In the early 1980s, I taught environmental education at a camp nestled in the coastal redwood forest near Occidental, California. The students were from elementary schools in cities around the urbanized San Francisco Bay Area. During each five-day session, we hiked in the woods, kissed banana slugs, played games, put on nature plays, read the stars, sang songs, and got a little dirty. For some kids, it was their first time out in nature. The program nudged them out of their comfort zones by design, offering supportive frameworks for negotiating the transition from the familiar hustle-bustle of the city to an eerily quiet place that seemed filled with unknown dangers. It was a hard transition for some kids to make.

Part of our strategy was to show the students that if they gave their attention to nature through their five senses, then nature was transformed from something threatening to a world filled with wonders. I liked to augment our direct sensory exercises by reading certain books during our mid-hike lunch breaks. My favorite book for this purpose, borrowed from the camp library, was The Other Way to Listen by Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall.

The book is about how a young boy learns about the desert landscape of Arizona through an elder and the land itself. The illustrations are so well done that in flipping through the pages I felt as if the boy blended right into the rocks and washes of the desert with no separation. In the story, the elder tells the boy that if you listen deeply enough, you can hear the voice of the desert. This voice is not in the sounds people hear without trying, like the whistling of the wind through the leaves, he tells him; it comes from wildflower seeds sprouting, cactus flowers blooming, stones humming, and corn singing. He tells the boy that he can hear the voice of the earth through patience, being alone, respect, and intense listening.

The boy follows the old man’s advice. He sits in different parts of the desert and listens fiercely. He hears nothing but the wind. Then one day he pierces the silence with his own voice, singing a greeting to the desert hills. To his surprise, the hills sing back to him in their own language.

Each time I read the book to a new group of children, I couldn’t get through the whole book without breaking down. Even though I knew the story very well and wanted very much not to embarrass myself in front of my charges, I couldn’t stop myself from crying. Nor could I come to any understanding of why the book affected me so deeply.

Back then, as a twenty-eight-year-old, I realized that the response of the earth to the boy’s greeting meant that a divine force existed in those hills, not just in “heaven,” as I had been taught in church. It seemed as if the boy was touching the hills’ soul, rather than looking at the land as mere scenery. Although the rational part of me understood that hills aren’t sentient and certainly don’t sing, I was open to possibilities. A girlfriend from graduate school had told me about a time when she was out deep in the forest, with a very present mind, and began to hear a deep humming coming from somewhere in the forest. She followed the sound, tracing it to a very large, old tree. It seemed to come from very old beings, she told me. I delighted in her story. None of this, however, got to the bottom of my emotional reaction to Byrd Baylor’s story.

What I didn’t realize until many years later was that reading The Other Way to Listen touched a deep wound inside me. That wound, very simply, was my own feeling of separateness from the earth. It was a psychological and spiritual wound hidden below the surface—a deep, dark void inside me. It encapsulated the grief I felt in losing a connection both to my own ancestors and to the earth those ancestors knew with intimacy. Looking back after all these years, I realize that Byrd’s story opened that wound, allowing me to feel its intense pain.

And that pain was made worse by my recognition—not yet intellectualized at age twenty-eight, but strongly felt—of what caused the wound. My whole culture was to blame. This meant not only that alienation from nature was imposed on me during my childhood but that the means for healing that wound were not to be found in anything familiar or close at hand. I knew instinctively that my culture had lost the ability to meet nature on a deeper plane of awareness and that if I wanted to regain that ability for myself I would have to look elsewhere.

At twenty-eight, I didn’t know where to look. I sedated the pain with alcohol, tried to ignore it by buying things and keeping myself entertained. These activities numbed the pain for a while but did nothing to doctor the wound. It festered beneath the surface like a deep lesion that would not heal.

Going to graduate school to study nature didn’t help at all. The scientific worldview put forth by my professors only estranged me further from the rest of creation. I was taught to measure and objectify nature, to pick apart mother earth piece by piece to understand what made her tick. I learned how to make and test hypotheses, design and set up experiments, define variables, and make models. Only by positioning myself as an outsider, my professors told me, could I hope to achieve objectivity and avoid the taint of my emotions.

I had the presence of mind, however, to know that going along with the program without a dose of skepticism would be spiritually unthinkable. I realized that the scientific way of looking at the world with my rational, analytical mind alone was incomplete. There had to be other ways to access the intelligence and mysteries of a desert, a forest, a plant or animal and to meet these living entities on their own terms. I began looking for these other ways without success.

When it came time to design and plan my master’s research, I unknowingly set myself up to access the wisdom of a completely different worldview with the power to heal my nature wound. I use the word unknowingly in the conscious sense; I think I knew intuitively that working with Native people in the Sierra Nevada would alter my life in profound ways.

When I began interviewing Southern Sierra Miwuk, Mono, and Foothill Yokuts elders, I was exposed to new ways of thinking about time, the landscape, and the place of humans in the natural world. Some of the elders I interviewed practiced deep engagement with nature through their senses. They still could hear the earth’s language and knew how to communicate with her.

The model presented to me by my Native teachers—the model for how to live connected to the natural world—worked its way slowly into my psyche. Throughout my thirties, forties, and fifties, I walked alone in nature as much as possible, read extensively about earth-based cultures, and continued working with Indians who generously shared their knowledge and stories. The phrase “we are all related” became not just a proposition I could accept but a statement of the way things are. I began to understand that granting beingness, even personhood, to other lifeforms and natural phenomena showed the utmost respect for nature and granted equality to all life.

It took many years, but eventually I got to a place where the experience of the boy in Byrd’s story no longer seemed like a flight of fancy. It just made perfect sense to me that a boy could sing to the hills and hear the hills respond in kind. I had come far along in healing the wound.

I understood, too, the deeper message within Byrd’s story. It is that nature responds to us when we shift our awareness. This idea parallels indigenous cosmologies, which hold that all beings are not just alive but are related to us as kin. Indigenous people call non-human animals and plants “relatives” and know that they respond to our acknowledgement of their existence. “We stand here seeing you,” indigenous people call out to the beings around them, “knowing you are seeing us.” This mutual acknowledgement is the literal root of the word respect, which comes from the Latin verb respicere, meaning “to look back at.”

The unbounded worldview of kinship with all life makes possible a qualitatively different relationship with nature that in turn fosters respect for other beings and the earth. Only then do interactions with nature, practiced again and again, provide an opening to a more profound understanding of the world around us and the possibility of communication with that world. In other words, it is through unbounded kinship that human union with nature takes place.

By practicing over many years the art of being present, I have had the privilege of hearing the soft tick tick tick of deergrass plants, the clicking sounds of red squirrels in a native walnut tree, and the bing bing bing of buckbrush seeds flying out of their capsules. Maybe someday, as I continue to re-learn what it means to be human and go out in the wild to hear what nature has to say, I too will hear rocks murmuring and hills singing.

References

Baylor, Byrd and Peter Parnall. 1978. The Other Way to Listen. Aladdin, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, New York, NY.

Martin, Calvin Luther. 1999. The Way of the Human Being. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.

Edited by Eric Engles