Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Moderator: Okay, great—pleased to have Priscilla Stuckey here and sort of a humanist perspective on the question of what might be a natural contract if we have a social contract amongst ourselves. How would we write a natural contract?

Priscilla Stuckey is a writer, scholar, editor, and earth advocate with a passion for reconnecting people with nature. Her new book, Kissed by a Fox: And Other Stories of Friendship in Nature, uses her own experiences when encountering trees, birds, or animals, drive a more hopeful, cultural stories about nature, including human nature. She’ll be reading from the book today, as well as speaking about it.

Priscilla holds a Ph.D. in religious studies and feminist theory from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She teaches environmental humanities in the graduate program of Prescott College.

When she lived in Oakland, she volunteered in urban creek restoration inspired by a stream that ran through her property, founded the Butters Canyon Conservancy, a neighborhood-based land trust. She’s now active in local and international movement to recognize the legal rights of nature.

After 25 years as a book editor, she stood up and moved to the other side of the desk where she now enjoys being a writer and now understands what it feels like to be edited by somebody else. We talked a little bit about the issues of style, and presentation of ideas through styles, an interesting question.

She now lives in Boulder where she walks mountain paths with her dog, Bodhi, and is learning to bird by ear—certainly interesting. Let’s welcome Priscilla to ASU.

[Applause]

Priscilla Stuckey: Thank you so much. I am delighted to be here. Thank you to each of you for being here, taking time out from your busy days. I have a couple of things. I have a bookmark here, and I think there are enough for everybody. I’m happy to pass them around. Please feel free to take a bookmark, if you would like. I also have a sign-up sheet. If you would like to stay in touch, give me your name and your email.

I have been looking forward to this very much, because it’s such a treat to be among people who have devoted so much of your lives to changing how we live in the world, how we live on this planet, and how we think about how we live on this planet. My own work tends in that direction.

Thinking about our thinking, how do the views we have of ourselves and of nature keep us from taking sustainable action in the world? How are they outdated? What kinds of outmoded views do we have of nature and human nature? Today I’ll be focusing, especially, on the ideas of individuals and communities and that balance.

I live in Boulder, as Ron said, and I live in a neighborhood that’s perched on a hill. If you know Boulder, you know that it sits at the western edge of the Great Plains, bumped right up against the Rocky Mountains. From our neighborhood hill, you can catch some wonderful views of the Flatirons, those enormous tilting slabs of sandstone that define the western edge of town.

Every morning and every afternoon, my dog, Bodhi, and I take a walk around the neighborhood. Many times we pass a certain yard. In most ways this yard is typical of the surrounding yards, with a peekaboo view of the Flatirons, some trees and grass.

In this yard there are two spruce trees, but under the spruce trees, there’s something extra—a few carved lawn ornaments—cattails of rich dark wood, beautifully smoothed and lacquered until their wood grain gleans in the sunlight.

It actually took me more trips past this lawn than I care to admit before I realized just how incongruous this was—cattails on a hill? If you’re an ecologist, you see it immediately. Cattails are a wetland plant. They live near ponds and lakes, their roots and stems in standing water.

Real live cattails would never survive on an arid hilltop like ours, which when it’s not being watered into suburban lawn, likes to grow prickly pear. Cattails would never choose to set their roots beside Colorado blue spruce, for blue spruce hate to be overwatered and will not thrive, while cattails need standing water to be happy.

The cattails were placed in this lawn for beauty, as an ornament, but still, doesn’t it take a certain lack of attention to real live cattails to place them on a dry hill beside a spruce tree? You have to mentally take them out of their wetland habitat, away from their natural community of other swamp-loving plants and animals and insects. You have to think of them as separate from their neighborhood to place them in yours.

Of course, this kind of abstracting goes on all the time, even with living plants. Visit your local garden shop and you’re likely to find a lot of the same plants and trees being sold in a broad swath across the United States. When it comes to landscaping, we think in terms of climate zones rather than eco-communities. All plants that tolerate a certain climate are assumed to be interchangeable with all other plants who like that same climate, whether or not they originated in the same parts of the world or not, or evolved alongside each other or not.

