Tiny Tanks

Tiny army tanks -- that's what they often look like.  Beetles, that is.  The way these particular insects, often with bulky bodies, plow ahead over rough terrain can easily remind a child of army tanks they've seen on TV.  (One subgroup is even called "soldier beetles.")

One 20th-century evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, suggested that a different type of mindset might lie behind this Coleoptera category of insects, and his comment has entered the canon of science-humor stories.  After a distinguished career in biology, a reporter asked Haldane what conclusion about the mind of the Maker he had drawn from his vast, scientific knowledge of Nature.  Haldane replied, "an inordinate fondness for beetles."

Indeed, there are over 400,000 species of these little creatures (almost half of all insect species), identifiable by their pair of hard forewings serving as armor.  Some beetles click; some emit blinking light; some are like whirligigs.  Although the word "beetle" derives from the Old English "bitela," meaning "biting," very few would bite you.

 I know God did not invent beetles just to entertain us.  (They and many other insects were, after all, around for at least 50 million years before hominids came along.) Nevertheless, more than one science-humor story revolves around them.

A frequently repeated anecdote is about the young Charles Darwin when he was alone, collecting beetles (one of his favorite hobbies).  Spotting an unusual beetle, he picked it up, but then spotted one of a different species, which he picked up with his other hand.  But then he spotted a third beetle, and so popped the second beetle into his mouth to quickly free a hand.  As Darwin later recalled, "Alas, [the beetle in my mouth] ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out."  The author of a juvenile-level biography concludes this story with the straight-faced comment, "Bugs don't always do what you want them to, and not all beetles want to be caught."

It would be fun to think that God had invented Darwin's squirting beetle so that writers of biographies for youth would have a funny story to insert into their manuscript.  But I expect God has larger concerns in mind than the entertainment of readers.  (Even if the 19th-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray was able to wittily turn "beetle" into a verb by saying in Vanity Fair that "Chambermaids... beetled from bedroom to bedroom loaded with... champagne.")

No, my hunch is that the plenitude of beetle species has more to do with the strength of their body type and its adaptability to many different environments.  Hopefully, our human sense of humor will remain just as strong and adaptable.

~~~

Even if you don't know what type they were, have you ever noticed any insects around the entrance to where you live?

(The Haldane quote was in an article by G. Evelyn Hutchinson

 in The American Naturalist in 1959 [93, 870]: 145-159.)

(The Darwin remembrance, originally in Life and Letters, Vol. 1, p. 43, and comment about it

 are from Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman, © 2009.  p. 24.)

Unable to Detach from the Past

1872 painting by John Gast

Examine the population and growth patterns of cities in the U.S., and you will find that many of them have grown more heavily toward their west sides than to the east, especially in the post-World War II boom. Although a fair number of cities are now seeing new growth in older, inner areas (often because of the appeal of shorter commute times), suburban sprawl is often greater on U.S. cities' western sides.  This peculiarity developed out of a much larger growth pattern in U.S. history:  The movement of European settlers on this continent has been primarily to the west.  A century-and-a-half ago, Horace Greeley quoted John Soule, commanding, "Go West, young man," and people in the U.S., men and women, young and old, have done just that.  Today's cities echo the nation's past.

This phenomenon is but one case of how we cannot escape our past, even as much as we might want to.  Frequently, our ties to the past remain unconscious.  For example, because of the westward growth of many cities, more people commute by driving into the sun in the morning and into the sun again in the evening -- an inconvenience we would have avoided if it had been the only factor affecting our decisions of where to live and work.

This inconvenience of squinting into the often blinding sun as we commute reveals another way in which we cannot escape the past:  We cannot break away entirely from patterns of Nature that were laid down long before Homo sapiens were around.  The sun is not about to change its course in response to where we build our houses and places of work.  The 20th-century author Maya Angelou cleverly wrote, "Nature has no mercy at all.  Nature says, ' I'm going to snow.  If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough.  I am going to snow anyway.' "

Given that we are unable to detach ourselves entirely from the past life on this planet,  how might we relate to it?  The answer all of the world's faith-traditions have given is that we should cultivate an appreciation of and a desire to emulate the highest values of the past.  Despite that commonality among traditions, people of one faith-tradition have not always comprehended the methods of another.  For example, Lin Yutang, an early 20th-century Chinese émigré to the U.S., explains how Christian missionaries mistook Chinese shrines honoring ancestors as being idolatry.  Thus the translation of the name for practices at the shrines as "ancestor worship" in English.  Lin Yutang clarifies the practices in this way:  "Only by the wildest stretch of imagination could they be called idolatry..."  Instead, the practice "for the Chinese, is the embodiment of reverence for the past and continuity with the past....  It was the basis of all that was good and honorable and of the desire to go forward."

Maya Angelou also had some succinct words about those who went before:  "They existed. We can be.  Be and be better.  For they existed."  That statement could describe non-humans in our evolutionary past just as much as it describes our human ancestors.

