I came to understand what  places have meant in my life when the places I cared for most were lost to me. It’s a loss that’s particularly acute if you happen to lose a place where you spent your childhood years. And the effect of such a loss is pretty much the same whether the place was lost to fire or foreclosure or whether it was demolished to make way for “development,” the latter being a means whereby whole neighborhoods are lost, with shopping malls and subdivisions substituting themselves for familiar neighborhoods you’ve known since you were a baby.

I know this loss first hand. I was born and raised in Southern California’s Orange County at a time when the entire county consisted of family farms along with a smattering of small towns whose high school graduating classes numbered fewer than a hundred graduates in any one year. If you went to school at Tustin, Orange, Costa Mesa, Newport, Santa Ana, or Garden Grove (as I did), virtually the only distinction to be noted between one school and another would be those of the school colors and which basketball or football team you cheered for. So while we had our differences, we were nonetheless a cohesive society and our cohesiveness resided in the land we shared. We all knew the intimate workings of the alfalfa, vegetable, and bean fields, the dairies and hog farms, the poultry farms, the walnut and orange orchards that spread across the county. These were the places where we lived out our lives. And just as our various farms bounded each other along fencerows and irrigation canals, so too did we sit comfortably side by side in the high school auditorium to watch the annual senior class play. We all had farms on our minds, and so wherever we happened to meet each other–either there in the school auditorium or the town hall or Schneider’s Market or Ogden’s Pharmacy or Alber’s Feed Store—we met in a bond of mutual understanding known to us without explanation or prompting.

To have a farm on your mind is to be in dialogue with a piece of land. It’s a conversation that’s never finished because the circumstances of place continually change and what you need from the land and what the land needs from you is forever variable. When the dialogue is broken and the conversation terminated, the subsequent loss is irreversible. The irreversible loss of Orange County occurred when the living land was reduced to mere location. The fields we’d come to know by patient attention and respectful care, and upon which we depended not only for our livelihoods but for whatever community we held in common as well, these same fields were being newly calculated as simple acreages, a cost factor, a commodity for exploitation by corporate development.

In 1949, the year before I graduated from Garden Grove High, my algebra teacher, “Pop” Eidelson, sold his orange orchard to the Disney Corporation as a site for the proposed Disneyland. It was the beginning of the end of the Orange County that I or any of us who’d spent our lives there would ever be able to recognize as home. Pop Eidelson’s orchard was one of the best, but from the time the sale closed escrow, the trees were never again watered, nor the field fertilized, nor any of the surviving fruit picked. As an orchard, Pop Eidelson’s land was simply worth nothing to its new Disney Corporation owners, its entire value reduced to a space for eventual construction. The field was soon fenced off to prevent trespass, and from outside the enclosure we watched Pop Eidelson’s trees wither and die, an occurrence emblematic of the pending fate of an entire county, whose contract with the living earth would soon be so undermined that nothing would be left of the age old faith we’d once shared with each other and the land.

One by one the farms were sold to developers whose eagerness to cash in on the building boom elevated property values beyond anything farming could ever justify. And with property taxes based on market value rather than use, many families simply couldn’t hold on to their own land. Not only that but the growth of agribusiness increasingly threatened the survival of family farmers who found themselves paying more to raise a crop than it could be sold for. Three years without a profit and further into debt, the Jensen family sold their farm to keep from losing it to their creditors. I was away at the time, drafted into the army and serving overseas. And by the time, I’d married and worked my way through college with the aid of the GI Bill and taken up teaching at a northern California college, nothing of the Orange County I once knew had survived the onslaught. The Jensen farm, where we’d carried on the ancient tradition of farming with horses, was buried under a shopping mall—the horse pasture, the garden, the fruit orchard, the grape arbor, the house and yard with its lawn, the sycamore trees and Chinese elms, all had disappeared under an asphalt parking lot. Shoppers were parking their cars on the very spot where the Jensen family once gathered round the table for evening meals.

All across the county you could find the newly displaced residents of Orange County, old farm couples who like my parents had taken the profits from the sale of their land and retired, living like refugees in one of the endless subdivisions that characterized the instant metropolis that had overwhelmed their lives. You could find them killing time at Harvey’s Barber Shop or Natty’s Tea House or one of the few original businesses that had survived the expansion and modernization of the county’s towns. In Garden Grove, Alber’s Feed Store was reduced to selling pet food and supplies, but a few of the old farmers could be found sitting on the loading platform, talking of hay and dairy feed and alfalfa prices as though such still existed. I knew it was more than land that was lost, when I saw my father carting home a dozen ceramic squirrels to perch in the limbs of an ornamental olive tree that the subdivision landscape plan had allotted for the backyards of every one of its lots. This was a man who’d been coaxing life out of dirt since he was a boy in a farming village in Denmark, and now without any dirt to coax anything out of, the frame of mind that had sustained his bond with the living earth was reduced to this pathetic purchase of his at the Tustin Garden Shop.

