Reading
Now that I'm 60 years old – as of July 31st -- I find myself looking for those who can show me both how to find a deeper sense of purpose in my life and how to age well. One such hero of mine is Loren Eiseley, a naturalist who as a boy, explored the salt flats and ponds near Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was born in 1907. Eiseley realized his dreams of becoming a pre-eminent anthropologist, becoming the head of the department of anthropology and provost at the University of Pennsylvania. But more than any of these, he was a writer and a story-teller.
For instance, listen to these words:
"The story of Eden is a greater allegory than [humanity] has ever guessed. For it was truly a man who, walking memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the world, sat down and passed a wondering hand across his heavy forehead. Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with his ever since. It is the destiny struck by the clock in the body in that brief space between the beginning of the first ice and that of the second. In just that interval a new world of terror and loneliness appears to have been created in the soul of [humanity].
"For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."
Sermon:
It has been said that growing old isn't for sissies, and though I'm far from being old -- aren't I? -- I'm beginning to realize the truth of those words. As I prepare myself for major surgery in less than two weeks to extract a pre-cancerous polyp from my colon, I resent the intrusion of the medical inconveniences, the examinations and tests, trying to keep track of doctors appointments, and then of course working surgery into my busy schedule. I'm sorry but I just don't have time for a medical crisis!
Then it hits me: this is not just an inconvenience to get through as quickly as possible. This is life and death. Or at least it could be. If I had not taken the time to have a colonoscopy in a few years I would have cancer, and I could die. I've done memorial services for people who did die because they couldn't work a colonoscopy into their schedule.
I believe that everything that happens to us, no matter how terrible, is an opportunity to deepen the meaning in our lives and to grow spiritually. I would have been satisfied with my 60th birthday being that opportunity, but being faced with the possibility of cancer has increased my awareness that my time on this earth is diminishing, and I need to reflect on what I've accomplished and what I want to accomplish in my remaining years.
I don't mean that I need to come up with a To Do list of places to visit or awards I need to earn. My yearning is more to live this life I have as deeply and purposefully and joyfully as I possibly can. Like the journey of Loren Eiseley I want mine to be an immense one, a journey that encompasses as much of this glorious life as possible. Don't we all?
Loren Eiseley is a hero of mine not because of any huge accomplishments he achieved but simply because of his closeness to life. He was a man who never spoke of spirituality, and yet his intimacy with the world around him infused him with spirit.
In his younger days he wrote and published verse, and in later writings on evolution and nature it’s this poetic revelation that merged with scientific insight bringing his books to life. He wandered the flat plains of the midwest, the pungent marshes of the south, the dense jungles of Africa, the arid deserts of more than one continent, and just about anywhere else on this planet where there was a trace of life and a glimmer of beauty.
But his journey was not limited to two legs or a noisy machine with four wheels. The imagination was his vehicle, an imagination that reached back to the very beginnings of time itself as well as to the outer limits of the cosmos. The immense journey he spoke of is the journey of life itself, and particularly the journey of human beings, that animal that climbed from the slime of the sea to the heights of the stars.
Eiseley unveiled for us a world alive with mystery. That, above all else, was his message: that life is filled with mystery and wonder, with riddles and paradox, and the purpose of our journey on earth is not necessarily to solve the mysteries, to answer the riddles, but instead to experience and appreciate them fully, to revel in them.
Eiseley tells the story of riding on horseback across the prairie until he sees a slit in the earth just large enough for him to squeeze into. As he walks down into the Slit he could see eons of time etched into the sandstone on both sides of him until finally, he comes eye-to-eye with an animal skull. As he begins to chip away at the rock, digging out the skull, his mind asks the question, “The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?”.
NATURE AS MIRROR
When Eiseley climbed down into that sandstone crevice he was actually climbing down into the human soul. By wandering through the ruins of past civilizations or staring into the empty eyes of a skull or simply pondering the flight of a bird, he was in reality exploring the spirit of humanity.
Eiseley saw much more in nature than most of us do. Nature is a mirror of the human soul. In nature he found all the mystery, the beauty, and terror that has merged into the making of each person.
"[Humanity] has always had two ways of looking at nature," he wrote, "and these two divergent approaches to the world can be observed among modern primitive peoples, as well as being traceable far into the primitive past. [Humanity] has a belief in seen and unseen nature. [She] is both pragmatist and mystic. [She] has been so from the beginning, and it may well be that the quality of [her] inquiring and perceptive intellect will cause [her] to remain so till the end."
Eiseley did not put humanity and nature in opposite corners, ready to spring on one another for a fight to the finish. Human beings are within nature, an inextricable part of it, no matter how much we try to deny the relationship. He criticized our hubris in contending that we are demi-gods, somehow evolved beyond nature into our own realm of mastership. He called for humility in our relationship with the world around us, a genuine sense of unity and equality with the Earth and its creatures.
For Eiseley, human beings are only "one of the many appearances of the thing called life, not its perfect image, for life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time." Yet humanity is also unique: we have "escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future."
