The Daily Theme: Essays: Topic 121: Nature's Language

Carol:

The Sounds of Silence

One of my favorite teaching exercises was meant to show students how to use all of their senses, not just sight. A computer classroom isn’t the best place for that with its controlled temperature and humming, buzzing and squeaking electronic universe. We needed to disconnect not only physically but mentally from the land of tweets and texts.

The campus was built into the side of a hill. A few yards uphill from the road that loops around the classroom buildings, students in an Environmental Ethics class had created a primitive classroom in a small grove of pine trees. Just a circle of large, flat-topped rocks in a clearing, placed at random so as not to destroy the natural lack of symmetry.

One fall evening I moved my Women in Literature students to this outdoor classroom. We would soon be reading essays and poetry by “nature writers” like Linda Hogan and Terry Tempest Williams, but we would begin with our own stories. As the light faded and the temperature dropped, we huddled closer together on the rocks, not just for comfort but because the rhythm and tone of our conversation changed…quiet, calm, focused, intimate. Stories moved around the circle, recollections of long-forgotten trips into the Sonora desert or the Mogollon Rim. The stories gained force, not with volume but with detail: the whooshing of a Class III rapids, the smell of pine needles underneath a sleeping bag, the sting of icy snow pellets against the face. We had to feel our way out of the clearing, holding onto each other as we returned to the sensory cacophony of the computer classroom.

Terry Tempest Williams listens to nature. She “interprets” the languages and contours of the natural world for “newcomers” just as a park ranger interprets the geography and biology of at Grand Teton or Bryce Canyon or Organ Pipe. Williams is a fierce and eloquent advocate for the environment, what she calls “bearing witness.” When she came to Prescott about 15 years ago, I heard her speak twice. Her passion for the history, landscape and environment of the West was quiet, the kind of “bearing witness” that causes you to lean over in your seat and pay attention with your whole body, not just your ears. She left such an impression of urgency and commitment on me that I couldn’t get her out of my mind for days.

Williams’ 1997 essay “Listening Days" begins with a visit to her dying grandfather and ends with the simple announcement of his death, “peacefully at home in the company of family.” In between she reflects on sound and lets thoughts move her from conversations with her grandfather about his radio program to “tonal memory” to the big question of “what do we know.” She walks the readers into the hills behind her home:

The leaves have fallen, leaf litter, perfect for the shuffling of towhees.

The supple grasses of summer have become knee-high rattles. Ridge

winds shake the tiny seedheads like gourds. I hear my grandfather’s voice.

All sound requires patience; not just the ability to hear, but the capacity to

listen, the awareness of mind to discern a story. A magpie flies toward me

and disappears in the oak thicket. He is relentless in his cries. What does

he know that I do not? What story is he telling?

Reading these lines as I look out my window and watch the reflected pink of the sunrise on granite rocks, I think back to those students in our outdoor classroom, re-tuning their senses to experience the languages of nature, adding their own voices to the stories of ancient grandfathers, prehistoric rocks, and magpie cries.

No cartoons today, no photographs. Take a few minutes, move some time around, and head outside, see for yourself. Calm down, breathe and listen. Nature is speaking.

Sources:

"Listening Days" by Terry Tempest Williams website http://arts.envirolink.org/literary_arts/TTWilliams_listening.html

Megan:

Nature’s Language

Many times I have heard visitors to the countryside comment that after the noise of a city, they find it difficult to sleep with all the quiet. I suppose the reverse is often true as well. I have lived in both environments, and where I live now, which is where I grew up, has the least amount of road noise. But if you spend time actually listening to the Arizona desert, you would realize it is anything but quiet. Between the crickets and the coyotes, the dampened crunch of deer hooves on gravel and the sudden scratching of startled rabbit fleeing through the bushes, plenty of sounds make their way through the apparent nighttime stillness.

Of course, it is easy to fancy for a moment that these nighttime sounds might comingle into a natural dialect, unique to this particular latitude and longitude but it is difficult to argue that actual communication is taking place. You hear the noises and you know you are not alone, that you share the space with other creatures, but there is no apparent interaction.

Recently, I have come across a number of facts and anecdotes which seem to confirm that although humans grow more remote from their natural neighbors, the flora and fauna may have their own languages, or some means of shared communication. We can acknowledge this possibility by observing the results of their apparent cooperation.

On March 3, a brief article was published by CNN Money which informed the public of a recall of the Mazda6 sedans because a certain type of spider had started building nests in the fuel system, which might ultimately lead to a fire in the engine. Usually you would find this sort of article on their Oddball news page, but because of the financial impact of a recall,the story had made it to the Money section. The article does not explore how or why the spiders came to develop this habit, merely commenting that there had been at least 20 occurrences of infestation. The company spokesman speculated that perhaps the spiders like cars that "go Zoom-Zoom" (the tagline for Mazda). But this article raises all sorts of questions (in my mind) about the communication powers of these spiders.

And then, over the weekend, I spent some time with my cousins, one of whom is the manager of a series of vineyards across the state. He mentioned that he is currently helping a new vineyard get off the ground on a pistachio farm. The owners are looking to diversify their crops because the pistachio trees do not consistently produce nuts. For a comparison, he mentioned that the pinyon trees so common in Verde Valley will occasionally, and for no observable reason, stop producing nuts for years at a time. And not on an individual level, he said. Entire groves will cease production together, as though they had a collective consciousness. There are no consistent environmental factors to point to as a reason (he gave me a word for these kinds of trees, which I cannot remember and the Wikipedia articles do not support what he said. BUT he is one of the smartest people I ever met, so I believe him).

There are countless other examples of apparent intraspecies communication (or perhaps mis-communication), such as mass animal death – large scale whale beachings, the sardines in Redondo beach in the past few days—declines in the bee population.

I’d rather not leave this essay on a negative note, so here is a more whimsical example of nature’s language. When I lived in Brighton, England, I used to walk along the seafront in the evening specifically to watch the starlings fly about in an acrobatic swarm. I’ve never been able to accurately describe what it’s like to watch, but luckily Peter Greenhalgh has compiled a video of the phenomenon on Youtube (warning: the music is sort of startling). Enjoy.