Encounters with Nature
Every now and then, on my walks around city/suburbanscape, I encounter nature through a pause, a quick glance before flight.
A few weeks ago in Muir Woods. The trees were giants and like ants, we walked along the laid out path. Parties of people moved in opposite directions. We ogled and prodded and spotted clovers and young salmon. We had our small packed lunch: sandwiches from Ike’s. I remember that it was cold but then at the clearing it got quite hot. I tried to listen for birds but the woods were mostly silent and only sometimes I could hear chirping from faraway. We sat along a felled tree and told our embarrassing stories. One by one, we crossed over small creeks and gathered under the shell of a hollow redwood. We breathed. The trees here nearly never die.
Later we took the bus to Sausalito. The bus wound through the mountains and from my window I could see the slope of the terrain. We were dropped off by the ocean where the water was green and lapping softly against the rocks.
At home, the same family of ducks congregate by a man-made pond. They’ve been molting. The walkways around the apartment look like sites of carnage. The males display scraggly inklings of green on their heads. Still in transition. In another corner, I find a mother hiding her ducklings under her wings. She looks bloated and determined, wiggling every so often to contain her budding breed.
In the past few years, I’ve found myself increasingly oriented towards fragility, so that when I encounter nature, I think more about our cruelty than of their persistence. The spider dies with the strike of a hand. The crows are warded off with stuffed replicas. I’ve been reading Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty, which explores why we make and consume art that displays the worst in us: sadism, masochism, murder, abuse. There is no magic to cruelty. But there is something about witnessing cruelty that makes us feel like we’ve reached reality in its purest form. Couched in such a sentiment is the implication that reality must feel “raw” or “visceral” to be deemed true. That our world is composed of only two types of existence: one of ignorance and bliss and another of suffering and cruelty. Through the book, Nelson cautions us against such simplistic views and urges us to think about how art can reveal a world that is dynamic with feeling and rich in dimension.
At the same time, Nelson encourages us to revel moments of paradox. Near the end of the book, Nelson applauds the title to John Cage’s writing titled “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse.)” She writes that “such gestures are in keeping with one of Buddhism’s most enlivening paradoxes: that we can dedicate our lives to ending suffering, while acknowledging the first noble truth, that life is suffering.”
Paradoxes, in Nelson’s book, are generative spaces full of activity and feeling. They create an avenue for “third terms,” which in essence break the binary relationship between “two opposing forces.” Third terms can be envisioned as sites of neutrality or the “practice of gentle aversion: the right to reject the offered choices, to demur, to turn away…” Nature has mastered the third term.
On the other side of California, hundreds of crows congregate along the water canal along the neighborhood where my father lives. They lay claim to the developing warehouses across the canal. For many paces I watch their silhouette bodies settle above the concrete structures. On my walks around city/suburbanscape, I encounter nature through brief moments of pause, a quick glance before flight. Like me, the rabbits come out at night and I find myself at a standstill. One rabbit with one eye turned to watch me. In another moment, they’re nowhere to be found. Where they go, I don’t know. They live in third places, and may we never find them.
Small plug on the biggest climate news this week, which as you likely already know, is a big understatement.
Big plug to my friend Kamau, who has influenced much of my thinking about nature and has humored many conversations of the sort.