Belden C. Lane - The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

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ISBN 9780190842673

eISBN 9780190842697

For Grandfatherand Elizabeth

Belden and Elizabeth in Grandfathers Side.

Excerpt from Reverence, from The Gift by Daniel Ladinsky, copyright 1999. Used with permission.

Coleman Barks, lines from his translation of The Sheikh Who Played with Children, in The Essential Rumi, copyright 1995 by Coleman Barks. Used with his permission.

Lines from Naomi Shihab Nyes poem The Art of Disappearing, from her book Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, copyright 1995. Used with permission from Far Corner Books, Portland, Oregon.

Lines from Farid Ud-Din Attars The Conference of the Birds, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, copyright 1984, Penguin Random House, UK. Used by permission.

Lines from David Wagoner, The Silence of the Stars, from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems, copyright 1999 by David Wagoner. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Lines from the Bennett B. Sims translation of Lao-tzu and the Tao Te Ching, copyright 1971, Franklin Watts.

Nathaniel M. Campbell, International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies, lines from his translation of Hildegard of Bingens O Viridissima Virga. Used with permission.

Part of chapter 3 appeared in In Quest of the King: Image, Narrative, and Unitive Spirituality in a Twelfth-Century Sufi Classic, Horizons 14, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 3948.

The excerpt from Who Is This Jesus? in chapter 13 originally appeared in an article by that title in Sojourners 45, no. 4 (April 2016): 3437.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

Wendell Berry

I confess that Ive always been more of a meddler than a scholar. Meddling in spheres that, strictly speaking, are none of my business. Crossing disciplinary boundaries with abandon, strolling library aisles as if they were forest paths, mixing genres in juxtaposing personal essays and scholarly articles.

If anything, its getting worse the longer I write. In this book, I wade into the field of natural history with none of the deftness of David Quamman or Barry Lopez. I wander into explorations of cross-species communication without the depth of Celia Deane-Drummond or Peter Wohlleben. I run the risk of oversimplifying the teachings of the saints, lacking the expertise of theologians like Bernard McGinn or Elizabeth Johnson. My forays into thinking ecologically have none of the sophistication of Joanna Macy or Ilia Delio.

I have to bank on the little I know: my experience with a single tree. Yet thats no small thing. Grandfather has been a teacher and friend to me for many years. Hes taught me more than I can express in these pages. Reminding me that being a meddler doesnt mean youre merely dabbling in this and that. It means youre thinking across fixed lines that others have drawn. Thinking like a mountainlike a tree. Practicing what E. O. Wilson called the consilience, the jumping together, of knowledge.

At any rate, Im in this for the long haul. Engaged with (and dependent on) a much larger community of mentors, filtering my experience through their wisdom. Thomas Berry, Bill Plotkin, and Richard Rohr among them.

Im grateful for each of the human and other-than-human teachers whove supported me in this work. These include two spiritual directors Ive had over the past two decades: a sister in the Dominican Order of Preachers (and my friend), Joan Delaplane, and a cottonwood tree I affectionately know as Grandfather. I cant imagine living an authentic life without either of them.

Im indebted also to a dog named Desert, a cat named Rusty, and numerous wilderness places that feed my soul. People to whom I owe much include my writing partner, Terry Minchow-Proffitt, a poet after my own heart; my extraordinary editor, Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press; and my encouraging friendsMike Bennett, Douglas Christie, Jay Kridel, Glenn Siegel, Laura Weber, and Sherryl White, of the Congregation of Sisters of St. Joseph. In the work of Illuman.org, Im thankful for men on four continentsincluding Jim Taylor and Stephen Gambill. Im grateful to Jan Stocking, of the Religious Sisters of Mercy, and Diza Velasco of the Rockhaven Ecozoic Center for embodying Thomas Berrys vision. To John DePuy for his artistic vision and stories of Ed Abbey.

I owe much to my tree-climbing teacher, Guy Mott of AdventureTree.org; Sally Longley and Beth Roberton of the Australian Network of Spiritual Directors; Anna Killigrew of the Koora Retreat Centre in Boorabbin, Western Australia; Ben Verheul of Ring Lake Ranch, Dubois, Wyoming; Ken Grush of the Missouri Karst and Cave Conservancy; Sandy Cooper of the C. G. Jung Society of St. Louis; the staff of the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary in Gibbon, Nebraska; the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Forestry in University City, Missouri; the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois; and the Endangered Wolf Center in Eureka, Missouri.

Kate, Ill never forget watching polar bears with you on the subarctic tundra. Or hiking with you, Jon, among the red-rock wonders of Ghost Ranch. You both make me so grateful to be a father. And then theres Patricia, a landscape of endless amazement for me, the greatest joy of my life. Thank you all.

Books and talks and articles about Nature are little more than... dinner bells. Nothing can take the place of absolute contact, of seeing and feeding at Gods table for oneself.

John Muir

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow

to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch,

or an old acquaintance among the pines.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Ive taken the dirt road toward the monastery, turning off before the Big Eddy takeout. Having left the car under juniper trees overlooking the Chama River, Im hiking the bluff downstream toward Lake Abiquiu. This is Ghost Ranch land. Georgia OKeeffe country.

The high desert landscape of northern New Mexico is a sparse terrain, bearing the trace of stories long forgotten. Its a good place to study the parlance of wind and flowing water, to ponder ravens on the wing and the play of shadows among the rocks. The land here cuts through you like a knife, enticing you to relinquish one trusted language for anotheror for none at all.