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The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul
"We are surrounded by a world that talks, but we don't listen. We are part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it."
In the face of climate change, species loss, and vast environmental destruction, the ability to stand in the flow of the great conversation of all creatures and the earth can feel utterly lost to the human race. But Belden C. Lane suggests that it can and must be recovered, not only for the sake of endangered species and the well-being of at-risk communities, but for the survival of the world itself.
The Great Conversation is Lane's multi-faceted treatise on a spiritually centered environmentalism. At the core is a belief in the power of the natural world to act as teacher. In a series of personal anecdotes, Lane pairs his own experiences in the wild with the writings of saints and sages from a wide range of religious traditions. A night in a Missourian cave brings to mind the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the canyons of southern Utah elicit a response from the Chinese philosopher Laozi; 500,000 migrating sandhill cranes rest in Nebraska and evoke the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. With each chapter, the humility of spiritual masters through the ages melds with the author's encounters with natural teachers to offer guidance for entering once more into a conversation with the world.
In the face of climate change, species loss, and vast environmental destruction, the ability to stand in the flow of the great conversation of all creatures and the earth can feel utterly lost to the human race. But Belden C. Lane suggests that it can and must be recovered, not only for the sake of endangered species and the well-being of at-risk communities, but for the survival of the world itself.
The Great Conversation is Lane's multi-faceted treatise on a spiritually centered environmentalism. At the core is a belief in the power of the natural world to act as teacher. In a series of personal anecdotes, Lane pairs his own experiences in the wild with the writings of saints and sages from a wide range of religious traditions. A night in a Missourian cave brings to mind the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola; the canyons of southern Utah elicit a response from the Chinese philosopher Laozi; 500,000 migrating sandhill cranes rest in Nebraska and evoke the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. With each chapter, the humility of spiritual masters through the ages melds with the author's encounters with natural teachers to offer guidance for entering once more into a conversation with the world.
344 pages, Hardcover
Published June 3, 2019
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1110 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 14, 2020
Just loved everything about this book. Amazing places in nature, great musings from the great saints of the church, an invitation to discover the interconnectedness of all things. Wonderful theological conversation. Only regret is finishing it in a time where travel to some of these places are limited! Ready to go visit and hike them all!
December 28, 2024
This second journey with Lane didn’t inspire and excite me quite as much as our first journey together, but he remained nevertheless eloquent, poetic, nuanced, and well-researched for this second installment.
November 6, 2021
Can’t recommend highly enough. Lane repeatedly shows himself to be a very careful and adept thinker who writes with tremendous power and authenticity.
October 12, 2021
The Great Conversation is a thought provoking read and raises many hard questions that really exposes the world and individual consciousness collectively. Amazing places and references that correlate the thought of everything serving a purpose and balance in the world. Strongly recommend for anyone questioning how the world and everyone got here, I meant is it so absurd to ask?
December 28, 2019
My pick for book of the year. I found it so rich in thought and references that I savored it over three months, and have it on hand to read again. Prompted reflection, discussion, and poetry. It's all in the title. Highly recommended.
August 15, 2020
"We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.”
Exactly my favorite kind of book that juxtaposes the more mystical side of religion and nature. A scholar of religion and a connoisseur of the feelings the natural world can evoke in us, the author thoroughly immerses us in wisdom and wonder. I think the world is dominated by mystery-rejecters and I needed this book to remind me I am not the last of the mystery seekers. I have written elsewhere that I have not had a tree ever talk to me in words, or in a voice in my head; but I have felt the majesty and shade and beauty of a tree enter my body and soul to carry with me and it brings peace and energy, so is this not a language other than words that is worth knowing?
I recently went on a hike in the high country, at 11,600 feet, and I went seeking the language of the late wildflowers, even before I read this book. It was an awful hike, smoke from wildfires in the western part of the state creating positive ions that were irritating to lungs and souls; but I still found some little refuges: a snowmelt stream with a riot of yellow monkey flowers, a new wildflower to me resplendent with sunlight; a hummingbird sipping from the last indian paintbrush wildflowers; the native grasses illuminated with the unreal yellow light; purple mountain harebells catching the light in saturated glossy color. Those refuges are now running in my bloodstream, I shared the images with my community, and they infuse my review in a storytelling spirit of the soul. Magic but something very real and very available to anyone who opens to it and seeks it out.
