An Ill Wind and My Spirit

It was a late summer.  There were more clouds than typical for a summer day, but that felt good because it gave relief from the hot summer sun.  What felt even better was a breeze that brushed across my face, bringing the promise of a respite from the summer heat we had endured for weeks.  "Maybe we'll get a cooling rain," I thought.  My slight elation at the change in weather was, however, kept in bounds by a larger awareness.  Namely, I knew that the pleasant shift in weather I was experiencing was the result of a distant hurricane that was coming ashore farther away, bringing destruction upon other people.

The soothing breeze that brushed my face thus raises the question of how I should think and feel about those things in Nature that bring both good and bad.  That tiny breeze raises spiritual and theological questions far beyond its small size.  To my way of thinking, the most distasteful responses to a hurricane during the past few years have been by people who claimed that God steered the hurricane away from them in response to their prayers.  Those people were thinking only of themselves, and seem to have had little concern about the other people who would be hurt by a re-directed hurricane.  Nor do such comments display an awareness of a long tradition of theological thought about the matter.

A less selfish response does not require more scientific understanding of storms.  It only requires a "compassionate heart," to use a Buddhist phrase.  A wiser and more  open-hearted response to tragedy was modeled by Jesus after a tower fell, killing people.  Even without a knowledge of Newtonian physics, Jesus knew that natural disasters do not injure just bad people, and that they do not spare just good people.  Challenging his listeners to join him in that enlightened response, he asked rhetorically,  "Those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them -- do you think that they were worse offenders...?  No, I tell you." (Luke 13:4-5, NRSV).  Jesus's reminder to us that "bad things can happen to good people," as we say today, echoes that same insight form the Jewish tradition's book of Job in the Bible. Job's suffering from natural forces was not a punishment.

Although in English we have separate words for "wind" and "spirit," in the Bible's original languages, the two are the same word.  We might think "wind-spirit." That equivalence can remind me when that light wind touches my face, to ask myself what my own spirit is like, especially when I know of the dangerous hurricane further away.

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There is another side of the coin to this matter of the uncertainties of the natural world -- the fact that natural forces can bring both damaging winds and needed rain.  I easily notice when bad luck befalls me.  In contrast, I easily overlook all the ways I have been helped by good things that were just as much beyond my control. The light wind that brushes my face can, therefore, widen my awareness even further.  The double meaning of wind-spirit can remind me to remember a larger spirit of unseen forces that support my life.  A native American Ojibwe song put it this way:

