WHAT IF? (Part 1: What if we were never separate?)

     Nature Man -- Michael Tomaka (Copyright Creative Commons)

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The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it.

                   --Paul Kingsnorth 

             He is

a wilderness looking out

at the wild.

          --Wendell Berry

This all began for me with a feeling of unease with the way people use the word “nature.” We go out into nature. We take a break in nature. We struggle against nature. Depending on their orientation, “nature” was something they revered or subdued, tamed or preserved, enjoyed or feared. But in all cases—no matter what their attitude toward nature—their language irrevocably and unconsciously separated “us” from “it.” 

There’s “nature”. And then there is “human”.

When I realized what was bothering me, I could then see clearly—oh how lovely our ability to project is!—that I was doing exactly the same thing. I just want to live closer to nature. I want to tap into natural cycles. I feel more comfortable in nature than in the city. But when I tried to do something different—to change my language—I found that I couldn’t. I couldn’t because there were no words (at least not in English) for what I was trying to say. The only difference was that now there was a little pause before I finally spit out the word “nature”. I would like to help to create more……um…...natural systems.

First I thought that what we must need are new words. Wouldn’t new words create a new way of thinking? That was what I started to write this post about several years ago. But as I followed this thought deeper, I realized that I don’t think new words are possible. This split is so deeply rooted in our psyches that we will not be able to come up with new words without changing our story.

Our language reflects and reinforces our assumptions. And this assumption I am circling around is fundamental to who we are, at least in western culture. Somewhere along the line we began to assume that “nature” and “human” were two different things. I am not going to go into the details of how this happened. We look to the shift to agrarian culture, religious texts, Descartes, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc., as though those things were responsible for this shift. I suspect these were the outgrowths of changes that were already occurring inside our own psyches—they were the manifestation of shifts that had already occurred. The important thing now is recognizing where we are.

We believe that humans are fundamentally different from nature.

So rather than proposing new words, I propose a radical new orientation: What if we are in no way, not ever, not at all, never were, and never will be, separate from nature?

Not only are we not separate from nature, but nature is not separate from us. Put simply: there is no separation, no matter how hard you look. There is no line, no break, no division, no us, no them. There is only the world—the whole breathing, living, integrated world in all of its fabulous beauty and terror, with everything in it together, humanity fully embedded in and embraced by it. 

If I take this idea to its logical conclusion—that whatever we are is nature expressing itself—this means that everything about us is nature, even our desire to be separate. Our thoughts, our tools, and all of our creations all are the result of nature doing what nature does. Consider this:

Nature is dancing en pointe in a tulle dress. 

Nature is building a bridge across a canyon. 

Nature is surfing the internet. 

Nature is lying drunk under the Aurora Street Bridge. 

Nature is circling the planet in an orbiting space station. 

Nature is translating a poem from Chinese into French.

Nature is singing itself to sleep. 

Our brains, opposable thumbs, language, tool-making, and social activity are all the natural outcome of the upwelling vital force of life on earth. Even our capacity to destroy ourselves and all other life along with us is natural; even our denial, our egocentricity, our violence, our narcissism. Also our love and our wonder. There is nowhere you can point to that is not “nature.”

What is, is.

And everything that is, is connected.

So when we think about coming home, there is nowhere to go. It is closer than close. We are here, already in our own nest. We are it and it is us.

What if nature and human are one?

Letting Go

You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you.
But suppose you were to hide the world in the world…

--Chuang Tzu

This trip began with a death and a theft.

The death was the death of my mother after a several-year decline. When she passed, not only was my care-giving no longer needed, but something I had taken for granted all my life suddenly disappeared. The resulting emptiness was both freeing and disorienting. I felt like a horse who had been hitched loosely to a post for a long time; now the post was gone and there was no guidance about where to go.

