Nature Telling Us Time's Running Out

The land is shrouded inn a ash-laden haze: a winter evening filled with gloom and foreboding. Scene from an English countryside, perhaps, where “The Hounds of the Baskervilles” is about to unfold.

Only it is not. This is San Jose in Northern California. The clock says it’s 9 in the morning, but the sun lies hidden behind wildfire smoke so thick that stepping outside poses serious breathing problems. Earlier, in the predawn sky where Venus used to glow brightly, I saw a pale tangerine planet barely able to hold its own.

Wildfires are on a tear in Western United States. Idyllic, pastoral towns are aflame and burnt out. People and trees are being uprooted at a scale never seen before. The ravaged, desolate landscape tells tales of nature’s sound and fury signifying everything.

In California, hundreds of freakish lightnings, utterly unanticipated by meteorologists - so much for our hubris of predicting and controlling the weather, far less the climate - started the terrifying fires, carried relentlessly forward, backward and sideways by hot winds that devoured everything in its way. We suffered long periods of blackouts but that was nothing compared to those who lost everything - homes, possessions. No accurate counting of lives lost is yet possible, but it will be tragic when the final tally is in, each death diminishing us all.

This, on top of the killer pandemic that has so far claimed more than 200,000 American lives. Misfortunes, as the saying goes, never comes singly.

The worst nightmare, of course, is the malevolent president who denies climate change, who calls those who made the ultimate sacrifice for America “losers” and “suckers.” Americans must surely know by now the existential threat this president poses to America and its values, to its standing in the world. We hope  this grievous wrong will be righted in the November 3^rd election this year.

For now, though, we must turn our attention to nature. It is telling us that time is fast running out. Burning fossil fuels to sustain our "quality of life" is unsustainable. Droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, famines, even civil wars are only another climate catastrophe away.

Yet we also know that given half a chance, nature will spring back. But for that to happen, we need a quantum leap in our thinking about consumption, development, and all the quotidian things we do that needs to be suffused with an awareness of their impact on the environment. Impractical? The alternate is fiery death.

In the air opaque with wildfire smoke and without birdsong, I risk a walk along the wooded trail that works its magic every time I am on it. Giant eucalyptus and pine trees stand like ghosts just a few feet away from me, hardly visible.

And then I see it and I stand rooted to the earth. A bluebird is resting on a pine cone, calm and poised. An ineffable sense of hope surges in me. Give me a chance, a small, tiny chance, nature seems to be saying, and I will make the air breathable, the water potable, and the birds transcendent again. 

A Season of Grace

What exactly is grace? It is not a single, easily-identifiable quality but a combination of many, with some elusive prerequisites that make it even more ineffable. We cannot experience grace when our hearts are anxious or stressed, as they often are in these troubled times. For grace to suffuse our soul, we must be at peace with ourselves and with the world around us as is, even if partially. That, and be open to new ideas and insights, be humble and patient, and have an instinct for the sacred and the transcendent.

I speak only for myself when I say that I find grace difficult to come by, either from others or from me. Yet when I experience it, I know I am having a transcendent experience. Recently I experienced it when a dear cousin passed away. I announced his passing to the congregation at my local mosque and sought their prayers for the departed. The way they opened up to me in sympathy afterwards, the way they consoled me and shed tears with me, told me that none of us need be alone, that when we express our vulnerability and seek solace from our fellow-beings, irrespective of race and religion, we have a chance to be touched by the Divine. We have a chance to experience grace.

Grace can originate from the natural world as much as it can from humanity. In fact, I will go so far as to say that it is easier to summon grace from birdsongs, from the way the wind ripples the surface of a pond, from the wonder of stars blooming like flowers in the garden of the night sky, from the way an agave leaf holds drops of rain.