~~~

What have you received from the past that you are particularly grateful for?

(The Greeley/Soule quote [1851] is taken from Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, © 1968.  p. 678b.)

(The Angelou quote is from "Maya Angelou: An Interview," Oct. 1974, in Conversations with Maya Angelou, ©1989,)

(The Lin Yutang quote is from From Pagan to Christian by Lin Yutang, © 1959.  p. 37.)

(The painting by John Gast [1872] is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Laughing Beneath the Meteors

What was it about the written reminiscence that made it so appealing?  Why could I so easily identify with the firsthand experience that was being described, and with the inner feeling the writer remembered?  It was a recollection by a poet in his twenties, thinking back to an occasion of nighttime camaraderie with peers:

"Some day I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled, and danced through the dark lanes....  and how we laughed till the meteors showered round us,

 and we fell calm under the winter stars.

 And some of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time.

 And seeing it so far above us, and feeling the good road so safe beneath us,

 we praised God with louder whistling...."

As I read this recollection, I almost wished I were there myself.  The cool night air.  The feeling of relaxation among friends.  The happiness and contentment.  The star-filled sky above.  The wonder of a sudden meteor shower.

Even as relaxing and restorative as those things were, there was also a deeper layer that gently emerged.  It seemed to have to do with that experience young people can have when they feel their youthful idealism beginning to be channeled into the paths of their individual identities:

"[S]ome of us saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time."

I felt as if I knew those subjective emotions because I had experienced them myself at that stage of adolescence:  The paradox of joyful freedom despite not knowing what the future will hold. The only thing I had not experienced as such was the meteor shower.  But I still felt as if I could understand the meaning of what the author described.  Today, in our U.S. popular culture, such things as meteors get mentioned mostly in the form of the fear that a massive asteroid might hit the Earth, bringing devastation.  Modern science also tells us that our sun will eventually burn out, bringing death to the Earth.  Terrifying scenarios caused by uncontrollable events in outer space abound (guaranteeing work for screenwriters of disaster movies).  In contrast, the young poet remembers laughing with his companions as the meteors rained down.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

The reminiscence has a power of its own.  But it is given added poignancy by knowing that it was written by the British poet Wilfred Owen, who died at the age of 25, fighting in World War I.  Owen's war poems have a sensitivity of feeling not unlike that which is revealed in this reminiscence, shared by letter with a friend the year before Owen was killed in battle.

