Saturday, January 09, 2010
Cold month of January has a beauty in itself
Liza Field
Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.
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Father Thomas Berry put the Bible on the shelf for twenty years and read the Earth. A lot of reading can be done in wilderness.
-- Conservationist David Brower, in 2000, age 88
"January has no purpose," someone told me recently, despondent over the cold and lack of holidays.
January is certainly a month hard to love for any purpose but itself, offering no vacation allure, strawberries, watermelons or balmy weather.
But January can be loved for its own sake, here in the cold, iron-hard, Virginia mountains. Like these ancient winter ridges themselves, now trundled in gray-and-brown humus, green moss, crusty snow and whitish knobs of hoarfrost, their stiff oak leaves rattling in the wind overhead -- January has a beauty in itself, beyond any clear function.
Everything in a January mountain is slowed, muted, diffused, and without any blatant practicality to humans, no longer a setting for tourism, mushrooming, trophy-hunting, trout, or rollicking motorcycle escapades down the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Tourists have fled. Picnickers have vanished. Likewise hunters, photographers of wildflowers, birders with binoculars, blueberry-pickers and backpackers. The hiker here is solitary, unable to cajole companions out for a pleasant ramble and chitchat amidst the deep-freeze, ear-numbing air.
A profound silence pops the lid off one's thoughts and a steep wonder expands beyond explanation or known reason. If you value such a world, it is for no reason but its own sake.
And what is the "sake" of a mountain, the "sake" of a world? The old English word implies an "end-in-itself," an "entity worthy of regard," not some secondary function. A "sake" is its own purpose, a reality beyond whatever else it might produce.
All creatures have a "sake," a function in themselves, figured Aristotle. Everything alive is here, as each human is, for a reason beyond any secondary use we make of it. For many philosophers, from Heraclitus to Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer to Thomas Berry, to really "know" a thing meant revering it as a reality bigger than an object of human use.
A lesson in understanding
This is a difficult concept today, when the "reason" for a thing often means "our use for it," our reason for allowing it to live. If no such reason can be named, we have "reason" to replace it with something more reasonable -- to us!
But surely the "reason" for a living mountain, a scrub pine, a black bear, a human life, is beyond our use for it. Its "reason" is beyond human "reason," two different words that rarely strike us as equivocal.
Because any absence of a known reason became literally "unreasonable" during the "Age of Reason," we (its heirs) still struggle to include anything beyond practical function in our plans, programs and personal time, legislation, academic curricula, even quite a bit of religious organizing.
How could you organize a "for-its-own-sake"? How could you industrialize, domesticate and reduce it to a function of humans? What dollar figure would you assign it?
President Teddy Roosevelt faced this challenge in protecting the early national parks, national forests and their creatures. Why should the last bison remain alive, if its entire function was to compose a dead trophy humans could be admired for possessing? Why should living forest "have standing" if it only made money as dead lumber?
The originators of The Wilderness Act, in 1964, faced the same challenge. For what "sake" should anything wild exist, when the very word "wild" implied "not utilized by man"?
In a world whose function the Industrial Age had reduced, at best, to a ball of "natural resources" (raw materials for man's use), the "sake" of anything wild had no meaning.
So it's remarkable that The Wilderness Act passed, and that other lands have been conserved since then -- both public and private -- because a few humans valued them "for their own sake."
In the writings of such conservation advocates, struggling to articulate to material mindsets "for what sake" living forest, free-flowing rivers, Appalachian mountaintops and creeks should be allowed to exist, the words often -- ironically -- reach the limits of molecule-land and have to enter the spiritual.
They frequently echo the feeling of a Deuteronomy verse: "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."
John the Divine located "the Word" "in the beginning," embedding all of creation. John Muir certainly found it there. Though steeped in a lifetime of Bible verses, he found the sacred scriptures most vividly available in the beauty of rocks, waters and wildlife.
"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread," Muir wrote, "Places to play in and pray in."
For what sake do winter mountains, creeks and wild creatures exist? For a reason beyond human reason, beyond known words, yet which calls to us, more than ever, to understand.
