SOME PEOPLE WORSHIP nature. Others consider such worship blasphemous. Most of us are less direct; just beyond the veil of rain, we feel a presence for which we have no name. Or no presence at all, except beauty and terror. Whatever form wonder takes, nature gives us, at the very least, kinship.
“At my office, I look out and see the ocean, waves breaking on the beach, the endless horizon,” says the oceanographer Wolf Berger, who speaks easily of his garden and the vast Pacific in the same sentence. He sees both as one address, his one true place. “Coming home from the office, I greet familiar plants in the front yard. Most of them are natives. They feel at home in our climate: Earth citizens, like myself. I know them as my cousins. The experience, then, is feeling at home, and being part of a very large family.”
This family is larger than science can measure.
For years, I knew little about the ocean, though I lived minutes from the Pacific. My friend Louie Zimm helped me finally see the sea. One Sunday morning, Louie, my son Matthew, and I headed out to sea in Louie’s twenty-foot boat. We went not to worship nature, or even to praise it, but to immerse ourselves in it. We moved above the great kelp forest, saw the leaves and trunks winding down into the other civilizations below. We moved on. To the west, a storm cloud grew darker as we turned toward it. Louie, a retired expedition captain for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, pointed to a series of white explosions on the dark horizon: dolphins chasing anchovies, he said.
Knowing the law and good sense, Louie did not interrupt the feeding dolphins, but later he positioned his boat behind them. As we clipped along at ten to fifteen knots, perhaps two dozen dolphins turned from their group of several hundred and circled back around to join us. As Louie steered, my son and I hung over the bow, where we could almost touch the racing mammals. They cut in and out, within inches of the hull. Then we sat on our haunches, watching our escorts swing away to rejoin the group.
“Look at yourselves,” Louie said, laughing. We were drenched with seawater blown back by dolphin exhalations.
These were common Pacific dolphins. Scientists now know that another species, bottlenose dolphins, essentially identify themselves through repeated signature whistles and clicks. The scientists don’t know why they do this, or why “they’re so self-centered,” as Newsweek put it, or if any of their messages are meant for us. But we do hear them.1
Recent neurological studies of whales have revealed that humans and whales share specialized neurons associated with higher cognitive functions, including self-awareness and compassion, and that these neurons may have developed in parallel evolution. In fact, they may have appeared in whales millions of years before they did in humans. In “Watching Whales Watching Us,” a 2009 article in the New York Times Magazine, Charles Siebert reported the growing evidence that whales live in worlds of complex social structures and even in cultures that appear parallel to ours: they teach; they use cooperative hunting tactics and tools (one of them consciously produced a “net” of bubbles used to round up schools of fish); and their clans communicate in different dialects.
Siebert reported that some scientists are baffled as to why gray whales off of Baja California Sur, Mexico, now “can’t seem to get enough of us humans.” Once referred to as “hardheaded devil fish” because they were known to smash ships into splinters, gray whales were hunted into near extinction. A 1937 ban on gray-whale hunting helped the population rebound. “Still, the question of why present-day gray-whale mothers, some of whom still bear harpoon scars [some whales can live for a century], would take to seeking us out and gently shepherding their young into our arms is a mystery that now captivates whale researchers and watchers alike,” Siebert writes. This behavior goes beyond the close breaching familiar to whale watchers. In some cases, whales have gently lifted fishing boats on their backs.
Conventionally, scientists have dismissed such behavior as reflexive, suggesting that the animals are attracted to the sound of the boats’ motors, or are using the hulls to scratch their barnacled backs. But other scientists believe that something extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, is occurring. A few observers have described the behavior as a form of forgiveness. That last notion may be hard to swallow, given the fact that these same whales are now threatened by a human technology that could prove deadlier than harpoons: deep-sea sonar. Still, as Siebert puts it, the whales’ “overtures toward us” may suggest a larger message: that they, and we, are not alone —or at least we should not be.2
When it comes to matters of the spirit, specificity is the enemy of truth. That’s my view. But it’s hard to fathom how any kind of spiritual intelligence is possible without an appreciation for nature.
Most of us intuitively understand that all spiritual life, however it is defined, begins with and is nourished by a sense of wonder. The natural world is one of our most reliable windows into wonder and, at least to some, into a spiritual intelligence. Someday, it would be fascinating to bring the religious proponents of intelligent design, who see God as the ultimate biophilic designer, together with those who believe in the Gaia Hypothesis, which holds that the biosphere and all the physical elements of the Earth, and all the life on and within and above it, are integrated into a complex, self-correcting system —a kind of superorganism.
Details aside, people will continue to practice all manner of older spiritual rituals in nature, as well as new ones they create.
Jonathan Stahl, the wilderness educator who went on the bonding trip with his fiancée, Amanda, feels spiritually connected when in nature. “I was brought up Jewish but never really identified with the religion (or any other for that matter),” he says. “I did, however, find my own way of incorporating some of the principles of the holiday Yom Kippur into my life.” Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is a time to pray for forgiveness for sins committed during the year, and to make a clean start for the new year. On Yom Kipper, Stahl heads for a local trail, preferably one that leads to a high viewpoint. “I find a rock and carry it in my hand, constantly meditating on anything I’ve done in the past year that I am not proud of or would like to improve upon in the following year,” he says. “If ever my thoughts begin to drift, the rock in my hand brings my attention back to the reason for this special hike. I think through various aspects of my life: career, family, friends, relationships, personal wellness, etc., and carry the weight to the top of the mountain. There, I leave the rock and all it represents, and look to the new horizon to start the year fresh. It’s symbolic and not at all traditional to Judaism, but it works for me.” He’s practiced this ritual for several years and has shared his tradition with Amanda. “It’s a way of bringing nature into religion and at least some aspect of Judaism into my life,” he says.