Recently I was visiting a friend in Portland, Oregon. As we were driving down the street, she pointed to a row of trees, and she said, you know, even in Portland, in this eco-progressive city, nobody pays attention to ecosystems. She said, look at those trees. She said, the city put them in, but those trees aren’t native. They don’t have anything to do with the ecology of the Northwest.

Detaching trees from their ecosystems, or maybe better said, from their eco-communities, involves regarding species, or individuals, as interchangeable, transposable, as cogs in a wheel. You might call it a bureaucratic or industrial approach, manipulating the parts of a system without regard for the unique sets of relationships that belong to each segment. It’s a mental habit with roots in the idea that nature works like a machine, and it’s a mental habit that western cultures have lived with for at least 400 years, the clockwork universe as the guiding metaphor of reality.

Today, we inherit the implications of that 400-year-old choice. A ravaged earth is flowing with polluted waters. Its soil is degraded with pesticides and erosion. Its plant and animal species are going extinct at a rate unseen since the asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, and its atmosphere is heating up so much that sometime, perhaps soon, life on the planet as we recognize it may no longer be possible.

I’d like to continue with a few paragraphs from my book.

Not to mention what nature as machine has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being, when we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation, a lonely spot indeed.

Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind, shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams, if we attend to them at all, are but the castoffs of yesterday’s overactive brain.

Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exidencies of mud or leaf, as if the human mind were not like trees shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not like rocks made of soil. Then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own view of reality has sunk us into an unbearable solipsism, an agony of separateness from loved ones, from other creatures, from rich, but unruly emotions—in short, from our ability to connect through sense, and feeling, and imagination with the world that is our home.

We stand in self decreed exile, having locked off our awareness of the mind flowing through all creatures in this world, and so we are unable to know ourselves as kin with those creatures, participants in the same life permeating all. The alternative to nature as machine is nature as kin, as community, a place where relationships are primary, and individuals matter.

The late philosopher—he actually called himself a geologian—Thomas Berry, he said, the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, not a clockwork. Nature is instead a community. Nature is personal.

What does it mean to say nature is personal? In the broadest sense, it means choosing a different paradigm from the Western idea of nature as machine. It means seeing more continuity than discontinuity between humans and other creatures. It means holding the possibility that all things on earth, even rocks and mountains, have their own will and intention. For don’t rocks, too, move from place to place, however slowly, shaping the world as they go?

Everything dreams, writes science fiction author, Ursula Le Guin. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes. To say that nature is personal may not mean so much seeing the world differently as acting differently. Or to state it another way, it may mean interacting with more than human others in nature, as if those others had a life of their own, and then coming to see through experience that these others are living, interacting, beings. When earth is truly alive, the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human.

Now if you’re a scientist, you likely don’t go as far as I would in talking about the world as personal, but today there are scientists from many different corners of science, many disciplines of science, talking about earth as a community of beings. They use images of relationship rather than machine as the guiding metaphor for their findings.

I think, for instance, of the weather researchers at NOAA in Boulder where I live, who tell us that rain and clouds behave like predator and prey. The same graphs that describe the waxing and waning of, say, fox and rabbit populations, can be applied to the relationships of clouds and rain.

When clouds proliferate like rabbits, the rains, like predator foxes, also increase. The rains eat the clouds, diminishing them, and beginning the cycle once again. Here researchers are going in the opposite direction from mechanistic theory, using living being animals as the guiding metaphor for a system of natural forces.

I think of physicist, Karen Barad, who says that some interpretations of quantum theory, especially Niels Bohr’s, suggest a radically communitarian picture, a universe where things do not exist at all until after they interact with others. What a strange idea that there are no things prior to relationship. Rather each something is brought into being through relationship with others. Instead of Descartes’, I think, therefore I am, this version of physics says, in relationship with others, I am.

I think of the ecologist, Aldo Leopold, who is best known for his vision of nature as a community. Leopold began his career in the early 20th century as a forester, but later in life, he advocated for preserving land health, or what we would call today, ecosystem health. He’s known for writing, The Land Ethic, which says a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. In Leopold’s words, we are one humming community. We are one body.