Photo by Hasan Z. Rahim

But for this to happen, we need to be attuned to the natural world, to its rhythms and patterns, to its strangeness and, well, to its grace. It will never happen when we waste our time consumed by the small screen of our devices, when social media and smartphones, to paraphrase Wordsworth, are too much with us, awake and asleep, buying and selling, wasting our powers, seeing hardly anything in Nature that is ours.

So, for a change, take a walk in the woods. Behold the magic of the sprouting tulip or the first appearance of butterflies in your backyard. Stroll along the shore and hear the song and sigh of wind and water in the waves that break at your feet. Listen to a towhee singing its heart out in the rain!

Photo by Hasan Z. Rahim

As the year draws to a close, and as the times threaten to become even more trying, each of us need to find our North Star, to focus on that which matters in our lives, be it love, friendship, living with less stuff, curbing cruel desires, revealing the power of humility to the arrogant, filling the despairing with hope.

In other words, we need to experience grace in our lives, whether summoned or unbidden, and know in the depth of our hearts, as the prophets of olden times knew, that beauty, truth, empathy, humility and unconditional love will set us free.

Allow me to end with a poem by Wendell Berry that I find myself reciting more frequently than ever before in a world that seems to have gone awry in a hurry - “The Peace of Wild Things:”

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 my 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 into the presence of still water.

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. 

Wilderness in the City

The Montgomery Hill Park adjacent to the Evergreen Valley College is perhaps San Jose’s best-kept “nature” secret. Its rising and dipping hiking trails are the city’s best, as are its serene meadows and sublime vistas. This unusual and unexpected 60-acre wilderness in the midst of a metropolitan city perfectly sums up Shakespeare’s observation: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

The Park is named after John Montgomery (1896-1011), an aviation pioneer and professor who developed flying gliders and tested them in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties. A gliding accident caused his death in 1911. The Park was declared a California Historic Landmark in 1967 in his honor.

What makes the park and its trails unique is that they are undeveloped. Surrounded by rows and rows of dense housing, crisscrossing roads and congested traffic, the park is a miraculous oasis of peace and quiet.

On a recent unseasonably warm winter day, I walked around the park, keeping to the dirt trails sometimes and wading through the grass at others. The temptation to roll down the hills was strong but I resisted. Rain has been scarce and the hills were not as green as they ought to have been. But the exhilaration of open space and rustling trees were enough to lift the soul.

From atop a hill, I could see the college campus sprawled out, the dome of the astronomy department’s observatory glistening in the sun. Cars crowded the parking lot of the shopping center at the base of the park, separated thankfully by a line of trees and hedges.

Some days later, the rain came. The dazzle of lightning and the boom of thunder one Friday night meant only one thing to me: I would be spending hours in my backyard park the following day.

Almost overnight, the meadows are full of tall grass, mustards, sorrels, poppies, thistles, wild roses and lupines. Although only a trickle flows in the stream at the park's edge, the oaks, the laurels and the pines are loud with robins, jays and sparrows. I am serenaded by crickets along the reddish trails that meander through the park like rivers.

Parents are out hiking with children and their dogs. Bicyclists pedal with purpose up the steep dirt paths. People fly kites. Some even fly, soaring and circling on machine-driven gliders. A pair of eagles above a grove of eucalyptus trees wheel, bank, pause, dip and soar, as if in homage to John Montgomery. Their grace and beauty is something to behold. An excited dad points out the eagles to his son and daughter and they are wonder-struck. Everyone looks up to see the eagles against a beckoning sky, their wings etched by spring light. All four picnic tables by the park’s college entrance are occupied by families enjoying a day in the “great outdoors.”

In the seductive shadow spread by an ancient oak in the middle of a hillock sits a musician strumming his guitar. The music mingles with birdsongs and floats upward. Like ripples in a pond, it also spreads outward across the open space. This is what repose means, earth, sky, birds, wildflowers and humanity connected in a holistic web. No matter where you are, you don’t have to venture too far beyond your backyard to find it.