There was at least one “hold out” that wouldn’t sell. And perhaps better than anything else I might have witnessed, their plight measured the extent of the county’s loss. Their names were Jim and Celia Warner, an old farming couple, who with the help of their eldest son George farmed a small acreage of vegetable crops. They lived on one of the county’s original dirt roads in a yellow two-story farmhouse with double-hung windows trimmed in blue and a wide elevated front porch with steps leading up to the door. They’d once bought the place for something less than $8,000 and raised four children there, all of whom had married and moved away except George who remained home and helped keep the farm going. When the neighboring farms joined into an agreement to sell to a development company that planned an extensive housing and shopping project for the site, the Warners refused to join with them and, since their property was essential to the developer’s plans, their refusal pretty much ruined the deal for everyone else. Eventually the development company went ahead and closed the deal with the others, calculating that sooner or later the Warners would have to give in.

And they did to a degree, forced to sell off portions of their farm to pay the property taxes on what was left. In the end, they were left with only the house itself with its back yard garden and ancient weeping willow tree. Their house was at best a curiosity and at worst an eyesore to the county’s new inhabitants. You could drive by and see the old relic with the back yard willow drooping like a flag of defeat, a shiny new Chevron station backed right up to the property line, the dirt road paved over and widened to four lanes, which, by the process of eminent domain had sliced off the Warner’s front yard, leaving the porch steps descending directly onto the pavement. They died there–Jim Warner first, Celia soon after—in their $8,000 house with its little back yard garden, one of the last vestiges of original Orange County farm land. When the old house was eventually demolished to make way for a drive thru Starbucks, I saw in its demise that it was not merely one more house and farm that was lost, but that the county itself was lost, all it’s distinctive character of place gone and the community of people who wrote out that character in deep affinity with the living earth gone as well. Those who were driven out of the county and those who stayed behind were both equally refugees, victims of “dis-place-ment.”

When we’ve lost our place were like transplanted trees whose roots long for native soil. A bond has been broken that can’t easily be put together again. The once living soil of Orange County now lies buried beneath sidewalks, streets, parking lots, and the foundations of endless buildings strung side by side from the mountains to the sea. For those of us who’ve known the county’s farms and fields, a return to the county is like a visit to a vast graveyard where earth itself has been entombed. “Out of sight, out of mind,” an old saying goes. And so for Orange County’s current residents, the land that lies beneath their very feet is out of mind. When something is out of mind, it’s not likely to be valued, and if what happens to be out of mind is the earth upon which our own continued existence depends, we’re in trouble. “Orange Counties” of whatever name they happen to be called have sprung up across the whole expanse of our nation, and generations of youngsters are growing up with no more intimate exchange with the earth than is accorded by an annual pilgrimage to a National Park. For these young ones the ancient dialogue with the land has been effectively broken.

Like so many others of my generation, I’ve witnessed the place of my birth, indeed the world of my birth, erased like incidental words from a blackboard never to be rewritten again. I fear what this loss of place portends for each of us, humans and otherwise. Will we lose the wisdom that earth itself teaches? We need to go home again, and we need to remember that our real home is the very dirt under our feet. It was a footing we were once intimate with.

Trail markers are a language of walkers. To come upon a trail marker on your walk is to engage in a mute conversation with one who has walked that way before. I’m not talking here about the signs that the Forest Service posts along the established trails in our national parks, forests, and designated wilderness areas. Such signs are useful to hikers, pointing out directions to known destinations and often indicating in miles the distance to be walked. Those are the authorized markers of established routes and more akin to freeway signs and traffic lights than to the unauthorized markers of alternate routes left by variant walkers wherever they might stray from the beaten path. It’s these incidental markers of chance occasion that constitute the conversation among walkers that I have in mind.

Hiking a trail once in the Amargoso River Preserve southeast of Death Valley, I came to a place where the official trail swung to the right along the brushy banks of the river and where a kind of lateral canyon opened up to the left.  The canyon looked inviting but the desert in that area is difficult for cross-country, so I thought I’d better stick to the trail. But then I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. At the mouth of the canyon was a trail marker, a little pile of stones balanced one on top of the other. Someone had gone that way before and had left an invitation for others to follow, and so I accepted the invitation. A little further up the canyon, I found the second trail marker. And then a third. And then another, and another, leading me through all the necessary twists and turns to avoid an otherwise brushy tangle of desert scrub. The last of the trail markers led me to where the canyon opened out and I found myself on a high rise above the whole sweep of the Amargoso River Valley. Up there, a stiff wind rattled the desert brush. Ravens soared along the cliff faces. In the far distance, red rock plateaus were cast into alternate light and dark as thunderheads formed overhead. In the valley below, the river twisted among the smoke trees and cottonwoods. Someone was the first to come this way, an event that was inevitable. Others marked the path piling stone on stone. I in turn had followed in their steps, casting yet another vote for the preservation of the way.

Trail markers can show up in unexpected places and lead to varied destinations. Hiking a streamside trail on the upper San Joaquin River, I spotted a trail marker on the opposite bank. This one was a true trail duck with a flattened stone placed on top to project like a beak and pointing in a direction upstream. From my side, the far bank looked thick with brush and impassable. But I was curious enough about the marker to wade the waist deep waters and find out where the trail duck might lead. On the other side, I discovered a thin slip of a footpath where one could squeeze through the brush until it opened out into a clearing on a rise above the river. The clearing held a primitive campsite with a stone ring for a fire and a square of blackened grate to cook on. A little pile of twigs and limbs lay stacked neatly at the edge of the clearing. A faded note printed on a scrap of yellowed paper and tacked to the trunk of an overhanging Ponderosa pine could be still be made out to read “Welcome.” It was the best campsite one could hope for, and so I accepted the invitation. I caught  fish to cook over a fire with wood my host had left for me and stayed the night there in the lingering presence of his company.