That the view of earth as community has grown up at all in the sciences is rather surprising, if you stop to think about it, because modern cultures tend to hold a very limited and limiting view of community. Most people attribute the suspicion of community to our famed Western individualism, our tendency to extract individuals or individual species, like cattails, from our environments, and treat them as separate from our communities of origin.

Community tends to be seen as a limiting force, something you might wish for nostalgically on those dark evenings when loneliness creeps up on you, but most days you’re rather happy to do without. When individuals can stand on their own, who needs community? It probably will just hold you back, limit your freedom.

I’ve always thought I detected a certain overtone of adolescence in American individualism, like a teenager fighting to become an adult. Where might that rebellious streak come from? I suspect it comes from a parallel tendency to view community as an overbearing parent. In Western cultures, individuals tend to be set up in opposition to community as if freedom can be found best apart from community.

Where did we get this idea? I’ve been thinking a lot about this question because the survival of the world as we know it may depend on the answer—and I’m not being melodramatic here. If reality, as both philosophers and scientists tell us, is more like a community than like a machine, then we’re going to need to find better ways of understanding community, and better ways of practicing it.

I have some training in history, and so when I ask what community is about, I often go to history for an answer. To get a longer term view of history, I recently delved into some very ancient history, and read widely in the works of archeologists and social scientists who are studying civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, and I discovered a few surprises.

Let me try to paint a picture of life in the earliest known urban center in the world, a city called, Uruk, around the year 3,000 BCE, or 5,000 years before our time. The city itself was a walled area about the size of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Inside this walled area lived at least 10,000 people, maybe many more. It was a very dense population.

The skyline within the city was dominated by an enormous temple palace, a ziggurat, reaching upward toward the sky. The 10,000 or more people in the city lived in small semi-nuclear families, but these families were set within large households that might contain hundreds or even thousands of people.

Each enormous household was headed by an important public official, a man or a woman of the highest classes. These heads of households owned and oversaw vast estates of barley fields and sheep herds that lay outside the city walls. Barley was the staple of the area since it can thrive in salty soils, though barley itself was hardly a native plant. It had been taken from China and Asia many centuries before.

The heads of households, who were also temple officials, managed a vast system of trade that by 3,000 BCE had been going on already for a millennium, prehistoric times. Ships left the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, sailed down the Persian Gulf, around the coast of Iran, and on to the Indus River Valley in Pakistan. There they traded textiles and barley for exotic woods and spices, gems and precious stones, such as lapis lazuli, and metals, such as copper.

When the traders brought back these luxury items from the far off lands, they facilitated at home in Uruk, a growing social inequality. By 3,000 BCE, the social hierarchy was firmly in place. The elite temple and state administrators sat at the top. Their lives and luxury goods maintained by a vast underclass of compulsory laborers—farmers tilling fields they did not own, and cloth weavers and clay workers sitting in factory like settings to mass produce textiles and pottery.

All of these thousands of workers were paid in rations for their work—a large ration of grain, or wool, or oil, for a man, a smaller one for a woman, and an even smaller one for a child. It was a bureaucratic system of paternalism and dependence, a centralized system of governance where a few people made a lot of decisions for the many.

The people of Uruk possibly thought of their thousand-strong households as large families. The people could imagine that their mandatory labor was contributing to a public, big family, good. By supporting the temple officials, the people were making possible all the temple rituals and the pieces of culture that gave every resident their sense of home and order.

It’s also likely that the temple officials also thought of their affluent lives as benefitting the public good, for they carried out all the temple rituals on behalf of the people. They oversaw the vast communal storehouses of food, and they also clothed and fed the indigent people with rations.

However, recent economic studies show that the value of the rations given to workers did not quite equal the value of their labor, which means that maintaining the social classes in Uruk, the first city, depended on exploitation. Though people in the household might have thought of themselves as related, in fact, a few people at the center were taking more from the rest than they were giving in return.

The bureaucracy of Uruk was so vast, and the system needed for keeping track of who owned what in those communal storehouses was so intricate, that careful notes had to be kept, and so the ancestral society of Western civilization invented writing as a form of accounting.

