Sweet Potato Haircut

I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s masterpiece, Prodigal Summer, about the interwoven lives of people each living in some relationship with the Appalachian lands around them, and the ultimate connectedness of humankind and the natural world. Kingsolver, a literary giant and biologist, writes beautifully on the realities of nature amidst compelling characters and emotive fiction. A thread throughout the novel which caught my attention is the lives of moths, those fluttering, mouthless omens who chase the light and bash their bodies against glass and windowpanes like they want to touch the light with their papery bodies. Moths, which I knew nothing substantive about until Kingsolver posed their truths with the words of a poet:

“This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

Moths move in seemingly manic, shuttering flight patterns toward nighttime lights, and attract mates not through displays of beauty or song, but through voiceless pheromones’ which can travel great distances. Kingsolver writes:

“The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.”

The natural world hums, flutters, and dances around us as we rush around, putting pieces of a life together so that we can have something to show for our time when it’s inevitably up. Novels like Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer invite us to pause, and reflect on the aliveness of things, the unique and wondrous missions of living things below our feet and buzzing through the air. Everything is fighting for life, heeding the mysterious unsung call to keep moving and to keep being.

Prayer: Mysterious and Inviting

The lovely naturalist poet Mary Oliver wrote the poem “The Summer Day,”

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Oliver’s poetry evokes a tenderness for the movement of nature and its many participants, regarded as being worthy of attention and consideration, an inspiration for the shaping of important questions with answers a lifetime can ponder. Though we don’t know exactly what a prayer is, or what it might do, being in wide eyed reverence for the aliveness beyond us seems like a good place to start. Kingsolver offers the small saying in her novel,

“Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.”

While prayer can be elusive and indefinite, the thoughtful consensus between these glorious women seems to be that gratitude and attention to the greater aliveness around us might set the course on our way through this wild and precious life.