The Polarizing Forces of Nature Inspire Awe and Reverence

A couple of months ago, I finished teaching the Romantic era to my British literature post-secondary students. One of the reasons I enjoy the Romantics is because of that heightened awareness of and keen attention to nature. Wordsworth is one of my favorite poets of the time, and his poems, the most famous, perhaps, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798—or best known as simply “Tintern Abbey”—are imbued with reverence to nature.

Other non-British writers of the era—the Swiss-born French writer Jean-Jacques Rosseau and the German Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—also celebrated nature. Rosseau loved to take long walks, and the impetus of his last work are those walks: Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire, translated as Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Likewise, Goethe writes about the violence of oceans in the opening of his famous, archetypal work Faust.

Today as I sit writing this column, I, like the Romantics, am enjoying taking in nature and may even retire momentarily to the outdoors. The vista outside my living room window is alluring, very nearly perfect—with the exception that the grass could use a little mowing. Yet, writing somehow seems more important than grass-mowing. Such mundane tasks can surely wait, especially when there is writing to be done.

It is difficult, though, to believe that just two to three days ago, the view all around the area was quite different. We were plagued with deluges of rain, powerful winds, and damaging hail. On Wednesday, after I sat on the couch and observed the downpour outside the window, I just as quickly witnessed the change: the sun shone, and very literally came the “calm after the storm.” All of a sudden, the storm that had continued for over a day was over.

Fortunately, west Tennessee, in comparison, was spared from the brunt of the damage of the overall storm system. It was both saddening and astonishing to watch videos of the destruction in the college town of Tuscaloosa, Ala. I visited there once, at the college campus of the University of Alabama, during a writing conference a few years ago. It is a quaint, wonderful little town. My favorite stop, of course, was Dreamland Bar-B-Que, where I enjoyed the ribs and a sauce so delicious that I had to dip it in the white bread when the ribs were gone. It was too good to leave behind.

And thinking of Dreamland, of course, reminds me of one of my very good friends, Jimmy Carl Harris, a retired Marine from Birmingham I met a few years ago at a writing conference in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Jimmy Carl is not only a fellow writer, but a man after my own heart when it comes to good “que.” I still wait to hear from him, and from the best I can discern online from others’ comments, he had a scary time of it and is dealing in the aftermath with a tree that fell on his house.

I cannot imagine what it is like to live through a storm such as the one that ravaged those Alabama towns. I am probably too complacent about storm warnings for a couple of reasons. Although the technology is a life-saving boon, sometimes, I think, we are a little too inundated with it. When the coverage goes on for hours, and the sirens are going on and off constantly, we get a little too desensitized—or “habituated,” the biological term for a conditioned lack of response, as my colleague, biology instructor Sarah Allison informs me.

Furthermore, I have never lived through such a storm or even seen a live tornado. The closest I came to witnessing such a storm was during the infamous 1991 tornado that swept through Selmer when I was a high school junior. I had never heard such hail, which sounded like a thousand hammers pounding on the roof, and the western sky behind my house was as black as night. However, actually being thrust into the middle of the storm is quite different, to be sure. In that case, I would probably have tucked myself neatly into the bathtub this time, along with scores of others who have been experientially conditioned to heed the violent tendencies of nature.

So as I love the serenity of nature, I, too, should learn to revere its fury. It is, like a clock, set in motion and not subject to our menial human desires or intervention. No matter how much we may wish for the best or offer up prayers, nature works by the principles of its own design. Hence, we take the good with the bad, the abundant display of polarized forces in opposition, of which we must ever, like those before us, remain in awe.