I find it fascinating that other parts of the world needed writing for other reasons. The Chinese invented writing to keep track of divinations. The Mesoamericans invented writing to trace the seasons and royal genealogies. In Egypt, writing was developed for public display on impressive public monuments, but in Mesopotamia, writing kept track of possessions.

While we have little evidence for how members of the huge households actually related to one another, it is likely that wide disparities in privilege—with most people forced at least part of the year to work on land or products they did not own—in a bureaucratic system that oversaw thousands, we can assume it did not exactly foster warm-hearted connections between people across the social spectrum, or between people and earth.

It is no accident that as inequality in Mesopotamia increased, connections with nature decreased. In other words, as the human community split into widely separated social classes, a sense of community with nature fragmented as well. Already 5,000 years ago, we can see evidence of regarding nature more as a source of commodity than a source of community.

Let’s jump—in our very fast little historical overview—3,000 years into the future to the Roman Empire. There we find that the ancient—what was by then an ancient system of holding land in the hands of a few—was still being practiced. It, in fact, became the foundation of the Roman Empire.

By the first century of the Common Era, many fields and vineyards throughout the empire were owned by wealthy absentee landlords—state officials, members of an aristocratic set of families who had bought it for investment. They leased it to peasants in return for payments and produce. Peasants who couldn’t keep up with their payments were driven off the land, which was then devoted to cash crops such as dates and olives instead of being planted with staple crops to feed local residents.

In a similar way as in Mesopotamia thousands of years earlier, unequal access to nature’s gifts went hand in hand with a utilitarian view of nature. The Romans, with their fields, and roads, and aqueducts, and architecture, perfected practices of mastering nature.

Cicero in the first century BCE boasted like this: We are the absolute masters of what the world produces. We enjoy the mountains and the plains. The rivers and the lakes are ours. We sow the seed and plant the trees. We fertilize the earth. We stop, turn, and direct the rivers. In short, by our hands, we endeavor by our various operations in this world to make as it were another nature.

It’s rather frighteningly contemporary sounding, but it comes from Cicero in the first century BCE. As the empire grew older, land became consolidated in ever larger estates, owned by ever fewer people, until by the end of Roman rule, early in the fifth century, less than 5 percent of the people owned more than 80 percent of the empire, and made all the decisions of government. Those enormous estates of the late empire became, in fact, the founding estates of Feudal Europe, and the feudalistic pattern was a social and economic system that held sway for most of the next thousand years.

The theologian and lawyer, Vine Deloria, of the Dakota nation, remarked more than once in his writings that the long history of European feudalism colors all of Western people’s thinking about community. He found it striking that Europeans and Euro-Americans have a hard time imagining social relations that are not strictly hierarchical and unequal, or to put it a different way, that Euro-Americans are so content with inequality.

Deloria traced feudalistic thinking all the way back to the Roman Empire. He was certainly correct, but he may not have known that similar social systems of stark inequality extended back thousands of years before that. Today we inherit traditions thousands of years old of arranging our social lives in patterns of inequality—often massive inequality. It is no wonder if there exists a bias against community—a certain feeling that one is better being rid of it—but there is at least one more ingredient in the modern suspicion of community.

For that ingredient, let’s return for a moment to the Roman Empire. In the very decades in which the empire was crumbling, the late fourth century, a man named Augustine rose to prominence as a great thinker and theologian. Augustine is best known for setting in doctrine the idea of original sin—the idea that human nature is flawed at its core, that we need outside, namely divine help, to bring us into line. That divine help for Augustine had to be channeled through the church, which, not coincidentally, had risen to state power during Augustine’s lifetime.

Augustine’s idea was born in a time of political chaos, when institutions were crumbling, and the empire desperately needed some kind of social glue. In that volatile time, Augustine forged a system of thought that held European culture together for more than a thousand years, but at the same time, reinforced a notion of the community or state as a restraining force, a system for keeping people in line.

Augustine’s idea that human nature is flawed was hardly original. A notion of innate evil always rears its head in a time of social crisis, and just as popular during such times, is the corollary that stronger centralized authority is the solution. When you stop to think about it, this idea of Augustine—that humans can’t be trusted to make good decisions on their own without help—in a spiritual sense, was already being practiced politically in an empire where 95 percent of the people had no access to government. He was, in a sense, merely translating a political practice into religious terms.

