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GREEN PARADISE LOST |
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9. Lost Dimensions of Human Identity I must stop periodically as I write to go to the basement to bring up laundry from the washing machine. We have just had a houseful of guests and there are mounds of sheets and towels to be washed and spread out to dry on the deck beside me. It is a magnificent drying day, overflowing with sun which warms the laundry and with wind, which billows it out in great puffs of drying contour sheets. The sun is glinting on the always-moving waves in millions of sparkles. The energy dance. As the sheets and towels dry, they are filled with the good smells of fresh sun and wind, and as I fold them I bury my face in their goodness again and again. As I work, my body and spirit seem fed with the goodness of those natural elements. Why have we separated ourselves from all the sun and wind have to give us? Why have we dried our clothes in technological boxes and then dreamed up chemical fragrances to give (as the ad says) "that fresh smell of clothes dried out-of-doors''? Why do we prefer foods chemically processed to the food as it was naturally? Why have we preferred our technological marvels over and over again? My spirit thrives here by the shore in the summer, where the activities of our days must be in cooperation with what the wind and sun and rain and water are doing. When the sun is shining, you work in the sun or swim or contemplate the wonder of creation. When the day is overcast or rainy, you do indoor things such as iron, read by the fire, or go to town to the stores. And every day you scan the sky and clouds for a sense of what will be coming next. My spirit is nurtured by such dialogue; my days are shaped and enriched by the limitations of what is possible. But come September when we go back to our other life, we return to a life largely inside. It is work-oriented and nothing we do is determined by the weather. The sterile sameness of days walled away from my summer dialogue with sun and wind and weather gets to me. I am eroded, thinned, flattened in spirit. No one we work with seems aware. Dining at the faculty club, no one notices: They turn from windswept river and magnificent skyline view to one another's words and ordering lunch. Is it that they have never lived enough with the out-of-doors or with the sea? All of which leads me to ask, Do we know who we really are as humans? Or are we but a shadow of our true selves, getting by with a diminished sense of our human identity given us along with our history, the language we use to think and speak, and the social functions or roles which occupy our time? Alienation in Myth and Identity I am struck by a line from Manas: "The myth supplies the materials for self-identification. This is its primary function." [1] In that event our hierarchical myths of Western civilization, scientific as well as religious, have served us badly. They have provided us with a sense of ourselves which, like Humpty Dumpty fallen off the wall, is "in pieces." Our inherited sense of self is deeply split and dualistic, and in science, in philosophy, in psychology, in theology, we are laboriously trying to glue the pieces back together in order to understand what it is to be human. Our old myths from both science and religion have told us we were split and apart, spirit (or mind) apart from our physical bodies and flesh. Ernest Becker's phrase about our being "gods with anuses" was a striking way to express this dominant theme of self-understanding in Western thought. Pain and the Awareness of Wholeness My own personal story is a study in the inadequacy of our split-apart self-concept. I was well-trained by long years of college and graduate professional school to enjoy the male world of intellectual activities and initiative-taking, and therefore I viewed myself as males are trained to do -- as almost exclusively mind and will. That was who I was. My selfhood transcended my body and had no important reference to my body. My body was merely what allowed me to act out my mind and will. How do I tell you about my rebirth of identity as I discovered my selfhood in relation to my body? I was sick for a two-month period, bed-ridden with pneumonia and a severe relapse. I discovered within the limiting six surfaces of that one room how my world view was constricted by the weakness of my body. Mind and will were limited by body. Some years later I had a soul-searing brush with death, fearing I had breast cancer. You discover then-- and not just in the clearly held convictions at the surface of your mind but deep in your gut -- that you are mortal. And you know a loneliness and fear which belongs to being a woman with a woman's breasts. Still again, I was pregnant several times with our children. In pregnancy and childbirth you find experiences which are if not soul-searing then soul-changing, because again your body is a woman's body, not a man's. In all these experiences you discover that all of you is in that body. Your mind and your will and everything that there has ever been or ever will be of you is "in" and "expressed through" and "experiencing" with that woman's body that is your own. That body is your self. And you gradually realize, even while you grow in love with your husband, that no matter how equal to him you are and no matter how sympatique he is with you, he still cannot go through those physical experiences that you do. He is different, a man. He is different; his is not only another body but it is a different body, a