"Sometimes I go about pitying myself,

But all the while

I am being carried by great winds across the sky."

~~~

Is there a way you have come to think about the uncontrollable uncertainties of life?

Famous Pump-handle, Overlooked Friendship

drawing titled
“Death’s Dispensary”

It is one of those legends of modern science that is usually told in a way that obscures almost as much as it reveals.  Like this:                          A terrible cholera epidemic is terrorizing London in 1854. The physician John Snow, defying the prevailing medical thinking, hypothesizes that the epidemic is caused not by foul air but by contaminated water.  He scientifically marks on a map the instances of cholera, and the instances are like arrows pointing to a public well on Broad Street at the intersection of Cambridge St. Snow removes the pump-handle, rendering the well useless.  And the number of cases of cholera, which had been surging, plummets.  Sure enough, the well's water was being polluted by fecal sewage.

Historians of science, however, point to many distortions in such a depiction.  Just to start with, people in the London neighborhood knew of many individuals who had drunk from the Broad Street pump but had not become ill.  Also, the statistics about cholera victims that John Snow gathered did not point like unquestionable evidence to that pump.  There were many anomalies.  Some families farther from that pump and near sources of clean water had still died.  And other people who worked at a brewery one block from the Broad Street pump were spared.  Snow had to laboriously search out explanations for each anomaly.  (Such as that the brewery workers were provided malt liquor by their employers, and so drank little water.)

The myth-like depiction also misrepresents the removal of the pump handle and what happened afterward.  Snow did not remove the handle himself:  He got the prompt cooperation of an only initially reluctant Board of Governors.  And even after its removal, the decline in cholera was not clear-cut proof because -- as Snow himself admitted -- the terrible wave of cholera had already begun to decline.  Nor had Snow scientifically surveyed the survivors as a scientific control.

Also, those opponents of Snow who held to the traditional view that vapors in the air were the suspect had a decent argument.  London's air was notoriously foul.  A few decades earlier, the poet Percy Shelley had written that, “Hell is a city much like London,” and the city's situation was hardly better in 1854.

The contemporary writer Steven Johnson, in his fascinating book The Ghost Map, points to a perhaps even more significant distortion:

"There is a kind of mythology that stories like this one tend inevitably to drift toward:
the lone genius shaking off the chains of conventional wisdom....
  [But] intellectual breakthroughs [are] rarely the isolated genius
 having a eureka moment alone in the lab."

In this regard, the physician John Snow stood on the shoulders of centuries of awareness that human sewage had to be sequestered and removed (as demonstrated by the sewage systems of even ancient Rome).  Also, for his mapping, Snow used death statistics that were continuously compiled by the city demographer William Farr.

Henry Whitehead

Even more likely to be overlooked is an Anglican minister, Henry Whitehead, who worked out of a church four blocks from the pump, and who had an intimate knowledge of people in the overcrowded slum -- including the survivors.  Thus were a clergyman's ministry and a scientist's research brought together.  The author Johnson explains how Whitehead and Snow, as they joined their investigations, developed "a quiet but profound friendship."

~ ~ ~

Have you known any religiously devoted people who minister to others with medical care?

(The quotation by Percy Bysshe Shelley is from “Peter Bell the Third,” 1819.)
(The Steven Johnson quotation is from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's  Most Terrifying Epidemic --
and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, © 2006, pp. 144, 149 & 181.)

Moving and Memories

Have you ever woken out of a dream in which you had been in a place where you previously lived?  Such dreams are not uncommon.  They were also the framework drawn upon by Marcel Proust to begin his masterwork novel Remembrance of Things Past.  The author tells of how, sometimes dozing in and out of sleep, he would awake disoriented, not sure at first where he was.  He easily imagined for a moment that he was in a childhood or other earlier bedroom. As Proust wrote, "When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years."

Such dreams fascinate me because they express so well how making sense of new experiences and challenges involves placing them within the context of something we already know.  New situations, particularly demanding ones, can be disorienting, just as Proust was momentarily disoriented.  Drawing upon abilities we already possess can help us orient ourselves in less familiar situations -- just as the dream of a familiar room and walls reveals our subconscious's drawing upon something deeply rooted within us.

Thinking back upon our lives, if we have lived in more then one location, we can recall times of transition that entailed moving.  Some moves can be exhilarating; others can be frightening. Leaving for college can be an exciting, hopeful time despite its uncertainties.  Being forced to move because of divorce is inevitably stressful, the atmosphere of a failed marriage suffocating for the time any joy that once was.

Reflecting upon this matter of moving leads me to thoughts of those non-human animals that must make frequent moves.  Twice a year, thousands of wildebeests make a mass migration covering many miles of East Africa.  Annual migrations by bird species, usually north and south, are an integral part of their lives.  Historians have sometimes employed the world "migration" to describe the movement of groups of people as they relocated, but those human "migrations" are in most cases once-in-a-lifetime, in contrast with the demand that instinct places upon such animal species every single year.  Nevertheless, in that instinct lies salvation, protecting the species against too severe weather, and offering the hope of food ahead.

I wonder if animals who migrate have dreams of previous homes.  I do know that researchers in laboratories have been able to detect through brain waves that rats dream about a new task they were challenged with the day before.  Birds are not as biologically close to us as such mammals, but might they also be dreaming of flying when their wings flutter while asleep?

Ecologists speak of "niches" in which species have evolved, finding their place in a life-giving way.  Human beings, try to find their place spiritually in relation to a Higher Truth or Power. Thousands of years ago, one ancient Hebrew, going to the temple for spiritual reorientation, looked up and was encouraged to see that the temple had also provided niches in its walls for nesting birds:

"How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD....

Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,

 where she may lay her young."

~~~

Have you ever made a move that entailed not just relocation but also growth?

(The Proust quote is from the opening chapter, "Overture," of the first book, Swann's Way,

 in Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 opus, trans by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, © 1928.)

(The quotation about the temple niches is from the Hebrew Bible [Christian New Testament], Psalm 84:1, 3 [NRSV])
(Photo of wildebeests, by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.)

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)