The theft came a few months later on a trip to the Oregon coast. We had parked at a trailhead early in the morning to walk on the sand dunes, and when I returned someone had stolen my bags full of all my clothes. All that was left was what I was wearing and my pajamas back in the tent. What was gone were the clothes I really liked—the soft ones or the perfect-color ones or the ones that I had adopted from Tom—or irreplaceable things like the last crocheting project my Mom labored over two months before she died. But though I felt bereft at first, I also noticed a new lightness at not having bags to carry, or having to decide what to wear the next day, or (ironically) worrying about stuff getting stolen. The freedom I felt made me wonder what price I was actually paying for ownership.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this trip is turning out to be about letting go. At first it was about letting go of physical things—cleaning out our house of 20 years and dispersing most of our belongings. Leaving my office and clients and our familiar surroundings in Seattle. Being separated for a time from friends and family. But I am finding that it is also about letting go of inner things. My plans. My strategies for belonging, like being helpful or busy, My old reactions and habitual responses.

This morning (May 1st) we are leaving yet another place that we have fallen in love with—another kind of letting go. Saying goodbye to the calming presence of Mt. Wrightson, to the Mexican jays, to the alligator junipers with their distinctive checkerboard bark, to the Rincon paintbrush and the sycamores. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and I feel this in my gut as a kind of ache at every leaving.

As I just feel this sadness—and let it go, too—I can feel a new Emptiness behind it. After having over 50 different “homes” this year, I am getting used to endings. I am beginning to see that grasping onto things to try to keep them the same creates a different kind of emptiness, one that is fearful and lonely. This new Emptiness is different. It resonates with energy. It is large enough to contain everything we have seen and done—and more. It is indefinable. And it requires trust.

Perhaps if we do not shut down when things are taken from us or when we are sad, there can be room for this. Perhaps this is one way of hiding the world in the world.

*****

This part of the trip is hard for me, as we don’t have plans for the coming months. In the absence of structure or purpose, I often find myself depressed. Or, to put it more exactly, I cycle between extremes: one day I feel awe or contentment. The next I find myself aimless and lost, unsure about myself or the point of anything.

Jim Corbett speaks to this difficulty in his book Goatwalking. He sees these feelings as the natural result of opening to Emptiness, which he calls detachment or selflessness. Detachment requires a loosening of our addiction to busyness, and in order to even see this addiction, it helps to step outside of the usual social structures for awhile. This, he says, is not easy.

“Wandering purposeless and without human companionship, one sometimes experiences emotional crises that are...similar to culture shock and cabin fever.... Society provides most of the make-believe that prevents one's hells from surfacing into full consciousness. But whoever leaves the world to wander alone...should be prepared to meet a devil or two, when busyness ceases to drown out the dream side.” (1)

This description helps me recognize the moods I feel for what they are—the natural outcome of wandering. Without this perspective I would have headed back to something familiar long ago. But this breaking open is the first step in receiving the world.

*****

A few weeks ago I took a nap in the trailer in the heat of the day and woke up thinking that I was a child again on the farm and that my family was just in the other room. Then I started having sense-memories of caring for Mom at Manor Care—the ammonia smell of the building, the long yellow hall, all those blank hours. I felt groggy and disoriented from sleep and had a jolt of empathy for her confusion there—how hard it was to not be able to get up and walk, to know where she was, or to go outside to find herself again in green things and rain and dirt. I was surprised at how fresh all of those memories still were for me, and how often these days I feel like I imagine Mom did during that time, as though I am still carrying her in my body. This is another kind of letting go—the need to let go of the past.

I think of all the letting go Mom had to do in her last years—of her memory, her ability to make sense of the world, her capacity to care for herself and make her own decisions, and most of what was fun for her in life. Eventually letting go of her body, of life itself.

When I think about this, I know I don’t yet understand the full implications of letting go. All I see now are the positive aspects of living lighter, along with a little collateral sadness. But when I think about Mom and consider losing parts of myself that are central to "Me"—memory, skills, home, work—I can feel the desire to clutch fiercely at these things, unwilling to give them up.

