“I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field,” wrote poet Mary Oliver. If “all day” is perhaps poetic liberty, her understanding of heaven in the world is not. Oliver’s writing is abounding with awe and astonishment in nature: the wild music of the waterthrush, the chesty, fierce-furred bear, the field of sunflowers like a host of haloed angels.
“Teach your children to walk upstream,” she advised, meaning not only in nature but against the current of culture. As a parent, I most often feel that I am swimming against the forces of virtual reality.
As part of our trip to Disney World, my sons and I rode a simulator that “flew” past some of the world’s most spectacular landscapes: glaciers in the Arctic, rainforests in the Amazon, and the Grand Canyon. It was incredible.
And yet, it bugged me when my son declared, “I feel like I’ve been to all those places!”
Perhaps the sci-fi dream of virtual reality is not as far-fetched as when I was a boy. Disney World is its own alternate reality. What worries me more is the encroachment of the virtual in my day-to-day life. Like my walks in the woods.
My younger son plays a video game called Pokémon Go on my wife’s iPhone. Using the GPS, the game shows our actual neighborhood and surrounding woods, but on the screen, adds Pokémon — cartoon characters — in real-life locations. The result is that my boy walks through the actual woods with his gaze affixed to a screen in his hand. He misses the gray squirrel’s acrobatic leap because he’s feeding pretend fruit to something called a Ponyta, a fire-horse. A Ponyta? What the … ?
I am no Luddite. I use technology every single day.
But when poet Ross Gay labels the supposed “smart phone” an “alienation device,” he’s not simply bemoaning technology. Gay’s thesis is that joy is about connection — “joy is the mostly invisible, underground union between us.” By “us,” he means everything that is natural, not virtual. Those daredevil squirrels, rascally crows and big bumblebees, the Mack Trucks of the insect world.
The other day, I’d had enough of Pokémon Go. I snatched the phone from my son, causing him to howl in protest. Then, he continued to talk about those virtual creatures, something about a Bulbasar with a flower petal blooming from its back. I was patient for a few steps.
“Look here,” I interrupted. “This pretty purple wildflower is called a violet wood sorrel.” As he crouched to examine the tiny petals, I remembered that the species was endangered; yet another life threatened by the intrusion of humans into a natural habitat. Who knows how long they will exist in the world?
Yet, that day, there was this gorgeous flower in our woods. The real thing.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church. His newly-published book is a collection of his columns for the Chatham News + Record titled “Hope Matters: Churchless Sermons.”