Let’s jump now to the 16th century when Protestants challenged the power of the Catholic Church. One might think that at that time, Augustine’s ancient idea of human sinfulness might fade away, but in fact, the opposite happened. Protestants took Augustine’s idea and ran with it.

For instance, in Switzerland, John Calvin turned his churches into ethical supervisors of their members. It became the church’s job to make sure the members were living Godly lives in a very literal way. Calvinist elders made the rounds several times a year, interviewing church members to see if their lives conformed to church standards.

The Puritans, one of Calvin’s communities, brought this practice of church discipline to North American shores. Puritans not only examined their own consciousness, they also examined one another, and might bring transgressors to church court, and examine them there. If they were found wanting and unrepentant, they might be banished from the Puritan community.

The church had to be a restraining force because individual human nature was too sinful to contain itself. If American individualism wears the rebellious tones of an adolescent, it may have something to do with this long history of authoritarian power being invested in the social community.

A few more paragraphs from the book:

I suggest that when we think about biodiversity and ecosystems, when we imagine nature as a community, what goes into our thinking is not just details of fox habits, or hummingbird migrations, or nectar flowers, or all of them put together. In the shadows of our minds, lurks this history, this idea about what community needs to be—a restraining force—because nature, especially the nature inside us, is broken and needs fixing.

After Augustine, it would take a thousand years, but eventually this vision of a deficient earth would shape itself into a vision of earth as a passive thing—a machine with parts that can be switched on or off at our whim. Plants and animals would no longer speak. They would toil away in their own little corner of nature’s factory, with instincts loud as factory buzzers telling them when to eat, when to sleep, and when to return to their jobs.

We, the operators of the machine, would take great pains to keep them under control. For hadn’t we decided long ago that those of us who crawl on earth are but fractious, sinful creatures in need of help, which is why the most hopeful world views today, the ones that can guide us toward friendlier relations with the wider community of nature, are found in cultures that do not share this history?

I think of a time in my life when I first caught glimpse of a friendlier vision of community. It was during a very difficult period, which was filled with a lot of sorrow and loss. During that time I signed up for a workshop that was led by a couple—two people from Burkina Faso—Malidoma and Sobonfu Some. They were leading a workshop that day on grieving.

The thing that stands out most from that day is what Malidoma and Sobonfu said at the start, when they tried to explain why grieving is so important, why people in the Western world experience so much grief without recognizing it, and why we need to take time to feel and release it.

In our village, they said, when a woman becomes pregnant, everyone looks around and wonders who is this person coming to join us? Villagers assume that the person is bringing gifts from the ancestors that the village needs. They speculate excitedly to one another on what those gifts might be.

As the pregnancy continues, a ritual is performed to answer their questions. The elders of this village meet with the pregnant woman, and through her, speak with the fetus. Why are you wanting to come here right now, they ask. The village learns what hopes and dreams this person-in-the-making brings to the world.

Above all, what gifts the child—once here—intends to deliver to the community. Will she have the fire of the ancestors burning brightly in her so that she can be a beacon to the village when it cannot see the best way forward? Will he be peaceful like water to smooth the rocky places between people?

It then becomes the job of the community to remember that person’s gifts after she arrives. We all forget our purpose, Malidoma said, for we go through the rigors of being born, then living as infants and toddlers. As we grow, we need to discover our gifts anew. The community exists, said Sobonfu and Malidoma, to help individuals remember their purpose.

I sat bolt upright, astonished. This was a view of community I had never heard before. My experience was the zero sum game, a tug of war between individual and community over the ultimate prize—freedom.

I could hardly fathom—and I believe most Americans cannot imagine—a community that pays special attention to each individual, nourishing each one with the quality of attention that helps each bring forth her deepest gifts. All because the adults know that every child will make a difference, not in some abstract way, but for them, for the world they will make together as the child grows—as if each adult were thinking while gazing upon each child, this person brings me, us, a priceless gift. It’s a different view of nature, of our natural state as bringers of gifts—each of us a contributor, not a barrier, to community.

