Questions of environment, wilderness, and spirit

“Out of shared imagination comes collaboration. Out of collaboration comes community.”

- Terry Tempest Williams

As we individually witness landscape through the lens of Terry Tempest Williams and related texts, we ask questions about wilderness, nature, environment, and spirit. We explore these questions through our individual voices, voices which were shaped by listening and imagining together. 

What makes a place sacred? - Mary Caruso
What is this call to co-create? - Jen Gehrig
What stirs the frozen blood? - Nuria Sheehan 
Which calls do we listen for, and how do we then respond? - Dana Hoeschen

What makes a place sacred?

We all live in a sacred cosmos that is the integration of the body, the spirit, the community, and the landscape. The spirit world infuses and informs the changing surfaces we see. We are merely guests of invisible owners. We’ve blown in like seed pods from foreign lands. Sacred ground has been given over to ritual space. Our spirituality is a deep understanding and honoring of the earth world and the spirit world; ourselves and other beings in this reality.

Our sense of connection is rooted in sacred memory. Intertwined, invisible thread ties us with each other and the natural world. Remembering, honoring and protecting the awareness creates a sacred bond, and with it, the responsibility between humans and nature. From this awareness arises equanimity and compassion. Without this sacred bond, we have no intrinsic commitment to the preservation of nature, and our only interest is what nature can provide us.

We are also creatures in need of a sense of place, of belonging to a particular place in a particular time. These places are so easy for us to conceive of as sacred. We are part of an illusion that each season is one of an infinite number of seasons, that this place is one of eternal renewal, unchanging, a touchstone of stability. The illusion is comforting; when I’m gone there will still be this sacred place where peacefulness prevails.

Sacred places and sacred landscapes, along with the feelings of those who dwell in them, are the lived experiences of the tradition. Only when all of them are held special, or at least treated with reverence, can we hope to survive as a species. Breaking that landscape, with all of its collective memories, is breaking our collective hearts.

By telling the sacred story, we are grounded, not merely in the landscape and its inhabitants, but in the power that creates and preserves the land.

- Mary

What is this call to co-create?

I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration

Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze

Of growing, these sparks that puff in wild gyration,

Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

- D.H. Lawrence, “The Enkindled Spring”

As I write this, we are just days past the spring equinox. It has been an unusually mild month in Minnesota and at a time when we typically experience a few heavy snowfalls, we are in the midst of the giddiness of spring. It is hard not to immediately be caught up in the euphoria I feel gazing at the tulip bulbs nudging their way up, ever-so-slowly, through the soil. It is hard too, to leave the earth alone. I want to plunge my hands into the loam, rummage my bare toes through the humus of the soil, dig, plant, and cultivate until the dirt stains my nails and resists all cleansing.

What is this call to co-create? From where does it arise?

In the midst of spring’s beginning in Minnesota, I traveled to southern Arizona. After a rain-laden winter, the valley of the Santa Rita Mountains in the Sonoran Desert was in bloom and turning shades of green. But this green was not the green of my Midwestern home. The green of the desert is the green of plants long starved of water and long exposed to the sun; a shallow, pale, woody green. The sandy earth is crusty, ashen yellow and protruding with spines and spindles. In the desert, so beautiful and so fierce, I found that my soul is bound up in the soft, wide, vibrantly green leaves of the daffodils and the worm-filled, mineral-rich soil that call to me from just outside my back door with the mossy scent of rain on newly-uncovered grass filling the air. This earth is home.

But as I travel, whether out my back door or through the desert, I cannot help but wonder about the difference between human co-creation and human control? Is temperance the middle way? Where does poetry stop and destruction begin?

- Jen

What stirs the frozen blood?

The warmth feels like a lie and I let it tease me further into the iron-veined woods. Only the first of April and an unusually hot wind is blowing from the south into this forest, the Chequamegon near Lake Superior. Deep underground the ferrous earth is still frozen, but on the surface it flows with abandon in the mud-red creek.  I feel and smell the blood-metal pulse iron all around me. The birches draw it skyward, exposing a rust tinted underbelly below their fine white skins.

I pass a bone (freshly picked clean) of a deer leg. I wonder what brought it here. A bear, a wolf, a coyote. A dog of visiting campers.

