Raking the Leaves

It's the first Saturday in November, and this afternoon I've enjoyed the sunshine, shade, air, and physical work all associated with the late-fall-to-early-winter task of getting fallen leaves off the lawn. I stroked a kind of rhythm with the swoosh of the rake getting the leaves into piles, as I listened to the shrill sounds of the leaf blower my neighbor across the street applied to the same task.

Invention is the mother of necessity: Historian Melvin Kranzberg's second law of technology. I've never actually wanted a leaf blower, though my sales resistance has certainly failed in a lot of other areas where I've taken on one "necessity" after another.

I do admire the holdouts, the resisters of the never-ending parade of Next Big Things. Thoreau, a lover of walking and a despiser of the railroad, said he could make a twenty-mile trip as fast by walking as another might by train, reasoning that the rail traveler had to devote a half-day earning the wages for the train ticket, then another half day to the trip. Henry would simply devote the entire day to walking, and enjoy the trip more for being able to appreciatively take in the country through which he traveled.

My afternoon of raking was physically demanding enough to cause me to break a sweat under my flannel shirt. I suppose I could have done the work faster with a leaf-blower, then I would have had time to drive to the gym and exercise there. That course of action would have been more consistent with the zeitgeist. Apply all possible aids to the cause of efficiency in your tasks, so you can do more tasks.

Another approach to fall lawn care involves just waiting until all the leaves are off all the trees, then cleaning them up in a single campaign against the clutter of dry fallen foliage. But it seems to me that I have to move most, if not all, of the leaves anyway. Why not go outside on several sunny afternoons and enjoy using my body? We tune our lives too much to the pace of machines, and natural rhythms, those biological realities we share with other forms of life, get forgotten.

Leaves don't fall all at once anyway. Today, only a few oak leaves were on the ground. Oak-strength holds the leaf to the limb the way their sturdy trunks hold the limbs. There will be brown leaves left on the red oaks in March, making it hard to get everything perfectly neat, even in time for spring.

I confess I don't much care about perfection. As Carl Jung observes in his interesting essay "Answer to Job," perfection only exists where completeness is absent. You have to leave out a lot of reality to sustain the illusion of perfection.

So my leaves will be gathered into piles for removal a little at a time, and when I finish (or more accurately, when I just stop raking them) there will be a few here and there to carry on their slow movement into the earth. I can live with that.

Old Music

I recently saw a production of the biographical play Hank Williams: Lost Highway at the Circuit Playhouse in Memphis. It's a compelling story, with Tim Greer as Hank, who presents the songs in authentic style.

Some works of art--plays, songs, poems, novels, paintings, photographs--linger with me in ways that go beyond the skill and craft of their making and presentation. They linger because they connect some of the widely diffused dots that outline my life, or they revive or recast a memory that had lost some of its potency. I suspect Hank's songs have done that for a lot of people.

The set and the staging of the play were especially effective. Stage right, there's a Sinclair sign, the suggestion of the old-style service station, complete with a few bald tires that, maybe like ol' Hank himself, had seen too much of the highway. The service station area also provides a hangout for a black street singer from Williams' home town, a man known locally as "Teetot." In Hank's early years, Teetot teaches him to sing from his own heart, sing his own pain and sing it with conviction. It doesn't come instantly to the young and callow white boy, but it does get there, with a rare intensity.

At stage left, a waitress who dreams of Cadillacs and better places works behind the counter of a truck stop diner. She hears the news of Williams's death on the radio there, and we learn later of a brief encounter she shared with a very drunk Hank, whose appearance is enhanced by the presence on the parking lot of his new '52 baby blue Caddy convertible.

The diner is a little garish, too much chrome and neon, but offers a spot on the road brightly lit by electricity and the waitress's smile. The service station is dingy, dusty and greasy in a friendly sort of way.

The center stage area is an elevated platform, used mostly for Hank's performances, from the Grand Ole Opry to the seedy honky-tonks he played in, from crowds that loved him to those he was too drunk to perform for.

When I was a boy in the middle-to-late 1950s, I liked being in a car going down a highway, and my highway trips were mostly in the rural South. Sometimes, I think, Hank's songs were on the radio. Sometimes the windows were down. There were Sinclair stations along with Essos and Lions, and diners and other local cafes, it being a little to early for fast food franchises to have gotten pervasive enough to homogenize the American landscape as thoroughly as they now have. Oil companies were big business, but restaurants were still mom-and-pop. A landscape in transition, like all landscapes. You just have to wait until a later moment in time to see where a particular landscape is in a transition process.

I live in a world now that I would describe as wider and less provincial. But my ancestry in the rural South is close to my time, with my generation being the first in my family to be born in hospitals. My parents were both born in West Tennessee farmhouses where plumbing and electricity were things of the future. When my mother was born, my grandfather was a tenant farmer, and would remain one until he got a job as a carpenter building one of those hastily-constructed U. S. Army camps where World War II recruits were trained for subsequent adventures in Europe and the South Pacific. I remember my grandfather in most of the time our lives overlapped as a finisher of hardwood floors.