A Reminder to Practice Humility

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried the city of Pompeii under ash and pumice. The Roman Empire was at its height then but against Nature’s fury, it was defenseless.

Time and again we are reminded of our fragility in this connected world when Nature breaks out of her bounds (as we imagine them to be) and clarifies who is really in charge. A shift in the plates here, a buildup of pressure inside the earth there, and suddenly business as usual comes to a halt. All our technology and ingenuity and scientific advances become irrelevant. We are mere spectators gazing at something terrifying and indescribable. Sure, we can pick up the pieces after the fact to study and investigate and add to our knowledge but then suddenly there’s another cataclysm of one sort or another and we are back to where we began.

The volcano in southern Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull glacier sends ash and silicate into the air. Born of ice and fire, the plume travels across land and ocean and soon the airspace over most of Europe is closed. People enjoying their spring vacations are stranded all over the world. Business deals are delayed. Artists are unable to perform. Crucial meetings are postponed. Home seems farther than it has ever seemed before. Even President Obama has to cancel his trip to attend the Polish president Lech Kaczynski’s funeral. Volcanic ash does not distinguish between an ordinary plane and Air Force One.

Natural calamities, perhaps more than ecology, teach us in unforgettable ways that we live in an interconnected world.

What we need to nurture in a technology-driven world is a sense of humility. If we put all of humankind’s achievements on one side and nature’s occasional yawn on the other, guess which side will tilt over? Yet we keep acting like masters of the universe, doing as we please, waging war, threatening, killing, pumping carbon into the air, plundering and raping the earth as if there will be no consequence.

Iceland’s Halldor Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955 for his epic “Independent People” and other works, wrote of the tragedy that befalls man when he indulges in hubris. Fly too close to the sun and your wings will melt. We forget this but then in the middle of our party, an earthquake strikes, or a cyclone or a tsunami, and we realize anew how small a corner we occupy in the vast canvas of our existence.

A Touch of the Wild

There is a section of a scenic highway on my way to work that enlivens my otherwise bland commute. Especially in spring, the sights fill the senses. It rained last night and this morning the sky looks as if it has been scrubbed clean to let its pure blue shine through. Hills and valleys lie in repose and eagles soar above the oaks and the willows. Here and there yellow mustard and orange poppies make the green meadows appear even greener.

Between two roads named Deer Creek and Coyote Hill, I catch a glimpse of white and chestnut horses basking in the fullness of spring sunshine. What compels my attention, though, is a colt that seems to be dancing rather than running, and a woman pursuing it with glee, coaxing it to eat oats out of a bucket she is holding. The two are engaged in a tango, and the sense of playfulness between animal and human is palpable.

A few minutes later I am at my desk, turning on computers and preparing to spend yet one more day of my life working with “productivity tools,” email and the Web. It is when I am about to save my work an hour later, in the service of a Silicon Valley company that pays my bills, that it hits me: what I am doing chained to my desk indoors when life is expressing itself with such force and zest outdoors? I cannot shake off the image of the frisky colt. A sadness slowly seeps into my day.

It is almost impossible now to imagine a day without the Web. That's understandable, given how deeply it has become woven into our lives. But what is tragic is how easily we have learned to pass our days without a single contact with nature. True, these are desperate times. People are losing their livelihood and their homes. Soup kitchens cannot keep up with demand. A cruel recession has already taken on the signs of a depression. Who has time for nature?

But that's precisely what we must make time for as we turn inward for solace and give up things we had no use for in the first place. A less cluttered life looks more and more appealing. Thoreau's call for simplicity resonates. We are rich, to paraphrase the Bard of Walden, in proportion to the number of things we can afford to let alone. To put this into practice, we ought to renew our relationship with nature, to go for a walk in the woods, to take to the trails, to look with fresh eyes at the trees and the birds where we live, to grow something in the backyard or on the window sills. I know I will because I can think of no better way to clear my perspective and cleanse my soul.