I’ve only been to church twice in my life, so I think the real chapel of my childhood was my mother’s sewing room in Upstate New York. With its perfumed air and buttery sunlight, walking through its wooden doors was like entering a place of worship. On the shelves and windowsills sat my mother’s small collection of cherished items, out of reach and protected from her two young daughters. Metal Baoding balls that sang when you rolled them in your palms, plants with dense green leaves, and tiny sculptures carved from white stone and clay. Of all the treasures, the small Japanese netsuke with a rotating face was my favorite. On the special days that my mother accompanied us into the sewing room, my sister and I would hold the figure carefully in our hands, covering it like a baby bird who might try to fly away.
I remember marveling at its happy face, deep set in a mane of sculpted black hair. With the gentle nudge of a finger, this face would spin to reveal another side– a look of anguish, carved with deep wrinkles and a furrowed brow. He was happy or sad, kind or angry, good or evil; he could never be both. This netsuke was a curious representation of what I’d been taught in school— our world is packaged in sets of opposites. Starting in kindergarten, I learned to label my surroundings in neat, binary sets. I learned to separate cat from dog, rich from poor, us from them. Even in my sanctuary, I was not safe from this concept of division.
In reality, our definition of opposites is simply a result of the way we perceive our environment, and my mother’s netsuke was a reflection of these perceptions. Rather than celebrating the relationship between good and evil, the netsuke portrays this bond as parallel. Here, good and evil will never mix. They will simply exist on separate planes, rising when one falls like the sun and the moon. This perception is one that is found in the way humans regard most things. But, to treat the world in this way ignores the complex relationships between all things in our lives, and in this universe. There can be no good if there is no evil to compare it to. And even then, evil can’t exist without knowing what is good. Allowing ourselves to create such binary categories for our experience prevents us from searching for harmony.
This isolation we create for ourselves damages our relationship with our environment. When a human stands in the woods and looks out at nature, he defines his “self” as separate from his surroundings. Like good and evil or strong and weak, we define ourselves as man and nature. From this separation comes a desire to establish a hierarchy: man always trumps nature. But when the power of nature questions this hierarchy, man responds with force. The way humans regarded the Atchafalaya river is a clear example of the desperation of man to maintain power over nature. When the Atchafalaya threatened change the course of the Mississippi river, humans responded with force and ignored the natural patterns of the river. Their attempts to control the river seemed to completely overlook the failure of human intervention in the past, failure that John McPhee claims is “generally masked by the powerful fabric of ambition that impelled people to build towns and cities where almost any camper would be loath to pitch a tent” (31). Building homes and industries in high risk flood areas demonstrates the hubris of man that allows him to believe he has power over the patterns of the environment. As McPhee explains, “For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature” (6). When man prioritizes himself above nature, he does not acknowledge the interconnectedness of self and environment. As this misconception grows and festers, we lose sight our responsibility to nurture the environment rather than fight it.
When man creates a hierarchy of self over nature, we become blind to the possibilities of harmony with our environment. Nature is impermeant and constantly changing, but we believe we have found ways to define its fluidity. Night comes when day goes, and summer is somehow the opposite of winter. Though these features of the world seem to be in stark contrast, there is true harmony between them. By separating them into opposites, we lose sight of their interconnectedness. Day can’t be defined without knowing night, and the warmth of summer cannot be described without understanding the cold of winter. In this way, man cannot be powerful while nature is weak, because power doesn’t exist without weakness. As verse 42 of the Tao Te Ching explains, “All beings support yin and embrace yang and the interplay of these two forces fills the universe. Yet only at the still-point, between the breathing in and breathing out, can one capture these two in perfect harmony.” The universe is completely relative; all things exist only in context of each other. When humans disconnect ourselves from nature, we create an idea of “us” and “them.” This separation is damaging for both humans and nature, because without our interconnectedness we force ourselves to stand at odds.
