Stepping In... to Step Deeper into the World

 I have met more than one person who very much likes StoryCorps stories, a brief weekly spot on Public Radio's Friday news programs.  The StoryCorps project traveled around the U.S. for years, recording ordinary Americans as they told about pivotal events in their life journeys. Many of what is shared is poignant.  When I take pen to paper to write my own thoughts about a wider world and reading, there is one particular StoryCorps spot that comes to mind.  As I imagine the experience in my mind, it also has to do with Nature.

A woman explained to StoryCorps how a bookmobile became a life-changing experience for her.  As a little girl, she lived with her family in Native American migrant-worker camp.  Traveling so frequently, the girl was not allowed to have books, because they would have been too heavy to move.  But then one day, when the girl was 12, a traveling library (a bookmobile) stopped on its periodic rounds where the family was currently living.  And the girl was invited to step in.

As the now grown woman explained her childhood experience, when first told she could take home a book from the mobile, she wondered what was the catch.  Being told there was none other than returning the book in two weeks, she began to devour books.  And her having stepped (at first hesitantly) into the bookmobile made it possible for her to step into a whole new world. Or perhaps I should say "worlds," because the girl's selections ranged from volcanoes to dinosaurs.

"The Journey" (1903)
by
Elizabeth Shippen Green

The child's stepping into that vehicle filled with books reminded me how each book can become for us a vehicle by which we step into the mind, and maybe the emotions of the author of that book. By so doing, we expand our world, even bringing hope to some corner of our lives where it previously could not be seen.  As the woman explained to StoryCorps, because of those books, "By the time I was 15, I knew there was a world outside of the camps.... I believed I could find a place in it.  And I did."

I am humbled by this story.  Although the family I grew up in was decidedly middle-class, we had a couple of filled bookcases in our house; and my mother periodically purchased an additional book so that our home library might grow as I grew.  I am also humbled because I know that it is upon the often hard lives of migrant workers that I depend for life when I purchase fruits or vegetables at the grocery store.

This woman's story came back to my mind during the COVID pandemic. Many of us had to step back into our homes in order to protect ourselves or others -- even when we would have preferred to go about freely. We turned to electronic means of communication to try to satisfy that human desire to learn and connect with more than our individual lives. Those methods were less satisfying than the "real thing." Nevertheless, the confinement of our circumstances could make us more aware of how much we needed each other, and how much other people depended upon us..

~~~

How have books widened your world?  Has there been a critical experience in your life that has made your life richer than it otherwise would have been?

(The quotation is from "Once Forbidden, Books Become A Lifeline

 For A Young Migrant Worker," by NPR Staff, May 30, 2014, and is used here under Fair Use.)
(The illustration by Green is in the Public 'Domain.)

A Shawl Wrapped All Around

One of the first things I was taught about God (even before I entered elementary school) was that God loves me and everybody else.  Another of the earliest things I was taught about God (just as early in my life) was that God is everywhere.  I still hold to these two basic principles, even though I admit to the complexity of using that word "God."

But how can I ever imagine that God is everywhere?  (Especially when I have been cautioned against elevating anything in the world into a god, an idol.)  How can I ever imagine that anything is everywhere?

For me, growing up as a child, it was the sky that helped me envision how God could be everywhere at once.  God was invisible, but the sky, which I could see, expressed a kind of "everywhere."  When I stood outside and looked up and around me, the sky seemed to surround everything on the Earth.  As I scanned the sky and guided my sight back down to the Earth, the sky seemed to wrap around the edge of the Earth at the horizon, no matter which direction I was facing.

Today, I know of an open, inclusive church that has in its mission statement in the worship bulletin the phrase "God's all-encompassing love."  Even though I myself struggle with how anybody could actually love every person on this planet (so ornery do we humans often become), I do have a sense of what "all-encompassing" is.  I learned my sense of that from the over-arching, all-surrounding sky I could see when I was a child.

There was a second way, as a child, that the sky gave me a visual experience of "everywhere." For, after all, church-school had also reassured me that this God who loves me is with me no matter where I go.  I got a sense of "no-matter-where-I-go" by watching the sky as I rode in the car at night.  You can experience this yourself the next time you are riding in a vehicle at night (with someone else safely driving).  Look out the side window and notice how the objects here on Earth zip by.  A parked car flashes past the side window of your vehicle.  And there's a tree a little further away from the road, so it moves less quickly -- but even it first comes into view and then is gone!  That's how everything in life is:  Things come, and things go.

But now notice, in contrast, the moon or stars up in the sky.  Notice how they seem to travel with the vehicle you are in as it travels.  Just like God.

My high-school English teacher taught me not to mix metaphors.  But religion loves using multiple metaphors, and so I'm now going to do so.  I'm going to mix metaphors because I think this metaphor of the heavens wrapping all around us resonates with another metaphor used a few times in the Bible (such as Psalm 61:4 & Matthew 23:37).  Namely, the metaphor of God being like a caring mother bird sheltering her tiny chicks under her protective wings. We are like God's chicks.

