Lyanda Lynn Haupt Quotes

Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.

Rooted ways embolden us to remember that with our complex minds we can feel—and live—more than one thing simultaneously. Anxiety, difficulty, fear, despair. Yes. Beauty, connectedness, possibility, love. Yes.

Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. —Francis of Assisi

In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

....hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' ...hope is our positive orientation toward the future, a future in which we simultaneously recognize difficulty, responsibility, and delight. Hope is not relative to the present situation, nor is it dependent upon a specific outcome... Hope is not an antidote to despair, or a sidestepping of difficulty, but a companion to all these things.

Hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' Not just responsibility for our individual futures but also for that of the world.

But I believed in the power of sacrament, in very much the way I do today—not as a Catholic but as a human open to the truth that something can be made sacred by the attention we grant it.

While we have more scientific knowledge of the universe than any people ever had, it is not the type of knowledge that leads to an intimate presence within a meaningful universe.… The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects.

Hope is not a remedy or even a substitute for the despair and anxiety we face in the modern world, but a companion to these things. Mature hope involves a willingness to allow that brokenness and beauty sometimes intertwine.

Birds will give you a window, if you allow them. They will show you secrets from another world– fresh vision that, though it is avian, can accompany you home and alter your life. They will do this for you even if you don't know their names– though such knowing is a thoughtful gesture. They will do this for you if you watch them.

And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill, stitch a quilt,; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the elder friend's fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear.

This is one of the blessings of the urban nature project: without the overtly magnificent to stop us in our tracks, we must seek out the more subversively magnificent. Our sense of what constitutes wildness is expanded, and our sense of wonder along with it.

Wonder, as a quality of intellect, has fallen from favor.

Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening for a tale; not "long ago, when animals could speak," but "Long ago, when people could listen.

Wonder feeds our best intelligence and is perhaps its source.

As we work to know the life that surrounds us, we stand in a lineage of naturalists — past, present, and even future. We join the "cloud of witnesses" who refuse to let the more-than-human world pass unnoticed.

Surely there is a continuum from a pure, undefiled wilderness to a trammeled concrete industrial area. But there is no place, we now know, as the relentlessly global impacts of climate change become increasingly understood, that humans have left untouched; and there is no place that the wild does not, in some small way, proclaim itself.

The modern science of nature is significant for many other reasons, beyond the obvious setting of conservation priorities and actions. Foremost in my mind being the fact that it is beautiful. Its wondrous mathematical synchronicities, the specifics of its chemical analyses, the complexity of its physics are beyond both the practical and intuitive knowledge of most lay naturalists (or mystics), no matter how seasoned. When mingled with the wildness of the natural world and the creativity of the human mind, good science reveals its center, its story, its deeper teaching. The science has its own poetic force.

Questions lead to further questions, and inquiry breeds insight. Gathering expertise brings both confidence and consolation. E. O. Wilson wrote: "You start by loving a subject. Birds, probability theory, stars, differential equations, storm fronts, sign language, swallowtail butterflies....The subject will be your lodestar and give sanctuary in the shifting mental universe.

With my new habit of carrying binoculars everywhere, I feel imbued with a readiness to see, an attitude that my life itself is a kind of field trip. The urban naturalist has the terrific luxury of stepping out her door and into "the field," without long rides or carpools, or putting money in for gas and Dairy Queen. When does the field trip being? Whenever we start paying attention.

Even time breaks down within this calculus of interbeing. We stand in a spiral—rather than a strictly linear—continuity with our ancestors and the ancient cosmos. We still see the light of the stars that died long ago and that now form our living bodies; so, too, do our actions reach into the future of all life and death. It matters what we bring forth with the matter of our bodies. We create, as cosmos-formed creatures, within creation.

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world.

Thanks to a confluence of demographics and technology, we’ve pivoted further away from nature than any generation before us. At the same time, we’re increasingly burdened by chronic ailments made worse by time spent indoors, from myopia and vitamin D deficiency to obesity, depression, loneliness and anxiety.

