What we yearn for in the midst of our lives of mostly minor-league chaos and occasional major-league catastrophes is some kind of stability, something solid and dependable, someplace to put that trust in life that we cannot live without. Part of our spiritual and intellectual discipline is to learn to trust the world, to discover that stability, and to keep ourselves together when our world falls apart. We once believed that we could put our trust in the “laws” of Nature; now we are not so sure. Heisenberg sends a shiver through us; relativity makes us wonder; we fear that chaos lurks behind the patterns of our lives.
Our scientists now seem divided on the issue. Once we had a mechanistic universe nailed down and operating according to set laws, purposeful and dependable as a steam engine, if not yet understood. Now there are alternative voices, some scientific, some poetic, saying that Gaia rules again; that the universe is a living organism; that it even has a kind of memory that informs successive generations, a memory so powerful that it can skip generations, coming back after a generation that has never experienced the event that memory recalls; that the cosmos is evolutionary rather than fixed, and that a certain randomness in mutations makes its direction, appearance, outcome all unpredictable, its purpose not merely unknown but nonexistent. Yet there is an irony, perhaps even an oxymoron, in that perceived lack of purpose in our cosmic development. Herman E. Daley quotes Whitehead to make the point clearly: “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” What Daley calls “the lurking inconsistency” in science may come about because “purposeful” and “purposeless” are not comprehensive enough to be useful or accurate descriptive terms for our cosmos.1
When it comes to describing the cosmos, we are all trapped in an inadequate vocabulary. One does not have to have either purpose or mechanics, or their alternatives, to characterize our cosmic operating system. It may be more open and comprehensive to say that we live in a cosmos of possibility, one that is not exclusively purposeful or purposeless and that may have some rules (mechanics) that do not change and others (organics) that do. Possibility as our cosmic operating system is more open than either mechanics or chaos, and is of a different order than organics. Possibility is not as vague as it may seem, for it is distinct from chance. Chance needs no prerequisites, has no requirements before it can unleash surprise. Purpose does have requirements to realize its ends. In our human realm, if the requirements are not available, we set out to create them.
Are humans a part of Nature, yet of a different kind—purposeful— than all the rest of Nature? That seems unlikely. Nature is of a piece. Possibility, on the other hand, opens itself to whatever is available. Purposelessness leads to genuine chaos, unlike the apparent chaos that some scientists today say masks pattern. Purpose narrows its focus; possibility opens up. Both purpose and possibility observe, ask questions: “If this swims next to this, what happens?” Both may say, “Ah! Now what would happen if . . . ?” But purpose has an outcome in mind, a hypothesis of hope, a dream of a single possibility. It then begins to narrow down, to increase its focus on smaller and smaller outcomes. Possibility works with what is to create what is not yet. Unlike purpose, possibility may add to possibility without manipulating, without even a hypothesis to prove or disprove, just seeing what may come. Perhaps Nature is more like a child at play than an adult at work. As we have seen, Nature can juxtapose the most unlikely elements to create the most complex relationships, putting the ten thousand things together in ways that are beyond our imagination. As descriptors of the universe, chance seems forlorn; mechanistic seems unreal; possibility seems hopeful, for a cosmos of possibility surely includes us humans as well as everything else. Possibility means we humans may still reach our optimum capacities, may yet become a fruitful and regenerative feature of the world rather than a degenerative liability. In that light a spiritual life that leads us toward sustainability must dwell within us, be available to us, if only those Heraclitean ratios come right to let that possibility blossom.
But possibility can open in any direction, positive or negative. We have seen what negative impacts humans can have on the world. To align ourselves with hopeful possibilities, we can add our personal experience of purposefulness to the possibilities inherent in the cosmos, cultivating our minds toward wisdom, our hearts toward respect, and our spirits toward compassion. It has always been hard to find the dependable in Nature. Purposeful or not, even a cosmos of possibility can hardly be deemed reliable. Many see only total indifference in the wild. We treat the land gently and it ignores us, and our desires, entirely. We do our best to make the land healthy and it comes roaring down in a blizzard that kills our sheep, our calves, or our crops and perhaps even takes our children. Nature knows its own mind, and it does not exist to know or satisfy or even acknowledge ours. This is not a matter of Nature’s will. It has no will and no capacity for knowing or acknowledging either our will or our desires.
In his essay “Nature,” Emerson holds that Nature is neither reliable nor dependable: “Throughout Nature there is something mocking, something that leads us on but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. . . . We live in a system of approximation. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary. . . . We are encamped in Nature, not domesticated. . . . It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions but suggestions.”2 Emerson sounds a bit like a farmer who complains that he did everything right and still didn’t get a crop. Or perhaps even more like a contemporary physicist who has worked her way back to the smallest unit of existence she can find and then is confounded, finding another, more elusive mystery she can neither name nor describe. “Quirk” may have been as accurate and useful a name as “quark.”
Nature has a heart of mystery for poet Robert Frost as well. In his book about Frost, Richard Poirier asks, “How does anyone know beans? More perplexing still, how does anyone know that he knows them?” In his “poems of work and in his work as a poet,” Frost’s answer is that “you ‘know’ a thing and know that you know it only when ‘work’ begins to yield a language that puts you and something else, like a field, at a point of vibrant intersection.” But even then, Frost concludes, “what you finally can know that you know is mysterious and dreamlike.”3 Apparently, neither Frost nor Emerson found Nature a dependable source of either being or knowing.
