I think the honeymoon is over...

Two days after we closed on the land purchase, we went to the bosque for a relaxing evening walk. It will be peaceful, I think, and we can get to know our way around the forest. And as we start out, the bosque is peaceful, with that late-afternoon desert light, the mesquite duff soft underfoot, the air silent and dusty.

As we near the river, we hear a familiar but unexpected noise. Cows?? And then we see them, a small herd of mostly black cattle with ear tags, scattering away from us as we enter the flood plain. Cows?? There aren't supposed to be cows here. Whose cows are they? Where are they coming from?

We continue toward the river, and as we approach the water hole, we see this.

One of the cows has wandered into the pool and gotten stuck in the deep mud. Her face is covered in mud, her eyes are covered with mud. She tries to move when we approach, but she is truly mired. We are worried that she might sink completely and drown, so we take off on an urgent walk the half mile to the neighbor's house and use their land line to call for help. How do you get a cow out of the mud? How many people do we need? There are no roads here—can we get a vehicle in? We call our friend who grew up on a ranch. He is calm and has experience and ideas. It is getting dark by now, but he can bring a truck with headlights and ropes and winches. If you let them stay in there too long, they can get nerve damage in their legs. We should get her out tonight.

So off we all go to collect supplies, as well as two young friends for extra muscle and morale. Well, and who doesn't want to come to a nighttime cow rescue? By the time we meet back at the pool it is pitch black. Pretty soon here comes our friend's truck bumping over the rocky river bottom. By the light of our flashlights we can see that the cow has actually managed to struggle her way across the muddy pool to the other side and is next to the far bank. We whoop and holler encouragement, but she can't seem to muster the energy to move, and even with all the commotion she stands looking defeated next to a little rise at the water's edge. Our friend takes off his shoes, wades in and pushes at her, swatting her firmly on the rump with a rope, and with all of us cheering her on she finally comes heaving out onto the bank. After falling to her knees a few time, she staggers up and stands. Eventually she disappears off down the river, grazing hungrily. 

The next day the owner's cowboys come down to assess the trespass cattle and find over 40 head roaming back and forth on the river and floodplain through our land. A week later, they rounded up about 25, but that still left at least 15 animals grazing on our land and drinking at the pool for the next month and a half. Finally, about a week ago the cows had drunk all the water in the pool and moved on to find water elsewhere

    March 14...

    ...compared to Jan 23

I didn't expect such an immediate reminder about how owning land doesn't mean that I control it. Arizona is a "fence out state" which means that it is the responsibility of landowners to fence cattle out, rather than the responsibility of cattle owners to fence cattle in. So even though these cattle were supposed to be on a grazing lease up Robles Canyon, miles away, there wasn't much we could do if their owner chose not to come get them. We want fewer fences, not more, for wildlife connectivity. Besides, though the river that feeds the pool runs through our land, the pool itself is actually on BLM land, as our property ends just about at the edge of it, so fencing it wasn't exactly legal. And how to fence the cattle out without fencing everything else out as well? 

Our drought is so severe right now that it is heartbreaking to see all that water that should have been available for wildlife drained away in such a short time. I'm all for cattle grazing when done thoughtfully, but letting your cattle run wild is nonsense, taking resources away from wildlife, destroying the prize garden of one of the best gardeners in the valley, getting into other ranchers' pastures. The canyon where the cattle were supposed to be was poorly fenced, the rancher understaffed and overworked, whatever...it just feels like disregard for other people, especially when the cattle are still loose over two months later.

I guess I didn't expect that owning land would be so emotional—so much vulnerability, anger, fear, along with wonder, delight, and awe. I didn't expect to feel so attached so soon to this place, to feel the land open up to us as we open to it. It is such a visceral thing, caring about something. But this is the way it is; connection comes with heartbreak. Loving something means loving all of it. And all good things end eventually.

I find myself praying not just for good fortune, but to be present to whatever comes our way. And maybe learning how to build a fence wouldn't hurt, either.