To me, the reminiscence, even as brief as it is, conveys an experience of belonging.  The combination of the companionship of friends and the surrounding realm of Nature convey a sense of ultimate belonging.  Wilfred Owen is now gone.  But nighttime is still cooler than the day. Overhead, there are still stars.  And there is still, I am sure, at least one more shooting star ready to be seen as it pierces the air we breath.

~~~

Have you ever experienced a moment of deep contentment while you were in Nature?

(Owen's reminiscence is quoted in "Memoir (1931)" by Edmund Blunden,

in the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, © 1963.  p. 172.)

(The photograph of Owen is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Getting Beyond the Bitterness

I turned to the poem in the anthology partly because of an experience involving a friend when I was in college.  That fellow student's family owned a produce company that brought together vegetables from a number of farmers, cleaned and packed them, and distributed them to grocery stores.  One evening, my friend took me to see the company's processing center after the day's operations had been completed.  There I saw more radishes than I had ever seen in my life or will probably ever see again.  The radishes were neatly packaged in small bags piled five-feet high on a pallet five-feet square.  An estimated 125 cubic feet of the familiar reddish radish, each no more than an inch in diameter!

As I said, it was partly that memory that prompted me to turn to a particular poem -- one with "radish" in its title -- in an anthology of sacred poetry.  The poem was a simple three-liner by the 18th-century Japanese poet Issa:

"The man pulling radishes

pointed the way

with a radish."

So short, the poem forced my mind to pause, taking it a few moments to picture the gardener on his knees, one arm outstretched to give directions, using the humble radish in a new-found way, as a pointer.

Growing up, I was introduced to radishes when our family had Sunday dinner at a restaurant.  On each of our restaurant salads was a single brightly colored radish, mostly as garnish.  It would require returning to that restaurant a few times before my sister and I could begin to nibble like rabbits on the humble, red vegetable as we became accustomed to its bitter edge.

In the collection of spiritual poetry, I turned to the biography of this man Issa, and found there more bitterness than I was prepared for.  The biography described how "Issa (1763-1827)... lost his mother at the age of three and was continually beaten by his stepmother....  His later life was marked by poverty... and the death of his first wife and four young children.  But somehow he triumphed over all these obstacles and kept his simple, affectionate nature.  His is particularly admired for his love of animals and his championing of the underdog."

My heart warmed to this somewhat overlooked man, and so I turned back the pages of my book to read another haiku poem by him:

"In the cherry blossom's shade

there's no such thing

as a stranger."

This second three-liner was a very upbeat poem, the kind our U.S. society today prefers to have populating its collections of religious poems.  However, having read of Issa's life -- both the bitter and the beautiful -- I decided to treasure both of the poems, printed back-to-back on a single leaf of paper in my book.

~~~

Has there been in your life any bitterness you have had to get beyond to find your way?

(The poems and biography of Issa are from The Enlightened Heart,

 ed. Stephen Mitchell, © 1989.  pp. 99, 158 & 100.)

A Small, Sound Voice on Stillness

Cultural historical memories are fickle:  A few people are remembered; many are forgotten. This holds true for literature as well.  How many people have written poetry?  The number is unimaginable.  And yet, open any anthology of poetry, and you will find poems by fewer than a hundred poets, usually only a few dozen.

Siegfried Sassoon (1917)

One early 20th-century English-speaking poet who has been a victim of this cultural forgetfulness is Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967).  His poems are mostly forgotten because he got labeled as being a "war poet" for his poems expressing the horrors of World War I.  But his war poems could not match those of his contemporary Wilfred Owen, and so Sassoon became eclipsed by Owen.  However, only some of Siegfried Sassoon's poems are about war.  Many are spiritual.  Some are also about Nature.  One in particular speaks of winter in a way that is meaningful whether the world is at peace or at war.

The poem begins with the words "December stillness," setting the nearly-still atmosphere of both the poem and the winter day the poet is experiencing.  The next words quickly show that it is more than stillness Sassoon is evoking.  He is also speaking about an invisible depth behind the stillness, a spiritual depth -- one that some readers might want to use the word "God" for, even though Sassoon never employs that word:

"December stillness, teach me through your trees

That loom along the west, one with the land,

The veiled evangel of your mysteries."

At this point, it would be tempting for any poet to begin describing those "trees."  After all, winter evergreens can be majestically beautiful, as can the outlines of bare trees with winter snow in the background.  Instead, Sassoon seizes upon another phenomenon of winter -- that the bareness of trees can better allow us to look up at the sky:

"Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words;

And let me learn your secret from the sky,"

Continuing to convey his firsthand, immediate experience, Sassoon has his clear line of sight caught by something seemingly unexpected:

"And let me learn your secret from the sky,

Following a flock of steadfast, journeying birds"

Now, Sassoon's contemplative openness to Nature on this still winter day leads to his becoming more aware of, and being able to express, a yearning within his heart.  The desire he speaks in the poem's final line mirrors something he perceived in the birds:

"Teach me to travel far and bear my loads."

We may all be eventually forgotten.  Nonetheless, may our lives more often touch the depths of our own living by being touched by the depths of Nature.

~~~

Even if winter has only begun where you live, have you noticed any changes in Nature?  Have you noticed any changes in the stirrings of your heart at this time of year?

(Sassoon's poem is from Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, © 1918, 1920.)

(The entire poem can be read at this external link:  "December Stillness.")