Martin Buber also insists that at the heart of things there lies mystery. His sense of the mystery differs from Frost’s and Emerson’s, for this mystery is neither a threat nor undependable. Instead, it makes everyday life sacred—“hallowed” is the word Buber would probably prefer—because everyday life is the place, the arena, the ground (the only ground so far as we know) whereon we confront the mystery and have the opportunity to live with it. That mystery, says Buber, “which is only a gate—and not, as some theologians assert, a dwelling,” is the gate through which we step forth into the everyday, “which is henceforth hallowed as the place where we have to live with the Mystery.”4
As science has come to acknowledge the mystery at the core of things, scientists sound more and more like humanists, theologians, philosophers, and poets. Perhaps the only real difference now is that many scientists are still unwilling to give the mystery a name, while theologians and philosophers—and some poets, like Robinson Jeffers —call it god or even God. But for Kitaro Nishida, an early-twentiethcentury Japanese philosopher, coming to know that mystery at the heart of a Nature that goes far behind mere universes or galaxies is “pure experience.” For him pure experience lies behind, or before, consciousness; behind, or prior to, time; behind, or prior to, the land or the planet earth. Because it exists at the deepest heart of Nature, it is eternal. We can rely on pure experience, Nishida holds, because it is always available to us, always present. Further, in that depth there resides a unifying force that Nishida calls “spirit.” He says, “I contend that reality comes into being through interrelationship,” and we hear echoing down the centuries Nishida’s ancestors speaking from the Eastern side of philosophical thought, and Heraclitus and others speaking from the West, all testifying to the underlying unity, the harmonizing power and balance that ramify through everything, all reminding us that we can live only in relationship.5
Robinson Jeffers, a distinguished American poet in the early 1940s, was also looking for something dependable, that is, a place to find what is eternal. If one could find that, he thought, then one could also find a refuge, and strength to endure life despite the horrors perpetrated by man. For Jeffers our human assault on Nature was so violent that he foresaw a time when only the sunset’s colors would persist and humankind would be gone. In poems both long and short, he looked forward to that day. Both Nishida and Jeffers ultimately find that eternal, pure experience only in the totality of all Nature. And for both of them the world is dependable in a way that is fundamental and enduring. But it is not in Nature as we usually define it. Pure experience, the eternal, lies beyond the land, beyond earth, in that Nature that is the pulse and rhythm of the entire universe, indeed lies behind all the universes. Though the earth might disappear, both Nishida and Jeffers would hold, Nature will survive very nicely, and continue.
In “Carmel Point,” Jeffers speaks of “the extraordinary patience of things!” His exclamation is caused by “this beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses— / How beautiful when we first beheld it.” Then it was “unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; / No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing . . . / Now the spoiler has come.” He asks of the place, “Does it care?” His own answer is “Not faintly. It has all time.” Nature, for Jeffers, is alive, aware, even self-conscious: “It knows the people are a tide / That swells and in time will ebb, and all / Their works dissolve.” While it waits for the human tide to recede, “the image of the pristine beauty / Lives in the very grain of the granite, / Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.” Nature has “all time” on its side. Our time, in comparison, will be brief. Very brief, unless we “uncenter our minds from ourselves.” The aliveness of the earth, not self-centered but egoless, will simply outwait us. In “Their Beauty Has More Meaning,” Jeffers writes about the moon, hanging “low on the ocean,” and describes how “the night herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings.” His life, like our lives, is short when set against the ongoing life of Nature.
I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years
I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it does not hurt;
They will be here. And when the whole human race
Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moons and ocean,
Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning
Than the whole human race and the race of birds.
In another poem Jeffers writes of an old man on horseback riding up into the coastal hills on his way back from a day of ocean fishing. “And nothing,” the old man thought, “is not alive . . . I see that all things have souls. / But only god’s is immortal. The hills dissolve and are / liquidated; the stars shine themselves dark.” The earth will disappear, but Nature will remain. Behind the hills, prior to them and remaining after they are gone is . . . even Jeffers has to give it a name, and the only name that seems appropriate to him is “god.” This is where Jeffers seems headed in many of his poems. Though one may argue with the name, Jeffers is on the right track. Nature is, as Nishida insists, our pure experience, the intersection where the knower and the known, the subject and the object, are one, a place of no ego—which is exactly the place that Jeffers is looking for as well: a place that our human ego, being absent, can neither wound nor destroy.6
Emerson seems to summarize both Nishida and Jeffers when he remarks, “Many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that . . . spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves.”7
Jeffers, though ostracized and dismissed for his “inhumanism,” is not entirely alone among poets in his worldview. War colored Sara Teasdale’s view of humankind too, and she, like Jeffers, finds both hope and comfort in the end of our human world. Even her phrasing sounds like Jeffers’s.
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling in their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
Not one would mind, neither a bird nor a tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when awoke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.8
I have been trying to build a case here for the connectedness of things: red rock arches, high Cascades, malignant tumors, the dankest city alley. I’m groping for the connections within the outgrowth of Nature, at least metaphorically—image and metaphor being the only tools we have to describe the indescribable mysteries around us—from the logos, the word, and the ties between Nature and our own interior lives, our spiritual lives, if you will. At the same time, I want to keep before us the ties between that spiritual life and subsistence, the ultimate realities that ground us, and sustainability—our current word for a possible future. These are links in a great chain of existence. And I’m trying to make a case for the idea that clarity in the language is one key to the development of a healthy spiritual life. Clarity in the language is also the root of our own personal integrity and will lead us to a worldview that will help us to create a sustainable culture for all. Clarity in our language is more critical for our spirits than any method of prayer, any reading of scripture, or adherence to any creed.
As we examine those links, some may see that language might provide a greater key to a contemporary spiritual life than a just society, a sound economy, or even a healthy environment, for language itself is a “wild” system, as Gary Snyder points out, and another natural element in our human nature.9 It may take precedence over all those because it will put our lives in a position of integrity, authenticity, and authority that will enable us to heal ourselves and motivate us to work on healing the rest of the world, impelling us to maintain wilderness, create justice, and treat the environment, including our fellow humans, with respect.
I’ve been trying, then, to think through, and provide a certain coherence for, what I really believe about the world, and yet I still cannot claim to know what all that might be. I wrestle with these ideas all the time, and I have spent a lifetime thus far thinking about these things without, alas, coming to any definitive answers for any of the most serious questions.
So what do I believe about our spiritual life? What constitutes an appropriate spiritual life in our time? I believe those questions indicate that the great question for our lives is not, What am I going to do? even though our educational institutions at every level are aimed at helping us to graduate with skills to do whatever will get us jobs. The prior and more serious question is, Who do I want to be? Howard Thurman, one of twentieth-century America’s great mystics, told the members of his Spiritual Disciplines and Resources class that for every person “there is a necessity to establish as securely as possible the lines along which one proposes to live” one’s life. He called it a “working paper” that each of us must develop. That, I think, is one guide to an appropriate spiritual life. Our task is to create a life here that works not only for us but also for all life. Some folks set out to have a career in business or law or academe or the arts or agriculture. But I’ve known others, like Thurman, who set out to create an integrated life, one that joins being and doing in a positive way. Both require a working paper that is expansive enough to allow us to create wholeness, to integrate all the broad range of experience from exaltation to loss, from a sense of life’s highest gifts and privileges to the extinction of our lives and the loss of all.
