TREES BREEZING

I believe in cause-and-effect;
so when the trees decide to dance
and sway, I have observed that the
Wind gets whipped into breezes.

I am not sure why Wind wants
to cooperate with the trees;
I guess it has some kind of natural
pact with them to get it breezing.

The effect on me is to cause
me to watch the dancing trees
and feel the Wind breezing
in sensual effect-and-cause.

YESTERSUMMER WE LIVED NATURALLY, THEN WE BECAME ENLIGHTENED

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7013764.ece

Not being British nor living there, I do not understand the venom leveled at Charles Windsor (see the London Times article linked above, about Prince Charles' criticism of the legacy of the Enlightenment period). I suspect that it is a combination of dislike for the perceived anachronistic monarchy itself (but, which is powerless in the political sense), skepticism of environmental activism (in which he is involved in the extreme), and a product of the times we live, in which public figures are targets of hatred by one side or another, even making fun of his use of homeopathy (learned from his Queen mom), organic gardening, and so on. My fiancee Diann dislikes him because of his former relationship peccadilloes with her beloved Princess Di. For my part, I feel some affinity for a guy who tills a garden outside a Scottish castle and listens to classical music and tries to save old buildings (even if he does wear a kilt!), and ponders the relationship of humans with nature.

If I were a public figure, virtually every aspect of my own life, present and past, would easily garner spitfire ridicule by one faction or another. Charles has my respect for assuming the responsibility of using his role in British society for what he so obviously believes is right. He could retire to his castle (he will probably be bypassed as king) and live a life of closeted ease. He is no faint-hearted Royal.

When I was in England yestersummer (I just now coined this word), I watched a speech of his on the tele and was knocked-over impressed with his acumen and ease in discussing the difficult and arcane topic of the philosophical relationship of humans to the natural world. I have never heard it better stated. Perhaps this is where some of the anti-Charles vituperation comes from: Who wants to hear an effete, privileged Royal lecture us about our disjointed life vis-a-vis the natural world? I for one really like, and respect, Charles.

Americans, also, have a tendency to dislike the professorial-sounding public figure. I think that was some of the problem with both the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns: It felt a bit (perhaps others think "a lot") like they were lecturing the body politic. Obama has some of that, too; so did Franklin Roosevelt. But, the best example of an upper-class, professorial politician was Adlai Stevenson, he of Chicago-Boston and Harvard law school, hated by a certain Dixiecratic crowd in the U.S.

The Times article (linked above) does not (nor the other British online news agencies I checked) give us enough to understand what Charles has found problematic about the legacy of the Enlightenment period--surely it is not everything. But, from what I have said above, it must have to do with the dualistic separation it engendered between humans and the natural world. The environment became the subject of scientific study and thus set off humans from the world in which they live, in a nature-as-object worldview. Humans began to see themselves as living separate from nature, IN the world with nature there to exploit, as opposed to living embedded WITH the web of the world, with nature as protective home.

I SAW NATURE ON TV; IT WAS A REALITY SHOW

Increasingly, inexorably, we have a Truman Show world where, if not Truman's light bulb or Russia's cement falling out of the sky (http://www.universetoday.com/2008/06/19/when-cloud-seeding-goes-wrong-cement-chunk-falls-from-the-sky/) , we see rising CO2 concentrations leading to a global climatic tipping point, disappearing frogs, bleaching corals, and exploding numbers of asthma cases (the latter two conditions thought to be caused by African dust falling in the West Indies)--all reflected in the signifying quote of the book Last Child in the Wilderness: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (quoting an astute fourth-grader): "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."

It's also where we can watch some nifty Nature shows (in our asthmatic state) and eat some snacks fried in peanut oil grown on the chemicalized, wind-swept, desertifying lands of West Africa.

COUNTERING PSYCHOTERRATIC ILLNESS

I wonder whether we are all headed to a Truman Show artificial reality in what some are calling a "post-human" world.

