Nature and the Sense of Home
An accidental bridge
A Short Biographical Note…
Please forgive my absence. Despite the personal success of having published a book of very good and well-reviewed stories, this year has been strangely difficult. I’ve struggled to feel inspired, and have only managed to produce three new stories, and a chapter in Saga Mac Bron. They’re rather good stories, and you’ll be able to read them in my next collection. Yet, something is definitely off. It may simply be that at thirty-nine, I begin to feel the passage of time—its icy, cloying claws in me—in a way I didn’t before. The invincibility of manhood begins to rub off. The ice begins to set in, and it becomes necessary to fight to keep it at bay. Every single morning, to again break free the sleigh.
There’s also the loneliness of being a writer, the isolation it involves, and the numerous other demands on my emotional, spiritual, and physical energies in the forms of teaching, fathering, husbanding, and coaching. There’s a creeping, discouraging dread that there’s so much more I could do to help my stories find an audience, and that I am not doing it, because I am simply overwhelmed by all the work, and research, and time that would be required to do it right. The potential wasted expense of doing it wrong! Then there’s the sense of disappointment—totally irrational; infantile, really—when someone close to me who loves my writing still hasn’t made the time to read much of it. And there are others all around me suffering real crosses that makes my artistic struggles seem trite, and this knowledge adds to my daily sense of guilt whenever I fail to do all I should to live my life to the fullest, or to seek God with my whole heart, or live up the many promises He’s made me; the hopes that ought to move me to decisive and consistent action. But I just went on a hike, alone in the woods, in the icy cold, and, at last, I’ve found something inspiring...
The Main Event…
I go blind sometimes. There was a period in my youth where I could almost taste ontology. That is, where I could sense in an almost visceral way the reality that all that is has being, and that to be is to be good, as well as to realize a distinct unity. I understood in my marrow that beings were either contingent or necessary, and that each of the beings I encountered were contingent, and yet quite deliberate, quite “necessary” in the ordinary, human sense of the word. I understood and could almost taste the necessity and the reality of Him Whose Essence Is To Be. This did not feel like a religious thing, so much as a philosophical insight, backed-up by a body of doctrines in which I also happened to believe. Nothing has changed in the world since then. There’s nothing new under the sun. And yet I lost it, somehow. That sight.
Maybe it was a good thing that I lost it. I’d never have developed a prayer life if I hadn’t, by turns, found myself in a deep wood, the way partly lost. I needed to claw my way back to God, and I’m still trying to do so every day; that is, to realize the truth that He has me, and won’t let me go. But I don’t see as I used to. I fight to see. I have to coach myself, like a madman whose still sane enough to know he’s going mad. I have to calibrate and recalibrate my glasses, because they fog up. Left to my own inertia, I’d walk around in that fog. The fog is caused I think partially by a kind of aging that can happen to the soul, and partly by having my eyes too much on attractive pseudo-realities. I used to pride myself on being the sort of Catholic who could go toe-to-toe with the world, always open to whatever good things it had to offer, always finding God there, always sifting out the chaff and keeping the wheat. Now there are days when I won’t let myself listen to a song I used to love, not because there’s anything particularly wrong with the lyrics, but because I know that day it will lull me into a kind of blindness. It’ll fog up my vision, make me take refuge in the artificial, and make it even harder to claw back toward the Reality behind this reality. Modern life is full of pseudo-realities that put a film over nature. And nature is a book we’re meant to read. A book of God; the other book, they used to call it, in the days before automation, and artificial lighting.
Often this clawing towards the real seems to avail little. I get little inertia, spiritual or philosophical, for all my efforts. I know, in a distant, antiseptic way, that God is there, behind the fog, and that my efforts to seek Him—or seek even a clear vision of the world—are meritorious. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels worse than bad, for it feels as if I were not moving at all, like a man swatting against nothing in an infinite space. Not an airless black abyss—that would be dramatic!—but a temperate, mundane, air-conditioned, gray haze. Yet sometimes I crack through. Sometimes these perfunctory efforts to reset my mind and spirit yield sudden fruit. Today, walking in the icy cold, it happened.
I moved west along a wooded path. It was dreadfully cold. The wind has been blowing hard all day, so hard in fact that a healthy pine tree about eighty feet tall broke at the bole and landed just inches from my neighbor’s house. Not wanting to hike in my bomber jacket, I threw a hoodie over sweater and walked briskly, carrying my coffee along in a tumbler. I thought I could keep my hands warm by occasionally shoving them in my pockets, an assumption very much disproved when I got home 30 minutes later, and the flesh of my hands seemed to have been impaled with five million small icepicks. But that’s getting ahead of myself.
From this vantage point, you’d never think you were miles from the freeway.
The trail is narrow in most places, and the trees that had fallen across it soon slowed my hike. Some of the downed trees dragged thorns into the path, forcing me to take my time navigating these obstacles lest I tear my hoodie or pants. In some strange way, the obstacles and the weather conspired to make me move at the pace of the forest. The wind by this time had died enough that I didn’t fear being suddenly squashed by a falling limb. My hands were not yet very cold, so I slowed down, and thought, and prayed. Because only people like me go walking in the woods in sub-freezing temperatures when there are trees down all over the place, I had no fear of company. Therefore, I spoke my thoughts aloud. I talked to God. I talked to the woods. I talked to God about the woods.
