by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, April 25, 2004
Eight or nine years ago I clipped and saved a story in Mars Hill Review, told by author Doug Thorpe. Thorpe wrote, "Early one morning, after four days of hiking and camping on and off the Pacific Crest Trail in the North Cascades, my eight-year-old daughter awoke tired and cross. I was outside the tent, close to where the trail crossed the meadows, where we'd watched the black bear browsing among the huckleberries the evening before.
But such delights were now forgotten. I heard howls from within the tent -- protests. Never mind that John Muir called what we were doing sauntering; Katie wanted none of it. We were, I thought, alone in the area….Miles from a road, isolated between the ridges at Macalaster Pass, the sound of my daughter's cries [volleyed] down and across the mountains…And then returned. Only this time the howls weren't from Katie but from wolves -- two or three or more -- a great distance over the next ridge to the east. The cries were deep and long, mournful, haunting. The wolves sang [back to my daughter] for five minutes. I listened, standing alone in the meadow, watching the light inch its way over the landscape…
I remember this moment nine months later as I stand on my front porch and watch my daughter walk down the sidewalk, lunchbox in hand, to her carpool…The braided girl who runs off to join her friends has sung with wolves. In hearing [their] song, I've learned this truth: a beautiful darkness, a wildness, runs between them. Invisible threads link us all, like the microorganisms that weave together the roots of trees beneath the forest floor."
There isn't very much in our lives that can rival this extraordinary image: a child in the mountains, wailing out her frustration to the world, and then the world answering her, immediately and directly, through the wild cry of the wolves. And yet although it's a more dramatic story than the ones we might be able to tell, it's one that most of us can nevertheless recognize. It's a story about the kind of communion we sometimes feel when we've managed to step away from the boundaries of pavement and power-lines and make the time and space to listen to all the other conversations, the non-human conversations, humming along in the world around us.
When that happens, we are likely to greet it with the odd combination of joy and sorrow that the poet Tagore articulated well over a hundred years ago, in the poem we heard as the reading this morning. There is joy at seeing a window suddenly flung open and getting a heart-stopping glimpse of what Doug Thorpe calls the "beautiful darkness", the invisible threads that link us. And at the same time there is a wistfulness, a strange sense of being on the inside -- boxed and locked on the inside -- looking out through a window and something we can't quite touch. As Tagore puts it, the sense of "some great separation that happened in the first morning of existence."
It probably didn't happen in the first morning of existence; it probably happened over the long, slow march that led to what we now call Western civilization, because there are native peoples still living all over the world in traditional patterns of life that leave them with much less alienation from the world around them. But whenever it began, the alienation is real, and the distressed environment around us is surely the consequence of that alienation.
Centuries ago that same alienation led to a peculiar dualistic theology -- the earth as sinful and flawed, and some imagined spiritual reality as our true home. The alienation invited people -- both long ago and in our own time -- to see the earth as packages of inert resources rather than a living organism. It allows us still today to divorce our lifestyle choices from their inevitable results. On the most drastic level, it has led to global climate change, and supports a mind-boggling level of denial by those who still draw the bottom line with dollar signs instead of environmental health.
My mother's younger sister Mary, who my siblings and I know as Aunt Bitsy, lives with less of this alienation from the natural world than anyone else I know. She has lived for almost all of her adult life alone, much of the time in a little prospector's cabin way inside the boundaries of Yellowstone Park. She was one of Yellowstone's first female rangers, and later when she earned her doctorate, she became a head biologist there. She was sometimes called "Buffalo Mary" because the bison became her specialty -- and maybe also because she hasn't ever been too subtle about the fact that she generally prefers the company of buffalo -- or most any animal -- to that of most human beings.
Over the years I've learned a lot by listening to my aunt, and most of what I've learned isn't connected to the huge body of biological knowledge she carries in her head. It has more to do with the kind of person she has become because of the way she listens to the world around her. She has said for years that she thinks like a stone. She doesn't mean that she believes stones sit around having profound thoughts that they share with one another in subtle, gravelly voices. She means that she has learned to anchor herself in geological time. She sees the seasons come and go and she observes them keenly; but she is tuned into rhythms that are unfathomably long, rhythms that the stones know, rhythms that don't have to do with months or years or even centuries, but with eons.
In my aunt's case, thinking like a stone -- being tuned in to geologic time in this way -- gives her an equanimity that may seem at odds with her passion for the environment. She is one of the most committed people I know in fighting environmental degradation, whether it comes through greedy ranchers, careless development, short-sighted bureaucrats or oblivious tourists. She was one of the first people I heard talk about global warming, long before it came into popular consciousness. She knows first-hand the choices people have made that have led to disaster for other species, and she has dedicated her life to bringing better choices into play.
Now into her seventies, my aunt still does all she can to throw her small weight onto the side of environmental awareness and careful living. But she wouldn't hesitate to tell you that she is not optimistic about our chances for survival as a species. The reason she can say that and nevertheless be mostly serene is because as it turns out, we're not her chosen team in any case. She's not really rooting for the human race, she's rooting for the planet, for the larger life into which she is so deeply linked.
She thinks like a stone: and in geologic time, green living things are a fairly recent invention, the dinosaurs came and went just last week, and the whole span of human life has happened in the blink of a stony eye. Letting her consciousness be anchored in this long and rocky view, my aunt says that the planet will survive us, no matter what we do, and it will also survive our extinction. That's what gives rise to her serenity.
