December Evening

This evening in December is quiet, and the hills and fields are shaded in the sky’s pastel colors. Light has traveled beyond the earth’s edge and shadows will soon darken and lengthen into night. Nature begins to settle down into the blues and grays of winter.

I stand on my deck and listen to the woods — the creaking of the trees in the light wind, the light clack of empty black sunflower shells landing on each other, dropped by wrens and finches at the feeder. My thoughts move among the trees as I halfway watch the squirrels chase each other. Dusk fills the woods with shadows and I open to the mystery of what is here.

In the Quiet of the Night

One year after the Christmas Eve service, I walked around Watertown, Wisconsin through six inches of snow as it continued to fall, muffling the sounds of the occasional car going by.

I walked past houses with windows lit up with warm lights and people celebrating inside, and went down to the Rock River.

The Transcendence of Nature

Its wonder, majesty, and downright gob-smacking awe.

Nature has the power to lift us out of ourselves, especially when we’re in the wilderness.

It renews, restores, and rehabilitates us when the pressure and drudgery of city life become too much. If you have a place in nature where you go because you feel alive there, then you’ll appreciate the following quotes. While these writers were all speaking about Yosemite, and often in terms of spirituality, feel free to translate the words to fit your own favorite place, whether it’s at the ocean, in the desert, or out on the prairie.

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"That mute appeal (pointing to El Capitan) illustrates it, with more convincing eloquence than can the most powerful arguments of surpliced priests."  -- Lafayette Bunnell, 1851

Cantus

In listening to Arvo Part’s Cantus in Memorium, I am struck by the silence.

Silence is programmed into the score as part of the music. This silence was not absence, of waiting for musicians to play the next notes. It was presence. It was not waiting for something to happen. It was already happening, because we were waiting in the concert hall, and listening.

When we go into nature, we travel with the thousands of thoughts that crowd our head. We enter with the noises of the city ringing in our ears. We have learned to tune out much of what we hear going on around us in our concrete environment.

A Place Apart: Nature

Late in the fall one year, I hiked up steep switchbacks for two hours from the valley floor to Glacier Point in Yosemite. The wilderness was surprisingly quiet and still at 8,000 feet.

A forest of sugar pines was behind me. In front was Half Dome and a view that stretched over the gray granite peaks and domes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains

No one else was here. The summer crowds had gone home months before. A few tiny people walked around on the valley floor far below. Except for a few squirrels and one Steller’s jay, no other creatures were letting their presence be known.

The breeze hummed lightly as it twirled the needles on the pines. There was a hush as the wind flowed over the nearby mountains on its way east. Now and then when the breeze shifted, I caught the sounds of Nevada and Vernal Falls.

John Muir and the End of the World

(notice the two people standing at the base of the tree)

John Muir is one of my patron saints. He said, “Creation was not an act, it is a process, and it is going on today as much as it ever was.”

When we go to natural places like Yosemite (or Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, etc.), it looks like it never changes. Yet if we go often, and pay attention to the details, we notice that everything is a little different than it was the last time we were here.

Mirror Lake has gradually filled in with sediment brought down by the river and becomes a meadow. Flakes of rock the size of houses have broken off the valley walls and fallen, leaving white spots behind on the gray granite. A meadow in the west end of the valley that was completely open now has quite a few trees. The spring flood carved a new path through the valley and shifted the river 500 feet.

Everything is continually changing in nature. Lesson number 1.

Refuge in Nature

Your place of refuge may be different than mine, but it’s necessary to go there when something has twisted your life into knots. It could be grief, loss of a job, a health diagnosis, a relationship coming apart, or a crisis of faith.

Wherever you go for renewal, to feel comforted, accepted, and inspired, it’s likely to be a place or an activity that brought you pleasure before trauma struck. Now it becomes therapeutic.

