The story of our revised "Frog Prince" was itself an example of metamorphosis. Grimm, the author of the fairy tale, had assumed that frogs would prefer to be princes. Willie and David had helped us stretch our imaginations through their raucous croaks and their energetic jumps around the room, so that, indeed, being a prince began to seem a little boring. They helped us all--even the little girls, who definitely wanted to "stay princesses"--understand that human beings are part of the circle of creation, including princesses, pools, frogs, and the flowers climbing the castle wall. (The truth is that, given the choice, it is unlikely that any frog today would change his place for a prince, especially in this day of tabloids and paparazzi!)
Willie and David, the perpetual frogs, reminded me that we can achieve a metamorphosis through the arts. Music, dance, drawing, painting, sculpture, and the other creations we call "art" can both be a doorway through which we enter into a deeper relationship with our natural environment--the way Willie and David jumped right into a frog's life--and a way to express that relationship. The arts can raise our consciousness, and that surely is the first step in moving toward meaningful changes in how we live on this planet.
The arts remind us of two facts that are grievously neglected in contemporary industrial Western culture: that we are physical bodies and part of the natural world, not "apart" from it, and also that we are spiritual beings who find wholeness and joy in creating things of meaning and beauty.
In participating in the arts ourselves, or enjoying the creations of other people, we use our senses, those marvelous antennae of our physical bodies. The arts help people of any age fine-tune these senses, so that we can better respond to the natural world around us. Creating things--music, dance, images, poetry--frees our spirits, so that we can be human beings in touch with the reality both of body and of spirit, reveling in our place in the circle of life just as the small frogs reveled in their destiny in the princess's garden pond.
MUSIC
All of the arts have potential to transform our consciousness of nature and ourselves. They can call us back to our origins, both as individuals and a species. Take music, for example. I will never forget turning on the first episode of a television series many years ago, "The Music of Man"[sic], narrated by Yehudi Menuhin, and hearing a repetitive "thud, thud, thud, thud." Soon Menuhin's voice reminded viewers that this was the first sound each of us heard in utero, the sound of our mother's heartbeat, and that, throughout our lives, we would continue to seek that sound through the music we made and heard. Great music takes us home to something: to our primal connection to our life's source. In the early history of humanity, music, like dance and the creation of visual art, was a sacred act, homage to the deity or deities. At its best, it still is. Perhaps that is the reason that, when I sit at the piano and play Mozart or Bach for an hour, I am a more centered human being when I have finished.Listening can be a first step in helping both young and old to connect with nature. I often suggest both to my pre-school dance and music classes and to my adult meditation classes that we sit in silence and take note of the sounds we hear. As we listen, we realize that the earth provides a veritable symphony of sound, to which we often do not pay attention. When we hear it, we also become motivated to combat the human-generated noise that often drowns it out.
When children learn to listen, they have learned the most important step in their relationships with other human beings, as well as with themselves and with their earthly home. When adults are able to quiet themselves enough to listen to music, perhaps they as well will be better able to listen to one another, to their deepest selves, and to the earth.
When we ourselves produce music, whether it is through making rhythmic patterns with our own bodies (clapping our hands, tapping our feet, slapping our knees), or through the use of the voice or instruments, we are contributing to that symphony which is already playing from the ponds and the treetops. There are some composers, in particular, who know this. The French composer and organist Olivier Messiaen based much of his music on the pattern of bird-song, and the Czech composer Jan‡cek, in writing music for the largely animal cast of his opera The Cunning Little Vixen, spent long hours listening to the voices of the forest animals he attentively depicted through sound.
But creating music is not just for the professionals; all of us are musicians at heart; all of us are seeking that primal heartbeat.
DANCE
A particular pleasure in my pre-school creative movement classes is echoing the movement found in our natural environment, because it is such a natural activity for children. Without hesitation, children "become" the ocean, rivers, trees, animals, stones--and, of course, frogs! They seem to find particular pleasure in taking the identity of these other species with whom they share the earth.I hope that these early experiences will help them, as they grow, to see all of nature as a dance. The choreography of crashing surf and gliding gulls, of quivering aspens and soaring eagles, the slither of the snake and the scuttling of the beetle, all are the earth's dance. A wonderful celebration of this dance can be seen in the movie Microcosmos, a beautiful film not to be missed, about the vibrant life of the smallest inhabitants in a French meadow.
I hope, also, that the children will never forget that they are bodies, and that bodies need to move to be healthy, both physically and spiritually. Dance compels us to notice our bodies; as we notice them, we realize that we share with other creatures our need for food and for rest, the inexorable fact of aging and mortality, and what I think is the pure joy of expressing our life energy through movement. Dance, in which we experiment playfully with our body's weight in relation to gravity, reminds us of what Brian Swimme calls "allurement": the gravitational force pulls us towards the earth, as a lover is drawn to the beloved.