Then I feel the wind blow, I see the tips of all the trees move together like a green ocean, and I know that these trees are connected to the canyons of Utah, the sagebrush of Nevada, the pines of the eastern Cascades, the great fir trees of the Olympic Mountains, and on and on. I feel the whole earth breath. I feel the pull to keep trying to understand what it means to hide the world in the world. I know there is no going back.

When you let go
you relax
open your hand—
everything falls to the ground.
You don't have to choose
any more.
This does not mean, though,
that you are bereft—
that things won't choose you.
That things with wings
won't land on your open palm,
or that little feet
won’t make the long journey
from the ground to your lap.
Just wait.
Open.
Everything
is a part of you.

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(1) p. 10 in Jim Corbett, Goatwalking (1991) New York: Viking.

Day 169: Friends with trees

As I was writing my post on cottonwoods, I noticed my reluctance to say that I felt these trees were my friends. Would I appear too emotional, too fanciful? Or perhaps not serious enough—as though seriousness is what’s required to be credible.

But how are we inspired to do difficult work or make hard changes? Our feelings show us what matters to us: what we value, what we love, what gives us delight, what distresses us. And our feelings let us know what we know we are related to.

At some level, we are related to everything, but we are wired for smaller scopes—to care about and protect the immediate family, clan, or tribe. And our feelings show us who we consider part of our tribe: who is worthy of our effort to protect, who we will risk our own comfort for.

To feel friendly toward something is a recognition that our fates are linked. For your friends you wish good health and a good life. You care about what happens to them. You share their joys and sorrows. You are willing to get involved when they need support, and ask for help when the situation is reversed.

Feeling friendly toward a tree is the first step in a deeper relationship. It may be, as we say, “only a feeling”—not in it for the long haul. But if that feeling is honored, trusted, and followed, it can also lead to deeper commitment and understanding.

Saying I feel the trees are my friends, also says something about me. This morning, with that eerie synchronicity that brings things to me when I need them, I picked up the other book of poetry I brought with me—H.D.’s selected poems—and opened to some of her words about trees. Most of it doesn’t quote well out of context, but this passage from her autobiographical novel HERmione gives a taste:

The woods parted to show a space of lawn, running level with branches that, in early summer, were white with flower. Dogwood blossom. Pennsylvania. Names are in people, people are in names. Sylvania. I was born here. People ought to think before they call a place Sylvania.

Pennsylvania. I am part of Sylvania. Trees. Trees. Trees. Dogwood, liriodendron with its green-yellow tulip blossoms. Trees are in people. People are in trees. Pennsylvania.

This intermingling of self and surroundings is something I have felt since I was very young. Trees are in people. People are in trees. There is a life-hum in the least grassy hillside. Even the gnats vibrate with shared life. Every rock has a say in the world.

Not to follow this sensibility—to hesitate to say something as simple as I felt a kinship with a tree—cuts off my strength. Plain and simple, it is hiding—in a time when we can’t afford to hide. H.D.’s editor says of her work:

What [she] is discovering in the pervasive earth, wood, and water imagery is the force of her natural love for all created beings: tree or flower, wave or meadow, man or woman. Her creative powers depend upon her ability to enter into the nature of other beings, other creatures, and to feel all the world about her endowed with powers…

I could say the same about myself: My creative powers depend upon my ability to enter into the nature of other beings… This could be a call to all of us who resonate with this knowing but keep it hidden, to wake up and have the courage to be ourselves, visibly ourselves.

To make a bold statement: This feeling of friendship with life is what we need most in our world right now. And being more open about my own natural love for all created beings is what I need most in mine.

Day 143-148: Finding Cottonwoods

One of the hardest moments of this trip for me was when I learned about the destruction of the cottonwood-willow forests of the lower Colorado River. These unique riparian habitats, the ribbons of great trees following the river, were submerged by flooding behind dams, cleared for agriculture, and cut for wood to power steam ships. The land has undergone many changes at our hands, but somehow this felt like a direct hit to my heart. Perhaps it is the rarity of trees in this desert landscape. Perhaps it is the fact that so many creatures depend on these oases of water, shade, and food.  Perhaps it is simply that I fell in love with cottonwoods, that they seemed like friends.

