“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)
The tiny fawn, curled into a soft reddish-brown, white-spotted ball, lay silently amidst the prairie grasses at the edge of the bordering woods, seemingly fast asleep yet likely alert to my presence. The tiny green bower shielded this new life from predatory eyes to some extent and showered it as best it could with coolness on this very warm and humid early summer day. Although the fawn’s mother had brought her young one to this spot for protection, I was nevertheless struck by the fawn’s vulnerability, here alone in the earliest weeks of its life. At this threshold between my own aging years and a fresh new beautiful being, I shifted my consciousness from the fawn’s vulnerability to my own.
I was on a peregrination, a journey that was part of a wonderful series of workshops entitled “Nature Photography and the Soul’s Slow Ripening” led by Prairiewoods’ Angie Pierce Jennings, based on Christine Valters Paintner’s book The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred (Sorin Books, 2018). Angie and our group took our cues from Paintner’s philosophical explorations and her practical suggestions for contemplative photography exercises. On this day I was visiting Bur Oak Land Trust’s Turkey Creek Nature Preserve to engage in peregrination, a wandering in which we let go of agendas and destinations, when we just let the wind of the Spirit move us from behind, just as the wandering Celtic saints did when they followed wherever God would lead them. Such an activity calls for a voluntary vulnerability—a willingness to cede control over where you are going, what you will find and what your outcome (if any) will be.
So the fawn and I met in a kind of mutual vulnerability, which I now realize was my peregrination’s destination. Central to Belden Lane’s “Great Conversation” with the natural world that I have talked about in earlier #PanDeepening blog entries is the idea that “communication in its deepest form is rooted in a shared vulnerability … a mutual convergence of vulnerabilities” (The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 37). And in this convergence of vulnerabilities, I had entered into a nature conversation with the fawn.
Conversation is not easy. As I’ve suggested in earlier “Nature Conversations” blog posts, the intentional listening we must do even when we are seriously conversing with other people can be a challenge, and it can be even more so when we listen to the natural world, especially if we’re not as familiar with it as we’d like to be. I’ve also talked about touching as part of conversation, and many of us may feel self-conscious about, possibly even afraid of, touching some of our companions in nature (and, granted, there are some we should not touch). The source of our difficulties with fully engaging in conversation—whether it’s with fellow humans or other members of the living world—is often vulnerability.
As I discussed in my last blog post about David Whyte’s “conversational nature of reality,” vulnerability involves some element of giving up the self. Whyte says that reality lies at a “frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you” (interview with Krista Tippet, On Being, Public Radio Exchange, April 7, 2016), and it is only at this frontier where you “broaden and deepen your own sense of presence” by paying close attention to things that are other than yourself.
The vulnerability of deep conversation is not just letting go of yourself but also tapping deep into parts of the self that you may wish to avoid or maybe aren’t even aware of. Belden Lane in The Great Conversation relates his first experience communicating with trees, when, not long after his mother’s death, he was camping one night in an Ozark forest at the site of a recent flash flood and spontaneously began telling stories to a few small pine trees that had survived the deluge. But what was even more unexpected for Lane was that “hearing the story as the trees heard it, I was carried more deeply into my own untapped grief. I was given another way of looking at my mother’s dying and offered a new sense of community, shared across a boundary bridged by mutual loss” (p. 36). Later, on reflection, Lane realizes this conversation happened as a result of this “mutual convergence of vulnerabilities.”
Today we are in the midst of a massive “mutual convergence of vulnerabilities”—the accelerating catastrophe of climate change and the human, social and economic devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. As Belden Lane says, our shared vulnerability is happening “on a cosmic level today” as we stare “into a fire of apocalyptic loss.” Yet this shared vulnerability invites us into “a richer encounter with the rest of the natural world” and “new ways of listening and being heard … The Great Conversation is being renewed because of our growing consciousness of being collectively at risk … Restoring the Great Conversation requires our meeting and being met by others in the natural world in the most intimate and risk-filled way” (p. 37). With the addition of the pandemic to today’s urgent environmental damage and losses, nature conversations have never been more important than they are now.
To have an ecological consciousness—just as with a spiritual or simply human consciousness—you must enter into vulnerability, giving up a good portion of your individualism as you enter into this frontier of a nature conversation. We—including the earth and all that informs it—are all one. As Lane says, “It’s like a strand of yarn in a sweater—you pull out one thing to love and everything else comes with it. The vulnerability of each piece affects the well-being of every other. Where once you saw disconnected parts, you now find an organism” (p. 47).
On that humid day at Turkey Creek, I “took” only a picture of the sweet fawn. But more accurately, as part of a peregrination and a contemplative photography practice, I “received” the picture, as Christine Valters Paintner would say. More importantly, I received the gift of connecting with a vulnerable life that inspired a sense of my own vulnerability in a world on the brink. Sharing that vulnerability through our nature conversation I hope helped ensure our mutual well-being, as well as, at least in a small way, the well-being of the entire web of existence.
—Thomas Dean, Prairiewoods programming facilitator and co-author (with Cindy Crosby) of Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit (Ice Cube Press, 2019)