R. Mark Liebenow's Blog: Nature, Grief, and Laughter, page 5

Slow Me Down

I come to this season wanting to soak up its atmosphere. I come to be moved and surprised in simple, yet subtle, ways.
But I have to be patient and wait for the Spirit to reveal, in its own time, what it will reveal. I cannot force insights to come. I cannot entice wisdom to descend. I have to trust and be receptive of gifts that I don’t anticipate and which I may not think I need. I have to be open to the unknown. This is a time of active waiting, and I confess that I do not wait well.

Slow me down that I may listen. Slow me down that I may hear. Slow me down that I may be present to this moment and to the people here.                                     

The Environment of Our Lives

Respect and Responsibility
A week ago, I listened to Lauret Savoy speak at the Aldo Leopold Center in Wisconsin about how our lives are intertwined with the environment. Savoy is Professor of Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She read passages from her book, Trace, which explores how her life was formed by the landscape of her family’s history, the places they lived, and her love of national parks, and she shared the words of Leopold.

This is my reflection on her words.
Each of us carries a community inside us. The history of all who came before us — our ancestors — are held within us. Our lives are rooted in their past, and we carry remnants of what they went through, the trauma they suffered, the indignities, the abuse, and the celebrations. These are encoded in our genes.
The home we grew up in is an environment as much as the forests, meadows and rivers around us. Our neighborhood is an environment, as well as the rest of the city. The weather and the seasons are part of this and affect us, shaping our outlook and modulating our moods. For example, if we love warm sunshine, when it’s cold and rainy for a week, we become negative.
We lose sight of our values under the onslaught of everyday chores and decisions.
With all that we have to take care of each day, we don’t have the time to think about the long-range implications of what we do or how this affects others or the land, and we need to. Every morning we need to take time to be quiet and remember our guiding principles so that we can use them to guide our actions throughout the day.
Respect other people and listen to them. They have a right to their views as much as we do. Make decisions together. Collective wisdom is greater than individual hubris.
Respect the land and take responsibility for your actions.
In the news this week, another large earthquake shook Oklahoma in an area where they never used to have earthquakes. The cause has been identified as fracking. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, drinking water for cities has been polluted by the industrial wastewater being injected into the ground. Those who are making money off of fracking say it causes no problems. Will the politicians and business people who profit from fracking take responsibility and pay for the damage that fracking is causing?
If we are shareholders in an oil company that fracks, but we say nothing about against it, then we are guilty of causing the damage.
In North Dakota, an oil pipeline is shifted away from Bismarck because white people worried that an oil leak would pollute their drinking water. The new route now goes by the water supply for Native Americans. The powerless are abused. Another treaty is broken by the United States. The oil company says the pipeline is safe. Then why move it away from Bismarck? This pipeline has already sprung a leak.
When a freeway was built through the African American community of West Oakland, it destroyed the culture of what had been a vibrant community.
Respect people and respect the land.
We continue to sell the lives of poor people, women, and peoples of color to make money. We are members of several communities – our family, our neighborhood, our city, and the land we live on.
Savoy notes that we have a history of fragmenting our communities and ecosystem. We need to foster ecological interdependence between human beings and the land. We need to encourage a sense of belonging to a place, as Leopold also believed. We need to stop exploiting the natural world and manipulating people.
We do not create communities by putting up arbitrary boundaries. Communities are organic.
We have a responsibility.

Stop Being a Man and Focus on Being Human

It is never okay to treat another human being as an object. For any reason. Ever.
Men are taught to be rugged individuals. We are taught to think, take charge, and make decisions, even if we don’t know what’s going on or understand what needs to be done.
Men are not taught the way of the heart. We are not taught how to be part of a community where ideas and insights are shared. We are not taught to respect each other. We’re taught to genuflect to power.

This is a generalization, of course. Not all men act like this.
There are many men with good and loving hearts. There are men who will stop what they are doing to help others. There are men who listen to the insights of others, who work together, men who are not afraid to learn or show their emotions, men who seek to do what is right even if it doesn’t benefit them.
The posts at the @Good Men Project are helping men learn to become better dads, husbands, and humans.
We do not create community through leverage. Cooperating with others is not a dirty word. Our community is strongest when we treat each other as equals.
It is never okay to treat another human being as an object. For any reason. Ever.

No man is an island, entire unto himself.