So it was a great pleasure when we arrived at Cibola National Wildlife Refuge to see large tracts of planted trees and to realize that many of the southern refuges on the Colorado River have replanted cottonwood and willow stands in an effort to recreate that habitat.

Cibola NWR was established in 1964 to mitigate the effects of channelization and dam construction on the Colorado River in the 30’s and 40’s. Its 18,500 acres are home to a wide variety of wildlife, including wintering geese, ducks, and cranes; migrating songbirds; and native fish. In one portion of the refuge they have planted cottonwoods, willows, and mesquite as habitat for the endangered Southwestern Willow Flycatcher and other wildlife.

A trail follows a mile-long loop through this planting. When I walk into the trees I am reminded of something the poet W.S. Merwin said about his effort of the past 40 years to reforest 19 acres of ruined land where he lives on Maui.

I have come to recognize that no human being can plant any forest. A forest is not made by a human being planting a few trees. It evolves as a complex society of soil organisms, and other plants besides trees. Only a forest can restore a forest—a section of forest that had once grown beside it. Our human destructions are often irreparable, like the extinction of species.
(from What is a Garden)

These plots of planted trees are not yet quite a forest. I can feel the imposition of outside order: the arbitrary square border instead of the meandering line following the water; the equidistant spacing of the trees instead of the clustering in good soil; the suggestion of grid lines instead of groves and copses.

But I can also see that, like Merwin, we are doing our best. And that is a lot. In these 36 acres, the cottonwoods, willows, and mesquite are planted in loops and arcs and bunchings that tries to recreate the diversity and variety of the forest. And it works. This place is a haven for many creatures and a delight to all my senses.

These particular cottonwoods were planted in 1999 so they are not old, as trees go. Yet they are still impressively tall. Their trunks are slender, and no matter what route their limbs take, they all tend up, creating single-pointed or narrow, umbrella-shaped crowns.  The bark is white. Or at least it appears white at first glance, shining pale in the strong sunlight or silhouetted against the blue sky.  A closer look reveals many shades of silvers and soft browns.  The young trees are smooth-barked like aspens but as they age and the trunk expands, vertical splits form in the bark, eventually creating a deeply-ridged network of vertical grooves.

After the recent rains the trees are bursting with new life.  There is great variety in the timing of their spring awakening. Some trees are still covered in the hard shells of last year’s dead leaves.  Some are just breaking their flower buds open. And some are covered already with wet-looking new leaves, like a green froth kicked up where the airy white branches meet the hard blue sky.

They are so tall it requires some help for me to see what is happening at the business-end of the branches. I feel a little self-conscious watching plants grow with my binoculars (as if bird-watching wasn’t already nerdy enough!) but this feeling passes as I see all the life that this closer look affords. The new flowers push out of their sticky calyxes like mounds of yellow-green frosting from the end of a cake tube. A low hum surrounds me from the honey bees swarming the flowers, their legs weighed down with their orange pollen sacks. Ants climb up and down the trunk. A redtail hawk rests on a branch and two owls hoot from the end of the grove, making me look without success for a nest. Yellow-rumped warblers comb the blossoms for insects. Towhees scratch in the thick leaf litter underneath. The slight wind shifts, and the breeze informs me of the unmistakable presence of skunk.

If I stand quietly for long enough in a forest I can feel the silent power flowing through it—that hum of life and energy of the whole. This reminds me of William Stafford's poem, "Is This Feeling About the West Real?" Is this feeling I have about this forest real? Listen—something else hovers out here... some total feeling or other world / almost coming forward...

Whether it is or not, this place gives me hope. That people tend these trees. That enough people recognize the importance of the network of life we live in that they planned this project. Even though a few strong men with chainsaws could cut all these plantings in a week, there is hope in the simple fact that right now they exist.