A trail can be marked by as little as a footprint. In April of 1963, Colin Fletcher climbed below the rim of the Grand Canyon and set out to walk the full length of Grand Canyon National Park. He was the second person to have ever walked the distance this and the first to do it in a single try. The canyon is marked by what Colin called “hanging terraces” described as “narrow steeply sloping ledges that often extend mile after mile as precarious steps between successive cliff faces.” On one of these terraces in a sudden flurry of snow when the available footing had narrowed to a marginal foot or two on the lip of a sheer drop to certain death should he misjudge and fall, Colin suddenly saw a trail of footprints tracked in soft mud showing him how to proceed. Harvey Butchart, Colin’s advisor on the hike, knowing how difficult this particular passage might be, had come down from the rim to scout the way and in doing so had inadvertently left the prints that Colin in his perplexity now chanced upon. Colin said of the event, “I found something obscurely yet warmly companionable about these footsteps.”

And so do we all feel a degree of warmth and companionship when in our solitary travels we come upon the footprints of those who’ve gone our way before us. It might well be like this for the aspiring actor or actress pausing before the footprints embedded in the concrete forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or for the young artist gazing at the tracks left on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo. For a time, we feel less uncertain and alone knowing we are following in the footsteps of another.

As a writer one the of trail markers that interests me is that of sentence punctuation, a system of marking that occupies a grammatical sector between convention and innovation. Convention is admittedly essential inasmuch as a colon, semi-colon, comma, period, quotation mark, question mark, exclamation point, and apostrophe are markers with discrete meanings that must be maintained or the intended function of punctuation fails to serve its purpose. If I were to punctuate haphazardly without regard to how the sentence is meant to be read, you’d be stumbling over this sentence right now, misreading and having to backtrack in order to make sense of it. But within that single limit of sentence coherence, a writer is free to punctuate as he sees fit. Innovative punctuation is a ready means to loosen up conventional expectations and lay out markers of personal dissent. This is not a small matter: a writer’s “style” of punctuation carries the sound and character of an individual voice. Innovative punctuation has a feel to it that’s lost if one is merely conventional. Strict accord dictates predictably strict results.

If getting to a known destination by the most efficient means were the only aim of life’s travels, there’d be no point in dissent and no markers left to suggest alternate routes. But there is dissent and it’s found in the footprints of all those philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, artists, sages, poets, and backcountry walkers throughout the ages who in a spirit of adventure have set out on their own and left trail markers for us to follow if we will.

On dark mornings after nights of heavy rainfall, I find them stranded on the concrete sidewalk that leads to my front door and again later on the asphalt pavement that winds through the woods along Chico Creek. They know nothing of pavement, which doesn’t figure in their knowledge of the world. They know dirt, leaf, root, air, and water. They are intimate with the ways in which decaying things rot into new life, a wisdom of which we who walk or ride along our various morning routes know so little. But caught out on an alien plain of concrete or asphalt, they inch along with little contractions and expansions of their segmented bodies toward certain death. If left exposed to even the palest sunlight, the UV rays of the sun will kill them. They will shrivel down to a crusty hardness, like a twisted twig or a stiffened length of discarded leather shoelace.

Entering my eightieth year as I write this, I find I have time at my disposal to notice things. And if I really stop to look at the dozen or so earthworms that have chanced unto the sidewalk, I find I can’t leave them there to die. I must return them to the lawn or put them under a shrub or among the flowers somewhere. In Chico’s Bidwell Park where they sometimes emerge onto the creek road by the hundreds, I can only save a few and must ultimately leave the rest to perish.

An earthworm is actually difficult to take hold of. Their bodies are coated with a lubricant that allows them to move smoothly along the little channels they form underground, and, when you take hold of one, you’ll find it’s very slick and will easily slip from your fingers and fall back on the concrete. Not only that, but an earthworm’s response to being touched is to wriggle and twist about in order to free itself.

I’m aware that a certain comic absurdity attends the image of an old man struggling to save the life of an earthworm that’s fiercely resisting rescue. But seeing them there on the pavement stranded and perplexed by the loss of familiar habitat calls up my own loss of familiar ground, the fields and family farms of my youth given way to shopping malls and freeway interchanges. Am I not, like these bewildered creatures, also caught out on the pavement? It’s not unreasonable to feel this way in a world encrusted with structures of our own invention, a world where so much of the natural order, rhythms, and textures of the living earth lie buried beneath the works of our own hands. It’s not a new circumstance, of course, and it’s not just about worms.

Here in the twenty-first century, under the guise of progress and development, we humans have built for ourselves a veritable maze of puzzling synthetic distractions to be negotiated. We’re left in a circumstance like that of not knowing what to wear because the closet is hung with an array of garments so superfluous that none seems essential to our needs. Or we stand stymied in the supermarket breakfast food section staring blank and uncomprehending at box after box of contrived and unfamiliar offerings, searching for something corresponding to a natural appetite. Our lives are increasingly analogous to surfing the net or grabbing for the remote in search of a more stimulating channel to entertain ourselves with. We anxiously post YouTube links on Facebook in a hopeless effort to broadcast ourselves to others with like minds and interests. We are statistics in the ratings, data for the advertisers. It’s apparent to me that like those lost and stranded worms inching their way across the morning pavement toward death, we humans too are embarked on an errant and pointless journey toward our own eventual demise.