I should tell you a little about the trail. It runs west here for about a half mile, before turning sharply to the south. The creek, a tributary of the Potomac, is usually on the left. Sometimes the path goes right beside it, even over it, while at other times the water disappears, or is only visible at a distance, carving through a valley or dell far below. The forest here seems fairly young, with most of the trees being no older than eighty years, I’d guess. We once found three abandoned cars here that looked to be from the 1950s, and also an old stone wall. Both were right in the middle of the woods, with no roads leading to them. That, and the age of the trees suggests this is old farmland that’s been set aside, and repurposed as public land. It certainly feels wild—something I’ll get back to in a moment—but it’s really a young forest.
Another sign of youth is its diversity. In general, certain trees favor certain topographies and environments. If you drive from state to state, you’ll begin to notice a shift in the woods that run beside the highway. Even if you don’t know trees, things begin to feel different. Virginia feels different than Maryland, which in turn feels differently than Pennsylvania, and so on. And forests, when they are allowed to grow for a long time, become cliquish. Certain species will dominate and define the landscape, while others only pop up occasionally, or occupy small stands, like outposts behind enemy lines. But this forest is a work in progress. There’s little rhyme or reason to it.
On the East Coast, you expect to see sycamores near water, and tulip poplars shooting up just about anywhere, but there are just as many pines, and dogwoods, and red maples, and white oaks here. Nothing is dominant. No species stands out, crying, “This is our forest.” Like the people who live in this part of the country, the trees are mostly transplants from somewhere else, filling in a void, trying to find their niche. It’s a great place to find a living—all the trees say so, anyway—but it’s difficult to find real community. It’s hard to find anyone really like you. You—I mean the trees, of course—may have all come here for the same reason, but something more is needed to make a place feel like home.
But this is where I contradict myself. The thought that came to me, as I walked through this patchwork forest that runs between suburbs and highways, this upstart forest, which was evidently built on somebody’s old farm or factory … the thought that hit me was home. Nature as home-ish. Home-like-ness as an odd, essential feature of nature. How do I put this into words?
Everything was doing something there. Everything had a reason to be there. Each tree, each species of tree, each little scrubby bit of brush, each fallen-down, cracked-up, fungus-killed maple, each rock, the lichen on the rocks, the water running under that out-of-place-covered-with-moss bridge rock, all had something to do. Its own plan. Its own purpose. Its own personal history. The sun shining down on the valley to my left had its purposes. The grass down there, which feeds the deer I keep running into in the wee hours of morning on my run, has its aims. The numerous little skittering creatures, strange, ghostly presences in the brush, were all going and coming with private intention. And it did not feel chaotic, nor thrown together. It felt like home.
Yes, I know the feeling.
The hominess of nature seems obvious, once it strikes you, but the reasons for it are not so. Why do all these things fit so naturally together? After all, they’re all doing they’re own thing. How is it that the sun and the wind, and the cold front coming in, make company; make a sense of community? They ought to feel more, well, Darwinian. Each player has his own history and is bound by the aims and designs of his own nature. Yet there’s a peace that runs through it all, like everyone is just where he needs to be. To be sure, this forest feels unfinished, but it does not feel artificial. It does not feel like a suburban development, with a golf course next to it separated by a high black fence, beside a parking lot, beside a busy road. There is some secret in nature that makes it work unitively, despite being diversely constructed. It’s as if in every place a song lurked in secret so that the natural things arriving there fell into it; into their particular niches within it.
If human beings are like this, I don’t see it. We feel crammed, whereas they feel gathered. We seem rudely funneled into small, functional spaces, whereas they seem to find and make a pattern that was already there in potency before it was there in act. Yet this is too metaphysical; too cute. It was just that I felt a sense that the things that make nature are at home with each other despite the divergent personal histories of each. Certainly, it’s not a perfect hominess. You come across ugly, scrubby, thorny sections which, viewed individually, are quite dour and uninviting. But in a forest, that’s the exception.
I’m not saying animals and trees are better than people, or anything like that. I’m just trying to understand this strange home-like magic of a natural place, left mostly to itself. Why should it feel like home? I can only guess.
My guess it that it’s for the same reason that a family living together feels like home. Each member of a human family has his own nature and aims, and, as with animals and plants, these members can be at cross purposes. But somehow the process of growing together, even imperfectly, effects a sense of unity that is quite unique and impossible to fake. When things grow together, they begin to anticipate each other. They may grow over, or around each other, but even in that, their patterns suggest the other. It's a well-known if under-appreciated fact that a tree will grow quite differently depending on its personal history; its access to sunlight; to water; its proximity to neighbors, etc., but this dynamic applies to everything in nature.
The ocean shapes the shore, but the water running down the mountain shapes the ocean. The grass and leaves pull in their food, and leaves go dormant, or drop off altogether, and some things live inside the litter, and some eat it. Everything is shaping everything else, all the time. Even that anonymous foreigner, the polar wind that sweeps in unexpectedly and rips up trees, leaves a hole through which the sunlight comes to draw up more. Somehow, the unity keeps reasserting itself; the song keeps trying to be sung. I don’t see that with us humans; with the things we make. I don’t see it in suburbs, and shopping malls; in highways and alarm clocks; in fencing and signage. Perhaps if I could, it would give me more peace.