For one person it may be carpentry or gardening, for another it may be working with horses. Maybe it’s going to the movies, the ocean, or the golf course. Whatever it is, this is where you can step back, focus on something else for a time, while at the same time, work your way through the problem in the back alleys of your mind.

Being in Community

I’m a rugged, individual American. Every American is.  (This probably holds true for whatever country you belong to.)

Or at least we think we’re expected to be this. And that’s a problem as our cities become larger and we have to drive to the grocery store rather than walk. We don’t sit on our front porches anymore and talk to people walking by because the houses in new housing developments don’t have porches, or sidewalks, or grocery stores.

We’ve lost our sense of belonging to a community of people. When we do gather together, it tends to be for national celebrations like July 4^th or for sporting events. The crowd is large and anonymous, and we don’t share on the personal level. We talk to the people we came with, and that’s about it.

The Spirit Land

Sometimes we hear the voice of a family member who has died, or we feel their presence. Is it real?

Out of the blue, I think to send something nice to a friend in another state. When it arrives three days later, it’s exactly what she needs. Is something more going on than coincidence?

We are more connected to each other than we think, both the living and the dead.

Soon after I arrive in Yosemite, a coyote always appears, either sitting along the road to welcome me in, or trotting across the meadow with a glance. Molly says Coyote is my spirit guide. She might be right. Some people say they never see coyotes. I see them all the time.

As I hike, I feel the companionship of Nature’s spirit, and let it guide me where it wants. The wind comes near and advises me about tomorrow’s weather. Taking a break, I fall asleep along the river, feeling I have come home.

We are not limited by what we can see.

The Seasons Within Me

I used to think that, for the most part, summer progressed smoothly into autumn, and autumn into winter, each day taking the next step on the way. Then I began to pay attention. Each season often has a pause, as though the earth is having second thoughts and is reluctant to let go of what has been.

A few days of unseasonably warm weather in autumn is often called Indian Summer, and yet it doesn’t feel like summer or autumn, but something that is all its own.

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Thunderstorm in the Mountains

from an October a few years ago

            *

As I come out of Tenaya Canyon in Yosemite after a hike, the skies darken and it begins to sprinkle.  Then thunder crackles and bangs through the sky. The wind increases and blows branches and camp chairs across the Upper Pine campground. I love rolling thunder, especially the type that I can feel rumbling deep in my chest. Hurrying back to camp, I grab my rain gear and head for the meadows so that I can see what the storm is doing to the surrounding mountains. 

A white cloud is forming just below the lip of Upper Yosemite Fall. It's the only cloud this low. The color of the water in the fall matches the white of the cloud so it looks like the fall is pouring into the cloud like a basin, and it seems that more water is pouring into the cloud than is coming out.

I wonder if the atmospheric conditions are such that the fall is creating the cloud? Maybe the cool air flowing down the Yosemite Creek canyon behind the fall is mixing with the humid, warmer air rising from the valley floor and forming a cloud at the junction. Lightning flashes and unhitches the cloud from the fall to float up the valley.

Hiking in the Rain

Today is a day of rest for my body. The physical exertions of yesterday's dawn-to-dusk hike wore me out. Generally the day after any hike longer than 10 hours is a rest day, or a day of a few short hikes, time to let the body recoup and stretch its muscles. 

So far I detect no serious tightness in my legs or hot spots on my feet. Although my mind wants to go on another long hike and see more mountain scenery, today’s sporadic rain dilutes my drive and encourages me to saunter around slowly and observe the details of nature more closely. 

This is also a good time to catch up on housekeeping chores in the tent, as I tend to dump things in when I return late from one hike, reset my backpack for the next day’s activity, and take off at daybreak.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

The feast day of Francis of Assisi is October 4. In this harvest season, as I drive through the countryside past golden fields of corn, I think of Francis and his great love for nature.

