“Conversation is perhaps our greatest hope not only for healing the rifts in human understanding but also for restoring and reinspiring our relationship with the natural world, which is our first and most profound home. Care of the world is always essential, and care arises from conversation.”
—Thomas Dean, Introduction, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit, by Cindy Crosby and Thomas Dean (Ice Cube Press, 2019)
“Look me in the eye.” We’ve all heard it. “The eyes are the doorways to the soul.” We’ve also all heard that. These are calls to authenticity, to a connection bound by depth, honesty, and the deepest reality. And it is a special kind of seeing that is crucial to a nature conversation.
To truly grasp our place in the interdependent web of existence, we need to see what conservationist and Iowa native Aldo Leopold called the “green fire” in the eyes of the world’s living beings. Leopold coined this term in his seminal essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which appears in his classic A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949). Leopold relates how, early in his career as a twenty-two-year-old forester with the US Forest Service in the Apache National Forest in the Arizona Territory, he and his colleagues one day spotted a mother wolf with her grown pups at the bottom of a canyon. At the time, predator extermination was the policy of the Forest Service, and Leopold and company were soon “pumping lead into the pack,” as he says. Leopold goes on to say, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.” Leopold dates the beginning of his understanding of what he would later in life call “the land ethic”—that all of the natural world, including humanity, is part of an interdependent community and must be treated as such. The green fire he stared into in the dying wolf’s eyes started his journey to “think like a mountain,” to understand, respect, and act within the holistic interconnectedness of all life.
Belden Lane puts this kind of seeing more directly in the context of nature conversations. As he says in his book The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul (Oxford University Press, 2019), “Restoring the Great Conversation requires our meeting and being met by others in the natural world in the most intimate and risk-filled way … It’s only in seeing and being seen by one who is radically different (another species, glimpsed in the wild) that you begin to know the mystery of who you are as well. Looking into the eyes of a bear twenty feet away on a mountain trail, being ‘stared through’ by a doe with two fawns in tow, gazing on the face of a horse you’ve learned to love, holding the head of a dying dog you’ve had to put down: you know in that moment that you’ve been seen. You know that something rich in mystery and spirit is looking back at you, opening you to a world full of others erupting in your dreams, interacting in ways you’d never imagined. But too often we aren’t paying attention. We’re blind and deaf to a world that’s truly alive, responding to us at every turn, no less vulnerable to suffering than we ourselves” (pp. 37–38). As I’ve discussed in previous “Nature Conversations” blog entries, this is also the essence of David Whyte’s “conversational nature of reality,” where the “frontier” between the you and the not-you lies, with the conversation between the you and not-you itself creating reality.
We’ve all had such seeing/being seen incidents in nature. In fact, we likely have such experiences every day. But the likes of Leopold and Lane ask us to look and think deeper, to think like a mountain, to pay attention to the world that’s truly alive. Two of my most memorable such incidents occurred with Leopold’s and Lane’s major examples: a wolf and a bear.
My family and I spend time each summer in the North Woods of Minnesota near the Boundary Waters, where we share the woods with wilderness creatures large and small. A number of years ago, when our kids were younger, we were walking our greyhounds one evening on the fire trail near the remote cabin we stay in. Dusk was oncoming. At one point on the old logging road, a timber wolf emerged from the woods and stopped on the trail maybe a hundred feet from us. It turned its head and leisurely examined us. We of course stopped, and to this day I still remember the awesomeness (in the true sense of the word—the awe) of looking into the eyes of this beautiful wild creature. Our lives connected in that watershed moment in my own relationship with the natural world, knowing that I was literally seeing the wild and it was seeing me in return. I was in touch with Leopold’s green fire, as well as the mystery that lies inside myself. The moment was profound yet fleeting. The wolf decided we presented little danger but nevertheless quickly continued his or her evening jaunt and disappeared silently into the birch, pine, and fir on the other side of the road. But that brief moment would forever be part of both our lives.
My exchange of looks with a bear is more recent. We were on vacation at the same cabin once again last year. One day while my daughter and I were out hiking at another lake and my wife (and our dogs) were alone in the cabin, a black bear decided to visit the cabin and pull down a bird feeder hanging outside a window to enjoy some sunflower seeds. The whole incident was actually more harrowing than that, with the bruin walking along the porch and looking into the window on one side of the cabin, sending our dogs and my wife, Susan, into a bit of a frenzy, before it sauntered to the bird feeder on the other side. The cabin sits on a hill, so the bird feeder side is about a half-story up. As the bear was trying to jump to grab the feeder, it actually dug its claws into the logs of the cabin and peered into the window on that side. After getting the feeder down, consuming its contents, and moving along, what we had left was a great North Woods vacation story, though my daughter and I regretted missing the excitement.
But that wasn’t quite the end of the story. The next morning, as I was returning to the cabin from the outhouse and walking on the porch deck toward the door, our bruin visitor appeared once again, coming around the side of the cabin. At that moment we both stopped short and locked eyes. As I stared into the close-set eyes and into the power of this beast of the north, the wild visitor returned my gaze as it assessed my threat to itself. Black bears are actually not dangerous to humans except in unusual circumstances. I experienced no fear, and I’m sure the bear wasn’t especially afraid either. But it had no desire to stick around with me around, and I knew it would soon be on its way. Indeed it was just a moment later when my wife opened the cabin door with our dogs on leash, heading out for a morning walk. I blurted out, “Bear!” Susan and dogs quickly retreated into the cabin, and Ursus was galloping down the two-track road back into the woods in an instant. Yet once again, this brief encounter allowed me to peer into the “green fire,” to share a moment of wild equality with this magnificent creature, both of us in “the family of things,” as poet Mary Oliver says in “Wild Geese.”
Bear and wolf stories are dramatic, but looking into the green fire is something that happens—or should happen—every day with creatures both large and small. We see the deer or wild turkey watching in the timber off of Prairiewoods’ trails. A squirrel eyes us warily from a tree branch above our heads, and we cast our own amused or endearing gaze toward it. Even a spider resting quietly on a leaf is no doubt looking at us as we approach. Return those gazes, with both companionship and wonder. When we look in this way, we are connected—not just as two individual beings but as companions in the interconnected and interdependent web of existence. We join the living world in all its meaning and spirit.
—Thomas Dean, Prairiewoods programming facilitator and co-author (with Cindy Crosby) of Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit (Ice Cube Press, 2019)