On Nature

Pt. 1 - The Light that Leads Home

[Greetings, friends, from beautiful Ronan, Montana! After a week removed from the hustle of city life, bathing in the cold waters of Flathead Lake and soaking in the sights and waterfalls of Mission Mountains (a range part of the Rocky Mountains), the sense that nature is the antidote to so much of modern urban life is overwhelming.

Having spent time in St. George, Utah each of the last two summers, this sense was not lost on me before coming to Montana (I wrote a little on the topic in On Beauty). But in the short time here, my conviction has grown deeper: regular periods of extended time in nature are necessary for the human spirit to flourish.

Something mysterious happens when we spend long stretches of time in solitude with nature. In the company of great mountains and towering trees, far from the audible hum of the economic machine, we come back to who we are at our core. Nature points us back to our nature… inviting us to contemplate our authentic identity and offering a mirror that reflects our origin. Among the deep waters and smooth sand, we relearn how to be ourselves in a world that constantly wants to make us something else.

Of course, I’m not the first to notice the profound benefits of solitude in nature. Many of my favorite thinkers and writers—Marcus Aurelius, Whitman, William Blake, Nietzsche, C.S. Lewis, Emerson, and Kahlil Gibran—express their admiration of nature and what it offers us in their works (some of which I reference below). My first week in Montana was filled with getting reacquainted with what these folks had to say on the topic.

With the rest of this essay, I offer an ode to the Antidote we call Nature.]

Figure: The Garden of Eden by Thomas Cole (1828)

There once was a witch named Watho who took two children and raised them in completely controlled environments. One, a boy named Photogen, was raised only to know light and day, never allowed to experience darkness. The other, a girl named Nycteris, belonged to the night and was never allowed to see the light except for what radiated from the dim lamp that lit her stony chambers.

Watho (largely) succeeded in her experiment until the children’s sixteenth year, when Nycteris managed to escape her dungeon, stumbling out to find a clear night sky lit by the glow of a full moon. Seeing a light other than her little lamp for the first time, Nycteris is filled with wonder and awe.

Figure: Landscape, Moonlight by Simon Mathurin Lantara (1820-1830)

This is the windup to one of my favorite scenes in all of literature (found in George MacDonald’s fairy tale The Day Boy and the Night Girl). The scene that follows is one I think about every time I stare at the stars and every time a mountain stares back at me:

Unconsciously, she took one step forward from the threshold, and the girl who had been from her very birth a troglodyte stood in the ravishing glory of a southern night, lit by a perfect moon—not the moon of our northern clime, but a moon like silver glowing in a furnace—a moon one could see to be a globe—not far off, a mere flat disk on the face of the blue, but hanging down halfway, and looking as if one could see all around it by a mere bending of the neck.

‘It is my lamp,’ she said, and stood dumb with parted lips. She looked and felt as if she had been standing there in silent ecstasy from the beginning.

‘No, it is not my lamp,’ she said after a while; ‘it is the mother of all the lamps.’ And with that she fell on her knees and spread out her hands to the moon. She could not in the least have told what was in her mind, but the action was in reality just a begging of the moon to be what she was—that precise incredible splendor hung in the far-off roof, that very glory essential to the being of poor girls born and bred in caverns. It was a resurrection—nay, a birth itself, to Nycteris. What the vast blue sky, studded with tiny sparks like the heads of diamond nails, could be; what the moon, looking so absolutely content with light—why, she knew less about them than you and I! but the greatest of astronomers might envy the rapture of such a first impression at the age of sixteen. Immeasurably imperfect it was, but false the impression could not be, for she saw with the eyes made for seeing, and saw indeed what many men are too wise to see.

As she knelt, something softly flapped her, embraced her, stroked her, fondled her. She rose to her feet but saw nothing, did not know what it was. It was likest a woman's breath. For she knew nothing of the air even, had never breathed the still, newborn freshness of the world. Her breath had come to her only through long passages and spirals in the rock. Still less did she know of the air alive with motion—of that thrice-blessed thing, the wind of a summer night. It was like a spiritual wine, filling her whole being with an intoxication of purest joy. To breathe was a perfect existence. It seemed to her the light itself she drew into her lungs. Possessed by the power of the gorgeous night, she seemed at one and the same moment annihilated and glorified.¹

This moment, when Nycteris stares at the moon for the first time with untrained eyes made for seeing, equal parts annihilated and glorified, and longs only to be what she was, we see one of the greatest gifts that observing nature offers us: a reflection of the divinity resting inside each of us—deep calls to deep. And the boundlessness of nature’s beauty speaks to the boundlessness in us.

