A Wilderness Pilgrimage

Devastation, transformation, and where we go when we die...

[NOTE: As the regime in D.C. continues its unholy war against love, truth and justice, trying to wear us down to a nub, we must protect space for ancient questions about what it means to be human, to live and to die. When madness crowds out those questions, we lose touch with our souls and our shared humanity, sources of the power we need to overcome tyranny. That’s why I’m reposting this 2015 piece, one that speaks for me yet today at age 86. Amid personal and political distress, nature gives us a model of persistence and the promise of new life…]

Image from SUWalls website. Artist unknown.

Their Slow Way

Let these woods have their
slow way with you. Patient
pines that hold their green
through all the frozen seasons,
lichen-covered rocks that live
indifferent to time’s passage—
these will teach you how to
bring your life to ground.

The fractal chaos of the forest
floor, its white anemones,
spiked grasses and dead leaves,
the fallen trunks and branches
splayed out like pick-up sticks—
these will teach you how
to live freely, with abandon,
and feed the roots of new growth
when your time has come.

As I write, I’m in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of northern Minnesota, a million acres of federally protected wilderness along the Canadian border. Years ago, before I had seen this place, a friend tried to describe it to me. “Everywhere you look,” he said, “there’s a perfect Japanese garden.” And so there is: rocks, trees, water and sky in endless permutations of elegance.

It’s a flawless August evening. The heavy, moist heat of the day has given way to cool breezes that stir my mind and heart even as they ripple the lake just down the hill. A low-lying sun bathes the forest in honey. The pines and the aspens, the weed trees, bushes and tufted grasses glow amber and green against what e.e. cummings called a “blue true dream of sky.”

I was in my mid-fifties when I first spent time in this patch of heaven. Its simplicity, beauty and peace fed me so deeply me that I’ve returned every summer for the past twenty years. At first, vacation was all I had in mind. But I soon realized that my annual trek to the Boundary Waters was a pilgrimage to holy ground, to a place of healing and renewal.

During the workaday year, when things get tough, I make this pilgrimage in my imagination. I close my eyes and see myself hiking through the sun-dappled woods, paddling down a windswept lake, hearing the unforgettable call of the loon, watching the cosmic drama of the Northern Lights, or eavesdropping on the ancient conversation between those two old friends, the lake and the land, as the cold, clear water laps gently against the shore.

It’s not tranquility alone that makes this wilderness a place of healing for me. It’s the patient, resourceful, resilient way nature heals itself, reminding me what it takes to heal my own wounds so I can show up in the world as a healer. Watching wilderness overcome devastation has helped me see how suffering can serve as a seedbed for renewal. Even more, it has offered reassurance that in the great cycle of life and death, new life always gets the last word.

On July 4, 1999, a derecho—a line of fierce, fast-moving windstorms that create an inland hurricane—ripped through the Boundary Waters. It took down millions of trees, making tinder for numerous fires that were to ravage even more forest over the next few years. A month after the derecho, when I arrived for my annual retreat, the sight of that massive blowdown broke my heart. I wondered if I could stay or would want to return the next year. But something held me there and kept me coming back, giving me a chance to witness resurrection.

One of my favorite hikes passed through a section of forest so thick it felt primeval. Knowing that this cloistered woods had been hard-hit by wind, then fire, it was several years before I felt able to hike that trail again. When I did, I saw how the void created by death had been filling with new life.

Raspberries and blueberries, lupine and purple asters had sprung up in abundance as sunlight fell on earth that had long been shrouded in shadow. Aspens grew from seedlings at the speed of a hungry teenager—today, sixteen years after the derecho, most of those seedlings are twice my height. And the massive rocks this trail traverses now look here and there like raku pottery, fired in the kiln of a fierce-burning forest, glazed in metallic shimmers of red and brown, blue and gold.

Pose Lake in the BWCA. Image from BWCA Wikipedia page.

For years, I’ve asked myself the ancient question, “How, then, shall we live?” I’ve often found good guidance on the time-honored paths of the world’s great wisdom traditions. But at age seventy-six, as I also ask, “How, then, shall we die?”, no path serves me better than those I’ve tracked through the Boundary Waters, my window into heaven.

Theologies that portray heaven as a gated community in the sky don’t speak to my condition. Among other things, an eternity spent exclusively among members of my own tribe sounds more hellish than heavenly. Nor am I persuaded by claims that, when we die, spirit separates from matter and takes on some sort of disembodied, wraith-like life. As far as I can tell, matter and spirit are intertwined and indivisible, a distinction without a difference, two sides of one coin. If flesh and earth were not infused with spirit, how could we and the natural world be so full of beauty, healing and grace?

I learned long ago how much I do not know, so I won’t be surprised if death has surprises in store for me! But amid all my not-knowing, I’m certain of two things: When we die, our bodies return to the earth, and earth knows how to turn death into new life. When my own small life ends in some version of wind and fire, my body will be transformed by the same alchemy that keeps making all things new, witness this wilderness. As the medieval alchemists dreamed, dross will be turned into gold.

It matters not to me whether I am resurrected in a loon calling on the lake, a sun-glazed pine, a wildflower on the forest floor, the stuff that fertilizes those trees and flowers, or the Northern Lights and the stars that lie beyond them. It’s all good and it’s all gold, a vast web of life in which body and spirit are one.

I won’t be glad to say goodbye to life, to challenges that help me grow, to gifts freely-given, to everyone and everything I love. But playing a bit part in making new life possible for others—that’s a prospect that helps me find meaning in the death that awaits everything that lives.

Twenty annual pilgrimages to this holy place called the Boundary Waters have convinced me that Julian of Norwich got it right: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

P.S. The wilderness known as the BWCA is under threat from the current regime in D.C., part of their relentless campaign against all that’s good, true and beautiful. If you’d like to help protect it, please visit Friends of the Boundary Waters.

[NOTES: My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack once a week. Free as well as paid subscriptions are welcome—both will always have access to everything I post.]