When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell. Wandering freely, we garner landmarks, presences, ecological awareness, a sense of kithship. Our brains and our hearts alike gather this knowledge as we become intimate with the paths that speak to us most strongly. Our footsteps in the outer world create an inner, wilder cartography that whispers, This way, this way…

Darkness possesses its own essential grace. It is darkness that bears liminal imaginings more difficult to access in the scattered daylight. Darkness brings the restorative sleep and dreaming our bodies and psyches require. Darkness takes the harried busyness of the day and transforms it to stillness, to quiet. Darkness brings us starlight. Darkness erases our view of the horizon, forcing our reliance upon a spacious inner vision that daylight cannot provide. Darkness offers a complex refuge for all beings and all aspects of being.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”)

Who wants an everyday path—paved and void of danger—when we can have beasts and shadows and secret flowers and unexpected visits from the feral wolf of our imaginations?

But in the bare practical outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our shoulders

But the earth and its beings are extravagantly wild, full of unexpected wonders. It is time to turn from our textbooks and listen to the birds themselves.

Here is the dream of the earth: continuance.

... be expectant, do not be dull, but bring the lost fullness of your intelligence to this endeavor as you come quietly into the presence of wild things. -- Haupt quoting Darwin

We practice wonder by resisting the temptation to hurry past things worth seeing, but it can take work to transcend our preconceived standards for what that worth might be.

When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell.

We know, both from experience and now from published scientific studies, that being among trees, or simply viewing trees through a window, makes people calmer, and even happier.

Wonder and enchantment require us to disengage from culturally constructed norms of rationality for adult humans and allow ourselves to be affected by the astonishing world that enfolds us always.

Somehow, in our language and in our psyches, we have come to equate good with light and evil with darkness. The symbolism runs deep. We see it in our poetry, our religion, our songs, and our cultural mythology.

I care with the brightened curiosity of one who loves a subject for no rational reason, but who loves it nonetheless and prodigally. This is the ardor of the academic Austenologist who believes that if she looks beneath the floorboards of the right dusty attic, she will find the diary entry explaining why Jane Austen rejected her one marriage proposal the day after she'd accepted it; of the birder in Costa Rica tiptoeing through tails of biting ants and fer-de-lance serpents in hopes of glimpsing a rare hummingbird that no one has seen for fifteen years. I could list such loves forever, the sort that visit our imaginations on the cusp of the impossible but that we cannot erase from our minds. We follow the trail with whatever breadcrumbs we can gather, with hope, with love, with an almost magical combination of urgency and patience...

One evening I came home and there on the couch I found my husband, Tom, with a freshly fledged crow sitting calmly in his lap. They were busy watching Star Trek: The Next Generation; since Captain Jean-Luc Picard was in the middle of an absorbing monologue, they hardly registered my arrival, but finally they both glanced my way, Tom looking a bit sheepish, the crow nibbling bits from a can of gourmet cat food. I thought of something Bernd Heinrich wrote, inspired by his raven studies, "Living with another creature, you naturally feel closer to it the more activities that can be shared, especially important activities like watching TV.

My wish for all of us is forest baths guided by our inner knowing. Where we don’t have any idea what is behind each turn. Immersed, unsettled forest baths—ones where we emerge with ankles enlivened by the prick of nettles, lichens in our tresses, pebbles in our pockets, an uncertainty about whether the tendrilly growth on our arms is hair or fur. Our heart rate calm yet beautifully feral. Let us return so mingled with the stuff of the earth that the first person to stumble upon us after we are home from our wandering looks at us and says, with a mixture of admonition, admiration, worry, and an urge to suddenly run out the door themselves, “You need a bath.

Dr. Ashley King, planetary scientist and stardust expert (an enviable job description), states: “It is totally 100 percent true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star and many have come through several supernovas.” Oxygen + carbon + hydrogen + nitrogen + calcium + phosphorous + potassium + sulfur + sodium + chlorine + magnesium = star-human. The stuff of the cosmos is woven into our bone branches and wanders in our blood rivers.

philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed, “The more ingenious and accurate our instruments, the more unsusceptible and inexpert become our organs: by assembling a heap of machinery about us, we find afterwards none in ourselves.

When the fraught name God comes up in conversation or reading, I always remind myself that whatever the source or language used, we are at root on common ground—invoking the graced, unnamable source of life, the sacredness that cradles and infuses all of creation, on earth and beyond.

