is between them, in frivolous play."

Reading that passage, I recalled immediately a quotation by the 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau. It goes like this:

"God did not make this world in jest;

 no, nor in indifference.

 These migrating sparrows

 all bear messages that concern my life."

These lines from Thoreau tell me that I should treat the world of Nature around me --  a world not made by humans -- with an earnestness.  Even treating it as having messages for me.  The line quoted from the Qur'an, in its context, tells me the same.  It is a view also expressed by the traditional Christian idea that Nature can in some fashion be read as the "Book of Nature," with its messages about God.

Even if I do turn my attention away from the many distractions of our highly technological society to look at Nature for awhile, the challenge can be that there are so many "messages," and they do not always seem to be saying exactly the same thing.  One "message" Spring brings feels comfortably warming after the harsh winter.  Another "message" that Spring often delivers irritates my allergies and can lead to a sinus infection.  And those are only two of the messages at one particular time of year in my "Inbox" from Nature.

It can be a bit like trying to sort out which e-mails are junk-mail needing only a glance, which e-mails are easily misleading spam, and which are personal e-mails I should truly slow down for, letting the inner message sink into my mind and heart.  Only some messages seem to be "signs" in the sense of pointing significantly to deeper truths.

Nevertheless, perhaps by just going through the "Inbox" of Nature every day -- being sure it gets my attention -- I will be invigorated.  For, as the 20th-century author Isaac Bashevis Singer said:

"What nature delivers to us is never stale."

~~~

Is there a particular time during the day when you have a chance to turn your attention to Nature? What is that occasion?  How does observing it affect you?

(The verse from the Qur'an is 21:16.)

(The Singer quote is from New York Times Magazine, 26 Nov. 1978,

 as quoted in A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, © 1992.  87:108.)

“Family” Rituals

All of the world's faith-traditions have rituals.  So much so that many people recognize the importance of rituals in adopting a religious path.  And so, as we live within religious traditions, we, our families, and our friends learn and cultivate regular practices that nourish our spirits.

Of course, rituals need not be particularly religious.  The 20th-century writer Joseph Wood Krutch wrote simply yet eloquently of one particular kind of ritual.  He wrote:  "To plant a garden, a window box, or even to cultivate a house plant is to perform a sort of ritual and thereby to acknowledge even in the middle of a city, one's awareness that our real kinship is with life, not with mechanism."  I think Krutch's words are particularly important and could become increasingly valuable with time.  With more people in large cities growing dissatisfied with long commute times, and with builders designing more compact modes of housing closer to downtown areas, more of us find ourselves living with less open land around our homes.  People more often have contact with green plants in the form of a small garden plot or house plant than in the form of a large, suburban backyard.

The phrase "family ritual" usually suggests some custom or ritual that is passed on within a family generation after generation.  I think Joseph Wood Krutch has given a new possible dimension to the phrase "family ritual."  He points out that we have a "kinship" even with plants -- a "kinship... with life."  We and plants are in the same family with the last name Life. Therefore, cultivating and teaching children habits of planting a garden or tending a house plant or window box, can be ways of becoming more aware of what might be called "our extended family."

Setting aside jokes about talking to house plants (whether anybody wants to do so is their own choice), plants can truly be sensitive to influences we don't easily pick up on.  Just as is sometimes the case with human family members.  I know from my own sad experience that a room that seems to have adequate natural light to my human eyes (which can adjust to the dark) is woefully gloomy from most houseplant's point of view.

Any good ritual, however, can deteriorate into routine, becoming mechanical.  Not a good thing, especially in a world that has become increasingly full of "mechanism," as Krutch put it.  To prevent the deterioration of rituals, spiritual directors and writers give us guidance on cultivating mindfulness during our religious and spiritual rituals.  Perhaps the same thing could be done during our rituals of caring for plants.  The much loved Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh has bridged the divide between Buddhists and many Christians with such practices as "gathas," or simple prayer-verses designed to be said during ordinary activities.  I suggest that we might cultivate the use of a gatha as we water that garden plant or house plant.  A gatha such as:

"As I water this plant, may it be given new life, 

and may there also be new life in me."