The high desert landscape of New Mexico is a sparse terrain, bearing the trace of stories long forgotten. It’s a good place to study the parlance of wind and flowing water, to ponder ravens on the wing and the play of shadows among the rocks. The land here cuts through you like a knife, enticing you to relinquish one trusted language for another- or for none at all.
We’re surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We’re part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it. We haven’t the courage to acknowledge our deep need for what we can’t explain. The soul feeds on what takes us to the edge, but we don’t go there willingly. Our longing is an echo of the Earth’s.
The connecting web is a mystery embedded in the ordinary. My falling in love with a tree has been a profound experience of the sacred…I increasingly encounter God’s presence in the rough touch of bark and the sound of rustling leaves. In the ordinary.
Over the years, I’ve attached myself to teachers in my own commitment to wilderness backpacking as a spiritual practice. Submitting to these spiritual guides in a penetratingly physical way is a life-changing experience. In wilderness (wherever you find it), there’s always a risk, but the physical challenge is the least part of it. Out on the trail, I find myself longing for an unsettling beauty, for a power I cannot control, for a wonder beyond my grasp. I can’t begin to name the mystery that sings in the corners of an Ozark night. But I can be crazy in love with it, scribbling, in turn, whatever I’m able to mumble about the experience.
I shoulder my pack and hit the trail, realizing I’m being called to a memory deeper than my own, to a language my body has known all along. The desert speaks- out of lifetimes of patience and pain-with a subtle but insistent voice. My role in the Great Conversation isn’t finally to understand, only to listen and love.
For most people passing through the urban park across from my house, the cottonwood is past its prime- scarred by fire…soon to be marked with a large red X by the crew… For me, he’s a presence in my life that’s hard to describe. Martin Buber, in I and Thou, spoke of two different ways of relating to a tree. On the one hand, he said, “I can assign it to a species and observe it as an…object. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I’m drawn into a relationship, and the tree ceases to be an It.” Buber and his tree were able to enter into a mystery of reciprocity.
A huge shift in consciousness is underway in our time. A sea change from the “I and it” marketplace conception of the world to an “I and thou” sense of communal identity. Joanna Macy describes it as a “Great Turning” an ecological revolution widening our awareness of the intricate web that connects us. Teilhard de Chardin called it an evolution of consciousness, an emergence of the “planetization” of humankind. We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.”
French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that human perception is deeply invested in a full-bodied exchange with the rest of the world. Sitting near his home on the seacoast near Bordeaux, he writes: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky…I abandon myself to it, and plunge into this mystery, it “thinks itself within me.” I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified…my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue.” The lines blur between his act of perceiving and the stunning character of what he perceives. The sky “thinks itself” within him.
The threat to natural wilderness forces us into the inner wilderness of the human psyche where wonder, grief, and longing are storming within us as well. Every experience in the natural world invites us to a corresponding work of the soul.
Rumi; “And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?”
Something similar (to bird migrations) draws human beings on pilgrimages as well… Pilgrimage is a spiritual as well as biological impulse, cutting across species. It’s even a cosmic mystery. The Earth itself follows a 584-million-mile path around the sun each year. We’re all defined by movement.
Wind varies in its emotional effect on humans depending on ions in the atmosphere. A hot, dry, dusty wind-generates positive ions that cause increased tension and irritability…on the other hand, waterfalls, pounding surf, and the aftermath of a thunderstorm release negative ions that clear airborne particles, relieve stress, and boost energy.
“If you keep saying the prayer over and over again-you only have to just do it with your lips first- then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active…I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing, which has a tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook.” J.D. Salinger
The splendor of light was a central metaphor (in the mystic) Hildegard of Bingen’s thought, a divine luminescence filling the earth…She heard God say, “I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every spark of light…I flame above the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars… for all life lights up out of me.” The same idea was also emerging in Jewish mystical thought (Kabbalistic)…the vessels containing God’s Shekinah glory were said to have shattered at creation, dispersing divine sparks that lie hidden within all things. The healing of the world (tikkun olam) requires the recovery of these shards of light.
