Can the Earth Heal?

"Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal...."

With that succinct declaration, the late 19th-century nature-writer John Muir put his own spin on what had become a conventional aphorism.  Specifically, the saying that "Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal," which had come from a poem by the Irish romantic poet Thomas Moore writing over half a century earlier.  Grammatically, Muir's substitution of the word "earth" for Moore's word "Heaven" was a simple matter.  But spiritually and theologically, that substitution leads us into complexities:  Does the Earth heal, and if so, how?

I remember as a child being shocked upon first hearing a particular Bible story about Jesus healing a blind man.  Having grown up in a church, I was accustomed to hearing stories about Jesus compassionately healing people, but this story was different.  As the narrative goes, Jesus "spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes."  (John 9:6).  Jesus's then telling the man to go wash his eyes with water from a pool did not reduce my shock, because I thought Jesus should be smarter than to put such an unsanitary substance as saliva mixed with dirt in a person's eyes.  Even as a child, I had learned not to touch my eyes when my hands were dirty.

Having now more knowledge about symbols in the culture the Bible comes from, I know that earth -- the ground -- was associated with the source of existence itself.  In one of the creation accounts in Genesis, "God formed man from the dust of the ground." (Gen. 2:7)  There is, therefore, the suggestion in the story of the blind man that Jesus's healing is also a creative act -- giving new life to the blind man!

Calypso orchid

John Muir's declaration that the earth can heal all our earthly sorrows gains added significance within his late 19th-century context.  Muir felt that too much of the Christianity of his time had become otherworldly and human-centered.  It often focused on the assurance that a person's individual soul would have a place in the afterlife, instead of rejoicing in the wonder and beauty of the natural world all around.  Muir himself had often experienced how his own spirit could be healed by immersing himself in Nature. One of those occasions occurred during an unsettled time in his life, when he had been traveling on foot for months across part of Canada, meeting very few people.  One day, after wading for hours through a swamp, exhausted and discouraged, he suddenly came upon, as he described it, "the rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants... a Calypso borealis."  The flower's beauty broke in upon him so unexpectedly that he sat down beside it and wept, relieving a greater burden than just that one day's exhaustion.

Today, there are many people who have also experienced how turning their attention to something in Nature can be restorative, even healing.  And it doesn't require wandering for days in wilderness.  Sometimes it comes in more ordinary settings.

~~~

Has there been, or is there, an occasion on which you are restored by Nature?

(The quote by Muir about the earth, written in 1872, is from John of the Mountains, 1938. p. 99.
The quote about the flower is from his letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr in 1866)

(The quote by Thomas Moore [1779-1852] is from his "Come, Ye Disconsolate.")

(The flower photo, by Walter Siegmund, is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

The Up-Flight of Birds

English translation
of Le Petit Prince

"... for his escape he took advantage of

  the migration of a flock of wild birds."

With that imaginative explanation, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tells how his title character in The Little Prince made his escape from the isolation of his own tiny planet to come to the planet Earth. That 1943 children's book weds that statement with Saint-Exupéry's charming drawing in which the little prince grips a cluster of strings that shoot up to eleven birds flying upward, lifting him off the ground -- in the way a cluster of helium-filled balloons might.  Even though the tiny planet and tethered birds are fanciful, the author's imagery takes advantage of something many people have seen in the real world:  The instant and virtually simultaneous flight up from the ground of a small flock of birds.

Birds in flight are not easy to capture convincingly with a camera.  Capturing a virtually simultaneous liftoff from the ground effectively is even harder.   If the shutter speed is too slow, the birds in the photograph will be only a blur, obscuring the gracefulness of their wings.  If the shutter is clicked prematurely, the birds will appear too close to the ground, seemingly leaden, as if they were having a hard time getting aloft.  The camera will not have captured that exhilarating burst of energy in which birds spray upward and outward.

So critical to many birds has been this ability to take to flight instantly as a group that it has been reinforced in some species with instinctive alarm cries.  In the case of white-winged doves, evolution has taken such group-protection to a higher level in two ways. First, white patches on the doves' wings flash when they take flight, thus adding a visual alarm.  Moreover, the white-winged doves need not cry vocally, because the doves' sudden flight upward causes their very wings to give off a sharp, twittering warning-sound made by the air passing through the feathers.

Some mornings on which I was driving to work, following my routine path that some days felt like a rut, I would occasionally see such a liftoff of social birds such as pigeons or grackles. Their sudden energy would give my own spirit a lift.

In a mysterious way, the up-flight of birds intersects with something that seems to be instinctive about our human nature.  Namely, that our own facial expressions and bodily bearings droop when we are discouraged, but then lift up when our spirits become encouraged.

There is something deeper here than individual human psychology. There is something here about being able to open ourselves to greater possibilities that lie unseen in this world.  This deeper level, for example, is evidenced by the way the facial and bodily bearings of "down" and "up" are employed in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament).  When Cain is discouraged by the inequalities of human fortune, God intervenes as if to try to prevent vengeance, asking Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?" (Genesis 4:6, NRSV).  In many of the Biblical books, people are exhorted to lift up their heads.  And lift up their eyes.

