While reading a book on the history of physics, Pythagoras’
Trousers by Margaret Wertheim, I encountered a bit about Barbara
McClintock. If you do not know about her, she is a woman scientist who was
awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She lived from 1902 to 1992. Through her study of corn, she found that the
genetic code of an organism is not a static blueprint. It is a flexible, dynamic code responding to
the surrounding environment. This
discovery, called “jumping genes” revolutionized genetics although at the time
she was working, her research was rejected.
She however, kept working in obscurity for forty years, believing in her
own work even though as a woman scientist, she was often dismissed. Like many other scientists, she was so far
advanced that others could not believe her. She says this: “If you know you are on the right track, if
you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off…no matter what they
say.”
McClintock says that she knew her corn plants intimately and
found great pleasure in knowing them.
She also says that she came to her ideas by “listening” to her corn
plants and seeing the world from their perspective.
I have a painted gourd an artist friend gifted me many years
ago. It is Corn Woman watching hercorn kernal grow. Whenever I look at it, I am
reminded of this process McClintock is also speaking about – of
listening/observing so closely. The corn
woman also reminds me of time, of the time it takes to observe and listen. It took McClintock forty years. corn grow.
I write this on a bad smoke day from the rough fire. Perhaps by the time you are reading it, the
fire will be more contained and the skies clearer. In addition to the discomfort of smoke and
heat, the fire raises deeper thoughts and emotions around the collective human
contribution to a landscape that is in trouble, as we all know and live with
all the time. One thread of that is the
drought. Last April I made a kind of
pilgrimage to Cedar Grove to see the many ponderosa pines that are/were dying –
weakened by the drought and then overcome by the bark beetle. As the fire burns through the mountains
around and toward Cedar Grove, these dead and dying trees are fuel.
As far as I understand what I read and listen too, though
droughts are a part of California history, this one is made worse by global
warming. I share human responsibility
then, in part, for the intensity of the fire even as I am uncomfortable from
the smoke.
And so I ponder the perspective, not unique or original with
McClintock, but beautifully articulated by her life, of listening to trees and
water and animals – of continuing, as so many have already begun, to attempt to
take into myself, my very being, a sense of what something might look like from
their perspective.
Listening in this way seems an almost lost art in our modern
world. While I don’t know that yoga, as
it was practiced by our yoga ancestors, saw such listening as an obvious goal,
I do think the practice lends itself to the kind of listening I am speaking of. Asana, though only one of the many ways one
practices yoga, does, I believe, begin to develop listening tools. In the repetition of postures over a long
period of time with attention to alignment one begins to integrate the postures
into the body on a cellular level. When
practicing asana, one is observing and listening constantly to the body if the
practice is done with careful attention. In this way we train our minds toward
focus and attending to – toward listening. We also train out some of the clutter or
movement (vrittis) in the mind so that clarity and space are available to observe
and listen from.
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| Barbara McClintock, Bear and Tiger |
Recently I was sitting in my morning meditation on my
outdoor yoga deck. I heard footsteps in the grass that were louder than the
quail I am used to hearing. I opened I
my eyes to find myself looking straight into the face of a bear about eight
feet away coming toward me. I convinced
her/him to go another direction with some hand clapping and my loud voice. But the experience has lingered in my mind. Over the next few days I learned that after a
period of not seeing many bears in Three Rivers, there have been a lot of bear
around the last few weeks. It seems they
are coming down from the fire and the drought.
What is the perspective of the bear if I were to be able to listen carefully
enough and what might that mean in my own life?
A story comes into my mind about a Buddhist monk who was
walking through the forest. He came upon
a mother tiger and cubs. They were starving.
He gave his life to become food for them so that they might live. Do not worry, dear reader, I have no plans to
give my life up to the bear coming down from the drought and fire but I do wonder
what it might be like for humans to give up something of our lives for the
animals or trees, to keep them more fully alive and healthy. How might we
listen to the many species who are dying out every day?