~~~

Does a garden, window box, or house plant add anything to your life?  What?

(The Krutch quote is from The Best of Two Worlds
 by Joseph Wood Krutch, © 1953.  p. 168.) 

Seeing More than Seashells on the Seashore

The ones I see in the natural world are rarely as beautiful as the ones I see in photographs in books.  Seashells, that is.  Almost invariably, the shells shown in books' photographs are shiny, smooth, whole, and brightly colored; whereas the shells I find on beaches are often worn, dulled, or even chipped.  Of course, that can be part of the fun in collecting shells -- the challenge of finding one that is nearly perfect.

The story of our human fascination with shells, however, has involved more than merely collecting shells. Seashells have become a part of human culture in both tangible and intangible ways. In some tropical locations, because numerous, small, almost identical shells can be found, they have been turned into such things as currency or necklace beads.  Even when fewer shells or only less spectacular ones can be found, they can still be turned into a child's art project.

Our intangible relationships with shells are less obvious, but more intriguing -- in particular, the way that shells have become vehicles for reflecting about who we are in the world.  The modern classic in this regard was Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1955 book Gift from the Sea.  In that little, beautifully written book, Anne Lindbergh primarily used the outward shapes of different shells as metaphors for aspects of her own life.  Different shell-shapes become springboards as she reflected upon the question, "What is the shape of my life?"  Her book, reprinted in numerous editions, has been an inspiration to many, especially those who have felt the burdens and restrictions of society's not allowing equal roles for women.

However, as I look at and think about seashells, I would like to think of them as more than a physical shape that can be an analogy for some contour of my life.  I want to keep in mind that those shells have been part of the body of living creatures -- creatures who have had interests and endeavors of their own, sometimes endeavors quite different than mine.  Although I am interested in relationships between those shells on the beach and my own life, it is not so much a metaphorical relationship as it is the actual relationship between our human lives here on land and the lives of creatures in the ocean.  (In this way, I am influenced by a later generation of nature writers who have been affected by the modern environmental movement and by the science of ecology.)  A snail-like spiraling shell might be a special object of beauty to me, but to the animal who lived in it, that spiral was just a side product of the way it added to its shell as its body grew.

Therefore, as I study those shells and look at pictures of them in books, I also look at the diagrams of the strange bodies that once lived within those shells.  I do not see anything we might think of as a "normal" animal shape in the strange body, but I can recognize the diagram's words labeling parts such as "Mouth" and "Intestine." And, in some cases, even "eye."  As I read those labels, I am forced into remembering that in this shell was once a living, breathing being!  Maybe my delight in thinking about all those other beings can be for me a different kind of gift from the sea.

~~~

Have you ever picked up or gathered shells on a beach?  What made it enjoyable?

(The brief line by Lindbergh is from Chap. 2 of

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, © 1955.

  Twenty years after its 1955 publication, Lindbergh wrote an afterword,
 looking back at the book, which can be found in many editions.)

Desert – Spelled with One “s”

The first time I ever entered a desert, there was snow on the ground.  Needless to say, I was surprised.  Probably like many other people, I had associated deserts with the near absence of rain.  I had even heard about a book entitled The Land of Little Rain, which is an early example of American nature writing about a desert region.  Admittedly, what I encountered on my trip was not rainfall but snow.  However, the precipitation's being frozen made it even more surprising because I had also associated deserts with high temperatures.  Nor could high altitude account for the snow, because we were very close to sea level.  My surprise was even greater because I had lived for many years in a southern U.S. city where it snowed only once every ten years -- and I had come even further south to get to the desert.

The next surprise after the snow was that the desert's ground was not sand, but instead more like a gravel parking lot.  My third surprise was how fascinating were the variety of plants -- much more than cacti!  And I was struck by the desert's open vastness.

As I've thought about it, I've decided it is appropriate that I should have been disconcerted by the desert. Deserts, after all, were not designed to meet our human needs, nor even perhaps our expectations.  That is why in the Bible, the desert, or the wilderness, stands as a reminder that God neither created everything for humans, nor does God do everything for the sake of humans. Nevertheless, wilderness is seen as having its own value to God apart from any utilitarian value to humans.  As one verse puts it, " [God] has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain... on the desert, which is empty of human life."  (Job 38:25-26, NRSV).

Although the desert's being a counter to human-centeredness has been the primary lesson spiritual writers have taken from wilderness, there is also a more subtle lesson there.  That lesson comes from how severe landscapes are somehow able to bring forth a kind of growth in us as well, a kind of growth that lush settings cannot induce.  The contemporary Christian writer Kathleen Norris, in reflecting upon another type of sparse landscape wrote:  "A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky.... [W]hat seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state."

This "opening" effect seems to occur in part because the vastness and quietness of the desert can evoke a stillness within us when we are on such landscapes.  A quiet reverence.  The opening of something new within us can also occur as we become more aware.  Each creosote bush or small juniper tree surprisingly sprouting in a terrain that at first seemed barren can make us more attentive.  Deserts may be short on rain, but they have their own world of life, both plant and animal.  Deserts may be short on precipitation, but they have had for humans many lessons to tell.