“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me.” Hildegard of Bingen
We have always sought a way to feel at home in a universe of far-flung stars. The immensity of the cosmos is overwhelming. Our planet glides through space on one of a dozen rotating arms revolving around the nucleus of the Milky Way Galaxy. Our sun takes 220 million years to make a complete revolution around the massive black hole at the galaxy’s core. It’s made only twenty-five such trips since the sun and the Earth were born. Multiply this by the two hundred billion other galaxies in the universe… and you have a truly inconceivable immensity. The light reaching us from the most distant stars (up to ten billion light years away) began its journey before the Earth even existed.
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something your bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is- it must be something you cannot possibly do.” Henry Moore
Canyons carry the soul into unfinished grief-into the pain we’ve stifled, the secrets we’ve hid, the depression we’ve feared. Deep chasms know the grinding action of stone scraped away, grain by grain, over millions of years, they’re conversant with dark shadows. Their deep recesses receive direct sunlight only a few minutes each day, if ever. You don’t see their beauty, in fact, without the shadows. Canyons are the grand opera of the desert landscape- lavish productions bringing to the surface emotions you didn’t know you had.
“Plants and animals change as one goes up the mountain, and so, apparently, do people.“ Diana Kappel-Smith
Mountains cover 24 percent of the Earth’s surface, accommodating 12 percent of the world’s population in 120 different countries. They tend to be hotspots of cultural diversity. In the Hindu Kush of the Himalayas alone people speak more than a thousand different languages and dialects.
The tallest mountains generally get the most attention. Fourteen of the world’s peaks are more than 26,247 feet high. The region about 25,000 feet is known as a mountain’s “death zone,” an altitude the human body can only endure for a few days…when Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he reverenced the mountain as Chomolungma, the “Mother Goddess of the World.” By contrast, after finished the ascent, Edmund Hillary wisecracked to a member of the team, “well, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Some folks seem tone-deaf to mystery.
Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he’d “have to speak in a forgotten language.” He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it’s easy to lose ancient languages we’ve long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?
Exactly my favorite kind of book that juxtaposes the more mystical side of religion and nature. A scholar of religion and a connoisseur of the feelings the natural world can evoke in us, the author thoroughly immerses us in wisdom and wonder. I think the world is dominated by mystery-rejecters and I needed this book to remind me I am not the last of the mystery seekers. I have written elsewhere that I have not had a tree ever talk to me in words, or in a voice in my head; but I have felt the majesty and shade and beauty of a tree enter my body and soul to carry with me and it brings peace and energy, so is this not a language other than words that is worth knowing?
I recently went on a hike in the high country, at 11,600 feet, and I went seeking the language of the late wildflowers, even before I read this book. It was an awful hike, smoke from wildfires in the western part of the state creating positive ions that were irritating to lungs and souls; but I still found some little refuges: a snowmelt stream with a riot of yellow monkey flowers, a new wildflower to me resplendent with sunlight; a hummingbird sipping from the last indian paintbrush wildflowers; the native grasses illuminated with the unreal yellow light; purple mountain harebells catching the light in saturated glossy color. Those refuges are now running in my bloodstream, I shared the images with my community, and they infuse my review in a storytelling spirit of the soul. Magic but something very real and very available to anyone who opens to it and seeks it out.
The high desert landscape of New Mexico is a sparse terrain, bearing the trace of stories long forgotten. It’s a good place to study the parlance of wind and flowing water, to ponder ravens on the wing and the play of shadows among the rocks. The land here cuts through you like a knife, enticing you to relinquish one trusted language for another- or for none at all.
We’re surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We’re part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it. We haven’t the courage to acknowledge our deep need for what we can’t explain. The soul feeds on what takes us to the edge, but we don’t go there willingly. Our longing is an echo of the Earth’s.
The connecting web is a mystery embedded in the ordinary. My falling in love with a tree has been a profound experience of the sacred…I increasingly encounter God’s presence in the rough touch of bark and the sound of rustling leaves. In the ordinary.
Over the years, I’ve attached myself to teachers in my own commitment to wilderness backpacking as a spiritual practice. Submitting to these spiritual guides in a penetratingly physical way is a life-changing experience. In wilderness (wherever you find it), there’s always a risk, but the physical challenge is the least part of it. Out on the trail, I find myself longing for an unsettling beauty, for a power I cannot control, for a wonder beyond my grasp. I can’t begin to name the mystery that sings in the corners of an Ozark night. But I can be crazy in love with it, scribbling, in turn, whatever I’m able to mumble about the experience.
