Being Inspired Even at a Distance

The Covid pandemic that began in 2020 put a kink in many people's usual plans for summer vacations, even in 2021, when vaccines were available for most adults in the U.S.  Life had changed, turning many in-person gatherings into virtual gatherings.  Adults had to depend more upon their memories of firsthand experiences they once had. And children needed to rely more on second-hand knowledge and their imaginations.  As I reflected on that situation, the following Wisdom in Leaves article, published four years previously, seemed particularly relevant.  It was titled "Hearing the Sea in a Shell."

~ ~ ~

It is an experience every child should have for the first time:  Holding a large shell to one's ear and hearing the sound of "the sea" supposedly still in the shell. How many parents or grandparents have initiated their child or grandchild to seashore wonders by instructing the child to "hear the ocean" in that way?  How many children have smiled upon first hearing the sound a large seashell makes, imagining for a moment they really heard the sea?  I recognize that an acoustical scientist could give a good, detailed explanation for the perhaps puzzling effect.  But I am more interested in how that experience can be an opening to how we and all things are part of a larger whole.  That is the very matter the poet William Wordsworth explored in his long poem The Excursion.

Even though the sea-in-seashell symbol could be a good literary opening, it appears in the middle of Wordsworth's poem when, in his memory, he sees himself as a boy:

"A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract

Of inland ground, applying to his ear

The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;

To which, in silence hushed, his very soul

Listened intensely; and his countenance soon

Brightened with joy; for from within were heard

Murmurings, whereby the monitor [the shell] expressed

Mysterious union with its native sea."

In the very next line, Wordsworth opens up the metaphor of how -- if we orient ourselves properly -- we can "hear" in the natural world intimations ("Murmurings") of a larger, deeper reality:  "Even such a shell the universe itself / Is to the ear of Faith...."  Moreover, Wordsworth later addresses his words to a larger divine Spirit that includes all of our own spirits, just "as the sea her waves."

The magic of children innocently believing (at least for a moment) they are hearing the sea in a shell derives from a child's wonderful delight in first discovering the world.  And so, a stanza early in the poem began with the statement "Such was the Boy."

oil portrait of
William Wordsworth
by Benjamin Haydon

Even though we adults cannot actually return to our childhoods, Wordsworth expresses how, even in old age, our memory can restore to us some of our original exaltation. That ability of memory to recreate something not physically present is similar to the seashell's ability to recreate the physical ocean, which is not physically present:

"If the dear faculty of sight should fail,

Still, it may be allowed me to remember

What visionary powers of eye and soul

In youth were mine; when, stationed on the top

Of some huge hill -- expectant, I beheld

The sun rise up, from distant climes returned....

... my spirit was entranced

With joy exalted to beatitude...."

~~~

Are there ways you restore contact and communion with those who are not physically present?

(The two large excerpts are from Book IV, "Despondency Corrected" of The Excursion [1814]

That full section of the book-like poem can be read at this external link:  The Excursion, Book IV.)

Hearing the Sea in a Shell

It is an experience every child should have for the first time:  Holding a large shell to one's ear and hearing the sound of "the sea" supposedly still in the shell. How many parents or grandparents have initiated their child or grandchild to seashore wonders by instructing the child to "hear the ocean" in that way?  How many children have smiled upon first hearing the sound a large seashell makes, imagining for a moment they really heard the sea?  I recognize that an acoustical scientist could give a good, detailed explanation for the perhaps puzzling effect.  But I am more interested in how that experience can be an opening to how we and all things are part of a larger whole.  That is the very matter the poet William Wordsworth explored in his long poem The Excursion.

Even though the sea-in-seashell symbol could be a good literary opening, it appears in the middle of Wordsworth's poem when, in his memory, he sees himself as a boy:

"A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract

Of inland ground, applying to his ear

The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;

To which, in silence hushed, his very soul

Listened intensely; and his countenance soon

Brightened with joy; for from within were heard

Murmurings, whereby the monitor [the shell] expressed

Mysterious union with its native sea."

In the very next line, Wordsworth opens up the metaphor of how -- if we orient ourselves properly -- we can "hear" in the natural world intimations ("Murmurings") of a larger, deeper reality:  "Even such a shell the universe itself / Is to the ear of Faith...."  Moreover, Wordsworth later addresses his words to a larger divine Spirit that includes all of our own spirits, just "as the sea her waves."

The magic of children innocently believing (at least for a moment) they are hearing the sea in a shell derives from a child's wonderful delight in first discovering the world.  And so, a stanza early in the poem began with the statement "Such was the Boy."

oil portrait of
William Wordsworth
by Benjamin Haydon

Even though we adults cannot actually return to our childhoods, Wordsworth expresses how, even in old age, our memory can restore to us some of our original exaltation. That ability of memory to recreate something not physically present is similar to the seashell's ability to recreate the physical ocean, which is not physically present:

"If the dear faculty of sight should fail,

Still, it may be allowed me to remember

What visionary powers of eye and soul

In youth were mine; when, stationed on the top

Of some huge hill -- expectant, I beheld

The sun rise up, from distant climes returned....

... my spirit was entranced

With joy exalted to beatitude...."

~~~

Are there some particular experiences in Nature that allows your spirit to feel how it is included as part of some larger Spirit of life and of the universe?