WHAT IF? (Part 3c: But wait...there's more!)

    The hazelnut orchard next to our trailer this summer. See end of post for why the ground is so bare.

My unplanned foray into the world of hazelnuts has one more twist. When I researched hazelnut farming practices I discovered some surprises.

The Willamette Valley is Hazelnut Central, growing about 99% of U.S. hazelnuts, otherwise known as filberts. A major threat to this crop is the filbertworm, the larva of the moth, Cydia latiferreana, also native to the area. The moth lays its eggs near the nuts and the larva burrow through the shell to munch on the kernal, leaving nothing to collect come harvest. The common practice for hazelnut farmers is to spray a pesticide to kill the eggs or the newly-hatched larvae before they have a chance to enter the nut.

Because of the skill of the filbertworm, organic hazelnuts are rare, with a mere 1% of hazelnuts being grown this way. And there is an interesting catch to organic hazelnut production. Even if the worm can be eliminated on the orchard itself, the worm lives on native white oak trees (Quercus garryana) and so oaks neighboring organic orchards are a source of re-infestation of the hazelnut trees.

Because of this, organic hazelnut growers may be encouraged to cut down native oaks on their property.

WHAT...?!!!?

Suddenly my plan to buy organic hazelnuts doesn't seem so great.

Oaks in the Willamette Valley and surrounding mountains are part of two ecosystem types: oak woodlands and oak savannas. The oak savannah is actually a grassland, with scattered single oaks that grow broad canopies due to the lack of neighboring trees. The Willamette Valley was once covered with oak savannas, but with changing human priorities, only a tiny fraction of this ecosystem remains, perhaps less than 1%. Oak woodlands are also increasingly rare, with around 5 - 7% remaining. Much of the remaining oak habitat is privately owned and on agricultural land, so this clash between sustainable farming methods and oak conservation is important.

If I was going to make a list of trees I would most like to be friends with, oaks are top candidates, along with cottonwoods and aspens. Their massive limbs and calm presences make them look like elder beings striding along over the grassy hills or settled into the draws. There is a small cluster of oaks along a seasonal stream about a mile from Tom’s parents’ house and I walk there frequently on hot days to feel the sudden coolness under the trees, and listen to the chatter of birdsong in the branches. After the hot asphalt road or the bare Christmas tree fields, this oasis of life is a welcome relief.

So it's a shock to me that my organic hazelnuts could be coming at the expense of my beloved oak trees.

    © Rick Shaefer   Used by permission of artist.

And it reminds me that things are never simple. John Muir’s oft-quoted thought, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” applies just as much to organic farming as anything else. More and more we find that not only do environmental goals collide with large-scale food production, but that different environmental goals also collide with each other. As I said in the last post, affliction is an inevitable part of life.

There are no easy answers.

And ironically, fully recognizing that seems like a step toward grace.

I was planning to end this article with a discussion of research collaboration between the University of Oregon and an organic farm to try grazing pigs under their trees as a way to reduce the number of filbertworm larva overwintering in fallen nuts.

I was going to use this as an opportunity to talk about how complex systems need complex responses—and that no matter how much we try to simplify it, the world we live in is complex.

I was going to talk about different disciplines working together—how growing food requires a knowledge of history, ecology, agriculture, demographics, philosophy, etc. For example, understanding that oak savannas in the Willamette Valley were probably maintained by Kalapuya and other local Native American groups using controlled burning. Or recognizing that there are over 140 different species of wildlife that use oaks for resting, feeding, or nesting. Or knowing that timing of agricultural activities and crop selection makes a difference. Or identifying the cultural values underlying our food production systems and recognizing the impact these values have on our surroundings.

But as I tried to do this, I realized that I was doing exactly what I said we shouldn't do. I was proposing an "answer". I was making complexity into something that we could imagine being in control of. I was making it too simple.

I would like to resist doing that at least for the time it takes to finish reading this post. I would like to hold the questions as questions. To leave it open. To just pause.

