Far From The Maddening Crowd
My mother showed me how to collect wild burdock when I was nine and I would bring home long roots of it, as a gift for her. I started reading around the same time and fell in love with “My Side Of The Mountain,” “The Cay,” “A Light In The Forest” and “The Yearling” – all children’s books that have the protagonists separated from modern life and living in tune with nature. Since I spent much of my youth playing out in the woods, to this day I consider myself a country boy more than anything else.
In 2004, Dr. Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize. Her African woman’s movement is responsible for planting tens of millions of trees, to counter-act deforestation in Africa. She brings to attention the vital connection between environmental destruction, poverty and war. She recalled a special tree that her mother told her, as a child, never to hurt because it was connected to God. Those trees were being razed. Many indigenous cultures, especially the animistic ones, see God everywhere in nature. It makes perfect sense to me.
Perhaps, if we know how to eat from nature, which most of us do not know how to do anymore, we would appreciate it as something that nourishes our souls and we’d want to protect it more like Wangari Maathai is doing.
In many religions food and eating has religious significance. Christians have the Eucharist where bread and wine is eaten as the symbol of the body of Christ; Muslims have Ramadan and Jews have Yom Kippur where fasting brings them closer to God; in Asian Ancestor worship food is brought to the shrine to feed the souls of their departed loved ones.
Foraging to me is like prayer. It helps bring me closer to nature, and nature always makes me feel closer to God, when I am away, far from the maddening crowd.