man's body. I heard later of theologian H. Richard Niebuhr's reaction to his brother Reinhold's stroke, and I realized that our experiences and moral reflections were akin at this point. Seeing his brother, so thoughtful and dynamic and creative, yet now encased and imprisoned by the limitations of his paralyzed flesh, Richard Niebuhr is reported to have found here a new appreciation for the incarnated quality of the human spirit: how enfleshed in a particular body the You that is yourself actually is. Niebuhr would characterize this as responding to God limiting us -- reminding us of our mortal, created existence in which "all flesh is grass." In my own case it gradually dawned upon me that any self-concept I might have of myself was seriously lacking if it did not take sufficient account of my body and its experiences of its own mortality in pleasure and in pain. I must now always include my body whenever I think of myself. I must now shape a self-concept which has a woman's bodily form. Integrating the Inner Pieces of Our Selfhood What seems to be emerging in our time is a healing of the old dualisms which divided mind from body, spirit from flesh. This new sense of wholeness in our identity is expressed succinctly by Penelope Washbourn when she says "I am my body," [2] and by the title the Boston Women's Health Cooperative gave their first book: Our Bodies, Ourselves. I think it was probably our dawning awareness of the psychosomatic nature of illness and healing that started us toward thinking whole about ourselves. Biofeedback and other clues to the psychosomatic nature of healing are reinforcing this whole direction of thought. [3] "There are a growing number of facts available," writes Ronald Glasser in The Body Is the Hero, "that show plainly we are as much a part of our own diseases as we are of our health, that we should be able to and indeed can help ourselves." [4] Biospiritual Organisms So the first and most basic step to a rebirth of an integrated inner identity is to realize that we are what theologian Kenneth Cauthen has called "biospiritual organisms." But we are not alone in having this sort of identity. This is equally true of all matter, whether a rock or a tree or a dolphin or chimp. Life comes "all together." The problem is in our minds, in our concepts of ourselves, for the basis of all life, both physical and psychic, is unified in what we have been calling "the dance of energy." Body, mind, spirit, matter -- these are all abstractions, metaphors which have socialized us to see and understand ourselves "in pieces." The efforts today of philosophers, psychologists and theologians to glue back together those pieces seem absurd in the light of the unity we now know is the basis of existence. Perhaps as process theologians such as Cauthen have been suggesting, God too is a biospiritual unity just as all life in God's creation has a biospiritual character. Perhaps there never is spirit without body and no body (or mass) without spirit. Is it in this sense that we are created in God's image? Have we put asunder what God created joined together? We now struggle like children to glue together the broken chards of our erroneous metaphors! As a part of this integration process, we must struggle also to glue together again our feeling and our thinking. Feeling has been so downgraded in our culture (as "feminine") and thinking (since it was declared masculine) so elevated into clouds of abstraction, that it is difficult to recall that humans have a thought every time we have a feeling and a feeling with every thought. Thinking and feeling are contiguous human processes constantly interpenetrating one another as we experience our lives. It is only as we repress each in turn that it comes to seem we have the one without the other. It is rare in Western culture that we acknowledge both as present at once, as for example Rene Dubos has done in this introduction to a lecture about "The Theology of the Earth": My presentation will be a mixture of the emotional response of my total being to the beauty of the earth, and of my mental processes as a scientist trying to give a rational account of the earth's association with living things. The phrase "theology of the earth" thus denotes for me the scientific understanding of the sacred relationships that link mankind to all the physical and living attributes of the earth. [5] Embracing Our Collective Identity as Humans Even if one living human being manages to glue together -- or even fuse together -- a wholistic sense of self, we will have only begun the task of forging a wholistic identity for all of us as humans. For we keep wanting to think about "nature" as "out there" somehow apart from "us" "in here." Many people who care about the environment still see it as outside of humans -- as "those trees and hills and mountains." But we who are within the energy dance are participants. The cosmic dance of energy moves in us as it does in everything else, and to believe still in the solidity of discrete entities such as our bodies or the mountains is simply not to understand either reality or who we ourselves are. "The stars and the seas," Kenneth Cauthen writes, "the earth and the earthworm, are not simply outside us as strangers. They are also with us as participants in the adventure. The elements in our tissues, the salt content of our blood, the rhythms of waking and sleeping, and the chemical processes in our brains all unite us to the whole web of life and matter evolving throughout the immensities of time and space." [6] We said all that earlier in chapter 