Wonder

A 22-month-old tigress photographed in November 2011 in India's Bandhavgarh reserve... startled by a floating leaf, perhaps mistaking it for a snake?!

George Schaller with a small friend.

Happy Thanksiving, every one

~ Patrick McDonnell, MUTTS

Cynical Capitalists

Privatize profit.
Socialize loss.

~ David Budbill, Happy Life (2011)

What Silence Might Say

I watch the bowl, held
On trembling fingertips.
The bowl itself is steady.
Being struck,
Metal and wood resonate
In sympathy.
The bowl hums.
Its vibration slows, and stills.

I watch the pond, willing
Ripples of surface agitation.
Rain falls, reaching bottom.
It is all accepted, taken in,
Received.
Light dances, currents, atoms, spirit
Flows.
Sympathetic resonance, this
Not so minor miracle.
The water stills.
Shadows lengthen.

The bowl hums, deeply.
The pond dances and stills.
I watch my fingers stop
Trembling.
And wonder
What it is.
And whether gratitude can express
Or ever be
Payment in kind.

~ Jennifer Scarlott

What can educators do to foster real intelligence?... We can attempt to teach the things that one might imagine the earth would teach us: silence, humility, holiness, connectedness, courtesy, beauty, celebration, giving, restoration, obligations, and wildness.

~ David Orr

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question "Whither?"

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

~ Robert Frost

to Julia

The Otter found the outlet of String Lake, traversed another lake and came to the outlet of it. The deep drift in the lakes was slight. No senses could perceive it. He swam, however, with so little willfulness that the flow could give his movements a direction. The guidance of instinct is like that flow, is like a trail in the water that can be followed, although it cannot be consciously scented, seen, or felt.

~ One Day at Teton Marsh, by Sally Carrighar (1979)

Bella joy

Wagtail and Baby

A baby watched a ford, whereto
A wagtail came for drinking;
A blaring bull went wading through,
The wagtail showed no shrinking.

A stallion splashed his way across,
The birdie nearly sinking;
He gave his plumes a twitch and toss,
And held his own unblinking.

Next saw the baby round the spot
A mongrel slowly slinking;
The wagtail gazed, but faltered not
In dip and sip and prinking.

A perfect gentleman then neared;
The wagtail, in a winking,
With terror rose and disappeared;
The baby fell a-thinking.

~ Thomas Hardy

Sweet sixteen...

The Panther and the Mountain Lion

Dear Cub kids,

I love poetry! You too? Do any of you know this poem, written in 1907 by Rainer Maria Rilke?

The Panther

The pacing past the bars, the steady stare,
A tiredness grown so nothing holds him here,
Of a thousand bars he seems aware,
A thousand bars, no world beyond this sphere.

With supple strength, with soft and gentle mode
He turns in smallest circles about his flank
It’s like a dance of power around a node
His great volition standing stunned and blank.

Sometimes his eyelids rise so he can sense
A picture spread across the moment’s chart,
Descend through limbs of sinew, silent, tense
And thinning, fading, cease within his heart.

From 1906 to 1908, Rilke, a German poet, worked as a secretary to the renowned French sculptor Auguste Rodin. After studying a small, bronze statue of a tiger by Rodin, Rilke decided to visit a panther at the zoo in Paris’ Jardin des Plantes. Feeling a deep sympathy for a fellow being’s pain, Rilke wrote a poem that conveys the despair and blighted life of every big cat in captivity.

Here in America, we have a single big cat species: the mountain lion, a beautiful, tawny, green-eyed creature with an enormous, long, thick tail like a snow leopard’s. Mountain lions, also known as cougars, pumas, catamounts and by many other names, used to roam all over this country, observing no boundaries in Canada and Latin America as well. As with so many countless species, the fortunes of the mountain lion plummeted the moment that Europeans set foot on this continent.

There continue to be small populations of mountain lions in the western states and even as far east as Wisconsin and Minnesota, but for decades, reports of mountain lion sightings in the Northeast have been discounted as wild rumor.

All that changed this summer.

In early June, people in the town of Greenwich, in the state of Connecticut, just a 40-minute drive from where I live along the Hudson River in New York City, began to claim that they had seen a very big, very wild cat, prowling through their neighborhood, along the edges of fancy schools and golf courses and busy roads. Authorities responded that anyone thinking they had seen a mountain lion, free and on the move in upscale suburban Connecticut, needed to get some sleep and have their eyes checked.

But then something tragic happened, late at night on June 11 in a neighboring town, that put all of the arguments to rest: a young, male mountain lion was struck and killed on a highway. “Oh my goodness,” all the officials exclaimed, “there really was a mountain lion in our state, where the big cats haven’t been seen in well over a hundred years!” But, the officials declared, we are certain that this was just a once-captive cat that had been “set free” when someone no longer wanted to keep it as a pet.

