UU Wild
The following talk was given at Mountain Light Unitarian Universalist Church.
Good morning! My name is Jim Walker. I am very happy to be here with you this morning and honored by your invitation.
I grew up near Atlanta, out towards Stone Mountain. In 1975, my wife and I moved to the mountains on the east side of Gilmer County because, for some reason, we felt more comfortable in the woods than in the city.
In April of last year, I hiked the Benton MacKaye Trail from Springer Mountain to the Ocoee River in Tennessee. I went alone, and in seven days, I saw more bears than people. This trip had several purposes. It was a vacation, an adventure, a physical challenge and also, in a way that I felt but cannot explain, a cleansing experience.
After my trip, Peg Griffith, the program planner at Mountain Light Unitarian-Universalist Church in Ellijay, asked me to speak about it, and that was the origin of what I am about to say to you.
In April of last year, I hiked the Benton MacKaye Trail from Springer Mountain to the Ocoee River in Tennessee. I went alone, and in seven days, I saw more bears than people on the trail.
After my hike, Peg Griffith, the program planner at Mountain Light, asked me to give a talk about the experience, and that was the origin of what I am about to say to you.
In North Georgia, we are fortunate to have a large amount of public land in the Chattahoochee National Forest. About 15% of the Chattahoochee National Forest has been set aside as congressionally designated wilderness, the purpose of which, according to The Wilderness Act of 1964, is
"to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition."
And The Wilderness Act goes on to define wilderness:
"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own
works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the
earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself
is a visitor who does not remain."
A few years ago, there was a small group of people going around to all the county commissions in the North Georgia mountains trying to get them to pass a resolution opposing any additional designation of National Forest land as Wilderness. When they quietly managed to put this question on the agenda of a meeting of the Gilmer County Commission, some pro-wilderness folks found out about it ahead of time and quite a large crowd turned out for the meeting. A lot of people spoke, mostly in favor of wilderness, some opposed.
I am usually tolerant of other people's opinions, but one of the instigators of this idea of an anti-wilderness resolution said something that provoked me. He said that the people who want more wilderness have a "social agenda." I don't know what he meant by "a social agenda," but I knew he was wrong, and I stood up and told him so.
I said, "You've got it wrong, "I don't have a social agenda for wilderness; I've got a spiritual agenda." Then I turned to the commissioners and asked them, "Which puts you more in mind of God - a stand of big old trees or the WalMart parking lot?"
The United States Congress defined wilderness in political terms. How are we to define wilderness in spiritual terms? What is the spiritual attraction of wilderness? Is wilderness somehow more spiritual than civilization? Closer to God? The primary temple? Does man trammel the world not only physically, but also spiritually?
Wondering about the spirituality of wilderness raises some very tricky questions, and the key one, it seems to me, is: what is man's place in nature?
A few years ago, on a backpacking trip with a troop of Boy Scouts, after several days in the woods, from a high place I caught a glimpse of a road far below, and that road reminded me of highways and the kind of development we are seeing more and more of throughout the North Georgia mountains now, that is to say, civilization as we know it - traffic, industry, commerce, things that money can buy. And for a moment I didn't want to go back to that. I felt that, in some sense, wilderness is more real, more essential, than civilization. But I immediately remembered that my survival time in the wilderness is strictly limited by how much store-bought food I can carry. Not to mention my various equipment and clothes - all products of our globalizing civilization that threatens to overwhelm the earth.
No matter how much I am attracted to wilderness, whatever spiritual benefit I may receive from it, my home is in civilization. "Love it or leave it" is not an option.
On the other hand, I've got nothing against people. I work as a translator, from Russian to English, and have spent some time in Russia. I once had to laugh out loud in a Moscow metro station. This was one of the big stations near the center of the city, deep under the ground, with incredibly long escalators constantly pouring people in and shoveling them out. Hundreds of people are waiting on the platform, and a long train comes every two minutes; hundreds of people get off, and then all the people on the platform pack themselves onto the train, pressed tight up against each other on all sides. What made me laugh was the thought that, "If you love people, you've got to love Moscow because it's so crammed full of people." I do love people, and I love wilderness.
To quote Gary Snyder, from his book The Practice of the Wild, "Where do we start to resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild?"
First of all, we can recognize our rightful role as human beings in the natural world and take our place in the community of life alongside all living things. We may or may not be wild, but there is certainly nothing unnatural about us. We are born, eat, sleep, reproduce and die just like all the other animals. Thoreau wrote, "Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable."
But obviously, we are a special class of animals, primus inter pares, first among equals. What is the essential difference between us and the other animals? The following poem by Wislawa Szymborska addresses this question:
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
In every other way they're light.
On this third planet of the sun,
among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One.
As human beings, we have regrets about what we've done. Not only on a personal level, but also as a species. We remember what has been lost. One of the things that has been lost is our own sense of wildness. There is very little space left in this world for us to be wild and free.
But the world is still full of life, and it's all wild. In contrast to our incredibly well-tamed social behavior, our own minds and bodies are wild, largely beyond our control. We each have an inner wilderness, an unconscious residue of evolution stretching back past the time when there was not so much to distinguish us from other animals, to a time when our conscience was also clear.
Wilderness, inner or outer, can be a scary place, with unknown dangers. A place where there is no one to rescue us. No protection. A place where we confront the world not as privileged, almighty human beings, but as just another piece of life, with the same ineluctable instinct to survive. As genuine, full-fledged members of the whole community of life. A community that cares not one bit whether we live or die, while we, collectively, not only have the power to destroy it bit by bit, but also the conscience to regret its loss.
Why should we bear this burden? When a grizzly bear mauls and kills a backpacker, it knows it is doing the right thing. Why should we have any doubts that trammeling the wilderness is the right thing for us to do?
Our doubts and uncertainty about what is right are the fruit / of the tree / of knowledge of good and evil. When we ate that fruit, we took a step away from the animals and toward becoming a likeness of God. But only a small step toward a very imperfect likeness. And now we struggle in between, no longer truly animals, but still far from God.
Animals live in total freedom because they know their place, without question. Because they are wild, they are free. Guided purely by their instinct to survive, they unerringly perform their role in the web of life.
We, on the other hand, because of our knowledge and the enormous, almost god-like power it brings, have choices to make. And nowadays these choices seem to be increasingly critical for ourselves and the whole community of life. Our knowledge of good and evil brings a heavy burden of responsibility upon us, so it is not surprising that some part of us may still be homesick for our wild, free life in the Garden of Eden, when our consciences were still clear. To enter the wilderness, however briefly, is like a homecoming.
This is how Carl Sandburg remembered his home in the wilderness:
THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes …
a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood-I keep
this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will
not let it go.
There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for
eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the
sun-I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let
it go.
There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates
… I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with
porpoises … before land was … before the water went down …
before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis.
There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle flies
among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags
of what I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon
before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of
hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes-And I got the
eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.
O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head,
under my red-valve heart-and I got something else: it is a man-child heart,
a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from
God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where-For I am the keeper of
the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the
world: I came from the wilderness.