I see him running through the fields of his scenic Umbrian countryside, robe flapping around him as he shouts his words of praise — lyrics about glorious flowers, singing birds, and the glowing fields of wheat. In what would come to be known as his Canticle of Creation, Francis praises the beauty and presence of the natural world and all its creatures, and gives thanks for his companions, brother Sun and sister Moon.




Sweetness of Living

Native life in the barren Arctic is a constant battle to survive. To the Inuits who live there, the brutal struggle to stay alive is balanced by the sweetness of living. A long life is never assumed, not even an additional year. There was gratefulness for what each day provided. For them, it was not enough to survive if they did not also find something to celebrate.

My great grandparents felt the same way, I think. Life was hard when they moved to Wisconsin in the late 1800s and created a farm in the prairie wilderness. Yet the physical life and the fresh food they grew helped them live long lives.

The Wilderness is Home

(The top of Yosemite Creek as it goes over the falls.)

This is where it began. In the snow. My journey in Yosemite began in the snow one winter. And I could not believe that such a place could exist.

I grew up in the woods, on the rolling hills and lakes of Wisconsin, reading the words of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson. When I moved to the Bay Area in California, and the urban landscape of endless buildings and highways, I lost touch with the outdoors. 

Yosemite Tree Notes

This week, forest fires are burning in Yosemite and threatening groves of giant sequoias.

In the late 1800s Sir Joseph Hooker said he had never seen a coniferous forest that rivaled the Sierra's because of the grandeur of its individual trees and the number of its species. 

The Ahwahnechee and their ancestors lived in Yosemite Valley for hundreds of years. Acorns from black oaks made up 60 percent of their food.

The prime growing area for the ponderosa pine is in the Sierra.

Until Every Land

(photo of a statue of Saint Francis)

“Until Every Land is Covered by Tranquility,” my short essay on a peace demonstration, was published this week at Mindful Matter. (You can read it at: http://hlst.ee/1N0wx1L)

That it was a protest against nuclear weapons in Berkeley, California is not unusual. That it was peaceful is affirming. That it was led by seminarians and faculty from nine Protestant and Catholic seminaries is notable because too often religion is silent on matters of ethics when society is for the status quo.

The demonstration took place in 1980, which is halfway between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and where we sit today. This year, on the 70^th anniversary, there was another protest. This means that politicians and the military still like their big, bad toys, like easy answers instead of lasting ones, that our work continues, and that we still don’t trust them to tell us the truth.

What touched my heart about our protest in 1980 was the presence of Japanese nuns of the Buddhist Lotus Sutra sect. One of their traditions is to beat on drums softly at protests as a way of sharing the peace in their hearts with others.

Old Wawona Stagecoach Road

There are special areas in Yosemite that continue to resonate in me because of what I experienced there. I return to them whenever I can. If you want solitude, there are many old, forgotten trails that are away from the summer crowds. This is the account of one hike I took on the Old Wawona Road.

Mid morning I’m at the Wawona Tunnel parking lot. A dozen cars are here and people are lined up along the stone wall taking pictures of the stunning view over the forests and up the seven-mile-long granite canyon of Yosemite Valley. In front of us are El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall, and Half Dome in the distance.

I go across the parking lot and start up the Pohono Trail. Twenty minutes later I reach the junction with the Old Wawona Stagecoach Road. Normally I would turn left and follow that trail along the southern rim of the valley to Stanford Point, Bridalveil Fall, Taft Point, Sentinel Dome, and on to Glacier Point.

Wilderness Questions

When I sit on the side of a mountain and watch clouds journey across the sky, thoughts come to mind that I like to ponder. Some are whimsical, but others, I’m sure, have profound implications.

Skyscrapers have been compared to mountain peaks because they’re both tall and massive. When we first see them, we are gob-smacked with awe and admiration. But if we put them side by side, the buildings begin to seem one-dimensional and uninteresting. We can hike into mountains, and they also have forests, rivers, and alpine meadows. And deer, birds, and coyotes, and bears, moose, and squirrels.