But everyone was in for yet another, even bigger surprise. This mountain lion turned out never to have been, like Rilke’s panther, a caged beast turning in “smallest circles about his flank… his great volition stunned and blank.” No, said scientists and cougar experts who tested the dead animal’s DNA and compared it with test results in their files. This cougar had walked over 1,500 miles to meet its end at the front of a speeding vehicle not far from the Atlantic Ocean. The cat’s DNA matched the genetic structure of a population of mountain lions in the Black Hills of South Dakota, AND, matched the DNA of a particular young male known to have roamed through Wisconsin and Minnesota in 2009 and 2010.

Scientists and even mountain lion experts were stunned by what they learned. Like other big cats, young male cougars reach an age where they must “disperse” from their family of origin, in search of their own territory and mate. But this young traveler, estimated to be somewhere between the ages of two and five, had wandered a great deal farther than the usual 100 miles. Other tests performed on the dead cat proved that it was indeed a wild cougar – it had not been neutered or declawed and had no microchip implanted for identification. It did have porcupine quills under its skin, and DNA matching that of a known population of wild cats out west.

Yes, there are big cats here in the northeastern U.S., just as there are bears, moose, coyotes, beavers and many a wild creature. No “thousand bars” for them. But so many other perils, like the car that put an end to this beautiful creature’s search for home, and hostile humans everywhere who have lost all understanding of what it is to live with wild fellow beings. We will need Rilke’s awareness that we long for the same things, before we find ourselves at peace with the cougar in our midst.

Your friend,

Jen

(Written today for the September, 2011 issue of Sanctuary Asia's Cub magazine.)

In Memoriam

Australia's lesser bilby Macrotis leucura

Mary Janelle Corsaut Scarlott ~ born Hutchinson, KS, 7/30/28, died Riverside, CT, 4/17/92, sister of Aneta Corsaut and Jesse Corsaut, daughter of Opal Swarens and Jesse Corsaut, Sr., mother of Kerry, Kate, Jennifer, Ann, grandmother of Julia, Meghan, Mary Ann, Jonathan, wife of Charles.

(Highly) Recommended Reading

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World

by David Abram (Vintage, 1997)

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

~ Henry Beston, from The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, first published in 1928.

(Photo: Red knots feeding on horseshoe crab eggs, Mispillion Harbor, Delaware, May 20, 2009, Gregory Breese, USFWS)

peace on earth

(Photo: Olaf Dziallas)

As the crickets' soft autumn hum

Is to us

So are we to the trees

As are they

To the rocks and the hills


~ Gary Snyder

The birds have dissolved into the sky
And the last remaining clouds have faded away
We sit together the mountain and me
Until only the mountain remains

~ Li Po, Zazen on Ching-t'inig Mountain

What have you done with your own gift of life?





(Amos Oz, Black Box)

California was one sweet bee garden throughout its entire length, north to south, and all the way across the snowy Sierra to the ocean. Wherever a bee might fly within the bounds of this virgin wilderness—through the Redwood forests, along the banks of the rivers, along the bluffs and headlands fronting the sea, over valley and plain, park and grove, and deep, leafy glen, or far up the piney slopes of the mountains—bee flowers bloomed in lavish abundance… broad, flowing folds hundreds of miles in length—zones of polleny forests, zones of flowery chaparral, stream tangles of rubus and wild rose, sheets of golden compositae, beds of violets, beds of mint, beds of bryanthus and clover… During the months of March, April, and May, the great central plain was one smooth, continuous bed of honey bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than four hundred miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky—one sheet of purple and gold.

~ John Muir's description of what California's great Central Valley used to be

(Photo: Larry Herzberg)

…no Scotch boy that I know of ever failed to listen with enthusiasm to the songs of skylarks. Oftentimes on a broad meadow near Dunbar we stood for hours enjoying their marvelous singing and soaring. From the grass where the nest was hidden the male would suddenly rise, as straight as if shot up, to a height of perhaps thirty or forty feet, and, sustaining himself with rapid wing-beats, pour down the most delicious melody, sweet and clear and strong, overflowing all bounds, then suddenly he would soar higher again and again, every higher and higher, soaring and singing until lost to sight even on perfectly clear days…

~ John Muir

He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

~ Epictetus

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~ Wendell Berry

"Days need birds and so they come..."

~ James Schuyler

(Photo: Rosalie Winard, American avocets, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Box Elder County, Utah, 2003)

(Photo: Louise Docker)

Any fool...

"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed--chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones."

John Muir, from "The American Forests," Atlantic Monthly, 1897.

"I will never forget the day. It was June 7, 1976. A tigress I had named Padmini, after my daughter, was seen by me with four cubs! I was wonderstruck and followed this family day and night. Initially, the tigress was unhappy with my presence, but eventually she began to trust me and seemed to treat me as a friend!"

~ Fateh Singh Rathore describing the first time that he saw tiger cubs in Ranthambhore.

(Photo: Ranthambhore tigress, Govind Sagar Bharadwaj)

Fateh's Ecstasy

~ August 10, 1938 - March 1, 2011


(Photo: Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos)

Earth, make me a channel of thy peace--that where there is hatred, I may bring love--that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness--that where there is discord, I may bring harmony--that where there is error, I may bring truth--that where there is doubt, I may bring faith--that where there is despair, I may bring hope--that where there are shadows, I may bring light--that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Earth, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted--to understand, than to be understood--to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to life.

