What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America

As an editor, I am paid to get inside the heads of authors. And Imam Feisal was generous in letting me get inside his. We spoke at length numerous times on the phone as we clarified the book’s message. What I found inside him bears no resemblance to the hateful images perpetuated by fearful people spreading messages of suspicion about a religion, and a project, they have not bothered to get to know.

What I experienced in working with Imam Feisal was unfailing graciousness. The person I learned to know has a deeply compassionate heart focused on one thing only: fostering more open dialogue and understanding between Muslims and people of the Western world. He is single-minded in this focus. His nonprofit Cordoba Initiative promotes interfaith dialogue.

The central message of his book is that the values that lie at the heart of Islam—equality and social justice—are the same values guiding the history of the United States. For years Imam Feisal has been saying loud and clear,

Our peoples are committed to the same values!

Which is why the anger and hate-baiting over the proposed cultural center are so profoundly disturbing.

And, let’s be clear: What is proposed is in fact a cultural center, not a mosque. Imam Feisal talks about the difference in this news conference:

It will be a cultural center because Imam Feisal is an educator. He believes that cultural exchange can help heal wounds between people tempted to see each other as enemies. It’s a trust in education deeply ingrained by his spiritual tradition of Sufism.

Back in the 1700s, in the face of a declining Ottoman Empire, two alternatives presented themselves to Muslim reformers. One was a legalistic return to the roots. This was the path chosen by al-Wahhab on the Arabian peninsula—purging Islam of anything not found at its beginning. Karen Armstrong in Islam: A Short History says,

Wahhabism is the form of Islam that is still practised today in Saudi Arabia, a puritan religion based on a strictly literal interpretation of scripture and early Islamic tradition. (135)

And because Saudi Arabia controls Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, as well as vast oil fields, the Wahhabi form of Islam holds tremendous sway throughout the Muslim world.

The other path was chosen by a Sufi reformer, Ibn Idris. This was the path of education. Improve society by teaching people to love God better—which in practice meant teaching people how to think for themselves by developing their own spirituality more deeply. Not too surprising that Ibn Idris sharply criticized al-Wahhabi for his legalistic tendencies.

In other words, Sufis are usually on the opposite side of the issues from fundamentalists. Which is why it is crazy to label Imam Feisal an extremist—crazy not just because to all who know him Imam Feisal is a progressive, deeply thoughtful scholar and teacher, but also because in the history of Muslim politics, Imam Feisal’s community has often been harassed, sometimes even banished, by fundamentalists.

How strange it is to see someone I deeply respect become such an object of controversy, even hate, in the American media!

I am proud to have contributed in even a small way to Imam Feisal’s work toward interfaith understanding. And I’m deeply disappointed by the depth of opposition to this center, which shows just how much more of it there is to be done.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON SUFISM:

• The journal Sufism, an Inquiry
• The many works of Sayyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University
• Sufi music and my band fave, Ghazal

FOR MORE INFO ON IMAM FEISAL

• This interview in Shambhala Sun
• FAQ from the Cordoba Initiative on the proposed community center

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

What about that mosque at Ground Zero?

Related posts:

1. What the world needs now

“What about reciprocity?” I asked. At bottom, our ecological crisis boils down to one simple fact: humans are taking more than we’re giving back to the Earth. What if each of us started giving back as much as we take—in all our relationships, with the human and more-than-human worlds? Even a simple gesture like showing gratitude can make a difference. Everyone loves to be thanked! Reducing our use of unsustainable resources is a solid first step in giving back to the Earth.

What follows are 10 close-to-home ways you can give back to the Earth.

1. Eat closer to home. The average American foodstuff travels 1500 miles to reach the table. That’s an astronomical amount of fossil fuel used just in transporting the food, to say nothing of growing and packaging it. Until our fuel sources are more sustainable, perhaps those bananas or Australian wines (to pick two of my faves) should be a special treat, not a staple. For more info, see the energy stats at Sustainable Table.

2. Thank your food. Look, really look, at the plants and animals on your table. Notice each one. Think about the rice or oat or wheat grasses waving under the sun, the carrots developing underground, the strawberries ripening on the vine. Most of all, if you eat meat, think about every animal. Picture the cow grazing (if you eat cows, eat grass-fed, not corn-fed ones), the chicken scratching, the fish swimming, the life labor that the hen put forth in making an egg, the goat her milk. Thank each animal, every time, for the gifts of their lives and their bodies. Christians call it saying grace. Buddhists call it eating mindfully. All of us can thank the plants and animals. Our lives depend on them. Literally.