I shoulder my pack and hit the trail, realizing I’m being called to a memory deeper than my own, to a language my body has known all along. The desert speaks- out of lifetimes of patience and pain-with a subtle but insistent voice. My role in the Great Conversation isn’t finally to understand, only to listen and love.
For most people passing through the urban park across from my house, the cottonwood is past its prime- scarred by fire…soon to be marked with a large red X by the crew… For me, he’s a presence in my life that’s hard to describe. Martin Buber, in I and Thou, spoke of two different ways of relating to a tree. On the one hand, he said, “I can assign it to a species and observe it as an…object. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I’m drawn into a relationship, and the tree ceases to be an It.” Buber and his tree were able to enter into a mystery of reciprocity.
A huge shift in consciousness is underway in our time. A sea change from the “I and it” marketplace conception of the world to an “I and thou” sense of communal identity. Joanna Macy describes it as a “Great Turning” an ecological revolution widening our awareness of the intricate web that connects us. Teilhard de Chardin called it an evolution of consciousness, an emergence of the “planetization” of humankind. We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.”
French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that human perception is deeply invested in a full-bodied exchange with the rest of the world. Sitting near his home on the seacoast near Bordeaux, he writes: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky…I abandon myself to it, and plunge into this mystery, it “thinks itself within me.” I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified…my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue.” The lines blur between his act of perceiving and the stunning character of what he perceives. The sky “thinks itself” within him.
The threat to natural wilderness forces us into the inner wilderness of the human psyche where wonder, grief, and longing are storming within us as well. Every experience in the natural world invites us to a corresponding work of the soul.
Rumi; “And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?”
Something similar (to bird migrations) draws human beings on pilgrimages as well… Pilgrimage is a spiritual as well as biological impulse, cutting across species. It’s even a cosmic mystery. The Earth itself follows a 584-million-mile path around the sun each year. We’re all defined by movement.
Wind varies in its emotional effect on humans depending on ions in the atmosphere. A hot, dry, dusty wind-generates positive ions that cause increased tension and irritability…on the other hand, waterfalls, pounding surf, and the aftermath of a thunderstorm release negative ions that clear airborne particles, relieve stress, and boost energy.
“If you keep saying the prayer over and over again-you only have to just do it with your lips first- then eventually what happens, the prayer becomes self-active…I don’t know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person’s heartbeats, and then you’re actually praying without ceasing, which has a tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook.” J.D. Salinger
The splendor of light was a central metaphor (in the mystic) Hildegard of Bingen’s thought, a divine luminescence filling the earth…She heard God say, “I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every spark of light…I flame above the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars… for all life lights up out of me.” The same idea was also emerging in Jewish mystical thought (Kabbalistic)…the vessels containing God’s Shekinah glory were said to have shattered at creation, dispersing divine sparks that lie hidden within all things. The healing of the world (tikkun olam) requires the recovery of these shards of light.
“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me.” Hildegard of Bingen
We have always sought a way to feel at home in a universe of far-flung stars. The immensity of the cosmos is overwhelming. Our planet glides through space on one of a dozen rotating arms revolving around the nucleus of the Milky Way Galaxy. Our sun takes 220 million years to make a complete revolution around the massive black hole at the galaxy’s core. It’s made only twenty-five such trips since the sun and the Earth were born. Multiply this by the two hundred billion other galaxies in the universe… and you have a truly inconceivable immensity. The light reaching us from the most distant stars (up to ten billion light years away) began its journey before the Earth even existed.
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something your bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is- it must be something you cannot possibly do.” Henry Moore
Canyons carry the soul into unfinished grief-into the pain we’ve stifled, the secrets we’ve hid, the depression we’ve feared. Deep chasms know the grinding action of stone scraped away, grain by grain, over millions of years, they’re conversant with dark shadows. Their deep recesses receive direct sunlight only a few minutes each day, if ever. You don’t see their beauty, in fact, without the shadows. Canyons are the grand opera of the desert landscape- lavish productions bringing to the surface emotions you didn’t know you had.
