I am sitting by a campfire, lively breeze blowing through giant pine trees, granite cliffs on one side, distant snow-capped mountains on the other; a stream flowing downhill over pebbles and boulders can be heard in the distance; at night the pitch black sky lights up with seemingly endless stars, somewhere far off an owl hooting…. I make a cup of coffee over the fire and converse with this wilderness….
Mostly we don’t think of that starry sky as also a wilderness, but it is that. It is “wild” in the root meaning of that word, not humanly controlled or manipulated, not running by human wisdom, but by its own inner wisdom which the ancient Chinese called the Tao. I look at the Milky Way, that fuzzy white spread of millions of stars like our sun, our galaxy, and millions of other galaxies out there whose light takes millions, even billions of years to get here….it is all so incomprehensibly and unimaginably vast, and yet in a very real way it is all our home. Every atom of every fiber of our being was made in those stars billions of years ago…and so with everything we touch, we breathe, we eat…. In the deepest sense there is nothing “out there” that is alien to us.
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
Gary Snyder
“I greet the breeze that happens along,
and lift a cup to offer to the vastness….”
Su Shih
BUT, there is a sad story to tell:
I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating—we, modern humans, experience different kinds of relationships to what we call wilderness:
- Wilderness is seen as a resource for wealth….lumber, metals, farmlands, land for development, land ownership(privatization of wilderness land), etc. In other words, wilderness as another commodity.
- Wilderness as a context for recreation….simply another theme park….
- Wilderness as an obstacle, a challenge…. The first Europeans who came upon the Grand Canyon cursed it because it was getting in their way on the search for the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold.” Today people jack up their Jeeps and trucks with massive tires and love to ride over the wild terrain.
- Wilderness as a context and a kind of boundary for religious/spiritual engagement. This one is fascinating in its various convolutions: The early English colonists in North America saw the wilderness as “dangerous,” where the devil had free play, where the “heathen Indians” lived. Two centuries later, the whole thing flips around in the American Transcendentalist Movement with Emerson and Thoreau, where the wilderness is the locus of spiritual growth. Similarly with the ancient Christian monks in a not so obvious way. Wilderness as “opening an inner door” to a Mystery of Wholeness.
Nothing really new in all this….in many ways these four have been with us for a long time…..but it was not always looked on as “wilderness.”
The root of the word “wilderness” is of course “wild,” and this word has taken on so many different shades of meaning over the centuries. “Wild” signifies processes and dynamics that are not human guided, human controlled, human originated, etc. Millenia ago, during the period of hunter-gatherer cultures, what we call “wilderness” was simply “home.” There was not this distinction, this dichotomy. And even in recent ages for some indigenous cultures which had not been touched by the great civilizations of Europe or Asia, this was still true. Chief Luther Standing Bear: “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began.”
Gary Snyder: “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of “wild systems.” When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive…. The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by “civilized” thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong.”
An ancient Chinese poet wrote: “The nation is destroyed; mountains and rivers remain.” The poet was Tu Fu (often written as Du Fu), one of China’s finest poets and a giant figure in world literature. He lived during the great Tang Period, around 750 CE. This line is taken from a poem written during the end of that period when the cultural, religious, and technical achievements of the Tang were destroyed through a brutal civil war. Tu Fu’s poetry is suffused with a quiet sadness at the impermanence of all human constructs, all human endeavors, all that is human….and he engages a kind of awestruck consolation in contemplating the natural world….a theme much favored by many Chinese poets and artists. From this evolves the awareness that human beings are simply a part of a great community of Being of which each member, whether it be a blade of grass, a butterfly, a human being, a star, a kitten, a mountain, a river, etc., unfolds in being through a hidden inner dynamic they called Tao.
Many, many centuries later, a new awareness unfolds,….a modern Japanese poet imitated this line but in reversal: “Mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State remains.”
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
Aldo Leopold
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .”
Wallace Stegner
We get the message!
The fact is that the wilderness has been attacked, abused, exploited in all cultures and in all ages, more or less. In the Critias, one of Plato’s Dialogues, one of the characters laments about the clear-cutting on the outskirts of Athens which caused serious soil erosion. Gary Snyder says that as a young man he thought that he had found in the Japanese and Chinese world, cultures that lived in harmony with nature. When he went over there he found that picture was only partially true and more complicated than he first realized. And so it is everywhere…… Snyder also said that in his opinion the last humans to live in a fully harmonious and true relationship with nature were the neolithic hunter-gatherers. The moment you have the development of settled communities in agriculture, you begin the process of urbanization and civilization, and then somehow humans lose a certain sense of their place in the great scheme of things and their interactions with the surrounding natural world are largely negative. (They are tossed out of “Paradise!”) All the great urban civilizations of the past, Babylon, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Xian, etc. have shown destructive tendencies and ignorance of who and what they are The landscapes of Europe, China….are nothing like what they were 5000, 10,000 years ago. And modern civilization is way past that point where we can even imagine what that awareness was like. Mother Nature seems to be trying to get our attention through climate change, but does it really look like we “get it”!? In modern civilization we find ourselves in this technological/electronic cocoon where wild nature seems alien to most of us, something “out there,” something maybe set aside for us, for our recreation or perhaps exploitation…. What is needed here is not some “good intentions,” but a real transformation of consciousness/awareness that we are a real part of this wild nature and it is truly part of us. In other words a new, deeper sense of our place in the Community of All Beings.
You would think that religion would help in this regard. Can only speak for my own Christianity, and this is a truly muddled affair! There have been environmentalists who have put the whole blame for environmental degradation on a certain mindset that Christianity brings. They point to Genesis and that mandate to “subdue the earth” and hold dominion over all its creatures…..that this kind of language leads us to see ourselves apart from the natural world, superior to it, and to activity that is simply for our own gain. Then, when the first Europeans came to this continent, they came armed with this mindset to the nth degree! They saw before them a vast wilderness, that which was not civilization as they knew it, that they could “subdue” and hold dominion over. Much more troubling, however, were the people who lived in this wilderness, whose very humanity could be questioned; well, they were “wild” in this scheme of things, so they too could be “subdued” and put under the newcomers dominion….if they managed to stay alive….. The rest of this history is too awful to think about…..
Modern Christian theologians and thinkers have tried to correct this view. They claim that such an interpretation of Genesis was a distortion of the meaning in the creation story…that humans are charged with a kind of stewardship of the natural world, and the “good steward” is an emphatic scriptural trope. Pope Francis has reminded us of all that. That may well be the case; but there still is a problem. That mandate is at the very least ambiguous, but more importantly even this “stewardship” thing creates a framework of dualism when you look at wilderness/the natural world. There is you, the human, and there is the “other,” wild nature; and how do the two “meet” and what transpires in that meeting?
“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
Aldo Leopold
But there are hints and resources within Christianity for a much different kind of vision, something beyond and deeper than stewardship. Consider Francis of Assisi, even Isaac the Syrian, or take a look at a fictional representation of a whole tradition in Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima. And various modern Christian voices like Thomas Merton’s….one of Merton’s favorite lines from the Old Testament was Job 39:26: “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars….” It doesn’t sound like we “own” that hawk! There’s a Zen koan in here somewhere! He called it a pure Zen insight, but that whole “speech” of Yahweh is harmonious with what the ancient Chinese mystics called the Tao. And then there is the very committed modern Catholic writer, Wendell Berry:
“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.”
Very sound and deep, theologically and spiritually!
And, in concluding our story:
“Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place.”
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI
“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”
John Muir