|
In those nights and weekends spent alone--immersed in that primary existence--I was afforded the luxury of having little, of reducing life to its bare essentials. I had no clock, no radio, no TV, little clutter of any kind. And yet, by standing apart, I saw the value in replacing individual ambition, personal needs, and selfish desires with fitting in, finding the way, becoming part of a more genuine whole.
There was a time when our species lived close like this to the land and its inhabitants, when there was less stuff between us and the natural order of things, when we were less estranged and our dependence upon the natural world was so much more obvious. It was essential to watch the comings and goings, paying attention to signs and seasons. Because of this, those deepest ancestors--intimate with the geography of their existence--saw in the landscape something more, something within the rock, on the wind, in the sky, in the look of a deer, that is today forgotten or ignored, disregarded as being unscientific and unsophisticated. But those years in the woods reminded me how natural it is to perceive the world as being infused with spirits or gods, deities or the divine. Our forebears saw the divine in radiant sunsets, the spiritual in the flight of a hawk, God in a starry sky. Now I, too, began to look for signs of the creator in creation.
In this autumn twilight, casting my bait into still waters, watching dried leaves twirl slowly down from lofty treetops, I thought back over the years and the transformation that had taken place in me. I remembered thunderstorms and lightning, sleeping on a blanket in the sun, summer breezes kissing my bare skin. I remembered winter nights when the snow was knee-deep and the temperatures well below zero. And how clear the night sky could be and how radiant the moonlit snowfall. I can still see two deer one winter night, bolting downhill and hitting the frozen pond, not expecting ice, so skidding, flailing, stumbling, and sliding into a snowdrift. And jumpy white-tailed rabbits and the smell of lilacs and the glitter of lightning bugs in June and the mulberry trees and raspberry vines flush with fruit and lemon-drop daffodils growing wild in the woods in springtime.
And I thought how at some point I had stopped looking for God in all this. I stopped looking for signs, for a signature, for evidence of the holy. I stopped because it was all right here--and it is all one thing. Body and soul, matter and spirit. An indivisible whole.
In those days fishing the pond, surrounded by geese, sharing my house and yard with far-distant relations, I settled into the landscape. Without really being conscious of it or knowing when it happened, I came home to the land. And so stopped looking for spirits and souls, as if there were a dividing line or wall somewhere, a border between the seen and unseen, between creator and creation. As so often happens, when I stopped looking, when I put away the books and lists, when I sat still long enough for the fox and the deer to come to me, I saw.
It was luck that brought me here, random chance. But as I walked and watched out the window and fished, as the seasons passed one to the next, I came to see the healing qualities of nature, the rightness of life, its rhythms, its ebbs and flows, its enduring, eternal forms--and my place within it all. So it is for us as a species. At some point in our past we moved away from here, divorced ourselves from the seen and unseen reaches of our universe. Our best hope for redemption is to find ourselves again within its embrace.
I took some comfort, casting my line into the autumn twilight, in knowing these spaces would be golf course and not mall, parking lot, or subdivision. And yet I wondered, watching the wildlife prepare for winter, how those who come after us will connect with the divine in nature when there is so little nature left. Here, too, we close another window onto a landscape offering redemption, further diminishing the ways we can know ourselves and God.
|
|