Adventure of Solitude

Many of us go into nature to unwind and be refreshed, but when we try to talk to others about how nature is transforming us, we find it hard to express the changes in words.

In Breaking Into the Backcountry, Steve Edwards takes on the challenge of describing this inner movement. He invites us into his days as he takes care of a cabin in the wild backcountry of Oregon for seven months. With no one around, he is forced to deal with the silence, isolation, and unresolved struggles in his life. As John Muir, one of Edwards’s heroes, said, the journey into nature is also a journey into ourselves.

Seeing Nature Through a Lens

(my photo of Half Dome, taken from across Tenaya Canyon)

Early one morning I followed the Merced River in Yosemite from Happy Isles to the big medial moraine, turned right, and headed up Tenaya Canyon. At the far end of Mirror Meadow I sat on a log by Tenaya Creek. Half Dome began on the other side of the river and rose a mile over my head. My intention was to sit by the quiet river, focus on the triangular boulder in the middle of the river with its image reflecting off the still surface of the water, let thoughts come and go, and calm into the mindfulness of nature. When the light in the sky was in the right place, I would take black and white photos of Half Dome backlit by the sun.

When I first began taking black and whites, I quickly learned that the “form” of colors, what gives colors their colors, does not translate to b/w film. Black and white picks up contrasts. What gives colors their power is reduced to rather indiscriminate shades of gray. I had to train my eyes to see the natural world differently. 

Celebrating Nature and Community

Dawn rises over our city. The oppressive heat and humidity of yesterday is gone. The rush of yesterday’s work day forgotten.

Delivery people toss newspapers that plop on cool, concrete steps. Joggers and dog walkers nod at each other on the streets as they slowly wake up. Buildings catch the early sun and fill the dark alleys with light. People linger in bed with windows open wide to let in the fresh breeze and the sounds of birds chirping. Lovers hold hands as they walk along the shore, remembering the sweetness of last night.

Street vendors roll their carts into place and begin to warm hot dogs and chorizo, Italian sausage, satay, and burritos. They ready their ice cream bars and shaved ice cones.

Trying to Hold Sunlight

I hike in nature to be overwhelmed by scenes of natural beauty. I want to be stunned by what I see. I want to be swept up in something that leaves me in awe.

The problem is that these moments seldom last very long, and as soon as I realize that I’m in one of them, as soon as I think about what I am experiencing, the moment ends. I become an observer instead of a participant.

I can try to stop thinking and hope that I slip back into the moment, but this rarely works because I can’t will myself to be surprised. Or I can hope that I’m still close to being in the zone, resume hiking with the chance that further down the trail another moment will sneak up and hijack my senses.

Sometimes I take a photograph of the special moment to preserve it, even though when I look at the photo a year later I wonder why.

Taking Risks

(photo of climbers gathered around Columbia boulder)

Camp 4 is where the rock climbers hang out, and when I’m in Yosemite I stay with them. I like their camaraderie and the stories they share around the evening campfires of adventures from the day.

On days when they’re not climbing the big walls, they often gather at the 30-foot-tall Columbia boulder in camp and challenge each other to make it up the overhanging “Midnight Lightning” route. Almost all of them will lose their grip at some point and peel off the rock, with friends catching them below.

Climbers know their big wall climbs are dangerous. Sometimes they will miss a hold, or the rock will disintegrate in their hands, and they fall, with safety ropes catching them forty or fifty feet down. Generally the only injuries are bruises and cuts.

Hunger for Life

Life is a hunger for Truth, Beauty, and Life. You know, the Big Ticket items. 

We think about this a lot, well, not so much really, mostly after a really long day and we are wondering why we work so hard. Or when we’ve had a little too much to drink and our guard is down.

We really want to know because we’re scared that we took a wrong turn and this is as close to understanding LIFE as we're going to get. There are no big answers, of course, to go with the big questions, only little ones that we fold up and slip into our pockets and pull out now and then to give us a measure of comfort. But we still stare at the beer nuts on the bar trying to decipher their arrangement like tea leaves for divine wisdom.

