The Sacred Earth: Writers on Nature & Spirit

Praise for The Sacred Earth

Assiduously mining the work of an astonishingly varied pantheon of writers — from John Muir to Linda Hogan, John Burroughs to Mary Oliver — and embracing every quality of the natural world from the spiritual to the practical, Jason Gardner has produced an anthology whose words, if we have the wit to listen, will echo in the mind and heart and enlarge our understanding of just where we stand in the great community of life.

— T. H. WATKINS

former editor of Wilderness magazine

and Wallace Stegner Professor of Western American Studies

Montana State University

The Sacred Earth is an engaging, uniquely conceived collection of nature writing gems — not long, intricate essays but substantial snippets of poetic prose. As a scholar of nature writing, I enjoyed this fresh approach to many of my favorite writers.

— SCOTT SLOVIC

author of Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing

and director of the Center for Environmental

Arts and Humanities, University of Nevada, Reno

The Sacred Earth

Writers on Nature & Spirit

The Sacred Earth

Writers on Nature & Spirit

Edited by Jason Gardner

Foreword by David Brower

Copyright © 1998 by Jason Gardner

Cover design: Alexandra Honig

Cover photo: Copyright © 1988 by Galen Rowell / Mountain Light

Reflection Pond at dawn, Denali National Park, Alaska

Text design and typography: Jason Gardner

Illustrations: Denise Gardner

Permission acknowledgments on page 165 are an extension of the copyright page.

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, or transmitted in any form, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The sacred earth : writers on nature & spirit / edited by Jason Gardner; foreword by David Brower.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57731-068-3 (alk. paper)

1. Nature. 2. Nature—Psychological aspects. I. Gardner, Jason, 1969– .

QH81.S194 1998

First printing, October 1998

ISBN 1-57731-068-3

Printed in Canada on acid-free, recycled paper

Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Denise Gardner and Maureen Phelan

for books and inspiration

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Experience

Texture

Practice

Belief

About the Contributors

Contributor Index

Permissions Acknowledgments

FOR THOSE OF US WHO CARE FOR AN EARTH not encompassed by machines, a world of textures, tastes, and sounds other than those that we have engineered, there can be no questions of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves — to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again, sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that place us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs — letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.

— DAVID ABRAM

The Spell of the Sensuous

Foreword

THIS BOOK IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR BEING OUTSIDE. But it will give a perspective on being outside that isn’t always easy to achieve. As someone who edited books for the Sierra Club and the University of California, I am heartened to see so many literary highlights from so many of my favorite authors, laid out to let us readers dabble in their work as we meander in the woods or pause on the trail — to allow us to find the writers who speak to us. Take them slowly; together, they’re a rich offering that deserves some pondering. Much more than a fine beginner’s sampling of nature writing, The Sacred Earth is a penetrating collection of crystalline prose presented as poetry, circling and building and creeping up on us. In the end, it may indeed change our view of the earth and our place on it.

These passages come from many perspectives, some that pat each other on the back in agreement, some that vehemently but respectfully contradict; some rightly serious, some rightly lending humor to our predicament. Its passages range from artful narratives of what it’s like to climb a mountain, to revelations about the physical mountain itself, to insightful thoughts on what mountains mean to us, to instructions for learning to think like a mountain, as Aldo Leopold proposed. Call it a well-magnified microcosm of the wild and our varying experiences in it. It shows what the wild can do for our spirit, and even how we can work out a successful relationship with nature.

I once wrote, To me, God and Nature are synonymous, and neither could wait the billions of years before man arrived to decide what to look like.… I have as much trouble comprehending Creation as I do comprehending what it was created out of. I like mystery, the unending search for truth, the truth of beauty. I would have no use for pearly gates and streets of gold if canyon wrens were not admitted.

Religion is sometimes in our way, rather than an aid to us in our search for a truth grounded in the splendor of mountains, the seas, the open land, and life itself. But religion can, and in many traditions does, help us in our search for the truths of nature. And some spiritual sense of nature may be, as this book suggests, necessary for us to halt our thoughtless misuse of the planet. We don’t have to agree on what spirituality means. It may simply be a search for personal truth that pays attention to what the world around us has to say. Readers will recognize that search in these passages and in turn will be inspired in their own search.

Enjoy this book for what it is: a trailhead to further exploration in the marvelous realm of nature writing; a totem to aid us in finding and cultivating perspectives that touch our own, sometimes buried, intuitive understandings of what’s right; and a reminder to urge us on in repairing the damage we’ve caused and no longer need to.

— DAVID R. BROWER

Berkeley, July 1998

Acknowledgments

Several comprehensive anthologies of nature writing were absolutely essential in guiding my reading, lending historical scope to the selections, as well as helping to provide essential biographical information: The Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by Robert Finch and John Elder; This Incomparable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing, edited by Thomas J. Lyon; The Nature Reader, edited by Daniel Halpern and Dan Frank; Sisters of the Earth, edited by Lorraine Anderson; Words from the Land, edited by Stephen Trimble; and the Sierra Club’s annual American Nature Writing anthologies, edited by John A. Murray.

