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.)

A Great Book Open for Learning

The popularity of books with "for Dummies" in the title must be attributed in part to the rapid spread of ever-changing technologies into workplaces and homes.  Even after a person no longer feels like a total dummy when sitting down at a computer keyboard, that person can feel their intellect and patience challenged each time a new software program comes out. Those Dummies guides are, however, not the first books to educate people.

The promise that a book could be a tutor became increasingly appealing from the late 19th through the 20th century as books became less expensive, sometimes even cheap.  Despite the prevalence of publications whose titles began with "How to," their content could sometimes be tricky.  An 1878 article in Popular Science Monthly entitled. "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" turned out to be a dense exploration of logic by the American philosopher Charles Peirce.  If I had been alive in 1924, I might have purchased a newly published copy of How to Write Short Stories, only to discover that it was a collection of stories by Ring Lardner lampooning the writing of his time. Another 20th-century title, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, seemed to offer potential buyers the temptation of learning without effort, but it was really a stage drama.  In contrast, Dale Carnegie's earnestly titled How to Win Friends and Influence People promised that learning intangible social skills -- usually requiring years of decades of maturation -- could be accelerated with a simple purchase.  My favorite of these titles is the paradoxical How to Read a Book.  It sounds like a dog trying to chase its tail.

That proverbial dog might prompt a question:  How do real dogs and other animals learn without reading instruction manuals or "How To" books?  Only half a century ago, we thought dogs' abilities came virtually entirely from inborn instincts, but we are increasingly learning how dogs also learn.  For example, dogs learn that humans who show teeth when they smile are actually happy, thus overcoming the canine instinct to interpret the baring of teeth as a threat.  Animals that are not pets also learn in the wild.  When green parrots raised in captivity were released in the U.S.'s western mountains, the birds could not at first fend for themselves.  We thus discovered that such parrots had no instinct for how to get seeds out of pine cones, but learned that technique by observing other members of their species.

I might imagine all natural terrains such as those western mountains as being an immense book, opened and laid out flat, upon which animals learn by observing, exploring, and experiencing.  Each feature of Nature is like a letter, word, or sentence, around which animals discover the shape of the land's vocabulary and grammar.  The language of Nature itself.

To me, one advantage of turning to the Book of Nature is that it can keep our ideas from becoming turned in upon themselves. It can keep us from chasing our own tails.  The thoughts of individuals, organizations and societies can easily become enclosed and provincial.  Turning our attention to Nature can wake us up and help us learn.

~~~

How do you think we can learn and grow by turning our attention to Nature?

(The photo of the tree-lined river is by Dr Richard Murray

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.)

Winged Flashes of Light and Insight

I can't remember the first time I saw a butterfly, but I do remember what my earliest impressions of them were.  Over the years, I have gradually learned more about butterflies, and with each step in learning, my thoughts about them have changed.  So also have butterflies been part of my changed thoughts about life itself.

A flash of bright, moving color in the sun.  That is my earliest recollection of a butterfly.  Even today, in the latter years of my adulthood, that is what first catches my eye.  It does seem to be an experience tuned to capture the interest of a young child:  The movement. The bright colors, something little kids seem to enjoy no matter whether it comes in butterflies or a box of crayons.  But nothing can quite duplicate a butterfly's tantalizing lure.  "Come and see me up close," it seems to say as it pauses on a flower not so far away.  But then it is off again, the direction it takes shifting unpredictably.  A beautiful combination of fragility and energy, a butterfly seems to be perfectly designed to encourage children to delight in life.

Like all children of elementary-school age, I soon learned about the connection between caterpillar and butterfly.  Even though the transitional state between the two was first described to me as a "cocoon," rather than the technically precise name of "chrysalis," I learned about the marvelous life cycles of these most beautiful insects:  Egg, larva (caterpillar), chrysalis, winged adult.  At some point I encountered how this almost unbelievable metamorphosis out of a dead-looking chrysalis has been a ready-made symbol for resurrection and rebirth.  The promise of new life and possibilities, even when death seems to have brought everything to an end.

In more recent years, I have become intrigued by some additional scientific facts about these insects. Specifically, that the winged butterfly -- which we tend to think of as being the point of all this metamorphosis -- actually lives an average of only two weeks.  Moreover, in the wild, only one percent of individuals make it through the whole cycle in all its stages.  I remember a man whose son was born with a genetic illness that meant the boy was destined to live only into latter teens unless he could get successful marrow and liver transplants.  The family struggled over the course of years, stretching out the life of a boy whose biological life did not naturally stretch into adulthood.  After the son died at college age, the father said that the most comforting words any person said to him were, "Your son's life was not wasted."  This, then is the latest lesson the butterflies carry for me, if I remember how short the lives of all winged butterflies actually are. Who would want to declare their lives a waste?

Perhaps a butterfly in flight can lead us to even another insight.  Eighty years before the theologian Paul Tillich's book titled The Eternal Now made that phrase famous, the nature-mystic Richard Jefferies described an experience he had outdoors:

"It is eternity now.  I am in the midst of it.  It is about me in the sunshine;

 I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air.

  Nothing has to come; it is now.  Now is eternity."

~~~

Do you have any special recollection about butterflies?  What do you like about them?

