Such Wild Love
The first time I read Mary Oliver's poem, The Sun, the last lines were the ones that grabbed me. I suppose they are the ones that grab most readers. Out of nowhere, they give this otherwise elegant and soft poem an edge. They seem to be bluntly telling us that we've picked the wrong pleasures, that our cultural obsession with power and things has caused us to turn our backs on the beauty of nature. But in re-reading this poem over the last few weeks, I'm not so sure this is Oliver's point. Lately it's the middle of the poem, rather than the end, that stood out for me, specifically that tiny line tucked away in the middle of the fifth stanza: "such wild love." In the midst of describing the power and importance of nature, Oliver writes the word "love." She could have written "beauty," but she didn't. She chose "love." And we need to take that choice seriously, because it suggests that it's not nature's loveliness that Oliver thinks we've turned our backs on, it's nature's love.
And there's a big difference between love and loveliness.
It's telling that I have to reach all the way back to my childhood to come up with an experience of nature's love. Ask me to talk about experiences of nature's loveliness, and numerous experiences from my adult life come easily to mind. But push me to share a story of being loved by nature and the only tale I can find goes all the way back to fourth grade. And oh what a tragic tale it is, and a bit embarrassing, so be gentle with your minister this morning.
I grew up on an eighty-acre farm. Forty of those acres were corn and bean fields, the other forty were woods. In fourth grade, one of my best friends was Jimmy Parks; the other was those woods. And to explain this friendship with the woods, I've got to introduce you to my 4th grade nemesis: Joey Porter. Joey was good-looking, athletic, quick-witted and funny; and he placed all those talents in the service of pure evil! You can tell I am still a bit wounded by this childhood trauma. Simply put, Joey was the class bully. And if Joey had had his druthers, I would have been his favorite target. You see, three things dominated my identity in elementary school: My red hair, the fact that I was a preacher's kid and my chubby belly-that's right, a triple whammy. No matter how many times Mr. Rogers told me that he loved me just the way I was and that my differences made me special, I knew the truth. Every kid knows the truth: in Mr. Roger's world, unique traits make you special; but in the world of fourth grade, they only make you vulnerable.
Joey would have gladly taken advantage of my vulnerabilities, but there was a catch. Not only was I bigger around the middle than Joey, but also I was also taller than Joey, and I could throw the football twice as far as he could. And in the weird universe of elementary school, this was just enough to keep me safe most of the time.
So it wasn't me, but Janice Justice, who Joey set his sights on. She also had a triple whammy: her name had a funny ring to it, like me she was larger around the middle than the rest of the kids in the class, and she had a tendency to trip a lot. Her fate was sealed.
I am ashamed to admit it, but I have to confess that I was part of keeping that seal on tight. When Joey went after Janice, I, like the rest of the class pretty much went right along--not necessarily laughing or teasing her directly, but certainly being an accomplice with my silence. As we all know, bullies seem to have this magic about them; like the piped piper of old, they cast this spell over entire groups, charming and scaring us into going wherever they're leading.
But on a certain spring day of that fourth grade year, something broke Joey's spell over me. It was a rainy day, so recess was inside. Kids from every class were jammed in the gym so there was no way for the teachers to notice everything that was going on. Joey saw his opening and went right after Janice. He chose a cow theme to entertain the group. With a sadistic artistry, he wove alliteration into his name-calling. "Clumsy Cow" he called Janice. I can't remember the exact circumstances-if Janice had just fallen or if Joey was taunting her in an attempt to get her to fall-but I do remember that chant: "Clumsy cow. Clumsy cow. Clumsy cow. Come on clumsy cow try to get away." Every time Joey repeated it, the chuckles from the crowd grew.
And that's when it happened. You might say it was my first and only out of body experience-a spirit possession of sorts. I don't remember thinking about doing it. I don't remember planning to do it. I don't even remember feeling like it was me doing it, but the next thing I knew I was watching myself shove Joey Porter to the floor. Now my parents raised me to be a pacifist and I knew darn well that knocking Joey over was not something Jesus would approve of, but here I was doing it anyway. And that's not all. Suddenly I found myself on top of Joey. I pinned his back to the floor and was covering his mouth with my hand. "Shut up!" I heard myself say, "You shut up! You will shut up right now!"
Everyone was silent. Stunned. But it was also clear that every fourth grader gathered there was on my side. Even though no one said anything, there was this sense that everyone was vicariously telling Joey to shut up right along with me. Suddenly everything seemed right with the world. Safe, not scary. For a moment, I think each and every one of us believed that teasing and the fear of teasing wasn't a given, but something that could actually be eliminated from our lives. With all my weight on him, Joey couldn't move an inch. For the first time, I loved my girth. For the first time, my husky jeans and larger than normal waistline felt like a great treasure.
