[Buddha-l] The American New England Transcendentalists' retreat--Follensby Pond

[Richard Hayes]

On Fri, 2009-01-09 at 10:28 -0700, jkirk wrote:
 
> In the US, nature was never far from mental cultivation concerns.
> Many of us, I suspect, had our first experiences of truth beyond
> the conventional while "communing with nature," as we used to
> say--hiking and camping in forests and meadows, deserts and
> mountains.

Normally (as long-time denizens of buddha-l may recall) I fulminate
against the word "spirituality," which has often seemed to me a word in
a desperate and mostly unsuccessful search for a meaning. That
notwithstanding, I have been participating in a Quaker "spiritual
deepening" group for the past five months. (Why, I wonder, are there no
spiritual enshallowment groups?) Something that has emerged in
discussions is that a good many Quakers consider themselves to be
atheist (especially if God is understood as somebody who appears as a
burning bush or a cloud hovering over Israelites on long camping trips,
thrusts commandments carved on stone tablets into the hands of reluctant
prophets, cheers the Israelites on in genocidal campaigns against
Canaanites, and stomps on human grapes wrathfully). But among the
self-proclaimed atheistic Quakers one tends to find a very deep love of
nature, just of the kind you report. Going on hikes in relatively
unpopulated areas and sitting quietly among the birds and spiders and
coyotes is how they recharge their spiritual batteries.

Having just spent a wonderful day at the Bosque del Apache wildlife
preserve with my wife and our dog, and feeling completely energized by
the hundreds of thousands of snow geese and sand hill cranes and a few
great blue herons and red-shouldered hawks, I would have to count myself
among the nature mystics in the Quaker (and Buddhist) fold.

One of the first shocks I had as a young man still experiencing the
first stages of a love affair with the teachings of Gautama was an
article I read making the observation that Buddhists in India tended to
see nature as dangerous and threatening, not at all the sort of thing a
person would want to have much to do with. A nature lover for as long as
I can remember, I wondered whether I could ever get serious about a
religion that sees nature as something to take refuge from rather than
as something to go for refuge to. Seeing nature as a paradigm of danger
rather than as a source of nourishment and rejuvenation seems so, well,
Republican! 

-- 
Richard Hayes