It may be an unspoken quest of everyone to find these places, these moments, to touch something eternal that will last forever, and then to linger in them for as long as we possibly can.

When I went with my grandfather into nature, we’d row his boat from the Mill Pond through the channel and out to a quiet place on Rock Lake in Wisconsin, put our fishing poles in the water, and sit. Often enough we didn’t catch many fish. We also did not talk much. I think he was teaching me how to listen to nature.

In autumn we’d walk at dawn across the fields and hills, listening to the dry corn shocks rasp against each other in the breeze, and solitary crows call to no one in particular. We’d smell the scent of fall apples in the air, and feel the cold bite of winter approaching.

Land Prophets

Destruction of the land stops only when people screw up their courage and speak up.

They dedicate their lives to figuring out a better way and showing others how they can do things differently. They confront the people in politics and businesses who exploit the land only to make money, who listen to special interest groups rather than the everyday people they represent and betray the public trust.

In California, John Muir saw sheep destroying the wilderness meadows of the Sierra Nevada and worked to get them removed. In the process, he helped create the National Park system that has saved large tracts of wilderness areas. He also wanted to save Hetch Hetchy, but the politicians in San Francisco sold nature out for votes.

Lingering in Wonder

                                             (photo of the Royal Arches and North Dome)

When I go hiking, it’s not to get somewhere. It’s to exist somewhere, fully present in the moment. This is not easy to do because most of the time we have monkey brains and we’re thinking about everything and not about what’s in front of us.

When I’m hiking alone on a trail through territory where bears and mountain lions live, I don’t want to be preoccupied with what happened yesterday. I want to be aware of my surroundings, what I am thinking and feeling right now.

It’s easy to carry concerns about home with us. On the trail I remember who I am because hiking moves me out of my head and into the wisdom of my body, and then my heart shows up.

Mindfulness

Kelsea wrote about watching the stark northern edge of the Alaskan wilderness for nature to call forth something hidden inside her.

Her listening throughout the day reminds me of a journey in my past when I paid attention to everything going on around me and I felt connected to the wonder of everyday life. Since then, distractions of secondary importance have taken over and control my days. Unfortunately most of them are worthwhile, so it’s hard to say “no” to them. But I end up skimming the surface of everything and do not connect to the depths of any.

Losing Track of Wonder

When did I learn not to see? After a week in the wilderness, I am no longer in awe of the majesty of the mountains rising up around me. 

Why did I forget how to taste? After the third day, I eat strawberries more for their nutrition than their fresh and exciting flavor. They tasted exotic on the first day.

A song moves me to tears on the first hearing. Then it becomes familiar and comforting. Then it’s nostalgic. Then quaint. What changed about the music?

There's a Cadence to Silence

It's odd we don’t think it's odd that we regard silence as deficient and not as full. 

We fill the air with banter, music, sports, news and weather updates until we fall exhausted into bed, the sounds of the day still ringing in our heads. Yet we feel unsatisfied because we’ve heard little that we want to remember. In the manner of the Quakers, we should remain silent until we have something important to say.

Words and music have powerful influences on us. If we listen to music throughout the day, it’s no wonder that we’re exhausted. Every song has a specific emotion, so every five minutes we are pulled into a different emotion. After a while, we no longer know what we’re feeling.

Improving the View

I set up a second writing desk at home, this one has a view of the green woods behind my house. Already I feel a surge of inspiration.

The woods aren’t visible from the desk where I typically write because the window is too high. You might think this change was an obvious decision, and long overdue, since I often write about how the woods inspire me. It’s only taken me six years to make the adjustment.

When we moved in, we put everything somewhere just to get the moving van unpacked. And that’s where everything stayed, with us arranging our lives around these objects.

How many other matters in my life have been organized in the same way, following patterns I set up simply to get me through the day?

