Conversations with a Soul (20 page)

Some folk habitually start their mornings with a cup of coffee and a reading of the daily newspaper. A former colleague claimed that he felt out of touch with the world until he had read the paper from the front page to the sports page and everything in between. Only then was he ready to face the day.

For my part, the coffee is indispensable, but, save for rare occasions; a casual glance at the headlines usually satisfies my curiosity about matters great and small. I confess to a deep rooted scepticism about editors and reporters. Is this
really
the news? Are they reporting news or
creating
it? Clearly they are skilled in
arranging
the information so as to suggest, with greater or lesser subtlety, what would be an appropriate reaction on my part to what they had unearthed!

With characteristic wisdom Tom Sawyer observed:

...one of the worst things about civilization is, that anybody that gits a letter with trouble in it comes and tells you all about it and makes you feel bad, and the newspapers fetches you the troubles of everybody all over the world, and keeps you downhearted and dismal most all the time, and it's such a heavy load for a person.
⁵⁵

Were it not for a suspicion that the owners of our newspaper are generally more anxious to sell newspapers than to search out accurate information, and that in this enterprise
downhearted and dismal
are significant allies, I too might be tempted to elevate reading the paper to a morning ritual.

Instead, my morning starts with a dialogue.

Most often the dialogue commences after my head is cleared of sleep, a process greatly aided by a cup of coffee. Once engaged, the conversation almost invariably demands that it be punctuated by long silences. The silences serve several purposes. Principally they afford me the luxury of easing into the day, instead of hurling myself into a routine that moves from shower to corn flakes to a commute, to a job. They allow me to savor the morning and quietly fall in step with my awakening world.

The long silences also reinforce my understanding that the first step in a conversation is not about talking but about listening.

Sometimes the dialogue originates from a place deep
within
me: perhaps stimulated by the remnants of a fading dream; or the awareness of something with which I was struggling; or a memory that cried out for healing; or something churned-up by a few words in a book I was reading just before I turned out the light; or a hunger for beauty, or questions about life and questions about death and questions about God.

They all vie for attention and so I carry them into the day.

Sometimes I carry them for many days. Sometimes I turn them over and over and around and around as I try to get the ideas into focus. Occasionally they disappear for a while, and the dialogue dies but they always came back, so I carry them into the world in the hope that something I encounter will nudge me in a creative direction.

At other times the conversation is initiated not by what percolates from within but
by the world
around
me, about which this book aims to report. These are the characters, the plots and the settings of a world into which I ventured morning after morning. Like mysterious messengers: kelp and birds and seasons and light and moving, flowing waters, and growing things or dying things became powerful, living images that reached deep into me and invited dialogue with my secret inner world, the territory inhabited by my Soul.

Such was the conversation initiated by the kelp.

I had walked along a certain stretch of beach many times and each time I left to continue with my walk, I left with a feeling that some unfinished business was waiting to be concluded, some mystery was waiting to be disclosed some bit of discussion needed to be started that would act like a leaven to my head and heart.

I started to notice little things and I made detours so that I might inspect the kelp washing ashore. Something told me I needed to pay attention and I needed to be open, for an invitation was in the offing. Another part of me hoped no one was watching my lunatic performance, especially someone known to my wife, who might receive word that her husband was seen behaving in a bizarre fashion!

I confess to being a lover of logic and reason. These are the tools I use to separate truth from falsehood, fact from opinion, propaganda from information.

My university years were richly influenced by being immersed in the rigors of Linguistic Analysis. I learned to ask questions about the
words
and the
structures
that defined my understanding of just about everything. The exercise demanded a scrupulous commitment to honesty and consistently raised issues of meaning. The language of faith and the assumptions in which the words were rooted was by no means exempted from scrutiny. Again and again I was pushed beyond theological formulations and challenged to articulate precisely what it was in which I believed and what exactly did I intend to communicate by using the words I did?

It sometimes felt as if I was a participant in my very own personal renaissance where reason wrestled with dogma and rationality faced off against tradition.

I found the practice exhilarating if, at times, disconcerting. Nevertheless the experience worked its way deeply into my bones and continues to serve me to this day. This is probably why my first response to hunches and hints and vague rumblings is to treat them with suspicion.

On the other hand, the years have also taught me that without respecting the unexpected and without an accommodation to mystery there can be no dialogue with the world around. On numerous occasions I’ve discovered that, when I have allowed myself the luxury of spontaneously responding to an intuitive
feeling about something, or someone
, without subjecting the event to analysis, I have been delighted by the result. I have encountered truth that lies beyond reason and a joy that makes fun of logic.

