Earth Seminars | ||
The Partnership conducts earth spirituality seminars held each month in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Brief papers or other materials are prepared and posted on the Partnership's website in advance of each meeting. Should you wish to be added to the listserv receiving notification, please contact Joan Brown. |
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“Poetry as Window Into the Soul of Nature” through the poetry of Pattiann Rogers March 2, 2006 Discussion Leader: Wallace Ford Pattiann Rogers is a contemporary poet
whose intuitive insights combine the art of writing, the understanding
of language and the unifying of reality in such a way that our vision
of eco-spirituality in enlarged, challenged and nurtured. This Nature Bach is nature, and the Marquis de Sade is nature. Florence Nightingale and the Iron Maiden are nature. Michelangelo's Pieta, the swastika, Penthouse magazine and solar flares are nature. Pedophiles and saints equally are nature. Ash pits, boggy graves, nuclear bombs, tubercle bacillus, Yosemite Falls, abortion, the polio vaccine, all are part of the sum total of everything that is and therefore nature. Nothing that is goes against nature, because nature is the way things are. Nature is what is, everything that is, everything that has been, and everything that is possible, including human actions, inventions, creations, and imaginations. This is my definition. This nature is the nature of roaches and cheetahs and honeysuckle, the nature of a Strauss waltz, the nature of the Ice Ages, the Black Plague, the eruption of Krakatoa, the nature of the slaughter of American bison, the nature of human sacrifice and bloody rituals carried out by Aztecs, Celts, Slavs. Nothing that exists, including language, is outside nature. We do not know an "outside nature," because knowledge itself is an element of nature. Even the word "unnatural" is part of nature (how could it otherwise be here on this page?) and is therefore self-contradictory. An ice pick through the chest or a soothing hand on the forehead, both are natural, both gestures of nature. Wild curly dock, malaria, exploding stars, continental drift, and the construction of Hoover Dam are natural, part of what is. Violent birth and violent extinction are older than we are and natural. We know a history of both. We have sometimes been involved in the nature of both. We cannot legitimately use the word "natural" as synonomous with the words "unsullied," "pure," or "righteous." It is no more against nature for human beings to clearcut a forest than it is against nature for Mt. Vesuvius to erupt and eliminate the town of Herculaneum. Human actions may be judged moral or immoral, wise or unwise, cruel or benevolent, heedless or thoughtful, but those are other terms and other issues. I am speaking of nature. Everything that we name noble is nature, and everything that we name despicable is nature, and our attempt to distinguish between the noble and the despicable is nature. Calculus, astrophysics, the automobile, the safety pin, and billboards were created by creatures born of the natural world and thus included naturally in the nature of everything that is. If we create justice, it exists in nature. If we act so as to bring compassion into existence, it is real within the natural world. Divinity is of the universe, part of nature, when it is observed and noted and imagined and expressed by creatures born of nature with physical, blood-beating, light-snapping minds. We are thoroughly nature. To claim otherwise is to attempt to place human beings and everything we do in some rare unimaginable realm beyond the universe, thus rendering the power of our origins lost and our obligations vague. Nature is everything that is. We are not and cannot be "unnatural." Our choices and our actions are never for or against nature. They are always simply of nature. Our decisions then involve determining what it is that we value among this everything-that-is, this nature. What is it we seek to preserve? to eliminate? to modify? to accept? to avoid? to cherish? to respect? to emulate? The decisions we make, how we justify and construct those decisions and the behavior that results, all these become part of the great milieu, and they have their effects in ways we may not always recognize. Our choices and our actions, whether based on aesthetic considerations, moral or spiritual considerations, economic considerations, or rational considerations, must be justified in some way other than by the claim that they are the natural world; for any behavior, even murder, even suicide, even war, even abuse of the young, can be justified by that claim. We may call these particular acts horrors, but they are horrors that are part of nature, part of everything that is, and they cannot be said to go against nature. They are horrors that are part of nature already replete with horrors. Perhaps these particular acts go against our sense of goodness or compassion, morality or beauty or justice, but they do not go against nature. Annihilation and creation are occurring constantly around us now, and they have occurred always, long before human beings came to be. Nature encompasses all contradictions. This nature is not a single entity, not a consistent force that sanctions or condemns behavior, not a god-substitute that we can embrace or blame or escape. It composes the entire, complex myriad of ever-changing events and details, unpredictable, paradoxical, passing and eternal, known and mysterious. Nature is the vast expanse of abstractions and multiplicities; it is the void and the concrete presence, an unrestricted inclusiveness. The definition of the word "nature" even includes its own definition and the maker of its definition. It is self-referential. I deliberately seek out the specific aspects of everything that is that I find ennobling, affirming, that engender in me hope, faith, action, and health, the chaos choose to value and praise them. Just a few of these aspects, for me, are the words of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Melville, Twain, Faulkner, Roethke, Jacob Bronowski, Jesus Christ; the music of Chopin, Beethoven, Bruckner, Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Takacs Quartet; the very existence of the body of preserved art, music, and literature that is my culture; the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights; arches, domes, and columns; the grace and order of an NBA basketball game; Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes; the curiosity, facility, and complexity of the human mind that results in the revelations of science; the way sunlight appears shifting its illuminations and colors on roofs and gardens and fields, making shadows of trees on the curtains-throughout the gradual coming of morning, throughout the patterns of evening, everyday, the gift of morning and evening; snow, that amazement; the surrounding great buffer of stars in which we are immersed; life in its unrelenting, ruthless, selfabsorbed, tenacious grasp on being. We are fortunate as human beings to have the opportunity to discern and to act, to recognize and experience ourselves in this welter of terror and beauty, to add our praise, gratitude, and testimony to the totality of everything that is, to place them as if we were placing seeds in soil into the flux and form of this nature The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Reciprocal Creation
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