Now and then I need to stop what I’m doing and check to see if what I’m doing nurtures me and others in the long run.

Trees With Leaves

The woods behind the house now has hundreds of interesting trees with a variety of leaf shapes and colors.  For months this winter I saw only bare brown trunks and branches that basically looked the same, so I looked right past them to the hill beyond.

People are like trees, and what makes people interesting are their differences, their peculiarities, their way of talking and thinking, the way they stir their coffee when they’re perplexed, or maybe they prefer tea over coffee. 

What makes us valuable as friends is sharing how we see situations from a different perspective. 

Walking Free

Out walking this morning, I am shocked to find that the world has gotten along on its own just fine without me. I haven’t been outside in a week, being busy with tasks inside the house. In the meantime, the trees have changed from empty branches to umbrellas of thick green, bushes and plants are flowering, and birds are filling the air with songs. I remember that I am part of the natural world, not the other way around. It feels enlightening to be outdoors again.

As I walk, my breathing speeds up to match the pace of the body. My thoughts slow down to move at the pace of my breathing. My mind and body reconnect, unlike when I sit motionless at my desk and work with my mind, ignoring the needs of my body until I stand up stiff, hungry, and dehydrated.

Morning Fog

Before dawn, fog moves up from the river, through the forest, and fills the woods behind my house. It’s a bit gloomy. Yesterday we had sunshine, and the brightness brought a surge of energy. Today, not so much. I want to put on a sweater, sit in a soft chair by the window, drink hot tea, and read a book about someone else’s adventures.

As the sun rises slowly, the white particles of mist float and turn on the whims of the breeze. At first glance, it looks like fine snow is drifting down.

Then I see it.

Boundaries

(photo of the top of Yosemite Falls in winter)

I do not make the transition between seasons easily. I get comfortable with the season I’m in, having rediscovered its unique beauty, and I don’t want to let it go. All winter, without leaves on the trees behind my house, I’ve been able to see across the valley to the hill on the other side. This week, with a little rain and warmer weather, the leaves have begun to emerge and close off my view. I miss the beauty of the snow and being able to see the contours of the land that soon will be hidden by the forest.

Making any transition has never been easy. I remember one fall when I was hiking in Yosemite in late October anticipating a week of dry days and cool, but sunny weather. One night a snow storm moved in. The next day I went on my hike, as planned.

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On the Yosemite Falls Trail going up the canyon wall, a scattering of snow begins to appear at the 6000-foot level. It gets deeper the higher I go, making the upward hike slippery and a little dangerous. I go around a bend and hit a cold wind funneling down, and think of the French voyageurs battling harsh weather as they canoed across Lake Superior. Then I think of Sigurd Olson canoeing there after them, in the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada, listening to the voices of nature around him.

Old Trees

There’s a street near my house that used to have large, majestic trees hanging over the road that provided cool shade even on the hottest summer day. For one block it felt like I was driving through what I imagine Sherwood Forest would look like.

Now half the trees are gone, trimmed back or cut down because they were old, and dead limbs were breaking off in storms. The street has a different feel to it, and it’s become every other streamlined road that takes me from here to there. I used to take a deep breath on that road to center me to something solid, real, and a little magical as I drove off to start my day.

The land we live on influences how we relate to others and deal with the day’s challenges.

Walking With Senses Open

To really experience nature, I need to have all of my senses working. I want to be aware of the large, carnivorous animals moving through the woods before I run into them, of course, but I also want to see beyond the generalities of woods, sky, and river and see their specifics.

I want to look at the individual trees, and see how they are different — the roughness of the bark, the shape of their leaves, and if they have nuts. I want to watch the interaction between the river and its bank and see what creatures live there. I want to listen to the quieter sounds of what is going on around me, and find the creek that is trickling somewhere nearby. I want to watch the movements of a vole walking under the leaves that is making them twitch. I want to have a feeling for the landscape, so that when I come around the bend I will instinctively know if it is going to rise or go down, be in sunlight or in shade.

