R. Mark Liebenow's Blog: Nature, Grief, and Laughter, page 8

Solitude of Trees

In a back issue of The Yosemite Journal, Howard Weamer writes about the Ostrander Hut that is in the area behind Glacier Point. The Hut is ten miles out in the backcountry, at an elevation of 8500 feet, and in winter is accessible only by cross-country skiers. Weamer was its caretaker and host for many years, and writes of the wide-ranging discussions that would go on into the night between people of different backgrounds. He also mentions the need for solitude that was often expressed by his visitors: "those who welcome it are assumed to have attained something special."
This phrase stayed with me as I hiked by myself out to the hut one gorgeous autumn day. The stone hut was locked up when I arrived because it’s a winter destination, but I looked in the windows at the close sleeping quarters, then looked out at the tranquility of the forest, mountains, and the small lake that feeds Bridalveil Creek, and I felt contentment.
Does being comfortable with solitude mean that we have arrived at our goal of attaining solitude? Is there nothing that happens once we arrive? What about self-exploration?
Does solitude lead us into self-awareness, or does self-awareness lead us into solitude?
In our society it takes great effort to get away from the bustle of the city and find a place where nothing seems to be going on. And being happy when you’re alone with yourself shows an acceptance of solitude. But it’s in solitude that we sort things out, drop useless habits, set aside limiting conceptions and empty traditions, and focus on where we want to go. It’s spring cleaning for the soul.
Certainly solitude is good for restoring our sense of balance, but it can also be transforming. Attaining solitude means slowing down enough not only to notice a hillside of trees shimmering in the afternoon sunlight, but also to see the differences in each one.
“The beauty and natural silence overwhelm me here.... How do you ask people, though, to walk into the trees and listen to ... nothing?"      Joe Evans
It’s not easy to get people to be still and listen to the natural world around them. When we finally stop our activities and stand quietly beside trees and listen to the silence of the woods, are we listening with the trees as they commune with nature, or are we listening to their voices in the silence, hoping to reach the place where we can finally hear our own?
During my hike, every time the breeze picked up, the sugar pines hummed. One time my mind jumped to the song "I Talk to the Trees" that Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, in his gravely voice, sang in the western movie, Paint Your Wagon, but as I sang the lyrics myself and started touching trees, I began to laugh and lost track of my thoughts.
As caretaker of the Hut, Weamer found that he often had to answer the same questions with each group that came in, and he tried, as with the Buddhist's bell, to speak and be heard as clearly on the fiftieth ring as on the first. He discovered his impatience and, in solitude, learned to let go of his pride. I would think that he also learned how to answer better, becoming, through careful listening, more tuned to hearing the nuances of how those same questions were asked. People do not always say what they mean, and sometimes they do not even know what they want to ask.
Learning to hear our own unspoken helps us hear the unspoken of others.

Today I walk into the woods near my home, along a creek to a place of solitude. The water is low and the boulders in the river are meditating in the still water of winter. I sit with the birds and squirrels to spend time in the quiet and think about the Ostrander Hut. I let the rush of the holidays fade, and wait for a vision to guide me in the new year.

December Evening

This evening in December is quiet, and the hills and fields are shaded in the sky’s pastel colors. Light has traveled beyond the earth’s edge and shadows will soon darken and lengthen into night. Nature begins to settle down into the blues and grays of winter.
I stand on my deck and listen to the woods — the creaking of the trees in the light wind, the light clack of empty black sunflower shells landing on each other, dropped by wrens and finches at the feeder. My thoughts move among the trees as I halfway watch the squirrels chase each other. Dusk fills the woods with shadows and I open to the mystery of what is here.

