You can't fast forward a sunset ~ and other TIME-ly thoughts

A while back I was teaching a circle dance to some children and told them to go clockwise.  They looked at me blankly and had no idea what I was talking about.  Their generation is used to digital clocks -- which do not go in circles at all -- and that got me to thinking about how we experience time.   "Clockwise" comes from the way that the shadow moves on a sundial.   Later, this was carried over onto the faces of mechanical clocks.  In both cases, time is seen as a continuous, cyclical flow.  

An hourglass, on the other hand, is not cyclical. It has a beginning and an end. But it still shows a flow of time, as the grains of sand slowly run down. A digital clock, however, shows time as broken up into a bunch of individual numbered moments that are often disconnected from each other.  All of this may seem like a bunch of nitpicking, but I wonder how it affects the way we see the natural world.   Nature goes in cycles. Days, months, years-- all are based on the somewhat circular patterns of rotations and orbits. Even the elliptical orbits of comets go in cycles.  And they all move at their own pace. But are we losing that sense of the "flow" of time?

So last week I was watching a program on PBS about how families are spending less and less time outdoors, and how this, combined with the high speed of modern technology, is indeed distorting our inner sense of time.  "You can't fast forward a sunset," one of the panelists said, and that statement has stuck with me. In a world where you can speed up, slow down, or freeze-frame a movie, or watch it over and over anytime you want to, the slow steady pace of nature  often seems boring. So kids prefer to stay indoors and play speedy video games instead.

Yet it is precisely that slowness that allows us to relax and tune in to God's creation.    Being with nature is a form of meditation. Our bodies evolved in nature, the Garden of Eden was in nature -- however you define it, we need the natural pace of with nature.  But nowadays, even meditation is speeded up -- or at least people try to shortcut it. They go to a weekend seminar to get "enlightened" and are disappointed it it doesn't "work" right away.   But true enlightenment is a lifelong process that takes hours and hours of quiet contemplation.  You can't get there by plunking down your money for a workshop and no, there isn't an app for it, either.

The only way you can freeze-frame a sunset - or any event in nature - is to take a picture of it. Even then, you only have a small part of the real experience.  In photographing sunrises (which I seem to do more than sunsets lately), I have found that there is always a perfect moment where everything in the picture is just right.  The minutes before and after that are beautiful, too, but that peak moment is the best picture in the series.  However, in order to capture that moment, I have to patiently sit there for about 45 minutes or more, because the sunrise is going to unfold at its own pace, and there's not a darned thing I can do about it. It's happening on God's time, not mine.

Watching a sunrise is a "letting go" experience that requires us to fit into nature's pace, not the other way around. Only when you are willing to just sit there quietly and absorb the experience are you able to notice the subtle changes from second to second and minute to minute. There's that magical moment about an hour before dawn,  when the first bird begins to sing, when the rooster begins to crow and the wild geese begin to honk. In Jewish law, the earliest time you can say the Shema prayer is when you can distinguish a blue thread from a white one.  Try it at dawn sometime.

  

Sunrise on the Gershom farm
Pine County, Minnesota, Sept. 21, 2006

  

To collect or not to collect -- is that really the question?

A while back, I had a conversation with a vegan who thought it was wrong for children to catch fireflies in jars.  Her reasoning was, that the flashes were mating signals and we would be interrupting their love lives.  "How would you like to just fall in love and then somebody grabs you and puts you in a cage?"  Interesting anthropomorphism, and a perfect example of how our society confuses sex with love.  But I highly doubt that fireflies actually fall in love.   A Black Widow spider certainly doesn't -- she EATS her mate.  So does a praying mantis sometimes. Nature in the raw is often far from romantic.

Still, the question remains:  Is it ethical to allow children to collect living things from nature?  My vegan friends say no, we don't need zoos or bugs in jars, the kids can learn from watching nature videos.  But TV just isn't "real" in the same way as seeing the actual live animal.  Things happen fast on nature shows because they edit out the long hours of waiting for the "action."  But actually stalking a frog takes focus and patience!

Thinking back to my own childhood, we regularly caught fireflies, watched them flash in the jar in our rooms after lights out, then released them in the morning.  I can't say what effect this had on the fireflies, but I do know that my sister and I learned a lot from watching the various bugs, toads, snakes, and other things we caught and kept in captivity for a while.   From our "catch and release" activities, we discovered a lot about nature firsthand.

We learned that you can't just throw any old leaves in with the caterpillars, you need the right species of plant and a way to keep the leaves fresh (which we accomplished by covering the mouth of a small jar of water with foil, then poking holes for the plant stems.  The food stayed fresh without caterpillars falling into the water and drowning.)   We learned what toads, snakes and turtles eat, and how they eat it, where to find it.   And we also learned how to look up and identify the things we found.  By 5th grade, I was reading college-level biology books.   And I must admit that I also collected insects in the usual way, mounting them on pins in boxes and attracting the attention of the high school biology teacher, who invited me to go on a museum entomology field trip.   Although I no longer collect, I still love entomology.

So I find myself wondering if kids today, who are often  forbidden by well-meaning parents to do this kind of hands-on learning, are  really discovering very much about the outdoors.  Have we gotten so politically correct about nature that we are defeating the purpose by creating a barrier between children and nature?  Lately there has been a public service ad running about "discover the forest," where two kids wander into the woods, turn over a log and look at some bugs, and then Shrek come along and eats one (a bug, that is, not a child!)  A cute fantasy, but in real life, how many parents would let their kids turn over a log in the first place?  (If you do, please teach them to put it back as it was when they are done, so you don't destroy the homes of things that live there.)

