About nature, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote:  “she accepts much that is unacceptable to men who have pushed too far in their efforts to imagine a universe they would like better.”

Krutch’s critique of humanity here parallels, I think, Matthew’s presentation of the devil’s first temptation of Christ – to turn the stones into bread.  Krutch believes we should be more accepting, like nature, and to “reconcile ourselves, as she does, to things unreconcilable with purely human attitudes.  His belief parallels, I think, Christ’s response to the devil and the lesson God sought to teach Israel in the wilderness after the exodus – man does not live by bread alone.

Nature, in Krutch’s assessment, and mine, provides more than bread.  “She is joyous,” he wrote.  Nature to Krutch is like the word of God to Moses.  Krutch wrote, “nature … furnishes the most cheerful as well as the most intelligible context for thinking and living and being….”

It is beautiful, this idea:  the joyousness of nature, that nature provides manna and joy, if we let her.  In her acceptances are tender mercies.

To climb mountains, to walk beside creeks and rivers and oceans, to follow washes in the desert and paths of deer in the forest, to watch birds, lizards, squirrels, waves, clouds and stars for the sake of her joy and tender mercies:  this is living and being.

(Quotations are from the last chapter of The Desert Year, by Joseph Wood Krutch, 1951.)

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