Where kin are relations of kind, kith is relationship based on knowledge of place—the close landscape, “one’s square mile,” as Griffiths writes, where each tree and neighbor and robin and fox and stone is known, not by map or guide but by heart. Kith is intimacy with a place, its landmarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings.

Whenever I renew a commitment to studying raptors or gulls or crows or the birds in my backyard, more are given, more show themselves. Our efforts are rewarded, our studies are enhanced in experience. I cannot explain this, and I am reluctant to sound to woo-woo but we can take this as confidently as if it came from the Oracle at Delphi: the more we prepare, the more we are "allowed" somehow to see.

We have come to an earthen moment wherein we must make all the connections we are able with the whole of life, no matter how at-risk that puts our public-facing façade of normality. Look at the vapid homogeneity of the wealth-based, earth-denuding, dominant culture: is this the approval we seek? When we turn to the sweet, ragged edges of society, we see the people carrying violins, mandolins, pens, microscopes, walking sticks. The ones with ink on their hands, paint on their faces, mosses in their hair, shirts on sideways because they have been awake all night in the thrall of a new idea. This is where the art of earth-saving lies. We are creating a new story –one of vitality, conviviality, feralness (escape!), wildness, nonduality, interconnectedness, generosity, sensuality, creativity, knowledge of the earth and all that dwells therein.

The rooted pathways offered here are not meant as a definitive list but as waymarkers and fortification for all of us seeking our unique, bewildering, awkward way through the essential question of how to live on our broken, imperiled, beloved earth. It is the question Thoreau asked. The one that Mary Oliver, who passed just before I wrote these words, has perhaps framed most beautifully: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own mumuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined. .

What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air the beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the

Who among us has not heard it? The wolf of this beloved, damaged earth, beckoning us by name just outside our safe living room, demanding our own response? The strange and persistent furry-pawed knocking? We peek tentatively through the door, just ajar, and see that there is no road, no sidewalk, barely a trail—and that obscured by stones, by leaves, by an intimation of the remains of those who have walked before us upon the unyielding circle of life. In spite of it all, we long to walk this path. For we know that there is more than what has been given and named by the overculture, more than what we have been told is true, more than green gardens and nature calendars, and recycling, and a summer hike in the mountains, and an occasional camping trip. More, even, than an hourlong “forest bath,” however lovely that sounds. We know there is a wilder earth, and upon it—within it—a wilder, more authentic human self. We know the need of each for the other is absolute.

Walker-thinkers have found various ways to accommodate the gifts that their walking brings. Caught paperless on his walks in the Czech enclaves of Iowa, maestro Dvořák scribbles the string quartets that visited his brain on his starched white shirt cuffs (so the legend goes). More proactively, Thomas Hobbes fashioned a walking stick for himself with an inkwell attached, and modern poet Mary Oliver leaves pencils in the trees along her usual pathways, in case a poem descends during her rambles.

In newer studies, Kabat-Zinn and other clinical psychologists are turning the question around: what if, instead of working to focus on the present moment, it is just as mindful to follow the mind where it wants to go, to let it wander? Kabat-Zinn adopted Krishnamurti’s phrase choiceless awareness to describe this more meandering meditation. The practitioner is encouraged to follow her distractions during meditation and so, ironically, not become distracted by them. Instead of intense focus, aimless wandering of both mind and body allow a renewed sense of calm responsiveness to our lives and world.

There is a way to face the current ecological crisis with our eyes open, with stringent scientific knowledge, with honest sorrow over the state of life on earth, with spiritual insight, and with practical commitment. Finding such a way is more essential now than it has ever been in the history of the human species. But such work does not have to be dour (no matter how difficult) or accomplished only out of moral imperative (however real the obligation) or fear (though the reasons to fear are well founded). Our actions can rise instead from a sense of rootedness, connectedness, creativity, and delight.

Walt Whitman asked that which we all primally ask: The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? We hold the ten thousand things of the troubled earth in mind and in spirit while offering the few beautiful things that we, and we alone, are able to offer with our ten little fingers. Whitman answered his own question: That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. This is all we have—our life and what we give. In our ragged wandering with padded feet and pricked ears and rewilded minds we find gifts from the wild earth, and we come to share our own gifts in return.

