Reading the Book of Nature

A conversation with Barbara Mahany 

In Texas, spring comes in February. And in the Rio Grande Valley, situated in the southernmost region of the Texas-Mexico border, plants are in bloom again. If I had a green thumb, or if my upbringing involved weekends at the nursery with my grandmother, I would use the next few sentences to describe what plants and flowers have shed winter’s indifference and are once more brightening this often-arid landscape. I would add metaphors about renewal and rejuvenation, perhaps even add detail that accentuated the colors of flora being named. But the window of instant description and definition has long since closed, and only one name comes to mind: bougainvillea. There are two of them, and they belong to my mother. Before she entered into a nursing and rehabilitation center to try to learn to stand and walk again (the chemo treatments and dialysis having weakened her body for months), she had expressed to my wife and me that she wanted bougainvilleas in her yard, that she wanted at least the front of her new home to feel welcoming. We brought two, potted them shortly thereafter, and a few days after we arranged them on her deck, she left to the center. My wife and I check on her house every weekend, and there the bougainvilleas thrive, pink petals and thorns and all, a reminder that in spite of the quick pace life often takes, there will always be opportunities that compel us not only admire the natural beauty of the world, but to remember that we are experiencing it with those we love the most. 

You have probably had similar sentiments when you’ve looked at a particular tree, or a mountain, or when you’ve found yourself on a path where only the music of crickets and anonymous bugs are hard at work. Perhaps you didn’t have the words for these feelings at first, but if you’re like me, there is no doubt that you will after reading Barbara Mahany’s newest book, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Breadloaf Books, 2023). Mahany’s “reading” of the world forges a new language with which we can translate our awe and wonder, and in turn allows us to seek answers to questions about our purpose in this life and our place in this world. 

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Esteban Rodriguez: Thank you so much for your time, Barbara. There is a lot to discuss from this incredible book, but as I was reading the introductory chapters, I couldn’t help but pause at the following sentence (in Reading the Book of Nature): 

Whether I notice or not, mine is the God who never hits pause when it comes to creation: inventing, reinventing, tweaking, editing, starting from scratch all over again, day after day after heavenly day. 

You are speaking about God as author, but I wanted to know if you as an author mimic these same qualities, that incessant passion for creating until you find if not perfection, then at least something that resembles it? 

Barbara Mahany: This is such a fascinating question, and I’d actually not thought about my own life as a writer when I wrote that sentence, but I suppose embedded in my answer was the deep DNA of one who has spent so much of her life “tweaking, editing, starting from scratch all over again.” There is a profound humility at the root of that process, the capacity to see that all is not quite as it could be. I love the image of a God almost bent over the drafting table, in that glorious frenzy of the Artist, the Author, the Creator, so engaged with the work that it goes on and on and on, a tweak here, a reinvention there. It is both incessant and a passion. It’s fueled by love. And I love that your question draws out that parallel. 

ER: To follow up, how did you approach writing The Book of Nature? Were there aspects that differed from your approach to your previous books? Things that stayed the same? 

BM: Another great question! This book was pure joy to make and totally different from my first four books. The first four were collections of essays that I originally wrote for a blog (pullupachair.org/) that I started in 2006, when I was trying to capture the quotidian unfoldings of my quiet little life as a writer and mother of two growing boys, and who found something so sacred in the rhythms (and hubbub) of home and garden. I loved the making of those books, weaving something of a pastiche from various threads. The Book of Nature, though, followed a single thread fueled by an almost insatiable curiosity, and then unfolded in almost two parts: the first half of the book, a deep dive into this ancient theology that views all creation as a source of encounter with the divine, was almost journalistic, and the second half, twelve essays or meditations exploring sacred places or hours that especially capture my sense that the holy is near. 

Here’s what I mean and how it happened: As I write in the book, it began when I was deep in a radio conversation with a rabbi shortly after the publication of my first book, Slowing Time. The rabbi almost offhandedly commented that Slowing Time “read like midrash to the Book of Nature.” As a lifelong Catholic married to a Jew, I knew that midrash was rabbinic commentary, and I was delighted and surprised to have a rabbi say something I wrote even remotely suggested midrash. But I was really stunned by his mention of The Book of Nature, which I could tell by the way he said it was something that came in capital letters. It was a “thing.” And I didn’t know of it. But how could that be, as I grew up in a house with a mother I refer to as the Original Mother Nature, one who’d schooled me in a curriculum of birds and wildflowers and gardens and trees as far back as I can remember. So I did what any journalist would do: I set out to find out. I read and read and read. For eight months, I followed what I call the Rabbit Hole School of Reading, where one title led me to another and another. I stacked more than 200 books on every flat surface in my little writing room by the end of my adventure: poets, mystics, naturalists, theologians. Oh, it was heavenly. 

