The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 303rd Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, “Why is Nature So Beautiful to Us?”
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
-- Joyce Kilmer, “Trees” (1913)
Mr. Kilmer, who at the time of publishing his popular but simple iambic tetrameter poem “Trees” at the age of 27 (before dying only five years later in The Great War [WWI], after having produced only slightly more complex prosody) – was the first to acknowledge the truth that his poem was indeed held by critics as “nowhere near as lovely as a tree.”
Why is this so? What is it about the arbors arching above us that fills our hearts with wonder and with unutterable peace?
Rachel Carson in “The Sense of Wonder” wrote, “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.” In her book “Silent Spring” she added, “Life is a miracle beyond our comprehension, and we should reverence it even where we have to struggle against it.”
Does an appreciation of the beauty of life arise from it being a miracle beyond one’s comprehension? Or does it arise from one’s recognition that one’s own form of life fully participates in that natural miracle?
T.S. Eliot, a contemporary of Joyce Kilmer (but a poet who lived much longer), wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
…I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas…
…I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Does our appreciation of the vast and seemingly eternal nature of Nature greaten with our own awareness of the fleeting passage of our own time? Or do we love Nature’s beauty because of its individual impermanence with hints of recurrence?
Can the beauty of Nature be transmogrified into an “uncanny nature valley” of the unsettling & off-kilter? How do we respond to the regimented rows of monoculture forests, or massive blooms of jellyfish triggered by climate warming, or the heat-bleached uniformity of coral reefs, or the compliant rows of cows in milking machines?
Is it our human nature’s interference that causes the rare repellant appearances of Nature? Or might the beauty of collective nature – in the army of soldier ants, the dance of a hive of bees, the murmuration of a cloud of birds, or the rushing of a school of fish – appear uncanny to us because we ourselves mimic that collective Nature?
Who decides what aspects of Nature are beautiful to us at all? Why do the baby dogs, kittens, bunnies, or human infants, all appear more beautiful to us than baby monkeys or baby wasps?
How do our past artists’ personifications of the beauty of Mother Nature reflect or distort the beauty of what we see of Nature with our own eyes? Does Gaia, when depicted as a numinous angel from on high, appear more or less beautiful than Gaia when depicted as an earthy fecund fertility-goddess? Why do we even view Gaia as a human, as our anthropocentric personification of our perceptions of natural beauty?
Why don’t we see a Goddess be
A thing as simple as one Tree?
Perhaps our hearts lie broken, stilled
From pangs of flowr’ing unfulfilled…
At 7-9 pm CDT Mo 9/15/25 by Zoom we'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate views on why we find beauty in Mother Nature’s mien and in her song. Our reasoning dialogue agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should help us open our eyes and ears!