Seems the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has recently perturbed three groups of Brits: Christians, naturalists, and historians. One thing it has done is to drop all references related to nature. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/081209/entertainment/axed_from_oxford

This reminds me of the discussion and controversy surrounding the publishing of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), which included as an appendix 500 facts (I believe) that Americans should know to be "literate" culturally, so as to be able to take part in public dialogue. (Later, Hirsch would publish dictionaries of cultural literacy.) We in education at that time (I was working on an MEd in secondary social studies while teaching high school) were strongly skeptical of his pedagogical recommendation to simply teach cultural facts. The teaching of facts is not effective pedagogy. But now I wonder how young people are to absorb sufficient cultural background, or cultural literacy, for continuing social cohesion. This, it seems, has not been resolved, and today does not appear to be on anyone's agenda. That a dictionary drops references to nature is not encouraging.

In a related matter, I ran across an article in Australian Psychiatry (2007, vol. 15 Supplement) in which the researchers studied people in New South Wales, Australia, in terms of their psychological stress induced by the persistent drought there. The researchers were applying the new (since 2003) psychiatric term solastalgia: the earth-related mental illness where people's mental wellbeing is threatened by the severing of "healthy" links between themselves and their home and territory. Geographers call this a loss of sense of place or placelessness. In the U.S. data relate that Americans get out into nature less; e.g. there are decreasing numbers of hunting and fishing licenses issued each year.

The connections I am making between a British dictionary that drops vocabulary reflecting the natural environment (flowers and landscape terms), and the loss of cultural literacy in America, and the great changes that both our local and global environments are going through is that we are headed toward increasing experience of solastalgia. In these times, it seems to me, we need greater emphasis on solidifying our experience of where we live, the localities in which we are embedded, our sense of local places.

I know many people revere the beauty, even sacredness, of nature, etc. Perhaps we, and many other adults who understand, will someday become docents to reintroduce younger people to their natural environment. Perhaps we are the reserve cadre of wise old ones--who feel "at home" in the world--who shall one day help to combat the widespread lived experience and pathology of solastalgia. It will be therapy for those missing the nurturance of their "mother"--Mother Nature. Nature is not only beautiful (and sacred), it is needed for human mental health.

GAZING AT TIME'S BODY

For enrichment to occur in our lives, other ordinary distractions must be minimized. This is why a wilderness experience seems, actually is, an enrichment: Big chunks of civilization are removed. Then, the numinous (sensing the presence of the divine) qualities of Nature can be realized. We can then, like Thoreau, sense that, "In wilderness is the preservation of the world."

Yes, it is a letdown to return to the strictly mundane, the quotidian routines of life, after one has seen the divine in Nature. Our experiencing a place like the Grand Canyon--with its exposed Earth strata of mauve, terra cotta, ocher, and brick-red--is partly like gazing into the living tree rings of the Earth itself. It's easy to lose oneself in time there, in the overwhelming sense of the immense span of time and its vivid corporealness, as if Time were a substance and we just short-lived molecules in its body. Yet, the body of Time and Nature continues and lives on, whether we are here or not. At least we can gaze part way into it. And, then, live here, now--in the body of Time.

NATURE AS METAPHOR AND SACRAMENT

It would be difficult to fashion a definition of what it has meant to be human ever since the beginnings of our genus, without seeing humanity in relation to Nature. We as humans still need to experience the timeless, the mysterious, the primordial. This is found in Nature. Not because we can understand the mysteries of the Universe, but perhaps because we CANNOT comprehend its timelessness and vastness. As Trappist monk Thomas Merton said,

"We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand."

I would say that our interior journey of understanding/not understanding is a mirror of our outer journey of understanding/not understanding. Nature, then, functions as both metaphor and sacrament of our Soul.

It's okay that we can understand so little of the interior/exterior wildernesses. But, the journey must be undertaken. Then, and only then, will we be helped along the way.