As we close in on the end of the semester and watch the leaves unfurl and flowers persist, we spend our last classes together examining nature. We ask: how do we engage with our environment? What were ancient perspectives on nature, and how can these influence our perspective, or more, our relationship, with the natural world today?

These questions bring us right back to where we began this semester with the power of story. When I approach the material we examine in HUM124, I don’t see any of it as something that exists in the past. The fact that we are here studying it speaks to its persistence through time into our present. But beyond this, the stories of the ancient world have shaped and continue to shape our reality to this day.

But not in a fatalistic way! The shaping itself changes: paths cross, perspectives shift, influences fade or come to bear, different ways of knowing illuminate hidden truths. And we can have a hand in this! As we listen, learn and see the effect of certain ways of thinking on our present existence, we are called into the conversation – to critique, consider and most importantly, to question. I see this in everything we’ve looked at from the idea of a “good” life to community politics to, powerfully and urgently, our understanding of the human relationship with nature.

Science & Story & Sacred

When we look at our collection of readings “Where have you come from; where are we going? Nature”: we see stories, science and sacred texts – all aspects of humans relating to the natural world. What’s important is that these ways of knowing – story, science and the sacred – are not discrete, exclusive. They cross and converge in all the readings.

• Our scientific perspective is shot through with story and mystery.
• Our storytelling cultures practice the science of conservation in word and habit.
• Our sacred texts articulate worldviews that form a foundation for future stories and sciences.

Presocratics

When I encountered the Presocratics (Moodle) in college, those guys blew my mind. The “natural philosophers” are known as western pioneers of science, and we know of them through (among others) Aristotle, the great empiricist himself. They were fascinated with the way the world worked and wanted to understand the world on an elemental level, but their science was not yet divorced from the influence of gods and monsters, and what we would consider mystery and mythos. It was my kind of science, and I continue to question the science/story dichotomy.

The presocratics saw the elements (Water, Fire, Air, Earth) locked in conflict, and the physical world a changing manifestation of this elemental strife. Their lives, dimly recorded, seemed to reflect this. According to Aristotle, Thales fell into a well and was laughed at by a witty Thracian slave girl. It was this embarrassment and his wet feet, I imagined, that led him to posit that “All is water.” Pythagoras, gave us his famous theorem and reportedly threw one of his fellows off a ship for mentioning irrational numbers (i), which eventually happens when you work in square roots.

They were scientists who appreciated a good paradox. From Heraclitus, we have the famous “into the same river, we step and do not step, we are and are not.” And Empedocles, who saw all of creation in the play of the forces of Love and Strife, threw himself into the volcano of Mt Etna, out of Strife. (He did think he was immortal, though.) And please, feel free to invoke Zeno’s paradox the next time you don’t want to leave your room.

Daodejing

The Way, or the Dao, is the way of nature. In the natural metaphors we encounter in the Daodejing (Reader pg 328) – water, wind, reeds – the way of non-action (wu-wei), and the idea that there is more strength in going with the flow and being flexible is embodied. We see seasons overtake and replace each other, never resisting the natural cyclic process of birth, growth, death and decay. To resist would be to defy nature, which is ultimately impossible. My friend and colleague Dr. Marc S. Mullinax, who just published a new translation (yes another one!), puts it this way:

“Wu-wei is wise, active, noninterfereing cooperation with the way of the Universe – yet another way that Tao is power for the peaceful. Not going against the grain of the blueprint of Nature means one is more at rest, at peace, and in sync with the world.

Marc S. Mullinax, tao Te Ching: Power for the Peaceful

You can watch his trailer for the book here, which is saturated with natural imagery. Consider this from a personal perspective: Has there been a moment in your life when you realized you had more strength and power through flexibility and “peaceful” acceptance?

Maya Worldview: Popul Vuh

In the creation story we read in the Popol Vuh (Moodle), we get a model of experimentation as Heart of Sky and the Sovereign Plumed Serpent come together to create the earth and her plant, animal and human inhabitants.

