Sping in the Desert ~ An Oxymoron?

Join us again this (and each) Thursday morning at 8:30 at Stone Cup Cafe for coffee and conversation on Spirit & Sustainability. Last week, we had a lively discussion on the sustainability of North Korea (before getting back to Nabhan) with seven people attending.

Winner of the 1986 John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Nature Writing, Gathering the Desert by Gary Paul Nabhan is in good company. A few others are the following: Song of the Sky by Guy Murchie won in 1956, On the Trail of Vanishing Birds by Robert Porter Allen won in 1958, and Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold won in 1977.

This week we take up Nabhan's section on spring in the Sonoran Desert, specifically looking at "mutualism" between the sandfood plant and Sand Papago, mesquite as a mirror of human failings, and the rain-festive quality of the organpipe catus.

Next week, it is onto summer in the desert--when temperatures rise to 140 degrees Fahrenheit and nomadic people people head to the coast. I recommend reading Nabhan's Cultures of Habitat (I can loan it out for a week), a book that asserts that environmental policy-makers must include the information and cultural patterns of the "native" before making policy decisions on conservation.

What's in the Desert?

The flower stalks drooped down like streamers, rattling in the wind against the half-burned miniskirts of old fronds. Gary Paul Nabhan wrote that in Gathering the Desert. Like Nabhan, I always loved the palm skirts. Living in California for 17 years, I noticed one year high up in a palm tree in my front yard a white owl (snow owl) living. I would see its ghostly flight at night sometimes but found its pellets or undigested waste of bones and fur below the palm tree more often. That owl ruled that palm roost.

It seems that Gathering the Desert by Gary Paul Nabhan (with excellent illustrations by Paul Mirocha; see Mirocha's palm drawing to right) has begun. We'll talk about why the creosote bush resprouted after a thermonuclear blast in the desert. We'll talk about male and female grasshoppers that mimic their host plant, the "greasewood" (another name for creosote bush). We'll talk about the lore, legend and factuality of the medicinal qualities of "the little stinker" (also another name for creosote bush). We'll talk about the sandfood or sandroot plant, a parasitic perennial, or mesquite and cacti providing "the staff of life" in the desert. Perhaps we'll get to the palm tree and its capacity for abundant water storage around its shallow roots.

Stone Cup Cafe at 8:30 a.m. today.

Wrapping up Murchie, Moving to Gary Paul Nabhan

It has been an interesting week with Guy Murchie. Our Spirit & Sustainability weekly group grew to six people, with new conversationalists Dr. Jim Tucker and Mr. Chuck Mehan in the mix. This week, on Oct. 5 at 8:30 a.m. at Stone Cup Cafe, we will wrap up Murchie as best we can, leaving him only for reference as we move to Gathering the Desert by Gary Paul Nabhan the next week.

Murchie has set Wade Swicord off into pleasant imaginings of universal consciousness and new energy resources for Chattanooga. Wade would like Chattanooga to be the world leader in alternate energy.

Murchie has drawn me closer to an Aristotelian-based Christian-Hindu consciousness (I am thinking, of course, of the noosphere). For Murchie is a scientist and a mystic of sorts, so much closer to the Pythagorean anima mundi, as well as the Hindu atman, than we might believe.

Evidently, our conversation on Murchie's mysteries last week had a reflective effect for Jim Tucker, who sent me David James Duncan's "What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation." Duncan starts with his own Seventh-Day Adventist background and its "fear-based" faith and moves into his "leaving the faith" phase. In this essay (sometimes polemic?), Ducan dissects the 24-hour business of right-wing politics, which encodes fundamentalist religiosity into Republican/Independent politics. I like Duncan's summing up of this business: The "Christian Right's" fully-automated evangelical machine runs twenty-four hours a day--like McDonald's, Coca Cola and Exxon-Mobil--making converts globally. But to what? The conversion industry's notion of the word Christian has substituted a "Rapture Index" and Armageddon fantasy for Christ's interior kingdom of heaven and love of neighbor; it is funded by donors lured by a televagelical "guarantee" of "a hundredfold increase on all financial donations," as if Mark 10:30 were an ad for a financial pyramid scheme and Jesus never said, "Sell all thou hast and distribute it unto the poor."