Thomas Berry would have loved that story.
I first met Berry in 2005. He was ninety-one and living in Greensboro, North Carolina. Caroline Toben, the founder of the nonprofit Center for Education, Imagination, and the Natural World, invited me to lunch with Berry, who was her friend. A Catholic priest of the Passionist order, Berry founded the History of Religions Program at Fordham University and the Riverdale Center of Religious Research. His books, including The Dream of the Earth, remain influential throughout the world. Near the end of his life, the United Nations honored him as a leading voice for the Earth.
For the better part of a century, Berry argued, eloquently and elegantly, that our environmental problems are primarily issues of the spirit. He often spoke and wrote about the transcendent childhood experience that served as a touchstone for his future life and work. “It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow,” he wrote. “A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something, I know not what, that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.” That moment never ended.
Minutes after we slid into his customary booth at the O. Henry Hotel restaurant, he began to talk about the future. He had clearly had enough of the twentieth century, with its industrialized violence and ecological destruction. “Everything we discuss now should be about the twenty-first century,” he said softly. His face lit up when he considered the possibilities ahead, and our evolving relationship with nature. “Our species once had two sources of inspiration and meaning: religion and the universe, the natural world. But we have turned away from nature,” he said. The great work of the twenty-first century will be to reconnect to the natural world as a source of meaning.
Berry articulated a view seldom witnessed in popular media; that we must move beyond the conflict between worlds. In one corner is science, steeped in the “Darwinian principle of natural selection, which involves no psychic or conscious purpose, but is instead a struggle for earthly survival.” This view of reality “represents the universe as a random sequence of physical and biological interactions with no inherent meaning.” In the other corner is the dominant Western religious tradition, which, he said, has moved too far from an older creation story, and toward a redemption mystique, in which passage to the next world is paramount and the natural world is of little concern. Most of the time, these two worlds —science and religion —communicate politely, but the antagonisms are deep. And yet, Berry wrote in The Great Work, we are moving into an extraordinary time: “As we enter the 21st Century, we are experiencing a moment of grace. Such moments are privileged moments.” In Berry’s twenty-first century, we return to Earth.
In 1999, an interviewer for the journal Parabola asked Berry if our relation to nature connected with our inner human development.
“The outer world is necessary for the inner world; they are not two worlds but a single world with two aspects: The outer and the inner,” he answered. “If we don’t have certain outer experiences, we don’t have certain inner experiences, or at least, we don’t have them in a profound way. We need the sun, the moon, the stars, the rivers and the mountains and birds, the fish in the sea, to evoke a world of mystery, to evoke the sacred. It gives us a sense of awe. This is a response to the cosmic liturgy, since the universe itself is a sacred liturgy.”3
You can see the possibility of a new movement among faith-oriented environmentalists, eager to move beyond the old divide between Bible-based interpretations of dominion and stewardship. (Of course we have dominion, they say; look what we’re doing to God’s creation. Why would we want to hurt God’s creation?) You can see the possibility in the young people who now dedicate their lives to sustainability, or to biophilic design. You can see it in the growing recognition that exposure to nature enhances health, improves cognitive functioning, and nurtures the spirit. You can see it among the religious and nonreligious alike.
The last time I visited Berry was in 2009, in his room at an assisted-living home, not long before he died. He was amused by that phrase, “assisted living.” He could no longer walk. He sat deep in his chair, wrapped in an Indian blanket. I asked him about aging and the architecture and ritual of retirement homes. He thought about this for a moment and then once again his face filled with joy when he considered the possibilities of this new century. “The whole routine of the year could be more localized, more re-natured in the architecture,” he said. “I suspect that will be done in future years. Particularly as we feel we can make our houses any way we want to, and begin to recognize that there are ways of doing things that require paying attention to a world that is beyond the human mind.” He told me he felt an urgency to “go out into the natural world every day, no matter what the conditions are.” Then he said, “In our later years, we feel a return. To be gifted with delight as a child, the giftedness should continue. The aging process is full of excitement that comes along with the pain of going through the changes. The giftedness continues.”
It does continue. Three miles off Point Loma, in a region of the ocean that may soon become a marine sanctuary off-limits to fishermen, my son and I saw an ominous-looking dorsal fin cutting the waves, moving toward us. The fin dipped loosely now and then, like a sleepy eyelid, and then we saw what appeared to be an eye—a flattened orb, a great blue pupil beneath a reflective skein of saltwater. The eye looked at us as if its owner were curious.
“Karma fish,” said Louie. He was smiling broadly.
We had encountered one of the strangest fish in the sea, an ocean sunfish, or Mola mola. This sunfish appeared to weigh a few hundred pounds. It circled the boat, almost touching the hull, pausing now and then. “Good luck to see one. Bad luck to hurt them,” said Louie.
The world’s largest known bony fish (sharks and rays are cartilaginous), the ocean sunfish can weigh up to five thousand pounds. Its shape suggests a flat, floating eye—or a fish head that has lost its body. When seen basking flat on the ocean surface, the sunfish can appear motionless, contemplative. It cruises slowly, eating gelatinous zooplankton and algae. Because of the insubstantial items in its diet, the sunfish must ration its energy, Louie explained, “so it takes its time.”
Since then, the Mola mola often comes to mind. That slow, unafraid creature somehow offered a reminder that life’s tide can be slowed, and that I must take more time to recognize the miraculous.