(The Jefferies quote is from his book The Story of My Heart [1883].  Chap. 3.)
(The photo of the chrysalis is by "Pollinator at the English language Wikipedia,"
 and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Clearly, Before Chickens

Back when most Western painters were into realism, one classic challenge in learning how to paint was to depict nothing but a white egg resting on a white surface.  That challenge prevented novice painters from easily relying upon a contrast of colors between the egg and its background to depict dimensionality.  Instead, the painter had to represent the subtlest gradations from whites to near-whites to the lightest of grays made by sunlight as it faded around the eggs curvature.  Not to mention the subtle texture of the egg's surface.  I think it was an exercise fitting for an egg, which feels like a wondrous, beautifully polished stone when held in the hand.

We encounter eggs as food early in our lives, and they can come packaged with learning.  What elementary-school child has not at some point encountered the riddle, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"  Even when not yet old enough to engage in abstract thinking, a child can taste of that impossible mental task of thinking back into an infinite regress of time.

One side-benefit of our modern knowledge about the evolution of life on this planet is that we can now answer the chicken-or-egg riddle definitively, although the answer might seem like cheating to some. Clearly, there were eggs before there were chickens -- reptile eggs, that is. (Not to mention the eggs without shells laid by nearly countless species of fish.)  Evolutionary biologists estimate that reptiles, with their ability to lay land-worthy eggs, have been on this planet twice as long as any birds.

ancient Egyptian god Ptah
creating cosmos as egg
on pottery wheel

Perceiving the potentiality that lies within eggs, faith-traditions in ancient times used the egg as a symbol for the cosmos.  In our highly secularized western societies, most people (even some ministers I have known) think of an Easter-egg hunt as just springtime fun.  But those Easter eggs (as well as rabbits, a prolific type) entered Christianity as symbols of new life.  Even today, a large porcelain egg or an ostrich egg hangs in some Coptic churches and mosques as a sign of rebirth and hope.

A peculiarity of chicken eggs many city-dwellers do not know about is that even though chicks come from eggs, hens can lay eggs without being fertilized by a rooster.  That seems counter-intuitive, given that the evolutionary value of fertilized eggs has been that of producing offspring.  Nevertheless, virtually all the chicken eggs marketed by grocers today in Western societies are infertile.  (In his early adulthood, Gandhi, staying in England, abstained from eating eggs so as to not take animal life -- until he was informed that those chicken eggs he was being offered could never have developed into a chick.)

Today, in watching nature shows on TV, I can experience something even more marvelous than being able to eat eggs while eating vegetarian.  I can watch as mother tortoises and other turtles use their clumsy-looking hind legs to dig a pit in the sand.  Then, out of their bodies emerge beautiful white ovals, looking so much like those familiar eggs we all know firsthand.  As part of a long line of reptiles, that mother turtles' usually private ritual dates back over 300 million years.

~~~

Do you have any childhood memories about Easter eggs, other eggs, chicks, or chickens?

The “House” that Nature Built

When I was in high-school, one area of curriculum being offered was called "home economics." Although the classes included household budget, they were primarily such things as cooking and sewing.  (Mostly girls attended.)  That recollection of the label "home economics" came back to me recently as I read about some of the history behind modern ecology -- history dating back 150 to 350 years.

illustration from
one of Haeckel's book

The key to understanding the matter is a single Greek word oikos, which means "house."  Although the fundamental ideas behind ecology developed over centuries as scientific knowledge grew, the term "ecology" was coined in 1866 by the prominent German biologist Ernst Haeckel.  To put what he did in English, a prefix derived from oikos was attached to the suffix "-logy" which means scientific study (as in bio-logy).  Thus, eco-logy looked at all of Nature as being a large "house" full of interrelationships that science was in the process of discovering.

That "-logy" suffix was a significant choice because it was a shift from a term scientists had been using in the preceding two centuries.  (Here's where those high-school classes about a woman's taking care of a home comes in.)  Before Haeckel, it was common for Europeans studying Nature to speak of the "economy" of the natural world.  We can see in "economy" the same "eco-" prefix as in "ecology." But "economy" has a different suffix, from nomos.  It is also from Greek, but means "management."  Thus, "eco-nomy" refers to the management of some type of "house" (à la "home economics" classes).

In the case of the "economy" of Nature, however, the "house" is not a building constituted by humans.  Nor are the humans the main managers.  In the worldview of scientists in the 1600's and 1700's, Nature by itself was seen as having an "economy," that is, a set of efficient, purposeful interrelationships.  This is why, for example, the 18th-century biologist Linnaeus was able to write:

"By the Oeconomy [i.e., Economy] of Nature,

 we understand the all-wise disposition of the Creator

 in relation to natural things,

 by which they are fitted to produce general ends [i.e., purposes]

 and reciprocal uses."

Over two-and-a-half centuries after Linnaeus -- who pioneered modern biological classification -- our current scientific knowledge and understanding of Nature's diversity and complexity has exploded.  Our increasing awareness of the wildness of Nature -- its resistance to being entirely domesticated or even subdued by our attempts at "management" -- has even raised questions about whether any "house" metaphor is accurate.

There is one thing our environmental problems have shown us, however:  As the 20th-century eco-theologian Sallie McFague puts it, in order for humankind to live sustainably in Nature, we need to learn this planet's "house rules."

~~~

What is the world of Nature (the non-human world) like to you?

(The Linnaeus quote is from his "The Oeconomy of Nature," 1749,

as quoted in Nature's Economy by Donald Worseter, © 1994, p. 37.)

(The illustration from Haeckel's book is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)