In childhood, I listened to the voices, the stories, the convictions, the delights and the dreads of my extended family. I suppose a lot of what I heard was similar to what Hank Williams heard. I learned to play the guitar when I was 14, but I was a rocker, at least in those days. Later, as an adult, I learned to play and sing some of Hank's songs, along with some of the old-time music he listened to and must have played at some time himself.

Hank was lost at an early age. He was lost for good at 29, but got on the highway that led him to that early death several years earlier. His brief adult life created an enduring body of work--the songs he wrote, his performances--that a lot of people find powerful, even beautiful. He poured his life into it. The pain in his back, the pain of his marriage, the pain of just not knowing what to do with his own life but sing it. Some artists burn themselves to ashes singing the timeless and classless pain of the human animal.

As for me, I'm sophisticated now. I went to university and graduate school. I've traveled a highway from a conservative Southern Baptist boyhood to what's getting to be a late adulthood as a progressive Unitarian whose mind and spirit flows freely across another phase of a changing landscape.

But the child who is father to this man won't die before the man.

Write, Pray, Live

"Well, is writing more like prayer, or more like life itself, or a little like both? I am not sure. They all seem remarkably akin to me. They all exact something from us, but it is hard--maybe impossible--to know in advance what that something is."

--Harvey Cox, from the Introduction to The Best American

Spiritual Writing 2007, edited by Phillip Zaleski

This quote from the well-known Harvard Divinity School professor and theologian seemed an apt epigraph to get me started on this little essay, given that I want to have that unknown something exacted from me. So, writing, prayer (Cox uses the term in a broad sense), and life, these three. Has Cox spent too much time contemplating the Trinity, or is he onto something?

Writing, whatever else it is, is a kind of thinking, an approach to learning. It draws things forth from the writer, helps him understand them better. It can be an approach to making sense of one's life, putting one's experience in some kind of order. It's a special form of attention, as is prayer in the way I would conceive it. The link to life from writing and prayer is in the ongoing human process of constructing the self by attending to one's experience, examining it, and integrating it.

The ongoing assembly of who we are comes from our assessment of what we already are, in creative tension with who we might wish to become. Most of us who hold this tension are somewhat restless spirits. We may even be very accepting of who we are, but there is still something else we want to incorporate into ourselves--mastery of a skill, the satisfaction of a curiosity, or some psychological or spiritual movement.

Writing an essay is also an exercise that allows work toward mastery, first and foremost through more clarity of expression, which follows from more clarity of thought. If the writer confronts himself in his writing (which is often as difficult to avoid as it is to do) there's an opportunity for clarity about his life.

I recently had an online discussion with a old friend, one from the town of my high school days in the mid-sixties. We found each other, as people often do these days, on Facebook. A message from him recalled concerns across the decades about people in our families, people among our friends, people entwined in our lives who'd had particularly troubling times. Both of us could recall times of regret for failures of simple kindness.

I like to think of myself as a kind person, but I can think back on times I just wanted to do what I wanted to do, and withdrew or withheld my time and attention from someone who may have needed it. At other times, I just didn't notice the often modest needs of people around me. I don't believe I'm particularly unusual where such lapses are concerned, and I don't judge myself too harshly. But I do want to be more conscious of my actions, so I have to pay attention, both to myself and to others.

The act of paying attention to people around you is, I think, the beginning of kindness. We start towards kindness by a kind of openness in which we notice, then allow ourselves to be moved by the needs of others. This openness is also a quality of attention, the kind that may come out in writing, prayer, and life. It's helpful to practice it in everyday things.

I had a co-worker a few years ago who had migraines and suffered them stoically. One day I asked him if he had one, pointing out that the smile he wore was just on his mouth and not in his eyes. He said, "Oh, you notice that!" And it was clear he was just glad someone did notice.

But that's one of the times I did it right. I don't know about all the times I did it wrong, because I wasn't paying attention, and so I didn't form memories of them.

The Jewish scholar and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel said: “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.” I think often of that, how one's perspective on what's important changes, and what might point to such a direction of change. I suspect reflection on one's life, which could come through writing, and the kind of concentrated effort to touch something sacred that some call prayer, could move such a change of emphasis.

Heschel wrote scholarly works on the Hebrew Prophets, and saw them as insistent articulators of the need for justice in the world. Some of his academic colleagues thought his scholarship was enough, and wondered why he took the trouble to march with King at Selma. Later, he wrote, "when I marched at Selma, my feet were praying."

Spirituality and the Self

Yesterday I got an email from a longtime member of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), an organization that holds week-long yearly meetings to ponder questions on connections between these two areas--science and religion--that have been and continue to be the focus of so much human preoccupation. They're both about knowing the world, and our place in it.

