{"id":25529,"date":"2022-07-15T12:07:51","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T16:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=25529"},"modified":"2022-07-15T12:08:11","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T16:08:11","slug":"at-the-blurry-margin-between-two-natures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/at-the-blurry-margin-between-two-natures\/","title":{"rendered":"At the Blurry Margin Between Two Natures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow aligncenter\" data-effect=\"slide\"><div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_container swiper-container\"><ul class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_swiper-wrapper swiper-wrapper\"><li class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_slide swiper-slide\"><figure><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1279\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_image wp-image-25535\" data-id=\"25535\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_color.jpg?resize=1024%2C1279&#038;ssl=1\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_color.jpg?w=1024&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_color.jpg?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_color.jpg?resize=820%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 820w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_color.jpg?resize=768%2C959&amp;ssl=1 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/figure><\/li><li class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_slide swiper-slide\"><figure><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1279\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_image wp-image-25536\" data-id=\"25536\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_mono.jpg?resize=1024%2C1279&#038;ssl=1\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_mono.jpg?w=1024&amp;ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_mono.jpg?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_mono.jpg?resize=820%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 820w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/hearttree_mono.jpg?resize=768%2C959&amp;ssl=1 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px\" \/><\/figure><\/li><\/ul><a class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_button-prev swiper-button-prev swiper-button-white\" role=\"button\"><\/a><a class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_button-next swiper-button-next swiper-button-white\" role=\"button\"><\/a><a aria-label=\"Pause Slideshow\" class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_button-pause\" role=\"button\"><\/a><div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-slideshow_pagination swiper-pagination swiper-pagination-white\"><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Images: &#8220;Heart Tree&#8221; (in color and &#8212; with a tiny exception &#8212; black-and-white), by John E. Simpson. <em><em><em><em><em>(Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/using-my-photos\/\" target=\"_blank\">this page<\/a> at <\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em>RAMH<em><em><em><em><em><em>.)<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em> I came across this tree in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, during a morning walk; I don&#8217;t know that the dab of red paint was indeed meant to be a heart, but I haven&#8217;t been able to think of it otherwise.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">One of the weird things about being out in nature &#8212; if you&#8217;re not being hedonistic about it all, frolicking mindlessly in the surf, so to speak &#8212; is how it can focus you on the experience of being human. I don&#8217;t mean &#8220;human&#8221; in the sense of two-legged, opposable-thumbed, neurotic, confident, selfish or aspirational. I mean &#8220;human&#8221; in the sense of, well, vis-\u00e0-vis <em data-default-font-size=\"20px\" data-default-color=\"rgb(0, 0, 0)\" data-default-background-color=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)\" data-default-font-family=\"-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif\">those beings which lie on the far side of some indefinable border<\/em> &#8212; the far side, that is, of <em data-default-font-size=\"20px\" data-default-color=\"rgb(0, 0, 0)\" data-default-background-color=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)\" data-default-font-family=\"-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif\">the line between human and not-human<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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), <em>feeling<\/em> (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 &#8212; 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&#8230; else?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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. <em>We are other &#8212; <\/em>i.e., more<em> &#8212; than that<\/em>, they say&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This week, courtesy of <em><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/2022\/07\/but-some-nights-i-must-tell-you-i-go.html\" target=\"_blank\">whiskey river<\/a><\/em> (last stanza), we encounter Billy Collins meditating on the line ostensibly separating his civilized human existence from the unseen oceanic swell beneath the ground:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p><strong>Water Table<\/strong><\/p><p>It is on dry sunny days like this one that I find myself<br>thinking about the enormous body of water<br>that lies under this house,<br>cool, unseen reservoir,<br>silent except for the sounds of dripping<br>and the incalculable shifting<br>of all the heavy darkness that it holds.<\/p><p>This is the water that our well was dug to sip<br>and lift to where we live,<br>water drawn up and falling on our bare shoulders,<br>water filling the inlets of our mouths,<br>water in a pot on the stove.<\/p><p>The house is nothing now but a blueprint of pipes,<br>a network of faucets, nozzles, and spigots,<br>and even outdoors where light pierces the air<br>and clouds fly over the canopies of trees,<br>my thoughts flow underground<br>trying to imagine the cavernous scene.<\/p><p>Surely it is no pool with a colored ball<br>floating on the blue surface.<br>No grotto where a king would have<br>his guests rowed around in swan-shaped boats.<br>Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow<br>there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock<br>and no man holding a long oar,<br>ready to take your last coin.<br>This is the real earth and the real water it contains.<\/p><p>But some nights, I must tell you,<br>I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.<br>I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.<br>I sing a love song as well as I can,<br>lost for a while in the home of the rain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>(Billy Collins [<em><a href=\"https:\/\/writersalmanac.publicradio.org\/index.php%3Fdate=2009%252F10%252F04.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">source<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And then there&#8217;s this, not from <em>whiskey river<\/em>, but brushing up against it, so to speak, in recognition &#8212; in affirmation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>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&#8230;.<\/p><p><em>This is not our world with trees in it. It&#8217;s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived. [&#8230;] Trees know when we&#8217;re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we\u2019re near&#8230; 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&#8217;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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>(Richard Powers [<em data-default-font-size=\"20px\" data-default-color=\"rgb(0, 0, 0)\" data-default-background-color=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2)\" data-default-font-family=\"-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif\"><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" data-default-font-size=\"20px\" data-default-color=\"rgb(34, 113, 177)\" data-default-background-color=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)\" data-default-font-family=\"-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif\" href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=_zQsDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT116#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\">source1<\/a><\/em>; <em data-default-font-size=\"20px\" data-default-color=\"rgb(0, 0, 0)\" data-default-background-color=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)\" data-default-font-family=\"-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif\"><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" data-default-font-size=\"20px\" data-default-color=\"rgb(34, 113, 177)\" data-default-background-color=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)\" data-default-font-family=\"-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif\" href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=_zQsDwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PT345#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\">source2<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">We spent the month of June more or less &#8212; and very much non-literally &#8212; 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 &#8220;home life.&#8221; The American West is a heck of a place to find nature, of course &#8212; nature which has nothing to do with human existence: nature in the form of things other than pets, livestock, vermin, cultivated or farmed plants &#8212; just raw, bare, nature. I don&#8217;t know that I&#8217;ll ever get over the experience &#8212; 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&#8230; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we&#8217;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, &#8220;Good morning&#8221; &#8212; 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 &#8220;soul&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Images: &#8220;Heart Tree&#8221; (in color and &#8212; with a tiny exception &#8212; 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&#8217;t know that the dab of red paint was indeed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Billy Collins, Richard Powers: 'At the Blurry Margin Between Two Natures'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,5433,247,1393,405,4701,250,4878,251],"tags":[365,1141,1314,4786,4787,5514,5548],"class_list":{"0":"post-25529","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-road-trip-2021","8":"category-ruminations","9":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","10":"category-nature","11":"category-my-photography","12":"category-art","13":"category-fiction","14":"category-poetry-writing_cat","15":"tag-edges","16":"tag-billy-collins","17":"tag-trees","18":"tag-fitting-in","19":"tag-not-fitting-in","20":"tag-nature","21":"tag-richard-powers","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-6DL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25529"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25549,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25529\/revisions\/25549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}