What I recognize in myself is that I have not always known what I was going to do for a livelihood or on behalf of causes I care about, but I have known for a long time what I would like to be. There has been a working paper in place since I fell under Thurman’s spell, perhaps even earlier, though I had not the language to recognize it precisely. It remains a working paper because I have fallen far short of the plan much of the time, a fact that makes T. S. Eliot’s lines, for me, among the most poignant in all American literature:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.10
Nevertheless, the idea of a proper being for myself has remained pretty clear—perhaps never more clear than when, under the light of reality, I have just betrayed it utterly and stand unmasked before a mirror.
The case I’m trying to make has to seem true to me as I examine my own life to discover where I have given my allegiances over the years, what ideas and causes I have tried to uphold, what it is I really believe and want to work for. It also has to include room for both science and spirit, for what I believe has to be based in the best knowledge that comes to hand and built on the best wisdom I can find in others or discover in myself. Spirit for me has come to mean, in part, the amalgam of the best intelligence I can bring to my life and the best heart I can muster. Together, balanced and harmonized, those two become more than the sum of their parts. That whole is what I would call spirit. Others might call it soul. But for me there are two other elements in this: soul is what in us desires to heal the brokenness, bind the wounds of the world. The spiritual life then includes whatever thoughts and activities lead us toward that goal. For Nishida spirit seems to be the unifying force in Nature. Emerson and Empedocles have the same bent. Breath, word, logos, and vāc have a similar resonance. I know there is mystery in me (would there were only one!) that has a unifying element. I assume it works in others as well. Spirit is a name for that mystery in us that takes all the wounds and all the epiphanies, the anger and the compassion, and keeps them in balance. It is the unifying force that holds us together when we feel ready to fly apart.
To my mind, these notions of balance and unity seem to be quite like the Chinese qi. “In East Asia,” explains Mary Evelyn Tucker, “naturalism . . . is characterized by an organic holism and by a dynamic vitalism.” The holistic aspect of material force is the enabler “for self-cultivation in harmony with nature.” In the Confucianism exemplified by Kaibara Ekken, the eighteenth-century Japanese scientist and philosopher, “the universe is seen as unified, interconnected, and interpenetrating. Everything interacts with and affects everything else.” This unification comes because “all life is constituted of Qi, the material force or psychophysical element of the universe. It is the unifying element of the cosmos and constitutes the basis for a profound reciprocity between humans and the natural world.” The other aspect inherent in qi is its “dynamic vitalism,” which is “the continuing process of change and transformation in the universe” and thus is a key to our own self-cultivation and the development of “an integrated morality.”11
The cultivation of that spirit so that we become a means to health in a world that, in its inherent unity, combines both health and illness, is the direction I’ve hoped my own life would take. I do not have regular times for prayer or meditation, and I am not sure exactly what those are or how they work, but I have been aware of times of gratitude and times of desperation so powerful that I felt full as a swollen tick. Perhaps that is one definition of prayer.
However prayer works, for years three ancient prayers have lain in my mind, often dormant for long periods and mostly subliminal. Occasionally, as recently when I was driving among the ubiquitous semis on I-35 north of Austin, Texas, one pops clearly and apparently unprompted into the forefront of my mind. It is always one of two verses from Psalms, as it was the other night on the road: “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Ps. 51:10). Experience tells me that is not going to happen, is not possible.
But experience also tells me that one step I can take toward that end lies in my language. The clearer, more direct and honest my language becomes—without causing gratuitous pain in others—the clearer my mind becomes, and the cleaner my heart seems to come. Language is not only the means to good government, as Confucius says, but also one means to a healthy spiritual life. When I get my words straight, I increase my capacity to get my life straight, straightened out. So creating in myself a clean heart is more than routing out simple lust; it involves straightening out my attitude toward the world and others, dealing with the anger, disappointment, loss, and pain that inevitably come into every life and that occasionally threaten to sink mine.
On balance, given the life I’ve led, so enormously privileged compared to those of most people in the world, I have to acknowledge that I have no right to my anger, that the annoyances that give it rise are mostly just that—annoyances, and petty. I’ve only had one job, ever, that I didn’t like. My work has achieved some good ends on occasion, and I’ve received some recognition from it. I have known men whose example has drawn me to a harder-working, smarter, more thoughtful life than I could ever have managed on my own. I’ve been lucky to love a number of women and can say that I still love them without being misunderstood by any of them, including my wife. My children are still speaking to me, and my pride and pleasure in them waxes daily. My brother means more to me every year. I have seen indescribable beauty in the natural world and have tasted its threats too: Once my first wife, Shirley, and I crouched near the stove in the center of our tiny house in Iowa while a tornado, passing less than a quarter mile away, blasted all the doors wide open and scattered hail into the corners of every room, and we wondered if the whole place would collapse. In Montana and Alaska I’ve walked (always unwitting, always astonished) within a few yards of bears both black and grizzly.
Once, fishing alone, I was wading Paul’s Creek in Alaska. It was late fall, the day overcast, the tidal river running on the rising tide, moving silver salmon up the creek. I was hoping for silvers. As I was casting ahead, watching the water closely, approaching a small island that divided the river, my attention was diverted by a movement in the dry, beige beach grass that covered my end of the island. As I looked again, an Alaska brown bear rose slowly upright, trying to focus his poor eyesight on whatever was encroaching on his territory. That bear looked huge to me as I stood thigh deep in the tidal flow. Some Alaskan folks say that one good thing when faced with a grizzly that size (or any size) is not to appear aggressive. That was easy. I did not feel aggressive. Standing in the river, armed with a fishing rod, water almost to the top of my hip boots, I knew in my bones the idea that humans are at the top of the food chain was nuts. I was not about to lose my fishing gear, or a leg, if I could help it, so I talked softly to the bear as I started to back away. “Sorry, Bear. Yes, I know this is your territory. You can have it; yes, I’m backing off here, Bear. Sorry to intrude. It’s all yours, Bear,” backing down the creek, Mr. Obsequious himself, reeling in line, trying to keep from falling, trying to keep the water out of my boots, trying to get to shore, bowing, talking to Bear.
So I’ve not only experienced the aesthetic epiphanies that great landscapes have to offer, but I’ve known fear. The biopsies I’ve had and the infrequent but powerful times when my body has had mechanical failures remind me that there are other places, far more intimate than great landscapes, where Nature operates, that human life absolutely is immanent in Nature and Nature is immanent in us, and the thinking of Newton, Bacon, Descartes, and Kant never changed that for an instant. They may have warped our perception of that—given too much rein to the hubris that would like to think it is possible—but they never altered the reality one whit. Man thinks he can sever that tie, Heraclitus muses, but the thought is clearly foolish. Given all that, how could I be anything but grateful?