Then Joey took a deep breath.
You see, the part of the story I've left out is that earlier that morning as I waited at the end of our driveway for the bus to come, I heard my Dad holler for help. He was moving pigs from one part of the barn to the other and Wilber, our huge boar, slipped past him and was running free in the yard. It takes at least two people to corral a grown boar back into his pen. So I had to help.
By the time we got Wilber into the barn, the bus was long gone and I was late. So we quickly hopped into our old farm truck and Dad rushed me to school. We were so focused on my being late that neither of us thought about needing to wash my hands. So when Joey took a breath, it was Wilber's aroma he encountered.
I wish I could say that this added to Joey's discomfort, but unfortunately it only served as inspiration for Joey's cruelly creative mind.
"Hey, it smells like pig" he said.
"Hey, it's you that smells like pig."
I saw him eye my middle and then a victor's smile appeared on his face as he began singing another one of his chants: "Hey, you look and smell like a pig. You're a pig boy! Hey, pig boy. Pig Boy! Pig boy!"
"How about getting off of me now pig boy?!"
Everyone laughed.
And with that, the world returned to normal, to that sad normal state in which bully's win, and turn usually kind classes of fourth graders into mean-spirited crowds. The rest of the day, I wasn't the hero who defended Janice or the brave classmate who finally spoke out against teasing. No, I was "pig boy." Not only in the eyes of all my chuckling classmates, but in my own eyes as well. Which meant that even more than being "pig boy," I was a little boy in a whole lot of pain.
And here's the part that's so important as we think about and celebrate Earth Day. I didn't take that pain to my parents. I didn't even take that pain to by best friend Jimmy Parks. No, I took it to the woods.
I went first to "Swing Tree." She was the giant tree behind our barn, right on the edge of the woods by the stream. I named her Swing Tree because one of her branches hung very low to the ground. It was this thick and burly branch that reached out from eight feet up her trunk, bending downward to the earth and then back up again, making her branch into a natural hammock of sorts. On that spring day, it felt like a giant arm. I laid in the curve of the limb for what seemed hours. And I cried. And as corny or sentimental as it sounds, Swing Tree rocked me as I cried. Back and forth, back and forth, as if she had me in her arms. And the wind joined in, caressing my hair and face, just like my mom did to calm me down.
By the next day, that calm was replaced by anger. I hated how being "pig boy" made me feel small and alone; and I hated Joey and my classmates for making me feel that way. A broken rake lay beside the barn. I picked up the handle and carried it with me into the woods.
When working as a therapist in a hospital, I once witnessed a mother who was told that her teenage son had just died in a car accident. Overwhelmed by pain and rage, she dropped to the floor and started beating it with her fists. The cement floor obviously was unaffected. It only made things worse. And then her husband did one of the most loving things I've seen. He walked over and pulled her to his chest, allowing her to hit him, absorbing her pain and giving her anger somewhere to go.
That's what it was like that day in the woods as I beat the branches with that old rake. I wasn't taking my anger out on the trees, rather it felt like the trees had reached out to me, invited me in, offering their weak and dead branches, absorbing each of my blows as a way of giving my hurt somewhere to go. In doing so, they offered me the feeling that everything would be all right, that everything was all right, and even more than that--that I was all right.
So here's the thing about experience with the woods. Call it projection. Call it imagination. Call it anthropomorphizing. Or even call it sentimental or irrational. But I agree with Mary Oliver, you've also got to call it love. Love-as we all know-is a reciprocal experience, an experience of both acting and being acted upon. And no matter how much we may want-or try-to explain it away, that's how this experience with the woods felt to me: reciprocal.
Do I think that the woods have a consciousness like ours? I don't.
Do I think that the wind on that day somehow intentionally made its way over to my face and hair? No, I don't think that either.
Do I think that Swing Tree somehow made her giant branch sway just for me? Again, no.
But neither do I think it is accurate to simply say I projected all my feelings and thoughts onto these non-human entities. Such talk, I believe, makes me seem more active than I was and makes the woods seem more passive than they were. Such talk completely misses and masks the fact that this was mainly-and importantly-an experience of being a recipient. I did not make that moment into something meaningful; that moment offered something meaningful to me. In other words-and this is so important-I was THE OBJECT, not THE SUBJECT, the object of a great gift. I was given the experience of being cared for. Or, as Mary Oliver would encourage us to say, I was given the experience of being loved.
