Friday, January 14, 2011

First Song of Spring

Even though it's only January, as I mentioned here, the signs of approaching spring start early in this part of the world.  This morning, despite the incessant blustery rain and wind we've been having for the past several days, I was thrilled to hear a song sparrow in a shrub on the sheltered north side of the house, testing his trills in what was undeniably a spring song.  What I heard this morning sounded more like the first of the two song recordings found here.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Human, Nature

The subject of humans in nature (and nature in humans) is one I'd like to explore a bit in my next few posts.  I've been asked to give a guest sermon at a local Unitarian Universalist Church in early February.  This will be a new experience for me.  I have done many public education programs for work, and lead many ritual services for my own church, but actually standing at the pulpit will be a new box to check on my life list.  I'm planning to discuss the relationship between humans, spirit, and nature, specifically with regard to the Place of the Salish Sea ecosystem.  There's a lot to say, but I only have twenty minutes, so hopefully musing here will help me to pare down my thoughts into a coherent sermon.

Western thought has famously created an artificial separateness between humans and nature.  The idea that the body, our physical selves, reliant upon the products of the natural world to survive, is completely separate from the soul, the thinking part of the Self, goes back thousands of years, even before Descartes did such a good job of fleshing it out (if you'll forgive the pun).  When your religion, rulers and scholars keep perpetuating a message like that, either by words or deeds, pretty soon it starts to feel like it is an eternal truth, and like nothing was ever any different...and here we are in 2011, most of us still acting as though what happens to the earth has no bearing on what happens to our bodies, and that how our bodies relate to the earth has no bearing on what happens to our minds, our hearts, our souls.  Indeed, the average human being living in the United States today has no idea where their food or water come from, or where their waste goes.  North American school children today might be able to tell you the names of several different kinds of exotic endangered wildlife living on distant continents, but can't name a single plant or bird species they might see out their windows.  Some of them won't even see birds out their windows, living as they do in such highly urbanized environments that even the most adaptive, invasive species don't often show their faces there.

To our ancestors a few generations back Nature was merely uncivilized, unknown, unexplored, and dangerous.  In modern times we look at Nature through our television screens and see in the shows about wild weather, aggressive wildlife, and the perils faced by those who seek adventure beyond the suburbs that it is still dangerous, maybe even more than it was before.  As the news media bleats an endless stream of stories about weather and wildlife anomalies, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, we see that Nature is uncontrollable.  And above all, Nature is dirty--this last, perhaps, the greatest threat to modern humanity if the advertisements for anti-bacterial cleansers for every surface of your home and your own filthy body are to be believed.

In addition to reinforcing an artificial separateness between humans and nature, the Western world has for centuries viewed the relationship between humans and nature as adversarial.  Christianity, with its teachings that the body is inherently sinful and that all things earthly should be eschewed as much as possible in order to receive an intangible eternal reward in some disembodied Heaven, helped to widen the gap between humans and nature.  Living on earth, toiling through one's life with the physical discomforts of weather too hot or too cold, illness, the pains of childbearing and old age, these were the trials.  Suffer through them, and go to your reward.  There were no rewards in nature, unless you were a wicked heathen who enjoyed your food, sex, and other earthly pleasures.  Although we don't consciously articulate this idea in a lot of modern discourse about the human relationship with the natural world, it is still very much there, just beneath the surface, vividly coloring the way we consider our place in the web of life.

I don't feel the need to dwell to deeply on the physical impacts of this way of thinking.  It should be fairly obvious to anyone who is conscious in this time that the results of this Western attitude toward nature, combined with the imperialistic push that has spread this worldview to every corner of the planet, has not resulted in a harmonious relationship with nature.  Stories of environmental degradation and imbalance and the way it is finally making humans uncomfortable are everywhere in the news.  Some even embrace it, welcoming what they interpret as signs of an impending apocalypse because it means that intangible heavenly reward might come sooner.  Indeed, in the United States, recent administrations have even encouraged various types of environmental destruction as a means of hastening these "End Times".  But this pervasive believe of separateness has had a profound affect on our very souls--the souls Descartes and others claimed could exist independently of the body, and, therefore, the earth.

Why, then, do so many of us feel in our souls a sense of being incomplete, a yearning for something that speaks to us in a sunrise, a birdsong, the smell of rain-washed leaves?

Next:  pining for the fjords

Monday, January 3, 2011

Sightings

I never seem to notice that the robins have gone until they come back.  This time of year they are spending a lot of time hanging out in the trees, like big orange fruit leftover from last fall.  A small group of them appeared in our yard on New Year's Day and have been passing through each morning since then.  It will be some week before we hear our first robin song of spring, though, announcing the time when they are beginning to nest.

Driving through Kenmore at twilight yesterday, just past the Hwy 522 and Hwy 405 interchange, the kids and I happened upon a tremendous flock of crows doing their pre-roosting aerobatics.  This is something I have seen crows do many times before, and have observed that it is something apparently triggered by the light levels at sunset, but never have I seen so many crows flocking at once.  A little research reveals that in the fall and winter, crows gather to roost in large numbers, undoubtedly what we were seeing.   There were easily thousands of them, filling the sky and swirling around, not behaving like a flock of starlings or a school of fish with synchronized turns but just milling about in the sky.  We pulled to the side of the highway to watch for a while, and even over the roar of traffic we could hear the cacophony of their calls.  It was spectacular, but also little eerie...anyone else who has ever seen The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock would have had a shiver down their back, too.

We're in the midst of another cold snap here, hard frosts in the morning and inches of ice on top of the rain barrels.  I even heard that all of the inner harbour in Victoria, BC, was iced over on New Year's Eve, a highly unusual thing. The cold weather is beautiful, offering crystal clear views of the snowy Olympics and Cascades against a perfect blue sky.  The sun doesn't offer much warmth, but at least it's shining.  A local news outlet reported that it rained here on every holiday last year, which is really only true if you celebrate the holidays they were looking at, but does indicate that our skies last year were not as sunny as they sometimes are, and that makes the sun all the more welcome now.