~~~

Have you ever tried to imagine God "everywhere"?  How?

Cycles and Rhythms

Day and night. That must be the most common cycle we humans experience.  That dramatic contrast between light and dark has also encouraged the evolution of different species of animals to occupy the shifting scenes of day and night.

The next most common natural cycle on Earth is that of the annual seasons as our planet tips back and forth on its axis in relation to the sun.  In some places, that alternation is primarily between dry and wet seasons.  Familiar to more people are the seasons of summer, fall, winter and spring.  It is the plants that primarily mirror that cycle with their dramatic annual changes.

The sun's cycles of days and the Earth's cycle of seasons come together to make our secular calendar of one solar year.  So where did the months come from?  They are derived from the less obvious cycle of the moon -- from new moon, through crescent shapes, and into a full moon.  That cycle takes 29 to 30 days.  People who live their lives at the ocean's edge have been more familiar with that cycle because they have had to adjust to the rhythm of the tides, which are caused primarily by the moon's gravitational pull.  Other cultures have found it valuable in other ways to keep an eye on the moon with its luminous glow, so different than the sun's heat.  One town in Japan has arranged the placement of residential plots so that each house can have an inspiring window-view of the rising, full moon.

So where did those seven-day weeks on our calendar come from?  That number seven is different:  There is no cycle of celestial bodies visible to the naked eye that completes its cycle at the number seven.  Nevertheless, there seems to be a human need to periodically take a break from the mere repetition of day and night, work and sleep.  Having nothing but that daily cycle can get monotonous.  People got a sample of that monotony when the coronavirus pandemic forced people who could work at home to do so.  Gone were the weekly cycles from Monday to Thank-Goodness-it's-Friday.  Also gone was weekend revitalization through sports, eating at a restaurant, and worship services.  Each day became tiringly the same.

Cycles can be comforting, but one rhythm alone in our lives can become oppressive.  In 1930, the dictator Joseph Stalin chopped off the two-day weekend from the Soviet calendar.  He was attempting to increase the nation's productivity by creating a five-day week filled only with work, and with no weekend-break.  How confining that would have been!

Down through history, various numbers have been tried by varying cultures for breaking up life into weeks.  The number of days has ranged from five to ten.  The seven-day week of today's secular calendar was established by Jewish people in ancient times as being six days of work followed by the Sabbath.  On that Sabbath, there was a mandated pause from work, commerce, and trying to get-ahead of other people financially.  As the 20th-century psychoanalyst Erich Fromm put it in the title of one of his books, the Sabbath was aimed at being a shift of mode from "To Have" to "To Be."  Similar to the way that the number seven transcends the natural cycles, the Sabbath was designed to transcend humans' easy habits.  It was an opportunity to bask in the grace of the world, and experience God's grace more deeply.

Not that the Sabbath meant getting away from experiencing Nature.  To the contrary, it can be the opportunity to experience the renewing power of Nature more fully.  Oppressors have known that power too, and have tried to keep the oppressed away from Nature.  In George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, the imprisoned Joan of Arc points to her being separated from Nature as evidence of her captors' evil character.  She says to them:

"It is not the bread and water I fear.... But to shut me from the light of the sky and
 the sight of the fields and flowers... and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God....  without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil,
 and that mine is of God."

~ ~ ~

(When and how have you found renewal through Nature?)

(The quotation is from Shaw's Saint Joan, Scene IV.)
(The picture of the Earth is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Bubbles within a Great Bubble

It reads like a modern parable, even though all the details come from newspaper archives.  In September of 1991, eight men and women, outfitted in blue jumpsuits, made an appearance before an excited press.  The small team was about to embark upon an experiment -- not going into space, but entering a human-made ecosystem called Biosphere 2.  Sunlight would enter the glass windows of the 3-acre complex of domes and pyramids.  But other than that solar intervention, Biosphere 2 was designed to grow its own food, create its own oxygen naturally, and filter its wastewater through the soil for purification.  A New York Times headline described it as a "Man-Made World."  An ABC news program held out the hope that the project might "save the world" -- because after all, Biosphere 2 would be sealing out the environmentally damaged, polluted world that the Earth had become.  The team in jumpsuits entered the Biosphere, and the airlock was sealed.

Any sci-fi writers worth their salt would know what should happen next if this were to be made into a Hollywood movie:  Competitiveness, jealousies, and sexual attractions would emerge among members of the team.  One member would turn into a Captain Bligh, fomenting a mutiny among the crew, who had been wanting the bountiful Biosphere to be an enchanted island of Tahiti.

As it turned out, the real Biosphere 2 soon had problems of a more ecological nature.  Even though its sealed world had included a miniature rainforest, coral reefs, and numerous species of animals, growing crops was difficult.  The team had to break into an emergency 3-month food supply they had kept a secret.  Despite that surreptitiousness, reporters discovered that deliveries were being made to the Biosphere twice a month -- seeds, vitamins, and mousetraps.  Mice were not the only pest needing controlling.  There were also cockroaches (no surprise), and nematode worms and mites attacking the crops.  Moreover, the honeybees and hummingbirds that were to have pollinated the crops had died.

