“Act Beautifully”
When I was young, I remember many times I found to marvel in the wonders of the universe, perhaps when morning birds sang with the rising sun, or when after a light rain a small rainbow danced on a blade of grass. The world moved slowly enough that I found the spaciousness to put my ear against the Earth and look through each blade rising alone toward the sky. And I felt closer to the world and to myself.
I also remember a great calm settling over me when listening to the gentle hum of water while playing alone among the cattails by a pond, or when taking a quiet nap beneath an oak tree in the breeze of a summer afternoon. In moments such as these, I felt as though there was some quality of the universe that echoed in the volume and chambers of my body.
Like melodies of experience, these moments of noticing were amplified by the stars that danced at night and that I could see when looking out through the window when alone in my room. These silent melodies stretched across broad colorful horizons during sunsets over the Mediterranean Sea, in the places where I spent a good part of my childhood. And like stepping stones of time, these moments form the memories of experience that guided me along toward the questions and desire to know and understand myself. As I moved into the field and profession of teaching, these questions extended into the larger diverse family and community of students with whom I work.
(How may we all understand ourselves and live into our fullest potentials; so that we do not lose our time to trivial and shallow investments of our lives that ultimately leave us feeling unfulfilled or frustrated?)
In pursuit of this goal to know deeply, often in my classes, I feel called back to Dr. Martin Luther King’s autobiographical writings. There is a passage in which he describes a prominent time each day, when he was in college, during which he would spend an hour or more down on the banks of a tributary to the Delaware River that ran along the side of the seminary campus. He describes sitting alone to create the space for his own reflection and for creating within himself even greater spaciousness.
He recollected that:
Every day I would sit on the edge of the campus by the side of the river and watch the beauties of nature. My friend, in this experience, I saw God. I saw him in birds of the air, the leaves of the tree, the movement of the rippling waves…. Sometimes I go out at night and look up at the stars as they bedeck the heavens like shining silver pins sticking in a magnificent blue pin cushion… (29)
Dr. King’s recollection of his practice of returning daily to sit in quiet by the river provide a constant reminder for me to reflect on my own practices for becoming even more human. In this short reflection from Dr. King’s journal, I see the impact that experience had on his life and work, and I feel inspired to even more deeply root into my own practice and awareness. The way Dr. King describes his time by the river with clear intention as a daily practice, rings deeply for me.
The model of Dr. King points us in part to his relationship with the Earth, and the strength he found in this communion to understand his place within the natural world. Kingian scholar and activist Drew Dellinger makes note of Dr. King’s ecological worldview from the “Christmas Eve Sermon” at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on December 24, 1967, only a few months before Dr. King’s assassination: “‘If we are to have peace on earth,’ he told the congregation, ‘we must develop a world perspective. . . . Yes, as nations and individuals, we are interdependent.’”
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Drew goes on to highlight how Dr. King, “then, with a sentence that could easily have been uttered by John Muir or Rachel Carson… states, ‘It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated’” (Dellinger). For King this was so radically important that he had said in the summer before that, “It would be foolhardy for me to work for integrated schools or integrated lunch counters and not be concerned about the survival of the world in which to be integrated” (Dellinger).
Dr. King died in April 1968, a little more than eight months before Apollo 8 astronauts took the iconic EarthRise photograph (on December 24, 1968, exactly one year after Dr. King’s sermon on interrelatedness), which has often been credited with transforming our collective consciousness toward a global family. Yet he had already described the vision afforded us through this image. In the final chapter of Where Do We Go From Here, King offers the anecdote of a family who had inherited a house in which they would all have to live together. He then extended the frame of this anecdotal proposition to what he referred to as the great world house, and the vast diversity present within the circumference of that family.
Presumably we also all know that in addition to maintaining these ecological foundations within his worldview, Dr. King had also studied Mohandas Gandhi’s approach to nonviolence, even traveling to India to study at some of Gandhi’s learning communities (ashrams).
In a parallel stream of life, Arne Naess, born seventeen years before Dr. King in Norway, was also also a student of Gandhian nonviolence (Næss 15), having employed the principles of the practice in active resistance to German occupation of Norway during World War II (and then as a form of activism for the Earth itself). Næss, a respected mountaineer, found a similar sense of communion with the natural world. There are important connections here between the sense of dignity and respect afforded to all life by King, Naess and Gandhi, and the way in which an underlying environmental ethic is implicit, and at times more directly articulated, in their work.
In 1972, Naess published an essay in which he coined and defined the notion of deep ecology, as distinguished from shallow ecology. He found that shallow ecology addressed superficial conversations about the environment and ultimately served an anthropocentric agenda that privileged the wealthy (Western illusions about recycling are a classic case of this phenomena). During his life, Naess was held in a place of profound and popular honor in Norway and around the world. He was also a scholar and writer who was fluent in several languages and knowledgeable about many subjects through which he was able to see the strands of interconnectivity. He believed that “richness and diversity are good in themselves, just as each being has intrinsic worth,” and as such, it is a fundamental goal of deep ecology, “to realize our potentials and to act beautifully” (17). Deep ecology is for Naess a practice for self-realization, both in the scientific reality, evident in, as King describes, our interdependence (or as Thich Nhat Hanh names it, inter-being), as well as through the aesthetic stillness, awe and wonder we may feel within the consciousness of our body as we enter into the mountain of our being.
Drew Dellinger calls to heart the intricate interrelationship of our global living family in quoting King’s “Letter from Birmington Jail”: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (Dellinger). Deep ecology is a practice for the realization of our potential as well as recognition for what King describes as mutuality. Naess advocated for us to follow “an approach of continuous open inquiry… as a loving pursuit of wisdom. It is a deep exploration of our whole lives and context in pursuit of living wisely… [and] to know ourselves” (19). And while he develops what he calls his own ecosophy (eco- meaning home and -sophia meaning wisdom), his point is not for anyone to adopt Naess’s views on what is right or wrong, but to see how he found his own path, and for each of us to find our own path up toward the panoramic peaks. The field of this exploration is the diversity of the natural world in which Naess encourages us to see “oneself in all things” (196).
Some Prompts to Encourage Forward Movement
- How might you start to flesh out your own ecosophy for mutuality and realization of self?
- In what natural spaces or places do you feel most like yourself?
- Arne Næss identifies 25 “Lifestyle Trends within the Deep Ecology Movement” that we may adopt for our own transformation (Naess 140–141). Reflect on one or more of these in your own life.
Works Cited
Basho, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the Interior. Shambhala, 2006.
Dellinger, Drew. “Martin Luther King Jr. — Ecological Thinker.” drewdellinger.org, https://drewdellinger.org/martin-luther-king-jr-ecological-thinker/. Accessed 19 June 2020.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. Warner Books, 1998.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here. Beacon Press, 1986.
Næss, Arne. The Ecology of Wisdom. Counterpoint Press, 2008.