~~~

Are there any ways birds lift your spirit?  How does looking up and about restore you?

(The Saint-Exupéry quote is from his The Little Prince, trans. from the French by Katherine Woods, © 1943.  p. 2.)

(The photo of the cover of The Little Prince is used under Fair Use.)

(The photo Pigeons is by Danko Durbić.)

Fathers of Biology, and of Children

Describing an often overlooked characteristic of 19th-century biologists, Joseph Kastner writes:  "Naturalists who never laid eyes on each other became intimate friends by virtue of the long and faithful letters they wrote to each other, year in and year out...."  Early British biologists' use of correspondence for research accelerated after the 1840 creation of the Penny Post within England, which set a fixed rate for a letter regardless of the distance it had to travel.  No biologist took greater advantage of the postal service for gathering scientific data than Charles Darwin, who penned over 14,000 letters.  But there is more than science in those early biologists' letters. There are also matters of the heart.

from Hooker's
Himalayan Journals

Appreciating the poignancy of some letters requires knowing about the state of 19th-century medicine.  Because there were virtually no vaccinations nor oral or injected antibiotics, a child was twenty-five times more likely to die before reaching early adolescence than is a child in Britain today.  Despite 19th-century biologists' accelerating knowledge about the natural world, they were not exempt from that statistic.

After the death of Darwin's beloved daughter Annie at the age of ten, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who helped Darwin study plant species, offered his condolences to Darwin.  Several years later, only an hour after Hooker's daughter died, Hooker was writing to Darwin to tell of his own grief.  Darwin wrote back at once.

Thomas Henry Huxley
   

The leading British advocate for Darwin's theory of evolution for natural selection, Thomas Henry Huxley, also lost a child.  After Huxley's son Noel died at the age of three, Darwin drew upon his own experience of grief with Annie to reassure Huxley that grief could soften with time, writing, "I was indeed grieved to receive your news this morning....  I know well how intolerable is the bitterness of such grief.  Yet believe me, that time, and time alone, acts wonderfully....  I cannot think of one child without tears rising in my eyes; but the grief is become tenderer and I can even call up the smile of our lost darling...."

statue of
Jean Henri Fabre

Such personal expressions of grief and condolence, sometimes traveling in envelopes as part of scientific study, also crossed the English Channel.  The most difficult of emotions were sometimes even revealed in the pages of scientific books.  The eminent French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre closed his first volume on insects with a dedication to the memory of his own son, who had died when Fabre was working on the book. Charles Darwin, despite scientific disagreements,  wrote a cordial letter to Fabre, saying,  "Permit me to add, that when I read the last sentence in your book, I sympathised deeply with you."