Of more immediate danger, a surge of bacteria was reducing the oxygen level to such a point that it was as if the team were living at an altitude of 14,000 feet.  A truckload of liquid oxygen had to be called in and sprayed into the Biosphere.

As the ecologist Rebecca Stewart summarized it, “The Biosphere 2 experiment failed to generate sufficient breathable air, drinkable water and adequate food for just eight humans, despite an expenditure of $200 million.”  The bubble had burst.  Reflecting upon our scientific knowledge, the scientists Joel Cohen and David Tilman wrote:

“No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with
 the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free.”

A rare look at a rare planet

A century earlier, it was the idea of a much more immense "bubble" that had initially prompted the word "biosphere."  In the 1800's, scientists had coined that word to refer to the network of integrated living species, from microscopic to large, that surround the Earth.  In 1926, the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky published a book about this living "skin" that surrounds our planet. The living beings in the biosphere not only draw upon the chemical elements of the Earth and air;  they also re-create the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.

We must marvel at what this Earth-Bubble, our home, can do.  But we might also draw upon the failed bubble-world of Biosphere 2 to ask if there isn't an intangible "bubble' we sometimes live in.  When we live in our high-tech human-made world without an awareness of how it is being sustained by the systems of Nature, are we not living in a mental bubble?  The danger of such a mental bubble is why our faith-traditions have cultivated prayers of gratefulness to use upon awakening, before eating, and when going to sleep, awaiting the sun's next rising.

~ ~ ~

(Do you have a way of remembering Nature in an appreciative way?  What is it?)

(Quotations and details are taken from "The Lost History of One of the World’s Strangest Science Experiments"
 by Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, March 29, 2019.)
(The picture of Biosphere 2 and of the Earth are used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licenses.
 The picture of the nomad is in the public domain because of its age.)

Myself as the Medium

Using the word "primacy" with its meaning of what is most important, Steven Roger Fischer writes:

" Everyone -- young and old, past and present -- has had to admit its primacy. 
For an ancient Egyptian official it was a "boat on water". 
For an aspiring Nigerian pupil four thousand years later
it is "a touch of light in a deep dark well". 
For most of us it will be the voice of civilization itself ... Reading."

So begins Fischer's 350-page book A History of Reading.

There is something a bit amusing about reading a book about reading.  (In the same way that you are now reading an article about my reading a book about reading.)  It is a bit like one of the Möbius strips we made as kids, learning how to give the strip of paper a half-twist before gluing the two ends together.  When cut down its length, instead of falling apart into two bands, the Möbius strip becomes a single giant band. It thus reveals that it was not actually two-sided before it was cut.  If a fly had crawled along the strip before it was cut, it would have traversed both the seeming "outside" and the "inside" -- because it was all a single surface.

Despite the circular irony of my reading A History of Reading -- becoming a part of that still ongoing history as I read -- Fischer's book provides a wealth of detail, along with a picture opening each chapter.  The picture facing chapter 1 is of a sculpture captioned, "Amenhotep-Son-of-Hapu, an eminent Egyptian scribe, reading a partially opened papyrus scroll. The statue dates from the 14th century BC."  The picture facing the final chapter 7 is of an adolescent woman today reading a message on a cellphone.  It is titled, "the future of reading . . .", with the three dots conveying the open-endedness of the still unfinished story of reading.  Facing that picture, Fischer continues that theme by titling that last chapter, "Reading the Future."

Being myself of an older generation than that young woman who grew up with electronic reading, I still prefer "the printed word" -- ink on nice, rectangular sheets of paper bound together.  Nevertheless, the Corona-virus pandemic of 2020 increased my appreciation of the quick connectivity of portable phones with texting capability.  Psychologists counseled us to guard against depression under the stay-at-home orders by staying in touch with family and friends.  Electronic media came to the rescue, and it included onscreen text-messages and emails to be read -- something that ancient Egyptian scribe could have never imagined!

But what do I put in my electronic messages?  Our modern fascination with the ever-changing forms of media can get ahead of transforming the content of what I write.  And ahead of transforming the content of myself.

Do I immediately re-send what presents itself as a "news" article just because it reinforces my personal gripes?  Do I quickly re-send it to those people who I know share my gripes -- thus creating a never-ending Möbius loop?  Or do I try to remember those friends and acquaintances I have not contacted in awhile, and create new loops of caring and comfort?  What is my primacy?

And for self-care, when I am feeling isolated, I might even pull out one of those rectangular books of paper, and quietly turn its pages as I read.  The story of reading continues . . .

~ ~ ~

(What type of reading do you find to be restorative of your best self?)

(Quotations are from Steven Roger Fischer's
A History of Reading, © 2003, pp. 7, 10, 306, & 307.)
(The photo of the statue is by Olaf Tausch and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.)