At the Blurry Margin Between Two Natures

[Images: “Heart Tree” (in color and — with a tiny exception — black-and-white), by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I came across this tree in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, during a morning walk; I don’t know that the dab of red paint was indeed meant to be a heart, but I haven’t been able to think of it otherwise.]

One of the weird things about being out in nature — if you’re not being hedonistic about it all, frolicking mindlessly in the surf, so to speak — is how it can focus you on the experience of being human. I don’t mean “human” in the sense of two-legged, opposable-thumbed, neurotic, confident, selfish or aspirational. I mean “human” in the sense of, well, vis-à-vis those beings which lie on the far side of some indefinable border — the far side, that is, of the line between human and not-human.

You stand on an ocean shore, by yourself, as the sun rises or sets over the horizon. You lie on your back beneath a jet-black sky dotted and smeared with stars, galaxies, aurorae. You stand in a grove of thousand-year-old trees, hearing the creak of timber untouched by human limb, hearing the rustle and squeak of unseen creatures (beetles, birds, rodents), feeling (without exactly sensing) the whisper of ferns and fungi and trees-sprouting-from-other-trees. You do that sort of thing once, twice, three times in the span of a few weeks — and you start to wonder how much, really, separates you from all that. Is a barnacle part of the rock it adheres to, or is it something… else?

Humans like to think of themselves as things apart from nature: encrustations. Yes, yes, they grant: there are similarities, there is shared DNA, chemistry in common. And yet, they insist: the differences are too great. We are other — i.e., more — than that, they say…

This week, courtesy of whiskey river (last stanza), we encounter Billy Collins meditating on the line ostensibly separating his civilized human existence from the unseen oceanic swell beneath the ground:

Water Table

It is on dry sunny days like this one that I find myself
thinking about the enormous body of water
that lies under this house,
cool, unseen reservoir,
silent except for the sounds of dripping
and the incalculable shifting
of all the heavy darkness that it holds.

This is the water that our well was dug to sip
and lift to where we live,
water drawn up and falling on our bare shoulders,
water filling the inlets of our mouths,
water in a pot on the stove.

The house is nothing now but a blueprint of pipes,
a network of faucets, nozzles, and spigots,
and even outdoors where light pierces the air
and clouds fly over the canopies of trees,
my thoughts flow underground
trying to imagine the cavernous scene.

Surely it is no pool with a colored ball
floating on the blue surface.
No grotto where a king would have
his guests rowed around in swan-shaped boats.
Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow
there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock
and no man holding a long oar,
ready to take your last coin.
This is the real earth and the real water it contains.

But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain.

(Billy Collins [source])

And then there’s this, not from whiskey river, but brushing up against it, so to speak, in recognition — in affirmation:

You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes….

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. […] Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near… When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.

(Richard Powers [source1; source2])

We spent the month of June more or less — and very much non-literally — sprinting up and down and across the state of California, and are now tentatively heading east: across the Rockies and Great Plains, down to (as they say) the heartland and then, eventually, Atlantic-ward and something like “home life.” The American West is a heck of a place to find nature, of course — nature which has nothing to do with human existence: nature in the form of things other than pets, livestock, vermin, cultivated or farmed plants — just raw, bare, nature. I don’t know that I’ll ever get over the experience — the experience, that is, not of feeling out of place, but spotting kindred souls in things and environments which, science often confidently asserts, have no souls at all…

When we’re in a hotel, and I go out into the hall or step out of the elevator and cross paths with another guest, they and I smile, nod, and say, “Good morning” — to all outward evidence, like two people who recognize and know one another, who acknowledge that they have something in common. And when I have lately stepped into a meadow, or a forest, or a mountain valley, without another “soul” around, I have the same experience: that boulder, that tree, that spring and I have stopped for a split-second, smiled at each other, nodded in fellow-feeling, and then gotten on with our lives.