Category Archives: New Attitude to Nature

We must declare Peace with the World

Affinity, Nature, New Attitude to Nature

 

The temperate Rainforest of British Columbia is a wonder. I had the pleasure of spending 2 months there last winter. It took me a long time to appreciate all that rain. Nearly a year in fact. My bad.

Rachel Carson was one of the finest nature writers, besides really inventing the environmental movement. In her magnificent book, Silent Spring, Carson talked about “a relentless war on life.” That’s what I would say capitalism is. It really seems anti-life.

Suzanne Simard wanted to learn how we had gone so wrong. In my view, we, as a species, started out on the wrong foot, when we took the position that we were not a part of nature. It is out there and we can do with it whatever we want. Heidegger adopted a phrase from Nietzsche to describe that: “the will to power.”

Carson then asked us to consider something very profound: “The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”

Really Simard in a very different way deals with the same issues.

If we are part of nature, we will likely treat it more kindly. It’s time for a peace treaty. Not just in Iran. Everywhere. That would really be a new attitude to nature.

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Finding the Mother Tree

Affinity, Books, Nature, New Attitude to Nature

 

 

 

 

A very radical Theory

A while ago now I read a book that I have wanted to blog about for some time. It is time for me to meander in that direction.

The book is called Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard. Simard has an amazing theory, which I think potentially has monumentally important consequences.  It really is a radical theory and it has been attracting both blame and praise. It might be the most important scientific theory since Charles Darwin. I recognize that this is an incredibly bold statement, particularly from someone who admittedly knows little about science and claims to like modesty.

Simard argues that trees show us that they live in a complex, interdependent circle of life in which forests are a system in which the organisms in it are connected to each other through underground networks. She claims that trees perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviours, recognize neighbours and kin, remember the past, and help each other out. Simard believes, based on her scientific work, that trees have agency about the future, elicit and give warnings to each other, mount defences against attackers, and both compete and cooperate with each other.

Much of what she says is relevant for other ecosystems too.

She bases her theory on work she has done in the rainforests of western North America, particularly Canada. She places importance on the fact that at the centre of these underground networks are often Mother Trees which connect and sustain those around them.

 

If you consider these theories seriously you cannot help but change your attitude to nature. These ideas will force us to change our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live.

 

I believe that Simard’s theory, though hugely controversial, is as radical and important as that of Charles Darwin. In fact, I consider my immersion into this theory as part of another journey I am on, namely, my religious quest in the modern world. How can that be?  I will explain but it will take some meandering.

Simard starts her book by talking about her work as a young botanist in the forestry industry of British Columbia. She found a world that was very different than she thought it would be. As she said,

“I discovered vast landscapes cleared of trees, soils, stripped of nature’s complexity, a persistent harshness of elements, communities devoid of old trees, leaving the young one vulnerable, and an industrial order that felt hugely, terribly, misguided. The industry had declared war on those parts of the ecosystem—the leafy plants and broadleaf trees, the nibblers, and gleaners and infesters—that were seen as competitors and parasites on cash crops but that I was discovering were necessary for healing the earth. The whole forest—central to my being and sense of the universe—was suffering from disruption and because of that, all else suffered too.”

 

This theory might be the path to a new attitude to nature, something I firmly believe, is urgently needed. from my personal perspective that is the point of this book and Simard’s radical theory.

I will continue to meander through this book and the forest she talks about.

Missa Gai/Earth Mass

Buddhism, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor Moriarty tended his lecture by talking about an   album of music released by Paul Winter in 1982 called “Missa Gaia/Earth Mass”.  The title actually refers to two languages, Latin for the word missa which means mass (the religious service)  and gaia from the Greek which refers to Mother nature. The earth in others words. So Missa Gaia is a mass for the earth.

 

Winter became artist in residence at the Cathedral of St. John Divine in New York City which Moriarty referred to as “a great ship wreck of a Church.” It was one of the largest churches in the world, which naturally did not impress Professor Moriarty. “It may be the biggest but it’s not the most beautiful he said. The mass has been referred to as “an environmental liturgy of contemporary music.” It is performed annually at that church. The calls of wolves, whales and other animals are weaved into the pieces of music sometimes used as melody.