If you resist the comparison of human circumstances to those of the earthworms, you’ll find that you already have more in common with them than you might at first suspect. I’ve learned that the earthworms I’m picking off the sidewalk, the ones occurring in the temperate zone of Northern California’s Central Valley, are of the species Lumbricus terrestris. A typical lumbricid, like we humans, has a brain, albeit a rudimentary one. And like us it has a heart, in fact ten hearts—five pairs that pump blood through a closed circulatory system like our own. And while it’s true that earthworms eat dirt, it must be admitted that we do too. Since soil is the basis for all terrestrial plant life and thus of anything that can be eaten, can it not be said that I’m compelled to eat from the very dirt under my feet? And if the improbable transformation of sunlight to chlorophyll by way of photosynthesis is the critical support for the entire earthly food chain, don’t the worms and I share an unavoidable appetite for sunlight as well? And don’t I drink at the same fountain of snowmelt and rainfall? In fact, can’t it be truly said that I eat the worms themselves, since their castings feed the plants upon which I in turn feed? That the worms and I and all creation are wrapped up with each other in a state of such inseparable interdependence is a basic tenet of modern ecology and the primal structure and insight upon which natural ethics are based.

I once came upon a surprising and arresting statement by Charles Darwin about the common earthworm: “It may be doubted whether there are any other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly creatures.” I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old when I read this, but I somehow knew that what Darwin said of earthworms might well be said of any creature we humans share the earth with. I think I’d have to be willfully indifferent to fact, if I were to suppose that I could include only those life forms to my liking and dispense with all the rest. Earthworms are particularly illustrative of the folly of ignoring the essential symbiotic relationship of all life. Yet, I have found that there are people who simply loathe worms, are disgusted by them. Such people would be glad to be rid of the nasty things and would find my morning worm rescues little more than a quirky sentimentality that overtakes old men with a compromised capacity for realistic judgment.

My neighbor across the street has been waging a decades-long war with the worms in her lawn. She complains that they leave “unsightly” droppings on the lawn and that she’s found no effective way to be rid of them. What’s missing in her complaint is the fact that the reason her lawn stays so green and vibrant is because of the very earthworms she’s been struggling all these years to exterminate. Earthworms are nature’s preeminent composters. They convert dead organic matter into rich humus essential to the growth of healthy plants. It’s this unseen, underground gardening of the worms that ensures the continuing cycle of soil fertility. Not only that, but earthworms “plow” the soil as well by tunneling through it. And these tunnels are the passageways through which air and water circulate. Soil microorganisms and plant roots need air and water just as we do. Without this vital work of the worms, soil would quickly compact to the point where air and water would no longer reach the roots of plants. Should this ever occur, we will watch helpless and perplexed as everything green turns gray, withers, and dies.

The most cursory investigation reveals that the continued healthy life not only of the earthworm but that of virtually all the earth’s creatures is essential to the continued healthy life of humans as well. But the value of an earthworm or of any other creature on this earth is not dependent on its value to humankind. Every living thing has a value in and of itself. When Arne Naess, recognized as the founder of deep ecology, and his colleague George Sessions set down in writing the first three principles of their Deep Ecology Platform, they were stating principles already felt by us in the deeper recesses of our hearts and minds;

(1) All life has value in itself, independent of its usefulness to humans.

(2) Richness and diversity contribute to life’s well-being and have value in themselves.

(3) Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy needs in a responsible way.

When I stoop to rescue a stranded earthworm from the sidewalk, my doing so costs me nothing more than a moment’s mindful attention. I only need to notice what is happening and act in accord with the obvious requirement of the moment. I do so simply because this little creature exists, its mere presence there on the sidewalk declaring its inherent right to its own life. And so when I finally get the thing in hand and drop it back on the lawn, the act may not seem to count for much in the larger scale of events; after all an acre of cultivated ground contains thousands of such worms. Yet in the very motion of reaching out and returning even a single earthworm to its rightful habitat, I enact an intimate expression of the heart’s own deep ecology.

(Reprinted here by permission of Wisdom Publications.)

Over 2500 years ago in ancient China, Lao-tzu wrote a little book of eighty-one verses called Tao Te Ching or, in English, The Book of the Way. Without exception, every verse bears witness to the wisdom of “doing nondoing,” what the Chinese call wei wu wei. Wei wu wei is not a kind passive inaction , but rather a movement in concert with circumstance. “Nondoing” ultimately means trusting the wisdom of the universe to show the way rather than imposing one’s arbitrary will upon it. As Lao-tzu puts it, “The Tao never does anything, yet through it all things are done.”

I learned much about this in the Fall of 2004 when, the war in Iraq was entering its second year and I began sitting daily peace vigils on the streets of Chico, California, in protest.  Wanting to do something for peace, I realized I first had to learn how to do nothing for peace—which is harder to learn than it might seem. But I increasingly felt it was essential to give bodily witness to the practice of nonviolence.  Peace, as it turned out, was less a matter of something you do than one of something you are—and I soon learned that the ends I sought required of me more than simply sitting cross-legged on the sidewalks of my hometown.

