Make sure you have a porch

I don't mind at all living in a little apartment.  I like it better, I think, than a house.  A house doesn't feel as cozy or secure--not in a practical, "I think someone's going to break in and take all my stuff" way, but in an "I can't sleep without the blankets tucked in under my feet" way.  But I am very, very glad that my apartment has a back porch.

It's not much, and I guess it's not a great view, but I'm still a little bit in love with it.  Rooftops and power lines do have a kind of magic to them.  And unlike, say, Manhattan, here I can still feel--with the intermingled trees, and open sky, and chirping bird--that humans are a part of nature.  We just need to remember it.  I wrote a poem last semester about small cities that I think I'll include with my project.

Ah yes, my project.  Due Monday!  The freakout I'm suppressing is something I've kept out of this journal. This is a nature journal, a spirituality journal, not a "worrying about course work" journal.  But I posted a link on Moodle, so maybe some of my readers are classmates?  If so, maybe I should take this opportunity to say a word about my project.

I haven't worked out quite how to describe it, but basically my project is a companion piece to the course, in which I flesh out some of my tangental thinking on eco-spirituality and throw in some research to boot.  It will include this journal, at least in some form, with some additional essays on humanity and nature, and my own future ministry (yikes).  I'll PDF it as a sort of "book" and you'll all get to see the whole thing.

Oh, why the whole bit about the porch?  That's where I'm writing this.  I'm so glad for WiFi.

Sunrise ruminations

I love rivers.  I'm drawn to them.  Rivers and their smaller cousins, like Clear Creek, over which I'm perched on the concrete pipe that spans it.  Any chance I get, I'll climb out over moving water.  I wonder if that has some kind of spiritual meaning.  I'll have to look it up.  This water isn't moving, though.  It's stagnant, despite last night's rain.

It's not quite seven in the morning, and though the sun is still out of sight, the gray light of dawn has reached the woods.  It should be bleak, with the dim lighting, the monochrome color scheme, the trees still missing their leaves.  But it feels so alive.

Maybe it's the birds.  The morning chorus has begun in earnest.  A lone owl hoots in the distance, but is far outnumbered by his relatives, whose songs nearly drown him out.

There are no humans.  Most everyone within a quarter mile of me is a college student, and college students don't get up at seven in the morning.  Not that I do, of course; I'm here because I was up all night.  Either way, the hour belongs to me.  The one hour from now until the end of my shift.
I'm not sure, given a photograph, that I could tell the difference between dusk and dawn.  But being here, I can feel the difference.  Even without the birds, I think, I would know.

The air is open... I can hear things further off.  Like when I camped in the woods in Mexico, a mile or more from the ocean.  During the day, you would never know we were near the coast, but at night we could hear the rush of the tide.  It's not that other sounds drown it out--not that I can hear, anyway--they just somehow make the air thicker, so the sound doesn't reach me.

Unfortunately, this openness is helping me hear cars in the distance, which sort of breaks the spell.  The fire department does their morning radio check.  That's my harsh, mechanical contribution to the woods' song.

The cold of the morning is somehow more tolerable than the cold of night.  It's crisp and refreshing, not chilling and oppressive.

I try to call back to a bird and it falls silent.  Suspicious?

As it becomes lighter, I can see that the creek is quivering.  There is always motion, it reminds me... it's just that sometimes it's too dark to see it.

I wonder how long it will take for the earth to remove all traces of humans?  We are always surprised by how quickly nature reclaims grown, like after a volcanic eruption.  Although I suppose such an eruption is nature reclaiming ground in a sudden, violent way.  But I mean living nature.  Plants and animals and microorganisms.

I am scribbling these reflections in my work notebook.  My reflections on nature are tearing through paper.  Irony.

Maybe one day I will give all this up and become a tramp.  I think I would like that.

a reluctant climb

I didn't want to go hiking on the first place.

I like spending time outdoors, and I want to like spending time outdoors even more than I do.  Despite my atrocious dining habits, good genetics have left me in semi-decent physical shape, so it's not a chore.  But all I do these days is do.  School work, work work, even my leisure time is spent watching TV or playing games.  I'm always doing.  So I saw spring break as a time to stop doing and be.  To sit outside and catch up on all this nature journaling I wasn't doing.  So it was for my friends' sake, and not out of delight, that I pulled on my shoes, tossed on a long-sleeved shirt, and stepped out the door.

Before we ever got to the mountain we were to ascend, the skies opened and began sprinkling the West Virginia countryside with a cold rain.  I suppose I would call it a disappointment, but the kind of disappointment one welcomes--a falling through of plans that leaves you feeling relieved, not miserable.  We'd do some quick shopping at the country store, admire nature from the car, and be back at the cabin in time for lunch.  And then I could go back to being.

I seriously underestimated my company.

It was still raining, albeit lightly, when we climbed out of the car and headed for the trail head.  Unlike my three companions, bundled tight against the cold, I had not brought a coat.  Cold and thoroughly displeased, but (mostly) not wanting to be a killjoy, I resolved that I would make it to the top of this damned mountain, come back, and then go have an evening I could enjoy.

Before long I found myself drawing ahead of my friends, there being an unspoken disagreement on how quickly this hike should be executed.  I pressed on as they fell out of sight, not particularly caring how they felt about being left behind, not angry with them, but neither considering much beyond my own misery.  The top of the mountain was a point I must reach, and getting there in the cold, and rain, when I wanted to be somewhere else, was an unpleasant task, but a task I must complete.  Each step had value in that it brought me closer to getting it all over with.