Brother Sun, Sister Moon

The feast day of Francis of Assisi was earlier this month. Clare’s feast day is in August. In this harvest season, as I drive through the countryside past fields of soybeans and corn, I think of Clare and Francis and their great love for nature and their mutual respect for each other. They were equal partners, even though Francis gets most of the press.I see them running through the meadows of their scenic Umbrian countryside, robes flapping around them as they shout words of joy to each other, praising the glorious flowers, singing birds, and the glowing fields of wheat. In what would come to be known as his Canticle of the Creatures, Francis speaks of the beauty and presence of the natural world and all its creatures. He gives thanks for his steady companions, brother Sun and sister Moon.

For years, Francis and Clare have been my sun and moon. In the background, I hear Donovan singing during this scene in the 1972 Zeffirelli movie. That’s neither here nor there, but why does life seem richer when there’s a soundtrack?
Except that Francis began this poem not when he was out in the fields being inspired by nature. The words came when he was seriously ill and lying in bed. How was he able to sing praises of joy when he felt so miserable that he couldn't get up? When I’m sick, praise is the last thing on my mind. I am truly a horrible patient.
Already exiled from his home and family, after days of being cold and shivering in a small hut built by Clare and her sisters, perhaps the words began to come into his consciousness when a single ray of sunshine warmed his skin, like the comforting touch of Clare, and as when a friend comes and sits with us to keep us company.

Rather than complain about his suffering, he celebrated this simple pleasure, gave thanks, and looked forward to when he could share again the beauty of Creation with Clare. I wouldn’t be surprised if Clare contributed half of the words.

Solace of Nature and Grief

When grief knots me up, I head for nature. Breathing the fresh air of the mountains pulls me out of my funk.
Nature demands nothing of me. It accepts me as I am.
Nature goes about its life and provides openings for me to participate as I want. I can sit beside a river for hours and let the sounds of the undulating water soothe my sorrow. I can wander in the forest’s cool shadows when the heat and brightness of the sun become too much. Or I can tromp across a mountain and physically work out my anger and frustrations.

When I met Evelyn, I had one other great love — Yosemite. When she died, I thought I had lost Yosemite, too, because the first time back, six weeks after her death, the trip was a disaster. For twenty years, Yosemite had never failed to inspire me with awe as soon as I entered the valley — iconic Half Dome, snow-capped mountains, green meadows, and waterfalls flowing down around the valley.
It was natural to return when Evelyn died, but that first time back, I ran into our happy memories of being there together. They burned like bonfires, reminding me who was missing. I ended up leaving early because it was too hard to be there.
On the morning I left, I went down to the river before dawn. The valley was still black. As the rising sun peeked over the mountains, it sent a beam of light into the dark forest in front of me and lit up a grove of green aspen across the river. I could see that it was amazing, but I couldn’t feel anything. I knew that I needed to remember this so I took a photograph.
The message I sensed was that I was going to be okay, but I had to be patient and wait in grief’s darkness for the light to reach me. This photo would end up on the cover of my book, Mountains of Light, about hiking through nature to deal with grief.
When I returned to Yosemite later in the year, I was nervous. If I still couldn’t feel the beauty of the landscape, I would leave and never come back. Yosemite would be dead. But as I drove around the bend by Bridalveil Fall, El Capitan rose up to greet me.
That trip I hiked every day from sunrise to sunset. After the first hour on the trail, the chatter of surface thoughts calmed, and I became aware of feelings I hadn’t had time to face. Now I had ten hours on the trail to work through them. Scenic views frequently stopped me in amazement.
Because this was the wilderness, I paid attention to my surroundings. Bears and mountain lions lived here, and occasionally I’d hear something large moving in the forest or see its tracks. I was hiking alone, and the trail often traced the edge of a cliff. Once I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I failed to notice the trail had turned and stepped over the edge. I was able to stop my slide by grabbing on to bushes.
As I watched nature carefully, I saw how it dealt with grief — nature mourns its deaths for a moment, and then moves on. I also noticed that nature was constantly changing, even mountains made of granite. Rockslides continue to come down and bury trails and animal habitats. Mirror Lake fills in with sediment brought down by the river and becomes a meadow. Each spring the river floods and adjusts its course.
Our lives are always changing, too, because people we love continue to die and take part of us with them. Each loss tears another piece out of the fabric of our universe. Being in nature allowed wonder to come back into my life.
In those early days when I felt battered by grief, hiking to the top of a mountain gave me a jolt of energy. Looking over hundreds of miles of wilderness, I felt connected to something more powerful than death.
No matter what happens to me now, I know that I can always return here and nature will be waiting to welcome me home.

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.