I learned much about myself that hadn’t been so apparent before, things worth noticing if I ever hoped to embody in my own person the sympathetic kindness I’d come to the streets to encourage in the world. For one thing, I underestimated the extent of my own frustration, the urgency I felt over the continuing world violence—and often saw anger well up in me. I would sit an hour’s meditation on a downtown street corner in an outward attitude of calm and peacefulness and feel like a perfect hypocrite because I felt so little peace within. What I wanted for others, I first had to find in myself. It was as if I had to have it already in hand in order to even begin to look for it. Like mercy or kindness, peace was a consequence of its own presence and not something of my willful devising.

What’s more, I came to see that peace isn’t a fixed condition of any sort but rather a continual openhearted adjustment to shifting circumstances, a living response to be renewed again and again. There on the street, I saw that peace wasn’t something you get right once and for all. I took to the streets to advocate for peace, an activism that turned out to be primarily a matter of learning how not to act and when not to interfere so that peace could be its own advocate.

Old sayings began to ring more clearly true for me: “Let there be peace and let it begin with me.” Gandhi’s “There is no path to peace. Peace is the path.” Or Reverend King’s “The ends are pre-existent in the means.” The conditions of the street made a student of me again, and the street’s first teaching was the most humbling. I could do nothing for peace unless I stepped aside. Peace was its own agent and I—at best—merely its instrument.

One day during my daily vigils, I read of an Iraqi family of five—a mother and father, a teenage boy, a nine-year old girl, a nursing infant—crushed to death beneath the collapse of their house, which was inadvertently struck by a missile during a U.S. attack of a suspected insurgent stronghold. Neighbors came out into the street, and as the dust and smoke began to settle, they heard the little girl calling from under the rubble. They dug to get to her, calling her name repeatedly, listening for her cry in response. But she fell silent before they got to her and found her dead, her legs trapped and crushed beneath a slab of masonry. She was dressed for school, wearing a little hand knit sweater and cap. The family had been eating breakfast when the missile struck.

I could have run screaming into the streets with such news.  I could have knocked on the doors of houses and forced strangers to hear how a little girl in Iraq died. I could have shouted it into restaurants and shops. But I didn’t. Instead I sat an hour’s peace vigil on the corner of Main and Second Streets, and continued to do so for another year and a half.

I still sit peace vigils occasionally, and I don’t imagine that my sitting here on a sidewalk in a small rural town on the west coast of the United States has prevented even a single bomb from dropping into the lives of people thousands of miles away in Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever our drones deliver their sudden death these days. t Nonetheless, this morning I sit in silent witness for all the little girls and boys whose torn or crushed  bodies won’t be attending school today or any day ever again. If my presence here can touch the heart of even one of my townspeople with the sorrow of such a loss, if I can bring anyone at all to disavow the violence of war, my sitting will be to some avail. If not, I must trust that peace will someday, somehow, find me—indeed find all of us—right here.

(Reprinted here by permission of Wisdom Publications)

 Sympathy is a consequence of inclusion, the affectionate result of an expanded identity that occurs when “self” and “other” is recognized as simply “self.” The presence of this newly inclusive sympathetic connection relaxes boundaries and discloses a frame of mind that lets more in. I can best explain this by example.

For several summers, my daughter Krista and I backpacked into the most remote areas of Sierra Nevada Range where we could be alone. We’d leave the trails, and traveling by compass, climb into some high glacial cirque where the topographical map indicated the presence of a lake. And if we found no one else there, we were pleased to have the lake to ourselves. We felt a little proprietary and even exclusive in a way, fishing the lake with no one but the two of us rippling the still waters, hearing only the sounds of our own voices, owning the whole view of the lake without a single intrusion of someone’s red, blue, or yellow tent anywhere to be seen with the exception of our own.

We liked the sense we had of entering an unoccupied wilderness and seeing it as if we were the first ever to come that way. Yet we never quite felt relaxed in our solitude until night had fallen because other campers could show up at any time and spoil our good fortune. We’d set conditions that couldn’t be enjoyed even when met. A worrisome little distress invariably accompanied having the place to ourselves. And, in addition, it sometimes felt quite selfish to wish for ourselves what we hoped to exclude for others.

This came to a head on a late afternoon at a lake in the Kern River watershed. Krista and I had climbed to 11,000 feet that day and found there a perfect setting. The lake lay still as a mirror reflecting the granite peaks that encircled the basin. The shoreline was dotted with miniature furs and there in the high altitude spring of late July, the basin grasses were freshly green. The skies were clear with a bright, slanting sun, and night promised a full moon. We were setting up our tent and laying out the supper things, when I saw the two of them with their packs, laboring their way up the outlet stream toward the lake. I felt just that first twinge of mixed disappointment and shame, but this time I was moved to do something I’d never thought to do before. They were a couple, husband and wife I supposed, and having seen our campsite, they veered away from us, straining under the weight of their packs to reach a stretch of shoreline distant from our own. Perhaps they thought to respect our privacy–or theirs. But I intercepted them on their way. “My daughter and I were just getting supper started,” I told them. “We’ve caught fish and have buttered potatoes to go with it. Why don’t you join us?”

They did. And when they were included, the distinction between “we” and “they” readily dissolved. These “intruders” on our solitude turned out to be such good companions that I drifted into an easy and natural sympathy with them. We ate together like one family and watched the full moon rise over the basin. Our evening together, brought home to me how the pronouns we humans choose to use are indicative of how we identify relationships, and before the four of us crawled into our sleeping bags that night, we’d commented (without apparent perception of irony!) on how fortunate it was that “we” had the lake all to ourselves.

