Value for Monday of Week 17 in the season of Growth

Appreciating Nature

Real

True Narratives

The city is interesting; but the tactual silence of the country is always most welcome after the din of town and the irritating concussions of the train. How noiseless and undisturbing are the demolition, the repairs and the alterations, of nature! With no sound of hammer or saw or stone severed from stone, but a music of rustles and ripe thumps on the grass come the fluttering leaves and mellow fruits which the wind tumbles all day from the branches. Silently all droops, all withers, all is poured back into the earth that it may recreate; all sleeps while the busy architects of day and night ply their silent work elsewhere. The same serenity reigns when all at once the soil yields up a newly wrought creation. Softly the ocean of grass, moss, and flowers rolls surge upon surge across the earth. Curtains of foliage drape the bare branches. Great trees make ready in their sturdy hearts to receive again birds which occupy their spacious chambers to the south and west. Nay, there is no place so lowly that it may not lodge some happy creature. The meadow brook undoes its icy fetters with rippling notes, gurgles, and runs free. And all this is wrought in less than two months to the music of nature's orchestra, in the midst of balmy incense. The thousand soft voices of the earth have truly found their way to me--the small rustle in tufts of grass, the silky swish of leaves, the buzz of insects, the hum of bees in blossoms I have plucked, the flutter of a bird's wings after his bath, and the slender rippling vibration of water running over pebbles. Once having been felt, these loved voices rustle, buzz, hum, flutter, and ripple in my thought forever, an undying part of happy memories. [Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1907), Chapter V, “The Finer Vibrations”.]

Other narratives:

Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012): “a breathtaking adventure tale and a profound meditation on the nature of grief and survival”.
Robert D. Kaplan, Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World (Random House (2017). “ . . . the shape of the river constrains the pilot’s course.”
Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places (Little, Brown & Company, 2012). “Krause’s term for this symphony is ‘biophony’: the sound of all living organisms except us.”
James Attlee, Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight (The University of Chicago Press, 2011): an idiosyncratic but engaging ode to the moon
Victoria Johnson, American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic (Liveright, 2018): “A biography of David Hosack, the doctor who assembled one of America’s first botanical gardens.”
Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (Penguin Press, 2018): “. . . an account of fixing up a farm in Cornwall, Conn.”
Nick Pyenson, Spying on Whales: The Past, Present and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures (Viking, 2018): “. . . a travelogue to chasing whales, both living and extinct.”
Karen Berger, Great Hiking Trails of the World: 80 Trails, 75,000 Miles, 38 Countries, 6 Continents (Rizzoli, 2017).
Robert Llewellyn and Joan Maloof, The Living Forest: A Visual Journey Into the Heart of the Woods (Timber, 2017).
Will Hunt, Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet (Spiegel & Grau, 2019): “A book can often have its greatest impact by rethinking familiar terrain, forcing readers to reconsider their entrenched preconceptions.”
Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019): “You know a book has entered your bloodstream when the ground beneath your feet, once viewed as bedrock, suddenly becomes a roof to unknown worlds below. . . . an epic exploration and examination of darkness and the caverns underground that have captured our imaginations, pulled us downward, housed our dead and allowed us to bury our most violent secrets.”
Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019): “Demuth rightly approaches the region not as a barren place through which human history progressed but as a complex ecosystem on its own, in which humans play just one part.”
Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Sarah Chichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “Most of the pieces here focus on Williams’s political and environmental resistance to such marauding, including her acts of civil disobedience, their fallout, and her sustained grief and anger over the despoiling of the natural world.”
Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing (Penguin, 2019): “ . . . poet Jamie (Sightlines) meditates on the natural world, lost cultures, and the passage of time.” “Jamie’s crisp language places you in a near-meditative state.”
Patricia Schultz, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die: The World As You’ve Never Seen It Before (Artisan, 2019): “ . . . a new, glossy coffee-table edition of the 2003 book by Patricia Schultz. . . . The most notable feature of the book is the absence of people and current events.”
Florence Wheeler, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017): “Scientists Examine the Benefits of Forests, Birdsong and Running Water”.
Philip D’Anieri, The Appalachian Trail: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021): “No one had authored the path – but also everyone had.”
Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays (Random House, 2022): “. . . if these essays have a unifying theme and express a single mandate, they are about the redemptive importance of paying attention to the planet and to the other beings with which we share it. Attentiveness works as an antidote not only to distractedness but to the fatal unseriousness of modern life.”
Adam Nicolson, Life Between the Tides (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): “. . . For centuries, . . . the shoreline has been ‘one of the most revelatory habitats on earth.’ Foundational tenets of taxonomy, paleontology and evolution ‘first emerged from studying what was happening to animals and plants between the tides.' . . .”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (Routledge, 1996).

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Grizzly Man, about Timothy Treadwell, who lived and died among bears

National Geographic Wild series and other nature documentaries:

Africa:

South America:

Asia:

North America:

Canada

Australia:

Europe:

Islands:

Oceans:

deadly ocean animals

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Novels and stories:

Paul Tremblay, Growing Things and Other Stories (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2019): “does what we expect the work of our best writers to do: reflect our world from a surprising perspective so that we might better see its beauty and contradictions, its comforts and aches. In these 19 stories, Tremblay doesn’t just hold a mirror up to reality, but live-streams it, projecting the whole spectrum of our modern anxieties so vividly it feels as if we’re watching in real time.”

Poetry

It may indeed be phantasy, when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.

[Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, “To Nature”]

Other poems:

William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To a Sky-Lark”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Invitation” (1822)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”
Walter de la Mare, “Silver”
Robert Frost, “Blueberries”
Robert Frost, “Hyla Brook”
Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed”
Robert Frost, “Rose Pogonias”
Robert Frost, “The Vantage Point”
Edgar Lee Masters, “Imanuel Ehrenhardt”
Edgar Lee Masters, “William Jones”
Seamus Heaney, “Postscript”
Navarre Scott Momaday, “The Earth”
John Keats, “I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill”
John Keats, “O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell”
Wallace Stevens, “In the Carolinas”
Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West” (analysis)
John Greenleaf Whittier, “What the Birds Said”
William Blake, “The Echoing Green”
Andrew Marvell, “The Garden”
John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Worship of Nature”
E. Cummings, “O sweet spontaneous”
Pablo Neruda, “Horses”