Discuss: Mind in the Forest

Thanks,
After listening to you at Chestnut Mountain, and reading the Conservationist Manifesto and A Private History of Awe. Sitting on the west bank of the Mississippi River I want to silently say Amen and Thank You.

Dear Scott,

You have composed pretty well what you have seen, heard, and felt.

It’s meditative piece and peace!

I am grateful for all of these comments (posted as of Oct 26), especially the eloquent response by Bill Johnson.  Since I first came to know Orion more than twenty years ago, this magazine has been the place I’ve turned to, as reader and writer, for artful thought about the human condition and about our place in this mysterious universe.  What we call “nature” is simply our source and our home.  Science has revealed, in marvelous and ever-increasing detail, how the universe works, but it cannot tell us how we should live.  Orion offers a home for writing and visual art that considers the questions science cannot answer—questions about meaning, purpose, beauty, responsibility, and belonging.  Everywhere I travel in America, speaking to people who care for their neighbors, their communities, and the earth, I find readers of Orion.

Absolutely sensational piece of text!!

No Matter, Never Mind

The Father is the Void
The Wife   Waves

Their child is Matter.

Matter makes it with his mother
And their child is Life,
          a daughter.

The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who, with her father/brother Matter
        as her lover,

Gives birth to the Mind.

              Gary Snyder
              Turtle Island

I had vaguely remembered that Bertrand Russell said it, but if you Google “no matter never mind” it seems that George Berkeley may have started this dialogue (“What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.”). But, as you can see above, Gary Snyder takes it a step further. Poetic but closely akin to a scientific viewpoint. And Snyder takes a stand on the chicken-or-egg sequence.
It’s when we ask, “What is the matter?” that we have to contemplate the fact that this “lowly stuff” is really something wholly other.
Picturing that other as Mind just seems to me to be a throwback to the biblical story of being “made in the image of..”. We wish. But if we’re not it needn’t be so disappointing. Whatever it is we seem to be a part of it (just not necessarily a copy in any sense).
We’re still heavily invested in the idea that mankind is the high point of evolution, that our mind is modeled on another higher mind. But by doing that we may be once again creating a new god in the image of man. It’s been done many times before.
I admit that, whatever may be true about these things, premonitions about our fragile position on an endangered planet should command our attention at the moment. Like the fox crossing the river at the end of the I Ching, we have to discern things clearly according to their nature - we cling to the ice while our tail dips in the water. The matter is the matter. Our mind is our best tool. Many rivers to cross. First this one. Hopefully there will be future generations to cross the others.

Scott Sanders has written an eloquent piece of nature prose, which is wonderfully reflective. However, as a Christian who has worked on and supported environmental causes for years, I take exception to Sander’s little slam at the ‘sky god’ (Abrahamic) religions. Trying to tie deforestation to ‘sky god’ followers hoping for a glimpse the heavens is a little over the ‘tree tops’. Cutting down trees has a lot more to do with human need and human greed – the need being to grow crops in support of burgeoning human populations and the greed to make money off of board-feet or to grow palm oil, sugarcane, pine-based toilet paper, fast-food beef, and other ‘cash crops’ at the expense of forest ecosystems. Slash, cut, clear, and burn has been accomplished in forests around the world by those of all religious persuasions and of no religious persuasion – Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Native Americans, pagans, agnostics and atheists (true non-believers).
Contrary to the belief of many in the secular environmental community, many Christians, including myself, have no problem with simian ancestors. (Hopefully, the ancestors take no offense.) In fact, our simian background may have more to do with our desire to create open spaces and our love of ‘savanna lawns’ in suburbia than it has to do with any ‘sky god’ worship. There’s the hypothesis among ethnologists, anthropologists, landscape ecologists, and others that the appeal of open spaces with scattered trees is because it’s similar to our ancestral environment on the plains of Africa – right there at the edge of the Garden of Eden no less. The open, tree-studded landscape preference may be in our DNA.
I encourage readers not familiar with Christians working on environmental issues (which I’m guessing might be the majority) to check out some websites such as those for the Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation (working to stop all old growth cutting in national forests), Christians for the Mountains (trying to stop the sacrilege of mountaintop removal in Appalachia), Earth Ministry (located right there in the Pacific Northwest), The National Religious Partnership for the Environment, and many, many others.
The sideswipes and innuendoes against all of Christianity as anti-environmental, so common in secular nature writing, do little to bring more like-minded Christians to the table with secular environmentalists for the cause of saving the earth as we know it. Whether we believe we’re reflecting our creative abilities back at an all-embracing universal mind or that we’re looking into the immanence of a God who is also transcendent, we all need to be working together for the good of the earth.