As I sit among the slender white trunks, these trees feel a little like ghost trees—a kind of memorial to the felled forests that used to line the river. I can see why trees are so often depicted as at least partly human.  Cottonwoods carry male and female flowers on separate trees, so there are girl trees and boy trees. It wouldn’t take much for me to feel like I was surrounded by people—calmer people who talked less and took their time making decisions. And this company gives me strength. With all the recent political turmoil, any hope for quiet living things is balm for my spirit.

Tom sent me a review the other day of a new book by astrobiologist David Grinspoon called Earth in Human Hands: Shaping our Planet’s Future. Grinspoon argues that we are entering a new epoch called the Anthropocene: a time when human activity can and does have planet-wide impacts. Rather than being discouraged by this, Grinspoon remains optimistic.

…our obligation now is to move beyond just lamenting the job we've done as reluctant, incompetent planet-shapers. We have to face the fact that we've become a planetary force, and figure out how to be a better one.  By seeing our role clearly, we take the first step toward assuming our responsibilities.

I think I will read his book. His ideas seem a little grand, but optimism is a necessary antidote to the fear I feel when I see our capacity for destruction. In order to move forward, we need to be able to think, and it is hard to think when you feel frightened or demoralized or paralyzed by despair. Whether the specific ideas he presents are ultimately useful, this could be as good a place as any to start a conversation.

Day 93-113: Desert wonderings

Under the stars at Valley of Fire

We left Zion on December 5, spent a day at St. George trying to fit in too many chores—laundry, groceries, and cleaning out the truck bed to discourage the rodent who had moved in while we were at Zion—then moved on to Valley of Fire, Nevada for two nights; then to Topock, Arizona for a week; then to Lake Havasu State Park in Lake Havasu City for six days; then farther south on Lake Havasu for Christmas. My thoughts this week are something like our travels: wandering and not staying in one place for very long. We have touched on so many new things and my mind is still trying to make sense of it all. 

Valley of Fire in the Mohave Desert

Great Basin. Mojave Desert. Sonoran Desert. These names are beginning to mean something to me. After Zion, we left the Great Basin behind, with its high-elevation sagebrush and cold winters. From there we entered the warmer Mohave Desert, the driest of the US deserts, with its signature Joshua Trees. And now at Lake Havasu we are on the border of the Sonoran Desert, the warmest desert in the US, home of saguaros and mesquite trees. We are experiencing one of the characteristics of the Sonoran Desert this week, which is that in the winter, storms from the Pacific Ocean sometimes blow in bringing widespread rains. Though the hills around us are mostly piles of dry gravel dotted here and there with a few scraggly creosote bushes, the steady drizzle all night and the low clouds slung around the mountains this morning make it easy to pretend we are back home in Seattle.

This trip is helping me realize how profoundly we alter our environments. This is not news, and I don't know why this is more obvious to me out here than it was in Seattle. In a way, when you live in a big city for a long time it can come to seem like a kind of ecosystem of its own. The streets and buildings and people begin to organize into their own system and I sometimes forget that it is all constructed. But out here where so much is still raw land, the contrast is more obvious.

As an individual I feel pretty puny most of the time. We hike out into the Havasu Wilderness south of Topock, which has no developed roads or trails, and follow the burro paths out to the jagged barren mountains of broken rock and then down to the Colorado River in one of the few places where it still runs wild. It is a hot day, for winter, and it is clear that without planning and supplies we wouldn’t last long out here. The desert feels so much more powerful than us, something that could never be mastered or tamed.

Colorado River in the Havasu Wilderness

However, when I see the miles and miles of solar grids being installed in the valley south of Boulder City, and the great towers of the power lines marching away from Hoover Dam, and the immense amount of water dammed in Lake Mead or Lake Havasu I wonder if even the desert will survive us: if we can appreciate its beauty, or recognize its inhabitants' lives as important, or really understand that we are embedded in a matrix of life on which we depend.  

