The Earnestness and Frivolity of Flowers

The painter Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "A flower is relatively small."  And yet she depicted them as being enormous!  Her easily identifiable paintings of flowers, which were one of her favorite subjects later in her career, often depict a single, huge, brightly-colored flower spilling over the edges of the canvas.  One of O'Keeffe's flowers can cover a hundred times its square-area in real life.  A biologist could easily appreciate that out-of-scale depiction, although for biological rather than aesthetic reasons.  After all the flower was a revolution in the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Green plants with photosynthesizing chlorophyll did exist on our planet before there were flowers.  However, it could take those conifers over a year to produce seeds snugly nested in cones.  One revolution flowers brought (when they evolved 100 million years ago) was the ability to release a seed in only a month.  That was an explosion in reproductive capability. That flower-explosion also brought about a revolution in the prehistoric world of animals.  As flowers evolved into different shapes, the insect world evolved simultaneously, new insects being adapted to take advantage of new food-source shapes.  In turn, bird and mammal species found new food in the flowers, seeds, and insects, thus putting competitive pressure on the older species of dinosaurs.

Today, understandably, few people are thinking about such significant events in the history of planet Earth when they purchase or pick a flower.  Flowers can be an earnest business for commercial flower-growers and florists.  But it is a flower's enjoyable color, fragrance, and shape that capture an average person's attention.

True, flowers do sometimes become a part of solemn ceremonies.  A wreath of flowers can soften the hard edge of a coffin, thus soothing the hearts of the bereaved.  Despite the flower's fragility, symbolizing the transitoriness of life, its reproductive associations bring a hint of life into the acceptance of death.

More frequently, however, flowers shout out "life!"  The humorist Mark Twain made the earnest observation that "Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole."  Over a century later, men wear boutonnieres much less often. But the symbolic tie between flowers and restored life endures.  All the way down to anti-war demonstrators inserting flowers into phalanxed soldiers' rifle barrels.

With their colorful intensity and their message of new life, specific flowers have gained a role as a prominent symbol in many of the world's faith-traditions:  The lily of Easter resurrection in Christianity. The lotus of life-giving tranquility in Buddhism. And the light-giving Golden Flower in Taoism.

For the billions of bees and other insects who search for food each day, flowers are a serious business.  But for most people, flowers are just plain fun!

~~~

Where do you encounter flowers?  Do you have any favorites?  What do they express?

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.) 

Elephants on the Agenda

Is there any child that at some point does not like elephants?  Why?  I think it has to do with more than elephants' trunks (even though those remarkable appendages do provide opportunity for children's jokes about what elephants pack in their trunks).  The Disney movie Dumbo, for example, spun its story more around Dumbo's big ears than around his nose.  And in Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who, the elephant Horton's entire personality propels the story.  Although trunks are part of our fascination with elephants, I think a larger reason might be the elephant's size and capabilities.

It was certainly the massive size of elephants that motivated adults to first domesticate them. Sadly, to me, one of the main uses the animals were put to was to fight in wars (at least as far back as the 4th century B.C.E. in India).  When I was growing up, I would occasionally hear some adult make a reference to Hannibal's feat of moving an army over the Alps in the 3rd century B.C.E.  It was only as an adult that I read the elephants' tragic side of the story:  When Hannibal began his long march toward Rome, he had 50 elephants in his military force; by the time he got beyond the Alps, only 8 elephants were still alive.

Today, with our growing consciousness of environmental impacts, we are more aware of the risks elephants face from poachers desiring their ivory tusks.

relief mural in Thailand

When children advance beyond Dumbo and Horton, they are likely to learn the story of the blind men, each of whom described an elephant differently because each touched only part of the animal, none of the men being able to see the whole.  I have heard that story variously described as being of Hindu and of Buddhist origin.  One form in which that parable has been perpetuated in English-speaking culture has been through John Godfrey Saxe's 1872 poem "The Blind Men and the Elephant."  Saxe, in his final stanza, clearly showed that his target was theologians ("in theologic wars," as he put it). Today, I think rightfully, we are more likely to use the story of the blind men to remind ourselves that in any endeavor we can become blind to the whole.

Over the past few decades, we have even learned that our knowledge of the lives of elephants has been fragmentary.  We have discovered that some elephant herds in Kenya make risky periodic trips into the Kitum Cave in order to get salt to supplement their diet.  And we have now found out that elephants grieve, displaying anguish not only over the corpse of a comrade but also over the bones of a deceased member of the herd.

Laotian painting of the
Buddha's loving kindness
calming an elephant
    

Oh, and as for that matter of why children are fascinated with elephants, I will speak for myself.  Looking back on my own childhood, I have decided my fascination was because of elephants' grace and friendliness despite their massive size.  Especially as a child, the world seemed massive and overwhelming.  But, with the elephants in the zoo and in the circus, I possessed evidence that something that seemed overwhelming could be made manageable.  Even made friendly.

~~~

Do you have any recollections of seeing elephants when you were a child?

(The photo with the Buddha is used through a

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(Saxe's poem can be read at this external link:  "The Blind Men and the Elephant.")