“Plants and animals change as one goes up the mountain, and so, apparently, do people.“ Diana Kappel-Smith
Mountains cover 24 percent of the Earth’s surface, accommodating 12 percent of the world’s population in 120 different countries. They tend to be hotspots of cultural diversity. In the Hindu Kush of the Himalayas alone people speak more than a thousand different languages and dialects.
The tallest mountains generally get the most attention. Fourteen of the world’s peaks are more than 26,247 feet high. The region about 25,000 feet is known as a mountain’s “death zone,” an altitude the human body can only endure for a few days…when Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he reverenced the mountain as Chomolungma, the “Mother Goddess of the World.” By contrast, after finished the ascent, Edmund Hillary wisecracked to a member of the team, “well, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Some folks seem tone-deaf to mystery.
Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he’d “have to speak in a forgotten language.” He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it’s easy to lose ancient languages we’ve long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?
October 4, 2020
Beautiful, contemplative, summoning. Right up there with one of the author's earlier works, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, which I absolutely loved.
September 9, 2019
There is a poignant beauty in understanding that we are woven into the vast, intricate tapestry of the natural world - and that the human soul was never meant to stand apart from that. In fact, cannot survive being removed from it. Everyone from Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th c. to Chinese and Sufi philosophers give their opinions on the spiritual sustenance we gain from the natural world.
As we hurtle mindlessly into climate change and an uncertain future, species will be lost, and with them the unique melody they add to the great chorus of earth. And humanity will be diminished by that.
As we hurtle mindlessly into climate change and an uncertain future, species will be lost, and with them the unique melody they add to the great chorus of earth. And humanity will be diminished by that.
March 25, 2022
2.5 - 3 stars The central concept of this book interested me, but while there were some worthwhile connections with it, overall I was disappointed. I have read more deep, striking and insightful explorations of these ideas in other works. All of the quotes and references to other books and writings give this a disjointed feel. The conclusions the author draws sometimes felt facile, and sometimes didn't really "land" for me.
A disclaimer: I did not read every chapter of this book, and I'm not a Christian, nor do I believe in a deity...I believe the divine lives in everything. I did like that this former Christian minister is relatively ecumenical and open to finding commonalities with other belief systems regarding proper reverence for the earth, the divine and the sacred. In other ways our beliefs in the source do not align, but are overall more alike than different. However, maybe I'm being unkind but the prose here tends toward the painfully earnest rather than inspiring, especially the many passages about "Grandfather" the cottonwood. As someone who has long thought of trees as persons and teachers, I expected to relate these experiences, but somehow he wasn't able to make me feel their mystery.
A disclaimer: I did not read every chapter of this book, and I'm not a Christian, nor do I believe in a deity...I believe the divine lives in everything. I did like that this former Christian minister is relatively ecumenical and open to finding commonalities with other belief systems regarding proper reverence for the earth, the divine and the sacred. In other ways our beliefs in the source do not align, but are overall more alike than different. However, maybe I'm being unkind but the prose here tends toward the painfully earnest rather than inspiring, especially the many passages about "Grandfather" the cottonwood. As someone who has long thought of trees as persons and teachers, I expected to relate these experiences, but somehow he wasn't able to make me feel their mystery.
February 27, 2024
Way too “woo woo” for me. While I like his general framework, and the way he proposes thinking about the interaction of nature and human soul, I can’t help but laugh every time he refers to this tree as Grandfather. This book is basically a sequence of him, noting something special about nature, quoting another writer, from throughout history speaking about this feature of nature, and some personal anecdote of his that, in my opinion, takes the idea of “conversation” way too far to be relatable.
August 7, 2024
I loved this book.. I plan to read it again and complete a review that does this book justice. Belden Lane is someone who has something to say, something we must hear. I was a participant at an online retreat where he was one of the speakers not long after I finished the book I found him even more impressive as he encouraged us to take that 12-15 inch journey from our head to our heart. I will never see our relationship with nature the same, and hopefully never again take it for granted.
April 19, 2022
This book may qualify as the 5th Gospel. An extraordinary book on fath and the environment. A must read !!!
December 30, 2022
Beautiful and transformative. Meant to be savored.
January 11, 2023
Luminously beautiful, deeply insightful, expansive, inquisitive, generous … no academic writes like Belden Lane. What a gift this book is, that he is.
Read
March 25, 2025Absolutely beautiful.
November 19, 2022
Thoughtful, very well researched yet deeply personal.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews