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.