7 and 8. The point here, however, is that we have not yet incorporated that reality of who we are into our self-concept -- our understanding of ourselves as human. At Home Again upon the Earth Who-we-are is rooted in our kinship with the natural. The water of life flows through our tissues, and we are nourished, watered, fed, sustained, and ultimately return everything in our bodies to the world around us. Yet today we have lost this sense of kinship with the earth which in other generations told us where we came from and whither we finally go: "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." We are like cut-flowers living in glass vases. We have forgotten and often deny our dependence upon our roots in the biospheral systems of the earth. Unthinkingly and uncaring, we "do in" species near us and forget our need -- and the globe's need -- of them. Alienated from our natural setting, we busily put up more glass buildings and cover more of the land with pavement, thus isolating ourselves still further. Enclosed in buildings, we cut ourselves off from any awareness of our need for the overarching sky, the sun, the rain, the wind, the snow. The conclusion is inescapable: we do not understand who we are. The consequences of our too-small self-concept is vividly described by the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis as "not knowing how to live." Not knowing how to live is separateness, the division of the world into self and others. I sit inside my skull and look out as a frightened man from a moated castle. Me in here and the world out there. We negotiate, we make deals, exchanges, but we are not one. I am an entity, complete. Never do I lose sight of where I stop and the world begins. With sleepless vigilance I patrol the edges of selfhood, warn visitors away. I am independent within this domain, but am dying. It is my wholeness that destroys me. I long for partness in a greater whole. Knowing how to live is oneness with the world. I die of the hunger of oneness. [7] Like Kunte Kinte in Alex Haley's Roots, we only know who we are as we appropriate to ourselves our kinship with the earth, which tells us where we have come from and provides the backdrop for understanding who-we-are, our dignity and destiny. We are like adopted children, adopted by the human culture within which we have been raised. Until we come to grips with the mysterious presence in us of the gifts and heritage of the good earth and rain and sun and stars, we will not understand all that we are and all that we are becoming. Larger Identity Means Larger Self-Interest Knowing what we are a part of, give to, and take from, gives to us a larger sense of self-interest. It softens the margins of a personal identity, a single body, and any one moment in time, so that we know we live for more than what may be good for this moment or pleasurable for my body or profitable for me. Those concerns do not disappear. But they find their fulfillment within a larger setting. This larger setting includes all the other humans and species and times and places I clearly or dimly perceive to be tied in with the significance of my own living. We will have an environmental ethic when self-interest becomes inclusive, when we sense that what hurts any part of my larger system will hurt me. The Sioux Indian proverb -- "With all beings and all things we shall be as relatives" [8] sums up this larger identity of each of us with the wholeness we contribute to and receive from. Someday, perhaps we shall have an identity that can enjoy the earth as friend, provider and home. When that happens, we will know that when the earth hurts, it will hurt us. Then the environmental ethic will not just be in our heads but in our hearts -- in the nerve endings of our sensitivity. This is what it means to be at home again upon the earth. About this sense of life and home Ian McHarg writes: From the ecological view one can see that, since life is only transmitted by life, then, by living, each one of us is physically linked to the origins of life and thus -- literally, not metaphorically -- to all life. Moreover, since life originated from matter then, by living, man is physically united back through the evolution of matter to the primeval hydrogen. The planet Earth has been the one home for all of its processes and all of its myriad inhabitants since the beginning of time, from hydrogen to men. Only the bathing sunlight changes. Our phenomenal world contains our origins, our history, our milieu; it is our home. [9] Perhaps, in these days, one has to have a special place on the planet to be aware of the power of this larger context of earth-home to nurture in us a larger sense of self. Ossabaw Island in Georgia has been such a place for many artists and creative people. Lin Root writes about this. Ossabaw provides the privilege of solitude; the comfort of kinship; a deep response to the strange power of the island; and more, much more that nourishes the spirit and makes it fruitful. Just as the fantastic flora of Ossabaw put forth roots and shoots, and multiply, so the writers, painters, sculptors, composers, scientists, scholars, project members of every type find their work taking on new dimensions, expanding in unforeseen directions. This is certainly the way in which the island has affected my work. Trying to analyze the many gifts I have received from Ossabaw -- I have come to realize that the gift of highest value -- is the gift of self. Ossabaw allows me to become more truly my own person. [10] (Emphasis added.)
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