I first read Rachel Carson’s seminal work, Silent Spring, as an assignment for my seventh-grade school newspaper Earth Day edition. It was a bit above my head as reading material goes, so there was a lot of skimming involved. However, the parts I did take in (and have remembered my whole life) have informed my passionate support for strong environmental policies and protection for endangered species.
That said, only recently have I been developing a more personal ethic of care for Earth and its varied creatures, one that continues to grow and develop through my connection with Prairiewoods. For example, my first fall as Director, we had a surprising number of snakes enter the Center. I watched other staff members carefully usher the snakes back outdoors, and was charmed. I was somewhat less charmed when mice started to come inside for the colder months and I learned that we would not immediately call an exterminator—instead, we worked to capture the critters who had already breached the perimeter and then to prevent their friends from sneaking in as well. Those were my first conversations on dismantling the “hierarchy of beings,” the predominant western worldview that posits that mankind is at the top of a tall pyramid of life on Earth and entitled to subjugate (or exterminate) life forms on the lower levels of the pyramid.
More important for my own development, though, have been the myriad ways Prairiewoods has encouraged me to see myself as creature, as one part of the whole of creation. During my time here, I’ve participated in an activity called “The Council of All Beings,” created by Joanna Macy and John Seed. This ritual is designed to help us get beyond our intellectual understanding that we are part of creation and begin to actually feel our interconnectedness. I was powerfully moved and inspired by a retreat led by Belden Lane (author of The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul), during which we were encouraged to enter into conversation with another life somewhere on Prairiewoods’ 70 acres. I found myself in conversation with a tree outside our chapel, which at first felt very weird and a little too “out there,” but which ended up touching me deeply. (I mourned that tree’s demise this summer, after a storm with straight-line winds that preceded the August derecho.) *
Since the start of the pandemic, when I’ve been more distanced from my fellow humans, other beings have played a more significant role in my ability to feel both grounded and connected. I’ve touched more trees, smelled more flowers, listened to more birds and appreciated more flowing water than ever before. I’ve learned that getting out of my head and into my senses is vitally important for nurturing relationships with our nonhuman kin. As someone who thinks a lot, it is a particularly difficult transition for me to feel more: to engage my senses of touch, taste, hearing, sight and smell more. David Abrams, one of the facilitators for our annual Spirituality in the 21st Century conference (April 30–May 1) writes:
“There is an intimate reciprocity to the senses; as we touch the bark of a tree, we feel the tree touching us; as we lend our ears to the local sounds and ally our nose to the seasonal scents, the terrain gradually tunes us in turn. The senses, that is, are the primary way that the earth has of informing our thoughts and of guiding our actions. Huge centralized programs, global initiatives, and other ‘top down’ solutions will never suffice to restore and protect the health of the animate earth. For it is only at the scale of our direct, sensorial interactions with the land around us that we can appropriately notice and respond to the immediate needs of the living world.”
—David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 268
I’ve had an intellectual concern for the environment most of my life. But as David suggests, the “direct, sensorial interactions” with the “animate earth” have finally gotten me out of my head and motivated me to respond to and act on that life-giving—and, yes, intimate—connection. More than any lecture or well-crafted book or video tutorial on environmental activism, it is these developing relationships and ongoing conversations that impact my current behavioral choices.
I can’t help wondering how the future of Earth could be changed by this type of direct experience, by this conversion from old paradigms to new hearts.
* Coincidentally, at that retreat I also met Thomas Dean, a writer based in Iowa City, in whose excellent book Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit Prairiewoods is featured.
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director
photo taken at F.W. Kent Park, Johnson County