This creation story forms the foundation of an indigenous way of knowing and ethic when it comes to the relationship between earth and her human inhabitants. In his article “Heart of Heaven, Heart of Earth,”  Maya writer Victor Montejo distinguishes Maya cosmology as the ecocentric, rather than anthropocentric; it is a worldview that situates the land as central to life and well being and human identity. Earth and motherhood and selfhood are inextricable concepts. This lived understanding has consequences for the way people understand and behave themselves in intimate relationship to – rather than other, apart or above – the natural world.

Cherokee Kinship

This brings us to the Cherokee stories – How the World Was Made and Freeman Owle’s stories (Reader pg 164) – and the relationship with nature revealed in the storytelling. More than any of our texts, these speak to the very land under our feet – the trees, rivers, stones, mountains whose names have been replaced by settler names – is Cherokee (Anigiduwah) land, and it is where we are.

In his discussion with us earlier this semester, Dr. Ben Steere gives us insight on how Cherokee culture and cosmology was embodied in their relationship with the land, telling the story of ancient mounds and their significance. Watch the full lecture here. He also reminds us that the Eastern band of Cherokee are still occupy their ancestral home, protecting the sites that have been sacred since ancient time.

In his story about his childhood, Freeman Owle talks about times when he would get up before dawn and sit in the woods. “What have you learned, his father asked.
“I’ve learned, Father, that if you’re quiet enough,
still enough, long enough,
that you become part of nature.”
And he said,
“You’ve learned well, son.”
He loved the forest.
He loved to tell the stories of the Cherokees.

These stories testify that there has been and is a way to understand the earth rooted in indigenous epistemology that is very different from a culture that sees nature as tool and convenience. The stories underlay the science of the Cherokee, who practiced some of the most sophisticated land management known to date. Early settlers came to this place and thought the forests just happened. But what they were experiencing was a complex large scale, long-term, niche-driven landscaping, architected to provide diverse food crops for different needs and seasons. You can read about this here in an excerpt from Weaving New Worlds by Sarah Hill (1997)

In my email last semester, I received a link to “Skywoman Falling” Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new introduction to her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer is an indigenous woman of the midwest Potowatomi nation, and she is a scientist trained in botany – someone who embodies the balanced tension of story and science. She uses the metaphor of the forest to talk about shifting and shaping ways of knowing and being. The overstory – the big dominant worldview that seems to be failing us now when it comes to sustaining life on earth – is burning and toppling. But this, allows the *understory* – the ways of thinking, knowing and being that have been marginalized – to grow back, healing over the scars and burns.

What the “overstory” of colonialism tried to suppress is surging. . . We remember the oft-used words of resistance, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the new intro to *Braiding Sweetgrass*

So, it’s my wish and hope for you, as you consider and dip into these materials, that you consider science, story and the sacred. The earth is the most ancient thing we will study. Our relationship to her are shaped by worldviews with very real implications and consequences for the future.

And don’t forget language too! Another thing we’ve seen in class is that names matter. And the way we speak of something shapes reality itself. I leave you with Kimmerer’s pronoun proposal, for your sincere consideration. In this excerpt, she’s trying to find an alternative to it.

“Aakibmaadiziiwin,” he said, “means ‘a being of the earth.’” I sighed with relief and gratitude for the existence of that word. However, those beautiful syllables would not slide easily into English to take the place of the pronoun it. But I wondered about that first sound, the one that came to me as I walked over the land. With full recognition and celebration of its Potawatomi roots, might we hear a new pronoun at the beginning of the word, from the “aaki” part that means land? Ki to signify a being of the living earth. Not he or she, but ki. So that when the robin warbles on a summer morning, we can say, “Ki is singing up the sun.” Ki runs through the branches on squirrel feet, ki howls at the moon, ki’s branches sway in the pine-scented breeze, all alive in our language as in our world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Speaking of Nature”

Please share your thoughts on this and any of the readings in the comments.

For Wednesday’s 4/20 class, bring in something physical that you feel represents human beings’ relationship with nature. It can be your relationship with nature, or the way you see an ancient culture relating to nature, a natural object, a recipe, or even an illustration of one of our texts.