 

Moriarty also said it was exclesias down there. Where God has come down to earth. This comes from the Greek word Ekklēsia (gathering of those summoned).  It was where people gathered. Like the Greek agora, that I remember from my very first day in Athens many years ago  led by a wonderful woman—Maria. She pointed out the agora to us. The word exclesias also makes us think of the Carol “Gloria, in excelsis Deo!”

 

In the music the voices of whales are heard and the alt sax that is used imitates the voice of the whale. And the voice of the loon and the voice of the wolf. When you hear this, Moriarty says, everything is brought in from the cold. You hear whales and wolves singing parts of the mass. It is an earth mass. It is a mass for the earth. It makes the entire earth sacred. And when you hear a mass for the earth how could you ravage it. It is sacred after all.

The Missa Gaia, according to Moriarty, is also the place where the Buddha found enlightenment. Apparently, there is now a temple there where the people have built a temple and called it Buddgaya or Bodh Gaya which is a village in the north east Indian state of Bihar.  It is considered one of  the most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites and houses at an ancient Mahabodhi Temple Complex, that was built to commemorate the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment underneath a sacred Bodhi Tree.

 

The mass includes as text the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei. The mass is an environmental liturgy of contemporary music.  The “Kyrie” is derived from the call of a wolf, the “Sanctus” from the songs of humpback whales. Man literally learns how to sing from animals. Missa Gaia  is not just ecological it is also ecumenical. It wants to contain and include all voices of the earth. Many musical traditions are embraced by the Missa Gaia such as Gregorian chants  from the Middle Ages, Protestant hymns, Romantic organ music, African instruments, Latin American rhythms, elements of Gospel music, and even rock music.

The name “Missa Gaia” refers to the  “Gaia hypothesis” proposed by scientists Jame Lovelock and Lynn Margulis which provides that “the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and power far beyond its constituent parts”.

 The Mass had been performed annually at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at The Feast of St. Francis which is the blessing of the animals.

 

When St. Francis of Assisi referred to brother sun and sister moon he is really saying, says Moriarty, “I am the little brother.”  He is saying they are the great brother or sister.  He is not saying I am the great conqueror! He is not saying I am the ruler of the earth. He is saying we are kin! That brings us right back to the ideas of Chief Seattle and the indigenous people of North America and elsewhere. Now that is really a profound new attitude to the earth!

Moriarty asked a very pertinent question: “Why don’t we call the earth Buddgaya?” That it is an enlightened earth?” At least that the earth will one day be enlightened. Of course, he is really suggesting that it is not enlightened now. I think the reason that has not been done is that we need a completely new transformative attitude to nature. Only when we do that can we consider ourselves, or the earth we inhabit, enlightened. We have not yet earned the right to call us or the earth enlightened. Not yet.

If we can do that Moriarty says on Christmas night when he goes to the stable, he won’t have to say humans are alone in the earth. “I won’t be experiencing the awful desolation of us and them.” Until we are enlightened, we will be experiencing the awful alienation of us from the earth. “Maybe our mass has to become a Missa Gaia. When we walk the earth we must realize we are walking in Buddgaya.

Then finally we will be walking beautifully upon the sacred earth.

 

 

An Irish Stream

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor Moriarty  told a story about a man in Dingle in the south west of Kerry on a lovely gorgeous evening when the mountains were almost heart-breakingly lovely and blue on a silent, silent evening. The only sound was the sound of a stream tumbling down the mountainside. An old man said, “It is calling us down into eternity out of which it is itself coming.” According to Moriarty this eternity is not behind time it is an eternity that is right there in front. It is right in front of you. It is unhidden.

It is the same eternity that Wordsworth talked about in the intimations of Immortality and that Traherne talked about. So the corn is the orient and immortal wheat.

Moriarty contrasts that with the end of the 19th century when white people were scattering around the American continent  in pursuit of Manifest Destiny. They came upon the holy sacred mountains of the Sioux Indians. As Moriarty said, “an old life, a sacred life was being destroyed there.” Of course, the same thing was happening everywhere across this great continent.  Non-indigenous people were destroying nature in pursuit of economic advantage.