If this quietness should bring back a forgotten memory, an unresolved feeling, or an insight into something that once seemed impenetrable, I would dwell on it. But I don’t need anything to happen. The presence I feel standing here listening to nature is enough.
The silence of the woods with its blue shadows, the appearance of the sparkling stars overhead, the slow journey of the earth through the dark, silent cosmos, remind me of Sigurd Olson and the words he wrote from his listening point on the shore of Lake Superior:
The movement of a canoe is like a reed in the wind. Silence is part of it, and the sounds of lapping water, bird songs, and wind in the trees. It is part of the medium through which it floats, the sky, the water, the shore.

Last week, people walked the streets of my neighborhood caroling of joy. Houses were full of revelers, and lights glowed from every decorated window. When holiday parties became overheated, people wandered outside to cool down. They listened to the woods quietly celebrating winter, and felt hope in something unseen.

In the Quiet of the Night

One year after the Christmas Eve service, I walked around Watertown, Wisconsin through six inches of snow as it continued to fall, muffling the sounds of the occasional car going by.
I walked past houses with windows lit up with warm lights and people celebrating inside, and went down to the Rock River.


It was a silence filled with the quiet assurance that hope was being passed from hand to hand, and from heart to heart, around the world tonight.

The Transcendence of Nature

Its wonder, majesty, and downright gob-smacking awe.
Nature has the power to lift us out of ourselves, especially when we’re in the wilderness.
It renews, restores, and rehabilitates us when the pressure and drudgery of city life become too much. If you have a place in nature where you go because you feel alive there, then you’ll appreciate the following quotes. While these writers were all speaking about Yosemite, and often in terms of spirituality, feel free to translate the words to fit your own favorite place, whether it’s at the ocean, in the desert, or out on the prairie.
            *
"That mute appeal (pointing to El Capitan) illustrates it, with more convincing eloquence than can the most powerful arguments of surpliced priests."  -- Lafayette Bunnell, 1851
"...as the scene opened in full view before us, we were almost speechless with wondering admiration at its wild and sublime grandeur.”   --James Hutchings, 1855
A "passage of scripture [is] written on every cliff." -- Thomas Starr King, Rev. 1860
"I am sitting here in a little shanty made of sugar pine shingles this Sabbath evening.” ‘Here I worship as never before.’   -- John Muir, 1868
"I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.' Upon reaching the top Ryder [Snyder] gives out a 'beautiful broken yodel of a strange musical and mystical intensity' and then suddenly everything was just like jazz."                                                                                  -- Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums

"The experience from which these Yosemite poems come is the experience of interacting with the Other — of constantly trying to be aware of the Universe as all one body, of trying not to be separate from it but recognize every part of it as part of yourself. There is nothing alien in it at all. Sometimes interacting with the Other remains theoretical. Even then it is interesting. Sometimes it is an experience. When it is, I can make a poem out of it.  It takes on the force of poetry."          -- Gary Snyder, 1955

Cantus

In listening to Arvo Part’s Cantus in Memorium, I am struck by the silence.
Silence is programmed into the score as part of the music. This silence was not absence, of waiting for musicians to play the next notes. It was presence. It was not waiting for something to happen. It was already happening, because we were waiting in the concert hall, and listening.
When we go into nature, we travel with the thousands of thoughts that crowd our head. We enter with the noises of the city ringing in our ears. We have learned to tune out much of what we hear going on around us in our concrete environment.

Bells have a presence in the Part’s composition. Part was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church where bells have a rich history of ringing over the mountains and calling people to come to something important, an awareness or a gathering.
In Cantus, at the end when the strings descend through dissonance to resonate together, the last bell rings, and it feels like the sky suddenly clears, and releases the tension after the turbulence of a storm.

We feel our hearts open, and rise.