3. Pick your teeth the old-fashioned way. Wooden toothpicks are biodegradable, unlike the little plastic gadgets most dentists’ offices try to pass out to their patients. Those tiny plastic picks and brushes only end up in landfills—not a good way to give back to the Earth! Many of them escape down rivers, becoming part of the enormous swirling toilet bowls of plastic in our oceans and endangering the lives of seabirds. When your dentist offers you little plastic tools for dental hygiene, say no thanks.

4. Teach your children reciprocity. Even small children understand fairness. No one wants to get the short end of the stick. Teach your children to give back when they receive something. Practice it yourself. If each of us truly gave as much as we took, the world would change.

5. Thank a tree. As you walk down your street, notice one tree or plant every day. Thank it for making oxygen. Your life depends on it.

6. Work to reduce pesticide use in your area. We all know about pesticide use in agriculture, but pesticides are used at an equivalent rate on suburban lawns. What about the playing fields at your local school? (Fungicides and herbicides are pesticides too.) Children absorb more pesticides per pound of body weight than do adults, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Next on my to-do list: a letter to my local HOA about the annual pesticide application on our pristine common lawn. I’d really rather have a common area that my dog—and all the children on the street—can run and play in safely. For more info, see the “Lawn Care” page at Beyond Pesticides.

7. Refuse overpackaging. Say no thanks to foods or supplements prepackaged in tiny portions. Every piece of plastic ends up in a landfill—if we’re lucky and it doesn’t end up on beaches or in the ocean. Though I love a certain brand of rice cheese, I’m giving it up because it is packaged in individual slices wrapped in plastic.

8. Host a zero-waste party. It’s easier than you think. Paper plates and cups can be composted in municipal composting processes, and cornstarch-based compostable flatware is becoming easy to find. To use even fewer resources (except for water), visit your local thrift store and buy a few dozen older plates and forks and wash them afterward. If you don’t have room to store them, donate them back after the party’s over. Same with napkins and glasses. I spent $25 at a thrift store for my last party and then got credit afterward for the same amount in donation. That thrift store benefits a nonprofit group, so when they sell their merchandise twice they raise even more money.

9. Volunteer for a cleanup or restoration project in your area. People have no idea how much fun these projects are. You get the pleasure of meeting like-minded neighbors in addition to the joy of giving back to the Earth in a very direct way. The sense of camaraderie and a deep-seated satisfaction after a day or a half day of work keep restoration volunteers coming back time after time. They look forward to having more fun. For a list of organizations working in ecological restoration around the country, see Global Restoration Network.

10. Work for the circle of life in your industry. I was astonished to learn recently that nearly half of GM plants are now “nil to the landfill.” If an industry like auto making can stop sending materials to landfills, certainly other industries can follow suit! How did the Earth survive for billions of years, perfecting the ability to sustain life? By a system of exchange in which every part of the whole gives off something others need. One species’s waste is another species’s fuel. What the organisms of Earth have been doing for billions of years, we will have to learn to do in every industry. Waste to fuel, around the circle. That means finding ways to break down plastics, mop up oil spills, and treat sewage by contributing something that someone else in the ecosystem needs. Interdependence is the name of the survival game. What if you are not an engineer or inventor? Then start with recycling. Even your office could be zero waste.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

10 ways to give back to the Earth

Related posts:

1. Reciprocity
2. Earth is the new bottom line
3. In defense of food

In the native plant garden at Chautauqua, the other volunteers and I spend hours digging it out, trying to prevent it from choking out the precious native wildflowers. All, it seems, to no avail. Bindweed is a public enemy—out to take over the world.

Or is it?

As I was sitting in the dirt at Chautauqua digging with a Japanese hori—nothing less than this wicked, six-inch, serrated blade like a hunting knife will do for tackling the underground runners—I started wondering about our nemesis.

If bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis L.) is native—and it is, despite the fact that we dig it out of the native garden—what services might it be providing to the ecosystem? You have to think that since it coevolved with all the other grasses, flowers, and animals of the region, it must be doing some good. What does it contribute to sustaining life?