It’s imperative that we learn to share the earth. The reluctance to share what we have with “outsiders” is an attitude that worsens the ecological crisis we find ourselves in now. It often manifests as an anxious concern regarding available resources, a worry that breeds competition between us, and erodes sympathetic concern for the needs of others. But it also erodes sympathetic concern for earth itself and distracts us from recognizing the cooperative nature of the ecosystem, a cooperation that sustains all earthly life. It’s an irony of the behavior of those who hoard and covet, that it’s inherent in the very nature of things that we best help ourselves by helping others.

I don’t think most people intend to deprive others of their rightful place and share in the world; it’s just that in wanting the lake to ourselves, we forget that there are only so many lakes to go around.

(Reprinted here permission of Wisdom Publications.)

The climb to Beckwourth Peak begins on the valley floor. I’ve made the climb so many times that it’s as intimate to me as the path from my own back door to the garage. In the lower elevations, there is just the faintest track to follow winding through a forest of Jeffrey pines. And then I come out onto an exposed slope of rocky ground, patches of grass, and stunted Juniper trees. From there I skirt past a little shelf of rock where a breeding Rock Wren bobs up and down like some avian athlete doing morning knee bends and all the while singing a most amazing repertoire of wren melody. From there I work through a dense thicket of shrubbery that’s impenetrable unless you know where to find the seam that lets you pass. Back in the open again, the climbing is steep, and the ground underfoot slips away, barren of any growth at all. And then finally, the cliff face itself comes into view.  I work my way up a rocky spine that falls steeply away on either side until I come to a little patch of level ground where a single isolated Ponderosa pine had somehow taken hold and managed to survive. It is here, within a hundred yards of the cliff face, that I set up a spotting scope and begin my four-hour watch of the Peregrine Falcon eyrie.

Karen and I had been married five years when we retired and moved to Sierra Valley, a remote mountain valley in Northeastern California. It was the summer of 1989, and we’d spent the previous three summers building the little house that was to be our new home. We’d only been there a short time, when the Forest Service hired me to monitor the first-year’s nest of a pair of newly mated Peregrine Falcons. The species is endangered and this single nesting pair was the sole result of a Peregrine reintroduction project underway in the Sierra Valley area. The Peregrines, like Karen and me, were setting up household there for the first time. We were all of us concerned that they succeed.

Karen and I had bought one of the few home sites in the area that we could afford, and while the property wasn’t ideal, it was, after all, ours to live on and do with as we pleased. We had an open view of the surrounding mountains, and a night sky as vivid in my memory now as if I were still standing out on the porch on a clear, icy night under that vaulted ceiling so populated with stars that the light from them printed my shadow on the porch boards.

We had but one native tree on the acreage, a small Jeffrey pine, and so we hooked up the utility trailer to the jeep and drove to the nursery in Reno, Nevada, where we picked out three five-gallon trees – an amber flame maple, a hawthorn, and a mountain ash. We worked at planting them most of a day, imagining all the while the shade our new trees would someday give us and the fall colors that would brighten up the yard. Not long after, we bought five apple saplings as well, hooking them up to a drip system that we strung out from a back yard faucet and fencing each tree from the deer that were already showing an interest in our undertakings. Our “apple orchard,” as we thought of it, was outside our bedroom window where we hoped one day to begin our spring and summer mornings in the sight of apple blossoms and ripening apples. That first summer there, I’d begun as well to turn under the native sod in a plot I’d marked out for a future vegetable garden.

It was in early spring after our first winter in Sierra Valley that I was hired to monitor the Peregrine Falcon eyrie on Beckwourth Peak. Monitoring an eyrie is an intensely intimate form of watching. I was required to keep a journal of all movements and interactions of the nesting pair. So day after day hour after hour, I watched and wrote entries in my journal, not knowing until the time and luck had finally run out, that I was recording the history of a failure.

The Peregrines were both new at this, and the first mistake they made was to pick the wrong location for their nest. In their inexperience, they passed up an almost perfect site on a ledge where the nest would be sheltered, and chose instead a site that would expose them to spring storms and the coming heat of summer. Soon though there were eggs in the nest and the pair were taking turns brooding. But there came a time when I knew that the brooding had gone on too long. The period for hatching had come and gone. The weather had turned adverse with slanting rains that must have soaked the nesting site until one day I saw the female sitting on her eggs in a puddle of water. There were other days of such heat that the brooding adult could be seen standing over the eggs trying to cool them with what little shade it’s spread wings might provide. It was all I could manage to watch and record this day after day. Still they would not abandon the nest, and their prolonged and courageous effort was slowly breaking my heart.

Though new to our mountain home, neither Karen nor I were children. We knew that things sometimes fail. As they did that year when sheer exhaustion a late and violent spring storm drove the falcons from their first-year’s nest. It was bitter cold the morning I climbed to the Beckwourth cliffs and was met with silence and an empty sky. In the abandoned nest only scattered fragments were left of that thin shell dividing all we know of what goes wrong from what goes well. I knelt to gather the pieces to be sent to the laboratory for analysis, and when I straightened up to go, I saw for the first time what the Falcons must have seen all those long weeks that they spent on this exact spot. I saw how the mountain slanted off into the valley where the wetlands spread among the grasses and reeds. And I saw as well, the high peaks of the Sierra coated with snow in the far distance.  Here was space enough to absorb the whole event in such a way that it would pass unnoticed and never be known by anyone at all had I not been hired to watch its occurrence. I thought of all the little failings that go unseen, swallowed up in the anonymity of those vast cities and fields of human indifference.  I was glad that I’d been here to witness and record the story of the falcons.

