R. Mark Liebenow's Blog: Nature, Grief, and Laughter, page 12

Hiking Alone in Nature

We aren’t alone when we hike by ourselves in nature because nature goes with us. Nature is a companion who walks at our pace, and has stored treasures around each bend in the trail. Sometimes nature converses so loudly that we can’t hear ourselves think, like when we’re standing at the bottom of a waterfall, feeling the earth vibrate from the pounding water. Sometimes it murmurs so quietly that we have to get down on our knees and lean in close to hear what it’s saying.
Often we don’t have to hike very far to feel nature’s presence. All we have to do is find a spot that feels right, sit, and let nature come to us. After half an hour, the birds and animals will set their caution aside, and resume what they were doing, and we can watch them go about their daily lives.
We can also hike on and on without stopping until our senses go on overload and we go numb with the onslaught of amazing image after image.I often have a problem when I go hiking because I want to see everything, and I’ll plan a hike to include as many scenic spots and destinations as I can fit in and get back to camp just as darkness if falling. This means that I don’t leave any wiggle room to linger at places that I didn’t know existed. If I’ve hiked up into the highlands from the valley floor, there aren’t any shortcuts home. If I’m halfway though a hike when I want to make a change, it’s either 7 hours back or 7 hours on to complete the hike. Once I reach the halfway point, I don’t have time to explore a new waterfall.
I’ve learned quite a bit from the rock climbers I camp with, like the need to take calculated risks now and then. Most of them don’t value speed climbers, those who use a stopwatch to see how fast they can get up the face of El Capitan. My friends like the art of climbing, and to them speed climbing is just a stunt. In my early days of hiking in Yosemite, I also delighted in seeing how fast I could hike somewhere, keeping time to see if I could beat my previous record. It told me what kind of physical shape I was in, but I could not tell you anything about the red flowering something that I saw on the hillside by Nevada bridge. I couldn’t tell you if they were flowers or tiny colored leaves. Since then I’ve learned the value of slowing down.
Once I hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls, crossed over the bridge, and was following the trail along the edge of the canyon towards North Dome. The plan was to have lunch there, wave at the people on the top of Half Dome across the valley, and come back down in time for a late dinner. But soon after crossing over Yosemite Creek and passing the Lost Arrow, I saw a vista along the rim that I had never seen before. So I sat down, and it was delightful. I stayed there and watched the valley for a couple of hours before hiking back. I was so proud of myself.
When I hike, I like to feel my way, sitting when I feel like sitting, and exploring little creeks cascading down then they appear. I want my relationships to be spontaneous, not planned out for the next decade. I want to do work that nurtures me as much as I nurture it. I don’t want to get to the end of life and realize that I haven’t lived at all, just reached destinations. I want people to be sad, really sad, when I die, and not just cross my name off their Christmas card list.
Nature meets us where we are, and encourages us to go further into our thoughts and feelings. Nature brings us new mysteries and realities to ponder.

When we listen to nature, we hear the wilderness within respond.

Wilderness Prayer

Mindfulness is camping in the wilderness, rising at dawn, and listening to nature wake up around you as you cook breakfast over a fire.
Prayer is a conversation we have with the mountains and rivers, with ravens and coyotes. We share our thoughts and feelings, and as we listen to the Other, our perceptions about ourselves and the world change and deepen. As we watch the lives of nature, we grow in compassion for all creatures.
The insights of contemplation come like a cool breeze on a hot day when we’re hiking up the steep ridge behind North Dome.
Awe is feeling the Creator walk by in storm that roars and bashes the valley walls with lightning and thunder.
As we hike into unknown territory, we trust the Spirit of nature to guide us to where we need to go. We travel with holy intention on a search that may take years, but being mindful is not the answer. 
Mindfulness is a journey, and compassion is our companion along the way.
Prayer is being aware of the beauty of a single pine seedling rising through the humus on the ground.

Gratefulness is watching the alpenglow on white granite mountains fade and stars appear that travel overhead, and feeling connected to them on their pilgrimage through the depths of the Great Cosmos.

Send Them Outside to Play

If you have no relationship with nature, you have no relationship with humanity.
-- Krishnamurti
The landscape of one’s home is always sacramental. It molds our character. It’s the soil out of which we grow. It’s where we either encounter the divine or we never make the connection.
-- Seamus Heaney
If we have a relationship with nature, we do better in relationships with people because we realize that the health of our community depends on the health of our environment. We realize there are bigger truths in the world than our own personal truths. Nature also has a way of humbling us, and reminding us that we’re not in control outdoors. In nature we become aware of a greater power.
If we don’t connect to nature, we will regard the forest only as a source of wood for building homes. We will think of the river only as a place for factories to dump their waste water. We won’t care about pesticides running off the land and into our lakes, killing the fish and making the water undrinkable. Unless we have a favorite fishing hole, or a favorite river that we like to canoe, we won’t care because we won’t have a personal investment.
Large businesses don’t care about the environment. They only exist to make as much money as fast as they can for their shareholders. Large businesses have large PR teams that create rosy picture to make you think they care. They don’t.
If we don’t connect to nature, if we don’t love the woods and rivers and mountains, if we don’t feel part of the community of living creatures, then we will exploit the land, and we will exploit each other. If we aren’t in community, then we exist only for ourselves.
And when we die, we will be alone, closed up in a hermetically-sealed room because the air smells bad. We will drink artificial water, and eat tasteless, plastic food. And we will be depressed by the lack of natural beauty outside our windows because it’s all been bulldozed flat.
Send your children outdoors to play so that they will grow up loving the land and care what happens to it. Go outside yourself before you become crusty and bitter. Breathe in the fresh air of the mountains and feel yourself come alive. Then you will understand what is at stake.
Pay attention to what is going on in nature before it becomes a toxic dead zone.

In the Darkness

In the darkness before dawn, in the quiet of the hours before people rise out of their beds, before the sound of traffic on the street picks up, even before the sunlight rises over the hill to wake the birds to come to the feeder, there is a delicious silence. 
In the fullness of this silence, I open myself to the universe, to whatever it wants to share with me today. In the darkness before dawn, I believe that all things are possible. What surprises will show up today? What moments of transcendence? What inspired words will come, what sharing of hearts will there be with others? How will I be renewed and challenged? How will I grow? How will I become more loving, more aware of other people’s suffering? Who will I meet today, and how will I love them in ways that I didn’t expect?
In the darkness before dawn, I ready my heart to open wide enough for the needs of others, ready my mind to listen with compassion and not judgment, and ready my hands to do work that needs to be done.
I give thanks today the Great Spirit. I give thanks for the natural world that inspires me.I give thanks for breath and the coming of light.
I give thanks today for you.

Nature as Revelation

John Burroughs wanted people to go outside and enjoy the nature that existed around them wherever they were, whether this was forest, farmland, ocean, desert, or a city park. He was concerned that people were staying indoors too much. He wrote this in the late 1800s. I think he’d be more concerned today.
We drive rather than walk to the neighborhood grocery. New neighborhoods often don’t have sidewalks. Or neighborhood groceries. Most of our houses don’t have porches for sitting outdoors, chatting with neighbors walking by, and watching the sun set over the woods. Our children don’t go outside to play, and many are afraid of being in the woods.
There are different reasons why we go into nature. Some of us go for several of them.Nature as a backdrop for our activities.We use the outdoors as a place for getting exercise — hiking, riding bikes, canoeing, playing baseball, soccer, golf, or skiing down a mountain. Most of us need the exercise, so this is good, but we often neglect to pause in our activities and observe what nature is doing around us. What did we learn from the mountain that we just skied down?
Nature as scienceSome of us like to spend hours figuring out how nature works. We look at it analytically and pull out guide books to identify trees, plants, and birds. We examine the scratches that glaciers carved into Yosemite’s walls, and the moraines they left behind. We take measurements of air and water to record matters dealing with global warming, pollution, and the effects of fracking. Nature is an experiment in process that we’re watching.
Nature as therapyNature can be a place for us to get away, relax, and unwind. We feel renewed by the fresh air, the unhurried pace, and the quietness of the outdoors. Maybe we think about the struggles we are having at home or at work, and let our minds wander around for insights. When we return home, we are refreshed, energized, and full of ideas.
Nature as inspirationIn places like our national parks, chosen because of their outstanding scenery, we are inspired by the beauty, the wonder, and the intricate diversity of life in the wild. Sometimes we see lightning flash off the tops of mountains during thunderstorms, tiny trout swimming under the ice in the river, or a two-foot-tall owl sitting on a branch in the woods.
Some of us feel spiritual outdoors, as if we were seeing the untouched remnants of Creation. We’re aware of a greater power around us. Sometimes we feel awe. We look for transcendence when we’re in nature, because we want to be reminded that we are part of something much greater than our individual lives.
Nature as relationshipWhatever we’re doing, no matter why we are outside, and whether we are following our heads or our hearts, we can develop a relationship with nature. We can rise with the sun and go to bed when it sets. We can adjust our life to interact differently with each season. We can treat nature as a friend instead of an adversary. It was only after John Muir forgot his plant press one day that he was forced to look at Yosemite as a whole, and felt a personal connection that he nurtured for the rest of his life.
The more we go in nature, the more we discover our favorite spots. Maybe there is a small glen by the river where we love to sit because we feel whole. Maybe the view off the side of a certain mountain makes us want to stay there forever.
Going outdoors for any reason is important, not only for our own health, but also for the health of the environment, because we only take care of what we love. If we don’t value being outdoors, then we won’t care what happens to it.

Nature reveals who we are, and uncovers longing for who we want to be.

Listening to the Woods

In Illinois, in midwinter, the trees are bare and brown. The sky is generally gray, and on most days there isn’t enough sun to satisfy my cats. Without leaves in the way, I can see a mile over to the next hill where there are more brown trees. Brown doesn’t interest me much. I prefer green.
The woods are quiet as I walk down the hill under their spare canopy, follow the creek around the bend where the water has carved a channel into the land, and find a place to sit. Today there is sun, and I lean back against a tree and wait.
Life has moved underground and is preparing for the warmth of spring. Everything around me seems to be frozen or dead. Yet when I look closer, I see the forest’s patchwork of life.There are shades of brown in the trees and bushes. The dry leaves that have papered the ground for months are a spectrum of muted colors — browns, of course, but also blue, red, yellow and purple. Lichen on boulders are colored sage, yellow, gray, black, and orange.
There are also signs of death. Several trees have limbs that have lost their bark. The trunk of one tree is bent at a right angle fifty feet up. I doubt that it will bloom again, but I will watch.
A slight breeze drifts up along the hollow of the creek bed and rustles the leaves. Squirrels emerge to dig for acorns. White-breasted nuthatches twitter in the trees, and a red-tailed hawk circles overhead checking the ground for food.
Over the rise, a crow caws. A response comes from the other direction, and a laid-back conversation begins as each crow thinks about something witty to say before responding. Sometimes, when I have been here, there has been a barred owl and a deer.

I am grateful to have a physical place to go where I can be surrounded by presence of nature and listen for the sacred.

One Percent Changes Everything

It makes a difference. The one percent.
You’ve seen the commercials. One person does something nice for someone else, like picking up a package she dropped or holding the door open. Someone else sees this and does something nice for another person down the street, and so on. A chain-reaction of helping others. But this is more than a feel-good moment.
An experiment with the particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois found there was a one percent difference between the number of muons and antimuons that arise from the decay of particles known as B mesons. This one percent more of matter particles than antimatter particles is the reason we don’t explode into smithereens. You see, matter and antimatter do not get along.Trying to save the natural world can seem like such a large task that we give up trying. How do I stop corporations from polluting and fracking the land into piles of waste? But we can save parts of nature where we live, whether this is blocking the company that picks up our trash from also dumping toxic waste into our landfill, creating a free recycling program, or convincing people to stop buying plastic water bottles. 
Aldo Leopold restored a denuded sandy area along the Wisconsin River that was once a thriving prairie filled with wildlife and birds. His efforts led to the formation of The Wilderness Society and the idea that it’s not too late to undo much of the damage that we’ve done to nature. Others saw his work and started their own projects, like the effort to preserve sandhill cranes near Baraboo, Wisconsin.
In practical terms, what I do on the local level won’t do much to slow global warming or save the glaciers from melting. Not by itself. But when my one percent is added to your one percent, and to the one percent of our friends, then we begin to affect larger matters. By working with our neighbors, who may not agree with us but who trust us, we help change their minds and they begin to do their one percent.
If I change my neighborhood, and you change your neighborhood, and a thousand others change their neighborhoods, a thousand people will see what we did, and they will make their changes, and soon we have made a noticeable difference.
The one percent in the world is capable of changing many things. I wonder if it will work with our wasteland of politics, run by money and not by compassion or common sense.

Staring Into the Woods

Why do I stare into the woods?
There’s not much going on. The woodchuck is hibernating. The deer haven’t come through in quite a while. The birds are foraging elsewhere. And don’t get me started on the owl that’s been on vacation for six months. Everyday it looks the same. Basically black trees sticking out of a foot of white snow that has buried the bushes and rounded the land so that everything’s smooth.
And yet I stare at the white landscape, mesmerized by the intricate patterns of dark branches and trunks, watching two squirrels chase each other over the snow.
I also like to walk in a cathedral when it’s deserted on late afternoons. Nothing is going on there, either. No rituals, no music, few people. Yet I do because I feel a presence as I sit in on the hard wooden pew in the darkness of that cavernous space. Red votives flicker up front. Stained glass windows glow in the shadows deepening to darkness on the side.
I do this because I like to be surrounded by something larger than myself, something grand and soaring like a cathedral, like the mountains of Yosemite. Something powerful and unsettling like a massive thunderstorm that booms and crackles across the sky. Something that holds mystery in its folds. A power that hums through the earth, vibrations I feel when I rest my hand on its stone.
Presence and mystery. Two matters that don’t physically exist. Things we can’t pick up, turn around, and examine from different angles because we exist inside them.
We sense the sacred when we are quiet and still, and when we stop talking and listen to another person’s journey.
It’s a grace to be in a place that opens up my interior hovel to light and fresh air. A place that allows me to breathe deeply and dream of what might one day be. A wild place that challenges me to take risks and see another unfolding of the spirit’s mystery. You probably have your own spots where everything comes together and you feel delightfully alive and energized. Hopefully you go there often. Life is hard, and it helps to be swept up by something greater than ourselves.
This woods, in the ordinary living of its life, helps me believe in more than what I see.

Winter Canticle

Primordial turn of Earth.Snow.Solitude with stone.
Light rises,            travels below the south ridge.Cold lingers            on the shadow side of the valley.Fleeting moments of warmth midday.
I clap hands to awaken my ears             to this season’s voice.This aliveness.This.Deer nibble the ground.Squirrels and Stellar’s jays scold us             for no apparent reason.Each creature listening            for enlightenment.
Snow covers the world.Night settles down into the meadow.Moon rises over the far ridge.Coyote trots over memories of buried trails,            listening.
Glaciers deepen on the north side of mountains.Icicles click in the breeze.
Listen.

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.
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.