Wolves

The story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio occasions the author’s trek into the Absaroka Mountains near Yellowstone, entering a territory where gray wolves have thrived since being reintroduced the 1990s. The inordinate hatred of wolves in Western thought is contrasted with Francis’s concern not to kill (or even to tame) the wolf, but to welcome it into a larger family where all species can thrive. Over the centuries the wolf’s stealthy elusiveness has led us to project a sinister quality onto these extraordinary animals. Barry Lopez speaks of our theriophobia, our irrational, deep-seated fear of the “beast.” It evokes an impulse to kill what we don’t understand. Yet gradually we’re learning to appreciate wolves without demonizing (or romanticizing) them. By the time Aldo Leopold wrote his Sand County Almanac, you could discern a shift in societal perceptions of apex predators. He spoke of grieving as he knelt beside a wolf he had shot, watching “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” He also noticed how the absence of wolves allowed the deer population to explode, with every edible tree stripped of its leaves.

Caves

After his conversion, Ignatius of Loyola stopped in Manresa, Spain, on his way to the Holy Land. There he entered into a dark period of depression, staying in a cave for several months outside of town where he wrote his Spiritual Exercises. Caves evoke an uncommon terror even as they disclose a treasured wisdom. Tales of descending into a dark cave and finding your way out again run through the literature and folklore of many cultures—from Theseus in his labyrinth on Crete to the cave in the Misty Mountains where Bilbo Baggins found Gollum’s “Precious,” the ring of power. But the cave is also the womb of Mother Earth, a place of birth and renewal. In Plato’s myth of the cave, the philosopher moves through a world of shadows into the light of reason and beauty. St. Benedict lived in a cave in the mountains southeast of Rome for three years before starting his monastic community. Muhammad, in a cave on Mount Hira, heard the voice of the Angel Gabriel reciting the words of the holy Quran. The underground chamber becomes a portal between worlds—a place of illumination where the hero finds the dragon’s treasure, where new life emerges. The author explores this reality as he spends a night alone in the depths of a Missouri cave, entering into something of Ignatius’ own experience of Jesus.

Mountains

Does a mountain topography lend itself to group solidarity, ecstatic spiritual experience, and social isolation? The author asks this question as he compares Pentecostal communities in the Arkansas Ozarks to the rise of the Hasidic movement in Carpathian Mountains of eighteenth-century Ukraine. Mountains have been universally revered as places of divine/human encounter—from Machu Picchu in Peru and Mount Olympus in Greece to Mount Sinai in Egypt and the five sacred mountains of China. Mountains are places of transformation. Alchemists in the Middle Ages regarded the mountain peak as “the philosopher’s oven.” The Baal Shem Tov, founder of the modern Hasidic movement, argued that authentic spiritual knowledge was best found among the simple, unpretentious people of the mountain villages. These were the shoemakers, chicken farmers, tailors, and innkeepers who made up his followers. He pointed out that God had appeared to Moses in an ordinary thorn bush, set aflame in the desert. “It is in the simple folk—the ‘lowly’ thorn-bush,” he said, “that this insatiable Divine flame is found.”

Conclusion

The conclusion deals with four pressing questions raised by the book—scientific, philosophical, theological, and ethical. Is this notion of a Great Conversation simply a fanciful idea or is it a truth whose time has come? How do we widen our skills in listening and responding to the “others”? How do we conceive of God as playing a role in this conversation? And given the current ecological crisis, what are the ethical implications of all this? Forest biologists like Suzanne Simard, Peter Wohlleben, and Robin Wall Kimmerer have done exciting work in researching the communicative capacities of trees. Creative efforts at interspecies communication in general have been pursued by Celia Deane-Drummond, Luther Burbank, Jim Nollman, and Buck Brannaman. Those who have explored God’s wild and creative relationship to nature include Annie Dillard, Wlater Kasper, and John Haught. Joanna Macy and Elizabeth Johnson emphasize the importance of our listening to the rest of the natural world as a starting point in the exercise of ecological responsibility.

