I have two readings this morning. The first reading is the opening monologue of a play by Paul Zindel entitled The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
He told me to look at my hand for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine. This part of me was formed from a tongue of fire that screamed though the heavens until there was our sun. And this part of me—this tiny part of me—was on the sun when it itself exploded and whirled into a great storm until the planets came to be. And this small part of me was then a whisper of the earth. When there was life perhaps this part of me got lost in a fern that was crushed and covered until it was coal. And then it was a diamond millions of years later—it must have been a diamond as beautiful as the star from which it had first come. Or perhaps this part of me got lost in a terrible beast, or became part of a huge bird that flew above the primeval swamps. And he said this thing was so small—this part of me was so small it couldn’t be seen—but it was there from the beginning of the world.
The second reading comes from a book by David Abram called The Spell of the Sensuous.
To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, is to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen.…We can experience things—can touch, hear, and taste things—only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world we perceive. We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh and that the world is perceiving itself through us.
I have heard it told though I do not know if it is true, in Japanese, the sentence “I see the dog” would translate as “I dog seeing” to acknowledge the perception of both dog and person. David Abram suggests the world perceives itself through us in the same way we rely on our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin to perceive the world.
The playwright Paul Zindel notes the atoms that comprise us come from stardust. If our atoms are whispers of the earth and we in our totality function as the earth’s ears, listening to the earth takes on new urgency.
Jim Nollman, who has been making music with orcas, dolphins, wolves, turkeys and other animals for more than twenty-five years, said in an interview,
I have a lot of friends around the world who are able to actually hear the natural world. Still, whether or not we hear, listening is important. Until we start to listen—and, I hope eventually hear—the natural world for ourselves, nonhumans will be regarded as objects. Just the act of trying to listen can change a lot of our perceptions about nature and that can change the way we live.
What would change if we listen to shale as we hydrofracture it to release its natural gas? Here’s the process involved, also known as “fracking.”
First a drilling rig will dig a vertical hole several thousand feet deep, gradually bending until the concrete-encased well reaches the shale layer. After burrowing horizontally for as much as a mile (1.6 km), the drillers lower a perforating gun down to the end of the well. That gun fires off explosions underground that pierce the concrete and open up microfractures in the shale. The drillers then shoot millions of gallons of highly pressurized water, mixed with sand and small amounts of additives known as fracking chemicals, down the well, widening the shale fractures. Natural pressure forces the liquids back up the well, producing what's known as flowback, and the gas rushes from the fractures into the pipe. The grains of sand included in the fracking fluid keep the shale cracks open — like stents in a clogged blood vessel — while the well produces gas for years, along with a steadily decreasing amount of wastewater from deep inside the shale.
I pose this question neither rhetorically nor poetically. Does the earth whisper as this happens—or roar? Can we hear ourselves in the sound of the shale yielding to five million gallons of highly pressurized water forcing gas through its cracks? Or in the sound of the Tokyo Electric Power Company “releasing more than 11,000 tons of radioactive water used to cool fuel rods into the ocean [or] water vastly more radioactive gush[ing] into the ocean through a large crack in a six-foot deep pit at the [Fukushima Daiichi] nuclear plant” ?
I dog seeing.
We earth speaking.
Listening earth we?
The poet Rilke writes to God:
At my senses’ horizon
you appear hesitantly,
like scattered islands.
Yet standing here, peering out,
I’m all the time seen by you.…
All creation holds its breath, listening within me,
Because, to hear you, I keep silent.
The contemporary writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen chronicles feeling swept away by a “future that looks dark, and darker with each passing species,” until he looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass and then another…and heard the hum of flies…and saw ants walking single file through the dust…and knew in that moment…that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life—every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale—and it is only our fear that sets us apart.
Is it fear that prevents us from listening?
I have had the experience after an injury or surgery of not wanting to look at the wounded part. There is something disconcerting in trying to reconcile the sight or sound of injury in oneself.
