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One Week in Winter
A Perspective on Crisis, Change & Difficult Times

   Some of our friends left the mountain; others couldn’t get back up, as the Interstate and all alternate routes were closed. Most of us just resigned ourselves to our unusually subservient status and “made do,” like the rest of the creatures around us. They, however, never seemed nearly as bent out of shape by it all as we were.

   I saw four deer walk gracefully across the meadow, just as they always do. I heard, hawk calling out as he does each morning from his perch high in the Jeffrey Pines above the lake. Below the ducks were huddled together in a tight little ring of water that had not yet frozen over.  

   And far, far away, on the other side of the world, the Earth shifted to relieve a tension deep in its belly and belched massive waves of ocean waters violently onto surrounding lands for miles and miles, destroying human lives in unimaginable numbers.

   We called it a tsunami. We grieved and sent our prayers and helped as best we could, and found it difficult to understand that nature holds us no ill will, but is simply being what it is. To our surprise, we also learned that if we attend, as other creatures do, to our full array of senses, nature alerts us to such events so we can better protect ourselves.

  Wild animals sensed the earth’s belch that day and knew what to do. They ran for the hills. Among the miles of desolation following the tsunami, not a single wild animal carcass was found. Some animals even prodded and nudged humans to go along with them. Some of us took note, too, of nature’s warnings: a child on Maikhao Beach in Phuket, Thailand, an earth science teacher vacationing  in the south Asian coast,[1] and many tribal people like those on Simeulue, a small Indonesian island close to the epicenter of the earthquake that preceded the tsunami. They, too, fled to the safety of the hills after the initial shaking, before the massive waves hit. (See related story below "Animal Wisdom; Our Wisdom)

   So it was that during this one winter week we came face-to-face in varying degrees with the same truth Thoreau came to face many years ago when he tried to climb to the summit of Maine’s Mt. Ktaadn. "There is in nature, he wrote, “a force not bound to be kind to man,” a force truly beyond our control. Thoreau abandoned his ascent of the mountain at that time and returned to camp, struck by the impact of his experience that “this was primeval, untamed and forever untamable, Nature”[2]

   This experience sharpened Thoreau’s understanding of our interrelationship with nature and with life, the regard with which to hold it and a deep respect for our own ability to comprehend the boundaries and limits it poses for us all. One long week in Winter, 2004, has given us a similar opportunity to understand and accept, as do the deer and ducks and the mighty hawk, our absolute rootedness in and dependence on nature.

“Talk of mysteries!” Thoreau wrote. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

   So, now as I look out onto the utter calm of the bright, sunny meadow below me, sprinkled still with crisp pockets of shiny snow, I enter this New Year newly humbled and newly awed by the amazing beauty and wonder that is this mountain and this Earth that is my home, and await the new mysteries that lie ahead.