And perhaps in that pause, this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke that my sister reminded me of recently would be relevant:

...be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
                       —Rainer Maria Rilke

    Young oak tree contemplating the future.

-------------------

ENDNOTES

A note about the drawing by Rick Shaefer: this is actually a type of oak called a "live oak" not a white oak, but Rick so captured the feeling of reverence that I have toward oaks, as well as the Tree's place in the savanna habitat, that I decided to use it anyway. Rick's work is impressive, both for its skill and the global scale of his view—I highly recommend a look at his website, especially his recent piece, The New Colossus, about Wall Building.

If you would like to read more about the research I referenced above, click here for a short synopsis of my own, and here for links to the project itself.

And I promised to tell you why the ground is so bare around hazelnut trees. The short answer is for harvest, as hazelnuts are collected by sweeping them off the ground after they fall. But the more I look, the more convoluted the reasoning gets. Bare ground means less habitat for filberworm larva and other insects. Bare ground means fewer ground squirrels and gophers who gnaw on tree roots. Moles would eat the insects, but they leave mounds that interfere with the harvesting equipment. Ground cover would help soil fertility but it also attracts more bees, so less ground cover means fewer bees are killed by insecticides. And on and on... The complexity of the reasons for simplifying an environment so dramatically point to the complexity of the actual system, regardless of how simple we try to make it.

WHAT IF? (Part 3b: Beyond helplessness)

    © Marc Hanson   Used by permission of artist.

The last post helped me to calm down—but I still didn't know what to do about the hazelnut sprayers.

What I could see was that my first response was violence—violence toward the workers in wanting to scream at them to stop; violence toward myself in telling myself there was nothing I could do. Either leads to helplessness: I’m either helpless to the strength of my emotion, or helpless to my inner criticism.

I am looking for a third option.

What I find is something I will call containment. There will always be affliction. Life lives on other life. There is no getting away from it. It doesn’t matter where on the food chain we eat, we are eating living beings, plants included.

In this case, there will always be affliction associated with growing food—hard work, weather, insects, markets. A farmer is faced with all kinds of difficulties. This farmer’s attempt to deal with these difficulties is pretty normal. (Though what the normal response seems to miss is that this style of farming attempts to destroy the afflictions themselves without seeming to recognize the whole new set of afflictions this creates.)

Similarly, my response to the people spraying is normal—my anger, fear, and disgust are all natural responses to feeling threatened. These are not only normal, but these responses are necessary—they let me know that I am alive and awake. They let me know what I care about.

The question isn’t how do I get rid of all affliction, or how do I get rid of my responses—these are both impossible. The question is, how do I contain my response, like a fire in a hearth, so that it provides useful heat, rather than a destructive blaze?

In this case, I can think of several options:

First, by pausing. Just stopping before acting allows my mind to settle so that I can think clearly.

Second, by my attitude toward my response. A friendly attitude to all of my feelings allows calmness to arise more readily. A critical, self-blaming attitude only creates more upset emotions.

Third, is to really feel what I feel. To name my feelings—all of them—and to simply experience them, viscerally, just as they are.

When I do these things, finally my mind begins to open up and start to work again, and I think of some alternatives to the violence of my first impulse. 

• I can talk to the workers to find out what they are spraying.
• I can ask the landowner to give us notice if they are spraying in the future.
• I can research hazelnut farming practices.
• I can choose to purchase organic hazelnuts.
• I can invest in an organization that promotes organic farming in the Willamette Valley.

Or, the option that I had already instinctively taken:

• I can write a blog post about it.

This whole approach of containment is not something I thought up myself. It is another example of help, in this case in the form of a book that I had read before, but forgotten, until I unearthed it from a storage box just after the spraying incident. The book is David Brazier’s The Feeling Buddha, which offers a practical approach to acting with courage in the face of life’s inevitable challenges. This is based on Brazier’s interpretation of the Buddha’s first teaching, but does not require Buddhist beliefs to appreciate or practice.