A Place Apart: Nature

Late in the fall one year, I hiked up steep switchbacks for two hours from the valley floor to Glacier Point in Yosemite. The wilderness was surprisingly quiet and still at 8,000 feet.
A forest of sugar pines was behind me. In front was Half Dome and a view that stretched over the gray granite peaks and domes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains
No one else was here. The summer crowds had gone home months before. A few tiny people walked around on the valley floor far below. Except for a few squirrels and one Steller’s jay, no other creatures were letting their presence be known.
The breeze hummed lightly as it twirled the needles on the pines. There was a hush as the wind flowed over the nearby mountains on its way east. Now and then when the breeze shifted, I caught the sounds of Nevada and Vernal Falls.
Sitting on a boulder, this felt like home. I couldn’t stay here, of course. There was no shelter, food, or water, yet I felt connected to something authentic, something real in a primal sense, something eternal.
Was it awe of the landscape that pulled me away from my ordinary preoccupations and made me think of mystery? Was it reverence for a place that was sacred to the Ahwahnechee, as well as to John Muir? Or was it respect for an ancient wilderness that had existed and looked like this for thousands of years?
It was probably all of these. I didn’t really need to know the why. Whatever it is, every time I come here, the burdens of life slide off and I feel centered and renewed.
Standing alone on top of a mountain, longing rose for something deeper than what everyday life has brought. It was longing for honest community, enduring hope, and unfettered joy.

In the wilderness of our hearts, the holidays are rooted.

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.

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.

Refuge in Nature

Your place of refuge may be different than mine, but it’s necessary to go there when something has twisted your life into knots. It could be grief, loss of a job, a health diagnosis, a relationship coming apart, or a crisis of faith.
Wherever you go for renewal, to feel comforted, accepted, and inspired, it’s likely to be a place or an activity that brought you pleasure before trauma struck. Now it becomes therapeutic.
For one person it may be carpentry or gardening, for another it may be working with horses. Maybe it’s going to the movies, the ocean, or the golf course. Whatever it is, this is where you can step back, focus on something else for a time, while at the same time, work your way through the problem in the back alleys of your mind.
When some thought or feeling shows up out of the blue, pause and listen for where it is leading.
My path was in Yosemite, and the following are notes from one of my trips. I hope you find parallels with your own journey.
            *Hiking any long trail in the mountains is rugged and demands more endurance than I think I have, but I want the challenge to see if I measure up. I need to be worn out by physical activity because I’ve been sitting at home for too long with grief, and nature comforts me.
This morning a Jeffrey pine stands in front of me. I rub my hand over the bark, feel its roughness, and lean close to see how it smells. I can never remember if it’s the Jeffrey or the Ponderosa that smells like vanilla. Ah, it’s the Jeffrey.
I listen to the Merced River flowing nearby, dip my hand into the cold of its snowmelt water, and feel the power of its surge. I wander into the meadow, sit on the ground, and look closely at its plants, at the hairy-stalked milkweed, the long stemmed grasses, and the glorious purple lupine.
My intention last night was to hike into the mountains today. But what do I feel like doing this morning? Do I really want to tackle a demanding hike, or would I rather sit by the river and read, or maybe saunter aimlessly?
I will try not to think of grief, or use the hours to organize my future. I will focus on nature and exist in this moment as fully as I can and see what happens.
No one here knows who I am or what I’m struggling with, and I can tell them or not. I’m untethered from my past, and free to express whatever thoughts and feelings I have this morning. In the next hour I may uncover deeper feelings and contradict myself. So be it. I will be enigmatic. I will find people I like, and we will share food and drink, and exchange stories that make us laugh and give us courage.
I will listen to nature, to the breezes humming through the branches of the Sugar pines, the opinionated chatter of blue jays, the haunting caws of ravens, and the scuffling of chipmunks through the leaves.
I will lean against a mountain, take in the view, and lose myself in wonder.
When I come across a side trail, I will take it, even if I don’t know where it goes. It will lead me through a new part of the forest, over the mountain, and down into the valley with the shadows of death. The path also leads me through my battered heart.

The path is my way and my refuge. I shall not want.