And yet, even amid the general gratitude, there are times still when anger boils up, or disappointment saps my spirit, or fear overtakes me, or loss overwhelms me with feelings so powerful I do not know what to do. I look at what is happening to America’s growing numbers of poor and listen to Congress talking about it—and I hear the economists telling us about the strength of the economy. I think about the world’s poverty and how my own life helps to perpetuate it, I watch the ease with which my country destroys those who do not do its bidding in the world with potent weapons, and I see great landscapes laid barren for the wealth of a few, and I get mighty irate and depressed. Friends now dead or dying, the loss and the potential loss rise like bile in my throat, bring tears to my eyes. All of those feelings are natural, and I want to acknowledge all Nature and accept it gratefully in all its manifestations, yes, but I also want to align myself with the forces in Nature that strengthen and heal and regenerate. Making my heart “clean” then means there is still much work to be done. Despite my Christian upbringing, I do not believe any god is going to do that work for me or take me off the hook; the forces in Nature that I want to work with require cultivation within me, undertaken by me, with whatever additional resources I can bring to bear.
The second prayer also comes from Psalms. My attention was drawn to it as Thurman began each Sunday’s sermon with it: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be found acceptable in thy sight, O Lord my strength and my redeemer” (Ps. 19:14). There is a clear tie between the former prayer and the latter; they always come to me in tandem, never one without the other. Both, for me, have to do with language; both make a direct link between our words and a truer life, as if the closer my words lie to the word, the closer I come to rectifying my life through the alchemy of linguistics, the power of language. That “truer life” does not necessarily mean a more moral life, at least not one that is moral enough that others would notice. But it does foster the possibility of a life with greater internal coherence, as Confucius knew, a life of greater integrity, greater allegiance to those forces in Nature that generate peace rather than pain and health rather than anger, and a life in which my perceptions are clearer, more real, more authentic. My own capacity to delude myself is then reduced, and I too have a greater chance to become more authentic, more real, more balanced and harmonized, more a self I want to think is my true self.
I do not remember a time when the third prayer did not come with the other two, all three together. Perhaps it does not come unbidden to my mind; perhaps the other two carry it with them. This third prayer has the power, for me, of extending my self-concern and self-cultivation to the wider world of society and landscape. Any spirituality that ignores either the local or the global culture, that does not aim toward rectifying our human society and all those related societies we now call ecosystems, at the same time we rectify our hearts is a false spirituality. I heard this prayer from Edwin Prince Booth, a history professor at Boston University’s School of Theology. He used it more than once on public occasions. I never learned it, really, but I never forgot it either: “Grant unto us, O God, such a vision of thy being and beauty that we may do thy work without haste and without rest.” If one comes to see Nature as the means we have to perceive the being and beauty of God, if Nature and God are inextricably linked, if the word is the instrument Nature uses to hold all its various elements in their rightful place, and if Nature and the word are cocreators, perhaps akin to qi in Chinese thought, then that vision both drives us to beautify the worlds accessible to us and sustains us in that effort. For me this prayer asks us to do what Nature asks us to do: to extend or expand the acceptance and compassion at the heart of the cosmos to everything else, to make our spiritual life active in the world.
I do not mean to imply that because I carry these prayers around in me that I am a good person or a religious person. I mean only that they seem to steep in my mind someplace mostly subconscious, and I suspect that without their occasional rising to consciousness I would be a different person. When they do come to mind, they force me to look at myself, and in the looking it usually seems that they have come to mind for a reason: I need to be reminded of them because I am screwing up somewhere inside, or my will to work on my self and for the world is flagging. They exert a discipline on my life, a call to examine my own conduct rather than the conduct of others. They are also a resource that helps sustain me. Sometimes, if I am alone, I find myself surprised, saying one of these prayers aloud, throwing the sound out into the darkness like a life ring, hoping it will save me.
Self-cultivation is thus a spiritual task, not simply a psychological or social necessity, and it requires discipline; indeed, in his class Thurman also told us that the disciplines he had in mind are not undertaken on behalf of the self or for the sake of the self; neither are they a matter of chalking up points toward salvation. The purpose of spiritual discipline for Thurman, as for Confucius, is to cultivate a self as whole and fully human as possible so that we create a reservoir, a well, something sustaining and of substance underneath or beyond the surface, something more than mere appearance. Out of that reservoir we can draw on the self to give of ourselves to others and to the culture: respect, attention, care for the other—whether fellow human, other species, or others’ ideas or thoughts. We will consider our prejudices; our role in the continuation of poverty; our effort to recreate, restore, or regenerate an earth under siege. We will train ourselves to be an instrument of Nature—that Nature which knows that everything needs nourishment for body, mind, spirit— knowing that our ideas and our faith are connected to our actions. We will pay attention and offer our reverence for it all. We strive, then, to make our self of a piece, just as Nature is all of a piece, everything connected in us, contributing to the whole, an ecosystem of the soul. We will pay attention not only to our personal and civic actions, and to those people we meet in the course of our lives, but also to how we live in the landscape, to those creatures who, Schweitzer says, all share our will to live and are therefore kin to us. That is how we train ourselves to be and do in a world we will transform in a positive way. It is also the intellectual, spiritual, emotional task I described earlier, and it is the kind of self-cultivation that will lead us toward Prescott Bergh’s sustainable culture.