Brazier’s book helped me see that part of my helplessness came from my misconception that my action had to eliminate the affliction. I was trapped in an all-or-nothing approach. If I can’t “solve the problem”, then why bother trying at all? Since most problems are not solvable, this results in a lot of “why bothering.” 

Not only that, but it was okay that the problem wasn’t solvable—this is the nature of most problems. Even if a problem has a solution, there is another problem waiting to take its place. This is part of the natural order of life—that problems, afflictions, exist. Birth to death we are faced with them. And that’s okay. Just because we face problems doesn’t mean we are failures. It just means we are alive.

I will let you read the book yourself if you are interested in more about this. But I would like to return briefly to the statement I made last post that we need all the shadow parts of ourselves. Whatever for? Wouldn’t we all be better off without them?

All these things that rise up in us let us know what actually lives in the depths of our minds. It lets us know what we fear, what we hate, what we don’t understand, what we crave. All of this is important information. It lets us know with exquisite accuracy what work we have to do.

But the work we have to do is not the work of eradication. It is the work of containment—again, containing the fire in the hearth.  Afflictions are the fuel; our responses are the spark. Fuel and spark together creates the fire that we can then use—when protected from the wind—to nourish passionate, meaningful lives. 

We need the shadow parts not only because they represent dismissed aspects of our multifaceted selves, but simply because they contain a lot of energy. When I cut the parts I don’t like out of my life, I reduce myself—my fire is too little. When I allow these parts to rule me, my fire gets too hot—I destroy myself. 

We are invited instead to a practice of constant tending. To see the affliction of our lives for what it is: beyond good and bad, failure and success, it is fuel for the fire of a meaningful life.

---------------

Brazier, David. (2002). The Feeling Buddha: A Buddhist Psychology of Character, Adversity and Passion. New York: Palgrave

WHAT IF? (Part 3a: What if we owned our shadows?)

       Holding Onto the Shadow Self.   © Loretta Mae Hirsch   Used by permission of artist.

This is not the post I planned to write today.

I thought I was going to write about something else, but after about an hour at my computer, I hit a dead end. I have a bunch of ideas, an outline, pages of notes, but I can’t fit the pieces together. The harder I try, the more stuck I get. And as I get stuck, I get more and more frustrated. So of course, I do what I know best—I keep trying harder.

As I am struggling to find a path through this confusion, I hear a motor start up outside and an intermittent hissing sound. I step out the door to see two people swathed in yellow hazmat suits, complete with full headgear and respirators, spraying a young hazelnut orchard planted in recent years next to Tom's parent's house.

As I watch them driving their cart filled with metal tanks, dowsing the trees in God-knows-what just a short distance from our trailer, I am livid. Any thought about loving my neighbor or accepting the world as it is flies out the window in my fury at the utter arrogance of our approach to this planet. At how everything is geared to efficiency and appearances. That anyone could think that there was anything healthy about a field of bare dirt in someplace as lush as the Willamette Valley. Or about spraying something all over our food that requires a hazmat suit to apply. Or that our perfect nuts are worth destroying every insect (and the chain of creatures that feed on them). I feel sick. MY home has been invaded, my little island of privacy and safety and peace, and it is no step at all to imagine how all the other creatures in that field feel. And worst of all, I have no voice—it’s someone else’s neighbor’s property and they can do what they want with it. What I feel like doing—running screaming at them to STOP IT—would get me nowhere.

Gone is any plan I had for the day to continue writing about good will and tolerance. This may be nature expressing itself as a pest-control service, but I am having none of it.

The irony of the timing of this is not lost on me.

The day goes on and they continue their work in the field—the silver mist of spray floating out in the breeze, the psssst of the nozzle, the rattle of the engine. A series of other unfortunate events doesn’t help my mood and late in the day I break down crying and ask Tom to help me sort through my feelings. What I discover as I talk about the day is that I am using the same words to describe the men in the field as I am using to describe my own behavior this morning trying to write this post.

“We get so focused on achievement or efficiency or perfection that we aren’t attending to the real needs.”

This is my first clue to the deeper layers of what is happening.

