Herons yes, humans no

photo by Frank Gioia

Some days, the dread really gets to me. I'm worried about my aging sister in the house on Amador Avenue in Berkeley. I'm worried about the ICE agents reportedly prowling around in Great Barrington. Here in Costa Rica where I'm spending the month of February, I immerse myself in the sea water and the jungle to dilute the anxiety. It's a luxury and it's only intermittently successful.

Much as I think I believe that the natural world is one organism, the body of God, and that we are all its limbs, its ears, I sometimes wonder whether, on the contrary, nature is completely indifferent to us. It goes about its business without a flicker of interest in our preferences. If it feels like snowing, it snows. Screw your travel plans.  I've been thinking deeply about this in Central America where the mangroves and humid forests are teeming with life that disguises itself, often in impenetrable camouflage, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we can see it. Everywhere in the national parks, you see people with puzzled expressions on their faces. They promised me a sloth. Where the hell is the sloth? We catch a glimpse of the occasional iguana and, of course, the white-faced monkeys. The monkeys, like us, their primate kin, crave sociability and seem to have grandstanding tendencies. Do not, however, confuse them with the exhibitionist-in-chief. Their motives are benign and they do not bite off more than they can chew. Most of the animals hide in plain sight or move so fast that your iPhone is always a step or two behind. The obsidian-colored rock along the beach forms the perfect background for the skittering black crabs. All you can see is motion. On the floor of the forest, everything looks like it's been tossed out of the back of a truck, leaves on top of vines, on top of dead wood, on top of fallen coconuts. I see no order in it, nothing that ties it all together. I have learned that the bats eat the mosquitoes, but it would take another lifetime, which I may or may not have, for my born-in-the-city sensibility to catch up to the larger meaning of this other, more ancient reality. From a boat in the estuary, the guide tells us that no humans, including indigenous peoples, have ever lived in the mangroves we see as we pass by. Herons yes, humans no.

I catch the pungent whiff of a theological question lurking here. This sense of a gulf separating me from the ways of nature, this yearning that stalks me wherever I go, feels like the desire to know and be known by an immanent divine presence, by the One who embraces me and allows me to rest and feel finally at home. Especially now. Like everyone else toting cameras and binoculars, I want to be embedded in nature, to be recognized and loved by the kingfishers and date palms as one of their own. Still, in Costa Rica, where the Pacific surf knocks me down, filling my eyes with searing salt, and the relentless sun, despite all precautions, is nevertheless persistent, I am humbled. I have found, like Copernicus and Darwin before me, that I am not the center of the universe. There are other songs and other stories. I have a potent experience of scale, of divine transcendence, of nature's detachment and my ultimate insignificance. I tell you, it's a great relief.

Some days, it allows me to lower the heat a notch on the political boil, carnivorous politicians strutting their blood lust day in and day out. Years ago on tropical vacations, no cell phones, no Facebook, we could escape the Reagan rowdies, the Bush bozos, but now we cannot disconnect. We know all to well what the big crybaby and his friends are up to. But when I look out on the sea, petrels and terns circling in the expanse of sky overhead, something new comes into focus, the glimmer of a new thought about my relationship to the natural world. I see that it's not there to entertain me, even though every night the mauve and salmon at the horizon stops me in my tracks. It's there to live and breathe in spite of the criminal interference of human larceny, the arrogance of rapacious over-development. Let it be, I say. Let it do what it needs to do before it vanishes. Care about it, love it, whether or not it cares about us. Resist the ascendant climate deniers. Make the necessary political moves on nature's behalf, even though the message of nature is the very opposite of politics. The toucans and the bamboo don't speak the shallow language of lies and false promises. They speak a deep truth that reveals itself to each of us from time to time according to our willingness to listen.


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