~~~

Have you ever taken a vacation to a desert?  If so, which one?  What impressed you most about it?

(The Norris quotation is from

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris, © 1993.)

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.)

An “Island” Larger than Land

Some of my most delightful opportunities to see the other-worldliness of Nature have been when I've gone to certain restaurants.  No, it was not the samples of Homo sapiens I was watching (although people-watching can be interesting too).  Instead, these were restaurants that had a saltwater aquarium on display for the entertainment of customers.

After dining, I spend time peering into this saltwater world, watching for movement so that I can spot the life-forms other than the obvious fish.  Did I as a child think of all animals as being symmetrical with a right and left side?  Here, in this salt-water world, that idea is disproved. Here, circular is the game.  Circularity allows creatures that have no obvious face to be sensitive to the world in a full 360-degree perimeter.

I spot a sea anemone, its innumerable tiny arms ready to grab some passing prey.  Most camouflaged is the coral, which has taken evolution's advice to look like a rock most seriously, building its own rock-like castle for a colony of nearly microscopic beings to share.  Eventually, I have to leave this bit of ocean world trapped behind glass and come back to our human world of restaurant and city.

Of course, I have a number of times gone to the beach.  But those seashells strewn on the sand are only stone monuments to the dead, the living organisms that once inhabited them having passed on.  Those seashells are merely hints of the life that lives out beyond the water's edge.  They are only inanimate fragments hinting of the life beyond.

I did once get a closer glimpse into ocean life than an aquarium provides when my wife and I visited the tide pools on the Pacific coast of Olympic Natl. Park.  Roaming the beach, we stopped at each small depression of sand that held some temporarily trapped seawater with living inhabitants.  The best find were tiny starfish with five 1-inch arms.  However, as we examined the life-forms in the tide pools, we knew they would soon be covered over with the rising tide, thus being taken back into their rightful ocean home.

The oceans on this planet are to me something like giant tide pools, pocketed away from our life here on land.  The oceans are like isolated islands of life, even though they cover a greater area of the Earth's surface than does land.

Locked away in their own world of life, the oceans whisper to me some message of eternity for a reason I cannot quite explain.  However, Rachel Carson heard, I think, the same whisper when she wrote:  "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides... is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.  These things were before ever man stood on the shore of the ocean .... They continue year in, year out, through the centuries and the ages, while man's kingdoms rise and fall."

~~~

How has it felt to you to go to a beach or the ocean?

(The Carson quote is from Under the Sea Wind, © 1941.)