I’m in love with yet another book: Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore. On the outside cover is a photograph of two speckled blue eggs in a nest. On the pages inside, the author takes me on a “series of excursions to ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the natural world could teach about sorrow and gladness”. [i]
It starts with snakes. The very first page in the Gladness section begins by talking about snakes having spent the winter underground in cracks between rocks and nestled together under a glaze of ice. With springtime coming, the author is curious about what the snakes are up to.
Years before when she and her husband moved to a house that sat in the middle of a long-ago cleared land, they made room for snakes. For Father’s Day one year, the kids dragged sheets of scrap tin and placed them along the edges of the property; perfect shelter for mice and voles … and snakes.
Early each spring when the mornings are still cold, the author – who is much braver than I am – lifts the edges of the makeshift shelters and peers inside to discover what creatures have nestled beneath the scraps of tin. No one is home under the first one. Mice and voles along with a few skeletons occupy the next few. Then voila! Snakes.
The garter snakes are left alone. They are the ones that slither through your fingers and prompt you to yo-yo them between our hands to keep them in sight. The garter snakes also deposit a smelly brown snake-stain on your skin that would make a skunk proud. But then there’s the little rubber boa snakes. They’re much more lovable. When one of these is picked up, it warms itself in the palm of your hand and then slowly wraps itself around your wrist, often looping its tail around a finger.
I’m not nearly as enamored with snakes as the author – I’m usually running the other way – but she has the patience to sit for long periods and observe snake behavior. She knows that snakes can do something humans can’t. When a snake flicks its tongue out, it gathers molecules from the air and then flicks these same molecules back into pits at the top of the its mouth. The essence of the air goes straight to the snake’s brain – “not tasting, not smelling, but in another way directly knowing the acid of adult eagerness or the sweet milky warmth of the morning.”[ii]
A snake, like a mouse, has a system of glands, genes, and receptors that are almost non-existent in humans. Snakes, and some other creatures, have over five hundred genes dedicated to this “sixth sense” which feed it information on fear, lust, hunger, thirst, and satisfaction. Humans have all these genes too, but only a half dozen are functional. All the other human vomeronasal genes are broken and degenerate.[iii] Human fetuses have two vomeronasal glands, but they dry up before birth.[iv] Let’s face the facts; snakes have more sense than humans. You might say snakes are more sensitive. Or at the least, snakes react on a broader base of sensory information. To be clear, I do not include humans with snaky personalities with having more sense, or using the sense they do have. But I do wonder, what do real snakes get out of gulping air that I don’t?
Snakes often give me nightmares. But I read about this sixth sense and the idea that I’m missing something right before I went to bed one night. I didn’t exactly have a nightmare, and snakes weren’t involved – but it still started with the snakes chapter.
In my dream there were characters and a plot. At one point I found myself sitting on a concrete wall along a sidewalk across the street from a city park. I sensed something was not right and told the others sitting next to me. I was not able to explain how I knew something was going to happen, but I knew. I got up and walked further up the hill away from the street. Then my dream went blank. I kept going back to the where I was sitting on the wall, but nothing happened. The dream wouldn’t come back. My solid dream dissolved into shreds. It’s like everything fell apart. My unexplained knowing could not be processed further. Where’s the vomeronasal gland when you need it!
I wonder if this dream was an enactment of the missing sixth sense. I had breathed the air on the street near the park, taken in information that was vaguely comprehensible but not tangible or explainable. I had an awareness that there was something more, but access was denied. It’s like trying to go to the next level in a game puzzler or a math problem, but I’m not there yet. I can improve my game skills and math skills, but I can’t make hardened glands or degenerate genes work. In the case of the sixth sense, the snakes win.
What am I missing? I have a fully functioning brain, five other sense organs that work well, a healthy body, and a soul. Most of these function well beyond the snake’s ability – although I have to give it to the snakes in the slither department! But I can easily be fooled into thinking that what I’m seeing is complete. The gulps of air that I do understand, inform my senses well enough to adequately cope in this world. I know that my human lack of a working sixth sense deprives me of additional information that might be useful. My other senses work overtime to assemble meaning in conjunction with my brain (and hopefully integrate with my spirit). But this world is filled with ploys to trick us into thinking we see the whole image. All the while, we are blindly unknowing. Often our economic interests provide a storyline that make it acceptable for us to ignore even what we do know.
When I was growing up, each summer Mom and Dad would load all three kids in the back seat of our wood paneled Country Squire station wagon for our annual trek to see grandparents. They’d roll up the windows, turn on the AC against the summer heat, and chain smoke all the way from North Carolina to Indiana. We’d head north through Mt. Airy, cut through a slice of Virginia and then we’d drive through the mountains of West Virginia. I remember loving these mountains. In the early years, there was a winding two-lane highway full of hairpins and steep drop-offs. Gradually, the West Virginia Turnpike came into being, basically adding an extra lane every now and then. But some summers, the outside lane, the one closest to the edge, had actually fallen off the mountain. Traffic snarled along mountain hollows, dense forests, and tumbling creeks. It was a long haul, but the mountains drew me into their magic.