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 3rd 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 6th 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.

Intimacy With Nature

I hike alone in Yosemite because I love the silence.
I love the presence of nature and want to be present to it. I hike alone to lose myself in the Otherness of the outdoors, and find myself home. The Ahwahnechees believed that humans are kin with the animals and birds, the mountains, rivers, and the sky. How can I come into nature and not pay attention to the members of my family?
To perceive what nature is and what it is doing, I need to involve all my senses. Of course, I want to be aware of large, predatory animals moving through the woods, but I also want to see beyond the generalities and notice their specifics, how they look, smell, and feel.
For example, once I headed out to look at Half Dome in the early dawn. I was so focused on getting a good view of the dome with the sun rising behind it, that I didn’t notice the coyote resting in the meadow, a small group of deer on the far side under the oak trees, and a harlequin duck drifting along on the current of the Merced River.
I want to look at individual trees, and see how they differ from each other — feel the roughness of their bark, the shape of their leaves, and if they have cones, nuts, or seeds. I want to watch the interaction between the river and its bank, and see what creatures live there. I want to listen to the quiet sounds of the meadow and locate the vole walking under the leaves and making them twitch.
When I am physically connected to the landscape, I will sense, before I go around the bend in the trail, whether the land is going to rise up or go down.
As I’m hiking, I try not to focus on anything but keep my eyes open and take it all in, trying to be aware of everything on the land and in the sky, including movement on the periphery of my vision.
One day I was hiking in the highlands behind Eagle Peak. It was hot and I was breathing with my mouth open because I was not used to hiking at 8000 feet. At home I live at an elevation of 34 feet above sea level, and I was out of breath. I began to pick up a variety of scents I hadn’t noticed earlier. Closing my mouth, I sniffed, but the scents were faint. Opening my mouth, I breathed in again, and this time I picked up the scents of pine trees, granite, and moisture from a nearby marsh.
I resumed hiking and was practicing my discovery when I picked up the smell of something musky. I knew it was an animal, but I didn’t know whether it was a coyote, bear, or mountain lion. I didn’t know whether to continue hiking or back away. You are supposed to do one for a bear and the opposite for a lion. Unsure about what to do, I stood still and waited. A minute later a deer walked calmly out of the woods and crossed the path fifty feet ahead me.

Each area of Yosemite smells and sounds different — the heady aroma of the oak trees by Rixon’s Pinnacle, the granite and crisp smells of the cascading water at Happy Isles, the dry sleepy warmth of Sentinel Meadow, the cool pine-scented forest in Tenaya Canyon.
Does it matter if I physically connect with the land? It does because while beauty attracts me to nature, physical contact is the beginning of a relationship. Nature then moves from being an accumulation of data, of observations chemical reactions and geological forces, to being alive, and intimacy begins. In nature’s storms, I learn her moods and celebrations. As I hike and camp, she learns mine.

When I know the scent of her hair, the touch of her meadows, the sounds of her voice in the river, then I move closer to my beloved.

Hiking With Nature Alone

When I hike by myself I’m not alone. Nature goes with me.
Nature is a companion who walks at my pace, and hides surprises along the trail, like yellow fungus on the backside of a tree. Sometimes nature talks so loudly that I can’t hear myself think, like when I’m standing at the bottom of a waterfall and feel the earth vibrate from the pounding water. Sometimes it murmurs so quietly that I have to get down on my knees and lean in close to hear what it’s saying.

I can also hike on and on without ever stopping, taking in scene after scene until my senses overload and my eyes glaze over from the onslaught of stunning images.
But I have a problem. I want to see everything. I start at dawn on a hike that I’ve mapped out to maximize the number of scenic destinations I can fit in and still get back to camp before it gets dark. This means that I don’t leave any wiggle room to explore a ten-foot waterfall I find that I didn’t know existed.
The rock climbers are helping me slow down and enjoy being in the moment. Most of them don’t value the speed climbers who use a stopwatch to see how fast they can get up the face of El Capitan. My friends feel that climbing is an art. Speed climbing, to them, is just a stunt.
In my early days in Yosemite, I would hike as fast as I could to Nevada Fall to see if I could beat my previous record. How well I did told me what kind of physical shape I was in. Yet I couldn’t tell you anything about the patch of red flowering something I saw on the hillside by the bridge, other than it was red. Were they flowers or tiny leaves?
Once I hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls, crossed over the bridge, and was following the trail along the edge of the canyon toward North Dome. My plan was to have lunch there, wave at the people on the top of Half Dome across the valley, who would wave back in a dome-to-dome greeting, and come back down in time to cook a late dinner.
But soon after crossing over Yosemite Creek and passing the Lost Arrow, a view along the rim enchanted me. So I stayed there, watching the valley for a couple of hours, especially the ravens who soared up on circling thermals of air, went down, and circled back up again. It was a delightful day. I didn’t accomplish anything, but I had an experience.
I want my relationships to move like this, to be spontaneous and not planned out for the next decade, which never works out, anyway. 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 checked items off my schedule. I want people to be really sad when I die, and not just sigh and cross my name off their holiday card list.

