I visit without a timepiece; without identification; and without any contact device to the modern world from which I come. I anticipate an insightful experience transcending time and space itself. Cañon del Oro is the name of the Sonoran desert river wash in which I have grown accustomed to walking and reflecting the past 3 years, since moving to Tucson. This time, the fresh morning rains have provided a rare setting of flowing water in which to frame the moment. The moist ground reveals the tracks of my ever-present yet rarely seen, Coyote neighbors. I locate the spot where I will join myself to the land in contemplative meditation.
This was our assignment. The Environmental Sociology 333 class has to find a place in nature to sit and contemplate for 30 minutes and record our experience. One, two, three deep breaths of the brisk blowing air and I open my eyes. I open my mind. I open my heart.
I am not an environmentalist. I am not a tree-hugger nor do I consider myself sensitive to such ideals. A farm boy from the Midwest, I am conservative, pragmatic, utilitarian. The Earth is my temporary home but not my final destination. I see it as the physical realm, the superficial realm, the world of shadows behind which lies the meaning and purpose of existence. Nevertheless, I am open to the exercise. I am willing to give it my all. So I sit. I breathe. I open.
A deluge of light floods in. Faster than I can think, 90,000 bits of information are transmitted to my brain each second. I process and translate the information into 400 thoughts per minute. Each thought contains pictures, ideas, and… and… music? Is that music? Yes, but what is it playing… a melody?, no… not even harmony. It’s a minor key. It’s the sound of mourning; a mournful dirge over a great loss.
Behind the green plants, the fresh sprouting life, the birds in flight, the buzz of busyness in my ears, there’s the dirge. Beyond the hope and promise of many more tomorrows as the cycles ebb and flow endlessly, there’s the dirge. Underneath the surface and deeper than the shell of Earth’s crust are millennia of lost civilizations, the spilled blood of innocents, and tombs of long forgotten ancestors. While we mourn the loss of a few, the land suffers the loss of every single soul. Stillborn in the womb of time, who can transcend? Who can escape? And so the dirge plays on.
Do I feel connected? Outwardly, in a sense, yes. I share the same 118 known basal elements. My carbon-based body will return to the dust on which I sit. Yet I feel foreign, uncomfortable, unsettled. Just as there is more to me than meets the eye, more to “being” than meets the eye, there must be something behind the curtain of land before me. Alongside the reaching branches and flowering buds I see the drooping and tangling as well. Amidst the evidence of design and organized systems of kingdom and phylum I see a random chaos. The constancy of change through the monotony of eons can be felt but only appreciated in an objective sense. The inevitability of destiny is before me. The anxious awaiting of the creation for some yet-to-be revelation is my subjective reality.
I thought the birds were singing for joy. Now I realize what they are saying; “Hurry up! Destiny awaits.” We all rejoice to see new life spring out of the death-laden land. New life means escape. It means freedom. It means independence! But alas, every living thing returns in death and we realize we have deceived ourselves with a false consolation. We hold on to hope beyond hope that there is something more, something beyond, something invisible yet more real than my own physicalness. And today I detect the evidence.
Something invisible yet very tangible is all around me. The breath. The wind. The spirit. The atmosphere is heaving with expression. I see its effects in every tree. I can’t grasp it nor control it. The earth is within it and subject to it. The land’s very shape is determined by it. Alas, there is hope. There is purpose. There is something beyond this terrestrial ball floating in a galaxy that is hurtling through space at a speed of 200 feet per second on a collision course with a neighboring galaxy. Everything physical points to futility. But the invisible wind, the breath, the spirit, points to something more, something we can’t see, but sense and know must be.
So I look upon the land and I see the shadows. These are the shadows of everything real. The shadows are seen with my eyes which are themselves shadows of my very being. Beyond the land, beyond sight, touch, taste and smell, beyond the restless surface on which I sit, there is the mystery, the purpose, my destiny. It’s unseen to the naked eye. But I know it’s there like I know the wind; not because I see it but because I see it’s effect on everything else. But millennia have come and gone and the death has been borne by the land, absorbed by the land. And the dirge plays on.
