Sacredness of Nature

We have lost intimacy with nature.

Most of us don’t work outside. We live in cities where our environments are climate-controlled. We no longer can tell what the weather will do by going outside and looking. We have to consult our smart phones and check the weather websites.

The wilderness is a wild place, archaic, and exists on the edge of what we understand. But if we do not venture into it, and hike into the hesitancy of what we fear about nature, then we will never understand the wilderness that lives inside us. This is no app for this.

When we finally travel to the outdoors, we remember how good it is to breathe fresh air and walk through a forest, and how peaceful we feel sitting by a wild river, and we wonder why we don’t do this more often.

Many of us also feel spiritually energized outdoors, although in an unspecified way. Some of us are spiritual, but not religious. Or if we’re religious, we’re not organized. Or if we’re religious and organized, we likely to meet inside a building where we can’t see what nature is doing.

When he was hiking around Yosemite, John Muir was stunned by the amazing beauty of the Sierra Nevada Mountains everywhere he looked, and he felt that he never worshipped so well as when he was outdoors. Like many of the early conservationists, Muir was brought up in a religious household and was fluent in the language of the Judeo-Christian Bible. But it wasn’t until he was in nature that he felt the power of the Almighty being spoken about.

Nature has been sacred to many people for a long time. The ancient Chinese regarded the tops of mountains as where the gods lived. Mt. Olympus was home to the gods of the Greeks. Cultures often put their shrines for deities on the top of mountains where humans and the gods could meet and converse. Some cultures, like the Japanese, honor the gods by climbing the mountains and paying their respects to the nature spirits along the way.

There is a long tradition of nature poets in Asian cultures, like Basho who recorded his insights into nature and spirituality as he hiked around Japan. Influenced by this tradition, Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth are two of my favorite poets who wrote about the Sierra Nevada.

In Christianity, the desert fathers and mothers of the 3^rd century went into the wilderness of the desert where there were few distractions from living a life of prayer. There they discovered the unexpected beauty that thrives in a dry environment and found the God of the wilderness.

In Ireland, Celtic monks and nuns of the 6^th century looked for isolated places along the rugged Atlantic coast where they could live a life of simplicity and devotion. The wildness of the land helped them understand the wildness of God.

From what I’ve read, the Ahwahnechees of Yosemite didn’t feel the need to climb the tallest mountains in the Sierra Nevada. To them, mountains represented the power of mystery, something to learn from and honor. Mountains were not something that needed to be conquered by climbing.

I go to Yosemite to get away from the noise and rush of city life. In the highlands I am alone with the animals and birds and learn from them. I also go to experience the Other, the force that moves through every living thing.

When I hike in the wilderness, I find myself home.