1 of a short series of 3
A small parliament
of the ordinary and
extraordinary
Adagio – to accompany reading
After a couple of days off — the UK heat wave briefly making an oven of Eden — I’ve been out and about again this morning for a 75-minute walk through the familiar and always astonishing landscape of the English Lake District.
I slowed down deliberately today. Not to cover ground, but to listen. And the birdsong rewarded the attention: Barn Swallow (at Red Barn), Eurasian Wren, Common Chaffinch, Linnet, Rook, Blackbird, Jackdaw. A small parliament of the ordinary and extraordinary.
What stopped me — ever the etymologist — mid-stride was the Latin. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the great Swedish botanist who named creation with the devotion of a man continuing Adam’s work in the Garden, left us these double-barrelled gifts in his binomial system: genus, species.
Troglodytes troglodytes: the Wren, named twice over as ‘cave-dweller.’ Fringilla coelebs: the Chaffinch — coelebs meaning bachelor, because Linnaeus noticed only the males wintered in Sweden, the females having quietly departed. Linaria cannabina: the Linnet, named for linum (flax) — a bird defined entirely by what it loves. Corvus frugilegus: the Rook — ‘the grain-gatherer,’ practical and unsentimental. Turdus merula: the Blackbird, merula being the old Latin word that gave medieval French its merle, and English its music. And — my particular favourite — Coloeus monedula: the Jackdaw, named from moneta (coin, money), for its legendary love of bright and shiny things. Which, I confess, probably makes the Jackdaw my spirit animal, though I’d tend to swap ‘coins’ for ‘ideas’ — and granting that I also have a close affinity with the Unicorn!
Linnaeus believed naming was vocation, not vanity. God creates, Linnaeus arranges. There is something deeply theological in that instinct: that attention to the particular — this wren, this mud-gathering swallow — is never a distraction from the infinite. It is the infinite. Wearing a small feathered coat.
Yet Linnaeus himself, in his final years, suffered a stroke — and the great namer forgot his names. There is no tragedy in that. It is, rather, the pattern written into creation itself: the pattern of adamah. In Hebrew, adamah means ground, soil, earth — and from it comes adam, the earthling, made from the dust of the ground. The Latin humus (soil) carries the same truth: it gives us human, humble, humility — all rooted in the same dark, generative earth. To be fully human is, etymologically, to be close to the ground. Linnaeus, who had spent a lifetime naming and arranging all things, was quietly returned — as we all are — to the earth from which he came. The great namer gave way, in the end, to a deeper silence. Adamah to adamah.
In the course of a lifetime’s contemplation of ‘God in all things’ — panentheism — I’ve come to believe that the Universe doesn’t dwarf the tiny cave-dwelling Wren, or you and me. It includes the Wren, and you and me. That, I think, is the panentheist’s quiet, constant and enormous joy — the cantus firmus, the enduring melody, the reason and the season for my song.
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The Universe includes the Wren
Thou emptiest again
Go back to where you came from
The Continuing Road – a Postscript
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