The first clue came from our naturalist leader, Dave Sutherland. “Bindweed likes disturbed soil,” he says. The plant is opportunistic. It takes advantage of damage to the surface, running its surface vines quickly over bulldozed, plowed, and trampled earth. We can view opportunism as a vice, and the tone people use when they say this about a plant or a predator often carries more than a hint of disdain. But there is another way to look at it. I think of the bindweed I saw last week along the edge of a trail, rich with its pinkish morning-glory blooms:

This ground was disturbed by building a road. The bindweed is rushing in to fill in the gap in ground cover. I was impressed by the evenness of its march, as if it was intending to spread itself like a mat across the naked soil. It knows what heedless humans didn’t when they cleared the prairies to plant grains—that disturbed soil will blow away into dust. That especially in the arid climates of the western United States, soil is precious and, because it is dry so much of the time, must be guarded by vegetative cover. So:

Gift #1: Bindweed guards the soil.

No surprise, then, that to control bindweed on a large scale, plant ground covers. Do the job of bindweed so it doesn’t have to work so hard. This site from the UK reports planting a common ground cover to discourage bindweed in vineyards. When the ground is protected, bindweed is less aggressive.

In fact, says herbalist John Slattery of Desert Tortoise Botanicals in Arizona, an overgrowth of bindweed is evidence that the soil has been mistreated—exposed by road cuts or housing developments, trampled or dug up or bulldozed. It turns out that bindweed is especially fond of cultivated land because the plant thrives in nitrogen-rich environments, such as croplands, suburban yards, and gardens—all thick with fertilizers. So:

Gift #2: Bindweed indicates the health of the soil.

Too much bindweed—evidence of soil out of balance.

My friend Molly Bigknife Antonio alerted me to a further gift of the plant. Molly and her husband, Gino, through their nonprofit Pollen Circles lead summer camps in Navajo land training kids in traditional skills and knowledge. When Molly gave a presentation at Prescott College in April, I was astonished to see a slide of bindweed—prized for its traditional medicinal uses. For details she sent me to John Slattery, who pulled together the ethnobotanical info. Turns out bindweed is used to help digestive ailments, spider bites, skin disorders, and excessive menstrual bleeding (more info below). Traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) is a good place to turn for finding redeeming value in even pesky weeds. So:

Gift #3: Bindweed is traditionally used as medicine for a variety of ailments.

But wait, there’s more! Western scientists too have been studying bindweed and finding it effective against cancer tumors. Here’s how it works: tumors enlarge by growing blood vessels (angiogenesis) so they can import more life-giving blood. One promising avenue of cancer research is finding substances that inhibit the growth of a tumor’s blood vessels (antiangiogenesis). A tincture of bindweed root seems to do just that. This study (unpublished?) showed a nontoxic form of the tincture shrinking tumors in mice. So:

Gift #4: Bindweed may help shrink tumors.

I find it interesting that what bindweed appears to do maliciously in gardens—choke the life out of plants—may be exactly what it does medicinally when used in the right proportion—inhibit unwanted growth. Its gift may reside in its curse. This public enemy, from a different perspective, may be one of our greatest friends.

The magic of this world—hiding gifts in weaknesses, disguising friends as enemies—at work in every square inch of the earth.

Even in bindweed.

For more info:

Thanks to John Slattery of Desert Tortoise Botanicals for documenting these uses of bindweed from the traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) of American Indians:

• Navajo, Ramah (Dermatological Aid)
  Cold infusion of plant taken and used as a lotion for spider bites.
  Vestal, Paul A. 1952. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 40(4):1-94 (39).

• Navajo, Ramah (Gastrointestinal Aid)
  Cold infusion taken with food after swallowing a spider.
  Vestal, Paul A. 1952. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho. Papers of the Peabody Museum of American
  Archaeology and Ethnology 40(4):1-94 (39).

• Pomo (Gynecological Aid)
  Decoction of plant taken for excessive menstruation.
  Gifford, E. W. 1967. Ethnographic Notes on the Southwestern Pomo. Anthropological Records 25:10-15 (15).

• Pomo, Kashaya (Gynecological Aid)
  Decoction of stem with leaves taken for excessive menstruation.
  Goodrich, Jennie, and Claudia Lawson. 1980. Kashaya Pomo Plants. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of California (73).

• Okanagan-Colville (Cordage)
  Stems used as a pack rope for carrying birds and marmots home after hunting.
  Turner, Nancy, R. Bouchard, and D.I.D. Kennedy. 1980. Ethnobotany of the Okanagan-Colville Indians of British Columbia and Washington. Victoria: British Columbia Provincial Museum (96).

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Even bindweed brings gifts

Related posts:

1. 8 reasons to go native in your yard

I had headed out the back door to look at lilac buds on the cusp of bursting into full bloom. But we just moved into this house ten days ago, so I wasn’t expecting the extra step down to the deck. My weight landed on the side of the step, my foot rolled under, and I crumpled to the deck in a lurch of pain.