Havasu Wilderness

One of our neighbors at our campsite in Topock was trading stories with another man about favorite guns and talking about a cabin he owned and how great it was to sit inside the cabin and shoot coyotes. I got nine of ‘em last year, he exclaims with enthusiasm. Our RV Park is at the edge of a small square island of houses in the desert bordering the Havasu NWR, and every night we hear packs of coyotes yipping and yowling as they hunt the bare gravel hills around town and lope through our campground. Our first night there, something peed on the back window of our truck cab. I assume a coyote must have jumped up on the tonneau cover to investigate the tent we had stored there and decided to remind us whose home we were in.

Then there was the day we drove from Valley of Fire to Topock, through some of the most spectacularly disastrous country I have ever seen. I do not understand the geology of this area yet, but clearly there has been some serious upheaval and the mountains are great rifts of rock, broken and tossed into near-vertical ridges and crazily-tilted crags in every color of brown, red, and black imaginable. Everything here is dry, dry, dry. Very little vegetation, and mile after mile of bare rock and brown washes and the smallest plants eking out whatever moisture they can from the coarse soil. In the distance, down the long, bare slopes, we get glimpses all afternoon of the great body of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, and see turnoffs advertising boat launches in a place where I would expect only the fossils of boats.

Then around a corner we come upon a vision so surprising I don’t even know at first what it is. Lake Las Vegas, like a little diorama of a city plunked without warning in the middle of the desert. Its brilliant blue water is surrounded by glass resorts and palatial Mediterranean villas in a tropical verdure of palms and grass and flowers. A mirage? A Hollywood set? A little research and I find that, no, it is “real” enough. A several-times-bankrupt business venture, the 320-acre “lake” and surrounding development was originally the brain child of actor J. Carlton Adair, though he was not able to see it through to construction. Other developers took it over and the lake was created by building an earthen dam on the Las Vegas Wash in 1988. The ambitious project has struggled though multiple bankruptcies, lawsuits, and economic downturns. But new investors are hopeful…

Now we are further south, camped on the shores of Lake Havasu, the lake created from the Colorado River by Parker Dam. It is beautiful, it provides water to many households and farms, and many people (including us) enjoy kayaking and fishing and boating here. However, it and the other lakes along the Colorado have drowned nearly all the cottonwood forests that used to line the whole lower Colorado. The Bill Williams NWR just south of us is one of the last stretches of original cottonwood habitat left, and it's nine-mile length is home to 11 species of butterfly that no longer live anywhere else.  

Yesterday, I spot three huge rafts of Eared Grebes in the middle of the lake in front of our campsite. The lake is so big they are tiny specks even in my spotting scope, making them difficult to count, but I decide that a conservative estimate might be something like 5000 birds. I read in a book published in 1991 that Eared Grebes don't usually number over 2000 here in the winter, but then I find a December 10, 2011 report of over 5000 birds, and a December 7, 2014 report of over 30,000 birds (yes, that is the right number of zeros) on the lake, so perhaps my numbers are low. Would these grebes be here without the dam? I don't know. But I enjoy seeing them, and if I am very quiet I can just hear their whistling calls and the far rustle of their wings and feet as they move around on the water.

The Colorado River behind Parker Dam has become Lake Havasu. This is where I saw the Eared Grebes.

What we do is just as "natural" as these grebes.  We are only doing what all animals do—living our lives, looking for food and water and shelter—only we have bigger tools and a greater reach. Many creatures alter their environments to suit them. The problem is just that we are very, very efficient at this. We can kill all the passenger pigeons. We can excavate an entire mountain for coal. And we can divert an entire river like the Colorado so it no longer reaches the ocean.

It is hard to realize as I sit on the shoreline here watching these lovely grebes and the other diving birds that feed here, that this lake is one of the reasons that water has not reached the Colorado River Delta in Mexico since 1998. (See link.) Same for the wonderful warm shower I can take for free in the campground, or the cool water in my pack, or the lettuce I bought at the store.  Everything we do takes water, and unless we treat it like the precious resource it is, it can disappear.