Spring Trees

Tiny buds that I can’t see on trees in the distance are giving the woods behind my house a light green sheen.

Last week I noticed a beautiful bare tree. Without any leaves, everything was visible —the trunk, main branches, even the smaller branches as they extended thinner and thinner into thousands of fingers. The tree was so symmetrical that I gazed at it in admiration, then had to leave because I was at a stop light.

We are like trees and the branches are our lives –relationships, projects, work, and all of our interests over the years. As some of our interests end, those branches die and fall off. As people we knew in high school move away, those branches never develop any further. When we start new interests and relationships, new branches appear and grow. The roots and the trunk of who we’ve been remain strong and provide support for our new ventures.

Hiking Alone in Nature

We aren’t alone when we hike by ourselves in nature because nature goes with us. Nature is a companion who walks at our pace, and has stored treasures around each bend in the trail. Sometimes nature converses so loudly that we can’t hear ourselves think, like when we’re standing at the bottom of a waterfall, feeling the earth vibrate from the pounding water. Sometimes it murmurs so quietly that we have to get down on our knees and lean in close to hear what it’s saying.

Often we don’t have to hike very far to feel nature’s presence. All we have to do is find a spot that feels right, sit, and let nature come to us. After half an hour, the birds and animals will set their caution aside, and resume what they were doing, and we can watch them go about their daily lives.

We can also hike on and on without stopping until our senses go on overload and we go numb with the onslaught of amazing image after image.

Wilderness Prayer

Mindfulness is camping in the wilderness, rising at dawn, and listening to nature wake up around you as you cook breakfast over a fire.

Prayer is a conversation we have with the mountains and rivers, with ravens and coyotes. We share our thoughts and feelings, and as we listen to the Other, our perceptions about ourselves and the world change and deepen. As we watch the lives of nature, we grow in compassion for all creatures.

Send Them Outside to Play

If you have no relationship with nature,

you have no relationship with humanity.

-- Krishnamurti

The landscape of one’s home is always sacramental.

 It molds our character. It’s the soil out of which we grow.

 It’s where we either encounter the divine

or we never make the connection.

-- Seamus Heaney

If we have a relationship with nature, we do better in relationships with people because we realize that the health of our community depends on the health of our environment. We realize there are bigger truths in the world than our own personal truths. Nature also has a way of humbling us, and reminding us that we’re not in control outdoors. In nature we become aware of a greater power.

In the Darkness

In the darkness before dawn, in the quiet of the hours before people rise out of their beds, before the sound of traffic on the street picks up, even before the sunlight rises over the hill to wake the birds to come to the feeder, there is a delicious silence. 

In the fullness of this silence, I open myself to the universe, to whatever it wants to share with me today. In the darkness before dawn, I believe that all things are possible.

Nature as Revelation

John Burroughs wanted people to go outside and enjoy the nature that existed around them wherever they were, whether this was forest, farmland, ocean, desert, or a city park. He was concerned that people were staying indoors too much. He wrote this in the late 1800s. I think he’d be more concerned today.

Listening to the Woods

In Illinois in midwinter, the trees are bare and brown. The sky is generally gray, and on most days there isn’t enough sun to satisfy my cat. Without leaves in the way, I can see a mile over to the next hill where there are more brown trees. Brown doesn’t interest me much. I prefer green.

The woods are quiet as I walk down the hill into the Forest Park Preserve, follow the creek around the bend where the water has carved a channel into the land, and find a place to sit. Today there is sun, and I lean back against a tree and wait.

One Percent Changes Everything

It makes a difference. The one percent.

You’ve seen the commercials. One person does something nice for someone else, like picking up a package she dropped or holding the door open. Someone else sees this and does something nice for another person down the street, and so on. A chain-reaction of helping others. But this is more than a feel-good moment.

