One of the cards that came this Christmas was different from any I had had in the past. It featured a painting, made by the sender, my sister, of a tree bent over in the wind with some leaves flying off and some still attached to the tree. It was titled, “Just let go.” The painting showed a natural process where no consciousness or choice was involved but the title showed it was a metaphor for the advice given in many religious and spiritual traditions, and some secular approaches to healing.
We readily draw lessons from nature about our own lives. We are beings within nature and subject to its laws but with consciousness (minds or souls). Much in poetry, art, and religion addresses what nature forces on our attention—impermanence, the cycles of birth, growth, fruitfulness, decay, death and the limits of our own control. (Anybody who wants to rule the world, it is said, should try to rule a garden first.)
I will come back to the picture of the deciduous tree, its title, and the relevance for humans, trapped as to some extent we all are in addictions, destructive habits, or dysfunctional attachments. But first, let’s ponder how we use nature metaphors to illuminate our lives and our relation to nature.
Practical
Farmers value nature for its fertility. It sustains life. It’s productive and workable. It takes detailed and practical knowledge and skills to cultivate crops and convert them into food or commodities for sale on the market.Theirs is an unsentimental view. Soil is fertile and can be made more so if handled properly. If not, if it’s sterile or exhausted, it’s unsuited for cultivation. It’s useless.
Spiritual
The Romantic poets of the 19th century still depended, as we do to this day, on those who worked the land, who made nature productive for human use. But their personal relation to nature was not practical but emotional or, in its highest expression, spiritual.Their poetry, in Wordsworth’s phrase, has its origin in “emotion recollected in tranquility.” For him, both the work on the land and the poet’s experience and recollection are solitary matters. Wordsworth’s verse about nature, it seems, is autobiographical.
… motionless and still, And, as I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.Wordsworth evinces a deep love of nature, an attitude of joy and gratitude (see his “Tintern Abbey” poem) that’s not to be dismissed as a sentimental indulgence.
Tropical–Nature as Threat
Both practical and spiritual perspectives see nature in terms of its benefits for humans. But as the U.S. Navy hymn—“Oh hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea”—attests, nature can be perilous.Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), the novelist who grew up in a tropical region of Colombia, depicted nature as a luxuriant threat, something to be kept at bay.
Imagine a general who finds himself on the wrong side of a coup, forced to flee his grand house and estate. Immediately, nature in the form of tropical vegetation and animal life moves in and quickly obliterates all sign that humans ever lived there. Nature from this behavior is a vulture, waiting until the human resident moves, dies, or becomes unable to defend himself.
Even in a temperate climate, gardeners and farmers must deal with weeds and bugs, but the tropics teem with life and fertility. Much of this tropical abundance neither provides food for humans nor induces awe as a Romantic poet or modern urban-dweller might experience. For a human settlement to survive and thrive, its inhabitants must keep at bay the vulture Nature.
The Leaves and the Tree
Is the advice to “just let go” in the painting’s title meant for the leaves or the tree? Is it telling the leaves to stop clinging to life, to just let go and be blown away to die and disintegrate? Or is it advice to the tree to let go and to not grasp or cling to things (addictions, possessive or controlling relationships, envy, hatred, pride, material possessions, and so on)?The major religious traditions I know teach non-attachment or detachment in both senses. We suffer by holding on when we need to let go, whether of grown children, addictions and vices, or, when the time comes, life itself. We suffer from craving for things to be other than they are, from trying to be as gods, with more control than we can have. Giving up clinging, grasping, and control is also central to secular health practices that have religious roots, such as Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its cousins or Mindfulness Meditation.
Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths speak of the centrality of suffering in our lives, its source in grasping or clinging, its solution in letting go, and the eight-fold path to doing that. The first three of AA’s Twelve Steps are, in brief summary form, 1. I can’t, 2. God can, and 3. Let God. Or even more briefly, “Let go and let God.”
With this wider perspective, we can see Wordsworth’s Romantic nature poetry as more than autobiography or as unhealthily self-obsessed. I had a tutor once at Oxford some 60 years ago who explained the decline of the poet’s powers by explaining that “Wordsworth was the first poet who had ever written so extensively and exclusively about himself. The problem was he ran out of subject-matter.”
That’s a perceptive statement about the poet’s long decline from the height of his powers. But Wordsworth’s nature poetry is, at its best, a kind of meditation. It recalls the poet’s standing in awe before nature and noting his own response as if observed by another. It’s consistent with empirical evidence of the healing effects of spending time (that is, at least two hours a week) in nature—of the awe defined as “that sense of being in the presence of something greater than ourselves that fills us with wonder.”