I would like to thank Maureen Phelan for her encouragement and feedback; Joe Durepos for wise advice, mentorship, and friendship; my sister, Danielle Gardner, who’s out in the world doing what this book talks about; my father, Philip Gardner, for heartfelt encouragement, generous support, and a sharp editorial eye; and my mother, Denise Gardner, for her reading advice, crafty dingbats, and love for the wild.

Thank you to everyone I work with at New World Library: Becky Benenate, Marc Allen, Munro Magruder, and Victoria Williams- Clarke have all contributed significantly and graciously to this book. Aaron Kenedi and Alexandra Honig worked passionately on the cover and indulged my eccentric tastes. Thanks also to Tona Pearce Myers, Marjorie Conte, Dean Campbell, Amy Garretson, Michael Rozendal, Cathy Bodenman, Dan Couvillon, and Kristin Wolfe. Everyone’s support is much appreciated. Charlie Frago and Thia Boggs offered sheer enthusiasm along the way. Chris Jones gave my introduction a professional edit. It was an honor to work with David Brower and Mikhail Davis at Earth Island Institute. And many thanks to Kurt Redenbo at the Wilderness Society for his flexibility and enthusiasm. The Society deserves everyone’s support.

Most of all, thank you to all the authors in this book, many of whom offered the use of their writing at no cost to help the Wilderness Society. Obviously, this book’s worth lies in their talent and wisdom.

And along with those thanks, a quick apology to those writers who belong here, but because of some fault of my own, I wasn’t able to include — John McPhee, Ann Zwinger, Farley Mowat, and many others come to mind. This isn’t a comprehensive collection, but a very personal one.

Introduction

IT’S DIFFICULT TO VIEW THE WORLD outside our human context. Staying alive and paying the bills both require our attention squarely fixed on our own business. Our sprawling cities and suburbs are wonderful and frightening tributes to creative self-absorption. In them, we spend our microscheduled days bustling between work and the endless details of our private lives, turning in our moments of rest to the buzzing distractions of television and computers — all accelerating toward some ultimate, unseen fulfillment of convenience and hyperreality. Little encourages us to pause and look around, much less question the end goal of all our busyness. Anything slower than the quick cuts of TV commercials is overwhelmed by our impatience and short attention. Unfortunately, we might be missing something important — to our happiness and to our survival.

The purpose of this book is to help remind us. Excerpted from the work of many of our best contemporary American nature writers — as well as some biologists, activists, and academics — these passages revolve around nature and its connection with the slippery, difficult notion of spirit. Like other overused and commercialized words, spirit has lost some of its meaning, as well as taken on a lot of new meaning. Although it is often associated with the supernatural — transcendence beyond this world — in this book its meaning is tied more simply to the natural. One dictionary defines spirit as, an animating or vital principle held to give life to physical organisms. Although some writers presented here might squirm at this definition, most might agree to root spirit in life — the teeming soil, the growing trees, the depth of the eyes. They might also extend this notion beyond what we recognize as alive to include everything: wind, water, even geological formations. Whether linked to religious beliefs about God, as in Christianity, or to cultivating awareness, as in Buddhism, here, spirit recognizes the world as sacred, and creates our responsibility to treat it with love, to consider it invaluable beyond its relation to people.

The passages in The Sacred Earth are short but substantial. Most present whole ideas, even though they are pulled from the larger arguments they serve. These passages may cater to our ever-shortening attention spans, but they also invite us toward a way of viewing the world that is increasingly difficult.

Our relationship with the natural world is maddeningly complicated. When considering the environment and our effect on it, we often seem paralyzed between self-protecting delusion and occasional, maybe realistic despair. In one moment, as we open a newspaper, an international pact to curb global warming brings unexpected hope. In the next, as we turn the page, we are stunned to learn that across the globe 150 acres of rainforest disappear every minute.

The past few decades have spawned a powerful environmental movement, with dedicated activists achieving tremendous progress. And where the idea of the environment barely existed thirty years ago, we now cultivate environmental awareness in kindergardeners. Yet for all our progress, it often seems that political environmentalism has failed against enormous odds — co-opted by money-driven politics or corporations seeking green PR, or, like many human activities, splintered into bickering factions. Environmentalism has made enormous inroads, but to the economic/corporate establishment, it often remains a cultural stereotype or a cranky political lobby — a hand-wringing relic of the sixties or an idealistic threat to profit and growth.

Whether we see the future as hopeful or bleak, increasingly, what seems missing from our political approach to the environment — and to nature itself— is a spiritual dimension. We need