Now, I want all of you to be honest right now. Do you feel yourself squirming a little bit? Does this talk of your minister being loved by a tree seem a bit weird? Foreign? Childish? Or even a little bit nuts? Well of course it does, right?! And this in a sense is exactly my point this morning: when it comes to nature, we are no longer familiar with the experience of being recipients. It's not "normal" anymore. Let me be more exact: when it comes to nature, we in the modern west have fundamentally lost the capacity to imagine and experience ourselves as anything but actors. Think about the words we use: we appreciate nature, enjoy it, protect it, honor it, meditate on it, take responsibility for it. Anything but be acted upon by it. That's just not part of our modern psychology. We are the subjects; nature is the object. We are lovers of nature, not loved by nature. We care for the trees and birds; they don't care for us. Which means-and I think this is what Mary Oliver is so concerned and upset about-somewhere along the line-certainly having to do with power and things-we, in this culture, have become a radically different kind of human being.
And notice that nothing I've said this morning involves exploitation. What we are exploring today is not the loss of concern for nature. It's something bigger than that, deeper than that, more subtle and invisible than that. It has to do with our consciousness, not our concern-with the way our ranges of experience and modes of awareness have become much more limited than they once were.
Again, it speaks volumes that I had to reach all the way back to my childhood to find a time when I felt like nature reached out to me. There are some who would say that I've grown up, that my relationship to nature has matured. But it is precisely on this point that we are being challenged today. We call the loss of feeling loved by nature "maturation," "civilization" and "sophistication." But Mary Oliver calls it crazy! Today is a matter of trying to figure out who is right.
I'd ask you to pick up your bulletins again. This time turn to the front cover.
Robert Hama is a cultural anthropologist who studied and lived with the indigenous populations of Alaska. He credits them for reawaking his relationship with nature, of giving him back something precious he had lost. At one point he says, the Alaskan people gave him his humanity back.
I want to read his words aloud:
The dark boughs reach out above me and encircle me like arms. I feel the assurance of being recognized, as if something powerful and protective is aware of my presence, looks in another direction, but always has me in the corner of its eye. I am cautious and self-protective here, as anywhere, yet I believe that a covenant of mutual regard binds me together with the forest. We share in a common nurturing. Each of us serves as an amulet to protect the other from inordinate harm. I am never alone in this wild forest, this forest of elders, this forest of eyes.
I don't know about you, but when I read this piece I can't help but agree with Mary Oliver. I don't feel mature or sophisticated or even civilized; no, I feel crazy, and certainly cheated. I'm jealous. I miss being able to feel like that.
And it's interesting, David Abram claims that we all miss feeling like that. He too is a cultural anthropologist. And he has a slightly different take on things than Oliver or Robert Hama. He claims that our culture hasn't lost the desire and need for non-human love; he says we've just relocated it. Whereas pre-modern cultures located non-human nurturing in the trees and animals, he says, we moderns moved it into the heavens and into our heads.
The modern west was parented by two related but very different traditions: the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Greek tradition. The Judeo-Christian tradition basically said, forget the trees, that's primitive foolishness; the true non-human sources of love and nurture lay in the supernatural realm among invisible beings called God and angels. The Greeks agreed when it came to the silliness of looking to the trees, but their alternative wasn't invisible beings above us, instead it was the invisible, abstract ideas in our heads. Truth, wisdom, and later the ego, super-ego and collective conscious--all are treated by us moderns as having a life of their own, as independent forces acting on and influencing us in remarkable and nurturing ways. Socrates sums up this modern psychology well. One of his most famous quotes is, "I am a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas the ideas of men in town always do."
The point here is that we moderns haven't eliminated otherness and non-human influences from our lives, we've just stripped it from the nature world. Nurturing otherness is ok if it comes from gods in heaven or ideas in our head, but not from the leaves, the sunset or the animal that comes near. And today I am suggesting that we suffer because of this, and that the world suffers as well.
Mary Oliver says we've turned from the world. Implicit in that statement is the plea, the urging, to turn back to the world, to reclaim and remember:
A time in our lives when promotions and retirement accounts weren't the only things that made us feel rich and safe; a time when being surrounded by woods could do that too.
A time when a walk along the beach was as powerful a source of wisdom as surfing the Internet.
A time when therapists were not the only option to turn to when other human beings let us down; a time when the comfort of an animal could calm us and bring us back to life in the same way.
A time when the coming of Spring didn't just feel like a stunning biological event, but instead felt like existence itself was reaffirming some kind of sacred marriage vow with us, promising that warmth and new life will always be available in good times as well as bad, through rich times as well as poor.
It's this kind of turning back to the world that, I believe, honors Earth Day in its fullest. If all we accomplish is a reconnection with nature's beauty or importance I think we've missed the mark. Once again, there is a big difference between experiencing nature's loveliness and experiencing nature's love. There is a big difference between human beings who see the non-human world as "a precious and fragile stockpile of natural resources" and human beings who see the non-human world as a loving friend.
May we both understand and experience that difference.
So be it. Amen.
April 17, 2005