Contemplative Biology

Some­times while walk­ing the Hill, I fall within hear­ing range of a fel­low cit­i­zen who is lis­ten­ing to a tran­sis­tor radio on a speaker. They are prob­a­bly unaware of how far the sound car­ries and how dis­torted it sounds to another hiker. They might as well be car­ry­ing a small battery-​operated rotary saw, for the effect their music shar­ing has on me.

I’ve been tempted to politely grasp the radio and then fling it as far as I can into the desert – but that would be lit­ter­ing of course. If I was king of the hill instead of just fool on the hill, I’d make it a rule to use ear­buds. Right now it’s just a sug­ges­tion. I once made that sug­ges­tion to one such tran­sis­tor­ized gen­tle­man that he, next time he comes walk­ing, bring some ear­buds. “They only cost 10 bucks at Office­Max,” I told him. Many peo­ple come to the hill for a quiet, maybe even con­tem­pla­tive walk. At least to get away from the city, no? He did not under­stand. Look­ing flus­tered, he turned his music off and kept on walk­ing. That didn’t work, I thought to myself.

Some­times I walk up the hill just to lis­ten. I am for peo­ple being in a spe­cial nature pre­serve like Tumamoc. Like me, each one is attracted to the place for some con­scious or uncon­scious rea­son. I enjoy the sound the foot­falls of dif­fer­ent shoes make all going in and out of sync, the heavy breath­ing, the frag­ments of pass­ing ran­dom con­ver­sa­tions, the light noth­ings that make up most human speech. Still, I’d like to try to com­pile some of these over­heard snip­pets and arrange them until they read like a poem. Some­times a run­ner will cry out or moan in some kind of plea­sure or pain. Under­neath this there is a layer of dis­tant sounds of the rail­road, a motor­cy­cle, inter­state 10, a jet­liner, or the heli­copter land­ing at St. Mary’s hospital.

Once last fall a drum­mer set up at the top of the road (within autho­rized bound­aries) beat­ing a rhythm that could be heard all over the moun­tain. It made me won­der how far drum­ming from cer­e­monies that might have been con­ducted on the sum­mit in ancient times could be heard. Maybe in the pre­his­toric vil­lage that once stood where St. Mary’s is now, or the one at the base of A-​mountain?

Under­neath this are bird sounds which I’d like to learn to iden­tify, a dis­tant pack of coy­otes. The wind. Then under that, is silence, but we can not hear it. As John Cage explained in his book Silence, we can’t expe­ri­ence silence. There are always two small sounds when all out­side is quiet: the low throb of the blood flow­ing in our ear, and the high pitched whine of our ner­vous system.

Some­times I am nei­ther lis­ten­ing nor see­ing any­thing as I walk. I get back to where I started with­out remem­ber­ing how I got there.

Dur­ing such a walk a few days ago, wrapped up in my own thoughts, I caught a move­ment in a Palo verde tree beside the road, with a tufted, flycatcher-​type hair­cut. I expected a Phain­ope­pla because of the mistle­toe grow­ing on the tree, but this one was grey. Try­ing to mem­o­rize every­thing I could about it before it was gone, I looked it up in Google on my phone and it turned out to be the female of the species. Of course. I expected a shiny, blue-​black, shiny, arro­gant male, one of the eas­i­est birds to rec­og­nize. These birds fol­low the mistle­toe berries north as they ripen, red and juicy for the hol­i­day sea­son. Even the mistle­toe can fool us if we don’t look closely – there are male and female plants.

Sci­en­tists have recorded Phain­ope­plas imi­tat­ing the calls of at least thir­teen other birds. Maybe to addi­tion­ally con­fuse us, which is another way of say­ing just to keep us pay­ing atten­tion. Know­ing that bird’s name and pro­nounc­ing the Greek syl­la­bles in my mind that day made me happy. I had been in the right place at the right time and I had noticed something.

Iden­ti­fy­ing a bird or plant is like fit­ting the first cou­ple of pieces to a thousand-​piece puz­zle. We start see­ing other things as well. In them­selves, the names aren’t that impor­tant – com­mit­tees of biol­o­gists make those high-​sounding labels up. It’s the notic­ing and see­ing that helps us.

We can con­tem­plate our own biol­ogy. The navel is a pop­u­lar med­i­ta­tion, but overused in my opin­ion. The old­est known mind­ful­ness tech­nique, called vipas­sana in San­skrit, does just that. It has you just fol­low­ing your breath with your mind. Viet­namese Bud­dhist monk and writer Thich Nhat Hanh has spo­ken and writ­ten beau­ti­fully on sim­ple walk­ing as a meditation.