The deck is tiny, and so fresh green grass beckoned just a few feet away from where I lay feeling a wave of nausea begin to rise. I crawled off the deck and collapsed into the dirt. Instantly the nausea ebbed. The thick, tall grass smelled cool and fresh, and I sucked in the fragrance as the pain slowly ebbed. The sharp scent of the grass cleared my head, giving me more resources for dealing with pain; the cool damp earth felt soft and welcoming.

But what to do now for the ankle? Ice, of course, Arnica too, then Ibuprofen. But the image that rose first in my mind was that of a mud poultice.

Now I have never used a mud poultice, have never been taught to use one, and have never seen one used. I was aware that American Indian cultures often advised direct contact with the earth to heal many kinds of ailments, but I had no memory of reading about poultices. But the mental picture was insistent—fresh mud on the injured tissue, it suggested.

My sweetie helped me hobble inside to the sofa, then he grabbed a shovel and headed to the side of the house. He gathered some damp earth into a container, added a few drops of water until the mud was a thick paste, and then, with a spoon, applied it to my ankle. An old dampened towel went over the mud, and we wrapped foot and mud together in more dry towels.

Instantly the ankle felt better. I don’t know how to describe it—a freshness that felt almost minty on the skin; a cool, soothing weight across the wound that was softer and more even than an athletic bandage, like being hugged just right. “It feels like love,” I told my sweetie. “Mud love.” Who knew soil holds compassion?

I am sitting on the sofa today with another mud pack on the ankle, and it feels just as fresh and soothing as last night. A Google search tells me that mud packs are good for keeping swelling down in sprains. In fact, for the extent of damage, the ankle is only slightly swollen.

The doctor who looked at the ankle this morning was surprised to find that the wound was not hot to the touch. She thinks nothing is broken—thank goodness—but I will need to keep weight off it for a few days. So it’s onto crutches for a while.

I would love to hear others’ experiences with mud packs or poultices, including what you know about the medicinal value of mud. I highly recommend the mud pack for a sprain. Be ready, though, when you’re done for the whole to look like a “soiled” diaper!

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Mud love

Related posts:

1. 10 things to love about dirt

People sometimes ask me where I fall in the science-religion debates. I teach the one (religion), I study and often write about the other (science). But I think both science and religion often skip too quickly over what ought to be the main attraction: the natural world. The world of fox kits and forests, eating and being eaten, thunder and sunsets. The world immediately available to our senses. This  is the world often bypassed in the rush to explore some dimension regarded as more important, more true, or more “real.”

I mean, think about science education. We start kids out in elementary school with lessons that teach them to observe through their own eyes, ears, nose, and fingers. Yet by the time they’re in high school we sit them behind microscopes, where they imbibe the unconscious message that the real story is not how eagles lock talons in flight or how worms turn garbage into fertilizer, but rather how their lab equipment reveals a truer world than the one they can see with their unaided eyes. In biology, for instance, we teach them to separate out the constituent parts of the ecosphere and analyze each piece—a (dead) frog, water, a rock—instead of teaching them to learn by being immersed in the (living) complexity of the whole. A system that focuses on the parts and more rarely on the whole, as does Western science, is a system that yields easily to quantifying its observations, and so numbers—abstractions, mental constructs—take  precedence over the senses as the most trusted means of exploring the natural world.

Or take religion. Banished since Descartes to the realm of spirit or mind, religion often focuses its attention everywhere but the living, natural world—on a world after death or a world inside the mind or a social world to be created in the future. I know this intimately, having spent much of my life first in churches, both conservative and liberal, then in religious studies. Western religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has been slow to perceive what faith has to do with agriculture or forests or the rising acidity of oceans.

Neither science nor religion, as its primary method, takes people out directly into nature to explore, through their own senses, the relationships right under their noses.

For indeed, the natural world is a world of relationships—between whales and climate change, between cows and humans, between pasqueflowers and snow, between mycelial mat and soil, between jet exhausts and jet streams, and of course between humans and one another. A world that functions through webs of interconnected relationships, if we hope to understand even one corner of it, demands the sharp, clear-eyed vision and an intellectual acuity that we normally associate with science.