These days, the West Virginia Turnpike is a heavily traveled interstate. When you drive south from Charleston, you speed along at 70mph – a hair-raising speed around curves on steep grades. Instead of looking at the mountains in all their splendor, you hold on with white knuckles and stare wide eyed as the road races by.
As much as I love the Appalachian Mountains, it is also true that the mountains that our family used to climb up and over in our station wagon, are mostly gone. It is still picture postcard perfect along the interstate, but once you go beyond the public sight-line, more than 500 mountains have been obliterated. Giant earth moving machines have scraped them into the creeks and valleys, extracting dirty coal as they go.
My senses tell me the trip through West Virginia is still beautiful. As long as I don’t push beyond what has been carefully engineered for public relations and tourism, I can hold onto my image of pristine mountains. But just like my dream that fell apart, the truth of the mountains – the ones that used to be – is shredded into thin air.
I listened to a snippet of an interview with Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourner’s Truth yesterday afternoon. His is a leading progressive voice in today’s challenging religious world. Something he said caught my attention. We can believe everything is all right or that things just are the way they are – until we change perspective. The mountains are there until I look beyond the interstate. There are no snakes on the cleared land, until scraps of tin are put in place to provide shelter.
Jim Wallis also said something else. He believes Mother Teresa was a saint because she didn’t ask why. Oscar Romero, a priest martyr who denounced poverty and injustice in El Salvador, dared to ask why. Unlike Mother Teresa, Oscar Romero’s path to sainthood is a political nightmare.
Is asking “why” akin to lifting the scrap of tin and changing our perceptions? If we had asked why in 1970 when the first West Virginia mountaintop was removed, could we have kept asking until we got beyond economic efficiencies and profit motives and delved deep into our moral and ethical obligation to not destroy the earth? I’m sure people did ask why but encountered a political nightmare. In the meantime, we’ve lost 500 mountains in West Virginia alone. Twenty-four states still permit strip mining.
There are philosophers who say that if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. If we blink, the mountains are gone. Where they really there? By playing God, we are altering our perceptions. Kathleen Moore, the author of the book I love, believes it is our entire onus, our human burden, to hold the world in existence by paying attention.[v]
Sitting by the snakes as they gulp air and flick the molecules into their sense organs, we could mourn our losses. Or, we could taste the air, listen with our full bodies, see beyond the sight line, and feel our deep connection with the earth.
Carl Jung once reflected on the ladder or hierarchy of creation. He wrote, “The idea that [humans] alone possesses the primacy of reason is antiquated twaddle. I have even found that men are far more irrational than animals.” According to Jung, elephants have the most wisdom. Followed by lions. Then pythons. Pythons! Snakes again! Humans fall somewhere below.[vi]
Is there any hope?
Once again, I look to nature – and religion. Our loss of connection with nature is not a personal or social problem: it is a religious problem.[vii] We are taught that divinity is not found in nature, but elsewhere. Our separation keeps us from listening to something ancient and deep within our selves. I wonder if lack of use of the vomeronasal sensory system caused its demise in humans. Likewise, I wonder if our lack of paying attention to nature has led to its devaluing and subsequent abuse.
Once again, I look to nature – and religion. Our loss of connection with nature is not a personal or social problem: it is a religious problem.[vii] We are taught that divinity is not found in nature, but elsewhere. Our separation keeps us from listening to something ancient and deep within our selves. I wonder if lack of use of the vomeronasal sensory system caused its demise in humans. Likewise, I wonder if our lack of paying attention to nature has led to its devaluing and subsequent abuse.
I believe that as long as religions of the masses continue to shun nature and keep the body separate, the earth will continue to suffer. So will we. Last month, UU ministers and others received a request from the Unitarian Universalist Association for contributions to a new hymnal that will include Earth-centered Liturgy. How wonderful is that! Within a religious framework that honors all sorts of human and religious diversity, we hold nature as sacred. This is the type of perspective shift that we need. Not the undoing of everything we know or the undoing of belief systems, but a change that enables a re-connection with the interdependent web of ALL creation.
Carl Jung advised that, “Enchantment is the oldest form of healing.”[viii] What would it be like if we fell in love with nature itself, not just books about nature. We run across the earth’s back each day, paddle across earth’s waters, fly above the clouds, and get soaked by the rain. What would it be like if we could gulp the air, tap into our primordial senses, and re-enchant our love affair with nature?
I’ve seen a picture of a lone pine standing tall and alive amid the destruction on a tsunami-wrecked beach in Japan.
Birds are migrating and winter ponds are shrinking. Baby birds will hatch soon.
Daffodils are blooming. And tulips. And magnolias. Ah yes, the nature is blooming.
And we’re alive!
We can gulp the air.
Awesome.
Happy Earth Day.
Blessed be. Amen.
[i] Moore, Kathleen Dean. Wild comfort: The Solace of Nature. Trumpeter. Boston. 2010. Back cover.
[ii] Moore. pgs. 5-6.
[iii] Moore. pg. 7.
[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ
[v] Moore. pgs 91-92.
[vi] Sabini, Meredith ed. The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology and Modern Life. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley, CA. 2002, 2005. 2008. pg. 12.
[vii] Sabini. pg. 2.
[viii] Sabini. pg. 4.
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