Being in Community

I’m a rugged, individual American. Every American is.  (This probably holds true for whatever country you belong to.)
Or at least we think we’re expected to be this. And that’s a problem as our cities become larger and we have to drive to the grocery store rather than walk. We don’t sit on our front porches anymore and talk to people walking by because the houses in new housing developments don’t have porches, or sidewalks, or grocery stores.
We’ve lost our sense of belonging to a community of people. When we do gather together, it tends to be for national celebrations like July 4th or for sporting events. The crowd is large and anonymous, and we don’t share on the personal level. We talk to the people we came with, and that’s about it.
Having a community where we know each other is important for our sense of belonging.
When I’m camping, community becomes crucial because things happen outdoors. If I break an ankle on a trail, I will need help getting back. If a cold thunderstorm soaks my sleeping bag and clothes, I will need someone to offer me shelter. When climbers have an accident on a rock wall, the community of climbers rallies around to get them safely off the mountain and taken care of.
We need each other if we are going to survive.
One year as I arrived in Camp Four in Yosemite, the woman who had been staying in the campsite before me gave me her food as she returned to Australia. When I left, I passed my food on to those who were arriving.
When I’m hiking up the trail to the top of Half Dome, community forms with strangers because we’re moving at the same pace for hours. Often we will take rest breaks at the same time on that steep, sandy trail as it heads for an elevation of 9000 feet. We talk and learn about each other’s lives. We suggest other trails that we think the other one would like. When we get to the top, we toast each other’s success as we marvel at the astonishing view of the Sierra Nevada range.
We are told to be strong individuals by society. But it’s in community that we learn the world is greater than ourselves.
It’s in community where our strengths flourish.

The Spirit Land

Sometimes we hear the voice of a family member who has died, or we feel their presence. Is it real?
Out of the blue, I think to send something nice to a friend in another state. When it arrives three days later, it’s exactly what she needs. Is something more going on than coincidence?
We are more connected to each other than we think, both the living and the dead.
Soon after I arrive in Yosemite, a coyote always appears, either sitting along the road to welcome me in, or trotting across the meadow with a glance. Molly says Coyote is my spirit guide. She might be right. Some people say they never see coyotes. I see them all the time.
As I hike, I feel the companionship of Nature’s spirit, and let it guide me where it wants. The wind comes near and advises me about tomorrow’s weather. Taking a break, I fall asleep along the river, feeling I have come home.
We are not limited by what we can see.
I sometimes wonder if my ancestors left predispositions in my genes, some trait that kept them alive and guides me like a hidden instinct. Science is increasingly saying this is possible.
When I’m hiking in the backcountry, I find trail ducks. These are short stacks of rocks left by hikers to indicate turns in the trail that are hard to see. They left them as a kindness for people who will come later; people they will never meet.
Black Elk believed that all members of creation were brothers and sisters to each other — the buffalo, mountains, human beings, rivers, horses, coyotes, and ravens. The Sioux pray to the Grandparents in the afterlife to send messages to guide them. And they do.
The Ahwahnechee of Yosemite believed that the deer willingly gave themselves up to their arrows, knowing that the Ahwahnechee had to eat.
Today is All Saints Day on the Christian calendar. Think about and honor those who have been saints in your life, those who were there at crucial times and helped you survive.
Many people hold celebrations this weekend — All Hallows Eve (Halloween), All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. The ancient Celtic people observed Samhain, when the living could talk to the dead. Latin American countries have a similar celebration called Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, with its fixation on skulls. It’s an observance that traces its roots back to the Aztecs, who believed that the deceased preferred to be celebrated, rather than mourned.
When we share something personal with others, this part of us begins to live in them. This does not die when we do, but continues to guide and inspire them, and it sometimes makes them laugh.
I believe that the spiritual can be more real than the physical, and that matters of the spirit are not bound by the laws that govern physical objects.
I believe that everyone I’ve ever loved is still here with me in some way.

This weekend I intend to listen for what I cannot see, matters that change the world, trail ducks of the Spirit — hope, faith, and love.