Islands

Islands have a way of reconfiguring the center. Off on the edge, away from the mainland, they speak of difference, resilience, and self-reliance. Islands can symbolize the heart of human darkness, reminding us of what happens in insolated places when law and morality break down. Think of the schoolboys in The Lord of the Flies or the mutineers of the Bounty on Pitcairn Island. Yet islands are also symbols of paradise and the highest human aspirations as well. In Greek mythology, access to the Elysian Fields came by way of the Fortunate Isles lying in the mists off the West African coast. St. Augustine thought the Garden of Eden continued to exist on a remote, inaccessible island. Saint Brendan, the Celtic navigator, claimed to have discovered a thickly wooded island paradise shrouded in the fog off the western sea. The writings of Nikos Kazantzakis draw their power from the life he knew on the island of Crete. When the call for wildness, passion, and resistance is strong in your life—when you have to stop playing it safe—his novels strike a rich chord. The author reflects on the mystery of “islandness” and the teachings of Kazantzakis in connection with a trip he made to Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine.

Canyons

The red-rock canyons of Utah have long beguiled geologists and depth psychologists alike. The way a river makes its serpentine cut through sandstone walls speaks to the value of carving out a void in the center of one’s life. Canyons carry the soul into unfinished grief—into the pain we’ve stifled, the secrets we’ve hid, the depression we’ve feared. Deep chasms know the grinding action of stone scraped away, grain by grain, over millions of years. They’re conversant with dark shadows. Canyons also carry the soul into the quiet acceptance of the Daoist master as seen in the Dao Te Ching. Learning to flow amid the harried pressures of midlife is a transformation we all seek. The Way of the Dao isn’t a doctrine; it’s a manner of life. It isn’t bound to any faith tradition. You might summarize it as a book about the wisdom of canyons, teaching the receptivity of a deep ravine. It asks: How do you empty yourself of chatter, unnecessary activity, the compulsive needs of the ego?

Stars

The stars have always fascinated poets and astronomers alike. Early Greek philosophers imagined a music of the spheres—a musica universalis—produced by the heavenly bodies. The sun, moon, planets, and stars, said Pythagoras, all emit their own unique hum, an orbital resonance based on the mathematical harmony of their movements. Number, motion, harmonics, mystery: These are the rhetoric of the stars. Origen of Alexandria, the third-century Christian theologian, drew on Plato and others before him in contending that the stars were living beings, actively engaged in praising God and assisting human life. In the twelfth century, the Mississippian people at the Cahokia Mounds site near East St. Louis carefully studied the rising of the sun and stars at important times of the year. The Cahokians created a habitable cosmos by perceiving the stars as the living source of their cultural and religious life. They built more than a hundred mounds and five wood-henges in order to carefully measure solstices, equinoxes, and star risings. They monitored the ascent of celestial objects like Venus and the star cluster we know as the Pleiades. On the winter solstice, the author spends a cold, wet night atop Monk’s Mound, awaiting the rising of the Pleiades himself.

Falling in Love with a Tree

Communication in its deepest form is rooted in a shared vulnerability. This is especially true of humans and the world of nature today. The threat of climate change and habitat destruction make us all increasingly vulnerable. The threat to natural wilderness forces us into the inner wilderness of the human psyche. There, the power of shared grief opens us to the possibility of loving the “others” and not simply using them as disposable things. The author speaks of a shared vulnerability as the basis for his communication with Grandfather, the cottonwood tree. He goes on to speak of four stages in the development of their relationship—moving from being a user to becoming an explorer to evolving into a celebrant and finally emerging as a lover.

Introduction

The book’s themes grew out of the author’s experience with a cottonwood tree he calls Grandfather. As the pattern unfolds in the chapters, he shows how twelve teachers in the natural world might be used as spiritual guides through the four stages of one’s life—as child, adolescent, adult, and elder. These teachers are now facing an overwhelming threat—due to climate change, habitat destruction, the use of pesticides and herbicides. They call us to a celebration of all that still lives—and to a language of lament that gives birth to action. The author reminds readers that we’re part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it. The earth yearns to teach us languages we didn’t even know existed.

Rivers

There is more to rivers than what we see. They flow in pockets underground as well as above. This hidden area of a river’s flow is its hyporheic zone, a subterranean ecosystem with its own forms of life—fungi, insects, and crustaceans that may never see the light of day. This lends the river an added mystery, seen in the Lost Creek Wilderness of Colorado—a stream that surfaces, then disappears again, eleven times on its way through the Rockies. Teresa of Avila was fascinated by water as a symbol of renewal in the spiritual life, offering four ways of watering a garden in dry terrain. “I don’t find anything more appropriate to explain some spiritual experiences than water,” she said. “I am so fond of this element that I’ve observed it more attentively than any other.” For her, the divine presence was alternately visible and invisible, revealed and hidden, an elusive yet ever-running river flowing through the high desert country of her life. It might go for years without breaking the surface, then erupt into effusions of indescribable joy.