I myself find it very hard to think like a stone. I think like a human being. I think like a mother who wants to believe that her great-great-grandchildren, and children long beyond them, will have a green earth to walk on, sweet air to breathe, the chance to see an osprey fishing in a lake, to hear peepers trilling out their awakening in the spring, and maybe even to hear the call of a wolf over a distant ridge.
But this is where my aunt's wisdom might nevertheless wear off on me: if we can learn to think like a stone, even some of the time, to think even a little with the long, long view, then we might learn to think as though we are truly a part of the planet instead of merely living on it. We might learn to see with a sort of double vision that allows us our love and loyalty to our own kin without embarrassment, but stretches us beyond them as well. With that dual vision, we can see -- and then start to live as though -- it is not human life that should be the measure of all things, but the planet's life.
Today is Earth Day, and I confess that I have some ambivalence about Earth Day celebrations, as some of you may have as well. On the one hand I remember that the first Earth Day was born from solid grass roots. It might have seemed a little naïve or hokey, but it arose at a time when ordinary people were just beginning to see and name our enormous power to hurt the planet that is our life. In that sense Earth Day seems both right and necessary: a day set aside to make ourselves more conscious, more reflective, of all that we hold in our hands both to help and to harm. On the other hand, Earth Day has joined the long line of other holidays and holy days that now seem to belong more to corporate agendas than they do to us. When Earth Day celebrations are sponsored by major polluters, like Mobil Oil and Pacific Gas and Electric, it does tend to tilt one's perspective toward a wee bit of cynicism.
But as with other holy days, we get to choose what to celebrate and what to reject, and it seems to me we can ignore the corporate sponsors and the contradictions they create in order to use Earth Day as it was originally intended. It was, of course, never supposed to be the single day each year in which we might tune in to ecological damage, pick up a little garbage along the roadside and then congratulate ourselves on a job well done. It is instead supposed to be an anchor, a touchstone, a tool of awareness and change by which we might notice the choices of the past year, measure their consequences and make new choices in a coming year. It seems to me a good day for resolutions, a sort of New Year's Day that we might devote to some courageous truth-telling.
And the most essential hard truth is this: unless we begin to think like the planet of which we are a part, and do it pretty quickly, we will not have very much that we can guarantee even to my children, much less to my great-great-grandchildren. What's needed is not just the ability to think like a stone, but the ability to think like an American chestnut or an elm, to think like a peeper, like a cicada, like a hawk or a red fox, like an anaconda, a vulture, a coral reef, an Amazon butterfly. And I don't mean thinking like them by projecting human thoughts or personalities onto them. I mean the willingness to imagine their needs and hungers, the willingness to listen for what they can teach us, the willingness to believe that their life on earth actually matters as much as our own.
This willingness to think like a planet is a radical stretch for most human beings, who have been taught in so many ways to believe ourselves the most precious forms of life that have ever existed. It is a good thing, a fine and valid thing, to believe ourselves to be precious. But it seems to me that it is only when we start thinking like a planet that our true value is revealed to us.
Because the truth is that we are not living on the earth. We are the earth, as everything else is the earth, rising into life in wild, abundant, chaotic, extravagant variety, but all made of the same handful of minerals and chemicals and salty water into which we will all dissolve again when we die. We are the earth made conscious -- not the only way in which the earth is made conscious, I hasten to add -- but a unique and marvelous way in which the earth itself can see, reflect, contemplate, behold, and choose.
Sometimes it's hard to hold much hope that we will ever wake up and realize this truth about ourselves in time to avert disaster. To know that the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting away, that the glaciers on the poles will soon make our oceans rise and island nations to vanish, that the fish living in our own Connecticut lakes and rivers are too polluted to eat, that plants and insects and animals are winking out of existence all over the planet, is to invite despair into our hearts. We have planet-sized problems, and very small human-sized hands and hearts, and oblivious, short-sighted governments.
The combination truly might do us in. But there are signs of awakening all around the world, and for those of us destined to love, with fierce loyalty, not only the planet but our own maddening, endearing kin, our challenge and our calling is to persevere. There are people everywhere who are learning to see with the long vision, learning to honor the strange and marvelous lives that are not human, learning to think like a planet. Our job is to deepen our own ability to do those things, and to call out the challenge, and the invitation, unceasingly to others.
It is time for us as a religious community to make of ourselves a training ground, a place where we and those who join us will learn to think like a planet. The workshop on May 22 is designed not just as a day to deepen our understanding, but as a launching pad for us to put our values and beliefs to work in a deeper way than we have ever managed before.
It's a work we can try to do alone, in isolation, or with kindred souls we might accidentally find along the way. But it's a work that will be more grounded and joyful, more determined and more successful, if it is held and nourished in the web of our religious community. I urge you, I invite you, to help develop and deepen our own training in the art of thinking like a planet, beginning on May 22.
I want to leave you with these words from poet Mary Oliver, who seems to think outside her own species almost all the time:
I rose this morning early as usual, and went to my desk.
But it's spring,
and the thrush is in the woods,
somewhere in the twirled branches, and he is singing.
And so, now, I am standing by the open door.
And now I am stepping down into the grass.
I am touching a few leaves.
I am noticing the way the yellow butterflies
move together, in a twinkling cloud, over the field.
And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.
Maybe the world, without us,
is the real poem.
AMEN.