The trees Karen and I planted seemed never to grow. The short growing season of the mountains sometimes produced fewer limbs than the weight of winter snows managed to break off. Our first planting of garden vegetables was decimated by hard freeze in the middle of July during weeks of otherwise ninety-degree weather. Such a freeze we were told could come any month of the year. These are small matters, but long before Sierra Valley Karen and I had seen how the best any two can make will bend and sometimes break. We had seen as well the power of mending. We’d learned how to heal and repair things broken. We’d found heart and warmth, enough to spare so that the worst failing is brought to cure like any common ailing we humans must endure.

The falcons returned yet another year, drawn back on the will of some design we cannot name. But still a design, surely the same that draws us back, whatever we lack, whatever our fears. This time the falcons chose the better eyrie and hatched an unimaginable four offspring when two at most is the usual limit. I spotted all four, still alive, and self-sufficient, before they left the valley for their winter grounds. That same summer, Karen and I bought row covers for the vegetable garden, put up some wind shelter for the struggling trees, laid down sod for a small lawn, and discovered that lilacs thrive in mountain conditions.

 

 

I’m increasingly aware of how the language I speak, the actual words that come out of my mouth, tends to shape my view of the world and determine what I think and what I do. It’s common to assume that language is in the service of thought and not the other way around. But once a word has gained currency among a body of speakers, that word feeds back on its inventor, continually reinforcing whatever connotations have attached themselves to the word’s common usage. In a certain we way, we truly become what we say.

Our human work, now as always, is to realize a sane, nonviolent, just, and merciful human society. It involves a choice between those who equally include the interests of all beings, whoever and wherever they are and might be and those who are selective, between those who place themselves first and those who would sacrifice themselves to the interest of others when fairness requires it, between those who would rely on military and economic force as a final resort to settle differences and those who would put aside such force and, as a final resort, rely instead on the persuasion of kindness, compassion, and love. And persuasion of this latter sort can only go forward when we truly talk to each other as equals, brothers and sisters the world over, putting aside all instruments of coercion. This is the talk of “let me be your friend,” of “let me understand.” It’s not a talk we’ve been getting much practice in as of late. But it’s the one conversation that speaks in the vocabulary of the peace that we long for.

The vocabulary of ambition, greed, hatred, and force is quite another thing. It’s the sort of vocabulary that disguises its intent in euphemisms like “national interest,” one of the cruelest expressions current in the English lexicon. In the name of national interest, governments the world over suppress, exploit, and threaten other nations. “National interest,” “patriotism,” “sovereignty” are staples of the vocabulary of force. It’s language that lies to the one who speaks it.

The struggle for a peaceful society is as much a struggle over who controls language as it is over who controls wealth and armaments. You can’t wage wars, either economic or military, without the consent of the people. And to get such consent, the vocabulary of ambition, greed, hatred, and force, deceitfully disguised in words of apparent virtue, is broadcast through a vastly expanded media into virtually every neighborhood and home throughout the world.

Even so, the language of peace already rides our own tongues? We know for ourselves how to say love, to say kindness, forgiveness, mercy, compassion. It’s the heart’s own mantra written in the blood and failure of centuries of forceful coercion and strife.

The report came in of an Iraqi family of five—a mother and father, a teenage boy, a nine-year old girl, a nursing infant—  crushed to death beneath the collapse of their house struck by a missile during the initial U.S. aerial attack of Baghdad. Neighbors came out into the street, and as the dust and smoke began to settle, they heard the little girl calling from under the rubble. They dug to get to her, calling her name repeatedly, listening for her cry in response. But she fell silent before they got to her and found her dead, her legs trapped and crushed beneath a slab of masonry. She was dressed for school, wearing a little hand knit shawl. The family had been eating breakfast when the missile struck.

It was such as this that put me to sitting daily peace vigils on the sidewalks of my hometown of Chico, California. I considered it my proper work for the duration and so I spent an hour a day for two and half years sitting cross-legged on the pavement.

Stan treated me to coffee one day after I sat vigil. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. Stan liked what I was doing and this was his way of thanking me. “Hey, the war’s over.” He said, “How come you’re still putting your ass to the ground?” The morning news had carried the story of the president’s victory flight on a fighter jet to the deck of an offshore aircraft carrier where he’d punched his fist into the air and announced an absurdly premature “Mission Accomplished!”

“The president says we’ve won,” Stan said. “With no more war to protest, what are you going to do for a living?”

“I’m going to sit in protest of victory,” I told him.

In the final paragraph of Woodrow Wilson’s Armistice Day proclamation of November 1919, he wrote that: “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory.”

Wilson’s, like most such messages, is remarkable in what it chooses to exclude. It’s a message that’s proud of its war heroes and grateful to be the victor, but manages to ignore the fate of the vanquished. It doesn’t address the full appropriate human response to a military victory.