I will never forget teaching an Elderhostel class in creative movement, in which the participants, all of retirement age, portrayed in dance the Hebrew story of the creation of the world. I remember one eighty-year-old man, in particular, who was the blazing sun, his energetic arms sweeping yellow and orange scarves in a great circle around him, and also the group of women, ranging from healthy early sixties to frail-looking elderly, once again feeling beautiful, undulating like the waves of the ocean, blue scarves in their hands.
When we watch the dance of others, whether it be the Native American dancing so deeply connected to the earth, professional ballet or modern dance which stretches the capacity of the human body to its limits, or the early ground-breaking work of Isadora Duncan, who based her movement on the choreography of nature, as observers we connect profoundly with the movement we see. We experience dance kinetically, from the brain through the nervous system, down to the last step of actually doing. Dance helps us learn com-passion, "feeling with."
When we are attuned to our bodies, we thrill physically at the flight of the eagle, the leap of the deer, the pattern of the bumblebee. And we feel stricken ourselves, through this kinetic sense in our bodies, when we observe nature struggling: the fish gasping in the oxygen-deprived lake, the songbirds and grizzlies searching for habitat, the forests razed by clear-cutting, the farmlands bulldozed for luxury homes.
THE VISUAL ARTS
The artist Frederick Franck tells of his childhood discovery of his grandfather's "stereopticon," an antique gadget through which the observer looks at twin photographs which appear as three-dimensional. One day, he realized that he could order his eyes, "Now look through the stereopticon!" when he was outdoors. He writes, "They would obey and...every sprig of grass came to life and stood there separately in its own space; clumps of trees broke up into individual beings, each one springing from its own roots, deep in the earth. People, when looked at through my mental stereoscope, underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis.... That which, when merely looked at, was mailman, poplar or squirrel became--when seen stereoptically, unnamable, ineffable."I remember once, as a child, taking a small water color set to a stream in a woods near my home. I dipped my brush in the quiet stream, trying to paint the scene. The result was far from what I wanted, but I know that now I can still see, in amazing detail, that scene in the autumn woods. Painting had given me Franck's "stereopticon vision."
Franck also speaks of the act of "seeing/drawing," in which his hand holding the pencil or pen became one with what he saw, so that he in essence entered its world. Our hand forming the image of what we see--in ink, or pencil, or paint, or clay--draws us into relationship with our subject. It is no longer an object, an "it," but a "thou." We do not have to be trained artists like Franck to experience this; we can be young children, or adults who draw simply in order to slow down our pace enough to really see the world around us.
Surely the world's great artists, from our early ancestors, the creators of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, onward, have understood that. We know that when we really see the images they have created we are also drawn into relationship with the world around us. When we take time to stand in front of such a work, we don't just look, we enter into dialogue. Claude Monet, who painted a series of paintings of haystacks in various weathers and times of day, opens our eyes not merely to the landscape but to the quality of light itself. His paintings suggest that we ourselves might benefit from the practice of observing a particular feature of the landscape in similar manner, watching it change from dawn to nightfall, and through the seasons. We would certainly become more attuned to the rest of the natural world, whose sensitivity to light far exceeds our own.
There is a wonderful small book by the sculptor Silvia Shaw Judson, The Quiet Eye: a Way of Looking at Pictures. It is a collection of pictures which Judson, a Quaker, used for meditation. She writes, "This book...is intended as an experience....I have wanted particularly to find examples with a sense of 'divine ordinariness.'" She includes a spectrum of works from many cultures. Her book, like Franck's, helps me look at the ordinary things on earth and realize that nothing is ordinary; everything is extraordinary, charged with the divine.
CONCLUSION
Perhaps that is the particular secret of the arts: the valuing of what seems "ordinary." The arts teach us attention. They give us the tools of listening, observing, seeing, and moving.We can't practice the arts, or appreciate them, as an abstraction. The arts are concrete, earthy. They teach us to be here, in our earthly home. The teach us that the most important moment is now. They teach us to live in, and appreciate, the sacredness of the moment: the fleeting moments when we hear the Bach toccata or the song of the cardinal, or see the choreography of the dancer or the seagull, or when we contemplate a painting of a forest or an ocean.
Moreover, as they draw us into relationship with the planet and with each other, they arouse our passion to preserve the beauty and complexity of this earth. Once we are swept away by our passion for this place, we can no longer be complacent when we see it being threatened by mindless human activity.
Willie and David may one day become environmental activists, working to preserve the habitats both of "princesses" and of frogs. They have already taken the first step. They have used their bodies and their imaginations to experience something of the wholeness of this planet. For them, I hope, the arts will continue to be a resource for learning about the world. Perhaps the arts will also become a way they can communicate to others what they discover; perhaps they will be the Pete Seegers or Gary Snyders or Paul Winters of the 21st century! They are moving in the right direction, learning to let both their spirits and their bodies grow in freedom and in relationship with the earth.
Nancy Roth is a dancer, musician, teacher, writer, and Episcopal priest, living in Oberlin, Ohio. She herself feels however, that her most important claim to fame is as the mother of the managing editor of Talking Leaves.
©1998 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1998
Volume 8, Number 2
Art and Ecology