While I wandered the dreamy quiet of St. Marx Friedhof, it was the Requiem that swirled through my head. But when I set my chestnut on the gray concrete that had to stand in for Star's tiny, forgotten grave, it was the wild, swirling cadenzas from A Musical Joke that filled my mind and heart. Even more than his poem, this flight of musical fancy was Mozart's truest elegy for his small friend, the commonest of birds who could never have known that he was joining with a musical genius in the highest purpose of creative life: to disturb us out of complacency; to show us the wild, imperfect, murmuring harmony of the world we inhabit; to draw our own lives into the song.

There is another world,” Paul Éluard wrote, “but it is in this one.”* One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly

Surely there is a continuum from a pure, undefiled wilderness to a trammeled concrete industrial area. But there is no place, we now know, as the relentlessly global impacts of climate change become increasingly understood, that humans have left untouched; and there is no place that the wild does not, in some small way, proclaim itself. Many human activities are wholly ugly, working against the nature upon which we forget we depend. Still, we do not flip-flop back and forth, now in nature, now in culture, now feeling quite animal-like, now wholly intellectual. We are, at all times, both at once. In this, humans may be unique, but we are no less natural. We are the human species, living in culture, bound by nature.

As long as we frame a worldview with language that refers to the wild as a commodity, it will be treated as one. It is likewise damaging to invoke technology-based metaphors to explain nature: the brain a computer, the earth a spaceship, the rooted and fungal soil beneath our feet a kind of internet. Such mechanistic phrasing unwittingly invites us to see the natural world as other-than-alive and reparable by human skill in ways that it simply is not. If we are seeking a relationship within the earthen community that is meaningful, genuine, and impactful, then the words we use to describe that relationship, and the beings in its purview, must be chosen with intention, with specificity, with intelligence, and with love.

And do most of us really need a scientific document to inform us that the animals we live with are conscious beings? I believe that the human sense of connection with the more-than-human world is innate and joyous. It is our truest way of being, of dwelling, of relating. It is not new; it is very old. It surfaces in the art and culture of every civilization across place and time - in stories of human-animal relationships that are based on respect, awareness, knowledge, and love. I have no desire to confer on any animal a capacity that it doesn't have. There is no need. Animals have capacities enough - those we do understand, those we do not yet know, those we can never know because they reside in the unique minds of other-than-human beings.

reading books over my shoulder and turning pages that I did not want turned, and having finished all of her e-mail correspondence, Carmen settles onto my shoulder, into the crook of my arm, or on my lap against my belly; she rounds her soft breast over her feet, fluffs and then unfluffs her feathers, and becomes perfectly still. Sometimes she will close her eyes; other times she will simply rest, entirely at peace. She might make a contented little sound, one I never hear from her aviary. It is a sigh-chirp, reserved for these moments of quiet snuggling. If I am still, I can feel her swift heartbeat. I will never tire of such moments. Comfort, rest, and unexpected consolation, shared so easily between two beings who grew from such seemingly different limbs of the taxonomic tree.

Certainly, I believe that wilderness experiences are both restorative and essential on many levels. I am constantly contriving to get myself and my family out of the city to go hiking or camping in forests, mountains, and meadows in our Pacific Northwest home and beyond. But in making such experiences the core of our "connection to nature," we set up a chasm between our daily lives ("non-nature") and wilder places ("true nature"), even though it is in our everyday lives, in our everyday homes, that we eat, consume energy, run the faucet, compost, flush, learn, and live. It is here, in our lives, that we must come to know our essential connection to the wilder earth, because it is here, in the activity of our daily lives, that we most surely affect this earth, for good or for ill.

