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.

I linger by a creek and listen to it trickle through the grove. I watch birds hopping on the snow looking for food. I lean back against a tree and marvel at how high the sequoias reach.

At the end of this glorious winter day, even the sun is reluctant to leave. The light blue sky of daylight intensifies to a glowing orange that deepens to red, fades slowly to pink, then releases to the cobalt blue of the cosmic night. Constellations of stars emerge and string the branches overhead with twinkling strands of lights.

John Muir wished that sequoia juice could run in his veins, and I’ve seen writing he did in his notebook using sequoia juice. Muir said, when he lived in these mountains, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

Yosemite is 1200 square miles, but every trail I’ve hiked and every place I’ve camped feels like home. The wild, unkempt beauty of the wilderness lives here.

The splendor of sequoias in the majesty of the mountains draws me into sacred roots.