Sobonfu explained what it looks like in practice. In the village, when a child enters the room, the body of every adult turns toward her to give her their full attention. Children need this complete attention, she said, if they are to learn to respect and trust their own gifts.

What would it feel like as a child to be nourished with full-hearted attention—to know that every adult around you has a personal interest in the gifts you bring into the world—to have the community feel responsible for helping you sort out your dreams, and find the best creative path you possibly can?

It’s a radically different vision of community from the one I inherited—community existing to empower its members, each individual member. Listening to Sobonfu and Malidoma that day was a moment of waking up to just how much my own culture operated with a different set of understandings.

The vision of an empowering community is one that other African writers also speak of. I think of George Sefa Dei, a Canadian sociology professor and an elder from Ghana, who writes, to many Africans, the dichotomy is not between the individual and community. Instead of thinking of individuals as competitive units separated from one another, as we do in the Western world, he says that in traditional African thought, individuals are cooperating, enriched by community. They receive nourishment from the community even as they give it.

The theme of radically valuing individual choice can be found in other traditions of indigenous peoples, including some traditions from North America. A few months ago, I heard the writer, Barry Lopez, speak of the Inuit and Inupiaq people. He reported them saying, we do not like collective nouns. We do not speak of what caribou in the collective might do. Each individual caribou might do one thing one day, and another day, might do something different.

It’s a radical respect for individual choice, including the individual choices of individual creatures, more radical than in my own heritage. Barry Lopez concluded we need to imagine societies in which we maintain the integrity of the community without compromising the autonomy of the individual.

I’m reminded of a teaching that the anthropologist, Thomas Buckley, received from a Yurok man when Buckley was living with the Yurok in Northern California along the Lower Klamath River. After dinner one evening, while sitting beside the fire, an older man picked up a stick and asked Buckley what it was. A piece of firewood, Buckley said. The old man looked away, disappointed. Buckley tried again, it’s wood, a piece of a tree. This was better. And what’s a tree, the old man prodded.

That night as they were turning in, the Yurok man offered more. When you can see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree. When you can see the tree, you can see the spirit of the tree. When you can see the spirit of the tree, you can talk to it, and maybe begin to learn something.

To be able to see each leaf takes many, many hours of staring at a tree. It also takes certain habits of mind, a conviction, for instance, that individual leaves matter, that each leaf is worthy of attention. To nourish individuals, each individual child, each individual student, each member of the community, in the same way, takes enormous amounts of open-hearted attention.

Empowering individual members is not a job we are used to assigning communities, but if we did, our world would change. What if the highest mandate of every school were to mentor each student in finding her life purpose, in releasing his gifts into the world? Education would look a lot different than it does, and this one change alone would completely reorder the relationship between individuals and their communities.

A theme is emerging—not that individuals are too highly regarded in Western cultures, but that they are not valued highly enough—not that uniqueness is too highly prized, but that it receives too little support. Not that communities have too little power, but that for many centuries they have exercised too much of the wrong kinds of power—the power to take from their members without giving as much in return, the power to command conformity.

Today Americans may not face the snooping eyes of church elders, but we live with different kinds of pressures to conform—to the latest norms in fashion, buying the newest electronics. Foucault famously said discipline no longer just comes down from on top; now it is everywhere.

It is no accident that cultures with the most to teach about reimagining individuals with communities, are cultures that tend to be called animist. Western people often get hung up on that word, animist, thinking it has something to do with spirits. Well, it might, but perhaps not in the way we usually think.

The Yurok man gave some insight into what the word, spirit, might mean. When you can see each leaf as a separate thing, you can see the tree, he said. That is, when you have spent time focusing attention on every individual part of the tree, you have a much better chance of seeing the tree as a whole. Then he said, when you can see the tree, you could see the spirit of the tree.

If you’ve spent that much time absorbing every aspect of the tree, you’re going to know a lot. You’re going to know what it looks like in cloudy weather or in sun, with leaves or without. You will have memorized the color and feel of its bark. Whether smooth, furrowed, pointelist, or knobby, gray, tan or red, you’re going to understand this tree’s surroundings—who lives next to the tree, who feeds on it, where it gets its water.

