Elder Berry and Us (Abridged) - Center for Ecozoic Studies

Betty Lou Chaika

I vividly remember my first encounter with Thomas Berry. In the spring of 1990 I was struggling to hold together my three passions—for being in nature, for spiritual fellowship, and for creative work. In reading The Dream of the Earth I had been deeply moved by Thomas’s ability to lyrically weave together the material and spiritual dimensions of life with a celebration of human creativity. Moving from the urban San Francisco Bay Area to rural North Carolina, I had been experiencing many encounters with animals in both the outer wild and the inner wild of dreams, and fervently holding the question of what it means when myths and fairy tales and Indigenous people all over the world say that animals speak to us. What does it mean that wild animals speak to us?

At the time, our son was in middle school. He told us he was writing a book called “The Quest.” One night he asked me to send him on a quest. I wrote out this quest for him to take to an Earth Day II school campout:

In polluting the land, air, and waters and in clearing land for development of housing, shopping centers, and roads we are destroying the habitats of many species. Without their homes they can’t live. We have lost our ancient deep connection with animals. We regard them only as pets or as food, or as entertaining attractions. That’s why we allow this.
Yet the stories of peoples from all over the world and from all different times tell of communication with wild animals, of animals and people speaking to each other, helping each other in times of need, even of animals being able to transform into people and people into animals. What have we forgotten?
A quest is to find something, an object or an answer to a question. Your mission, Tristan, should you choose to accept it, is to find out about the native animals who live in your habitat, these Piedmont woods, fields, and streams. And to answer the question: What is communication with animals, and how does it happen?

At the same time there was to be an ecumenical conference on Land Stewardship at Brown’s Summit, near Greensboro, North Carolina, where Thomas Berry would speak. I was excited at the opportunity to experience the coming together of spiritual communities in relation to nature. Communities of nature and of spirit were both important to me, but they were rarely joined together. I had arrived at the conference and was enjoying a walk in the lush forest amidst wonderful mosses, lichen covered rocks, and wildflowers when suddenly I came upon a very large, lumpy, black rat snake lying right across the path, stopping me in my tracks. A rat snake when confronted kinks itself and becomes motionless. We looked at each other for a long time. I took this as a synchronous appearance. Snakes sense the world around them through picking up vibrations with their entire bodies and tasting the smells in the air by flicking their tongues. This alerted me to tune into my senses and trust my feelings in what was about to unfold. The presentations were all about stewardship and the ethics and responsibilities of land use. I kept thinking about what I had overheard a young man say in the morning, that we needed to gain a spiritual relationship with the land, hear the land speaking to us. Yes, I didn’t want to hear about stewardship. I wanted to learn about voice. I wanted to ask the American Indian man sitting nearby what he knew about hearing nature’s voices and to say that this stewardship talk bothered me because it seemed patriarchal. Just then Thomas Berry stood up and said, “It’s not enough to talk about stewardship. We must listen to the voices of the trees, the voices of the animals, the voices of the land.” It was as if he had heard my thoughts and spoken to me! Ah, here were words that I wanted to listen to!

I went up to him afterwards (wearing my mountain lion earrings for courage) and told him that I had had experiences of plants and trees as a child that I recognized as communication, but not experiences of communication with animals. At first he started to talk about having a dog, but I stared him in the eye, and, looking deeply back into my eyes, he said, “You get the communication, you just don’t recognize it. It’s not in the form you expected.” As he spoke, I remembered that I had been having these synchronous experiences and dreams of animals. Maybe these were forms of communication—I just wasn’t recognizing them as such. Thus began a life-long exploration of synchronicity and kinship with wild animals and with this man whom I felt to be a mentor in such matters. (At the recent 2019 conference on the living legacy of Thomas Berry held in the Piedmont region of North Carolina (TB19), many people shared similar experiences of being spoken to very personally by Thomas on a level that deeply supported their unique interests.)

Thereafter I heard Thomas Berry speak many times – at Duke, at Carolina, at our local Jung Society, at Earth Spirit Rising, and at many other conferences and gatherings over the years. He continues to speak to me. In preparing to attend the TB19 Conference I read an old paper of his, Elders: Their Creative Role in the Human Community, in which he called upon us to take up the role of elders and tell our personal stories of “bio-cultural regionalism” with “a high level of emotional-aesthetic-spiritual communion with the natural world.” These two phrases leaped out at me, his voice loudly supporting what I feel called to convey in my own work of eldering. As an elder my overarching desire is to hold together the community of people with the community of plants, animals, and spirits native to our place on Earth in a joyous circle of love and belonging, as we were always meant to be joined. As an artist, writer, and photographer, I teach eco-psycho-spirituality through weaving illustrated stories on the Earth Sanctuaries website and through forming an Earth Sanctuaries community. (www.earthsanctuaries.net) . . . .