Just the night before, I had read that when conflict arises, the first work to do is inside ourselves. In this case, the first thing I am finding in my intense emotional reaction is something that I didn’t see in myself. In Jung’s word, part of my “shadow”— all the things I haven’t accepted or admitted to in myself.

When I was writing this morning I was not paying attention to what I needed (time to think, a calmer brain, perhaps some help) I was just focused on meeting the deadline I had set and how to construct a rational argument. I was ignoring the real needs, like honesty or connection.

So part of the shadow was that what I was reacting to “outside” myself was a mirror for what was inside.

But the deeper shadow work is not just about sheepishly admitting to my behavior, as though it was a fault to apologize for and improve on next time. This is just as much a quest for perfection as the original projection. Claiming my shadow also means recognizing that not only do I possess whatever I am condemning outside of me, but that I actually “need” those qualities to be a whole human being. That I need access to my arrogance, my thoughtlessness, and my will to power in order to be a whole person. That claiming my anger, my fear, and my violence is necessary. If I don’t acknowledge all these things as existing in me, and existing as a part of a full spectrum, then my choice about how to behave is actually no choice at all. It is just repression of everything that I don’t like, as though I could choose one side of a polarity and live there. And things that get repressed, tend to come up sideways eventually.

What if I claimed my own capacity for destruction? Or the ways in which I am thoughtlessly efficient? Or just my own basic will to live, which always comes at the expense of other life?

What if I owned my fear?

I started writing these posts as a response to my fear. I am concerned about wildlife habitat, the health of the earth, the future of human society. Most of all, I am concerned about the polarizing nature of much of the conversation surrounding these issues. The primary question on my mind is: how do we address the issues we face without creating more “us and them” energy?

Owning this part of my shadow helps me to address the “us and them” division that lives inside my own head.

But though I am less reactive now, I honestly feel no closer to knowing how to respond to the hazelnut sprayers than when I started.

As I am wrestling with this, trying to figure out how to finish this post, I find myself getting frustrated again—I feel that familiar "pushing" stance where I try harder and harder with fewer and fewer results. This time, though, I notice. And I do something different.

I stop.

Let’s go do something else for awhile, I say to myself, and decide to go cut up an old sheet for a rag rug I am making. Cutting a long straight strip of cloth is the perfect mind relaxant, and as I focus, my thoughts settle and the path forward clears.

I began this series with the idea that help can appear when least expected. And what I realize is that this small invasion of my life in the form of the hazelnut sprayers is actually the help I need right now. Getting triggered into my own “us and them” thinking is not a distraction from these posts; it is a real live test case for the ideas I am working out. It is the perfect opportunity to learn by doing.

I don’t have to have all the answers; I can just stay open, follow my responses to this event, and see where they lead me. And this basic trust—in myself and in the process—opens up some ideas to try next.

       Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow.    Used by permission of artist Amy Bogard

Knowing this is enough for today.

(to be continued...)

WHAT IF? (Part 2: What if we remembered our relations?)

    Pine Marten

While everything that humans make and do is "nature expressing itself," our “making and doing” has isolated us from many of the rest of the world’s inhabitants. We have forgotten our relations.

This seems at least partly due to the “human” and “nature” split that I talked about in the last post. When we use the terms “human” and “nature” we begin to think of them as somehow equivalent: as though “human” were on one end of a see saw and “nature” was on the other. We forget that we are just one species—ONE—among millions. One current estimate is 8.7 million. That looks like this:

1    (That’s us.)

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111………

That is only 352, but you get the point. 8,700,000 is a lot.

It is easy to forget that those zeros stand for more than the space they take up on the screen. Imagine 8,700,000 written out fully rather than symbolically. If we continued with the hatch marks, each page in a typical book would hold 2860 of them. A book with a hatch mark for every other species on the earth would be 3042 pages long. That is a very, very, VERY large book.

    American Red Squirrel

So to recognize that there is us.

AND there are 8,699,999 OTHER kinds of life that we share the world with.

