Nature’s Nourishment: Olympic National Park

It’s three days since Aretha Franklin died and I’ve got her CD playing in my Forester. I drive from the mini-peninsula of Port Townsend across the tip of the broader Olympic Peninsula, singing to the firs and hemlocks, “You make me feel like a natural woman…” Oh, yeah, tree friends, wrap me in moss and slap me with river spray! Get me back to nature, baby. I turn onto Hurricane Ridge Road to go to the famed lookout point at the road’s end. This is both stupid and obstinate because there’s no view to be had. But I want to get outside and it’s on the way to, well, outside.

We moved recently and I’ve been inside unpacking boxes or out foraging thrift stores and garage sales. Although it’s gratifying to create a new home, I need a change. Western Washington is up in smoke from wildfires in Canada and elsewhere and we’re advised to stay inside and certainly not exert ourselves in the polluted air. My plan was to go on a leisurely beach walk with friends, but that isn’t enough for me. I want out and I want to go alone.

I get like this sometimes, when I’m hankering to wander and I’m not sure why. After the fact, I usually realize I was starved for a chance to catch up with Mother Nature and with myself. For me, that is best done in solitude (or with someone I know so well I can have lots of quiet time). So I don’t mind if I can’t see all the way to Mount Olympus, the highest (at 7,980 feet) of the Olympic Mountains. I’ll wave to Hera and Zeus through the haze.

Later I find a room for the night at Lake Crescent Lodge. I get some cauliflower curry soup and watch the sun set pink over the shrouded, ghostly hills. I feel lucky to be in this historic and, momentarily, peaceful national park.

Yet the sad truth is that the park, which sound tracker Gordon Hempton (whose book I described in a past post) identified as the quietest place he could find in America, is in trouble. The rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula are under acoustic assault and may not remain quiet for long. I’ve written our government representatives to try to keep it that way, without military jets shrieking overhead for training missions from Whidbey. There is more to be done.

Night dreams are an escalator down to my nether world and I head back to the woods as soon as I wake up. I am getting to that place of inner quiet.

My morning walk leads me to a mossy log where I sit for a while by the rapids of Barnes Creek. I seem to have the sacred space all to myself until I am joined by a companion in contemplation: a curious Douglas Squirrel joins me from the pew of her tree.

When I continue on, I am happy to also make some human friends on the way to Marymede Falls.

Then, inner haze somewhat cleared, it is time to go home. As the song goes, “I used to feel so uninspired… Now I’m no longer doubtful of what I’m living for.” Sometimes you gotta go out to go in, and get nourished by nature. And sometimes we have to speak up to keep the peace.

“Nearly all the park is a profound solitude. Yet it is full of charming company …with sermons in stones, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful of humanity.”                     John Muir (1838-1914)

Follow Sound Defense Alliance on Facebook and see their website for information about protecting the Puget Sound area from noise and other pollution.

 

Wonder Walk: Hiking for Health

Hiking in Costa Rica

The first Wednesday of April is National Walking Day.  This is one way the American Heart Association promotes habits that keep our heart happy.  Whether you walk alone or with others, the idea is to get moving.  If you can connect with nature while you’re outside, so much the better.

Buddhist author Thich Nhat Hanh leads walking meditations at his retreat center among the sunflowers of Bordeaux, France.  In Peace Is Every Step he reminds us, “Be aware of the contact between your feet and the Earth.  Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”

Librarian Ann Vogl and English teacher Cheryl Gorsuch decided to hike the Ice Age Trail–all 1000 miles of it.  It took them five years, getting together on weekends to do a bit at a time.  They often talked while they walked and got to know each other very well.  They also got to know thirty counties of Wisconsin as they followed the edge of the last glacier!  Upon achieving their goal this month, Gorsuch commented, “I think you see so much of Wisconsin at a personal level, foot by foot, step by step.”

Mark Hirsch is another inspired Wisconsinite.  Every day for a year, he walked to a 163-year-old Bur Oak, took a picture of it, and got to know it very well.  It became “That Tree” project, completed just two weeks ago.  (See www.facebook.com/photosofthattree.)  People who saw his photos posted online got to know the oak, too, and shared their stories of special trees.   So whether we hike a thousand miles or walk to the same place every day, there are benefits from the physical exercise and the connections we make.

Though I like taking sociable walks with friends, I pay more attention to flora and fauna if I go quietly by myself.  I can pause and watch birds to my heart’s content or lean against a tree until I have set down roots alongside it.  For heart health, a rapid pace is best, and I do like race-walking.  But for peace of mind, I like to pause and appreciate my surroundings.

Kathleen Dean Moore of Oregon writes in Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature of walking along a river by the Cascade Mountains.  She couldn’t help but take her stress with her.  “Already,” she says, “just a few hours into the weekend, time feels short.  I hurry to relax before I have to go back to my complicated life.”  She pauses to watch the river, a tortoiseshell butterfly lands on her arm, and her awareness shifts.

“Lucky.  If I hadn’t stopped to watch the river, if I hadn’t worked up a sweat in this unlikely sun, if I hadn’t pushed my sleeves up past my elbows, I might never have discovered how to drink in the peace of this time and place, every warm drop.”  Moore continues, “This is what a human brings to the world–the ability to take notice, to be grateful and glad, glad for the river swinging by, for the sun warming my shoulders, for the breeze lifting the hairs on a butterfly’s back.”

May you get lucky on April 3 and every day.  Don’t hurry to relax.  Take your time and have a heartfelt walk.

