We Tend To Reflect Our Surroundings

Majestic Nature Matters

Here's a photo that shows how a society with a greater focus on the natural world approaches art.  It shows my mother's father's hand-painted birth announcement from Osaka, Japan in the late 1880s.  It projects a natural balance.

It also illustrates a point.  Our unconscious, from childhood, reflects the world around us.  And as the world has modernized, it's lost the perfectly locking puzzle pieces that are wilderness.  Instead, arbitrary straight lines and flat urban surfaces have taken over.  Likewise, societies have gradually switched over from nature-worship to institutionalized, man-made beauty in the form of religion, ceremony and art.  Its as if we were squaring a circle that, as a guide, is gradually fading.

At first this was likely successful, since wild remnants could always be found and revered, giving rise to hybrid forms of wild and human beauty like the above birth announcement.  Here, for example, are what look like two puzzle-pieces in a single landscape: forest and grassland.  On closer inspection we find that they're actually two types of moss on a forest floor.  So the original old-growth forest and flowering prairie may be gone, but if we look hard, even in this modern era, we find interlocking puzzle pieces to remind us of original wilderness.

Unknown, is what'll happen if natural inspiration becomes ever rarer.  And, worse yet, if the institutionalized, man-made order found in modern civilization is ever over-taken by over-crowded excess, disease and destructive conflict; what then?  In that light, the past few hundred years seem almost like an unwieldy experiment whose outcome is unknown and potentially disastrous.

Here's a visitor to Patriarch's Grove under Mount Rainier in Washington state, a place I visited on that same day.

What I'm proposing in these few paragraphs is that being with such splendor--in this case, ancient Douglas fir--would impact default patterns of unconscious / conscious reflection in a visitor's mind.  Instead of dwelling on disjointed minor details, the visitor would aim for the big-picture, and in a bold manner.

All of which might suggest that there's truth in Thoreau's line: "in wildness is the preservation of the world".

A final note: A recent study has found that the single biggest determinant for success in life, for those born into poverty, is not parenting, but whether the poor get lucky and grow up in a community with good schools and nice neighbors.  Which would suggest that we actually do, to a certain extent, reflect our surroundings.

Environmental Isolate

Two Views Of One

In reading the news of the past week

I came upon a fundamentally surprising

article suggesting the Bible's organizers,

over the years, edited out mention of

Asherah, whom the Book of Kings and

other sources suggest was worshiped

alongside Yahweh, in his temple, as his

wife.

The comments following on the article

were heated beyond the usual urgency

that drives people to contribute. As one

can imagine, there were those eager to

discredit (God is neither he nor she; it

is our language that uses pronouns), as

well as those eager to see vindication

(at last, we're finally appreciating our

Queen).

Let's just say I think both perspectives

are right. And here's an example of why:

As I read on, I came upon an article about

a well-intentioned group called the

Archangel Ancient Tree Archive whose love

for ancient trees has led them to clone the

mightiest specimens still living on earth

(think towering redwoods and sequoias)

and to plant these clones hither and yon,

hoping they will succeed in growing to the

size of their clone-sakes.

The AATA is probably going about their

work with a minimum of smarts; they probably

aren't planting their clones in unsuitable climes.

But they are ignoring Ashera; essentially,

they're growing environmental isolates. One

has only to look at secondary forests growing

on land that once saw wilderness in all it's glory.

After the old growth is cut down, decades of

rain leach the soil of nutrients; the complex

web of life, involving animals, fungi, microbes

and temperature modulation are swept away

and often a monoculture is then planted instead.

Such second-generation trees are guaranteed

to be compromised in stature.

This is why wilderness is so valuable. It is not

just isolated champions standing tall, proving

themselves superior and able to pass on genetic

success; it is the nurturing entirety of the dead

and the living, creating the fertile soil and

enveloping circumstance that enable greatness.