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.

In nature, changes are part of a process. Sandbars become meadows that become forests. Plate tectonics raise the Sierra Nevada Mountains up. Wind, rain, and rivers wear the Sierra Nevada down. The air gets warmer, and the Lyell Glacier that Muir measured begins to disappear.

The natural world continues to evolve. Lesson number 2.

We are part of the movement of creation, too, as well as part of its destruction. One world ends and a new one begins. Old sections of our cities are town down, and new buildings are constructed.

We want everything we love to stay the same, yet even we aren’t who we used to be. We learn new things and our thinking shifts. We develop relationships, and feel our hearts deepen. We grow. We evolve. We would not want to be who we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago because we are aware of so much more now. We are wiser and, hopefully, more compassionate.

Yet, when something changes suddenly, like when the slab of rock the size of a football field fell from Glacier Point and knocked down thousands trees at Happy Isles, changing it from a dark shaded grove into an open-air space, I grieved the loss of a unique place that I loved, and was not ready to celebrate the airy beauty of what it had become.

Life and death are ongoing in Yosemite. Lesson number 3.

Young and old deer are killed by coyotes because they’re vulnerable. And while I’ve come to understand this, it’s still hard to accept it, to feel that this is okay.

Muir has long been a companion on the trail for me as I hike through Yosemite, but I found out something new about him after my wife died. Muir, who understood the ways of nature and accepted the cycle of life and death, was so devastated by his wife’s death that he spent a year in the desert Southwest trying to get back on his feet.

Then, when his beloved Hetch Hetchy valley was dammed to provide water for San Francesco, he died of a broken heart. Two of his great loves had been taken away, and to him it felt like the end of his world.

The evolution going on in the natural world doesn’t mean it is getter better. Nature is not more beautiful now because of all its changes over the last thousand years. It was beautiful then, and it’s beautiful now. It’s just different.

We become attached to the beauty that was, and miss the beauty that has replaced it. But sometimes the changes are just too great.