The Grace of the World

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and our children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water,

and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come to the presence of still waters.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light.

For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

~Wendell Berry

Land of Rest

The snowy woods.  Its silence is otherworldly.  I don't know what takes other guys into the woods, but for me it's mostly the silence.  And the solitude.  And the possibility of discovery.  There's a profoundly spiritual calm that settles over me when I've been in the woods--especially in winter, but not uniquely.  It doesn't have to be beautiful woods.  It doesn't have to be a long trek.  All I need is silence, an absence of distractions, and eventually a reasonably comfortable place to sit.

Once on Bear Mountain--just north of New York City on the Hudson River--I made a long trek through the snow and came across two Asians meditating.  They sat still as stones and didn't even acknowledge my presence.  I thought I'd just chanced upon the dead bodies of two guys who were just too stuffy and proud to fall over.  I had never seen anyone meditating in the forest before.  Now I do it, and to my knowledge, no one has ever witnessed it.

The worst thing about doing your spiritual practices in the snowy woods is that by the time you get up and hike back to your car, your body is no longer in perpetually-warm hiker mode.  Meditating in the snow puts the body and the mind on autopilot.  You've essentially turned off the inner furnace for 20 minutes, and the hike back can be pretty damn cold.  And yet, I live for it.  That sylvan fix is the one thing that makes everything else in my life possible.   

The Promise of Silence

The promise of silence is nearly as lifegiving as the actual experience of silence.  But not quite.  This morning as I prepared to go to the woods, I could have sung for joy.  It's been such a long time, and though it's not my favorite season, there is nothing like the forest under the snow of winter.  The silence is profound.  The solitude is usually perfectly unbroken.  Today, winter made its second cameo appearance in the season that bears its name.  I've missed the true winter, and today was a gift.  On Tuesday, we'll return to the high 40s. 

Here at last, in the second photo, are the "snow and jaggers" for which this melancholy little piece of Internet real estate is named.  This is State Game Lands #203--up in the North Hills; it's the only SGL in Allegheny County.  Of course, it's still deer hunting season, but only flintlock.  I figure if some hunter would 'accidentally' shoot an orange-bedecked hiker with musket and ball, then Providence is just out to get that poor hiker, and if it's not some antique-firearm lover, it will be a slow-moving postal delivery truck with its four way flashers blinking, or a bizarre grease fire in his own damn kitchen.  In other words, it would be almost unheard of to catch a stray musket ball.  Musket shooting is far less haphazard than other rifles.  Besides, it's not like up in the North Country--where angry fat men stay in cabins and hunt drunk.  

SGL 203 is nothing to get excited about.  It's a patch of woods being encroached upon by suburban development and the soulless subdivisions of the damned.  But it did the trick.  When there's snow, you don't need a trail; you can just follow your own footprints back out.  So I bushwhacked into the woods far enough that there were no road noises to be heard.  I made it to the summit of some unnamed hill--or a hill whose name is long since forgotten, and there I found a good spot to sit on a fallen tree.  As always, I sat in perfect stillness, perfect silence...this time for ten minutes.  Ideally, a good contemplative spell will last a minimum of twenty minutes.  I think it takes the body and spirit at least that long to get the point: "Hey guys!  No talking.  No moving.  No intentional thinking.  We're shutting down.  Pass it on!"  But I was so starved for the purity of the winter woods that the trancelike state came upon me within the second minute, and it didn't dissipate until I began to feel the snow beneath me melting into wet spots against my skin.  

I know the trancelike state very well.  It's one of the greatest joys of my living, and nowhere is it easier to achieve than in the winter woods.  In scientific language, it's just endorphins.  In religious language, it's a Zen-like place past emotion and care.  It's my drug.  It's my substance of choice.  It's the thing that keeps me coming back to the woods for more.  I tried to tell some Scouts about this at a recent pack meeting that I was invited to attend, but I don't think anyone quite got it... 

The Tenth Day of Christmas

Alas, I've got Lyme's disease.  It struck in the form of swelling and intense pain in the knee on the morning of Christmas Eve, resulting in a wife-induced ER visit on Christmas night.  I suppose I should have expected it, given my lifestyle...