We are not here, as some believe, simply to discover who we are or to fulfill our own nature. Rather we are here first to fulfill the nature of Nature. When we work on that, we fulfill ourselves in the process. That is the work Buber outlined for us earlier, and it is a matter of being in the world in such a way as to bring our deeds and our words together, putting, as Heraclitus said, our “acts and our words to the test.”12
In 1708, at the age of seventy-nine, Kaibara Ekken published Yamato zokkun (Precepts for Daily Life in Japan). Mary Evelyn Tucker, whose grace- ful translation of this work and whose insights into Ekken’s life offer us a compelling and thoughtful introduction to his writing, tells us that Ekken was first an important scientist, a biologist and botanist, whose books, articles, and drawings were careful studies of the plants, fish, and birds of Japan. His love of Nature and his study of the classical Chinese texts, especially the works of Confucius and his followers, fit together, and one might say that his “ethicoreligious” stance toward the world grew directly out of both. Nature was both source and pattern for his self-cultivation and his actions in daily life. Further, his classic Confucianist view of family as the great metaphor for all our relationships is as appropriate for us, and for our educational systems, as it was for early-eighteenth-century Japan: “Humans have heaven as their father and earth as their mother and receive their great kindness. Because of this, always to serve heaven and earth is the Human Way. What is the Way by which we should serve heaven and earth? Humans have a heart of heaven and earth, namely the heart of compassion which gives birth to and nurtures all things. This heart is called humaneness. Humaneness is the original nature implanted by heaven in the human heart.”13
Reflecting that endless reciprocal compassion between earth and all its creatures, Ekken insists that every ethical attitude is rooted in our gifts from Nature. Because we are children of Nature (heaven and earth), we have “a heart of compassion”; because we have a heart of compassion, we have a responsibility to turn that compassion alive and loose in the world. “The principle of humaneness makes it a virtue to show kindness toward human beings and compassion for all things,” Ekken says. He explains, “The way to serve heaven and earth is by preserving this virtue of humaneness without losing it, and deeply loving humanity, which heaven and earth have produced. Then by having compassion for birds and beasts, trees and plants, and adhering to the heart of nature through which heaven and earth love humans and all things, we assist the efforts of the great compassion of heaven and earth and make the service of heaven and earth the Way.”14
For Ekken, living with humaneness in the world is a matter of study and of spiritual practice. The study he upholds for all, whether of noble or peasant birth, is the study of the great classics. But study, to be worthy, must reveal itself in action: “There is no other way to serve heaven and earth than to obey the mind-and-heart of the universe. Obeying this heart . . . implies extending warmth, compassion and respect.” Humans are born and “through the beneficence of nature, they receive its heart and make it their own. They live amidst nature and partake of its nourishment.” And here Ekken, too, sounds like Heraclitus, complaining that people hear the logos but do not understand it: “Thus they receive an infinitely great favor, but most people do not realize it.” To not serve Nature is “to receive the great favor of heaven and earth and at the same time to act contrary to nature.” Such a life is “extremely unfilial,” Ekken says with great force, speaking from a culture in which to be unfilial is a grave error.15
Writing about Koyukons in Alaska, Richard Nelson examines the combination of the natural and the spiritual that characterizes the Koyukon view of Nature. Summing up, he says, “In the moral system that this ideology encompasses, the proper role of humankind is to serve a dominant nature.” It is also a matter of recognizing, and acting on, the relationship we have with all creatures, learning to hear the world around us and the songs the cosmos sings through “the music of the spheres,” to feel its whirling movement as everything in the world moves around us, to learn what the river says—and say it ourselves.16
Once, driving into the growing light of dawn around Turnagain Arm in Alaska, I felt that movement in a visceral way. First the dark and a sense of presences, of things mysterious and huge, looming behind the dark. I knew what lay back there because I had been down this stretch of road many times before. But then the first glimpses: a narrow gleam, a silver sheen on a narrow strip of water, the light gray sand emerging from the tide in its retreat, then mountains looming, clouds lightening, and gradually the pale glaciers, forests bending to the wind, all moving, all coming into the light, all directly connected to me, to all of us, and everything moving, farther than eye could see or mind could fully grasp, beyond stars, beyond galaxies. Now I think Eliot was wrong: There is no “still point at the center of the world’s turning,” as he claimed.17 There is only the circling movement, the dancing swirl of great Nature within its infinite and eternal cosmos. The word, the dance and the song, the beauty and mystery of our habitation, and each of us aligning ourselves with the creative powers of the word and of Nature, using our words to tell the stories that will heal us: this is our movement and our song, the reason for our being. If we can give ourselves to such attention to the world, we will take our place within a system Koyukon and other peoples have known for thousands of years.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr traces the development of “the Order of Nature,” a schema for the world that allows humans to see order in chaos, from its earliest, indigenous beginnings through the development of the world’s great religions and their view of a divine order in Nature. What Nasr finds beguiling in those views is the similarity of their structure. For the most part this order was designed by the structural cultures that I discussed in an earlier chapter. But once again it is amazing that people of so many different cultures and times develop such common views from their disparate environments, traditions, and perceptions. That order of Nature does not now sit well with contemporary science, but the problem with it is not that it lacks scientific rigor but that it is our human fear, awe, desire to understand, and our perception of the world imposed on Nature. We order it, whether it is ordered or not, and in our hope, fear, and arrogance, we put ourselves at the earthly top of the ten thousand things—a little lower than the angels, we concede, our humility more than a little lower than our arrogance.
But what if we reverse the process and let Nature impose itself on our worldview? Nature has always been our teacher, but in stories and lore in the West it has also been bent to our desire for order. Our world-view of the order of Nature stems less from what we have learned from Nature, more from our hope that Nature is ultimately ours to use, and if we can only find the order in it, we can bend it to our will, establish some control over it. Forget order, our culture finally holds. Go for control. In that one move we defy the entire operating system inherent in cosmic possibility, closing off potential futures for ourselves.
But we can let Nature provide the means to our worldview, a world-view that can evolve (and has evolved, whether we acknowledge it or not) as Nature evolves, in fits and starts and random discoveries and gradual growth and development as the possibilities emerge. Then we learn to listen to the river, as William Stafford says, and learn to echo the river in our thoughts so that, finally, “What the river says, that is what I say.” Then Nature’s innate self, ordered or not, becomes our self, our thought, our means for looking at the world. Rather than looking for a pattern in Nature we cultivate ourselves to fit Nature, discernible pattern or no, and allow ourselves, as my son Kevin says, to become both natural and truly civilized.
From the beginning there has been a word between us. In the nature of things we say a word to another. It fills everything in, closing the gaps between us, creating a bond. There is also a word between ourselves and all other creatures, ourselves and all Nature, a word even between ourselves and that ultimate mystery we hesitate or refuse to name. Heraclitus and John and our oldest texts, Eastern or Western, indigenous or not, oral or written, all were right in this: that word, the name we are reluctant to give to the mystery, is what holds everything together. If we don’t keep up our end of the conversation, things fall apart. If we do keep our word, then the creative power of Nature and the logos, vāc, and the world’s breath is realized through us in the world. One sacred means to achieve harmony and balance, to be the chord that sounds between humans and everything else, is simply the clear word. I have said it before: the spiritual quest for us is, like Abel’s in House Made of Dawn, a search for the right words.