On our first night looking at the new book, we marveled over the photo and description of Argiope aurantia, the Black and Yellow Argiope spider, common throughout the United States. And the very next day, for the first time ever, we found a wriggling cluster of freshly emerged argiope spiderlings under the lowest wooden step of our back deck. While Claire hovered over the spiderlings and sketched them in her notebook, I wondered over the fact that if we'd found these spiders just the day before, we would have known nothing about them. And I was sure, on some level, that it was learning about them that allowed us to find them, Whenever I renew a commitment to studying raptors or gulls or crows or the birds in my backyard, more are given, more show themselves. Our efforts are rewarded, our studies are enhanced in experience. I cannot explain this, and I am reluctant to sound too woo-woo but we can take this as confidently as if it came from the Oracle at Delphi: the more we prepare, the more we are "allowed" somehow to see. This is a guarantee: select a subject, obtain a proper field guide, study it well, and you will see more than you ever have of your chosen subject — and more than that besides.

I realize that in giving birth, managing a household, raising a child, and composting potato peels in a city, I have learned some things about wildness that even Thoreau could not have known.

It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity. Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple spreads faster than we could have imagined..

Our new ways are disruptive. They will look weird. This is good. Let us not care, but enjoy that glimpse in another’s eyes that we will find sometimes—the one that says, “You’re not crazy. I feel it, too.

How easy it is to feel paralyzed by obligations. How easy it is to feel lost and insignificant and unable to know what is best, to feel adrift while yearning for purpose.

We enter as pilgrims, as wayfarers—knowing there is something we are seeking, something nameless, beautiful, waiting, wanting. Something that will change us so thoroughly that our cozy slippers will no longer fit, that our cat will, at first, hiss upon our return, our hair tinted green with lichen, sweet root tendrils among our toes.

For thousands of years we have struggled with the human condition under the assumption that this condition, whatever its faults, would continue. Now and forever, the creed of my childhood faith reads, now and forever. But now, for the first time in human history, we are living at a juncture where the twin realities of climate crisis and habitat destruction are so far-reaching that the basic web of biological connections required to support life on earth are swiftly breaking down. People are rightfully experiencing unprecedented anxiety and despair as we contemplate our place on this planet, and what is asked of us.

Humans are more creative, physically hale, and less depressed after walking in a forest; wandering barefoot upon the earth improves podiatric health and increases the physical intelligence of our whole being. Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.

We live in “an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen,” argues Solnit. “It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.” She speaks directly to the pairing of complex hope and the summons to respond: The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.

The word is Latin, from monastic ritual dating back to the sixteenth century: adsum. I am here.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

all

all animals have distinct and complex consciousnesses and intelligences and languages beyond what we have ever scientifically acknowledged;

We gather ourselves for the time when we must go forward—a time, indeed, that leavens our wandering time.

Science is only one way of knowing and its purpose is not to generate absolute truths but rather to inspire better and better ways of thinking about phenomena.

Hope is “that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future,” and a quality that

In natural burial, the body is wrapped in a shroud, perhaps laid in a simple casket of biodegradable material (willow, untreated wood, woven grasses), and buried directly in the soil. There is no toxic embalming fluid, no thickly lacquered coffin lined with synthetic fabric, no concrete vault for interment—none of the practices that keep our dear bodies unnaturally

The nature of urban places simultaneously enchants us, educates us, and points us to the ever-presence of a wilderness beyond what we will ever see or experience.

Directionlessness leads to clear vision and creative flourishing. Decoupled from overt value in the usual measures, wandering is an unorthodox act, removing us from the anthropic realm of striving, judgment, and economic utility.

Solitude frees us from what psychiatric science calls the spotlight effect: the tendency that we have in public to overestimate the attention others pay to our accomplishments, our errors, our appearance, and the words that come out of our mouths.

Language is a central foundation of a new story that proclaims our deep interflow with the wild earth and allows a sense of wonder and kinship beyond mere utility, even as we feed, clothe, and house ourselves with the stuff of the natural world.

When the fraught name God comes up in conversation or reading, I always remind myself that whatever the source or language used, we are at root on common ground—invoking the graced, unnamable source of life, the sacredness that cradles and infuses all of creation, on earth and beyond. I

Our bodies, our thoughts, our minds, our spirits are affected by the whole of the earthen community, and affect this whole in return. This is both a mystical sensibility and a scientific fact. It is an awareness that makes us tingle with its responsibility, its beauty, its poetry. It makes our lives our most foundational form of activism. It means everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.

Kith is intimacy with a place, its landmarks, its fragrance, the habits of its wildlings. Kithship enlivens kinship.