Nature meets us where we are, and encourages us to go further. When we listen, we hear the wilderness within us respond.

            *

“Waiting for Owls,” a short reflection published by River Teeth Journal. http://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2016/02/08/waiting-for-owls-

The Presence of Place

When I go to Yosemite, I want to be alone with nature. As soon as I'm within the valley walls, a deep sense of peace settles over me. Every granite dome and peak looks glorious glowing in the sun. Even a nondescript spot on the valley wall below Yosemite Point is intricate with details, which I notice only because it is framed by tree branches where I'm momentarily standing. 
People travel to natural places in search for what is missing in their lives.

When I go to Yosemite, I’m constantly hiking and listening until I’m overwhelmed by the grandeur of nature. I watch the everyday life of the mountains until I feel their presence, because then I can feel the yearning of my heart.
I try to walk slowly and notice everything around me. I try to move at the pace of nature. I try to be mindful of what is present in each moment instead of hurrying as fast as I can from one inspiring view to the next, which is a problem because there are so many vistas and I want to fit them all in before I have to leave. Often I have to remind myself to slow down. Whenever thoughts about the wilderness rise, I dawdle over them to see where they are leading.
It is helpful to be in a place like Yosemite that is both simple in focus and spectacular in presentation. I value the simplicity because it is direct, and so much of life is needlessly complicated. It’s just nature and me, with no buffers or filters in between. I value the spectacular because it pulls me out of my quiet reserve and inspires me to shout and dance with excitement, which I don’t do often enough.
When I’m here, my focus is completely on nature, and I try as best I can to understand. There are no people of the land, no cultures left to guide me with their insights or interpret what I’m experiencing.
When I need to rest my eyes from the magnificent mountains around me, I watch the ordinary world of the deer in front of me nibbling acorns on the ground, and I am moved to my depths. This land, this valley, this place has existed unchanged for thousands of years.

What I discover in nature opens me to mystery and wonder. As I deepen this relationship, I begin to understand why.

Morning Fog

Before dawn, fog moves up from the river, through the forest, and fills the woods behind my house. It’s a bit gloomy. Yesterday we had sunshine, and the brightness brought a surge of energy. Today, not so much. I want to put on a sweater, sit in a chair by the window, drink hot tea, and read a book about someone else’s adventures.
As the sun rises, the white particles of mist turn and twirl on the whims of the breeze. It looks like a cloud of fine snow is dancing.
Then I notice.

The three trees are magnificent, and stand silently like sentinels. Or like Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and Mrs. Hudson. Mystery is afoot in the woods.
Sometimes I need a fogged-in day to see what is in front of me.
Most of the time, I take in everything all at once in my constant rush to get work done. Specificity becomes an opaque blur. It’s the difference between mingling at a party, talking to everyone, and sitting on the side with one person, watching that person’s eyes, and seeing in them the history and struggles behind what is being spoken.
Listen to the spaces between the words.
We think we want to understand everything. We want to believe that more knowledge will bring us more happiness. But knowledge is not understanding, nor wisdom, nor compassion, and many things we do not want to know. Too many problems would overwhelm us.
We like the illusions that allow us to live happy, protected lives. We do not want to know how many people are hungry today because family farms have been paved over with highways and shopping malls, how many animals are being abused in food factories so that we can have cheap meat, or how much of the wilderness is being bulldozed and fracked in the name of making money. Destruction does not build integrity or community.
What we want, what each of us really do want, no matter how many illusions we hold on to to prop us up, is to experience one moment each day that is utterly real, a moment that gives us vision, hope, a taste of the transcendent. We want to connect to people, and to stand up against injustice. We want to notice what is going on in the world in front of us and make it a little better. Soon the fog will dissipate into the warmth of the rising sun, but I will remember.
We live for these moments of clarity.

But if we do not slow down and pause when these moments come, then we will never see the trees, the dancing of the fog, or each other.