Within, Without

"[T]here was that magic, just that connection, that there was something beyond the world of the everyday. And the way to get there was through nature. The birds knew how to do it. The ice on the puddles knew how to do it. The trees knew how to do it. And I thought that if I could just sort of soften myself then I, too, would be able to enter that world, speak that language, yet be able to come back to this world with wisdom and a story."
--Trebbe Johnson, in an interview with Parabola, Fall 2012

"Birds knew how to do it."  An osprey on Reelfoot Lake floats gracefully into the treetop nest.

"The ice on the puddles knew how to do it." Crystal: the word comes from the Greek for "ice." We've long been copyists of what we didn't make.

"The trees knew how to do it." Springtime, here, new buds opening silently and steadily, changing the scene slightly every day until the leaves emerge fully. 


What is it that birds, ice, and trees know? How to be perfectly themselves, only themselves, unclouded and uncluttered. What Whitman wrote about animals could apply to the entire non-human world:  "Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, / Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, / Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth."

Consider an old tree stump covered with moss:

The moss, along with other life-forms like beetles, fungi, and a variety of microorganisms, keep the tree, long "dead," in process. It feeds the species that turn it into soil. There is no "waste" in nature. You can read about that in books. Or, you can watch it for yourself, if you look closely. I like to see trees that are left in forests where they fell many years ago slowly crumbling into particles of what they had been. Around the fallen trunks, the tree-particles blend into the earth at some point, and become indistinguishable from the soil. 

Closely watching the natural flow of things is like reading a sacred text. 

Can we "enter that world, speak that language," as Trebbe Johnson says? We don't have to enter it--we're already a part of it. What we have to do is remember our membership. Remember that our human range--in spirit and in body--extends almost unimaginably beyond our egos.