Nature Encounter Nurtures

Bonding with the Feathered Brother

Bird watching is fascinating. It’s been happening in my sister’s house in Chennai. Every day a crow visits her kitchen window. Not for his day’s share of cooked food or bird's feed, but for his delicacy mixture (a common spicy snack). When others try to offer the best bird’s feed, it doesn’t interest him. He demands only mixture. So, the mixture finds its rightful place in the weekly grocery list. “If you want to form a bond with a crow, be consistent in rewarding them,” says John Marzluff, a professor of Wildlife Science. It is not buying their attention or love but establishing a relationship with what we can offer. 

To our surprise, this intelligent being reciprocates with gifts too. Gabi Mann is from Seattle, USA. As a small girl she used to drop snacks while eating outside her home and immediately the crows used to alight and eat them. As she grew older, she rewarded their attention by sharing her lunch on the way to school. Gabi’s hospitality went from being accidental to purposeful, because the family got together, placing food and water in their backyard. Gabi is luckier because she gets gifts from her feathered allies in return. The gifts are shiny ornaments, rusty screws, a black button, a blue paper clip, a yellow bead and likewise. For Gabi these things are more valuable than gold. 

Human beings and crows belong to different species, but a warm encounter can open up new relationships and bonding. Understand each other’s gestures, not needing words. 

Social Network Under Our Feet

Have you heard of ‘Wood Wide Web’ (www)? An amazing underground networking system. Research shows that beneath every forest there is a complex underground web of roots. Fungi helps to connect trees and plants to one another. This ‘www’ helps different tree species to communicate, regulate and influence the forest community. We always thought of fungi as killers of plants, but fungi form close bonds with tree roots, bringing about not infection but connection. These underground encounters help mutual growth. 

The fungi, for its survival, receive food from trees, in the form of carbon rich sugar. The trees, in turn, obtain nutrients from soil through fungi by means of enzymes which trees do not possess. These encounters sustain the forest ecosystem. Why are trees such social beings, and why do they share food? Nature knows the advantages of working together. Many trees together create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. The forest community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Every tree is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. That is why even sick individual trees are supported and nourished until they recover. Trees encounter and communicate with each other, share resources, warn of dangers and sustain the forest ecosystem. All flourishing is mutual. As Richard Powers says, “There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is a forest.”

Encounter Nature and Dwell in the Divine

We never imagined birds would feel with us and enter into a deep bond, and we never thought they could express gratitude and give gifts. We know the forests are thick and beautiful, but least expected that they have been intertwined for 500 million years under our feet, communicating and nourishing each other. These beautiful stories of encounters, humans-birds and tree-fungi-tree, are only snippets of the abundance of awes and wonders of our mother earth.

We marvel at the diverse forms of life around us. This sense of wonder wipes the line between the self and the natural world, diminishes our ego and links us to the larger universe and the divine. The moment you get entangled with nature; you dwell in the presence of the divine. This is what exactly happened to nature mystic Francis of Assisi. He found God in the vast and beautiful fields of nature. Everything spoke to Francis of the infinite love of God – trees, worms, flowers – all were gazing up into the face of God. 

His spirituality was a spirituality of solidarity with creation. Near death, he wrote the famous ‘Canticle of the Creatures.’ The canticle is admired not because it praises God the Creator of all things but through the created things themselves. Instead of the familiar image of stewardship to describe our relationship with nature, he speaks of ‘kinship’: all creatures are my brothers and sisters. He called ‘Brother Sun,’ ‘Sister Moon,’ ‘Brother Fire,’ and ‘Sister Water.’ For him everything in the created world has life. Each in its own way beautiful, mirroring the beauty of God.

Encounter Nature:

To stay in a sense of wonder and connectedness

In ecology, individual existence is an illusion. The fundamental unit of life is interconnection and relationships. Zen mystic Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “Our body is not limited to what is inside the boundary of the skin. It is much more immense. It includes even the layer of air around our earth. There is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us, from a pebble resting at the bottom of the ocean, to the movement of a galaxy millions of light-years away.” 

In ignorance, sometimes we say that one species is more important than the other. Our scientists have named and described only about 1.8 million species and another 10 to 50 million are still to be discovered and named. Pope Francis invites, “From the panoramic vistas to the tiniest living form, nature is a constant source of wonder and awe. It is also the continuing revelation of the divine.” Slowdown, breathe deep, look around and feel. It is an essential thing for us to turn towards nature and enter into contemplation. 

To have a Purpose-filled Life and Personal Wellness

Losing the sense of wonder has serious consequences. It affects our health. Bill Plotkin narrates that, as a psychotherapist, he believes that one of the root problems of all the clients he worked with was, the core restlessness: a sense of “I don’t belong here, I’m not at home.” He ties this core restlessness to a disconnection from nature. He argues that reawakening this sense of wonder to embrace the wild world again is an important and effective therapy. Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth will never feel lonely or weary of life. Whatever be the problems of life, their thoughts can find ways that lead to inner contentment and renewed excitement in living. Beautifully asserted by Rachel Carson, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Embracing the natural world in silence and solitude puts us in perspective. Perspective that prioritises life and true living, caressing the entire universe with love and compassion. 

To Care for the Common Home

In our attitude today, the natural world is a commodity to be bought, sold, used and thrown away. Only love and a sense of sacred will lead us to see the natural world as the primary manifestation of the divine. It is said, “We will not save what we do not love.” We humans have moved from being just awed observers of nature to understanding nature’s wonders, and now we have become nature’s engineers and decision makers. Today we have the power to both understand and to destroy them. Indeed, we have done both. We live in a paradoxically great age of discovery and also of mass extinction. Species vanish at great speed. If you hurt nature, you are hurting yourselves. Our admiration of the beauty of nature should turn to concrete actions to protect it. “Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good,” encourages Pope Francis. We need to learn more about climate change as a moral issue; participate actively in all the ways possible to mitigate climate change; change behaviours and attitudes; and join hands with all those who fight to protect the natural environment. We will conserve what we love, because the trees, the stars, the worms, the lakes, are all our brothers and sisters.

Fr. Ricopar Royan

Courtesy of Magnet. This article first published in its April 2024 issue.