The forest is emerging from its long hibernation, waking mid-rot as leaves surrender to dirt. Mid-breath as birds and wind collude in a dizzying rush of movement. The wind fills the trees with a sudden rush, an expectation, a sense that if I continue to follow this stream, this wind and bones and the smell of the earth’s blood that I will reach some encounter. An encounter of what I’m not sure. Of wildness. Of terrible beauty.

Just beyond my sight, further in the trees, something is happening. A frenzy that sounds like hundreds of water birds. Leaving the creek that I’ve been following to find the source, I imagine I’ll find a flurry of wing, of ducks, loons, swans. Nearing the sound, a small muddy pool, I see no signs of these phantom birds and when I reach the pool the noise stops. There is only silence and stillness and no signs of the wild celebration.

Now the center has shifted, I hear the calling further, deeper into the forest and continue to follow it, a foolish child running after the sweets left by the forest witch. At each pond it is the same, the paean ends as soon as my presence is known. I wait, hoping to see signs of this invisible flock. A flock that I now understand must be of frogs hidden in the leaves and water.

I realize it is growing dark when it begins to rain. I have been trying to catch a wildness that doesn’t belong to me and it is time to return home.

Rana sylvatica.

Wood frogs, I later learn were the source of the elusive noise. Their tiny frog bodies had just emerged from a long winter hibernation spent lodged in the soil, their blood frozen. Shaken out of their icy dreams by that hot southern breeze, they had immediately found their way to the nearest bit of water to begin their raucous breeding.

Their frozen blood, their frozen selves waking up furiously, rushing to encounter itself in newly melted water.

- Nuria

Which calls do we listen for, and how do we then respond?

I sense it more than hear it. It’s not the bird song outside my window, or the sound of the wind and rain through the trees. It’s not the gruff bark of the dog or the chittering arguments of the squirrels. It’s not the roaring grumble of the training flights zooming over the river, between bluffs, and over our house at the lowest altitude possible. Those sounds lure me outside, to locate and identify the maker, even enjoy the breeze, smell the rain freshening.

What I sense comes from the land. It is a deep tremble, barely perceptible, sometimes unnoticed. When my brain is busy worrying over some issue or incident I feel the slightest rumble, the faintest ripple. My toes curl. Like tree roots descending through the space of the basement cavern I reach for the slightest contact with the ground, the land.

A friend told me I could connect by anchoring myself to the ground. She suggested standing in the garden, barefoot, centered in my body and quiet in my mind. If I stayed open to the sensation I would feel my roots stirring in the soil, absorbing earth energy, healing old injuries, and shielding me from new ones.

One April morning I stood in the garden, in the debris of the previous year’s flowers. I dug my toes into leaf litter until I felt the slippery chill of mud between my toes. After shooing the dog away, after taking numerous deep breaths, I felt something. My feet, embedded in the soil of the early spring, were cold.

The rumbling persists. A restless need for movement overcomes me. It seems I do my best imagining outside, not at a desk surrounded by books and the thoughts of others. Not that those words and people don’t matter. They are connecting threads to a community of fellow seekers. When I wish to get away from the chatter, the inundation of information and ideas, I go for a walk.

Almost every day the dog and I walk from the house to the mailbox and back. The round trip is a half mile; it takes less than a half hour. We don’t hurry, even on days when the northeastern wind bites and blasts us with ice pellets or on humid summer days when the air hangs and we seem to be the only things moving. The plants growing on the roadside, the animal tracks left in the soft gravel of the road, and the cloud formations shading the fields have me lingering to consider and connect.

Some days the pull of the call lures me beyond the road and the yard to walk, wander really, trying to locate the source of the impulse. It is the land that holds and generates the associations. It is the land I seek in restlessness.

- Dana

Discussion

In addition to the questions posed above, consider asking of yourself or trying the following discussion questions and writing prompts:

• How do you correspond with the earth? Is co-creation inextricably tied to sustainability?
• Can representations of nature in formal or symbolic or ideological properties be portrayed accurately or even adequately? 
• Take a walk around the block, down the road, or in a park. Take note of what you see, hear, smell, and feel. Describe the walk using all your senses.
• How does the natural world inspire your creative process?