Finding these things out first-hand hurts. I feel grief at all the things I didn't even know existed that are already gone. Cottonwoods, butterflies, pupfish, desert tortoises, whole ecosystems. And I also feel inspired by the resilience of what is here, and by the way life is continually adapting. The pain is worth it, because in return I have a larger, more inclusive view.

It is not about trying to make things stay the same. Change is happening all the time, with or without us. When you take the really long view, much of this area was underwater during the last ice age. Do I feel grief also for the lost Lake Bonneville? For the dinosaurs? And after all, we need power, we need water. I am very appreciative of both in my little home. But how much do we need and what do we use it for? How much is enough? Who decides? And who pays the price of those decisions? These are the agonizingly difficult questions that people have been worrying over for decades here, where water is scarce, and getting more precious all the time.

Perhaps not having a permanent home for now is helping me see how we are really always visitors in this world. How short our time is here; how limited our view; how much we do not know. I am inspired to respect this place I am visiting by becoming more aware of the water I use and try to make wise choices.  And I am reminded of good traits for all visitors faced with the unknown: some humility, some patience, and a little stillness. I have been reading William Stafford—who is one of the best advocates I know for all three of these traits—and his words infuse the land around me.

Pintail Slough in Lake Havasu NWR. A manmade marsh.

The earth says have a place, be what that place

requires; hear the sound the birds imply

and see as deep as ridges go behind

each other.

Day 69: Something binds it all together

Something binds it all together—

forest, field, canyon, and coast.

The edges of things when we look close

are missing—our mind alone thinks whether

we use this name and not another.

Which is not to deny there's difference:

each thing is certain that it is

no other.  A cottonwood is not

a rock. A rabbit is not a hawk.

Junipers grow here and firs grow there.

The ocean eventually ends in sand.

But what strikes me more than 

the differences in land, is continuity,

the shared destiny of each stand

of trees or shrubs or lichened rock.

A great cycle of effects turns always

even in the farthest place—and mountains,

deserts, woods, and water

all together make a space where we

see both: whole and part, different and same—

the everything that transcends

each name and also gives names

their breath and flame.

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We have experienced many different ecosystems already, and appreciate how this way of traveling allows for a special kind of perspective: we stay long enough to feel the unique character of a place, but move on soon enough to recognize the way it is linked to the next very-different place. Not sure if I have quite captured what is in the back of my mind yet, but I thought I would go ahead and put this out so I can set it aside and work on the next post. Click here for a small photo album of some of the ecosystem variety we have seen so far. Photos include Cape Disappointment, Skamakowa on the Columbia River, the Willamette Valley, then over the Cascades to Sisters, Oregon; Malheur NWR, OR; Steens Mountain, OR; and Bruneau Sand Dunes in southern Idaho.

Day 65: Post-election Reflection

Chickahominy Reservoir, OregonAs I reflect today about what is important for me in the midst of this election, I come back to what supports us at all times no matter who or where we are: mother earth. I am reminded of all of her different landscapes, all of her plants and animals, the variety of her soil and rocks, the fluidity of her waters, and the vibrancy of her surrounding air and weather.

Being so close to the earth this year is helping me to learn how to honor the feminine that lives all around us. Today, the day after this election, feels like an especially good day for me to consider this, beginning with my own self as a woman. To feel my inner strength. To connect to the clarity of my mind and the power of my voice. To remember that the feminine is comfortable with not knowing, with waiting, and with patience. To re-commit to compassion as the core of my spirituality. And to know that I can choose to stand up for what matters.

I am thinking of my mother today. Of my girlfriends. Of my sisters and neices. Of the teenage daughter of my friend who is just learning who she is and how she fits into the world. And I am thinking of all the men we know and love. May we all live in safety and harmony with each other. May we all have respect for each other. May we all remember our common roots.

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I was planning to post a piece about our last few weeks on the road, but it didn't seem right to not acknowledge the election today, so I will save the update for later.  Right now we are staying with good friends in Caldwell, Idaho for rest and repairs. The above picture was from October 23, when we spent a couple days at this beautiful reservoir watching the many ducks and geese that use this as a stopover on their migration through the desert.