The writer of the email, sent to a long list of people with an interest in these areas, wanted to gather ideas on what spirituality means to people who perhaps have a religious bent, but are less conventional, and more naturalistic, in approach than those usually thought of as "religious." So I took it as an opportunity to muse on where I am in my life just now with respect to my spiritual journey. In my life, what I have thought of as spiritual moments have been characterized by feeling larger connections that expanded my perspective, feeling a sense of awe at the core of reality, and a having a sense of timelessness. 

Spirituality is really a way of experiencing the world, a way that contributes to the sense of who we are--our sense of self. For me, it's a mode of experience that is uncommonly open and receptive to something outside ourselves, yet connected to us. It isn't just a feeling of connection, it's also a sense of belonging--of having a place among everything else. I often find these experiences, as do many people, in links with nature.

A few years ago my wife and I visited Isle Royale in Lake Superior. It's a place that's pretty remote by any current standard—to get there, we took a five or six hour boat ride from a little town on the northwest shore of Lake Superior seven miles south of the Canadian border. One afternoon we were canoeing in an inlet called Tobin Harbor, where there were nesting loons. Loons have several calls, and one call is reserved for telling other creatures to get away from their nesting areas. On the water, we saw a pair of loons near the shoreline and paddled towards them. The male swam out to meet us. We stopped the canoe. The loon stood off about 20 or 30 feet, sounding and repeating his warning call. We stopped for just a moment and took a couple of photographs. Then we turned the canoe around and paddled away. The loon who'd been telling us to leave immediately swam back to his mate near the shoreline, and the business between us was finished.

But in that brief moment, we--humans and loons--were at the border of each other's worlds. We could have paddled closer to where the nest probably was, but then we would have violated the natural order of that place. As it was, we were the visitors, and we were also potential intruders. We were at a boundary we ourselves did not set, and we could not linger there without disrupting something of ancient importance. But we were there, nonetheless, actors in the natural order of things, compliant with that order, and thus in harmony with it. 

A sense of awe also attended the experience, awe at the beauty and the otherness of these creatures who were here long before us. Our experience also, brief as it was, offered what felt like a moment out of time, supporting my suspicion that eternity is not endless time, but the absence of time. 

I don't have to travel such distances to encounter these feelings. I can sometimes feel the sacred character of the life in this world along the frequently dry creek that runs at the border of my backyard. Perhaps most often, I feel it in conversations, deep encounters, with other people, in those moments that Martin Buber characterized in his I and Thou as governed by the primary word I-Thou instead of the more common I-It. 

Buber says we really only know ourselves through our relations to others, and when we utter the primary word I-Thou in the context of relating, we are guileless and open to whatever and whomever the Other before us is. We consciously abandon the I-It position of our own agendas and ideas and prejudices in favor of genuine openness. You can spend a lifetime working on this, and it's a way of approaching spiritual growth. 

Along these lines, some of us believe that Biblical religion is at its core about relationship, as in the importance of covenantal bonds, and not so much about the propositional, systematic theology that has through the centuries been layered over the original stories. The traditions in sacred literature have spoken to us over the ages, and the ones that speak with the greatest ring of truth and authority continue to speak to us. In that way they are not bound by time. 

In Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal, an interesting little book just published in 2008, Rob Rieman writes of

. . . values that are universal because they are the same for all people, and timeless because they are of all time. Culture is the knowledge and shaping of these intangible spiritual qualities, collected in the cultural heritage. Only those works that are themselves timeless are significant; they continue to speak to us from generation to generation because they are the only works that express a timeless reality, an idea. . . . The only correct attitude toward timelessness is a receptive, answerable, and disinterested one. (58)

I find in these notions expressed by Rieman the suggestion of a possibility of the transcendent: something not limited to what is within one person or place at one time, but in some sense "alive" across time and place. Rieman also argues that timeless values and ideas won't be found in the search for what has some immediate utilitarian purpose: their value is inherent, and demands an openness not unlike the attitude of I-Thou. 

And what are these inherently valuable things? Traditions, texts, ideas. They may be old, the wisdom literature of Job and Ecclesiastes, or new, but they have the quality of timelessness and perspective-growing insight. Here's an example from "A Brief for the Defense," a poem by Jack Gilbert from his recent collection Refusing Heaven:

There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. . . .

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

Gilbert is paying a special kind of attention here, I think. He's affirming the "what is" of the reality we live in, being open, being present. Montaigne, in his essay "On Experience" affirms the essential connection with what is immediate, right here with us:

It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine, for a man to know how to rightfully enjoy his being. We seek other conditions because we don't understand the use of our own, and go out of ourselves because we don't know what it is like within. Yet it is no use for us to mount on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk with our own legs. (Excerpted in Stephen Mitchell's The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose.)