Once again, a remarkable model for this comes from another culture and an earlier age. Yi I was a Korean philosopher and government official in the mid-sixteenth century known by the pen name Yulgok. For Yulgok the cultivation of the self, the very possibility of learning, begins with a focused will. That focus comes from sincerity, a notion that he picked up from Confucius and his followers. Yulgok, writes author Young-chan Ro, held that “the process of becoming sincere was in large part a linguistic one, the disciplining of one’s use of language.” For Yulgok, then, “language can become much more than communication. It can become a mode of being and action, and when language becomes the true manifestation of both being and action, it becomes sincere.” Yulgok himself wrote, “Learners . . . must be careful regarding language. Many human faults come from the misuse of language; so words must be careful, truthful, spoken at the proper time, and given in a serious manner.” Ro stresses that “this process was not in any way metaphorical for Yulgok. . . . Being is dependent on language, but language must be combined with sincerity.” When that happens, words and actions “gain the power to shape and define reality.” Indeed only the combination of thought and action, sincerity and language, can create what Yulgok calls a “sincere reality.”18
What I can say about our spiritual life in these days is that we have to create our own. The only spiritual life that will work for us is the one we work at creating ourselves. No institution can do it for us. Humans, like all the ten thousand things, are sacred. Our institutions, even our religious institutions, are not. Our religious institutions are no more sacred than our military or our government. It is but idolatry to believe so. We may give our allegiance to a particular faith or church, follow its disciplines and practices, even believe what it tells us to, but until that faith is tested in the crucible of our own experience, it is not truly ours. Always our experience tests our faith, and we create our faith as we work at our own lives, live out our own experience, adapting the elements of faith that work, that remain believable for us, and ignoring or sloughing the rest.
Further, no one can easily appropriate a spiritual life from other cultures: if we are not Lakota, we cannot simply steal a glimpse of Lakota spirituality and make it our own. We get something greater if, like Gary Snyder, we immerse ourselves in the ways of another culture for years and live what we learned for the rest of our lives, exploring the meaning until it is our own. Snyder’s Buddhism is not that of his earliest teachers, nor that of his latest. It has become his own. It is Gary Snyder. We may use what is enabling for us from many sources, including institutions of religion and spiritual resources from other cultures, but ultimately the faith that sees us through is the one that we have accumulated, nourished, fostered, come to terms with—seen to be true in our own experience—and that we can continue to shape as circumstances and events change or even assault us. We grow into that inner life just as we grow into our ideals as we grow older, pulling together the various fragments from many sources to create a coherent whole.
For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, some theologians, echoing Nietzsche, were saying, “God is dead.” Buber instead said, “God is silent” in our time.19 It is up to us, then, to utter, however weakly, the creative word that the Priest of the Sun said was there before the silence and was in the silence. In some traditions God sends his emissary into the world. In the Christian tradition God decides to become incarnate; the word becomes flesh. But there is another view that holds that if God is to be present in the world, we must bring God here through our own actions. What Buber seems to suggest is that those who believe in God must bring God into the world themselves, that God is “to be realized through us.” But what Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucianists have shown us irrefutably is that one can achieve spiritual strength, authenticity, morality, and an expanding circle of care for humans and the other ten thousand things of Nature without belief in a transcendent god. Further, in acts of huge generosity, they open the doors of participation in their practice without asking others—Christians, Muslims, Jews—to forsake traditional faith in order to join them in spiritual discipline, practice, and praise.
As later Confucianists developed their thought, they saw that we humans stand between heaven and earth and are created out of both. Our human role is to realize the heavenly in the earthly. They were not alone in this view, anymore than Jeffers was alone in his. Heaven cannot realize itself fully without our help. To Munetada Kurozumi, the ties among human and heaven and earth are so obviously immanent that “this heaven and this earth represent the self.”20 If that is the case, the stakes are clearly as high for us as they were for John. One of our culture’s healing stories, told by Norwegian novelist Johan Bojer, seems to echo Buber’s idea of how God comes to be present in the world and also speaks to the Confucianists’ task of realizing the principle of heaven in this world.
Bojer has Per Troen in his book The Great Hunger rise to the heights of fame as an engineer.21 He is invited to the palaces of kings and sought for all over the world as a great builder in steel and concrete. But at the height of his career, things begin to go wrong—a mistake in calculations, workmen killed. His career begins to decline, his health begins to fade, and his life falls apart. Per is forced to go back to his Norwegian homeland and settle in a tiny peasant village where he is surrounded by the uneducated and the poor. His next-door neighbor is a suspicious man who hates everything he cannot understand, and one of the things he cannot understand is Per. The bitterness between the two men climaxes when the neighbor’s dog attacks and kills Per’s little daughter.
One night after that tragedy, Per sits looking out the window, and he begins a letter to a friend. He has come to realize, he writes, “that great sorrow leads us farther and farther out on the promontory of existence.” He has come to the outermost point now—there is no more. He writes to his friend,
I sat alone on the promontory of existence, with the sun and the stars gone out, ice-cold emptiness above me, about me, and in me, on every side. But then, my friend, by degrees it dawned upon me that there was still something left. There was one little indomitable spark in me, that began to glow all by itself—it was as if I were lifted back to the first day of existence, and an eternal will rose up in me and said, “Let there be light!” [The Word sounds again from the darkness and silence.] I began to feel an unspeakable compassion for all men upon earth, and yet in the last resort I was proud that I was one of them. . . .
There was a drought then. When people finally dared to plant their grain, the frost came hard and late and the seed froze in the earth. The neighbor had his patch of ground sown with barley—but now it was gone and he had no more seed. Indeed there was no more seed to be had. He went from farm to farm begging for some, but people hated the sight of him and his great dog; no one would lend him any, and the boys on the road hooted after him.
One night, as Per lay sleepless, he got up when the clock struck two. His wife rolled over and asked him where he was going. “I want to see if we haven’t a half-bushel of barley left,” Per said.
“Why? In the middle of the night . . . ?” his wife asked.
“I want to sow the neighbor’s plot with it,” Per replied, “and it is best to do it now so that no one will know it was me . . .” He went out into the soft night air. The farms were still asleep. He took the grain in a basket, climbed over the fence between him and his neighbor, and began to sow. From the heart of sorrow, in that letter he wrote to his friend, Per had said, “Mankind must take heed that the godlike does not die. The spark of eternity was once more aglow within me, and said, ‘Let there be light!’ Therefore I went out and sowed my grain in my enemy’s field that God might exist. And when the grain was sown and I went back, the sun was glancing over the shoulder of the hill. There by the fence stood my wife, looking at me. She had drawn a kerchief over her head in the fashion of the peasant women, so that her face was in shadow; but she smiled at me.”
