The Bushman people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa speak of two hungers: the Small Hunger of finding food and the Great Hunger of finding meaning in life. From what I’ve read and heard, it seems that all people speak of these two hungers.  

To the shame of most world societies, many people, during many days, cannot satisfy even the Small Hunger. In addition, observations during many years have led me to believe that some people spend their days without experiencing a rich meaning in their lives. They’ve never searched for that deep corner of their psyche that holds their secret wish, a dream that, if followed, would bring them a sense of deep fulfillment. Such people seem to not have a magnificent obsession: an abiding goal or purpose that drives them on, that shapes their lives.

I recently asked two people to give me, without pondering the question, the word that came to mind after I had asked them a particular question: what gives meaning to your life? The first said “whatever gets a person out of bed in the morning.” That “whatever” could be almost anything, but some choices could probably be practiced only without telling the police, boss, or spouse. The second respondent, good at seeing the issues, answered immediately with a single word: love. I was intrigued, as I’ve long felt that the words “if,” “why,” and “love” should be on the short list of the most powerful words in our vocabulary. And the greatest of these is love! It probably is impossible to list all the myriad ways in which this heart-warming, life-enriching, life-affirming, even life-saving phenomenon is expressed and received. So, find someone to love — as much or more than you love yourself.

I recall the controversial studies done by a university researcher (in Wisconsin, I believe) with primates (baboons, I think). Some babies were kept with their birth mothers, and they thrived. Some babies were placed with mechanical surrogate mothers. Although fed on a regular schedule, those babies lost weight, were decidedly unhappy, developed abnormal behavior patterns, and they all died. Such studies led the late John Shelby Spong, Episcopalian bishop and recognized biblical scholar, to make the statement in his last book, Unbelievable, that “all wild babies die if they do not receive love.” 

Overstatement or no, we do know that human babies who do not receive love pay a great price for that. We tend to know this fact intuitively about infants, but it also is true for adults living without love, whether without love of self or from another. At least one meaningful relationship seems necessary for robust mental health.  

I want to mention a special case. Richard Reeves, founder and president of The American Institute for Boys and Men, believes we have a real problem with the way we raise boys. He gives some figures: from 1979 to 2019, the proportion of women who were employed grew more than 20 percent across all age groups, while for men the proportion fell across all age groups, with men younger than 35 hit hardest. Currently, one-third of men with only a high school education, a group of about 11 million Americans, have dropped out of the work force entirely. Men without jobs are less likely to marry, maintain relationships with their children, and have strong social connections. 

Reeves argues that shifts in education, labor markets, and economic development are part of the problem, but the stark differences go far beyond the lack of a college education. Boys lag girls in school readiness at the age of five, and this gender gap is larger than the one between rich and poor children, or black or white children, or kids who attended preschool and those who did not. Boys are six points behind girls in reading scores in fourth grade; by eighth grade the gap is 11 points. When high school students are ranked by GPA, girls are two-thirds of the top ten percent, while boys are two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent. Young men are more likely to drop out of college than young women. Far more women than men currently earn bachelor’s degrees — 20 percent more, - and that trend is expected to grow steadily. Reeves makes no mention of attendance and graduation numbers from technical colleges.

Reeves sums up his argument with the observation that we have far too many males wearing adult sizes but who are, judging from their thoughts and actions, still boys. He speaks of that large group of young men basically adrift, without moorings, without any clear directive as to what is next. Is there some sort of necessary love or instruction they are not getting? Reeves floats the idea that we seem not to have developed a successful way of getting the message to growing boys that they are needed as adults to fill certain responsible roles in our society. That the acceptance of responsibility, in all its various forms, is the basic earmark of the adult male or female.

Finally, let’s look at love from another direction. Some of you know that I have, after nine years, decided to cease writing a monthly Outdoor Encounters (OE) column in The Messenger. I need to get going on two other major writing projects that I’ve put off far too long. In fact, this article is my last regular OE piece, my last monthly shot at arguing that we need to get our act together in the face of the on-rushing Climate Crisis. I will, by agreement with Sarah Duggan, write an OE article for the first Thursday of both February and August.

Now, about that other direction. A basic truth is expressed in the title of Alice Walker’s 1998 book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved. This truth also applies to the Natural World, now seriously endangered by the Climate Crisis. Most humans, even if they glance positively at this Natural World, most always come away with only a sense of fascination, or titillation, or enchantment, or intrigue, or awe, or wonderment. These shallow emotions do not equate to, are not the same as, love. 

Only rarely are we moved to study and learn enough about the workings of nature to develop a sense of love and caring for even the little corner of that world we inhabit, a sense that motivates us to become loving stewards of our earth. We rarely reach for the meanings hidden in the marvelous details of life cycles and natural histories of wild ones, hidden in the wonder and complexity of the interrelationships between wild creatures.

Author Joy Williams said it beautifully: “If animals did have voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels — at the very least with the tongues of angels — they would be unable to save themselves from us. Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes.” 

Perhaps we need to stop just looking at the lives of wild ones and begin to look into those lives. To learn to see both the detailed workings of those lives and the ways in which wild species influence each other. I offer a couple of examples. In the Amazon Rain Forest, a colony of a particular ant species builds its nest just a few feet up on the trunk of a tree. A particular species of wasp builds its nest just above the ant colony. The two species seem not to interact, but they protect each other! Small tree-climbing anteaters survive on ants, their eggs and larvae, but the ants, having only those tiny jaws for protection, cannot fight off the anteaters. However, the anteaters are deterred by the many stings delivered by wasps from the colony above. Also, wasp stings are not an effective weapon against other species of marauding ants seeking wasp eggs and larvae, but, in ant society etiquette other ant species seem unwilling to move upward on the tree trunk past the existing ant nest. This relationship guards the wasp eggs and larvae. Marvelous!

Consider the soft-shelled turtle, a creature that almost meets the qualifications for being so unattractive that “only the mother could love it.” Evolutionary speaking, the turtle form is ancient, with fossils first appearing in the late Triassic Period of geological time, at least 210 million years ago. Turtles are referred to as “living fossils.” Their fossils suggest that the modern hard-shelled forms, e.g., common snapping turtle, have changed very little. 

In contrast, the soft-shelled turtle has undergone marked changes to shell, neck and snout. Much like we see in documentaries about sea turtles, I once watched a large female soft-shell laying eggs into a scooped-out hole on a muddy riverbank. Soft shells prefer moderate or fast-moving streams with mud or sand banks and bottoms. The female may deposit up to 40 eggs in that mudbank nest. They are active during the day with hunting and with basking on a bank or downed trees sticking out of the water. They feed primarily on insects but will take fish, frogs, snails, salamanders, crayfish, and worms. Aquatic insects are preferred by females and terrestrial insects by males. The significance of this sexual preference is unknown.    

The soft-shell rests at night buried in mud or sand in water shallow enough to allow the long snout to reach the air for breathing. They hibernate in winter deep in the muddy or sandy bottom of a stream. This implies a dramatic reduction in respiration rate and overall metabolism. What little oxygen is required diffuses from the surrounding soil and water into the body through the permeable skin of mouth and throat.

The soft-shell survives in a tough game, as do most other living forms, by virtue of their endless variety of adaptations, complex life cycles, and inter-specific relationships. Learning to love and care for wild creatures and their habitats would be a most noble and worthy magnificent obsession. 

Namaste.