Thank you for “Mind in the Forest,” and the gift of your tapestry of woven words, awareness, awe, emotion, wisdom.  Simply elegant.  You fanned the flames of my love for ORIOIN Magazine, and the fact that my yellow labrador, Dylan Thomas, takes his nap with his head resting atop my stacks of Orion.  The Literary Dog.
Your essay was like a favorite song that I’ll return to again and again.  It brought to mind a specific day, a specific tree, and the gift it bestowed. 
Here in the mountains of Idaho, there is an old pine tree just off a hiking trail on Griffin’s Butte, north of Ketchum.  The girth of this pine tree is too large for two people to touch hands while hugging it.  But my daughter and I tried.  I named the tree “the crying tree.”  Soon after my 28 year old son died unexpectedly, I hiked this trail with my daughter.  WE discovered with great awe, this tree, her deep grooved bark literally covered, every inch of it, in sap.  We stood in amazement, breathing in the scent of pine sap, touching it, some droplets hardened like wax, others oozing sticky deliciousness. The sap dripped like an enormous candle in teardrops of muted irridecent colors, hues of blues, sage,rosey pinks, milky yellows.  This Mother Tree gave me what I needed:  A woman who could share my tears.  The visual image of a strong mature pine tree, with her entire trunk dripped in a painter’s palette of sap, comforted me: You can mourn and be joyful and grow, simultaneously. I took the image of her with me.  The weaping mother, with her roots strongly anchored in terra firma, her scent deliciously wafting through the breeze, her branches shouting out around her to gather both vertical and horizontal energy, her bright new tender green needles at the fingertips of every branch.  There she stood, anchored in stone maternity, and reaching towards the sun.  I bathed in the beauty of your words and thoughts, and appreciated the reminder that we can find soulful noursihment in every dimension and direction.  As a musician and painter, I needed this! I’ll not forget to look earthward for spiritual nourishment as well. And, as always, To ORION Magazine.  Thank you.  Nancy Thomas.  Sun Valley Idaho

Again, I appreciate readers’ responses to “Mind in the Forest.”  To erstwhileterrestrial (comment #13), I would say that understanding human existence as a participation in the flow of what we call “nature,” and understanding human consciousness as only one manifestation of the inwardness of that flow, does not exalt humans above other species.  On the contrary, it places us as members alongside all our fellow creatures—and, I suggest in the essay, alongside rivers and mountains, trees and stones.  The fallacy, decisively formulated by Descartes and perpetuated in mechanistic philosophy, is to imagine that we humans are the sole home for thought or source of meaning in the universe. 
I agree with JTL (comment #14) that many Christians, along with many people of other faiths, take seriously our responsibility to care for the earth, and they are acting vigorously on that conviction.  In addition to the worthy efforts mentioned by JTL, I would call readers’ attention to the Evangelical Environmental Network, Interfaith Power & Light, and the Forum on Ecology and Religion.  On the views of Christians about evolution, here is what I wrote:  “Of course, many who decry tree-hugging don’t believe we have a simian ancestry, and so perhaps what they fear is a reversion to paganism.”  Note that I said “many,” not “all.”  I realize that the majority of Christians accept the theory of evolution as the best account we have for understanding how life has taken on its myriad of forms.  But, unfortunately, millions of the most ardent, vociferous, and pugnacious people who call themselves Christians are Biblical literalists who dismiss evolutionary theory entirely and push to have its teaching eliminated from our public schools.  It’s ironic that JTL labels my work as “secular nature writing,” since I have been taken to task elsewhere for drawing on the language and teachings of religion.  Over the past thirty years, especially in the dozen or so essays that I have published in Orion, I have explored the spiritual dimension of nature, and of our place in nature, often to the discomfort of my fellow writers who take an entirely materialistic (in the philosophical sense) view of things. Readers curious about this effort might look at my latest two books, “A Private History of Awe” and “A Conservationist Manifesto.”
And to Nancy Thomas (comment #15): I appreciate your generous words, and your story about communing with a pine tree after the death of your son.  We don’t need to believe that our fellow creatures—whether pines or panthers—actually share our feelings in order to be comforted and inspired by their presence.