I am struck by the tenderness and cordiality of these condolences mingled among the scientific facts.  I cannot begin to comprehend all the research of these early naturalists. But I can hope that some of my emails and "snail-mail" notes might express a similar warmth.

~~~

How do you think we today might make our correspondence spiritually supportive?

(The Kastner quote is from A Species of Eternity by Joseph Kastner, © 1977,

and is taken from The Naturalist's Path by Cathy Johnson, © 1991.  p. ix.)

(The Darwin quotes are taken from Annie's Box by Randal Keynes, © 2001.  pp. 221 & 285.)

Are Libraries Natural?

In the U.S. and many high-tech nations today, we possess so many gadgets that we are inclined to think of an "invention" as being an electronic device or a piece of machinery.  What intrigues me are those human inventions that cannot be shipped to our homes in a delivery truck, not even a very large one.  Such as the invention of church-state separation.  And national parks open to the public (a U.S. first).  Among such non-shippable great inventions, I would list free public libraries.

Of course, any person's private collection of books is sometimes referred to as their "library." But we more often employ that word for a large, shared collection of books, particularly one in a building dedicated to that purpose.  Following that meaning of the word, we can identify libraries even in the ancient world.  Such as the fabled Library of Alexandria, which existed in Egypt from the 3rd century B.C.E through most of the 4th century C.E.  But that research library existed for only an intellectual elite who could read, and they could not take its scrolls home.

Library building in Peterborough,
New Hampshire built in 1893

The truly free, publicly-funded  library as we know it today was an invention of people of the United States.  It depended upon a prior intangible invention:  the idea of a democratic, educated public.  Probably the oldest free public library of the kind we know today (rather than being a subscription library) was opened in 1833 in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  Only sixteen years later, that state legislated funding for such public libraries. Other states followed suit in setting up libraries, including the Boston library in 1848 (thus allowing for jokes about books being "banned in Boston").

With the rapid rise of the Internet, many have predicted the demise of libraries.  With people now being able to read and download electronic books to their computers at home, what use is there for physical library-buildings with all those antiquated hard-copy books -- or so it has been asked.

Anyone who has recently visited libraries in a large city, however, may have observed how libraries have changed with the Internet, finding new ways to serve people.  I have seen librarians coach people, many of whom do not have Internet connections at home, in how to research on the computers set up in libraries.  Invisible wifi signals now fill the air along with the faint scent of paper books.  (One library I have been in even boasts that its wifi signal can, for convenience, be picked up in the parking lot.)  And the 2008 recession increased library use as people who had lost jobs or homes relied upon libraries for job-research or for an air-conditioned respite from the weather.

Traveling burro-library in Colombia

Almost paralleling that ancient Library of Alexandria, which included a museum and a research center teaching dissection, some of our contemporary libraries have rotating museum-like displays, as well as rooms for classes on such things as computer programs or English as a second language. (Sorry, no classes on dissection.) And those displays and classes are not just for the elite.  Maybe in that sense libraries are not "natural,"  but they are evolving, and are far from being extinct.

~~~

In what tangible or intangible ways have you benefited from libraries?

(The photo of the burro-library is by Acción Visual/Diana Arias,

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

Cotton: A Soft but Prickly Story

My hunch would be that I experienced cotton even before my very first memory.  Probably as an infant, I experienced the soft touch of sterilized cotton, or the careful cleaning of my ears with a cotton swab.  I can make that assumption because those items were regular residents in our medicine cabinet.  By the time I was taught the song about Peter Cottontail, I had the basis for knowing what a cottony tail would be like.  I now know, however, that there is a lot of rough, impure history behind that white substance.

Just to begin with, cotton (from plants of the genus Gossypium) is never that pure in the natural world.  Although humans' use of it dates back maybe 7,000 years, the cottony material begins as seedy fibers packed within a seed capsule called a "boll."  Both picking cotton from the plants and extracting seeds from the cotton-fiber are laborious tasks.

Despite that challenge, a cotton industry flourished in India from 2000 to 1000 B.C.E., having gotten its roots in the Indus Valley of northern India and eastern Pakistan. Ancient people of Egypt and China also harvested and converted the plant's cotton into clothes. Late medieval Germans, who could only imagine the plants that cotton came from, named it baumwolle, or "tree wool."  (Fancifully, some people imagined that in other countries lambs must grow on trees.)

It is when we follow the story of cotton into an English-speaking country, Britain, that the story at times becomes more painful.  By the 1800's, British colonialism had enforced policies on India that favored the new industrial looms in England.  As a result, the native cotton-weaving enterprise in India was undone, and the people of India were forced to buy more costly fabrics from the looms of colonial Britain -- even when the cotton was grown in India.  This is why Gandhi's encouraging the people of India to spin their own cotton thread at home was part of a political revolt.

"The Cotton Pickers"
by Winslow Homer

The U.S. was another source of cotton for the rapidly industrializing Britain, and the American side of the story is even more painful.  By 1790, slavery was actually on the decline in the U.S. because it was not economically sustainable.  But that changed with the invention of the cotton gin by the ingenious Eli Whitney in Savannah. The climate in the U.S. South allowed the cultivation of only a "green seed" variety of cotton, which demanded an inordinate amount of time for extracting the cotton fibers from the seeds.  With Whitney's machine, a person could extract in one hour what would have previously required several days.  Once the word about the invention was out, farmers planted green seed cotton in mass -- and an economic place for slave-labor was ensured.

In hot weather, I enjoy the cool comfort of cotton shirts.  I am not that comfortable with some of the history behind the fiber in my shirt.  Hopefully, we humans will do better by each other in the future.  After all, the cotton plant offers us lots of good possibilities even beyond textiles: Material from that genus of plants provides salad oil, soap, stems for paper-making, and maybe even a drug for preventing HIV.

~~~

What thoughts or memories has this story of cotton evoked in you?

(Both the photo of Gandhi and the painting by Homer are in the Public Domain

because their copyrights have expired.)