The Book of Nature: An Offhand Beginning

The Book of Nature: An Offhand Beginning

by Barbara Mahany

Every book has its backstory, and my most recent, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books, March 21, 2023), is one that began in the unlikeliest of ways. 

There I was, a half-hour deep into a radio talk show, impishly titled How to Be a Holy Rascal, with a rabbi whose poetry and prayers in our synagogue’s prayer book had often made my knees go limp, with that frisson that comes when words, like a truth-seeking missile, pierce the heart, because poets have that way of putting to words the otherwise ineffable, the unnoticed that’s long been right before your eyes. 

We, the rabbi and I, were talking about my very first book, Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door, a collection of prayerful essays and a hodgepodge of wonderments that unfurls season by season, very much rooted not only in the ramshackle runaway garden outside my kitchen door, but in the whole of creation stuffed in my quarter-acre plot here in a leafy little burg along Lake Michigan’s shoreline. The good rabbi was peppering me with probing questions, listening along, when all of a sudden he piped in: “Slowing Time reads like midrash to the Book of Nature.” He had me at midrash, ancient rabbinic commentary, the practice of bringing sacred imagination to a scriptural text. It’s not every day that a lifelong Irish Catholic has terms like midrash tossed her way and certainly not in a way that pins her to the practice. 

But if midrash got my attention, it was Book of Nature that stopped me. Was there an actual thing, a book filled with pages of nature’s wonderments? And if so, why would anyone—be they rabbi or scholar or priest—be offering up commentary? How had I missed it, this book that I sensed was not your everyday field guide but something so awe-infused it comes with capital letters? 

I set out to find out, beginning where many a quest for knowledge begins these days: Googling. Indeed, there exists such a so-titled tome, though it’s metaphorical in name, and its roots lie in religious tradition. It’s ancient. It goes back, long before it was named, to preliterate civilizations, to eras and epochs and dynasties and tribes before pages were printed, long before script. It goes back to the first human stirrings on the planet, when the first someone looked to the sky and felt some epiphany. Or suffered the blows of a harvest gone pfft when some almighty scourge drowned or devoured or way overbaked it. Ancient peoples read the Book of Nature as the first sacred text, the text of all of creation, inscribed and unfurled by a God present always and everywhere. 

Once I moved beyond Google, once I pulled from my bookshelves a handful of monks (Thomas Merton and David Steindl-Rast), poets (Mary Oliver, Rita Dove, David Whyte, and W. S. Merwin, among the many), Transcendentalists (the Concord duo, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and the great twentieth-century literary prophet (Annie Dillard), I moved back in time plucking the tomes of Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, the ancient Celts, the T’ang Dynasty poet Li Po, and the Japanese master of haiku, Matsuo Bashō. I skipped around continents, from John Muir’s and Henry Beston’s America to Pablo Neruda’s and Octavio Paz’s Latin America, from Roger Keats’s and Robert Macfarlane’s Great Britain, to Rumi’s and Hafez’s Persia, and the Desert Fathers and Mothers of Egypt. I read the believers (Francis of Assisi) and the maybe-nots (Loren Eiseley).

By the time I’d read across the centuries, poring over and meticulously note-taking from more than 200 tomes, my writing room (once a one-car garage attached to our old shingled house) proved a veritable danger zone, with teetering bookstacks ringing the room, and a treacherously narrow path barely cleared between the door and my desk. 

It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d been researching my book much as I’d done my reporting in three decades of daily journalism. As a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune for just shy of 30 years, my job was to interview sources hither and yon. Over the phone. At the scene of a crime. Outside the courtroom. On the far end of an airplane ride. If you wanted to get to the truth, to tell the most compelling, most accurate tale, you filled your notebooks with quote upon quote. You soaked up color and context. And then you typed, straight through till deadline.

In the case of writing my own Book of Nature, my ballooning bookshelves housed all my sources. In the same way that I’d once relied on first-hand accounts, or experts in particular fields, scoured public records, or archival documents, I now mined sources and documents across the millennia. The bejeweled pages of history and literature, of brilliant nature writing and transcendent unorthodoxies, filled my notebooks. And then I set off for the woods, and the lakeshore. I sat under the stars. Pressed my nose to the windows when darkening skies rumbled with thunder, or quieted under snow clouds. I wove the wisdoms and wonderment of ancients and moderns with my own first-hand attentions to all of creation. 

Somewhere in the thick of all that reading and wandering the woods, the book’s architecture fell into place: I began with a deep dive into this ancient and timeless theological construct, the Book of Nature, followed by chapters on the spiritual practices of paying attention and seeking stillness. The second half of the book would be a collection of twelve meditative essays, field notes from my own watchkeeping on the stirrings of nature, drawing from those especially sacred places and hours when I most profoundly felt some inkling of divine presence.

Turns out one of those first three chapters—the one on stillness––wound up on the cutting room floor. But only because in the back and forth of editing the twelve essays grew more layered at the prompting of a brilliant editor, who needled me to plumb deeper ground and who drew out epiphanies that revealed themselves only in the process of writing.

After a long newspaper career covering murders and mayhem in the big city and beyond, it surprises me some that I’ve become a scribe of the soul. But maybe it’s antidote to the madness of the everyday. And, as a liberal Anglo-Catholic long married to an observant Jew, I’ve devoted my attentions over the years to those interstitial spaces that weave between and within sacred traditions. I aim to gather in, not to exclude. And certainly so in my writing.

In our increasingly balkanized world, where words are so often used to divide, my hope is that The Book of Nature––begun in a rabbi’s offhand comment, explored through timeless teachings of prophets and poets, mystics and monastics, punctuated with my own quiet attunements to the wordless stirrings of all creation––illuminates a shared simple truth: heaven and earth are thrumming with sacred wisdoms and wonder. It’s ours for the reaping. If only we open our senses. And so, too, our soul. 

If we ignore it, the wounds to the earth will pale against those of our soul.

—

The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text

We live inside a nautilus of prayer–if only we open our senses and perceive what is infused all around.

Throughout millennia and across the monotheistic religions, the natural was often revered as a sacred text. By the Middle Ages, this text was given a name, “The Book of Nature,” the first, best entry point for encounter with the divine. The very act of “reading” the world, of focusing our attention on each twinkling star and unfurling blossom, humbles us and draws us into sacred encounter.

As we grapple to make sense of today’s tumultuous world, one where nature is at once a damaged and damaging source of disaster, as well as a place of refuge and retreat, we are called again to examine how generously it awaits our attention and devotion, standing ready to be read by all.

Weaving together the astonishments of science; the profound wisdom and literary gems of thinkers, poets, and observers who have come before us; and her own spiritual practice and gentle observation, Barbara Mahany reintroduces us to The Book of Nature, an experiential framework of the divine. God’s first revelation came to us through an ongoing creation, one that–through stillness and attentiveness to the rumblings of the heavens, the seasonal eruptions of earth, the invisible pull of migration, of tide, and of celestial shiftings–draws us into sacred encounter. We needn’t look farther for the divine.

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