On nature and the end of a summer
When I was a boy, nature afforded me endless possibility. We built a treehouse in the woods adjacent our home in New Jersey; it really was just a floor, and when I say ‘we’, it was a friend’s father. 7 planks of wood, hammered into the surrounding trees, with an unsturdy handful of planks down below, so that you could get on up. That treehouse, with just a few pieces of wood, recycled back into nature with man’s tools and imagination, hosted many free days of running around, play acting different versions of good against evil, hiding and finding, and much more. In those days, I would go camping with a scouting organization and nature continued to whisk me away: crackling fires that got me lost like gazing at crashing waves, almost in hypnosis, or simply playing in the dirt, seeing creatures emerge from the ground in ways that we often forget the ground is even capable of producing. The list goes on. Nature was the background to countless scenes from childhood, activating my imagination, hosting dry-runs of many scenarios.
This summer, as California suffers some of the worst wildfires in history, compounded by heat waves, rolling black outs, and not-to-be-forgotten, a global pandemic, nature was back again. Of course, it never left. I found myself on neighborhood walks, appreciating vibrant bougainvilleas, seeking solace in the sturdy trunks of oak trees, and restraining sadness at the smog-covered landscape of downtown San Francisco. I turned to literature to understand the mix of emotions that I felt and found Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature an invaluable field guide to understanding.
A beautiful scene from a walk in Stillwater Cove in California this summer
Emerson wrote Nature in 1836 with a goal: make Americans realize that we, too, should see nature through our own two eyes - not others. He felt Americans were still thinking and acting in the shadow of Europe, the past:
OUR AGE IS RETROSPECTIVE. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around us and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Emerson distilled four classes of benefits from nature: Commodity, Beauty, Language, and Discipline. We use nature for practical purposes (commodity), we feel an indescribable sense of divinity and splendor (beauty), we use the symbols, animals, and plants of nature to convey ideas that can best be described in such metaphors (language), and we use nature to regulate our own bodies and excesses, and remind us of the center (discipline). He put crisp words to sentiment we all feel, like how nature is a relief to being inside too long with our loved ones: “To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone…” He explained that sense of fleeting wonderment I have when I catch the last moments of a sunset: “To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again“ by recognizing each glimpse of nature is at once eternal and temporary.
The transparent eye-ball, “a representation of an eye that is absorbent rather than reflective, and therefore takes in all that nature has to offer”
He also explained to me why nature triggers ideas, connections, and a processing of every day life: “There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order of things...“ by grasping its relation to the intellect and its ability to help us make sense of life. He even helped me understand why nature is inspiring and moves me to write essays upon return: “...[we] seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art. The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity.” He also unearthed a sense within me that the words we use everyday are indeed connected to the natural world that preceded us, and explained what that looks like: “The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression the crossing of a line…”
“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
I find myself, on Labor Day, marking the end of summer. But this summer was like no other, and the idea of “returning to life” after summer, hunkering down for the winter, well… only the latter is true. There is no return to normalcy during this fall, but we do, nonetheless, need to be prepared for further challenges ahead this year. As such, I can now better understand the secrets that nature is hiding for us in plain sight with the wisdom and clarity that Emerson achieved. Nature can provide restoration, inspiration, and a sense of beauty and divinity to support us even in dark times.
He said it best: “I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it...”