I realized that I really approached it as I had approached all my big projects as a journalist (I was a staff writer at the Chicago Tribune for just shy of 30 years). When reporting a story, a journalist aims to track down the very best “sources” who can most accurately, and sometimes vividly, recount, or explain, whatever is the subject at hand. I followed the same paradigm for this book in that my 200 books, written by brilliant minds and great thinkers from across the centuries, were serving as my “sources.” In reading them, I was fine-tuning the ways I see the world, and deepening my understanding of this glorious sense of God’s closeness. The second half of the book, the “meditations,” or “pages from the Book of Nature,” were for me a heavenly mix of first-hand reporting as I plunked myself at the lakeshore, in the woods, under the night sky, and gathered notebooks full of observations, musings, trying to draw out the precise details of what I felt and saw and heard and smelled and noticed. That’s where you begin to connect dots, to see things you’d not before so acutely seen. I wove all that with science, or the wisdoms of others who’d similarly taken to the woods, the dawn, the garden. It became something of a conversation across time as I turned to Thoreau or Terry Tempest Williams, to the incomparable Annie Dillard or Thomas Merton. I’d unfurl their brilliance in passages drawn from their writing, then respond to it, or simply let it stand, luminescent on the page. 

I had a brilliant editor, Lauren Winner, who again and again prompted me to go deeper, with my own reflections and with this fascinating form of lectio divina. Because my years of writing personal essays for the Tribune and for my blog,  “pull up a chair,” have taught me how to pluck the personal and particular from my own life, and to mine those moments for their universal themes, I found the writing of those more intimate passages came naturally. But I did, though, have to be prodded a bit by Lauren to plumb deeper into the personal, as my early draft hadn’t gone in that direction. Early on, I was letting my wisdom counsel (the litany of great thinkers whose works I’d inhaled over the months) do all the talking, and I’d stayed mostly out of the way. I hope the interplay adds a dimension of deeper engagement, and that it subtly invites the reader to do the same: what do you hear rustling in the woods? How do you feel when you stand beneath the vastness of the star-stitched dome of night?

ER: You mention Thomas Merton, and your essay “Gentle Rain, Thrashing the Storm” reminded me so much of Merton’s opening piece in Raids of the Unspeakable. Merton opens with the following:

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. 

Merton goes on to say that he listens to the rain “because it reminds [him] again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms” he has yet to learn. While Merton might be speaking about commodifying wonderment, you state so beautifully that to “pause to consider the rain is one of the capacities of the soul that might be divinely inspired.” How do we avoid this commodification of wonderment? How do we find or reconnect with our “oft-parched souls”?

BM: Oh, lordy, your questions make my heart soar. This is such a wonder of a question, and I am sitting here imagining myself shoulder to shoulder with Merton, beneath a canopy of sodden leaves, as the percussions of rain surround us…

My immediate thought to avoid the commodification of wonderment is to strip ourselves of all things that beep or ping, and step into the woods or the meadow or under the stars unadorned. Let only our ears and our flesh and our eyes and, yes, sometimes our tongues be our guides. To step into it is to be struck by it. Surrender to stillness, that posture that allows absorption of wonder. Often, it’s the necessary place to begin, especially if we aim to be infused by the subtle rhythms that Merton reminds us run the world. Sometimes, of course, we can’t help but be thunderstruck, when wonder comes hurling our way––the hawk swooping suddenly over our head, the rush of the wind in its feathers all but brushing against us; the baby bird cowering in the rush alongside the path where we amble. But more often it’s our intentionality that invites in the wonder. Carving out time for quietude, recognizing that tending to our soulfulness is best fueled when we set out to soak in what surrounds us. I’m an early riser because the stillness at the edge of night, just before the dawn, is such a porous hour and the veil between heaven and earth is so very thin then. And be on the lookout; find a perch where you can keep watch––it might be a fire escape in the city, or a stone bench in a bustling square, or a nook in your house where you can press your nose to the windowpane. (I should note that for me, an inveterate people watcher, wonder comes plenty when I keep watch on the choreographies of human interaction, as well as the astonishments of all the rest of creation.)

But here’s another way in, and it’s a thread that runs throughout my book: Turn to the poets and mystics and star-seekers who’ve trod this way before us. Read their words and their poetries, their illuminations and musings, and allow them to teach us to see. I might never be an Annie Dillard (the essayist who wrote the brilliant Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) or a Drew Lanham (the brilliant poet ornithologist whose Sparrow Envy, especially, leaves me breathless), but they can point me toward seeing and hearing and sensing what I might otherwise miss. And their questions, their epiphanies, their meditations can catapult thoughts, take my breath away, as if we’re side-by-side in the woods, or at the kitchen table. When I read, and I read gulpingly, it’s almost as if I’m in conversations across time with this cloud of great witnesses. 

