Category: Desert

Affirmation, Cancer, Cancer treatments, Creator, Darkness, death, Desert, Dying to Self, Faithful Living, God, Heaven, Lessons from the Wilderness, Life's Storms, Mary Oliver, Pilgrimage, Uncategorized

Pilgrim

This Side of the River

Another brother has cancer.

We are not stunned like we were with Hugh. All the same, it’s another round of watching and waiting and praying it through.  It is true: our body ages and decays in this broken world. I have never stopped wondering at the marvel: that we are created body, soul, and spirit together. An amalgamation of identity and being. It isn’t an integration where one is a receptacle for the other, like lock and key, but blended, so tangled up together that they cannot be distinctly teased out.

It is a ONENESS that defies full description, almost impossible to appreciate or embrace but for a blind faith in God who is himself three yet one.

So, when our body gives way to time, disease, unlucky genes, and the random tragedies of this earthly life, we spend most of our resources on trying to eradicate the physical dis-ease with drugs and surgery, while often ignoring the impact this all has on our whole self.

It’s easy to forget that the wilderness, which we seek out for its inherent beauty, quietness, and solitude is also constrained by the world’s brokenness. We tend to think, wrongly, that the wilderness is eternal, unchangeable. But, even its fullness is stained by decay, predation, random fire or flood; dangers lurk in its untamed, and indifferent beauty.

Upon hearing her own cancer diagnosis, poet Mary Oliver wrote,

Why should I have been surprised?  

           Hunters walk the forest without a sound. 

           The hunter, strapped to his rifle,

            the fox on his feet of silk,

            the serpent on his empire of muscles-

            all move in stillness,

            hungry, careful, intent.

            Just as the cancer entered the forest of my body,

            without a sound.*

The same goes with us. Though God promises us eternal life –conditional on our recognition and acknowledgement that we cannot save ourselves- we walk as pilgrims through (rarely around) life’s wilderness and dangers. And, for each of us, there is an appointed day in which the shroud of our whole self is forever torn by death, our body returned to the dust from which it came. What was once whole is now separated, that our soul and spirit can rise unburdened to God. Who can explain it?

And so we go forward, hand in hand in the hope of healing for our brother, the one who’s “got next”. If God is for us, who -or what- can be against us? We call the treatment of cancer a battle, and its eradication a victory. A curious thing, that it is couched in war language. But, it’s not just our physical self that is saved is it? All through the wilderness of living is the battle, often unseen, for our soul and spirit too. God wants, he demands that we yield all of what and who we are, cancer or no. On this side of the river, you just can’t be whole without it.

~J.A.P. Walton

* Mary Oliver. “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac” in Blue Horses.2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

adventure, Blessings, Creation, Creator, Desert, Faithful Living, God, Henri Nouwen, hiking, Lessons from the Wilderness, Nature, Outdoor Adventures, Perseverence, River, Silence, Uncategorized, wilderness, Zion National Park

Always Worth the Climb

This Side of the River

Let me tell you about a day I spent alone in Zion National Park last month.  My husband and brother-in-law set off at 7:30 a.m. to hike the Narrows, the most popular hike in the park.  The Narrows is a train of steep, high canyon walls along the Virgin River, and the only “trail” is upstream through the river itself.  The fellows wanted to hike a minimum of 6 hours upstream, then back in knee-deep water hiding infinite ankle-twisting hazards. Not wanting to go that far, nor get my feet wet (or my ankle broken a 2nd time), I opted for the more moderate 3-mile hike on the Watchman trail, followed by an hour in the museum, an afternoon nap in the shade of a giant oak at the lodge, topped off with a cappuccino from the coffee cart.  Not exactly “wilderness” but delightful nonetheless.

The Watchman is an uphill trail along a dusty, rocky path of switchbacks and ledges on the south and west sides of the east-side canyon wall.  In the early morning, when I hiked, it is gracefully shady and cool, and much less crowded with hikers (Zion N.P. has 5 million visitors per year, so it’s not a place to seek out wilderness per se).  The trail begins at the Virgin River and rises about 600 feet to a football field-sized outcrop with a 270-degree view of the park. I found myself thinking about the men of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) who built this trail in 1934.  CCC  Who were they? Could they conceive of the millions of people who would hike here for the next 100 years?

Toting 64 oz. of water, two granola bars, an apple, a hiking hat, my camera, and hiking poles, I set off alone, thinking of the distinctions Henri Nouwen makes between loneliness and solitude. It can feel lonely hiking alone in such a beautiful, magnificent place because there is no friend or lover to share the experience.  But, Nouwen insists that solitude does not depend on outer circumstance, rather an inner orientation of solitary rest that underpins our spiritual health.[1]   I did feel lonely at times, but it was also an inspiring, uplifting, strangely restful day in the canyon.  Besides, I made a few friends along the way.