In California a man rose up to the heavens during an eclipse where he learned a sacred dance that later came to be called the Ghost dance. The dancers would fall into a sort of trance. It was an apocalyptic dance, according to Moriarty. They were dancing in circles. According to Moriarty. And they were dong it everywhere.

As Moriarty said,

“they were going to roll up the whole white world that we had brought with us in the way you would roll up a carpet, from the Chicagos  and New Yorks and then the North American continent would return to the way it originally was. We know Europeans who treat corn as an economic commodity  and have to undertake a ghost dance ourselves. Ghost dance was what Wordsworth called their light of common day out of our eyes. Ghost dance is what Traherne called the dirty devices of the world. The philosophical assumptions and axioms. Ghost dance the Medusa mind set, the European mind set out of our eyes.”

 

 

Moriarty wants us to walk “enfranchised on an enfranchised earth.”  We need to be liberated. Then we can be in a paradise that is not “out there”, but down here where we are. All we have to do is “ghost dance the dirty devices out of our world.”

Moriarty believes this could bring about a new and reborn agriculture.  It would no longer be just an economic thing. According to him, “our eyes have become economic tumours.” When we look at things in that way, we are committing a sin Moriarty says. That is why we must comb them out just the way Takana Kapsalut’s hair had to be combed out of the sins of the people. We need the ghost dance in Europe.

 

Moriarty railed against the ancient and long-standing tendency of humans to try to shape nature, rather than allowing nature to shape us. “Sometimes,” Moriarty said, “I think we have gone the wrong way. We have gone the disastrous way and the world is paying a terrible price for that.”  This is exactly what I have been saying. We desperately need a new attitude to nature. It is like Prometheus who stole technological fire from heaven. The whales and dolphins instead went into the water where there was no fire. They did not want to go the technological way. As Professor Moriarty said, “They did not go the way of technological domination of the earth. They said to the world shape us.”

 

Moriarty says he has problems with the idea of the transcendence of God and domination of the earth. It often seems that this is now impossible. No one can go the way of the whales and dolphins anymore, though Moriarty hopes that some people can still do this. We believe that somehow, we have given permission to do to the earth what we are doing. Moriarty has problems with that view. He too wants a new attitude to nature.

Moving Jewels

New Attitude to Nature

 

 

For about a century and half before Wordsworth Thomas Traherne had a tremendous passage he said, wrongly, that I would remember, from “The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat”:

 

 “The corn was orient

And the mortal wheat which never should be reaped

nor was ever sown.

I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.

The dust and stones from the street was as precious as gold.

The gates were at firs the end of the world

The green trees when I first saw them first through one of the gates

Transported and ravished me.

Their sweetness and unusual beauty made my breast leap

And almost mad with ecstasy they were such strange and wonderful things.

Oh he men such strange and venerable creatures to the aged had seen

Immortal cherubins and young men and glittering and sparling angels

And made strange and cervavic pieces of life and beauty.

Boys and girls tumbling in the streets and playing

and were moving jewels and knew not that they were born or should ever die

but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places

eternity was manifest in the light of day

and something infinite behind everything appeared

which talked with my expectation and moved my desire.

The city seemed to stand in Eden or to be built in heaven

But the streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine.

Their clothes of gold and silver were mine

As much as their sparkling eyes, their skins and ruddy faces.

The skies were mine over the sun and moon and stars

And all the world was mine

And I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.

I knew not churlish proprieties

Not bounds not divisions

But all proprieties and divisions were mine

All treasures and possessions of them.

So that without much ado I was corrupted

 and made to learn the dirty devices of the world

which I now unlearn and become again

 as it were a little child again

 that I may enter into the kingdom of God.”

 

This story is of course not unlike the Ojibwa story of the origin of agriculture. What we all must do is unlearn what we have learned from corrupt or dirty devices and become once more the child who can enter the kingdom of God. It is also not unlike the Wordsworth poem Intimations of mortality or even the Navajo cradle song.  All of these  teach us, according to Moriarty, how to walk beautifully upon the earth.

Intimations of Immortality

Nature, New Attitude to Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Professor John Moriarty was more than a a keener for Indigenous spirituality. After all he was also a long time professor of English literature and a poet.