ER: Well, I will say you are shoulder to shoulder with all who have paved the way before us. I love that you mentioned that you’re an early riser because I am too, at least during the work week, and I start off my day every day by reading. There is a peacefulness that puts me in a calm mood, and you mentioned in “Dawn” that dawn is one of the holiest times of the day. It gives you inspiration, and I wonder what beyond literature, the words and wisdom of mystics and star-seekers, and reading the Book of Nature makes you “realize [you’d] better get to work”? 

BM: The short answer is that I dig down deep in my soul in the birthing hour of each day. In the quiet and the aloneness of the dawn, I feel the veil lifted between heaven and earth, and between heaven and my soul. It’s when I’m apt to slip into a soulful inventory premised on a sense of standing naked before God, stripped of whatever self-trickeries might otherwise fool me into thinking I’ve done enough to just get by. 

What I mean by “get to work”––and here I’m treading into whispers of my soul I don’t usually lay on the table, but you ease me into candor––is that I’d best not tarry when it comes to whatever is the holy work I’m meant to do here in the years that bracket my time on earth. And by that I mean that in my deepest heart I do feel called to work toward holiness, a state of being that dwells in gentle loving kindness, and those few fine codes that comprise my own core ethic: turn the other cheek, speak out against injustice and unkindness, be alert to those in pain and be present to those who suffer, live and breathe the Beatitudes. Those are a few of the threads I try to weave into the warp and weft of my every day. I call it my spiritual practice, emphasis on practice as a verb that means I try and try again, knowing full well there will be stumbles along the way. Part of that work demands an unfiltered, pull-no-punches truth-telling to myself––an inner confession almost––to own my failings, shake off my humiliations, and get back in the ring to try again. I find the quietude of dawn, the starting over at the root of it, invites that sort of spiritual stock-taking.

The urgency behind the “get to work” comes, perhaps, from a long-held awareness that we’ve no guarantee of tomorrow. My life has shown me, over and over, how fragile this all is. My father, who’d had no history of heart disease, dropped dead of a heart attack at 52, a devastation that  hollowed me, and then changed the course of my life. As a pediatric oncology nurse I held the hands of kids who’d gone to the doctor with what they thought was just a fever, and wound up––on my watch––getting spinal taps and being told they had leukemia. And I was there, after years and months and weeks of loving them, when some of those same kids breathed their last. I think there’s something sacred in never losing sight that none of this can be taken for granted. It’s my prompt to stay awake.

So the start of each day, the porousness of dawn, is both an unrippled oasis that becalms me, and an hour of true encounter in which I orient myself for the holy work ahead. 

ER: In “Garden,” you say the following about tending a garden: 

To tend a garden, to keep close watch on the rise and fall of the rhythms of earth and its dance with the sun, is to enter into the frailties and absurdities, the puzzles and conundrums that elude reason or rhyme. 

I don’t have a green thumb, but my wife does, and watching her tending to the plants that we do have is just incredible. We bought a Monstera a few weeks ago, and the pot that it came with didn’t have drainage holes. We spent a night drilling holes in this ceramic pot, and she repotted the Monstera with new soil, unsure how it would react with such stress. I’m glad to report that it is doing great, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that experience when I read “Garden.” Can you speak more about this piece and how cultivating a physical space, such as a garden, can also cultivate the soul, despite the uncertainty that sometimes comes with it? 

BM: First, I love the image in my head of the two of you bent over a ceramic pot, plastic lab goggles strapped on for protection, as you get to work drilling away on your Monstera pot! Do the garden stores not know that a Monstera––or nearly any other growing thing, for that matter––does not want to marinate its roots in too much pot water? Electric drills should not need to be added to one’s tote of garden tools! 

And now, about the garden as a plot for soulful stretching: I suppose it begins, for me, with the posture of bending my knees, and folding into some form of a veneration pose. Kneeling at the garden’s edge, hands muddied in the dirt, sifting through the grainy loam, almost nose-to-nose with stem or leaf or fattened bud about to bloom. I am already in prayer, and I am only just beginning. And I am literally immersed in all things earthy, with each and every sense on high alert: sight and sound and smell and touch, and taste if I happen to be knee-deep in the kitchen garden. 