So being "spiritual," at least in my view, need not take us into supernatural regions--the holy is here within and among us, and is our legacy as people in search of what is most real. We just have to pay attention. Mary Oliver says it so well in her poem "The Summer Day":

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

What, indeed? Maybe paying attention is a state from which you can enter, at any point, the noble enterprise of addressing the question of  "what it is you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?"

"Much of a self derives from recollected events, their weight and outcome, and the personal iconography they create," writes Diane Ackerman in An Alchemy of Mind. The focus of one's spiritual life is on the inner life, which itself grows out of encounters with the world. In being more observant, more deliberate, more open, we enlarge that inner life, and grow our selves, our spirits.   

Troublesome Beliefs

The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. 

-- Alan W. Watts, from The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message

    for an Age of Anxiety

Alan Watts wrote these words in 1951, about four years after W. H. Auden's long poem "The Age of Anxiety" was published. Any widespread anxiety identifiable in those years has only gotten more intense in the bewilderingly complex fabric of contemporary life. We often take refuge in beliefs, which can soften anxiety's influence by providing a comprehensible structure to the world. 

Yet Watts says, as have others, that the world goes on, much of it opaque to us, and talks of giving ourselves over to the insecurities, those unlit, unknown regions, allowing ourselves to experience things as they are, letting life be what it is, unfiltered by our preferences and prejudices. 

Our beliefs are not the world itself. They provide a model of the world for us, one necessary to navigation of the world. But how should we think about our beliefs? A statistician named George Box said, "[a]ll models are wrong, but some are useful." Philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski noted that "the map is not the territory."

A map or a model can be a guide, but it's not the thing it represents. Neither are our beliefs the things they represent. Recently, we've seen vividly what can happen when economic and financial models are given too much credit for faithfully representing reality. One prominent critic of the methods that got the U.S. financial system into the mess it's currently in is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. "My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know...." begins Taleb's web page at http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com . 

From science to economics to education to religion, we comfort ourselves by thinking we know more than we do. The problem is that our overly optimistic assessments of our knowledge limit us from learning. If we want to learn and grow our minds and spirits, we must be open to adjusting any beliefs that, when tested in the world's empirical reality, just don't hold up--beliefs that, in other words, don't represent the world faithfully. 

The faith of letting go that Watts mentions affirms life. It's an openness to reality, a willingness to accept and engage the world. Loving a person is not about loving our idea of the person--it's about loving her as she is. Loving the world, in turn, is about loving it as it is, which is where we have to start, even if we think we might be able to improve a little part of it. In order to love the world as it is, we must be open to actually knowing it as it is. 

Even devotion to whatever is sacred must contain within the devotion a willingness to admit that we do not know fully and with flawless fidelity what the sacred really is. So we must remain open, giving up any blind allegiance to a map we want to insist is the territory.

People, of course, have varying levels of attachment to their beliefs and ideas. And yet even seemingly trivial beliefs can inspire what appears to be frighteningly rigid devotion. Beliefs are often held onto as though they were the flesh of the believer--challenging someone's belief is tantamount to Shylock's insistence upon a pound of Antonio's flesh. 

In James Jones' novel From Here to Eternity, an army Private named Robert Prewitt undergoes vicious abuse from his fellow soldiers who won't respect his decision to withdraw from boxing. Jones has Prewitt musing on the business of challenging people's beliefs:

You can't disagree with the adopted values of a bunch of people without they get pissed off at you. When people tie their lives to some screwy idea or other and you attempt to point out to them that for you (not for them, mind you, just for you personally) that this idea is screwy, then serious results can always and will always come out of it for you. Because as far as they care you are the same as saying their lives are nothing and this always bothers people, because people prefer anything to being nothing . . .   

This forcefully expressed view seems to fit the facts of human conflict more often that not. People do become so identified with their ideas of the way things are or should be that disagreement with their ideas launches them on a mission to crush opposition through the exercise of whatever power they have. 

Without that faith that's brave enough, that trusts enough, to let go, the beliefs that cling can not only limit the healthy expansion of an individual's spirit, they can be downright toxic. 

We need beliefs--we need a map of the world. But we also need to understand that some aspects of the world, and some aspects of human experience, are beyond the scope of our knowledge and understanding at any given time. 

The philosophy of pragmatism--an American contribution to that long tradition--asks that we judge ideas by the effects they have in the world. With that in mind, here are some questions to consider: What is the effect of religious zealots' beliefs that God wants, by various means, to see the world cleansed of people they regard as "unbelievers"? What is the effect of the belief Israeli settlers in occupied territories hold that, thousands of years ago, God gave them the land from which Palestinian Arab families who'd lived there for generations are displaced? What is the effect of the belief that nature is only a "resource" to be exploited by humans? 