In an effort to determine what is good and what is bad, humans have developed an affinity for constant growth. Stagnation is synonymous with failure in our culture. The madness gene of humans, which gives us the hubris to build cities in flood zones, turns catastrophic in a society that rewards endless expansion. For example, the city of Los Angeles seems to exist where no city should. According to McPhee, Los Angeles “exists in a semidesert, imports water three hundred miles, has inveterate flash floods” (191) among other geologically dangerous conditions. Despite this, people continue to flock to Los Angeles and build homes in the mountains surrounding it. The madness gene, which is perhaps both biological and societal, convinces humans to congratulate the ingenuity that allows them to fight against nature. When we become set on living in areas that are not suited for human development, we are essentially fighting against nature. Natural disasters are not enough to convince us to leave an area once we set our sights on it; we would rather fight through drought, fire, and mudslides than move out of Los Angeles. As John McPhee explains, this tension shows that there is “a great temporal disparity between the pace at which the mountains behave and the way people think” (202). Mountains do not act in predictable ways. Though we try, we can never fully understand the patterns of nature. By seeking constant growth, we are ignoring the ways our environment communicates with us.
Holding growth and expansion to such a high standard causes us to lose sight of what stand at the opposite side of the spectrum—contentment. Satisfaction is not possible when we seek only to own more, consume more, and gain more. As the Tao says, “Grabbing and stuffing—there is no end to it.” While growth can be beneficial, uncontained growth conflicts with nature. In the dance between humans and the rest of our environment, we are stepping on its toes, moving too quickly, and refusing to let nature lead. Verse 46 of the Tao writes that there is “No greater curse than desire, no greater tragedy than discontentment, no greater fault than selfishness.” All these vices cause humans to see nature as a cornucopia, constantly giving and overflowing with resources. In reality, nature is full of gifts that require gratefulness and attention. If we take without returning, our environment becomes weakened to the point of catastrophic collapse. To have a healthy, restorative relationship with nature, we must learn to be comfortable with contentment. As described in the Tao, “The movement of Tao is return. The way of the Tao is to yield.” To be yielding is not synonymous with weakness or laziness. Instead, it is the way we can learn to dance with nature.
On my weekly visits to the woods this semester, nature never divided itself into the categories we have created for it. There is no hierarchy in the way elements of nature interact. Birds are no more important than the bugs they eat, and trees are no better than the dirt from which they grow. Without the participation of others, nothing in nature can exist. In all my hours spent there, there was no truth to good and bad. Each natural occurrence has stemming reactions that cannot be measured or categorized. Similarly, there was no such thing as winter and spring in the woods. March 20th did not signify the end of cold, and winter didn’t stop the earth from flourishing. On my trips, I heard frogs singing for warmth when there were no leaves on the trees, I saw flowers bloom in the cold, I witnessed some things grow while others waited patiently for their turn. Nature knows that all creatures have different needs, different times, and different roles. However, these roles aren’t quite as separated as we sometimes believe. Everything in the woods is relative and constantly dependent. There is no individual in a forest, just like there is no truth the “self” we create.
On my 18th birthday, my mother gave me my own netsuke, wrapped carefully in white paper. He watched over my room with his rotating face, an endless conflict between good and evil. When I thought of it, I held it in my hands and twirled its delicate face. Happy, angry; good, bad; happy, sad. But, outside of the sewing room, my mother wasn’t there to warn me to be gentle with tiny figure. Eventually, my constant turning snapped the delicate mechanisms connecting its face to its body, leaving its head lolling in a helmet of black hair. Now, the face spun in all directions, revealing the sides of the face that had not been carved. Unmarked and clean.
I’d like to be unmarked, like the hidden face of my netsuke. Only when it broke out of the cycle of division was this spotless side revealed. The cycle of dividing and labeling our world strains our relationship with the environment, and eventually cause it to snap. By attempting to classify our experience with nature and with each other, we lose sight of the world’s webbed, contextual quality. This interdependence is only damaged by the desire to catalogue our perceptions. Like the Tao says in its first verse, “A mind filled with thought, identified with its own perceptions, beholds the mere form of this world.” The netsuke was weakened by its divisions, in the same way humans are weakened by our own perceptions.