Good Rulers: The Beauty of Our Dominion Over this Enchanted World
New research is showing that the natural world is much more conscious than we might think—and it behooves us, as its keepers, to pay attention.
By Elise Tegegne
Talking to the flowers,” Kaki tells me, “helps them grow.” My mother-in-law and I are talking together in her garden. Hidden within the concrete labyrinth of Addis Ababa, hemmed in by stone walls, this small patch of green is a haven. Pure sunlight anoints our heads, heat prickling down the backs of our necks. We gaze at beauty: rue blossoms tilting yellow throats skyward. Blush roses eyeing the confetti of color with demure gravity. Marigolds frocked in garnet ruffles awaiting the wind’s invitation to dance.
I wonder: what is it about the sound of the human voice that could galvanize roots sinking deep, petals unfurling, the miraculous alchemy that transforms light and air into life-sustaining sugar? And not just the human voice; according to Kaki, it is voice ordered in conversation that encourages plants to grow. It is engaging plantkind, intentionally, in relationship. As if flowers could feel. As if flowers, like Kaki and I, could receive kind words and return them in beauty. As if the world was enchanted with an animacy beyond our ken.
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Since childhood, I’ve believed animals could feel. I remember lying in bed and listening to the cries of our sprawling puppy Jack, imprisoned each night in his wire cage. He spoke in a language as clear as my own: Get me out of here! I felt his groans and sobs in the pit of my stomach, his consternation tying us together. But once he was freed in the morning, joy shook his unbound limbs.
Perhaps ascribing human characteristics to my beloved pet was merely wishful thinking. But since Darwin (the first scientist credited with serious studies of animal emotions), many would disagree. According to the research, tickled rats laugh. Elephants stroke the bones of dead kin. Birds coo lullabies when cuddling their nestlings. The idea that animals experience and express far more than humans generally give them credit for is humbling.
But what, to me, is even more astounding is the recent research uncovering the sensate nature of plants, too. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that her elders were right in saying trees talked. Not in words, but in pheromones. When attacked, let’s say by a gorging Gypsy moth, trees will release certain compounds into the air, a kind of distress call. Downwind trees then have time to arm themselves with defensive chemicals. Could this warning be rooted in a sense of arboreal community? Could it be that trees caution their neighbors out of concern, or even altruism?
Trees talk in scents and, some scientists believe, in sounds, too. When the flow of water from roots to leaves is blocked, ultrasonic vibrations occur in the trunk, writes German forester Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Could this be a cry of thirst? Wohlleben also writes of mimosa plants remembering outside stimuli; of mother trees nursing nearby saplings with their own sugar; of healthy trees keeping particular stumps alive centuries after being cut down, in what could be called a kind of friendship.
Memory, desire, and speech are just a few ways in which plant and animal beings seem to resemble humans. But in other ways, they exceed us. Nonhuman creatures possess some wild preterhuman magic. Kimmerer writes: “The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury.” Such awe-inspiring wonders shimmer in every nook of the globe.
Weeping elephants and laughing rats. Trees who speak and flowers who remember. It is as if the children and the elders and the poets and the fairy tales were right all along. As if the whole world—bird, tree, bud, bee—is fantastically enchanted, if only we would look a little closer.
We walk in a world enchanted with the weight of God.
I wonder if the Bible might agree.
Reading through the unfolding drama of divine mercy and judgment in the Old Testament’s minor prophets, I was recently struck with a presence I had largely ignored: that of the natural world. It is not merely people who suffer or rejoice under God’s wrath or favor. Describing the anguish of divine reprobation, Joel prophesies that “the ground mourns and the fig tree languishes. Even the beasts of the field pant for [God].” Similarly Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
The anthropomorphism employed by Joel and Paul imbues the natural world with a sense of personhood: emotions and will. All that God spoke into being—wombat and firefly and pebble and ocean—groans. Like my childhood dog Jack, like thirsty trees, field and fig mourn and suffer: they feel. And it’s not just Paul and the prophets that use this rhetorical device to illustrate the depth of a creation in mourning. Personification flourishes across the Bible’s pages, and divine poetry is particularly fertile with this language. The Psalmists write how the trees clap their hands and the mountains tremble and the heavens declare the glory of God. Perhaps biblical personification is not merely figurative ornamentation. What if the divinely-inspired poets and prophets who composed the Scriptures were not just employing a literary device when they pictured life in the works of God’s hands? What if they were creating a theology for the animacy of nature?
In the quaking, smoldering, rainbow-shot throne room of heaven, the seraphim sing, “The whole earth is full of your glory!” Glory: kabowd derived from kabad, meaning “weight, splendor, copiousness, honor.” Kaki’s roses and marigolds; sprawling puppies; bees and rats and elephants—all radiate the abundant, profligate splendor of God.
