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.