Nature is nasty; no source for spirituality, say some 

Sue Grafton is a mystery writer. Her latest book, “Q is for Quarry,” is arguably one of her best. Towards the end, as her Kinsey Milhone is heroically on her way, in the dead of night in scary desert terrain,to apprehend the killer and the accomplice, she, the author, has Kinsey thinking this to herself,"Unbidden, my brain suddenly played back in excruciating detail Dolan’s earlier recital about Mojave insect life, specifically the trantula hawk, a species of desert wasp, the female of which sniffs out a tarantula, stings it into a state of paralysis, drags it back to her burrow, and lays an egg in its addomen. Once hatched, the tiny grub feeds daintily until its final moult, then rips open the spider’s abdomen, thrusts its head and part of its thorax inside and devours everything in sight. Sometimes the trantula is even dead by then. I was grossing myself out. This is the very same Nature that some people find spiritually uplifting.”

I said to myself upon reading this last night, “AHA! What does Kinsey, or more to the point, her creator Sue Grafton, think spirituality is? Something truly lofty and noble no doubt, quite separate from anything impure or masty, something that is supposed to be a transcendance of, even an escape from, the toils and coils of everyday life, including of course, natural life. Spelling Nature with a capital N, as she does, is another give-away in this same mode, seems to me. 

True enough, there are many who romanticize nature, especially in California apparently, which is where Grafton’s novels are set. But Grafton in return is taking that romanticized version and merely reacting to it—which only re-establishes the prevailing conventional ignorance about nature and the human relationship to and within it. She throws out the baby of nature’s teaching with the bathwater of romanticized and anti-romanticized readings of nature.

Nature teaches us many things. In this case, it teaches us how imperious the thrust for survival is, how complex and powerful the force of re-production of one’s life and one’s species is. Knowing that, and pondering that, in a spirit of wonder, awe, self-acknowledgement, and yes, shock, in the sense of being shook up out of one’s moral complacency. There is more than a hint of spirituality in such knowledge and such pondering.

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