When the American conquering forces rolled into Baghdad, images of celebration reached us through the media.  So much glee and self-congratulation. But what was missing—and is still missing—is any hint of regret. As human beings, we can do better than to gloat over the vanquished and humiliate them with our bravado.

The cries of the vanquished reach us from the aftermath of every war that was ever fought. From the smoldering rubble of the New York World’s Trade Towers, you can hear cries that shatter the mind like splintered glass: the anguished voices of office workers, janitors, mothers, fathers, children, husbands, wives, sweethearts, friends.  You can hear as well the bewildered and stunned outcry of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Dresden and Frankfurt, and that of a seven-year-old Vietnamese girl running in horror from a Napalm bombing with her hair and dress aflame and her skin burned away.  You can hear the dismay of Israeli parents whose children have died in a disco bombing, the rage of Palestinians whose entire village has been razed with even the village orchards and kitchen gardens laid waste.  You can hear the anguish of an Afghan mother wandering blindly in the aftermath of a U.S. bombing raid, calling hopelessly for her husband and child.

We need to hear these cries. Our humanity depends upon it.  If we don’t, we are merely brutes divested of the natural sympathies we were born with. If we could just for once learn to love something beyond the confines of our own skins, we’d lose our taste for gleeful victory. If we could perform this simple, natural act of love, we’d belong to the earth once more and know the peace for which we were intended.

As the war rolled on, I kept vigil here among my townspeople, the shoppers on foot, the traffic passing by. The life of the town flowed around me like waters parted by a settled stone, the public current rarely conscious of what I was doing there or why. Now as the slaughter of innocents goes on in whatever war our fears and ambitions take us, I call upon the deep inward core of peace wherein no one wins and no one loses.

(Reprinted here by permission of Wisdom Publications)

Opposites often merge in ways that are contrary to expectation. Seeing this, it might be well to enjoy life’s party with its occasional stomach ache.

Roshi John Tarrant tells of an evening when his friend’s girlfriend was having a birthday party for her daughter. Balloons trailing pink ribbons, half-eaten cones and gobs of ice cream going soft in the heat of the kitchen, sticky messes of chocolate cake, and lots of chattering, gooey little girl’s faces. When parents had hauled the others off, the daughter came to her mother complaining of a stomach ache. “Honey, you ate too much cake and ice cream,” her mother told her. But the boyfriend, flaked out on the sofa and having never raised a child of his own, told her, “Maybe you didn’t eat enough.”

I doubt the gastronomic accuracy of the boyfriend’s diagnosis but I like the way it turns things upside down. “Maybe you didn’t eat enough” is so contrary that it teases the mind out of its conventional expectations. Life itself is a party with a stomach ache, requiring a tolerance for contradiction that frees us from whatever argument we’re having with circumstance. If we find ourselves in one of life’s distressing circumstances, we can lobby the universe for relief but from the universe’s viewpoint the distress we’re being handed may be exactly what’s needed to see the situation through to its intrinsic conclusion.

One of life’s contradictions is that the best intention is invariably wrong. When I took the time to notice, it wasn’t hard to see that anything we humans think or do is bound to be mistaken one way or another. “Ten thousand beautiful mistakes,” the Chinese Zen masters were fond of saying. An old Christian story attributed to the Desert Fathers touches on the beauty and innocence of this human fallibility. The story goes that a monk asked Abba Sisoius, “What am I to do since I have fallen?” The Abba replied, “Get up.” “I did get up, but I fell again,” the monk told him. “Get up again,” said the Abba.  “I did, but I must admit that I fell once again. So what should I do?” “Never fall down without getting up,” the Abba concluded.

Falling down is inevitable; it’s what we humans do. When I acknowledge this it brings me to an unguarded kindness and sympathy. Falling makes us human and, if there is such a thing, it makes us wise. Abba Sisoius is showing the monk that the trick of falling is in the getting up. It is the getting up that alone redeems a fall. Some truly perilous falls may occur in a lifetime, but they are the very ones that reveal the obvious truth that we can only get up in the place where we fell down. And even more pointedly, our falling teaches us that it is in the very act of falling that we learn the way back up. “The coin lost in the river is found in the river,” old Master Yun Men told us ages ago.

It was 1946 and I was fourteen when I opened a thin little book that began with the following description of a moment in the life of a young Japanese woman:

 ”At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning of August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”

John Hersey’s Hiroshima altered for good the direction of my life. Toshiko Sasaki was just about to say something to the girl at the next desk, perhaps a simple morning greeting or a comment on the pretty dress she was wearing or a curiosity about a date she’d gone on the night before—but whatever it was she meant to say, it was never said because before she could speak, the world in which such things might be said was incinerated in a flash of immense heat and blinding light. I became an advocate for peace and for the abolition of war because I was never able to put out of mind all the little ordinary things people were doing in Hiroshima the instant the bomb ended a hundred thousand lives.

I’d known about the bomb for over a year at the time, ever since it had been dropped. And I knew that something terrible had taken place, but it wasn’t until I read John Hersey’s book that I understood that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was something that should never have happened to anyone anywhere on the earth. I also somehow knew that the Toshiko Sasaki’s of Hiroshima, the clerks and factory workers, housewives and schoolteachers, the nameless “inconsequential” inhabitants of that doomed city, lived lives that counted for everything that constitutes the best of what builds and sustains a genuine, human civilization. Continue reading »