I am paying exquisite attention there among the greeneries, noticing the resilience of a stem that’s bent but will not break. Marveling at a fat and fuzzy caterpillar inching along a milkweed pod. Gasping at the curlicue of a cucumber vine, and the way it reaches for a leaf to cling to, as it shimmies up its trellis. The animations of the garden, a plot I tend so tenderly, seem to call to me these days as if I’m meant to “read” them on a deeper level. Now steeped in the long-held knowing that the Book of Nature is a source of endless godly revelation, I can’t help but putter about the garden without keeping one eye on the lookout for epiphanies. A snapped-off vine, a morning glory blooming even after the first frost, those moments are no longer mere incidents I notice and dismiss, but rather I’ve taught myself to look and look again. To consider what parable or wisdom they might hold––if something other than pure and sumptuous delight. And so gardening for me is a contemplative engagement, and one that dizzies me with its endless wonders. I never ever know what I’m going to stumble onto out there, but all of it––be it a crushing blow, or a take-your-breath-away blast of beauty––holds some wisdom or wonder for me to carry back inside.

ER: There are so many amazing pieces here that touch on the wonderment we spoke about above. Which piece was your favorite to write?

BM: A question akin to “Who’s your favorite child?” Oh, gosh, off the top of my head, I am going with––oh no, I apparently can’t pick as easily as I thought––maybe Garden, maybe Birds. Maybe Dawn. I honestly delighted in the writing of each of the twelve essays that fall under “Pages from the Book of Nature,” because each one was this sort of heavenly romp of gathering up the astonishments of science, the poetries of the geniuses I turned to in my vast and voluminous reading, and then––with mindful prodding from my editor––a bit of personal narrative as I held these wonders up to the light, and gave each one deep consideration. I mention in the book that I’ve a long practice of commonplacing––a centuries-old literary tradition of gathering up bits of wonder and esoterica all along one’s way, and tucking them into a “commonplace” book for safekeeping. And that practice has oozed beyond simply how I read, but also into how I write. I love to dip into a myriad of sources, to extract the juiciest and most delicious bits, and stir them all together, in hopes of the sum (or stew, if we’re sticking with a cooking metaphor) becoming all the more glorious than the disparate parts (or particular ingredients). 

If I must pick just one, it might be Garden, because it includes intimate passages that bring a tear to my eye each time I read them (the story of the rabbi and the garden blessing and the miracle of fertility that unfolded months later), and yet it also draws in wisdoms from no less than Charles Darwin and George Bernard Shaw; it cites a charming children’s storybook, and, one page later, unfurls the horrors of Hiroshima, as told through the words of that great, great journalist and writer, John Hersey, in the pages of a 1946 New Yorker masterpiece. 

ER: In the Epilogue to the book, you say that you’ll not forget “the God who created this, the Divine Artificer, [who] looked down upon his work and 'saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.’” You then go on to conclude with the following: 

I can’t bear to look away. Can’t imagine how hollow this brokenness must be for the one who wants nothing more than to open the book, spread it before us, and catch us out in the wild, poring over each page. 

If this book can be in the hands of anyone living or since passed, who do you wish it would go to? 

BM: While I wrote my book with almost a come-with-me spirit, an animated sense of shared awe–– “let me show you this wonder,” or “what might be the wisdom in this?”––as if traipsing the woods or the water’s edge with a companion both curious and porous of soul, someone who might already be scanning the pages of the Book of Nature, the urgency lies beyond that. 

And it’s that urgency that propels your question: what’s at stake, imagine the loss, if we don’t see that this holy and blessed and marvelous creation is God’s great articulation?

So, with whom do I wish to open this book, the awe-inscribed Book of Nature? The litany, in a world at the fragile edge of so much devastation, is long. And it spans from a lone hiker who might drop a cigarette ash in a piney forest, to a developer who might bulldoze a meadow. It’s anyone who treads this earth with heavy footprint, who’s blind to the intricate interweaving of all creation, and doesn’t yet see that the sacred pulses through every last fiber, hasn’t yet sensed that it’s all awaiting our notice. 

It’s any of us who succumb to the hectic, harried pace of the everyday cacophony, of the concrete jungle. Who dash from hither to yon, forget to pause, to pay attention. Who box ourselves off in our cars or our shelters, rarely expose ourselves to the bedazzlements of nature, instead filling our hours with digital pings and glowing glass screens. We slip, without notice, into an anesthesia of the soul.   

The antidote, perhaps, is not beyond reach: it begins with an inkling that the sacred infuses all creation; it begins when you begin to see the faint outlines of God’s authorship, a palpable presence pulsing from within. And through this wordless text––the one written in an alphabet of birdsong and budding branch, streaking star and sky ablaze at sunset––you might find yourself brushing against, or shaken by, the Holy Intelligence.