You’re going to have a relationship with the tree, and once you have such a relationship with the tree, you can glimpse the personality, or the person, the kindred spirit within the tree. Then, he said, when you can see the spirit of the tree, you can talk to it, and maybe begin to learn something. Here is where wisdom starts, he said, when your relationship with a tree goes so deep that you can hear what it has to say.

It takes a focused and open attention to listen this deeply, the kind of attention we normally give only to our closest friends, our own children and family members. It takes this depth of attention to find kinship with the tree, to see it as a person like ourselves.

This is not some airy, fairy, mystical awareness. This is awareness that, like scientific research, begins in the senses. It’s a sustained practice of seeing, looking, receiving, over time. It’s a relationship that is built, as with family and friends, through observing and interacting, noticing individual quirks, seeing each leaf as a separate thing. In this way through practicing family, we become family with the creatures around us.

I would like to end today by reading a story of a time when another creature treated me as family. This happened to be a red fox. He was living in a wildlife rehabilitation facility in California, in the Bay area, where I was volunteering at the time. One of my jobs was to bring Rudy, the red fox, his dinner. As you’ll see, the process could sometimes get tricky.

I squatted on the floor waiting for Rudy to finish pacing. At last he had slipped inside the safety of his night pen, and I had dropped the gate to lock him in. Now his food bowl awaited, but would he approach it with me crouching only two feet away?

The red fox and I had performed our usual evening dance. Me: stand just inside his night pen with my hand on the long rope leading to the gate. Rudy: race around the outside enclosure; dart into, then out of the night pen. Me: stand stock still. Rudy: creep up to the doorway, peer in. Me: don’t breathe. Rudy: take two steps in, then dart out again.

Once Rudy knew the staff person bringing him in, he slipped into his night pen readily, but until you had passed his friend test, he tried to keep his options open. I was safe with Rudy, or thought I was. Hand raised by humans, Rudy was the darling of every staff person at the center. He was wary, like a good fox, but not unfriendly.

Because Rudy seemed safe, I wanted to get closer. We were making good progress. Last week as I squatted on the floor, he had padded softly toward me, sniffing. I stayed motionless, afraid I would spook him if I so much as breathed, while his pointed black nose probed the air just inches from my body.

Tonight I squatted again, this time closer to his bowl. Soon Rudy was padding toward me again and sniffing. He made a slow circle around me, one moment almost touching, the next retreating. My knee on the ground was beginning to ache. How long could I stay propped in this position?

Suddenly, he stepped directly in front of me. Then, without warning, he lifted one paw, put it on my lower knee, and raising himself vertically, stared directly into my face. I gasped. I couldn’t help it. I’d never been that close to the needle-sharp teeth of a fox. Captivity, I knew, makes people, and especially wild animals, crazy. Was Rudy planning to attack?

After studying my face up close for a moment, he opened his mouth, stretched out his tongue, and with it reached between my parted lips. Startled, I made an effort to keep still. After licking the inside of my mouth for a few seconds, he withdrew his tongue, let himself down to the floor, and began gobbling his food. I’d just been French-kissed by a fox.

[Laughter]

I was elated. I wanted to spit fast and hard all in the same moment. A little dazed, grinning and working grit out with my tongue, I slipped out the door, leaving Rudy to his dinner. After that night, Rudy’s kisses became de rigueur. I never did get used to that gritty tongue. He’d been rooting around in the mud and in who knows what, and neither did I get used to being French-kissed by a creature who smelled more than a little of skunk, but neither did I catch any dread diseases.

Only much later did I find out what Rudy was actually doing. Visiting a friend one day, I pick up a book on wildlife tracking and turn immediately to the chapter on foxes. There I read that newly weaned fox kits remain in their den while the parents go out and hunt. When one adult returns with food, the kits eagerly crowd around, trying to lick the parent’s mouth, probing inside it with their tongues to see what mom or dad has brought for dinner, and stimulating the adult to regurgitate the food. Rudy wasn’t kissing me after all; he was checking the menu.

[Laughter]

He must have wondered why I never coughed up the dog chow, dead mice, boiled eggs, and chopped fruit that appeared in his bowl. He was also greeting me as a fox greets a trusted member of the family. Years later, I still feel honored. Thank you very much.