What gave me hope this morning

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Posted on March 9, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection

pileated woodpecker Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

I had one of those moments this morning when I felt truly that all is not lost, something that in a moment of delight gave me reason for hope.

I am staying a few days at a house on Sligo Creek in Takoma Park, Maryland. I was out walking my friends’ dog when I saw this little group of people standing at a quiet intersection looking up into the trees — just standing there staring up into the trees.

What caused this moment of wonder? A woodpecker. Yup, a woodpecker — brought their morning to a halt. It was certainly a gorgeous creature, a pileated woodpecker, and I had heard it as I walked out my door, pecking away at a tree branch with a sound that punctuated the air above the woods.

I have seen this before in my old neighborhood — people who stop and wonder at the natural world around them, stressed and distressed as it is with our human habitation. Upstream a bit, a couple of pair of yellow-crowned night heron took up residence a few years ago, and they return every spring. It was a good sign for the creek, which underwent a bit of a clean-up some years earlier — there are enough little fish around for them to feed.

Out for a run or a walk along the creek, I have often seen people stop to watch them, some with binoculars, and they always seem to be touched with delight and joy at the siting. Later this spring, the heads of their little ones will pop out of their nests as mom and dad bring them something to eat. It is awesome to watch them vigiling in the creek for food, silently wading through the shallow water, or standing perfectly still, waiting…

If some of us have not yet lost this — the ability to delight in nature, to stop to watch a moment when it catches our attention, rather than rushing on by, or even worse, being too busy or surrounded by noise to even notice — then there is hope for us.

Because we don’t want to lose this, and we know what it will mean to lose this.

Maybe delight and joy can be our motivators, even our saviors, because loss of delight and joy will be the end of something that gave reason for the evolution of the human. It is from this sense of wonder that art and worship first began, the sense of the sacred, even when this was often tinged with fear and dread (as it still is at times when we contemplate the vastness of the universe and the inevitability of the end of our own solar system).

If we can stop on a busy morning to look up at where that rat-a-tat noise is coming from, and have our breath stopped a moment at the wondrous creature making that noise, (one person called it a ‘gigantic woodpecker;’ actually, it was just its normal wonderful size), then we can also appreciate what is endangered by how we are living, what is endangered by our destructive relationship with the creatures around us.

Maybe we will refuse to lose this.

In the whole evolutionary process, maybe we should think about this — that one of the essential roles of the human is to contemplate, to experience wonder at, to experience awe in, the whole unfolding of creation.

Here is a paragraph from a book I’m reading right now, The Body of God, by Sallie McFague:

To feel that we belong to the earth and to accpet our proper place within it is the beginning of a natural piety, what Jonathan Edwards called “consent to being,” consent to what is. It is the sense that we and all others belong together in a cosmos, related in an orderly fashion, one to the other. It is the sense that each and every being is valuable in and for itself, and that the whole forms a unity in which each being, including oneself, has a place. It involves an ethical response, for the sense of belonging, of being at home, only comes when we accept our proper place and live in a fitting, appropriate way with all other beings. It is, finally, at a deep level, an aesthetic and religious sense, a response of wonder at and appreciation for the unbelievably vast, old, rich, diverse, and surprising cosmos, of which one’s self is an infinitesimal but conscious part, the part able to sing its praises.

There is a poignant context to this post, one that we must keep in mind as part of the larger framework for this sense of wonder and delight. Birds are among the most endangered of creatures as the Earth warms and climate changes, and as we continue our assault on their habitats and migration routes with our unrelenting developments and suburban and exurban sprawl.

I blogged about this a few months ago and want to link again to the article that brought this to my attention. I cannot imagine a world without birds, without the spring chorus that I hear every morning now as nesting season begins. I don’t know if I want to live in such a world.

But this morning, there was this little group of people taking their role in this wondrous cacophony of nature, doing what comes naturally to the human spirit, before we crushed it under the weight of our industrial development.

This morning, despite that weight and the noise and the distraction, a little group of people looked up into the natural world and sang its praises.

Photo credit: Male,Pileated Woodpecker, by George W Bowles Sr


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