So I’m making a plea for natural history. It’s a field that has suffered a decline of respect in recent decades, perhaps because it involves observing more than experimenting. It lacks the prestige—in funding, in university status—of sciences that overtly try to predict nature’s patterns or control its processes. Naturalists tend to be public educators, observing plants or forests and communicating their learning to “laypeople” through educational hikes or birdwatching tours. Famous naturalists, like John Muir or Aldo Leopold, were accomplished writers and thinkers as well as observers of the natural world. Perhaps it is this willingness to engage philosophy that sometimes, these days, leaves natural history at the edge of the sciences, not quite “hard” enough to satisfy those who might think science means only quantitative analysis. (Such folks would do well to remember Darwin.)

In a time of ecological crisis, we need numbers and quantitative models, yes, to convince those who hold the purse strings that climate change is real or that more species are disappearing now than in millions of years. But we also need people for whom observing the natural world is tinged with love. We need, in other words, more naturalists. It’s a job not limited to scientists. In fact, it’s a job where science and religion regularly meet. It works like this.

Squat beside a creek. Dig one finger into the rough silt along its edge. Pick up a glob of sand and sift it through your fingers. At your feet you may notice pebbles, your eyes moving now to larger stones, and then to the flicker of a trout tail next to that large boulder. The trout, you notice, likes to live in the shadows, which may lead you to realize that the willows hanging over the creekbed must be important to the fish, and so are the deep bends in the stream, and even if you haven’t yet heard a naturalist say that fish need shade and meanders in order to spawn, you’ve already absorbed several lessons in natural history just by squatting here.

As your eyes wander up the flow of the stream, you might notice your mind begin to flow as well toward questions such as how the rocks came to be here, and how long it takes brush or ferns to grow across the currents. And in your reverie your thoughts turn to the centuries that have passed with this water flowing here, past this boulder, and the eons that you hope are yet to come. Before you know it, reflecting on the sand under your fingertips and the trout before your eyes has turned you toward questions of meaning and how you might live in a harmony with these surroundings—questions usually assigned to ethics or religion.

This is the power of the natural world—to lead one moment toward science and the next to spirituality. To nudge us in a seamless transition from observing with our senses to contemplating meaning. And this is why, when it comes to spiritual practices, my favorite is the simple act of watching and wondering—an experience that I as a scholar of religion share with birders and biologists, children and astrophysicists, hikers and climbers and geologists.

The world is here for us to wonder at, to learn from, and to love. Nature discriminates not at all between science and religion. Perhaps we would do well to follow its cue.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Where science and religion meet: the natural world

Related posts:

1. A spirituality of THIS world
2. Trusting the senses
3. The great work of Thomas Berry

White with a pinkish hue, spring beauties sport dark pink lines down the center of each petal, which my wildflower book says “guide insects to nectar, like runways.”

Such a lovely simile, “like runways.” We immediately hear the buzz of a bee, or an airplane, roaring in a straight line toward its terminus. I was treated to thousands of similes this past weekend at the annual conference of AWP, the Association for Writers & Writing Programs, held here in Denver. For two whole days I played hooky from work to soak in the poetry flowing from lips of many of my favorite writers. (At AWP even prose writers speak in poetry.)

Keynote speaker Michael Chabon offered the highest ratio of similes, an average of about  three per sentence. Before I gave up taking notes and sat back to revel in his words, I did manage to snatch this gem:

Ideas are the easiest and least interesting part of the [writing] process; as Madge of Palmolive fame used to say, you are soaking in them. The hard part is sticking with the ideas when they begin to lose their luster—sitting on their heads when they try to roll out from under you.

One of my favorite panels was titled “Writing the Mind’s Wild Geography”—one of several sessions to focus on the connection between language and land.

The earth and all the music of language are one. Language is made from the earth as much as the sparrow or sunflower. —Pattiann Rogers

What a wonderful reminder that everything we produce as humans is not, as we tend to think, removed from earth! Words, music, and even the language of skyscrapers are nourished by the same sunshine and soil, produced from a forest as much as is a butterfly.

It is the music of the language that contains gateways to those experiences sometimes called holy, sometimes called terrifyingly holy. We experience the spiritual in the body. I try to stay close to the physical in language. —Pattiann Rogers

Embodying the connection between words, music, and the physical, Joy Harjo wove jazz and words together in a mesmerizing hour that brought tears to most of our eyes.

When we leave this world, we’re going to take only what we learned by heart. —Joy Harjo

This morning I celebrated language of the heart in yet another way—by attending the first-of-the-season meeting of volunteers at the native plant garden at the Ranger’s Cottage at Chautauqua. We deadheaded last year’s wildflowers, raked, pruned, and chatted in the bright sun and brisk April wind.