Anyone can construct such a list according to his beliefs. I have no doubt that some of my own beliefs are on display in my short list. So I'll entertain a final question: What might be the effect in the world of beliefs that could always be challenged and discussed? Not discarded, just challenged, and discussed. Of course we have challenges and discussions in the world, in marriages,  in the meetings of organizations, in diplomacy. But we could do a lot better.

Time Seen As Old Trees on the Ground in an Old Forest

They're more obvious, more starkly visible in wintertime, these trees lying on the ground where I'm walking in a remnant of an old growth forest, large trees allowed to die a natural death, finally falling when their roots, weakened by rot, lost the strong fiber needed to hold them up. I walk the length of one trunk slowly, noticing the thriving carpet of moss on the tree's remains, almost the only green thing around in the wintry scene. In some places, bark hangs toward the ground, suspended for the moment in its slow-paced separation from the tree trunk.

Most of the trees are oaks. They probably stood upright for more than a hundred years. Some of them have been on the ground so long they're identifiably on their way to becoming the ground. You can look at the remains of old trees in late stages of decomposition, particles of what was once unmistakably wood in a line sloping to the ground, the particles the dark color of the soil. Following the line to the soil, you see that at some point the decomposing tree and the earth are indistinguishable. It's a dramatic, if subtle glimpse into the process of decay and regeneration. The trees become the soil that feeds new trees, progeny of the old.

Walking through a woods like this, and really seeing what's here, offers a sense of a time scale we rarely have such a direct opportunity to reflect on. On a clear winter night I can see the Orion Nebula through binoculars, a place in space called, in a delightfully anthropomorphic metaphor, a "stellar nursery." In this most vivid of constellations, stars, over immense ages of time, are formed. But the pleasures of Orion are not as direct as those of the forest, where I can actually see stages of something unfolding over more years than my life will hold. In the forest, I can even smell it, touch it.

Human education has always been sadly lacking in lessons on what time is really like. So much we do affects the places we live, and can go on affecting them for long spans of time. Our perspective is limited to what we need and want now. Our imaginations are underdeveloped and thus unable to reach across the ages.

And now some say we are the universe becoming conscious of itself. Evolution has reached a point where creation can contemplate its own wonders. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge continues to feed us. Now we have some ability to watch what happens not only across generations, but across geological ages, and even back to a time when there was no earth (the ge in geology) to have ages.

So what are we doing with this knowledge? I can see, in the transmutating trees, a process that extends over hundreds of years--decay forming soil, smaller trees nourished by the decay, large, mature, strong trees that most intensely characterize the forest, and that, left alone, will also feed it one day.

I can see, too, as can a number of other conscious people, a process unfolding over hundreds of years that is changing the climate of the earth. Still, for me as for so many others, what is judged as urgent from my personal perspective usually takes precedence over matters I know to be of greater ultimate importance. It's difficult, this business of being human and taking responsibility, at your own expense, for events that will occur after you die. Most of us just aren't up to it.

And now we've come to a time when our actions have powerful implications for our own descendants, as well as so many other forms of life on earth.

The earth is old, so much older than we are, and eventually, it will regain any health lost to human bungling. This blue and green planet has been through a lot of changes in the last four and a half billion years, and our star is thought to have at least that much life left in it. The question is not whether the earth will remain, but whether, and how long, we and our race will remain.

A Real Survivor

Last week, a golden retriever named Buck was reunited with his family after six months of fending for himself in rural Montana. Buck had been on a trip with his people when they stopped in the town of Chester. Buck was alarmed by the blast of a train whistle, and, in accordance with his instincts, bolted. The Halter family of Bonney Lake, Washington, stayed around a while to look for him, but eventually left after posting pictures, descriptions, and contact information.

Stories about Buck's time in the wilderness appeared this week in the Liberty County Times (Paul Overlie, "Buck makes it home," Feb. 3, 2009) and the Associated Press (Amy Beth Hanson, "Dog found after being missing for 6 months," February 7, 2009).

The Halters left Montana in August, and got a call at the end of January from a local resident who'd found a dog fitting Buck's description, first sighting him on a day the temperature reached 27 degrees below zero. Buck was holed up under a collapsed building, and the farm family that found him lured him out with food--he'd lost a lot of weight.

I wondered briefly when I read these accounts if the dog had been named for another Buck, the dog who goes from a slow-paced easy life in a sunny California valley to the harsh and competitive environment of the Yukon in Jack London's The Call of the Wild. London's Buck just gets stronger in the wilderness, besting dogs, wolves, and men around him in a series of contests for survival and dominance. In the course of all his trials, he becomes legendary. I read Call of the Wild for the first time when I was in elementary school and was utterly enthralled by it. Leafing through it now, almost 50 years later, I'm still drawn to the tale.

And yet the Buck from a town near Seattle who spent from August 2008 to January 2009 on the loose in Montana is a more plausible story. He got separated from his protective human family because something--a train whistle--really scared him, and he took flight. Railroads these days often carry an aura of history, and in this country, what we like to call "Americana." But to animals who don't understand their uses, they're just something huge, fast, extremely noisy, and altogether incomprehensible.