In plain Eng­lish, these mys­ti­cal tra­di­tions are just sug­gest­ing we become aware of our own aware­ness. Sim­ple, but hard to do. But it’s been con­sid­ered more valu­able than accu­mu­lat­ing fac­tual knowledge.

Any­thing – your own thoughts, some­thing out there in nature, a radial saw – can be an object or a sup­port for med­i­ta­tion. The Tumamoc road is a per­fect place to prac­tice: the con­stant talk show of the mind turns down and one notices more details in the landscape.

Tumamoc road is a per­fect place to prac­tice: the quiet even­tu­ally cre­ated in the mind just by the slow steps coör­di­nated with one’s breath­ing allows for a kind of expan­sion of vision – one tends to notice more and more in the landscape.

But to get to the point, this is a book report.

In his new book, The For­est Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, biol­o­gist David George Haskell pub­lishes the daily obser­va­tions he made for a year of a small patch of ground in the Ten­nessee woods near his home. He had the idea after see­ing a group of Tibetan monks make a sand man­dala on the cam­pus where he teaches biol­ogy. About a meter square, the man­dala sym­bol­ized and seemed to con­tain the whole uni­verse. The painstak­ing act of cre­at­ing it, tak­ing about a week, was a end in itself. A med­i­ta­tion. In keep­ing with the imper­ma­nent nature of all things, the sand was swept up and poured into the near­est run­ning stream. I once watched this process dur­ing a visit of some Tibetan monks to Tuc­son. When they were fin­ished mak­ing the man­dala, they poured the sand into a dry wash.

Haskell’s man­dala was a cir­cle about the same size, a square meter. The con­nec­tion between study plot and man­dala is easy for a biol­o­gist because the quadrat was one of the first tools of the new sci­ence of ecol­ogy that was devel­op­ing around the begin­ning of the 20^th cen­tury. It is the basis for the long-​term study plots on Tumamoc marked by Vol­ney Spald­ing in the same way Haskell did. Biologist’s quadrats can be of any shape and size, even circular.It’s what humans do– we can’t look at every­thing at once. We set up a lit­tle boundary.

The plots on Tumamoc are only looked at every decade or so because the object was to map long – term change in plant asso­ci­a­tions. Step­ping back a bit for per­spec­tive, the whole moun­tain, all 860 pro­tected acres, can be seen as a man­dala for con­tem­pla­tion of the Sono­ran Desert.

Haskell went to his spe­cial spot every day and kept notes start­ing with what­ever obser­va­tion came first to his mind. Of his cho­sen scale he says:

Indeed,the truth of the for­est may be more clearly and vividly revealed by the con­tem­pla­tion of a small area than it could be by don­ning ten-​league boots, cov­er­ing a con­ti­nent but un-​covering little.

And he asks the ques­tion, “Can the whole for­est be seen through a small con­tem­pla­tive win­dow of leaves, rocks, and water?” You can lis­ten to a good inter­view with David Haskell on the Diane Rehm show on NPR here.

See­ing a whole by closely observ­ing one small part of it is not just a mys­ti­cal Asian idea. Haskell cites William Blake’s often – quoted open­ing of his poem “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infin­ity in the palm of your hand,

And eter­nity in an hour.

One does not need to know what an augury is to con­tem­plate these lines. As I like to point out, 19^th cen­tury geo­g­ra­pher, explorer, and super – sci­en­tist Alexan­der von Hum­boldt in his life work, the multi-​volume book Cos­mos, con­sid­ered the whole uni­verse an infi­nite inter­con­nected unity like a man­dala. The task of sci­ence was to look at it all piece by piece fit the pieces together, whether it was through col­lect­ing data points or mak­ing a paint­ing of it. Our obser­va­tions were part of the Cosmos.

Among the con­tem­pla­tive biol­o­gists who specif­i­cally cite Humbolt’s Cos­mos as a major inspi­ra­tion were biol­o­gist Charles Dar­win, poet-​scientist Henry Thoreau, Fred­er­ick Church and the Hud­son River school of land­scape painters, and con­ser­va­tion­ist John Muir.

Still, my favorite cos­mol­ogy comes from the two-​thousand year old Avatam­saka Sutra, trans­lated as “Flower Orna­ment Scrip­ture”, some­times called Indra’s net. In a nut­shell, the image is that of a mul­ti­di­men­sional net stretch­ing out to infin­ity in all direc­tions. At the “eye” or node of each thread in the net some­one has tied a jewel. Each jewel reflects every other jewel within that infi­nite network.

So with all that going on, why would some­one hike up Tumamoc with a tran­sis­tor radio? I don’t know, it may be their med­i­ta­tion. I don’t want to become the audi­tory police. I’m just try­ing to lis­ten for a Phain­ope­pla call.