REACHING OUT
Humanity is nature looking at itself, nature thinking and reaching back into the past and forward into the future. Here Eiseley writes about our vision beyond the years:
"Whenever I catch a frog's eye ... I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him. And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of reaching out."
Eiseley was fascinated by that strange, wondrous transition from non-human to human. In our voices he heard all the grunts and groans, the visions and dreams, of our distant ancestors: "The profound shock of the leap from animal to human status," he wrote, “is echoing still in the depths of our subconscious minds." He believed we are still haunted by those ghosts of our past, though they are not necessarily unpleasant phantoms.
"As a modern man," he wrote, "I have sat in concert halls and watched huge audiences floating dazed on the voice of a great singer. Alone in the dark box I have heard far off as if ascending out of some black stairwell the guttural whisperings and bestial coughing out of which that voice arose."
Eiseley looked down the aeon's of time at the evolution of human life and marveled at the mystery of it all. And yet, when he looked at modern humans and especially many of the scientists and technocrats he wondered if the immense journey of humanity was nearing its end.
Eiseley criticized those scientists who were only scientists, who look only into their instruments and not into the eyes of nature or into the depths of their own imaginations. He saw a need for modest men and women who would listen to the world speak and who would dare to speak back with gentleness.
Eiseley spoke of the need for the contemplative naturalist of the past, a person who in a less-frenzied century had time to observe, to speculate, and to dream. That person was a vital part of our society for, as he wrote, "when the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that [humanity] and all that made [it] will be in that instant gone."
ENOUGH TAMPERING
One of his stories that convinces us of the need for gentleness is about a man who was one of the chief architects of the atomic bomb. The scientist was out wandering in the woods one day with a friend when he came upon a small tortoise.
Overcome with pleasurable excitement, he took up the tortoise and started home, thinking to surprise his children with it. After a few steps he paused and surveyed the tortoise doubtfully. "What's the matter?" asked his friend.
Without responding, the great scientist slowly retraced his steps as precisely as possible, and gently set the turtle down upon the exact spot from which he had taken him up. Then he turned solemnly to his friend. "It just struck me," he said, "that perhaps, for one man, I have tampered enough with the universe." He turned, and left the turtle to wander on its way.
Eiseley did not call for an end to our tampering with the universe, but he did urge us to handle it with care and sensitivity. He was a man of science, but also a man of feeling. He was a great humanist among scientists trying to reconcile science and religion in an age when the two have turned into enemies. His message was that the "mystery still exists." No matter what secrets science uncovers the mystery of life will always be there.
In words that ring with relevance for us today as we hear rumors of cloning human beings, Eiseley wrote:
"If the day comes when the slime of the laboratory for the first time crawls under [humanity's] direction, we shall have great need of humbleness. It will be difficult for us to believe, in our pride of achievement, that the secret of life has slipped through our fingers and eludes us still. We will list all the chemicals and the reactions. The [scientists] who have become gods will pose austerely before the popping flashbulbs of news photographers, and there will be few to consider -- so deep is the mind-set of an age -- whether the desire to link life to matter may not have blinded us to the more remarkable characteristics of both..."
So this is my friend and hero Loren Eiseley, or at least a small fragment of the man and his immense journey. He has been helpful to me in my journey, teaching me to open my eyes and my ears to the world around me, to wonder and dream, to lift up rocks gently to see what lies beneath, and to speak to the forces around me, to call out to the wind and rain, the sun and trees.
CLIMBING WALLS
But most importantly, he has urged me, and I hope you as well, to enter into an immense journey of my own by wandering through the vast landscape of my own mind in search for beauty and wonder. Eiseley wrote:
"I am middle-aged now, but in the autumn I always seek for it again hopefully. On some day when the leaves are red, or fallen, and just after the birds are gone, I put on my hat and an old jacket, and over the protests of my wife that I will catch cold, I start my search. I go carefully down the apartment steps and climb, instead of jump, over the wall. A bit further I reach an unkempt field full of brown stalks and emptied seed pods.
"By the time I get to the wood I am carrying all manner of seeds hooked in my coat or piercing my socks or sticking by ingenious devices to my shoestrings. I let them ride. After all, who am I to contend against such ingenuity? It is obvious that nature, or some part of it in the shape of these seeds, has intentions beyond this field and has made plans to travel with me. We, the seeds and I, climb another wall together and sit down to rest, while I consider the best way to search for the secret of life. The seeds remain very quiet and some slip off into the crevices of the rock. A wooly-bear caterpillar hurries across a ledge, going late to some tremendous transformation, but about his he knows as little as I."
Loren Eiseley’s immense journey ended in 1977 at the age of 70 years. But when I read his words I can't help but think that he believed as Peter Pan, that death must be the grandest of all adventures. I imagine that in his own way he is still climbing over walls in search for the mystery of life, going late to a tremendous transformation of his own. And one day I will dare to follow.
So may it be.
Resources:
The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley
The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eiseley
The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley and Gary Holthaus