The Buck of 2009 inspires with the sheer force and efficacy of his survival resources. Just enduring the cold seems a remarkable achievement. What are ordinary dogs capable of? Their wolf ancestry may hold unexpected possibilities. In his fascinating Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez writes of some of the ways canis lupus deals with bitter cold:

In extreme cold the wolf can reduce the flow of blood near its skin and conserve . . . heat. A team of biologists in Barrow, Alaska, found that the temperature of the wolf's footpads was maintained at just above the tissue-freezing point where the pads came in contact with ice and snow. Warmth there was regulated independently of the rest of the body.

So maybe Buck's body knows something about conserving heat. Bodies do have a wisdom built into them, a fundamental, pre-rational kind of wisdom that bolsters survival. Dogs, people, and other animals may well have resources beyond what we believe. How else would people endure some of the things they endure?

Buck's family wondered where he'd been, what he'd been doing all that time. I also find that unanswerable question interesting. In the 1970s, my wife and I had a dog named Maxwell. One night he was accidently left outside. We spent the next day looking for him and posting "lost dog" notices on utility poles around the neighborhood. That night, a still-warm September in Tennessee, we slept on the couch in the den with the windows up, so we could hear him if he barked at the door. The next morning, he scratched on the door. I heard and immediately recognized the sound of the paw on wood, jumped out of bed and welcomed Max home. He was damp in spots, and carried a load of cockleburs and beggars' lice. We gave him a royal meal. And naturally, wondered where he'd been, what he'd been doing. He'd been gone less than 48 hours.

The story of Buck's Montana sojourn is life-affirming in and of itself, with its overtones of a capacity beyond what anyone might have expected--separated from his accustomed civilized support in a hostile environment, he held out.

As for Jack London's Buck, he ends as the Buck of legend. Maybe a Ghost Dog who continues to threaten the native people who killed his closest human companion, his last link with what was not wild. Maybe in one of his progeny, who continues to lead a wolf pack. London's yarn closes thusly:

When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.

Thoreau recognizes the way of nature's wisdom: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Not wilderness--wildness. "A song of the younger world," maybe. Human culture, itself an extension of nature, is smart. But nature is smarter.

The Rhythms of Solitude and Conversation

I recently answered one of those items on a form that introduces you to a new place, giving you a chance to send a probe that may make a connection with someone. "Tell us something about yourself," it said. I answered that I liked solitude and conversation. I left it implied that I did not engage in both at the same time. I trust anyone who read it chose not to picture me sitting alone, captivated in scintillating conversation with myself. At least I hope no one did.  

And yet, solitude offers time for reflection, and unless we're not only meditating, but meditating very skillfully, we will entertain thoughts, some of them just intrusive, others connected to an effort to understand or express something that's important to us. We only seem clinically dangerous if we manifest a running vocalization of those thoughts. 

For me, being alone and being in the company of others weave a complementary fabric of life that suits my personality. I am an introvert, and though I like most people and treasure a few, social overload can deplete me. I restore my energy by saying no to the demands of interaction for a while. And it's only when I'm alone that I can reassure myself of my ability to live with myself without the need for constant distraction. 

Solitude releases the energy demanded when we focus on others, and gives us a chance to choose where to focus our own attention. Sitting on a log in a wooded area one day, I noticed red maple seedlings in profusion around me. One or two up to my ankle, another up to my waist, another at my shoulder. The large red maple that generated these seedlings shaded most of them, as did nearby oak and hickory trees. So the young trees had little or no chance of growing tall and mature. Nature is prodigal, making more than it needs, extravagantly covering the world with life. 

I thought of Loren Eiseley's wonderful essay "How Flowers Changed the World," one of the chapters in his Immense Journey. Eiseley points out the role of angiosperms--flowering plants--in spreading enough biomass on the earth to support large populations of warm-blooded animals, with their (our) high metabolic demands. So the maple saplings around me that day in the woods were part of this revolution in life, along with all the other hardwoods, the grass, wildflowers (including those we classify as "weeds"), and the crops we grow for food. 

It's hard to get a chain of associations like that, one starting from a close observation, then tied to reading also done in solitude, at a dinner party. 

On the other hand, it makes for a special kind of conversation, one in which people who are interested in you, your direct experiences, and what you make of them may find interesting. I like conversations that allow the weaving in of quiet, distinctive experience to enrich the knowing between and among people. Who are you, I ask my friends, including those I've known for a long time. They often ask me the same thing, and we enrich each other, along the way creating a rich texture in our relationships, a history of having shared the thoughts and feelings generated in our separate experience. I've had chances to tell people why I appreciate goldenrod, and some of them have listened without thinking me terribly idiosyncratic. 