“He told me to look at my hand for a part of it came from a star that exploded too long ago to imagine…formed from a tongue of fire that screamed though the heavens … And this small part of me was then a whisper of the earth.”
It is difficult to listen to our own cries in the heaving; in the grieving earth. Bitter to taste iodine 131 or the salt of our tears. Painful to feel eruptions of skin and tectonic plate. Easier to turn away, to withdraw our touch, seal our lips, close our eyes, cover our ears than to listen to the sweep of the tsunami as it swallows villages whole, or the detonation of the mountaintop swept away for coal.
It is easier perhaps to tune out the real sounds, replace them with noise: talk radio and jabber TV, the audible posturing of politicians along coordinates of bluster and denial.
Derrick Jensen asks: “If salmon, tuna, or wolverine could take on human manifestation, what would they do?”
What would they hear in fracturing shale and exploding water? What would we hear in ourselves if we could take on the manifestation of tuna, salmon, wolverine? Ocean? Mountaintop, old growth forest?
David Abram explains in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, once humans developed phonetic alphabets we no longer relied on pictographs, images that connected us to our “sensory participation with the enveloping natural field.” Whereas we used to depend on images tied to our interaction with other species and the elements, now “each letter [is] purely associated with a gesture or sound of the human mouth.” Our written images no longer “function as windows opening onto a more-than-human field of powers but solely as mirrors reflecting the human form back on itself.”
The downside of mirrors is that they never offer the entire view.
We can romanticize the earth by conceiving of it as a paramour—a lover we dote on or worse, use to gratify our desires; but the earth is not something we choose to love; it is what we are. Earth is our provenance. We carry it in our cells as much as we are carried by it.
We’ve all been in situations when we needed to listen to ourselves, heed that inner voice, but we didn’t. Instead we tuned into old tapes, social pressures, cultural tropes. By the time I was thirty-eight, living alone and loving it, I knew I was happiest living by myself, blessed with wonderful friends and family and work I enjoyed, but I kept turning the volume down on that voice of clarity deep inside. I would get into a relationship and move in and move out and disrupt and distract myself from what I loved and what nourished me. It took me another ten years to finally listen.
Tuning out the earth is the quickest way to disruption and destruction. We lose touch not just with the beauty of the earth, the power of creativity, and “our place in the family of things.” We lose touch with ourselves and the parts of us that belong to “a star that exploded too long ago to imagine.” We lose touch with the red hills and red river valley, the canyons and the salmon swimming upstream and the orcas singing with us.
Jim Tollman, the man who makes music with non-human collaborators explains the benefit he gets from listening intently.
I experience a sense of grace. That's what communication with nonhumans is really all about. When communication happens, no matter how subtle it is, no matter if it doesn't register on some meter, or on tape or on film, I feel as though I've been blessed. It is the greatest blessing of my life. In some very basic way, I suppose it's the same thing that other people experience through religion.… I've always felt that the primary purpose of religion is not intellectual, for instance to explain a mysterious universe we can never really know. It's sensuous, a feeling that places us in a situation where blessing can occur. When that happens, however it happens, the universe suddenly seems less distant. We all need that experience, whether we find it though religion, or through playing music with whales.
When we turn soil and plant seeds, tend a garden, our hands hear the earth and we feel the connection. The seasons, the cycles, the thrum of life reclaims us as we stake ourselves not to the ground but with it. We join together in communion—a community of union that refastens us to the holy within ourselves.
That’s what listening to the earth and for the earth does. To touch the bark of a tree, the fur of animal, the grit of dirt is to feel our own tactility, ourselves being touched back. Held in the embrace of a world that includes us and comprises us and in turn, allows us to be its eyes and ears, its fingers, mouth and nose.
The grains of sand in fracking fluid, the radioactive waters flowing from Japan, the vanished mountaintops of Appalachia beckon us to be their eyes and ears, to see and hear in them the obstruction and absence that diminish our earthliness.
“All creation holds its breath, listening within [us].”
We earth being.
Amen.