This would be the place in this post where it would make sense to talk about extinction rates. Where I might mention how the usual background extinction rate is something like 5 species a year, and about how the extinction rate at this point is 1000 times that, more on the scale of the extinction of the dinosaurs. But one of the reasons I am writing these posts is that I am looking for a different route through this material. We have all heard about habitat loss and climate change, but this doesn't change how we live. I know when I hear things like that it is not really motivating; I just feel discouraged.

I get glimpses every now and then—mostly when I am still and silent—that there is a subtle but profound shift in my awareness in which I get a sense, for lack of a better word, of "okay-ness." I can't yet fully identify this shift and I certainly can't yet reliably live it. But I know that it exists, and every now and then I find it for a few minutes. Perhaps it is a sudden recognition of myself in the eyes of another creature. Perhaps it is really wondering what it means to do something as radically ridiculous as turning the other cheek. Perhaps it is actually letting in the idea that I am a light in the world.

What I do know is that motivating people to change through fear and shame doesn't seem to be working. Though it may galvanize short-term action, it also creates divisions—both in our hearts and in our communities. We can only care for what we love. And in order to love our relations, we first have to love ourselves.

    Western Screech-owl

So instead, I will start by saying that forgetting our relations is pretty normal. I don’t believe that ants pay much attention to the well-being of plants that can’t grow around their ant mound. Or that the cougar worries about the rabbit. Or that deer are concerned about grass. For the most part, this kind of worry would not be very helpful to that animal—it would simply create a creature that could not survive. This is not adaptation; it is neurosis.

Most species pretty much take care of themselves. And up until now it has mostly worked. Different species came and went, populations increased and decreased, but in the long run life on earth has become increasingly more complex and specialized and interwoven, mostly as a result of the collective effect of individuals going about their individual business.

    Metalmark Butterfly

But we find ourselves in a different situation now than the mountain lion and the ant. We find ourselves in a situation where our ability to problem solve and our communal reach has extended our impact in a way never before seen. We have not only developed more efficient ways to find food and shelter, allowing us to expand where we can live and in what numbers, we are also managing to reduce many of the factors that would have previously limited our population growth.

Human population estimates as of June 2019 (according to the US Census Bureau) list the current number of people at around 7.57 billion. If you thought the number of species is a lot, try wrapping your head around these numbers.

7,577,000,000

If it took a book 3042 pages long to hold a hatch mark for every species on earth, how long would that book be to hold a hatch mark for every human being on earth? Ready?

2,649,301 pages.

    Green Shore Crab

So this is another reason why it is easy to focus on ourselves. There are a lot of us. And we are big and noisy and interesting. We take up a lot of space. We make race cars and operas and World Cups and best sellers and satellites and movies. We wage wars and claim water rights and drill for oil. We can talk to someone from any country in the world by tapping our fingers in a magical pattern on a little glass screen. We can see pictures of ourselves (maybe even videos) from the time that we are born to the time that we die. 

There is so much about nature expressing itself as humans that is fascinating and beautiful and dizzyingly awe inspiring. And also terrifying and terrible. I do not understand a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the things that we are capable of as a species—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And I can turn on a screen that will show me pictures of human beings doing fascinating and courageous and stupid and inspiring and horrifying things from all corners of the planet at any hour of the day or night.

Where is there the time or the inclination to think about bobolinks or blister beetles?

    Blister Beetle

And this is not even taking into account the effect of wars, natural disasters, scarce resources, or just the daily effort of making a living and raising children on our ability to take the time to think about other creatures, or the systems of the earth as a whole—the air, waters, forests, fields, and lands that sustain all of life. There are many reasons why we have forgotten our relations.

I believe our relations are worth remembering. That having empathy and understanding for other creatures is part of knowing ourselves. That when we see the connections between things—can see the systems rather than just things in isolation—that we can find our place in the world. That what we do to the least of them we do to ourselves.

    White-tailed Deer Fawn

Wise men and women of all peoples throughout the ages who have known these things. Have known that life depends on other life. Have known that our well-being is tied to the well-being of the web. Have known that our nest is our nurture.