The snow has come at last, and it's more than welcome, although I sure hate having to shovel my driveway four--yes four!--times in a single day.  It is at last a thoroughly white Christmas, though not until the Tenth Day of Christmastide.  Traffic into the city today was slower than a scooter ride across the Rockies.

Tunnels

You start off believing that the rules are simple, that life is overseen by responsible grownups who know a lot more than you do, and they can be trusted.  And if the grownups don't always have your best interests at heart, then there's always a higher authority, perhaps even an all-knowing Deity, who will make everything okay in the end.  Things happen for a reason, and even if tragedy strikes, it's okay because Someone Somewhere knows why things had to go down the way they did.  

In time, your grownups disappoint you, or they demonstrate their fallibility, and the whole notion of a Supreme Being begins to have a suspiciously Santa-Claus-like ring to it.  The key is to trade certainty for hope.  Instead of "believing in" things, I've had to start simply "hoping for" things.  I've found that, in this way, I've been able to maintain a sense of wonder and awe alongside a healthy degree of skepticism.  

The things that I actually believe in are few, which can make life hard in my line of work.  I believe that life is good; love is real; and dreams are worth pursuing.  I believe that light will always dispel darkness, but only when it's time.  I believe that death is not the enemy.  

And yet, the things I hope for are many.  I hope that perfect love will finally cast out fear.  I hope that there is indeed a joy that outlives sorrow.  I hope that--somewhere, somehow--life will have the last word, in the end.  Hell, and since hopes don't have to make sense, I even dare to hope that I'll see my maternal grandmother somewhere on the other side of Mystery.  I can't quite believe it, but I do hope it, because she was the kindest, wisest adult I ever knew--until I became an adult myself, of course.  

In a way, you get your Supreme Being restored to you, but now instead of an all-knowing Parent, he or she is the deathless spirit of love, the force of life itself, the breath of life within us.  

The Quest for Illusions

 The old, familiar joy--at last--to feel the bracing cold of winter as I stride out into the Big World!  A dismal season of endless rain and 45 degree temps lingered far too long.  Although my recent outings have been largely limited to the local rail trails, due to hunting season, it was freeing and restorative to feel the cold wind searching my outer layers of clothing for even the tiniest point of entry.  Besides, one good thing about walking the rail trails in the winter is that you get to pass through the old rail-towns like the slow ghost of some long-ago steam engine.  The above scene of wintry desolation is the tired-out old borough of Imperial. I always thought it seemed like a dingy place from Route 30, but from the Montour Trail, it has charms.

 A part of me really hates life in the 'burbs.  Even though my career is far more successful here, and folks here tend to understand me a lot better than they did up North, on the whole I found life in the country more to my liking.  I've lived inside large cities before, and would do it again if I had to.  Every city has its own distinct spirit and style.  A fine city like Pittsburgh takes decades to discover and offers new adventures all the time.  But this indistinct place between city and country puzzles me.  Actually, I've been a little dysthymic ever since we moved down here a year and a half ago.  But there's a sad, forlorn loveliness to the worn-out landscape around the the edges of the former Montour Railroad.  

When I was a child, I trusted the eponymous "sylvan" hills that provide the backdrop for all of life in this part of Pennsylvania.   I knew that those hills were my native place, and believed that they would take me back and shelter me...if I asked them to.  Theirs was the power to take me in, give me refuge.  Somehow, I believed that if I could only wander up onto the steep, wooded hillsides at the edge of any town--Kittanning, Oil City, Franklin--then I could escape into a vast wilderness, as free and unencumbered as Grizzly Adams.  Now, of course, I know that most of those hills just have valleys with roads and buildings on the other side.  But my weekly hikes are still an old, old quest to maintain the illusion that there's fuller life, freer life, just around the bend and over the hill.  Much of life's happiness is in the ability to maintain healthy illusions.  

Le Soleil d'Hiver

The Montour Trail is a last resort for me.  It's typically too crowded.  But if you pick a chilly gray December day, with the slightest dusting of snow on the ground, you probably won't run into anyone.  Besides, the stretch from US-22 northward to Imperial is---though postindustrial---somehow otherworldly...in a good way.  If not for a hint of seedy Appalachian neglect, the little settlements along the trail would have a toy-like quality, reminiscent of the miniature Christmas villages of a toy train set.