Hope is “that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future,” and a quality that gives our actions “special urgency.

As perilous and complex as these times are, we are armed with a rare trio of tools that offers a rooted way forward: the joining of nature, spirit, and a uniquely modern science. The innate connection between humans and the natural world is coming to the fore in a new way, as academic research rises in support of truths that poets, writers, mystics, artists, naturalists, earth-based religions, and Indigenous cultures have always proclaimed. Multiple studies appear in the most respected journals, including Science, Nature, and The Journal of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing evidence that: trees are able to communicate with one another, both through the motions of their branches, spreading chemical messages aboveground, and through a web of intertwined roots and fungal mycelia belowground; all animals have distinct and complex consciousnesses and intelligences and languages beyond what we have ever scientifically acknowledged; humans are more creative, physically hale, and less depressed after walking in a forest; wandering barefoot upon the earth improves podiatric health and increases the physical intelligence of our whole being. Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.

In the genre of philosophical nature writing, academic science is sometimes suspect. Philosopher and wilderness guide Jack Turner writes that “science disembeds individual context, people, flora, fauna.

Hildegard of Bingen was a Rhenish mystic, musician, composer, prophet, herbalist, pharmacist, and healer (at certain times she would have been called a witch, in spite of her Benedictine monastic garb, and these days she is heralded as such in certain circles as this word is reclaimed). Hildegard would not have been surprised by the effects of our separation from nature: in the 1100s she referred to people deprived of contact with the “lush greenness” of the landscape as “shriveled and wilted.

When mingled with the wildness of the natural world and the creativity of the human mind, good science reveals its center, its story, its deeper teaching.

When mingled with the wildness of the natural world and the creativity of the human mind, good science reveals its center, its story, its deeper teaching. The science has its own poetic force.

Yet no matter how significant the research, I believe that spirit—the response of our hearts and imaginations to the whole of life, so often beyond traditional rationality—is required to fully animate the new science. The quantified results of scientific work, and the stringent lexiconic language in which they are reported, awaken and sing through the brightness of our ensouled stories, unfolding in concert with nature. The poetry of earthen life cannot reach its fullness on a computer screen, or even in the synapses of our magnificent intellect. Our hearts are formed of a wilder clay.

Kuan Yin, or Kannon in Japanese—the bodhisattva of compassion.

I didn’t need a particular organized religion to live in a manner that embraced their wild teachings.

To be alive is to give praise.

Moments of enchantment and wonder are typically portrayed as experiences that fall upon us, when in truth they most often require a cultivation of openness to their visitations.

The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than as a communion of subjects.

Hildegard of Bingen grounded both her ecospirituality and her herbal medicine in this knowing. Her central concept of viriditas, or divine “greenness,” sanctifies more than the literally green mosses and leaves; over and over Hildegard calls upon the interdependence of trees, seeds, spirit, and soil as sacred cocreators. She used various trees in her practical cures, but they were also stand-ins for the mythic tree of life in her writings and visions. In one of Hildegard’s greatest hymns, she sings to the trees on her lush Rhineland. “O happy roots, mediatrix, and branches…” The “happy” roots, ever underland, grow in the particular favor of the divine (and perhaps of Hildegard herself—there is speculation that some of her visions may have been enhanced by the hallucinogenic mandrake root, which she prescribed as a cure for depression). Green branching is only and always mirrored in rooted darkness—the place we, too, come from and return to. To be whole on earth is to embrace this exuberant darkness, the landscape we visit with every turn of day into night.

In his book Our Wild Calling, Richard Louv describes this modern human condition as “a desperate hunger for connection with other life.… All of us are meant to live in a larger community, an extended family of other species.” Without this, a number of pathologies grow within us and “the family of humans loses comfort, companionship, and perhaps even the sense of higher power, however one defines it.” Animals, too, have evolved with humans among them—and this distanced relationship in which we currently live may be an incalculable, unknowable loss to them as well. Being in

high to the oak’s crown, she napped among the oak’s branches. Lynda wrote about the experience in her book Witness Tree, and told me she has no doubt that in time, the tree recognized her presence—that they belonged to each other. To return and return and return is to come into relatedness with a specific tree and the surrounding land. It is the great lesson.