I had silly conversations with a chatty canyon wren that was flitting gaily amongst the juniper and prickly pear.

I spent 10 minutes studying a green lizard near a wet patch of seep, and kept busy sweeping the heights with binoculars in search of peregrine falcon and California condor.  I saw mule deer with their laughably large, light-filtering, body-cooling ears.  I kept watch for the western rattlesnake.  (Since I am easily startled, I like animals and people who make noise to announce their presence).

Still, it was already pushing 80 degrees, this was an upwards hike, and because I am prone to acute altitude sickness, I had to rest often, yet keep going, albeit slowly, watching carefully where I put my feet, and leaning -sometimes too heavily- on my trusty hiking poles.  About halfway up, some people approached coming down.  And I thought I had started out early!  Then commenced the “dance” that occurs on narrow, gritty trails alongside high, dizzying ridges- no one ever wants the outside position, nor do you want to flatten your back along the canyon wall looking “craven” -as they’d say in Game of Thrones.  Onward and upward, through pinion pine, scrub oak, mosses and ferns doggedly rooted in the sandstone cracks and seeps until I was nearly level with the tree line. Here, the trail turned abruptly southward, still climbing toward a large plateau just made for walking, sitting, snacking, sunning, and thinking.  There were about 30 people already here, and more streaming in behind me, but I had the strange feeling that I had the place to myself.  That is the inner serenity that Nouwen speaks to, and that nature beckons us to immerse ourselves in.

The views are always the reward for hiking up.

True, I didn’t hike a Rocky Mountain 14er, but I was pleased with myself nonetheless.  With the binoculars, I could make out our old RV in the far parking lot, and the throngs of people at the Visitors Center.  To think this was all carved out by the Virgin River over time.

It made me wonder what God is carving out, ever so slowly in my life, and if the result is as beautiful as all this. And that unfolded another secret of solitude: it creates in us a deep, inner, carved-out space for the Spirit of God. Always worth the climb.

~J.A.P. Walton

[1]Henri J.M Nouwen.  Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life.1966.

adventure, Adventure Tourism, Bryce Canyon National Park, Camping, Creation, Creator, Desert, God, hiking, Hope, Lessons from the Wilderness, Mountains, Nature, Outdoor Adventures, Praise, River, Starry Skies, Uncategorized, Water, wisdom, Zion National Park

Thin Air, Thick Dust, Beauty All Around

This Side of the River

It is good to be home in Michigan after a 3-week spell in Arizona and Utah. Here, I can drink deep draughts of the autumnal palette of green, vermillion, orange and gold, reveling in this bounty of colors so much rarer in the western landscape.

Phoenix was particularly hot and dry where the greenish-yellow of the prickly pear and saguaro cacti stands in base-relief against the purple of distant mountains. Here, the only deep greens are on the golf course, watered with precious and dwindling flows from the Colorado River, and on the cell phone towers painted green to look like giant saguaros.

Climbing out of the desert into the high mesas to the north, the landscape changes in an instant. The cactus and sand give way to rock and bristlecone pine at the higher elevations. In appearance it seems an unforgiving landscape, but

the Hopi and Navajo have lived here for a thousand years, “thriving long in adverse conditions: poor soil, drought, temperature extremes, high winds.”*

Past the Grand Canyon and on into southern Utah, aspen join the autumn chorus, waving golden, glittering arms in gladness. Here, the weathered rock cathedrals tower, where sandstone is king, and sagebrush his queen as they reign over free-ranging cattle on a thousand hills. Here is the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, those life-giving ribbons of water, home to the pronghorn antelope, nattering prairie dog, and swift peregrine falcon. Here, too, is Zion, a river-carved fortress of sheer honeyed walls, and Bryce, with its colorful hoodoo armies blown by winds like fine glass.( Zion National Park   and Bryce Canyon National Park )

It is an entirely different kind of wilderness than what we experience in northern Michigan and southern Ontario.  Here, damp, verdant, fertile. Out west, thin air thick with dust, where the only immediately visible abundance for hundreds of miles is rock. To be sure, both are beautiful in their own ways. Both point to an imaginative Creator, who paints with a bold and vibrant palette.  Both give us the same gifts that wilderness always gives: delight in its bigness, contentedness with our own smallness, hope that life and beauty abound wherever we find ourselves, and that

nothing on this earth is godforsaken at all.

~ J.A.P. Walton

* William Least Heat Moon. Blue Highways. Chapter 2.