Of course it is not enough for me just to feel my feelings.  I must also commentate on them, critique them, debate forcing myself not to feel them (and yet feeling them is cathartic enough I never actually make that decision).  So the voice in my head started in:

You're making yourself miserable unnecessarily.  You're choosing to be this way.  You're vacationing with friends, you're out in the wild (which is why you came here)... you could easily be enjoying this.


and (more poignantly):

This, right here, is exactly what you're trying to change about yourself this semester.  You are scurrying, doing, making this walk a means to an end.  This is the opposite of mindfulness.  Your head, somewhere else.  Your thoughts, spiritual poison.  Each step, just a fraction of a percent of the journey.  Why can't you be present, in the moment, observant?  Your belief that you must find some mystical Eden to be mindful is fallacy.  Your need to find that place is precisely why you never will.


I did not overcome my melancholy through force of will or great enlightenment, but because I am as quick to calm as I am to anger.  Before we reached the top I forgot I was unhappy.  Maybe having a bite to eat helped.  We climbed past the sign that warned us against further travel, took some pictures at the top of the world, and scurried cheerfully down.  Before long my chilled body was soothed by wine and a hot tub.  Now I have this blog post and some nice pictures, and nothing negative to show for the whole ordeal.

cold and denial

Something that really stuck out at me while I was working on my mini-project on John Muir was repeated mentions of how cold weather didn't really bother him.  He could be inadequately clothed in fierce winter weather, but he felt warm--sustained, perhaps, by his sheer love of being where he was.

It stuck out at me because I absolutely do not identify with it.  If I shun a coat because I am just running out to the car, I am cold to my core, shivering and miserable, cursing the long Indiana winter.  And while I don't get cold as easily as some people I know, I still like cranking my thermostat to 75 degrees--a practice I excuse by pointing to my tiny apartment and the heating assistance that drifts up from the elderly woman downstairs (I still use a quarter as much gas as my more thermally conservative friends who live in a house).

Didn't identify with Muir, that is, until today.  I was contemplating which coat to put on when I thought, "Screw it.  I refuse to submit to any more winter."  So with a long-sleeve T-shirt, sleeves rolled up, I stepped out into the cold, sleety snow.  I pretended the sun was shining, that it was in the upper eighties, and that the chilly wind was a welcomed summer breeze.

I wasn't cold.  I could tell it was warmer inside than out, but I didn't feel cold.  Not on the way to my car.  Not in my car.  Not on the hike from my car to the school.  Not on a trip out to my car and back to grab something I'd forgotten.  I checked twice, and the temperature is in the 30s.  That's Fahrenheit.

I am not a person of extraordinary willpower--my classmates may confirm this by checking my posting habits in our online course--but apparently denial worked this time.

That, or the granola bar I had for breakfast was sheer magic.

paths in the woods

I was going to go back into the woods the other night after I got off work.  Maybe go sit in my favorite spot--on the pipe directly over the creek--and experience the night.  But I got off work at four in the morning and by then I was way too tired.

I did manage to make it into the woods earlier in the night, though, while searching for some locals who had an illegal campfire going.  You think--rather, I think--that woods are just a series of trees through which you can walk in basically any direction.  That you just follow the flickering and the voices and you get there.

But it's not like that.  You need to find the path, because it's too dense and difficult to just cut straight for your goal.  So my co-worker and I tracked and backtracked, scratched our heads, and even had to jump over the creek at one point in our attempt to get there.

It gets back to that vastness thing, I guess... there's so much more to the woods than I thought at first.  I thought of it as a basically finite space, all discovered, no secrets.  But there are places so difficult to get to that few do, and any journey from point A to point B is not a straight line, but involves finding the trail.

writings from west virginia, three

We all want to be teachers.  Humble thyself and be a student.  A fool is one who thinks he has nothing to learn.

Cows have little place in nature.  They are a destructive force.  Their hooves tear and destroy.  But we have brought them here... what now?  If we stop eating them, shall we unleash them on the wild?  We have already shifted the planet with our actions.  Not shifting is no longer a choice.  We can take drastic, unnatural action to try to shift it back, or we can let nature balance itself over thousands of years.  But the shift has already happened.

It's easy, in the city, to say we are destroying the earth.  Here, I see an earth confident that though it may change, it will survive.

writings from west virginia, two

The ground beneath me is so much.  We lay asphalt or tile or carpet or wood.  One substance.  Maybe patterned.  But in just one square foot of this earth there is grass, dead and alive, moss, leaves, some kind of small weed, pebbles, mud, sticks and twigs, an acorn, bark.  Such diversity, such complexity, without human touch.  We under-appreciate God's floor.

Ahead of me, forest.  Evergreens.  I forget how to distinguish the kinds, something to do with the shape of the needles.  Dense, tall.  Proud?  Nervous?  How does one take the temperature, the pulse, the blood pressure of the earth?

I see leaves floating from right to left.  They will gather at the end of the pond.  Then what?  Nature is never linear.  Or is it?  Are stars born faster than they die?  Will the universe ever end?  Will there ever be nothing again?

I speak too much.  My words have little value.  It's a supply/demand thing.

Bird flapping its wings in the tree behind me.  I want to learn to move without frightening it.  Should I stop eating meat?

My physics teacher said the waves of the ocean are compression waves.  The whole ocean is moving.