An experiment with the particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois found there was a one percent difference between the number of muons and antimuons that arise from the decay of particles known as B mesons. This one percent more of matter particles than antimatter particles is the reason we don’t explode into smithereens. You see, matter and antimatter do not get along.

Staring Into the Woods

Why do I stare into the woods?

There’s not much going on. The woodchuck is hibernating. The deer haven’t come through in quite a while. The birds are foraging elsewhere. And don’t get me started on the owl that’s been on vacation for six months. Everyday it looks the same. Basically black trees sticking out of a foot of white snow that has buried the bushes and rounded the land so that everything’s smooth.

And yet I stare at the white landscape, mesmerized by the intricate patterns of dark branches and trunks, watching two squirrels chase each other over the snow.

I also like to walk in a cathedral when it’s deserted on late afternoons. Nothing is going on there, either. No rituals, no music, few people. Yet I do because I feel a presence as I sit in on the hard wooden pew in the darkness of that cavernous space. Red votives flicker up front. Stained glass windows glow in the shadows deepening to darkness on the side.

Winter Canticle

Primordial turn of Earth.

Snow.

Solitude with stone.

Light rises,

            travels below the south ridge.

Cold lingers

            on the shadow side of the valley.

Fleeting moments of warmth midday.

I clap hands to awaken my ears

            to this season’s voice.

This aliveness.

This.

Wandering Home

(One day in January a few years ago, I spent an afternoon in the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in Yosemite.)

Leaving my car at the entrance, I walk slowly through deep snow and let the silence of the sequoia grove wrap around me, moving from one giant tree to the next, placing my hand on the red bark of one hoping to detect its pulse. I feel endurance in the thick red bark.

Beneath my feet I sense its roots connected to the roots of the other trees and feel the strength of community. In its stretched-out branches I see its praise of creation. And in its canopy I know that an ecosystem of life exists, above the visible life that I can see from the forest floor.

I feel insignificant here, and imagine how dwarfed I’d look in a photograph standing next to it. These 3000-year-old elders of the mountains hold centuries of memories in their branches, and in the quietness of the afternoon, I listen to their wisdom.

Beneath trees that John Muir loved, I pick up three dark-green cones and hold them in one hand. It amazes me that cones from trees 300 feet tall and 30 feet around should be so small and their seeds so tiny. Freshly cut down by Douglass squirrels, the cones tightly bind their seeds inside, seeds that hold giant trees waiting to begin their lives. The cones will not open without the intense heat of a forest fire, a fire which also burns away the undergrowth and prepares the soil for the seeds to grow.

100-Year Flood

Eighteen years ago this month, in 1997, Yosemite Valley experienced a 100-year flood. Warm rain melted the snowpack in the high country and all that water flowed into the valley. The damage was so great to the roads and infrastructure that the valley was closed for several months. When minimal facilities were restored and I could get in, I hiked the seven-mile length of the valley, going from the east end by Half Dome to the west, surveying the damage and hoping that the places I loved have survived.

The photo above is at Happy Isles, with trees knocked down and branches piled up on the far bank of the river.

            *

In Tenaya Canyon, the bridge crossing Tenaya Creek above old Mirror Lake is gone, washed away like many of the other footbridges in this area. I reach the other side by stepping across boulders in the stream. The trail that went along the riverbank disappeared with the riverbank. The tranquil spot by the river that had a reflection of Half Dome overhead is gone.

In many places the water is red-orange, which indicates the presence of iron. There is an actual "Iron Spring" below the lower pool of Mirror Lake that colors the water there, but this coloring is new since the flood and starts just below where Snow Creek joins in. The pine trees in the middle section of Tenaya's landscape are dying, whether this is due to the change in the river's route, damage from the flood, the new presence of iron in the water, an infestation of insects made possible by the environmental changes, or all of the above.

Change one element in nature and the effect ripples throughout the ecosystem.