What would it take for us as a culture to remember our relations? Would it take nature developing a new mind—one that has more consciousness of the whole? Is this mind already in us and just needs practice and discipline to access? Are there indigenous cultures that know more about this? Is there a spiritual force in the universe that connects us to a larger reality?

And what would we have to give up? What would we have to face in our own hearts? What would we have to feel?

What if we were to remember our relations?

These are enough questions for a lifetime. But when I think about what it would look like to remember our relations right now, right here, today, I think of this:

“From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.” 

                       --Ursula K. Le Guin

    Coyote Pup

All photography by Tom Talbott, Jr., licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

WHAT IF? (Part 1: What if we were never separate?)

     Nature Man -- Michael Tomaka (Copyright Creative Commons)

---

The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it.

                   --Paul Kingsnorth 

             He is

a wilderness looking out

at the wild.

          --Wendell Berry

This all began for me with a feeling of unease with the way people use the word “nature.” We go out into nature. We take a break in nature. We struggle against nature. Depending on their orientation, “nature” was something they revered or subdued, tamed or preserved, enjoyed or feared. But in all cases—no matter what their attitude toward nature—their language irrevocably and unconsciously separated “us” from “it.” 

There’s “nature”. And then there is “human”.

When I realized what was bothering me, I could then see clearly—oh how lovely our ability to project is!—that I was doing exactly the same thing. I just want to live closer to nature. I want to tap into natural cycles. I feel more comfortable in nature than in the city. But when I tried to do something different—to change my language—I found that I couldn’t. I couldn’t because there were no words (at least not in English) for what I was trying to say. The only difference was that now there was a little pause before I finally spit out the word “nature”. I would like to help to create more……um…...natural systems.

First I thought that what we must need are new words. Wouldn’t new words create a new way of thinking? That was what I started to write this post about several years ago. But as I followed this thought deeper, I realized that I don’t think new words are possible. This split is so deeply rooted in our psyches that we will not be able to come up with new words without changing our story.

Our language reflects and reinforces our assumptions. And this assumption I am circling around is fundamental to who we are, at least in western culture. Somewhere along the line we began to assume that “nature” and “human” were two different things. I am not going to go into the details of how this happened. We look to the shift to agrarian culture, religious texts, Descartes, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc., as though those things were responsible for this shift. I suspect these were the outgrowths of changes that were already occurring inside our own psyches—they were the manifestation of shifts that had already occurred. The important thing now is recognizing where we are.

We believe that humans are fundamentally different from nature.

So rather than proposing new words, I propose a radical new orientation: What if we are in no way, not ever, not at all, never were, and never will be, separate from nature?

Not only are we not separate from nature, but nature is not separate from us. Put simply: there is no separation, no matter how hard you look. There is no line, no break, no division, no us, no them. There is only the world—the whole breathing, living, integrated world in all of its fabulous beauty and terror, with everything in it together, humanity fully embedded in and embraced by it. 

If I take this idea to its logical conclusion—that whatever we are is nature expressing itself—this means that everything about us is nature, even our desire to be separate. Our thoughts, our tools, and all of our creations all are the result of nature doing what nature does. Consider this:

Nature is dancing en pointe in a tulle dress. 

Nature is building a bridge across a canyon. 

Nature is surfing the internet. 

Nature is lying drunk under the Aurora Street Bridge. 

Nature is circling the planet in an orbiting space station. 

Nature is translating a poem from Chinese into French.

Nature is singing itself to sleep. 

Our brains, opposable thumbs, language, tool-making, and social activity are all the natural outcome of the upwelling vital force of life on earth. Even our capacity to destroy ourselves and all other life along with us is natural; even our denial, our egocentricity, our violence, our narcissism. Also our love and our wonder. There is nowhere you can point to that is not “nature.”

What is, is.

And everything that is, is connected.

So when we think about coming home, there is nowhere to go. It is closer than close. We are here, already in our own nest. We are it and it is us.

