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Hay, John

John Hay was president of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History at Brewster and a teacher at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of Nature's Year: The Seasons of Cape Cod, The Great Beach and, with Arline Strong, A Sense of Nature.

Knowledge is the motion by which the human animal may come closest to another in the family of living things. The Run, 1959.

 

When the sea pushed inland and the alewives moved ahead or returned, I began to see an infinite route, of surpassing, complex elaboration; and in their pulse and tempo I felt something that gave me present assurance and a touch of joy. Ibid.

 

I have idly wondered whether a single fish, isolated from its brethren, might not suffer some kind of unknown hell of estrangement. I have seen one swimming wildly down a narrow ditch off a tidal inlet as if it knew the crowd had left it behind, and was frantic to get back. Ibid.

 

There was an imperative rhythm in their spawning act, with grace in its preparation and power in its fulfillment. Humanity calls it love. Ibid.

 

What further connections are there , say, between the sun and sight, between our tactile senses and the medium of earth and air in which we are born, between the moon and the tides and the rhythms of water and of blood? Ibid.

 

Who knows more about the universe-I with my conscious measurements, my personal faltering, or the poor fish with its unthinking precision through the various unknown? Ibid.

 

No matter how many times I try to describe the alewife by the uses of human speech, or classify its habits, its intrinsic perfection resists me. It is something else. It goes on defying my own inquiring sense of mystery. Ibid.

 

Under the full moon, the ground is a network of intricate shadows, meticulously drawn. The trees seem to move across the fluidity of light, extending electric arms and fingers. Their trunks are braced against the wobbling, racing planet. They seem to lift me with them in a sailing of their own. The Undiscovered Country, 1981.

 

The sky is flying, not toward a neatly assembled collection of cumulus clouds, but toward infinite combinations, Ibid.

 

Everything lies ready to be, for an instant, a thousand years, and though we may be able to count and measure everything we meet, the great, cosmic swing of the tides takes us beyond all measurement. Ibid.

 

Can "mother nature" be our protector any longer when we cast her out? The Immortal Wilderness, 1987.

 

I watch the sun lighting up a flock of white shorebirds as they speed off, like a swinging basket in the air above the sea. Ibid.

 

Putting nature down in favor of our own "superiority" over the rest of life is our stock in trade, but in so doing we not only excel in the rigidity of our thinking, we begin to lose our ability to see. Ibid.

 

We force the worlds of life into a corner. They become a sacrifice to our monopoly of space; but all true sharing, and interchange, lies not in us but in the unseen allowances of wilderness space. Listen to the music and you hear the earth's designs. Ibid.

 

The universe is not concentrated on the success or failure of the human experiment but on the birth of a bird. Ibid.

 

How shall we find our way to the future unless we, as well as the birds, can locate ourselves by means of the patient landmarks of the earth, as well as the sun and stars, the wind and the rain? Ibid.

 

Birds, fish, mammals, plants, natural habitats are fast disappearing not only because of the murderous stress of the human presence, but because they lack enough company in the human spirit. Ibid.

 

The drone of engines; the grinding of gears; shore mud that smelled of gas; the ebb and flow of cash in voices everywhere; some loud kids and a quiet heron. Ibid.

 

Vision, visual memory, keenly tuned senses in a bird or an insect, are not separable from the plant growth of the world around them but have developed in direct response to it. Ibid.

 

The leaf signals its shape to the butterfly. Ibid.

 

The motions and behavior of animals affects the growth, nature, and chemistry of the plants with which they associate. Ibid.

 

In a sense there can be no "passage of time" in a culture that rejects continuity. We model. We manage systems. We subject all things to endless analysis, while hunting for money is our basic game. We inevitably fantasize the world we live in. Ibid.

 

One tree suddenly sings like a bird, a singing note that is kindred to the wind, a sound that moves with air and snow, as we ourselves have voices that move in harmony at times with some deep, far off foundation for sound. Ibid.

 

These trees might tell us where to whet our minds and appetites and examine our credentials for sight and hearing . . . A real acquaintance with them is more than good enough for the grace that living asks of us. Ibid.

 

The great tropical message is inclusion. The forests, with their endlessly varied functions and differences in form, are statements as to the total involvement of life. They are the original grounds of life's inventions, a great drawing in of all kinds of possibilities, over endless time. Without them, we lose not only their incomparable species but the foundation of shared existence. Ibid.

 

The earth's regional distinctions can now be viewed in the living room, although we may not know the name of what it is that grows or flies outside the window. Ibid.

 

The whole nature of the earth is shared by the lives that follow its lead. That is why I would never be separated from a single leaf, whose circulation is traced in the veins of my hand. Ibid.

 

I pass a thrush in the trees, upright, poised in a scared, wild way, wood brown, with a dark forest eye ringed with white, still carrying spring carillons in its spirit, and our two lights meet. That thrush is the apple of my eye. Ibid.

 

Day one is any day of the year. Leaves are born this minute; winter or summer, flowers never die. The fish circle on within the greater circles of the sea, and the birds in their migrations translate affinities from one hemisphere to another. The Bird of Light, 1991.

 

All things move ahead in accordance with a passion endowed with immortal principles, like the earth itself. Ibid.

 

This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. Ibid.

 

Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. Ibid.

 

I will never wholly know the terns because of the facts and information I am able to collect about them. I follow after them because the quality of their being is still wild, still unconquerable, out of the ocean of being that created them. Ibid.

 

I also found a fragile cup, all that was left of a broken egg shell, a symbol of where life begins, the shell of the womb, the shape of the globe itself. Ibid.

 

What do I know of the earth that its prior inhabitants are not already aware of? Ibid.

 

Is it not possible to follow the light through the medium of a bird? Without them, the days would go by without definition. Ibid.

 

Winter backs and fills, with its polar opposites of light and dark. Ibid.

 

Dead shorebirds are seldom found; they get lost to wind and wave. They are like flecks of foam, ephemeral, though in that life and death context, omnipotent. Ibid.

 

From one end of the earth to the other, crossing the seasons, the seabirds roam, following its energies and its food. Ibid.

 

The same, imperative inner demands send us ahead on our own migrations. Subconscious motivation is a common property of life. We are unable to escape our origins. Ibid.

 

Our contemporary world favors the idea that there is no such thing as "nature" not made by man, or in his hands. To which the gulls, whose uncompassionate, yellow eyes regard me on the shore, might easily say: "Take your time. It's all you have, since you take everything, but do not seem to know what to do with it.' Ibid.

 

Different races of birds have been described as being slaves to their particular forms of environment and their food, but they are highly accomplished in their employment of them, and they are also outreachers on a global scale. Ibid.

 

It has always given me great pleasure to listen to swallows, barn or tree, as they lightly, gently twittered, like a string of water beads. Ibid.

 

The weight of the ocean beyond me tugs at my senses, pulling me out. If I could fly up over the shore with those easy-riding gulls, feeling the tension of distance, I might learn to explore the wide world with more confidence. Ibid.

 

A land stripped of its detail may sell a million house lots, but it has also lost its roots in the earth. The houses themselves have been deprived of a location. The sun rises without the trees, and the night has lost its company. Ibid.

 

We behave like a race apart. Ibid.

 

"Wildlife," the label we use for the animals, only describes the poverty of our feelings toward them. Ibid.

 

What more do we need to know than that the truth lies not in us alone, but with every other form of life . . . Ibid.

 

The world begins and ends in love, and unexplored affinities. A tiny hummingbird knows more than I do about the brilliance of its attachments. The future lies in a flower, and the mind of a bird. Ibid.