As I clipped, I thought about Ann Pancake’s words from the “Mind’s Wild Geography” panel:

Our culture desperately needs new myths, new stories, about the natural world. —Ann Pancake

Pancake wrote a killer of a story for Narrative magazine a few years back exploring what mountaintop removal does to a person, to a family, to a life. The larger story she points to—the story that unites coal mining in the Appalachians with gardening in Boulder—is a story we’ve inherited that devalues the biotic communities that are here, wherever “here” happens to be. It is a story teaching that the land can be used, replaced, or even destroyed without consequence. That what is “here” is not good enough to be preserved.

Meanwhile the serviceberry bush just overhead was near to bursting its fresh leaves:

I want to think that cultivating native plants is one tiny contribution toward changing the story. I want people to know about the birthright of the land—that local landscapes are something to study and learn from rather than replace with water-guzzling turf and exotic flowers. I want to think that changing the story is possible—that we can learn to love “here,” that we will learn to love “here” before it’s too late.

A highlight of AWP was sitting at the front to hear Terry Tempest Williams read on the final night of the conference. Her essay—suffused with birds, of course—told of the stroke she had in September and the uncertainty she now lives with on a daily basis. Even though her brain might erupt and debilitate her at any moment (my brain can too, for that matter, or yours), and fear stalked the essay, her words rang also with celebration:

The birds remember what we have forgotten—that the world is meant to be celebrated. —Terry Tempest Williams

The wildflowers say it too. On the trail in Chautauqua after pruning in the garden, I glimpsed the first blooms of the creeping Oregon grape (Mahonia repens) on a bright hillside next to sun-radiating rock:

Mahonia has the last word here. I think it is joy.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Words and wildflowers

Related posts:

1. Pasqueflower 2010
2. Write your heart out
3. When you don’t want your sister reading it…

Which is why I’m remembering some wisdom from the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in west Africa, as related by Malidoma Somé in The Healing Wisdom of Africa. (Full disclosure: I was paid to edit and develop this book a dozen years ago.)

Language, say the Dagara, is but a distant echo of the meaning to be found at the center of all-that-is. Writes Somé,

Words are but a remote reflection of meaning, like the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. . . . “To utter” [for the Dagara] means to be in exile.

The very act of putting a sentence together shows just how far we dwell from the source.

Language implies nostalgia for our true home, which is nature.

The idea captivated me—that nature is our true home. That we’re all longing to return home. And that words won’t get us there.

Meditators know the paradox. Becoming fully present in the moment means being able to interrupt the inner chatter, turn down the volume of the mental broadcast. Anyone who has sat quietly for even a few minutes knows how hard this is to do.

But the Dagara take the idea further. The amount of language a being uses, they say, shows how intelligent or foolish it is. In Dagara cosmology the beings closest to the center of meaning are plants and trees, for they do not depend on language to communicate. They are the wisest and most intelligent beings in nature. Farther away from the source are animals, who need some language to survive. And farthest away of all, the least intelligent species, are human beings, who rely almost entirely on words.

It’s the Western hierarchy of nature upside down. Instead of residing at the top of nature, close to the gods, we’re at the very bottom, far from home. In exile.

We could learn a thing or two from our wiser sisters and brothers—the trees, the animals, our own bodies. Which is why I recommend sitting with a tree, and why most of my meditations involve nature—from the body-focused awareness of shavasana to hiking among rocks and pine trees. Which is also why the Dagara recommend nature-based rituals—to help us remember our place in the scheme of things. To remind us to listen. To help us remember the center.

Because the more language, the more forgetting.

It’s tempting to think this is a nice philosophy—for village folk, not for modern urban people. But I got a good dose of something similar recently through a Western scientist’s book, My Stroke of Insight. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who in 1996 had a stroke that wiped out the verbal language centers in the left hemisphere of her brain. Her inspiring TED talk about the stroke and its aftermath has been viewed by millions.

Taylor says that within minutes of her stroke, she was plunged into wordlessness.

You might think it was a bleak existence, but the truth is rather different. Certainly she wanted to speak again, and she worked hard for years to regain her language skills. But she didn’t want language at the expense of what she experienced during those first minutes and hours after the stroke when she was without it.

When I lost my left hemisphere and its language centers, I also lost the [linear thinking] clock. . . . Instead of having my moments prematurely stunted, they became open-ended, and I felt no rush to do anything. Like walking along the beach, or just hanging out in the beauty of nature, I shifted from the doing-consciousness of my left brain to the being-consciousness of my right brain. I morphed from feeling small and isolated to feeling enormous and expansive.

Without her linear-thinking left brain, she also lost the ability to see herself as a bounded body separate from her environment.

My left hemisphere had been trained to perceive myself as a solid, separate from others. Now, released from that restrictive circuitry, my right hemisphere relished its attachment to the eternal flow. I was no longer isolated and alone. My soul was as big as the universe and frolicked with glee in a boundless sea. . . . I loved the deep inner peace that flooded the core of my very being.

Her stroke provided a quick trip to nirvana, and she hung out in a bliss that meditators work for years just to glimpse.

The more language, the more forgetting—of that boundless sea. Of the peace in the present moment. Of the perfection each of us is, just by being.

We love our dogs and cats for their ability to bring us back to the present, to remind us to laugh and roll in the grass or stretch out in a sunny spot on the floor. Animals communicate using so much less language than we do—which brain research (as well as the Dagara) might suggest is the source of their joy.

Is it possible that the trees and plants also dwell in that boundless sea that Jill Bolte Taylor found when her left brain went offline? Perhaps, not needing language to communicate, they too are big as the universe.

Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself,

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab.

For good reason. These humans talk too much. It can get in the way.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Words and trees

Related posts:

1. Finding tongues in trees
2. Trusting the senses
3. Insulated from nature

Recently, during some way-too-busy weeks of an overwhelming workload and too many unknowns looming, I slipped away one sunny morning to the Boulder reservoir, hoping to see eagles. Bald eagles begin nesting here in February, and although the reservoir this year was still capped with a solid lid of ice, I hoped perhaps the eagles would perch nearby even if they would not likely find a decent breakfast between its shores.

I parked near the reservoir and began hiking. The lake was blinding white. No dark hulks loomed in the cottonwoods along the shore. I remembered again how much fun it is to bird in winter when the trees have no leaves and the great perching birds may be visible for nearly a mile. Enjoying the bright sun and clear blue sky—we’ve had less than usual of it in recent weeks—I kept walking, periodically scanning the trees with binoculars.

A half mile or so into the hike I saw what might be a dark spot in a faraway cottonwood. Double-checking through the glasses, I saw a dark shape with a white head and a white tail. And yowze! A second one perched in the same tree!

I drew closer. Okay, I had to cross a fence or two and trespass into a muddy cattle pasture, but I ended up about thirty yards away from the tree. I sank down carefully between cow pies.

The sun warmed my back; the sky was open and blue. My cell phone was off; no one could interrupt me here. I sat with the eagles, appreciating.

After some minutes the one on the right lifted off and drifted lazily toward a cottonwood farther away. The other, consenting to my presence, remained in place. We watched—the eagle training sharp eyes on prairie dogs, trespassing human, and faraway cattle, and me gazing back wide-eyed through binoculars. I memorized each detail of riffing feather, golden claw, and blazing eye.

After about twenty minutes this eagle too shifted from foot to foot, flexed its wings, spread them wide, and stepped into air.

I sat for a few more minutes, smiling. Then I got up, stretched, and retraced my steps to the car. I was breathing more deeply. The sky seemed even bluer, the morning more graced.

I have my own collective noun to add to the centuries-old list: a “peace of eagles.”

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

A peace of eagles

Related posts:

1. Scenes from a writing weekend
2. Writing that walloped me
3. Words and wildflowers

In other words, taking and giving in equal measure is the only sustainable practice in human relationships, whether interpersonal or international.

But then I’ve been thinking about how reciprocity is key in our relationship with the Earth too. At bottom, our ecological crisis boils down to one simple fact: humans are taking more than we’re giving back to the Earth.

For instance, we take oil out of the rock, and instead of making something of it that nourishes other life forms or enriches the soil, we make things out of it—plastic, CO2-releasing fuels, fertilizers, pesticides—that over their lifespan take more out of the soil or water or air than they contribute.

How did the Earth survive for billions of years and prepare an atmosphere conducive to life? By every species giving as good as it gets. By a system of exchange in which every part of the whole contributes as much as it uses. One species’s waste is another species’s fuel.

Who gets it?

• Plants: They take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen.
• Animals: Just the opposite. They take in oxygen and produce CO2.
• Ecologists: They always think in terms of the whole ecosystem—how each part contributes and uses resources in balance with all the others.
• Indigenous peoples: They’ve been teaching their children for millennia that reciprocity with the earth is the bottom line for survival.
• Real estate agents: They know that a good deal is one in which the buyer and seller both go away happy. And that the only fair trade is an equal trade.
• Religious folks: They developed the Golden Rule in all its forms. Receiving as much as we give—it’s how everyone wants to be treated.
• Adam Smith: Yes, the father of capitalism himself talked about responsibilities as well as rights—something his economic progeny forgot in the nineteenth century when they permanently severed economics from ethics.