In our founding desert traditions, the metaphors we use to characterize God are similar in each religion: “He,” “omniscient,” “omnipotent,” “eternal,” “ever present,” and “loving and caring for ‘His’ creation” are general characteristics that fit the God shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Our differences are less over the concept of God than over who God’s messenger, messiah, or prophets might be. But if the word is God and the word is the binding force of relationship and harmony in Nature, if God as word and Nature as word are conjoined, as so many traditions indicate, then the words we use to characterize God are equally applicable to Nature, for Nature exhibits many of the characteristics attributed to the traditional transcendent God of our desert-born cultures.
One of those descriptors, possibly two, should be shed by all religions. One is “he.” Changing “he” to “she” is not a help here. Nature is, quite naturally, both male and female and the full range in between. Moreover, in the myriad reproductive capacities of its cells, plants, and animals, Nature is heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual. The second questionable descriptor is “omniscient.” That word has been twisted over Christian history to mean “foreknowledge,” to suggest that God knows everything that is to happen. For some it means that “he” knows beforehand that some of the persons whom “he” creates are destined to suffer throughout eternity, whereas others are to be saved for a glorious afterlife. “He,” in this line of thought, can even identify the members of each group ahead of time. Such a god may know more than we do but is so brutal “he” may be worthy of fear but not of awe, and not of worship. Such a god forecloses on two possibilities: the possibility of growth and the possibility of redemption. But Nature operates on a system of possibility, of openness, of acceptance, of relationships so complex and marvelous, so intricate and lovely as to instill awe wherever we direct our gaze.
What Nature asks of us in exchange for its openness and acceptance is our moral responsiveness to whatever conditions in which we find ourselves. One mode of responsiveness is respect—that we respect all Nature including humans—another is being open to possibility in Nature, including possibilities for other humans and ourselves. Therefore, we have an obligation to “grow in wisdom” and not just in stature or in knowledge, to steal a biblical phrase. Wisdom includes growing not only in our knowledge of how the world works, in our self-knowledge and knowledge of our human nature, but in moral wisdom as well. If we are to create a sustainable culture, growing in moral wisdom is an ever more inclusive concern for “the least of these,” whether the least be the smallest, least attractive units of Nature or the humans who seem to be lowest in our social world’s estimation. Sustainability requires this regardless of our faith. Nature has given us our intelligence. We may argue over whether or not it is as great as the frog’s, who is wise enough not to drink up the pond in which he lives, while it appears that we lack such constraint. But we cannot argue over whether or not we need to cultivate ourselves to continue to grow—not only in knowledge but also in the wisdom that leads to a more profound, inclusive, and responsive morality. To grow in wisdom is the natural course for us to take.
Because possibility cuts in both negative and positive ways, we may lose our natural course and quit learning. There are also some natural reasons for us to fail to grow: our capacities may be limited; our circumstances may circumscribe our possibilities. We may have to spend so much time just trying to survive that expediency short-circuits opportunities to acquire wisdom. We may have to work such long hours that we exhaust both ourselves and our time for reflection. We may have had the desire for wisdom beaten out of us by abusive parents. Nevertheless, most of us in this privileged nation, this privileged culture, have little or no excuse for not being responsive to Nature, to one another, and to ourselves. We have had some terrifying models in our time of how our human morality can become crabbed and even vicious and yet parade under winsome, though deliberately false, arguments. But once again, it is the testimony of many cultures, including our own, that we can cultivate ourselves toward a wisdom that is without malice and reveals “charity for all,” as Abe Lincoln and King James have it. We can be sure that unless we cultivate a charitable spirit within ourselves, it will never return. We have too many institutions now bent on harsh judgment rather than generosity. Judgment is a religious matter, not a spiritual practice. If we are to err in our spirituality, let us err on the side of generosity rather than judgment.
Nature is also eternal, regardless of its operating system, whether it is mechanistic or living, evolutionary or driven by law, purposeful or possible, as Nishida and Heraclitus and Jeffers all suggest. Nature has ever been present and will be, ever emerging, open to possibility, unfinished, and undiminished, after our humankind is long gone and all the stars we see have burned out. Nature is the one eternity we may be absolutely certain of. Some religions of both East and West fret about our entering into eternal life. Generally in the West, that means we may, by means either of our profession of faith or of our benevolent actions, earn the right to enter an afterlife such as heaven. In the East, it may mean melding into eternity after a succession of rebirths in which we improve our character, shed our human pettiness, and purify and repurify our souls until we are fit to flow back into eternity. But as part of eternal Nature, we humans need never worry about entering eternal life. We are already part of it.
As part of an eternal, ever emerging Nature, open to possibility, we are thrust into this earthly natural existence by Nature, and Nature continues to hold us in this life even as we move to this life’s end and join another aspect of eternal Nature without pause. Death is not an event but part of a process. In Nature we are participants in eternity entirely independent of faith and action, holders of a creed or utterly without one, with or without our will. We are always Nature’s, in one form or another, accepted without reservation, held as we are, whatever we are, in the presence of Nature. Thus we come from eternity, live in eternity here on earth, and continue in eternity as part of the great cosmic Nature that comprehends all life. Nature does this without ever asking us what we believe or what we have done.
In The Sign of Jonas, Trappist monk Thomas Merton quotes scripture: “In Him all things are made and in Him all things exist.”We do not injure either fact or faith to say, “In Nature all things are made and in Nature all things exist.” Our desert religions insist that we live and move and have our being in God. It is a matter of faith that we live in God’s presence and that God’s spirit resides in us; it is a matter of fact that we live within Nature and that Nature lives within us. We live and move and have our being in Nature, or as Thomas Berry puts it, “The human is less a being on the earth or in the universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the universe itself.” It is not necessary then to “realize God through us,” as Buber asks. Our task is to realize our own nature and all the rest of Nature through us. Nishida offers a kind of summary that incorporates all the above notions: “There is nothing that is not a manifestation of God.”22 As I read it, of course, he could as well have said, “There is nothing that is not a manifestation of Nature.”
Further, Nature is all-powerful, as we know in our personal experience; for all our technological exploits, human power has no strength to withstand Nature’s power. Our strongest houses succumb to tornado or quake, and floods—often created by our own foolish land use—sweep our lives away before our eyes. Volcanic ash buries even our most beautiful cities and clogs our engines, all our technology, no matter how advanced their technical perfections.
