In a world of constant change—politics, economics, decay, jobs, cultural shift, hardware, software, means of communication—I HAVE to go outdoors. My point-seven-two walk to and from work provides me at least a small daily dose: of staying in touch with what is unchanging. While change does happen in the natural world—especially in the north where all four seasons are dramatically different from each other—this change is expected, regular, normal, and older than humanity. My soul craves such orderly constancy—constancy that has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Skunk cabbages, marsh marigolds, and jacks-in-the-pulpit unfold in that order at the marsh verges after the winter thaw every year. Crows steal songbird eggs, gang up, an
d harass owls and hawks every year. Song sparrows sit on bush tops and celebrate life every nesting season. Robins, cedar waxwings, and starlings compete for old crabapples every spring. Cicadas brreeee and katydids skritch every waning summer. Sugar maples and sumacs flame every fall. Snow turns my landscape into light every winter. Year after year after year.
And all of this occurs regardless of—what happens on Wall Street, who is in the White House, when TV goes digital, who has been born and who has died, my having a camera with enough pixels to show up nicely on screen and in print, whether Osama bin Laden has been terminated, or whether I chose to have my molars crowned or pulled.
In the natural world, if I and my neighbors have not messed it up too badly, I can forget the vicissitudes of my life
, and find both confidence and hope in the constancy of earth’s life as promised long ago by our Creator: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (Genesis 8:22).
I, you, and our children need to deliberately spend time outdoors if for no other reason—as Henry David Thoreau said—than to “not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.”
See you outdoors,
Dean
March 23rd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Thoreau’s beautiful poetry expresses what I think, but not so rhymic and that is I need to spend time outdoors to restore my sanity.
Your calling it “blessed constancy” is a wonderful way to put it. Although the natural places continue to change with falling trees, migration of birds, movement of animals from place to place, fish biting one day, not the next, etc. that type of change as you say is expected. But it really isn’t change, it is the natural world responding to its Creator’s plan. I see no rebellion in it either.
Just being there in the woods, hills or meadows, with no cars, bars, and cigars is therapy no amount of money or prescriptions could purchase. I can be myself with no pretense, no worries, no agenda, no schedule, no interruptions. I can and do worship my Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and Friend in a cathedral more beautiful and glorious than any man-made edifice.
I guess I don’t return with a visible glow similar to Moses’ when He left the Holy Mount, but there is an inner glow that carries me through until the next outdoor session.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Now who says you aren’t “rhymic”?
This is at least a good start:
“No cars, bars, and cigars is therapy”
That resonates with me!
March 25th, 2009 at 10:06 am
I will be 62 this year and as young as that is to some, it is enough for me that I have been a witness to all events of my life.
There is very little consistancy in anything. Winter, spring, summer, fall, they all come early or late. They are colder or wetter. Warmer or drier, Seldom the same.
My saddest observation is the shrinking of the natural world that surrounds me. More forrests clear cut, more streams polluted, less and less of the old ways. Too many highways too many atv’s and trail bikes.
Little creeks that used to grace the landscape dried up or stripped mined out. The little brook trout that lived there all gone.
I am sorry, the constancy I see and hear is the groaning of the earth.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Steve, your counter thoughts are a good check on having a Pollyanna view of the natural world around us. Yet in the midst of nature’s groaning is the constancy of life processes that have gone on since the beginning—and wherein lies our hope. Francis Schaeffer felt—and I feel too—that we all must be about a “substantial healing” of all the rifts created by the fall (the rifts that are the cause of the universal groan). These are the rifts between God and man, between man and man, between man and nature, and between the man who is and the man who ought to be. We are not going to be the ones who restore, redeem, reunify, and reconcile all things to God. That is Jesus’ ultimate coming work. But there is no reason we cannot begin to live now in the manner that will be required of us when Christ returns. And there is enough of goodness in God’s good earth for us to yet celebrate beauty and blessed constancy. Perhaps a part of that is reacquainting ourselves with what we have gotten jaded to—the return of migrating birds, the annual explosion of wildflowers, bats on the wing at the eve of a warm summer night, brooks that still run free, and the golden hues of the season’s first leaves celebrated by Frost in his poem “Nature’s First Green is Gold.” “My” old orchard is a tiny island in an urban sea, but I can still delight in natural processes that go on there. In fact, a couple years ago, I stood concealed in the low-hanging branches of a highbush cranberry and performed the traditional birder’s call—pishhhhing—and soon had ten different species of birds come in to check out what was going on in their neigborhood: robins, bluejays, chickadees, wrens, catbirds, brown thrashers, sparrows, house finches, goldfinches, and even a pair of yellow warblers. It made my day—my week!
March 26th, 2009 at 7:49 am
Dean, Yes there is a constancy in nature. Spring is indeed a welcome sight. I didn’t mean to bring you or anyone down from enjoying it.
Here in my little world, everything has changed and is changing. Not always for the good. I am weary of fighting against the tide.
Hideous stick figures of windmills are being errected on the ridgetops. They have no real value except to mar the skyline. They collected over 4,000 dead bats under the windmills, last year. Creeks run red with sulpher and a useless lifeless river moves on toward the Chessapeak Bay. The bay in crisis.
Down in other parts of my state, the coal companies are removing entire mountain tops, and placing the material into the valleys between. No concern for the streams and eco systems that are forever changed. All done with the aid and assurence of the EPA.
What used to be a gleeful walk through the woods has become a ordeal of joining hunting clubs, paying dues and following regulations. Some of the regulations are good, but not followed by the majority.
It gets harder and more difficult to find any place that is peaceful, and uneffected by the foot print of greedy selfserving people.
If you have found your peacefull place, I am happy for you. I have been chased from mine over and over again.
March 26th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Steve, what you are reporting is very important. So don’t feel any need to apologize. These degradations of God’s creation are far too common—especially in coal country. Are you aware of Christians for the Mountains? My good friend Allen Johnson, a West Virginia man, was one of the key individuals in getting this group started. You might want to go to their website and see if there are ways that you and your neighbors might get involved in “fighting back” against these forces.
Fortunately for those of us in West and Northern Michigan, the degradations are not as visible, and, in fact, are in part being addressed in some rather dramatic ways: sewage overflows are being reduced significantly by construction laws that require almost all new buildings to divert their parking lot water runoff into retention ponds where the water seeps back into the aquifer instead of into the storm drain system which was flooding our water treatment plants every time we had a major rain event. RBC has such a pond about 100 yards from where my desk sits, often providing me with a glimpse of urban wildlife: muskrats, shore birds, ducks, and snapping turtles that nest right along the edge of the interstate. A few years back we had an “invasion” of tiny turtles on our parking lot requiring me to collect a bucketful and get them to the pond.
This and other clean water legislation has turned our Grand River into a salmon and trout stream—something I never dreamed of as a kid when all we would catch is what we called “trash fish.” Of course, since God does not make trash, these fish were merely the hardy survivors who could live in swill.
Nonetheless, our electricity comes from huge coal-fired power plants toward which long trains snake along the tracks from your devastated mountains to our Lake Michigan shore where many of these power plants dump their heated water. On the surface, Lake Michigan looks pristine, but below there are problems galore. Unfortunately your environmental disasters are sorely visible—and depressing. God’s good earth groans everywhere.