![]() This intuition is an ancient one common to traditional cultures the world over, whether Aboriginal Australian, Shinto, or classical Greek. All this strikes one powerfully as so obviously good that it seems to suggest a Goodness behind it all. It’s the inkling one gets when hiking, let’s say, through a forest on a cool morning in early summer, hearing a red-winged blackbird sing in the sumac, watching largemouth bass dimpling the surface of a misty lake, startling a fawn up from the brush. It’s a spontaneous wonder at the beauty – the apparent meaningfulness – of life. This very-goodness will be familiar to anyone, religious or not, who loves nature. The natural world is a book that reveals the divine, just as the book of scripture does. “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” declares the first sentence of Genesis, which then sums up the creation story with the affirmation: “And it was very good.” Flowers, birds, humans, stars: we are all creatures, the handwork of a Creator. With childlike sweetness, the hymn sums up a core belief shared by most religions. “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all,” wrote the Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Frances Alexander in her well-known 1848 hymn. People in earlier centuries took the joy we feel in other living things at face value, as a pointer to a theological truth. Evidently, we have learned to communicate as fellow creatures who genuinely enjoy each other’s company. Their masters feel the same, thanks to the same chemical, oxytocin. By analyzing hormone levels, the same study showed that dogs feel a pleasurable rush when their masters show them affection. Is it then instinctive manipulation when my Brittany hound gazes at me with his sad and eager eyes? No doubt, but that’s not the whole story. Put more cynically, dogs have managed to hack into our most primal emotion. When they look at us, we feel the same tenderness as when we’re face-to-face with a young child. ![]() The researchers found that in the thirty thousand years since dogs separated from wolves and began consorting with us, their faces have changed so that their eyes “appear larger and more infant-like” and are capable of mimicking human expressions. Mommsen bestows high-octane attention, with reference to many sound texts, on the book of nature: “All this strikes one powerfully as so obviously good,” he writes, “that it seems to suggest a Goodness behind it all.” Awesome.ĭogs evolved “expressive eyebrows” to trigger feelings of affection in humans, according to a 2019 study reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From her, Christina intimates that she is learning an alternate way of being. Smooth and cool to the touch, she just is. For hours, Chickpea rests on a leaf, breathing in and breathing out. To this, she added Hudson River driftwood and green plants. Christina quickly built for her a vivarium, filling the tank with earthy substrate aerated by microscopic insects that arrived by UPS from the department of agriculture. ![]() With peach-colored, soft-as-silk skin, Chickpea (her human-chosen name) slurps up a banana smoothy from time to time and sips water from a tiny plastic cup. My daughter Christina Ellsberg recently received the unexpected gift of a just-hatched Australian crested gecko, only slightly bigger than a thumb. Mommsen opens the conversation that while connecting with creation through your dog might be an experience delivered to your door on a silver platter, less accessible expressions of nature are also Godly. Mommsen admits that his own dog might be playing him emotionally, fairly enough, but writes a larger essay that connects us with God through nature (“the natural world is a book that reveals the divine”) and with nature as healer (“Reading the book of nature is therapeutic”). My dogs use their eyebrows, yes, and they also smile for the Iphone camera and tilt their heads to demonstrate they are paying attention. ![]() John Cheever wrote that he woke every single morning to the realization of how much he loved his dog. He begins by describing dogs as having “expressive eyebrows”-and, of course, it is true that after 40,000 years of domestication, dogs have managed to “hack in” to our emotions. Thanks to Plough for once more dedicating an issue to my favorite subjects-this time, especially, for Peter Mommsen’s essay on reading the book of nature. ![]()
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