And that loving and caring for its creation? I find it in that acceptance, compassion, and forgiveness that I described earlier. It comes as we look behind the appearance of Nature’s indifference and discern Nature’s acceptance at the heart of the heart of the cosmos.
This may seem like old-fashioned “nature worship,” now abhorred by many as primitive, animist, or even “savage.” If that is the case, so be it. Our culture is as fiercely superstitious about the economy and political and military power as any indigenous culture is about Ground Squirrel and Bear. I will trade in my culture’s worldview filled with the superstitions that demonstrate our respect for accumulated goods, wealth, and power above all else. The superstitions of an indigenous worldview that respects all life and engages in rigorous self-cultivation and study, the goals of which are wisdom and survival of the people, seem like a good swap. The former choice— putting my faith in our current system—means I have a ticket on another Titanic, soon to go down in its own selfish acquisitiveness. The latter choice means I sign on for a rich, enlightened, and all-encompassing spiritual life that may lead us on a path toward sustainability.
I don’t know much about worship, but I admit to awe at Nature’s complexity and mystery and to respect for its power and pervasiveness. And I admit to finding solace in its inescapable, all-encompassing character, its indifference, and the comforting acceptance that lies behind that indifference. And, finally, I admit that I am challenged by the effort, never fully realized, to understand it. If these are also aspects of worship, so be that too. To betray Nature is to betray the very “ground of our being,” to assault the sacred. If we have forgotten this, perhaps a Koyukon elder will remind us: “The country knows. If you do wrong things to it, the whole country knows. I guess everything is connected together somehow, under the ground.”23
Whether you call that power God, or whether you call it Nature with a capital N, as I have come to do, our task is the same: to put our lives together in such a way that our lives and our words stand together with that word which is in and of Nature, whether it be logos or qi. That is basically a spiritual task. Ask Per Troen or the Priest of the Sun. Ask Epictetus or Confucius. At the same time we work for a sustainable life for the earth and for our social world, we have to work on ourselves, on setting ourselves right. This is now, also, the common parlance of our psychologists and counselors: “The only behavior we control is our own.” Would that we could manage even that! In that task lies the self-cultivation envisioned by Confucius and his followers, and it is an essential task, one that is never ending, never fully achieved. Somewhere in that notion lies the meaning of integrity, the integrated life, and the key to a sustainable life for all. Ask Confucius. As usual, he said it better two and a half millennia ago: “Only those who are their absolute true selves in the world can fulfill their own nature” (this is that spiritual life we’ve just been thinking about); “only those who fulfill their own nature can fulfill the nature of others” (there’s the social life, the purpose of which is to help others realize themselves); “only those who fulfill the nature of others can fulfill the nature of things” (I’ll cheerfully admit that “things” is a pretty vague term, but I choose to believe that it has to do with all those “ten thousand things” around us in the environment); and “those who fulfill the nature of things are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life” (there’s the whole of it all put together).24
The Chinese character for living up to one’s word is made up of two separate characters placed together. I heard this from Sam Hamill almost twenty-five years ago, and I have been reading it over and over, first in Ezra Pound, then in the Ernest Fenollosa he learned from, and since then in many others. This is the character for “human”:
This is the character for “word”:
Together, they represent hsin, a person standing by his word:
What is crucial here is that the word we strive to stand by is not just our personal word. That’s just ethics, and ethics don’t interest me much. Some call for a “new” land ethic. I think we do not need any more ethics. They are too often a means to separate us: “we” have them; “they” don’t. What we mostly do with the ethics we already have is ignore them. We have known for millennia how we should treat the earth. Our problem is not that we lack ethics but that we fail to act on the ones we have. So here I am after something that is deeper than ethics, something not only of the law but of the spirit. What interests me is whatever it is that comes before ethics and prompts us to create them. What is that impulse? Where does it come from? That something, I believe, is the universal logos/vāc/breath, the word that is the ground of an appropriate spiritual life for us all. It leads us to respect and to that natural acceptance of the cosmos as it is, which is the essential condition for love.
We accept it all, the cosmos as it really is, and we love it. But we align ourselves with and struggle for the healing and wholeness of the healthy aspects of Nature. In the process of developing the compassion of heaven and earth in ourselves and extending it to all other creatures, we help Nature realize its own best nature. When we align ourselves with that word, we align ourselves with all the creative natural forces for balance and harmony in the world and focus our creative minds and hearts on the world’s present and future.
I’ve been trying for that all my life—only off and on, I must confess—and have tried to speak the word I believe to be true, though I have not come close to accomplishing that yet. Still, it seems a project worth pursuing and remains the work that is most exciting, for I am convinced that the key to taking care of the earth and the society lies inside each of us. If, as the rhetoric of sustainability insists, the health of humans is utterly dependent upon the health of the earth, so, too, the health of creatures of every kind, and landscapes everywhere, now hinges upon the health of our spiritual life. I have been trying to show that the real roots of a healthy spirituality lie in two arenas. One is our language, rather than any scripture, creed, or institutionally transmitted belief. The other is in our self-cultivation toward humaneness.
Though our human nature is “natural,” David Armstrong, a thoughtful biologist at the University of Colorado, reminded me that it is also peculiar to us, somewhat different from the nature of other species. That peculiarity, David said, has allowed us, alone among species, to burn the earth’s energy faster than Nature can replace it. Now the earth has grown so crowded with our ubiquitous presence that we wear it down and wear it out. We can affirm what Lucretius believed in the first century, that the earth is getting old. But when we get our most interior, spiritual lives in line with the eternal logos (or the cosmos, as followers of Confucius would insist) we may cultivate the capacity and the will to speak the word that tells a story of and for and from within Nature—to say what the river says—and then stand by it. Then we can see the earth not as our adversary, nor as raw material, but as our only, most desirable, and most mysterious home, the only place where our humaneness may reach its full flower.
“But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance,” says Emerson. “Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature.”25 That’s a story that can be finally and fully realized only through our own spiritual lives. It’s a story of subsistence that will create a sustainable life, restore balance to the environment, and bring harmony to all our societies in a fashion so sound and fair that “justice will roll down like water” (Amos 5:24) for all creation. There we have, just as in Koyukon tradition, the natural and the spiritual inseparable. We share, then, a task that is both spiritual and pragmatic and a path, a way that leads toward sustainability. Both the task and the path call us to create ourselves, to cultivate ourselves so that we can grow into the best selves we can become. Our children’s and our grandchildren’s lives depend upon our response.