Fine conversations, in turn, may feed the reveries of solitude. Taking a quiet walk, a memory of some powerful moment in talk that bound me to a friend brings pleasure, a moment to savor something in life that I've been granted. 

The inner life develops in solitude, but it also develops in interaction with others who share their inner lives. We're all richer for the rhythms of interaction that go on both within us and among us. 

Pleasures of the Watershed

The boundary of my backyard is a creek. It helps drain the watershed I live in, and though it's dry most of the summer and fall, it runs steadily, if slowly, through much of the winter and spring. I take pleasure in considering my little space on earth as a microcosmic watershed. 

Toward the south end of my property, there's a gentle bend in the stream where a tree leans over the creek at an angle of around 45 degrees.  The water that's run through the creek over the years of the tree's life has eroded the soil around its roots. The fate of the tree is a visible reminder of the way water slowly shapes and reshapes the land, carving out bits of it as the speed and volume of water dictate. There's no schedule for this construction project, and no goal. It's part of an immemorial process. 

It's January. Last week the temperature dropped low enough to freeze a lot of the water in the creek. I walked out one morning and considered the ice, the way one might stand in an art gallery and consider a series of paintings. I was taken by the variety of forms expressed in the ice. 

One shallow area was more strikingly crystalline than any other, a testament to the origin of the word "crystal" in the Greek word for ice: krustallos.  After this word was coined, someone noticed that the structure of quartz looked something like ice, and the meaning of "crystal" ramified in the direction of similarity, as many words do through their history. The ice crystals behind my house contained straight rods an inch or so long, pointing all around the compass, all held together in a matrix of less obviously patterned ice. 

In a deeper spot, the ice layer was thicker, and had a milky cast to it. This ice put a question into my mind: If I looked at it under magnification, would I see other patterns, other crystal structures? In yet another spot, ice was thin, the sandy bottom underneath it visible, and liquid water on top. This ice had a clarity that reflected the patterns of bare winter branches in the trees above it. 

Looking at the streambed over a distance, I saw a larger perspective, with all these variations in the icy mix. The ice in different shades of white. The water going from solid to liquid, released from its arrested movement by the day's warming. So much variety in the space of a few feet. 

The freeze only held the water for a short while. The water would flow down through Oliver Creek, on to the Loosahatchie River, then to the Mississippi, and out to the Gulf of Mexico, as it has done for many ages. 

The land I live on was once an enormous forest. Then, for a while, it was a plantation. Now it has a suburban character, at least on the surface. But the signs of its more permanent affiliations are here, perhaps most vividly in the creek. 

The poet and essayist Gary Snyder has thought seriously about the nature and value of watersheds. In an essay titled "Coming into the Watershed" he writes:

A watershed is a marvelous thing to consider: this process of rain falling, streams flowing, and oceans evaporating causes every molecule of water on earth to make the complete trip once every two million years. The surface is carved into watersheds--a kind of familial branching, a chart of relationship and a definition of place. The watershed is the first and last nation whose boundaries, though subtly shifting, are unarguable. . . . For the watershed, cities and dams are ephemeral and of no more account than a boulder that falls in the river or a landslide that temporarily alters the channel. The water will always be there, and it will always find its way down. 

So I have--as we all have--another way to think about where we live, one that represents a deeper substrate of our place on earth than does the political entity that collects taxes and provides streets and water mains and sewers. I live in Shelby County, Tennessee, in a town called Bartlett. But I also live in the Loosahatchie River watershed, and people a few miles to the south live in the Wolf River watershed. It's helpful and healthy for me to remember this. 

We are social creatures with a rich culture. But we are also creatures of nature, entirely dependent on, and embedded in, conditions set and provided by nature. Human preoccupations in Western history have frequently leaned toward our fascination with the institutions, ideas, and technologies we've created. And human culture is fascinating. But so is its natural foundation, beautiful in its stunning variety, and vital in its singular ability to nurture human culture. 

I can see it through the windows on the back of my house, and I can walk a few steps for a closer look. The little walks I take down to that creek help prevent me from taking a great gift for granted. 

 

Folly Marches On

"A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.” So begins Barbara W. Tuchman's 1984 book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

On January 14, 2009, Isabel Kershner, writing in The New York Times ("War on Hamas Saps Palestinian Leaders"), paints a picture of unintended but predictable consequences stemming from the devastating Israeli Defense Force (IDF) assault on Gaza. It seems that, contrary to Israel's hopes, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian authority are losing influence among Palestinians, and Hamas is gaining support. 

Should anyone be surprised? Where is the historical evidence in the Mideast to suggest that desperate people can be thrashed into submission? The Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982 gave birth to Hezbollah. What was the net effect of that military operation on Israel's security?