 

 

Reliable Friends

O, Tannenbaum, how lovely are your branches.

You need no introduction to nature.

You are nature.

To nature you return.

Nature holds you every day.

Yet who among us does not need

a reminder of these things?

That is the point of this Of the Earth blog, to remind myself to go outside, to be in nature, to remember what it’s all about.

On this Solstice, I am remembering.  I am watching for babies’ smiles.  I am listening for the voices of my friends and family.  Now I pause to listen, too, to the more quiet ones with the cold, damp bark and the skitter of feathers.  With them, I am “one of the common things,” as poet William Stafford (Allegiances, 1970) said, joining in rejoicing for the lengthening days.

“World, I am your slow guest,

one of the common things

that move in the sun and have

close, reliable friends

in the earth, in the air, in the rock.”

Even in winter, the Hudson River naturalist John Burroughs (John Burroughs America, 1951) made a point of conversing with the plants where he lived.  “Nearly every season I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers.  It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood,” he wrote.

Like John Muir and Aldo Leopold, Burroughs had a special fondness for conifers and he wrote, “How friendly the pine tree is to man—so docile and available as timber and so warm and protective as shelter!  Its balsam is salve to his wounds, its fragrance is long life to his nostrils; an abiding, perennial tree, tempering the climate, cool as murmuring waters in summer and like a wrapping of fur in winter.”  In thinning the white pines near our cabin, I brought three inside and now I see my friends all around.  As my favorite carol says, how lovely are their branches.

old friend

A Square Inch of Quiet

New kinds of listening

I am learning lately to listen more carefully and preserve  peace and quiet when I can.  I recommend Listening Below the Noise by Anne LeClaire and One Square Inch of Silence by Gordon Hempton and John Grossman because those authors have helped me listen deeper, more frequently, and with fresh ears.

For Gordon Hempton, listening is his practice and silence his therapy.  Unlike a monk in silent retreat, Hempton goes forth to take full measure of his adversary—noise pollution.  And he does it while crossing the country, from Washington state to Washington, D.C.,  in a 1964 Volkswagen van he calls “Vee Dub,” a car that is a character in its own right.

Hempton’s other constant companion is his sound-level meter with which he takes a noise profile of the United States from one end to the other, with many side trips to places recommended to him as quiet.  The results are not good.  Rarely can Hempton find the peace of nature (with its diversity of sounds) for more than a few minutes without the intrusion of man-made noise.  Those pervasive noises from airplanes, cars, and oil rigs can grate on us in ways we don’t even realize, adding an undertone of stress to an already stressed-out country.  As Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, noticed, “Men have become the tools of their tools.”  The racket those tools are making is drowning out our opportunities to pause, appreciate, regroup, and reflect.

Gordon Hempton is an Emmy award-winning acoustic ecologist who records sounds for everything from movies to video games.  His book is called One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World (2009).  He even includes a CD of nature sounds with his book, which, sadly, was missing in my library copy.  His listeners have let him know that they find joy, solace, and healing in the music of birds, water, and trees that he records—soundscapes where humans felt at home for thousands of years.  Soundscapes now almost impossible to find.

Part memoir and part manifesto, the writing in this book can be a bit rambling at times, just like his trip.  Yet there is something compelling about the story and his efforts to inform—and ultimately confront—federal officials who, on paper anyway, are mandated to protect citizens from unmitigated noise.  His main pleas are to the park service and the Federal Aviation Authority.  If we could restrict airplane travel over the national parks, that would help preserve the very peace and quiet that visitors seek there.  Hempton is not hopeful about winning that battle because it is too late.  Both commercial flights and sightseeing flights go over the Grand Canyon, for instance.

But Hempton has staked a small claim to silence and that is the one square inch of the book title, a red stone he placed on a log in the Olympic National Park in Washington state.  That area of the northwestern United States has very few planes flying over it and he would like to keep it that way.  He invites anyone at the Park to hike to the stone and leave him a message in a jar he put there.  He likes to know that he has allies in his often lonely fight to be conscious about protecting natural silence, the silence that we don’t  even know we’re missing till we get under the rumbling threshold of noise that has become the norm.

The book by Anne LeClaire is Listening Below the Noise: A Meditation on the Practice of Silence (2009).  For almost two decades now, LeClaire has taken two days of silence a month.  Doing so, she has found a source of renewal and peace that helps her remain true to herself in the midst of a busy life.  I was fortunate to spend a weekend with her and take time to listen to myself and nature more attentively than ever before.  Both Hempton and LeClaire remind us to pay attention, both within and without, and treasure the silence.

Anne LeClaire’s website is http://www.anneleclaire.com.  Look for her Sacred Silence workshops.  Also see http://www.onesquareinch.org and, if you can, take a walk in the Hoh Rainforest, find Hempton’s stone, and sit a spell.

Earth Blog

Rock art, Boynton Canyon, AZ

In this weblog, I am writing about the need for nature and the way we learn from plants, animals, and others.

Started out with 3 degrees in psych., trying to comprehend human behavior. Found the best alternatives to our collective neuroses by going outside my own WASP upbringing into other cultures, particularly by learning about Native American and Eastern philosophies.

Take all that intercultural learning, the subject of my dissertation, one step further and I find myself fascinated by inter-species learning. An elder asked me to try it and and I was amazed at what I “heard.”

Would be interested to know your experiences with nature.
So this is my first blog. We are, indeed, connected and of the Earth. Thich Nhat Hanh says “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” We are all related.  I just may benefit from getting outside and paying attention more often, and I’ll write about it here.