When I was a kid, there would have been no need for such an advertisement.   You could hardly keep me out of the small suburban woodlot we called our "forest."  Contrast that with my 8-year-old grandson, who has been spending daycare time with us in the country this summer, and who, although he has 15 acres here to play and explore in, rarely goes outside on his own.   Too boring.  When he first came, he could not tell a daisy from a sunflower, but has gradually learned some basics about the outdoors.   Today, we both looked up an unfamiliar purple flower and learned it was a species of vervain.  When we are outside, we watch things happening in nature, such as bees pollenating squash flowers or wasps hunting caterpillars among the broccoli -- things he would never stop and watch on his own.   One day, I took him into the back woods and then told him to lead me home.  He did -- by following the sound of our roosters crowing and our geese honking.  "See?" I said, "You won't get lost if you pay attention to what is around you."

So is it ethical to catch and collect things?  I think it depends on how you do it.  Certainly it is wrong to pull wings off flies or leave animals starving or dying of boredom in cages.  But I see nothing wrong with letting kids keep a toad for a few days, then release it back into it own environment.  When I find a snake or turtle, I bring it in the house for the kids to see.  Who knows?  Maybe the snake benefits spirtually from having helped a child learn more about the world.   In the long run, maybe a little reptilian inconvenience now might well save that snake's home in the future.

Nature Deficit Disorder and Jews

I just finished reading a book called Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. “Nature deficit disorder” is not a medical diagnosis; it’s a term he made up to describe what he sees as a very serious deficit in childhood experience nowadays. The book examines some serious psychological research and concludes that direct exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and for the physical and emotional health of children and adults.

Louv makes the point that, as parents have become more and more worried about child abductions, accidents on playgrounds, lawsuits, etc., the lives of children have become overly controlled and, more and more, their playtime is all happening indoors. With many housing developments and condos having covenants forbidding tree houses, playhouses, even gardens in some areas, kids who do have a backyard have only dull, boring places to play. Everything is being so tightly organized by adults, there is little or no free time for children to develop their creativity. Add to this the fact that kids are spending hours and hours in front of TVs and computers, developing obesity problems and having heart attacks in high school (unheard of when I was growing up), and there is a serious problem affecting modern society.

And we Jews are not immune.  In fact, I think we have a worse case than the general population.  I am often appalled at the lack of basic knowledge about nature in the Jewish community.  In Chaim Potok's children's  book, The Tree of Here, he describes a robin living in a hole on the tree -- but robins do not live in holes!   Even Artscroll's beautiful coffeetable version of Perek Shirah: The Song of the Universe  misidentifed a photo of a Grackle as a Starling, and one of the rooster pix is really a hen.  Nor are these the only nature-oriented bloopers I've found in recent Jewish books.   Although the Psalms and siddur (Jewish prayerbook) contain many verses about God's beautiful creation and how everything in nature is praising God, these have become mere words to be recited at breakneck speed with little thought as to their meaning in the real world.

So, although many of our patriarchs and matriarchs were shepherds and farmers who spent a lot of time outdoors, and we have their beautiful references to nature in our classical texts, these teachings don’t stand out to most Jews nowadays.  Why?  Because there is no real contact with the outdoors to ground the texts in everyday life.

For example, there is so much pollution in the atmosphere in urban areas that even if someone were to try to gauge the time for saying the evening Shema by seeking three stars, they would err -- if they could see any stars at all.  So they rely on their wristwatches and astronomical calculations, which are not bad things in themselves, but if you have never looked up at a starry sky or listened to a chorus of birds singing at dawn, how can you make any real connection with the texts that describe such things?  How can you picture God as a mother eagle sheltering Her nest if you’ve never seen a bird nesting, and know eggs only as something in Styrofoam boxes that you buy at the supermarket? 

In many of our yeshivas, even the teachers often lack these firsthand experiences with nature. So they focus on stuff that is familiar to them, namely, the rules of kashrut and using animals as food.  This, in turn, causes Jewish kids to see nature as something totally utilitarian.  My good friend Richard Schwartz (author of Judaism and Vegetarianism) tells how, when he was at an outdoor Sukkot gathering, the kids saw some ducks and said "Let's schecht (slaughter) them."   This is a far cry from when I was a kid and we used to go feed the ducks in the park.   When was the last time you and your kids did that?

I was very lucky, in that I grew up in an area where I could go play in the woods --and my parents let me do it.  This was not wasted time -- it was learning in a very different way.  It enriched my understanding of Torah in ways that my nature-deprived urban brethren often cannot grasp.   And it ultimately led to me becoming a Breslov Hasid, because of Rebbe Nachman's teaching about hisboddisus -- the practice of spending an hour alone with God each day.  He recommended doing it in a forest or field  because, he said, the plants and animals would join in our prayers.  And he meant that literally. 

Breslovers still try to do that today, although in a city it is hard to find the solitude. But at least they have the teachings about spending time in nature, which many other groups do not. In fact, mainstream Jews have sometimes considered the Breslovers crazy to go wandering in the woods. Rabbi Odesser, (may he rest in peace), a Breslov teacher who died in 1994, once told how, when he started following that path in his youth, the local rabbi warned his parents that roaming in the woods could cause their son to literally lose his mind. Now, I don’t think being with nature makes you go insane. Quite the opposite is true: It restores your sanity and opens you up to connect with God in a very real and personal way.