“Folly, in one of its aspects, is the obstinate attachment to a disserviceable goal.” Tuchman again, page 96. Bludgeoning by whiz-bang military hardware, the "shock and awe" touted by the neoconservatives who shaped policy for Bush 43, often fails at its goal of making the enemy run for the exits. 

Military historians and strategists have long understood the concept of "asymmetric warfare," in which a force like the Palestinians, far weaker than its opponent in conventional military terms, applies strategies and tactics that allow it to keep fighting. The ragtag Continental Army of the American Revolution hid in the bushes and shot at the larger, better-equipped British forces as they marched in disciplined formation. The Viet Cong moved openly on the fields of battle, indistinguishable among their South Vietnamese countrymen. Iraqi "insurgents" have wreaked destruction with "improvised explosive devices" along the roads traveled by U. S. military vehicles. 

I'm not a pacifist, and I do not deny that Israel has often been under siege in its short national lifetime, beginning with its having to fight for its beginnings in 1948. But all the U. S.-supplied superior firepower of the Jewish state has failed to deliver the kind of security it undoubtedly wants. 

The hope for peace in the Mideast, always fragile, seems more elusive than it was a month ago. The world seems less safe. 

Tuchman once more: “If pursuing disadvantage after the disadvantage has become obvious is irrational, then rejection of reason is the prime characteristic of folly.” (380) The naivete of hard-liners is striking. When the U. S. Senate was considering the resolution to allow the Bush administration to attack Iraq, I wrote my senators suggesting that they read Tuchman's March of Folly. A quixotic gesture on my part, maybe--I don't think they read it. 

Escaped Beavers, Nuisance Deer, and Dying Wolves

As human numbers have grown over the millenia, we've worked tirelessly towards setting the messy house of nature in order. We are busy like the proverbially productive beaver, always thinking not what we can do for the tree, but what the tree can do for us. 

Last week the BBC reported that three beavers, members of a species hunted to extinction in Britain hundreds of years ago, escaped from a farm owned by a conservationist and wildlife photographer. The farm's owner, Derek Gow, is duly licensed by Natural England, a government agency, to keep beavers. He's been able to catch two of the fugitive aquatic rodents, both of which are females. The one still at large is a male, who may be out looking for a mate, or maybe even another mate. (See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7805128.stm , "Escaped beaver fells river trees," 30 December 2008.) 

The runaway beaver "broke out" of his confines in October, but it seems that he's given away his hideout's rough location to observant individuals who noticed trees were being cut down by distinctive beaver tree-felling methods. The presumptuous creature has also apparently established a territory, and is going about the business of making nature's disorder into something he can better live with. 

But it's only a matter of time before The Authorities and Mr. Gow close in on the errant animal. Traps baited with the scent of his species' female will eventually stop him from acting out his grandiose fantasies of independent living according to his own instincts. He'll return to the fold at the farm where other "wildlife" continue to be conserved and preserved. 

I live in one of those neighborhoods that's close to a city's edge, one where all the trees weren't cut down to build the houses, so deer still roam freely in fairly large numbers. A recent homeowners' association newsletter carried a short article about the problem of the area being "plagued with deer. . . . [that] eat azaleas, excite dogs and run in front of cars." Since we're not allowed to hunt in our suburban city, we have few defenses against these pesky ruminants in our midst. Though some homeowners think they're "cute and interesting to watch" we are asked not to feed them, which "encourages them to stay in the neighborhood [and] interferes with the normal cycle of wildlife."

In my yard, they leave the azaleas alone and go after the hostas. It's also occurred to me that they were here before the cars and landscaping. And, a long time ago, we killed off their natural predators to make the world safe for our own ruminants. We're still doing that, too. 

But I guess trapping beavers and advising against feeding deer are an improvement from earlier times. And we've even given the wolf a chance in a few places, though not without an ongoing fight. The most moving and poignant expression I know of one person's awakening to the folly of human contempt for the wild is Aldo Leopold's short essay "Thinking Like a Mountain," collected in almost any available edition of his nature-writing classic A Sand County Almanac.

The story central to Leopold's essay is about killing a wolf and watching it die. He was young at the time, and would eventually be known not only as a writer but as the wildlife biologist who figured out that a top predator actually fulfilled an important function in an ecology. When he learned to "think like a mountain," he acquired a longer view of things. The mountain, Leopold understood, had been there long enough to watch what happens without wolves to thin the deer herds that ate the vegetation growing on the mountain. He writes:

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and the mountain. 

And, near his conclusion:

We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.

And now a lot of us strive for the dullness of safety from ravening deer and beaver. From concern for physical safety, we've moved to concern for a kind of safety that's about not having our landscape views disrupted, or our dollars-and-cents wealth compromised, as if that was really the only kind of meaningful wealth. 

Is there another way of knowing about wealth, or perhaps more properly, well-being, for those patient enough to listen? What knowledge was in the eyes of the dying wolf Leopold watched? Whatever it was, he was permanently changed by it.