I wonder if Paul was contemplating the seraphic hymn when he wrote, “In Christ all things hold together.” I imagine divine hands upholding the necks of giraffes and lifting the heads of newborn seedlings. I imagine divine breath exhaling carbon dioxide into the mouths of dogwood blossoms. I imagine divine arms curling around the edges of lakes and oceans. When we engage with creation, we engage with an expression of divine power: beings rooted in the divine mind, spoken to life in a divine word, sustained with divine omnipresence.
We walk in a world enchanted with the weight of God.
Such enchantment is not just for our own vanity or pleasure. Every created thing was made for a much higher end: worship. The Psalmist prays, “Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!” Marigolds, praise Him! Rats, praise Him! Elephants, praise Him! There is no fuller expression of life—of animacy—than worship. And it is this act to which all breathing beings, bud and beast included, are called. Though our languages may differ, our end is the same.
Embracing my role as a Keeper of the Green World goes far beyond buying second-hand clothing and bringing canvas sacks to the grocery store. It’s about cultivating a certain orientation towards the natural world: a posture of relationship.
In meditating on the wonder and dignity of the natural world, or as Kimmerer might say, “nonhuman persons,” however, we cannot forget the divinely-given uniqueness of human beings, made in the imago dei. We cannot forget that, of all the kaleidoscopic gamut of creation, God gave dominion over the earth to human beings alone. It is this very reality that makes the animacy of starfish and stones all the more poignant. If we recognized how crenelated tulips and dappled cows are animated and upheld by divine power, how they speak and feel, how they are subjects (not objects) in a kingdom we have been given, I wonder how our attitude towards—and engagement with—these beings would change.
Gifted with an abundantly glorious kingdom, humans have a divine calling to care for our animate subjects. As Kimmerer writes, “Gifts have a dual nature…a gift is also a responsibility.” The wounds of the world—tainted waters and unbreathable air—are not someone else’s problem; they are ours to attend. Like Eve and Adam, our responsibility is to cultivate and keep the given world. This call carries a sense of urgency, and tenderness.
I am wrestling with what embodying this call looks like in day-to-day life. Reducing, reusing, and recycling are fundamental ways of caring for our kingdoms. But I’m learning that embracing my role as a Keeper of the Green World goes far beyond buying second-hand clothing and bringing canvas sacks to the grocery store. It’s about cultivating a certain orientation towards the natural world: a posture of relationship. What should a relationship look like between us, as the imago dei, and the green kingdom we were given to rule?
Remembering fairy tales and histories of queens and kings throughout the ages, I imagine what a Good Ruler would be like. Rather than exploit their subjects for their own ego-centric ends, Good Rulers would sacrifice their treasure chests and energies to serve their people. They would do everything in their power to help their subjects thrive. This thoughtful care would lead them out of their castles and into the realms they tended. They would be humble enough to walk barefoot in streams and muddy their hands in fragrant humus. Through attentive observation, they would know their subjects’ names, what they needed, the particular conditions under which they would grow into the glory for which they were made.
For someone who feels quite unroyal, these high ideals overwhelm. Bearing the whole weight of the earth’s brokenness—disappearing bees and inundated islands and desiccated farmland—is utterly beyond my powers. But being a Good Ruler—a Keeper of the Green World—begins in small ways in our own yards and neighborhoods. Perhaps we can start by giving attention to the enchanted world—memorizing the particular chant of an oriole or taking a few moments to gaze under the arms of a venerable tulip tree or learning the names of spring flowers often dismissed as weeds: henbit, healall, ground ivy, violets. If I could hear the trees talking and the elephants weeping and the flowers singing hymns of praise, would I be shocked and a little scared, unsettled by the unveiling of the glory of God? Would I press my knees to the earth? Would I quake a little?
Maybe embracing my royal role means learning to tremble at beauty again.
After all, this abundant, lavish beauty—a glory flashing out of the dark, groaning universe—is a reminder to hope. One day trees and dogs and figs and humans will no longer weep. One day the veil hiding the ineffable fullness of God will be torn at last. One day the earth will be whole again, restored.
***
It is a warm spring Saturday after months of winter. Kneeling by my raised garden beds, I embrace cardboard egg cartons of tender seedlings. Gingerly, I scoop out the breathing life from each cup and lower it into tiny indentations in the sun-baked soil. I prop up drooping leaves with little clods. I take my water bottle and dribble droplets at each thread of root. Remembering Kaki, I talk to these nascent beings: “Courage. You can do it.” I cannot hear any words of response and don’t wish to impose any. But maybe the words are not important: maybe what matters is that I’m trying to listen at all.
Elise Tegegne is from Indianapolis, IN, but considers Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the other half of her home. Besides being an amateur gardener, she is a writer whose work appears or is forthcoming in Windhover, Dappled Things’ Deep Down Things blog, Rock & Sling, and Fathom, among others. Connect with her at elisetegegne.com, Facebook, or on Instagram @elisetegegne.