(The two large excerpts are from Book IV, "Despondency Corrected" of The Excursion [1814]

That full section of the book-like poem can be read at this external link:  The Excursion, Book IV.)

The Oyster’s Secret

One species of
edible oysters

Any number of movie writers have used the plot device of a person eating at a restaurant and finding a pearl in their oyster.  If the screenwriters had consulted marine biologists, those scientists would have disappointed them by explaining that those species of oyster people eat do not include the mollusks that produce pearls. The idea of such a find is appealing, however -- like a winning lottery ticket from Nature herself!  But this source of new-found wealth would come in the form of a small luminescent sphere.

The 20th-century novelist John Steinbeck cautioned against that appeal in The Pearl, a book that was assigned reading when I was in middle school.  The school's decision to require our reading that novella probably lay in its small size and obvious moral:  Greed over material possession can cause people to damage what is truly valuable -- human relationships and love.  Human beings have now figured out how to artificially induce the growth of "cultivated" pearls.  We have not, however, figured out how to get rid of human greed.

There can be another reason for appreciating mollusks:  for food, as many oyster lovers know. Oysters even come with a running gag to make eating them more entertaining.  Namely, the joke that it was a brave man who ate the first oyster.  (I myself very much appreciate the first man or woman who learned how to batter and fry oysters prior to their being served.)  Many people repeat that "brave man" joke without knowing that it originated with the 18th-century Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels.

Although the oyster's secret might seem to be a possible pearl hidden within, it is really no secret that pearls are now usually cultivated.  What is a secret is not what might lie within an oyster, but where oysters lie.  Where they now lie "at rest," so to speak.  And what that speaks about humankind.

The walrus and the carpenter --
whose oysters had fictional legs

That secret lies underwater in middens, old refuse heaps from human cultures.  Those underwater heaps,  which are on coastal areas throughout the world, besides containing bones, contain oyster shells -- evidence of how oysters were an important source of dietary protein and minerals to Neolithic cultures twelve thousand years ago. One midden in Maine, mostly oyster shells, was over 30 feet deep and over 1,300 feet wide.  Although in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass the comic walrus and carpenter tempted the oysters to come out for a walk on the beach so that they could be eaten, oysters had the benefit to humans of being food that could neither run away nor counterattack.  As such, oysters would have sustained human life over precarious times.

Without eyes or an obvious head, and given their inability to run away, it can be easy, I think, for us to forget that oysters are animals, as are we. Oysters live; they breathe; they reproduce. They are another testimony to evolution's ingenuity.  Moreover, although there may not be a pearl within that rugged lump of seeming rock, for ancient humans, there was a source of life within.

~~~

Imagine people gathering oysters thousands of years ago.  Does anything come to mind?

(The photo of oysters is by Myrabella

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

(The illustration of walrus and carpenter is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

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.)

Stranger and Truer than Science Fiction

Sometimes after watching an episode of the Star Trek TV series, I think that the designers of the space aliens' costumes and makeup need to go back to school, so to speak.  Not to a costuming course in drama school.  And not to a makeup academy.  Instead, they need to return to fiction-writing school to give more thought to what an alien that developed on another planet might even be like.

I tend to think this way not after reading an astronomer's analysis of conditions on other planets.  Instead, my thoughts incline this way after seeing pictures or reading about forms of life in the ocean on our very own planet Earth.  Evolution has come up with some "costumes" and "makeup" far beyond the imagination of any science-fiction writer or director.  And the strangest ways of being a living being can be found in our oceans.

Just take the matter of virtually all space aliens on Star Trek having two symmetrical sides, right and left (just as do humans and all other vertebrates).  A simple exception in the ocean to such symmetry are male fiddler crabs, which have a claw on one side of their bodies much larger than the claw on the opposite side.  (Thus the whimsical appellation "fiddler" we have given them.)

Nature had already gone a step even further away from requiring animals to have two sides when the invertebrates previously evolved.  Sea anemones, sponges, and jellyfish are all circular in design.  Imagine a Star Trek director instructing a person in a spherical costume to "face the camera."  Evolution had an even greater imagination when it came up with the starfish's "costume," giving it five arms -- an odd number, of all things.

Another area in which I think science-fiction writers have been outdone by Nature has been in that of eyes.  I have seen a TV space alien made up with one additional eye on its forehead, or even with an extra pair.  (It would take more work to mask over the actor's real eyes and give them a single, centered eye, like the Cyclops in the ancient Greek epic Homer's Odyssey.)

Contrast that prosaic eye-on-forehead thinking with the idea of a whole ring of small eyes around a circular cookie-shaped body.  To make that many-eyed circular costume even stranger, don't space the tiny eyes at even intervals, but place some a little closer together and others a little farther apart.  That is the approach actually taken by the blue-eyed scallop of Australia. Moreover, what a colorful touch in the pinhead eyes being blue!

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I am not really trying to criticize science-fiction writers.  I do recognize that science fiction is really more about our human societies than it is about what exists on other planets.  (I also recognize the limitation of trying to make an alien costume that allows a person to fit inside.)  My aim is not criticism but amazement.  I am amazed at the immense variety of "costumes" of the beings in our oceans, demonstrating again that life's possibilities are even greater than our own human imaginations.

~~~

Do you think we might draw a lesson from the strange variety of species?  Or would that be carrying our imaginations too far?

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.)

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.)