~ a (green and secular version of ) a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi

(Photo: banyan tree, Ranthambhore National Park, Rajasthan)

Thoreau's Ecstasy

"Thoreau, it seems, was endowed with an almost preternaturally acute sense of hearing...

'... And now I see the beauty and full meaning of that word sound. Nature always possesses a certain sonorousness, as in the hum of insects, the booming of ice -- which indicates her sound state. God's voice is but a clear bell sound. I drink in a wonderful health -- a cordial -- in sound. The effect of the slightest tinkling in the horizon measures my own soundness... All sights and sounds are seen and heard both in time and eternity. And when the eternity of any sight or sound strikes the eye or ear -- they are intoxicated with delight.'

In such reflections on Thoreau's frequent experiences of acoustic rapture, we see manifestations of the doubleness characteristic of Thoreau's mature ecstatic vision. Ecstasy results when a single impression overflows its own natural borders and propagates itself through a wider arena of consciousness, beyond time, beyond location."

~ Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness

(Photo: Ivan Kruys)

I just heard the first red-winged blackbird, Agelaiu phoeniceus, of the year, down by the river. 8:42 a.m. Delicious, peaceful sound.

"For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought:
For there is nothing lost, but may be found, if sought."

~ Edmund Spenser

treasure

Fateh Singh Rathore in Ranthambhore, his gift to tigers and the world. February 11, 2011.

(Photos: Belinda Wright)

Awareness is immanent and infinitely available, but it is camouflaged, like a shy forest animal.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arriving at Your Own Door

(Photo: Keith Slausen, U.S. Forest Service -- Sierra Nevada red fox Vulpes vulpes necator, thought to be extinct for 20 years until confirmed via camera trap and DNA testing in September 2010)

Amur tigers or oak toilet seats? (hint: we can't have both)

More highly recommended viewing

Please visit The Story of Stuff website for brilliant, brief, kid-friendly cartoon videos about our consumer culture. You'll also find terrific curriculum materials like "Buy, Use, Toss" for grades 9-12, which can be downloaded for free.

Next time you feel helpless to save... say, a tiger in the forests of the Russian Far East, refrain from making that trip to your local Bed, Bath and Beyond, Ikea, or Home Depot. Cheap consumer goods at big box stores = destruction of natural resources around the globe = climate change = species extinction rate 1,000 times the natural rate.

Does it ever strike you that in our (Homo sapiens') headlong drive for more and more growth, we are like "toons" bent on self-destruction?

I arise in the morning, torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it.

~ E.B.White

Not torn, George Schaller does both. Watching snow falling in an Afghan shepherd's yurt in 2004.

(Photo credit: Beth Wald)

Highly recommended viewing

... a remarkable, heartstoppingly beautiful film of planet earth... climate change, all incredible aerial footage. A must see and spread the word:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU

"Home" by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (2009) can be viewed in its entirety on Youtube, but should be seen on a big screen if possible. It can be purchased on Amazon.

Mindful Primates

"In myths from around the world, men and women have searched for an elixir that will bring protection from suffering. Buddhist psychology's answer is mindfulness. How does mindfulness work? Let me illustrate with a story.

If you've ever seen the film Gorillas in the Mist, you know about Dian Fossey, the courageous field biologist who befriended a tribe of gorillas. Fossey had gone to Africa to continue the work of her mentor George Schaller, a renowned primatologist who had collected more intimate information about gorilla life than any scientist before him. When his colleagues asked how he was able to learn so much about these shy and elusive creatures, he attributed it to one simple thing: he didn't carry a gun.

Previous generations of biologists had entered the territory of these huge animals with the assumption that they were dangerous. So the scientists came with an aggressive spirit, large rifles in hand. The gorillas could sense the danger around these rifle-bearing men and kept a far distance. By contrast, Schaller -- and later Fossey--entered their territory without weapons. They had to move slowly, gently, and above all respectfully toward these creatures. In time, sensing the benevolence of these humans, the gorillas allowed them to come among them and learn their ways. Sitting still, hour after hour, with careful, patient attention, Fossey finally understood what she saw: a whole new world of tribal and family relationships, unique personalities, habits, and communication. As the African American sage George Washington Carver explained, 'Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.'

Mindfulness is attention. It is a non-judging and respectful awareness... When people initially come to a meditation class to train in mindfulness, they hope to become calm and peaceful. Usually they are in for a big shock. The first hour of mindfulness meditation reveals its opposite, bringing an unseen stream of evaluation and judgment into stark relief...

But like George Schaller, we can put aside these weapons of judgment. We can become mindful. When we are mindful, it is as if we can bow to our experience without judgment or expectation."

~ from Jack Kornfield's, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology (Chapt. 7), Bantam, 2008.

No one who looks into a gorilla's eyes - intelligent, gentle, vulnerable - can remain unchanged, for the gap between ape and human vanishes; we know that the gorilla still lives within us.
~ George Schaller

I have taught myself joy, over and over again.

~ Barbara Kingsolver (from High Tide in Tucson)