Natural History

The deer are gray-coated now. The season of the canopy flame will soon give way to the long season of the gray tree trunks, where the deer so appropriately colored seem to materialize as phantoms among the smudgy gray.

The repast of acorns is falling hard on the leaves.  A creation of the oak from those days of bright sunshine and long lazy days, the acorn feeds the beasts. The chipmunks store them in their dens, and the deer and the bears devour them to make their winter fat.

I step into this forgotten forest as a visitor, the same as I stepped into the taiga of Denali National Park or snorkeled among the sea turtles and bird wrasse in Kauai. I come here more often, but my basic humanity is that I am but a visitor here. I will never know this land the way the wild coyotes do, where they use the land to hide themselves from our firing guns. I will never have that wisdom, nor will I have the wisdom of the old men who ran the hills setting traps and hunting for hides.

And I am far removed from those first Siberians who came into this continent and lived of the bounty of the land and began their own nations before being cleared off by the Europeans.

It is as the visitor that I step into the woods. I am a visitor, a wannabe pilgrim, who has come looking for the divine. I search not for the divinity of my own Anglican-Methodist childhood, for I’ve moved beyond it. The questions I have cannot be answered in that tradition any longer. These questions I have about what it means to be good. To be good is the fundamental question for me.  How can I be decent toward others? What does it mean to be a good man?

And my other question is about my position in the cosmos, and notions that I am the center of the universe and that some omnipotent being loves me don’t withstand my skepticism.

The only deity I know is nature. My worship of this deity is to spend time alone or with dogs in that which has not be forged by its forces and meditate and ask questions.

I live in a world in which those questions can be adequately answered in the traditions of the Bible.  I live in a world where people are hurting and lost. The coal industry will never return, and the steel mills are running silent. The middle class created here has been gutted, and the unions are no more. An apocalypse has happened, and people want answers. Traditional religion provides those answers, and I will allow them to find some comfort there.

My church is the wild woods,  and my hymns are the the hoof-beats of deer, the falling of acorns from their oaks, and the soft panting of a golden retriever puppy as she leaps around on her first sylvan excursions.

I think of the spinner dolphins I saw cavorting on a quiet bay in Kauai last summer.  They leaped and spun in the pure joy of existing, a sort of ecstasy that I only dream of experiencing. The azure sea was their home. They weren’t visitors. They were truly at home in their native universe.

A piece of me wishes to feel that nativity, to feel that ecstasy.

Yet I know that as a human living in this century, I am already an alien. My world is digitized and pixelated.

But the real world is organic and pungent smelling. It is carbon and oxygen and nitrogen. It is the green stems and the fur and feather.

The real world is a place I can touch, but with which I can never fully be.

I am thus separated from the only deity I will even known, but deeply I will yearn for it. I will keep asking my questions. I will keep on going.

I am born again a pagan each time I step beyond the world of man. It is here that I find my solace, my closest sense of peace.

And thus I will be until I take my final breath.

Maybe my life will signify nothing, but for now, I will let my reverie be my meaning.

And I will take you along.

If you want.