Furthermore, I am slowly learning that there is some part of me that hears and understands long before my conscious mind picks up on the clues. It’s a part that employs its own language and demands its own freedoms. At such moments I have sensed that I was venturing out into the territory ruled over by myth and legend. I was tapping into a source of knowledge which was the common property of men and women of every age and every Faith but which demanded a certain surrender of the will before it could be apprehended. This is probably why The Renaissance was not simply concerned with geometry and science but unlocked doors that led into the worlds of art, poetry and literature.

I am also aware that on too many occasions I ignored the voice of my Soul and later, sometimes too much later, regretted that I hadn’t responded to a moment which knocked once and then was lost forever.

I freely admit there’s nothing particularly attractive about discarded kelp fronds, whereas the rest of the beach offered much to engage and entertain me.

I cannot recall how many mornings I made the pilgrimage to walk along the water’s edge listening, watching, questioning, waiting, for what, I did not know.

Then one morning, it came!

Slowly at first, then with gathering excitement the ideas tumbled about. It dawned on me that this beach with its dead remnants of a kelp forest, this sand upon which I stood, these waves which sent me scampering to higher ground, this common marriage of land and sea was more, far more, than simply a meeting place where one fronted up against the other. It was a bridge to life. I was standing at a border. It was
a frontier.
Unquestionably, the most important frontier that ever there has been or ever will be.

Across this frontier, life came
to
the earth, and across this frontier life came
from
the earth. Some that made that crossing stumbled into extinction, and some that made that crossing, stretching over millions of years and countless experiments, launched our world into a living, breathing organism, a home to all that live here today.

4 billion years ago ours was a dead planet. Simple life forms evolved about a billion years later, then somewhere about 500 million years after that, the first players emigrated from the sea – plants, vegetation, growing rooting germinating sprouting things that prepared the earth to receive the earliest known creatures.

Before about 480 million years ago, the continents were lifeless save for thin crusts and varnishes of bacteria. Green algae growing near the coasts began to creep into inlets and estuaries, where rivers carried fertilizing loads of weathered minerals and dead microbes. The algae moved into shallower waters and evolved a thick skin that protected against longer and longer exposure to the open air, until they no longer had to be submerged. They became land plants. Soaked by sunlight, they evolved into low mossy mats and then ground hugging weeds . . . new species evolved, slowly at first, developing roots and associations with underground fungi to extract food and water from the ground, and hard tissue to hold the botanical weight high. When the plants died their corpses enriched the estuaries and inlets with nitrogen, phosphorus, and other scarce elements, making it easier for succeeding generations to grow. Invertebrates emerged from the water, beginning with millipedes, 450 million years ago, and then followed by insects, spiders, scorpions, worms and mites; they began to root through the thickening soil and nibble the stems.
⁵⁶

I stood there as the kelp washed ashore, transported back through time in my mind and imagination, witnessing a process that has been going on for millions of years!
⁵⁷

Somewhere around 385 million years ago lobe fined fish, of which the celebrated coelacanth is a distant cousin, migrated into wetlands and marshy inlets, and another frontier was breached.

Not shaped for long, deep-ocean swims like sharks and tuna, lobe-fins were better suited for sudden bursts through sludgy water. One of the risks of life on the coasts was the sudden drop in the oxygen caused by blooms of bacteria feasting on organic matter in shallow water, and sucking up the gas for themselves. But with lungs the lobe-fins could get their oxygen elsewhere. The fossil record suggests that lobe-fins thrived in these places. Evolving into enormous forms, they feasted on the galaxies of small fishes that in turn fed on the invertebrates that lived in the muck. Their limblike fins even let them move along the bottom of the lagoons, and in shallow water they might have pushed up with their front fins to breathe
.
⁵⁸

Perhaps, some amphibious creatures may even have started to colonize the land through their fertilized eggs. Washed into estuaries and lagoons they lay in shallow water until they hatched.

Yet the migration was not simply from sea to shore but also from shore to sea!

Mammals that breathed oxygen yet live in the ocean, present us with an anomaly. What are oxygen breathing creatures doing in a world where the inhabitants were designed to filter out
oxygen in the water?
Palaeontologists and their evolution-investigating cohorts came to believe that whales must have evolved from land creatures, where breathing air is a natural part of being alive. They initially suspected that their investigations would lead them to some kind of primitive elephant. Then along came Hans Thewissen, a paleobiologist and he changed all that speculation when he unearthed the bones of a creature he dubbed
ambulocetus
(“walking whale”). Ambulocetus, a land mammal, had definitive ear bone structures
found only
in cetaceans, primarily in dolphins and whales.