What if nature and human are one?

WHAT IF? (Introduction: You never know what you'll find in an RV park)

          Boromir's Death — used by permission of Anke Eissmann

I have recently been reading about models for the future that don’t have happy endings: the possible collapse of our current economy and food production; wild unpredictable variations in climate; the extinction of large numbers of species on earth, our own species included. None of these global scenarios leave me feeling like any of my actions have much effect.

It is easy in the face of this kind of information to either deny that anything is happening, collapse in despair, or adopt a kind of the-Hell-with-it attitude and go about business as usual. I can say (from personal experience) that while these strategies provide some immediate relief, none of them satisfy in any meaningful way.

A couple weeks ago I happened to pick up The Two Towers—Tolkien’s second book in The Lord of the Rings—from an RV-park book exchange, and started reading it again while I was waiting for a load of laundry to finish. The book begins with despair. The group of “peoples” charged with the task of destroying the ring is in shambles. Gandalf is dead, Borimor has tried to steal the ring for himself and has been killed by attacking Orcs. Frodo and Sam have struck out on their own, two small hobbits against all the might of Mordor. The other two hobbits have been taken prisoner by the attacking Orcs. And Aragorn, who wasn’t there to help with any of the fighting, is left with Legolas and Gimli (and his aching conscience) to lay Borimer to rest and decide what to do next.

Aragorn feels the tragedy of their plight deeply. He recognizes that he has failed in his duty, he doubts the ability of any of them to succeed in their goals, and he mourns the deceit and untimely death of Borimer. He is clear-eyed and open-hearted in his assessment, and he is honest about it with his two friends.

And yet in the midst of his grief and doubt he is able to act with integrity. When he has fully felt the despair of their situation, he returns to his own inner values and chosen commitments, and uses these as compass points to make decisions at a time when decisions could seem futile. This leads him to act, not necessarily in the ways that are "biggest" or "best", but in the ways that are most "him"—in the ways that are most true to his own abilities and place in the world.

For example, he doesn’t follow the ring-bearer, though he was charged with his protection. Frodo—he reasons—has made his own decision. Merry and Pippin, who were carried off as prisoners, did not. Aragorn is “responsible” in a way to all of them, yet he cannot be all places at once, so he chooses to follow Merry and Pippin for the time being, because to him their need is greatest.

And once this decision is made he acts on it. It is true to him, and he is true to it. He can’t know, will never know, if it is the “right” decision; all he knows is that his insides and his outsides are in agreement.

I can think of worse models for personal action in our current world than this man of Middle Earth.

And once again, I am reminded of how help can appear when least expected. Even in the middle of a long afternoon in the dingy laundry room of some RV park in Winnemucca, Nevada.

*****

Tom and I have been thinking a lot over the past three years about our place in the world, both individually and as a species. It is no little subject, and I am struggling to put the pieces together into a whole.

This next series of posts—which I have called “What if?”—is my attempt to bring together some of the ideas I have been mulling over. I think of these ideas as sparks from a fire I am stirring late at night. Maybe they flicker out and don’t go anywhere. Maybe they flare up, create a larger blaze. Maybe they illuminate something for just a moment in the corner of my vision. This is a place where I can poke around in the embers, see what happens. Where I can ask that potent question: What if?

Reading about Aragorn helped me realize that writing these posts is my next action. It is definitely not the biggest or best action. As I am sitting in front of my computer all morning it may look like no action at all. But working out my thoughts is what’s in front of me. It's my way to be in integrity—to match my insides and my outsides. And like Aragorn, I am not sure where following these thoughts will lead.

I don’t expect, or even want, everyone to agree with what I have to say. In times of change we need all of our perspectives in order to be adaptable and to see the big picture. We need more richness rather than less. And in order to have that richness, each part of the system needs to be true to what it is. We need our heart cells to be heart cells and our liver cells to be liver cells. I am not sure what kind of cell I am, but this is the view from my perspective. I am interested to hear the view from yours.

What if.......?