Earlier this year, I read Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", which is a Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction book of reflections on nature with some philosophy, biology, and theology thrown into the mix. This is very much NOT the kind of book that I normally read and it took some effort to get all the way through, but it was well worth the effort as it's the kind of book that lingers with you for months. It could inspire all kinds of discussions, but for this blog post, I'll do two:
1. What is art?
The best kind of art shows rather than tells. (Credit to Kenny for this idea.) There are plenty of articles telling me that I should slow down, stop and smell the roses, unplug from technology, and spend time in nature. I agree with these sentiments, but when you are just told to spend more time in nature, it feels like one more item on the to-do list.
What Dillard does, and what makes her writing true art, is she shows you examples of things in nature that are beautiful, or startling, or surprising -- and all of this makes you want to get outside and see an example of the thing she's talking about. One example: Eels (yes, the snake-like sea creatures) sometimes migrate across meadows! Check out this description: "Imagine a chilly night and a meadow; balls of dew droop from the curved blades of grass. All right: the grass at the edge of the meadow begins to tremble and sway. Here come the eels. The largest are five feet long. All are silver. They stream into the meadow, sift between grasses and clover, veer from your path. There are too may to count. All you see is a silver slither, like twisted ropes of water falling roughly, a one-way milling and mingling over the meadow and slide to the creek. Silver eels in the night: a barely-made-out seething as far as you can squint, a squirming, jostling torrent of silver eels in the grass." How crazy would it be to see that sight??
"Pilgrim" is full of examples like this, facts about nature that make me pay close attention to what's around me as I'm in the backyard or out for a walk. I'm not paying attention to nature because some HuffPost article told me it would be good for me; I'm paying attention because Annie Dillard showed me examples of things that would be amazing to observe.
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2. I believe that God is eventually going to restore the earth to perfection - what will nature look like then?
A key part of my Christian beliefs is that, in the future, God is going to create a new earth, and that it will be perfect. So in some ways it will be like what we have now - we will inhabit physical bodies, live in a real physical time and space where we can see and touch and taste, and still co-exist with nature and with other human beings. But in more important ways, it will be nothing like what we have now, because all the bad things will be gone. Our bodies will not be subject to health problems of any kind and they will not experience decay and death. No more war, school shootings, poverty. No more famine, tsunamis, earthquakes. No more brokenness in relationships, abuse, abandonment. No more of me acting in ways that are selfish, lazy, prideful, narcissistic, cowardly.
Going back to the book, Dillard describes in great detail how very brutal nature can be. I tend to think of nature in a much more cartoonish, Bob Ross type way - beautiful mountain vistas, birds singing their songs to each other, turtles lazing in the sun. Dillard talks about these kinds of things a little bit, but she spends much more time describing animal species that eat eat their own young, or purposefully abandon their newborns, or eat their mates. She points out that 10% of the world's species are parisitic and ponders what it's like to live as a parasite (or as the host of a parasite). It's a kill or be killed world for animals, from the most microscopic insects to the carnivores at the top of the food chain.
So my question is: what will nature look like when the world is restored to perfection? Will the parasitic species cease to exist? Will there even be such a thing as a carnivore? Will praying mantises no longer eat their mates? Will poisonous animals no longer be poisonous? I don't think we can answer any of these questions, but it's interesting to think about.
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