The English poet Wordsworth put this well in his poem, “Ode and the Intimations of Immortality”:

“In the beginning like trailing clouds of glory do we come. This is from the poem

“Our birth is but a sleeping and a forgetting

The soul that rises with us,

Our life star hath had elsewhere setting

And cometh from afar

Not an entire forgetfulness and not another nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From god who is our home.

Heaven lies above us in our infancy,

Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy

But he behold the light and whence it flows he sees it in his joy

The youth who daily farther from the east must travel,

Is still his nature’s priest

And by the vision splendid is on his way attended.

At length the man perceives it die away

And fade into the light of common day.”

 

 

This story is of course not unlike the Ojibwa story of the origin of agriculture. What we all must do is unlearn what we have learned from corrupt or dirty devices and become once more the child who can enter the kingdom of god. The prison of ordinary life can be a prison for a young boy if it squeezes out nature and can lose the “vision splendid.”  The old man must learn to walk beautifully on the earth to regain that vision and escape the prison of the ordinary day. I think that is what Professor Moriarty wanted to do. It was part of his religious quest.  I hope he managed to do that. Most of us never do.

 

A Sacred Navajo Cradle

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

Professor Moriarty in his YouTube lecture, imagines the original great people who settled in Ireland and they brought with them sacred objects.  Then he imagines a new settler coming to Ireland and bringing a sacred Navajo cradle. He said, “A Navajo cradle is different from our cradle but it is still a cradle.”

Three is a Navajo Cradle song about a man making a cradle for his child.

“A Navajo Cradle

I have made a cradle board for you my child

May you grow to a great old age,

Of the sun’s rays I made the back

Of black clouds I have made a blanket

Of rainbow I have made the bow,

Of sunbeams I have made the side lopes,

Of lightning I have made the lacings

Of river mirrorings I have made the footboard,

Of dawn I have made the covering,

Of light on high horizons have I made the bed.”

 

Like Professor Moriarty, my wife Christiane and I have experienced stories from Navajo story tellers. I think in particular of one who gave us a spectacular jeep ride through Canyon de Chelly in northern Arizona. We learned a lot from him.  Professor Moriarty also learned a lot from the Navajo.

As Moriarty concluded about that Cradle Song:

“This is a cradle that all of us need. No matter what age we are, where young or old, male or female, it is a cradle we should all be willing to lie down into. We would be lying down to great creative nature. We would be lying down into the creative genius of the universe. In this cradle we can experience ecological second birth. We Europeans who think of ourselves as belonging to the first world and look upon the Navajo as belonging to the third world. It sometimes appears to me that we are living in a spiritual third world. Instead of having potbellies we have pot-bellied hearts and minds because we aren’t being nourished any longer by our culture. We aren’t being spiritually nourished and our seals breathing holes have closed over. Think of this whole evening [he was talking to adults listening to his lecture] as a journey to this Navajo cradle. A cradle in which we might all lie down in and be born again…God bless the first peoples of the world if we are willing to listen to them. Then we might listen and learn to stand and walk beautifully on the earth.”

 

You can see from Moriarty’s words that he is as much a poet as a teacher or professor. We learn a lot: We can be born again. We can walk beautifully on the earth again.We can make America and Canada great again, but just not the way some politicians claim

 

 

Big Medicine

Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Professor John Moriarty talked about a North American indigenous story about a small mouse that learned from a buffalo and a wolf that the world was a world was of medicine. The buffalo and the wolf led the mouse to the edge of a river that was the medicine river. It was filled with Big Medicine and it saved and healed a sick mouse. Some indigenous people have learned this, he says, during a vision quest.

He contrasts this with average Europeans. As Moriarty says,

“when the average European stands up in the morning he sees an economic opportunity. When the average native American stands up he sees Big Medicine. The Earth is Big Medicine. Everything in it is medicine. Isn’t it a wonderful way to see the world and get in touch with it as medicine? We are destroying the medicines that would heal us.”

 

 

Again, Moriarty contrasts the European vision and the Native American vision:

“The European vision is to see God as transcendent. God is above us. God is out there.”  The Greek vision is to see the earth as divine. If you see the world that way you will be reluctant to put a scythe to it. And he says, “I am on the side of the Divine. I won’t abuse it in the way I won’t abuse a chalice. God is transcendent but God is also imminent.”

 

Such an attitude makes all of nature sacred.