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Turtles are reptiles. That means they are related to snakes and lizards and, more distantly, to crocodilians, but they are far from slimy-skinned amphibians like salamanders and frogs. They reproduce by copulation and internal fertilization, lay eggs, and can have quite elaborate courtship rituals. Most are love-‘em and leave-‘em types, but some stay around to protect their offspring. Like other reptiles, they have lungs, not gills, and possess a bony spinal column and senses that are familiar to us, along with a couple that aren’t. Among the latter are the ability to detect electrical activity in water, to pick up vibrations in the ground using their shells, and perhaps the ability to sense specific airborne chemicals, especially pheromones.
Turtles are also poikilotherms, meaning that they depend upon external sources for the heat needed by their metabolic processes. They can be cold to touch when that heat is not forthcoming, leading to the misnomer “cold-blooded.” Actually, their blood can be warmer than ours—whilst basking in the desert sun, for example—and in certain situations, some can even generate a little bit of their own body heat. Contrary to folklore, turtles are not particularly slow. Because of the limitations of their physiology, most are not able to sustain fast movement for long periods of time but can get up and move quickly in a short dash or swim. Giant sea turtles can even traverse entire oceans at a clip that only a high-speed submarine could match.
The turtle’s defining characteristic is its shell. In most turtles—we will meet some exceptions in the fables that follow—the shell’s surface layer is comprised of keratin, the same stuff as human fingernails and hair, and as the horn of a rhinoceros, too. This keratin is divided into sections called scutes, which are basically giant versions of the scales characteristic of all reptiles. The upper shell, the carapace, is joined on each side of the turtle to the lower shell, the plastron, by a bridge. Beneath the scutes lie bony plates that approximate but do not exactly match the scutes above them. One unique feature of the turtle skeleton is that the shoulder girdle is inside the rib cage. If we were built that way, we’d be able to bring our ribs up to our ears when we shrugged.
Turtle shells range in shape from flat and streamlined to domed and unwieldy, the better to discourage predators such as alligators and wild dogs from crushing them for a meal. Some turtle shells close up so completely that only the most powerful and persistent predator can get inside to the soft parts; others have shells that are quite reduced to facilitate climbing or crawling about in the mud. Turtles with less protective shells typically make up for their deficits with strong jaws, a sharp beak, and a nasty attitude.
Speaking of attitudes, most turtles get along, at least with each other, and can live in large communities of different species. They have some surprising abilities, too. A few can spend an entire winter under the frozen surface of a lake or pond, reducing their heartbeats to nearly undetectable levels, and extracting what little oxygen they need through skin in their throat folds or urogenital area. The North American red-eared slider, Trachemys scripta elegans, has the most complex color vision system of any vertebrate, with seven different types of color-sensitive cone cells in the eye. Some turtles, while not nearly so eloquent and voluble as the ones we will encounter in the tales that follow, have a significant vocabulary. The Australian northern snake-necked turtle, Chelodina oblonga, uses growls, grunts, chirps, and more to communicate to other members of their species in murky, underwater conditions. Other tortoises vocalize loudly when mating.
Turtles inhabit Earth’s most intimate spaces. So alien to us and yet so familiar that we routinely take them for granted, turtles remind us that despite our preoccupation with finding intelligent life out in the cosmos, such life is right here beside and below us. They remind us that we are most definitely not alone, though that is something that could also be said of many, many other types of animals. The real reason I chose them is that of all the creatures that crawl, fly, swim, run, slither, burrow, and climb in and through our world, they are the ones closest to my heart and the ones I know best.
Daoism, Meditation, and How a Monk Talks to Turtles
Popular with Chinese elites since the fifth century BCE, Daoism can be seen as a religion, a philosophy, or both. Its fundamental permeability makes it nearly inextricable from the Chinese culture that birthed it, although right from the start, it proposed looking at the world in a way quantum physics, game theory, systems theory, and medicine all came to echo millennia later. Perhaps the first coherent environmentalism and argument for sustainable living, Daoism also foreshadowed Deep Ecology, a scientifically dubious but emotionally appealing philosophy first advanced in 1973 by the Norwegian Arne Næss and later popularized by British author James Lovelock.
The word Dao suggests a path or way, yet it is neither an entity nor a verb. Perhaps it is a process or presence, though Laozi, greatest of all Daoist sages, warns us not to confuse the word Dao with Dao itself. In the same sense that the word moon is not the heavenly orb, Laozi declares, “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal [real] Dao.” In fact, it is easier to say what Dao is not than what Dao is. It is neither goodness nor God, though some see it as benevolent. Perhaps it is easiest just to think of Dao as nature, itself a complex and multilayered concept. Venerating nature and its workings, Daoists see all living things as part of the same vast, ever-changing tapestry of matter and energy. We believe that in our original state, unsullied by propaganda, commerce, and the bewildering array of agendas forced upon us in our modern lives, we all have access to the direct, spiritual experience of “something going on.”
Westerners know more of Daoism than they realize, as George Lucas clearly drew upon Daoism when creating his wildly popular Star Wars franchise—so much so that late entries into that filmdom even feature overtly Daoist symbols. In that fictional world, the rebels represent Daoists while the empire represents the competing, more rigid philosophy of Confucius, which relies upon strict codes of moral conduct, government regulations, and inviolable social roles and positions. On the surface, Star Wars chronicles the struggle between Jedi masters who understand universal forces and wield swords like kung fu heroes on the one hand, and generals and soldiers who embrace guns and bombs as the tools of tyranny on the other. On a deeper, more real-world level, it is the conflict between lovers of nature and lovers of law and order, between free-thinkers and conformists, between those who embrace evolution and change and those who fear and resist both, between, dare I say it, literal (not political) liberals and conservatives.
What Star Wars fans do not know is that in addition to conjuring a love of nature and an Eastern view of the world, Daoism offers physical practices, rituals, techniques, poetry, literature, music, and arts, all of which brim with exoticism, wildness, insubordination, revolutionary evolutionism, a deep love of truth, individuality, diversity, and a nonjudgmental, egalitarian world view. Today’s flesh-and-blood Daoists may not carry light sabers, but they have little tolerance for submitting to authority nor to conforming to societal norms. Rather, they live balanced, spiritually rich lives, embracing compassion, frugality, and humility, Daoism’s three spiritual treasures. The ideal Daoist life is one of free and easy wandering, whilst being maximally effective with minimum effort. A term for this attitude in action, or nonaction, is wu wei.
Change is integral to Daoism and is represented by the yin/yang symbol seen on everything from surf-board-toting pickup truck windows to hip clothing. Yin and yang are terms commonly used to describe forces, states, energies, or qualities and are typically portrayed as opposites. More accurately, they exist only inside the circle that encompasses them and are, together with that circle, a symbol connoting motion and constant change. The symbol, properly called the taijitu is best seen as a movie rather than a still image. In that movie, yin and yang exist only in relation one to the other and are in a constant state of exchange, one perpetually replacing the other. Think of the way day replaces night, the two changing places at dawn, and how male and female each contain a bit