Who doesn’t get it?

• Plastics manufacturers and users: That’s us—every one of us. We’re putting into circulation a product whose end-of-life does not fuel some other life form but instead endangers the soil, the oceans, and all kinds of animals.
• Banks that shell out astronomical bonuses: They’re unsustainable because not based on reciprocity—unless you want to argue that bank execs are contributing a value in either goods or services equal to their bonus. And I can’t think of anyone who does. In fact, in a time of recession when labor is plentiful, wages (according to the law of labor supply and demand) should go down. Something’s definitely fishy here.
• Those who deal in natural resource extraction: Because the value of a healthy, functioning ecosystem is beyond measuring, any treaty or trade that places a number value on natural resources is by definition not reciprocal and therefore not in the long run sustainable. Think clear-cut logging, mining, and just about every trade agreement between industrialized and developing nations.
• Coal-mining companies that blast the tops off mountains AND the people who rely on the energy they produce: Again, all of us. Destroying ecosystems is the definition of unsustainable, rooted in a lack of reciprocity both with the people who live near those mountains and more generally between humans and the earth.
• Buyers of nonorganic food: Guilty here. Fossil-fuel-intensive agriculture is the epitome of nonreciprocal relations with the earth—and is therefore unsustainable.

It looks to me like humans are the only species capable of such radically nonreciprocal relations. We’re the only ones who can forget so spectacularly that we have to give in equal measure with getting.

Which is why our systems of education, religion, ethics, business—you name it—in this time of ecological and economic crisis must turn toward helping humans remember reciprocity.

Reciprocity—it’s the only sustainable practice. In ecology, in trade, in friendship. Reciprocity is the meeting place between economics and spirituality.

Reciprocity is, quite simply, the only way to hand down to our children a world conducive to life.

Reciprocity is the bottom line for survival.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Reciprocity

Related posts:

1. 10 ways to give back to the Earth
2. Air money—or bringing the financial crisis down to Earth

But because storytelling requires language, and because until recently Western humans thought we were the only animals who had language, we also thought that we were the only storytellers.

Now the picture is getting more complex.

Recent scientific studies with animals from monkeys to parrots indicate language use that satisfies all but die-hard linguists. Koko the gorilla is perhaps the most famous for using sign language, and Alex the grey parrot, on the night before he died in 2007, told his trainer, “See you tomorrow. Be good. I love you.”

This week the Times reported on the work of Klaus Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who studies the utterances of monkeys. He finds that Campbell’s monkeys string different calls together to make new meanings. For example, one call means “come to me,” but when followed by a different call, it means, “falling timber!”

If that’s not a story, it’s at least the start of one.

Dr. Zuberbühler has observed a similar achievement among putty-nosed monkeys that combine their “pyow” call (warning of a leopard) with their “hack” call (warning of a crowned eagle) into a sequence that means “Let’s get out of here in a real hurry.”

I feel cheered when I read about researchers like Dr. Zuberbühler, who is able to understand nuances of animal communication because he is willing to go beyond worn-out assertions about what other animals are and are not capable of. It’s a matter of training ourselves to perceive as other animals do, to pay close attention—to notice things to which we were previously blind, or deaf.

In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before.

Of course, Indigenous peoples have never thought otherwise. Carol Lee Sanchez, of the Laguna Pueblo, wrote in 1993 in what have become some of my all-time favorite words:

There are trees and grasses and flowers and birds and ants and bees waiting for you … to say hello to them—to call them sister, brother, cousin, or friend. They are your relatives; they hear your thoughts as you travel around your town or city.

With the complex social systems of most other animals, you have to think they are communicating in ways many humans just don’t recognize. Hearing thoughts, sending images, appearing in dreams—the repertoire of animal communication is broad, say Indigenous folks.

And speaking of dreams, I have to think of Bodhi when he sleeps. In his dreams he chases deer or maybe foxes—all the animals he’s not allowed to chase in daytime. His paws thrash, his eyes dart back and forth. He grunts in the dream version of barking.

I have no doubt he’s telling stories, if only to himself.

Post from: this lively earth
Copyright 2009 Priscilla Stuckey

Do animals tell stories?

Related posts:

1. Animals and awe at Gobekli Tepe
2. What your soft animal body loves
3. Nature, God, and Styrofoam