This is Emerson’s point in his essay Nature: nature is the herald of inward and eternal beauty. “How does nature deify us with a few cheap elements!”² “In the woods,” Emerson writes, “standing on bare ground…all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”³

[N]o man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal...⁴

When we bathe in nature, our eyes turn outward toward the trees, mountains, and streams, and upward toward the Sun, moon, and stars; we are often suddenly struck with the sense that we are also looking inward. Nature speaks to our nature… inviting us to contemplate our common origins and the eternal truths of life:

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine.⁵

All of nature testifies to eternity. All in the heavens and the earth declares “the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.”⁶ Through creation, we come to know something of ourselves (as fellow creations) and our shared Creator. It is a knowledge that does not come from reason but from spirit. “The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.”⁷

When we honestly wait in silence and watch the way the mountains drum His praise, the rivers run for His glory, and the stars shine with His light, we are humbled by their obedience and contentedness to be exactly what they are. “The pastures of the wilderness overflow; the hills are robed with joy. The pastures are clothed with flocks, and the valleys are decked with grain. They shout in triumph; indeed, they sing.”⁸

But of course the doctrine of Creation leaves Nature full of manifestations which show the presence of God, and created energies which serve Him. The light is His garment, the thing we partially see Him through (Psalms 104:2), the thunder can be His voice (29:3-5). He dwells in the dark thundercloud (Psalms 18:11), the eruption of a volcano comes in answer to His touch (Psalms 104:32). The world is full of his emissaries and executors. He makes winds His messengers and flames His servants (Psalms 104:4), rides upon cherubim (Psalms 18:10), commands the army of angels.⁹

Who, we ask in the presence of these created things faithfully fulfilling His word, are we to rebel against our nature? “When I behold your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place—what is man that You are mindful of him…?”¹⁰ This is the experience of Nycteris we saw at the start of this essay. In her longing to be only what she is, she learns from the moon what we must learn from nature… how to love our fate and how to worship.

Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, [nature] is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us. The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lessons of worship.¹¹

Between 1881 and 1888, Nietzsche spent seven summers high in the Alpine village of Sils Maria, surrounded by nature and away from crowded cities and urban noise. In those summers, Nietzsche took long walks and fell in love with the mountain cattle that lived there. He thought they embodied the Greek state of serenity known as “ataraxia,” or “unperturbedness.” In Thus Spake Zarathustra (a book he wrote while summering in the Alps), Nietzsche paid homage to his beloved mountain cattle saying “[u]nless we change (or be converted) and become as cows, we shall never enter the kingdom of heaven.”¹² 

At first, this statement seems like nothing more than a silly aphorism. But Nietzsche saw in the cattle what Emerson saw in nature. Cows do not try to become birds… cows are not jealous of birds… cows, like the field lilies, do not toil nor spin. They just are what they are—obedience embodied.

As they are, so may we be.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.¹³

—

P.S. A Hymn to the Sun

I will write a full-length essay on this at some point, but there is a hymn from an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh (Akhenaten, who ruled 1353 to 1336 BC) that praises the Sun’s power and glory for its role in creating and sustaining life. It is a poetic tribute to a single deity reminiscent of the Psalms and historically significant in that it was a radical departure from the polytheistic religion of Egypt's past. Below is an excerpt:

All creatures stir, at Your wondrous sight, Beasts in the fields, in pastures delight;   Trees and plants, all flourish and grow, Birds take flight, in Your warm glow… Oh, how wondrous are Your creations, Hidden from man's sight in all nations; The only god, unmatched in power and might, you shaped the world with Your own insight. Alone, you created men and beasts of every kind, On the ground and in the sky, with a masterful mind; From Syria to Nubia and Egypt's lands, you have set each person's place with your hands. Their tongues, natures, and skin tone, you crafted and distinguished on Your throne; You made a Nile in the underworld to flow, and one in heaven, so foreign lands can grow. Cities, towns, fields, roads, and rivers, all bask in Your radiant light that shivers; In my heart, you are enshrined, No one knows You like Your son refined…¹⁴

1. George MacDonald, The Day Boy and the Night Girl, Ch. IX: Out.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, p. 10 (Penguin Books - Great Ideas) (“Nature”).

3. Nature, p. 5.

4. Nature, p. 40-41.

5. Nature, p. 17.

6. Psalms 19:1-4.

7. Nature, p. 44.

8. Psalms 65:6-13.

9. C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, p. 94-97.

10. Psalms 8:1-5.

11. Nature, p. 43-44.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Ch. LXVIII: THE VOLUNTARY BEGGAR.

13. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.

14. Akhenaten, Hymn to the Sun.