My spouse and I spent this Labor Day weekend hiking around Great Basin National Park. This national park is huge and is often overlooked by tourists due to its lack of accesibility.
I am a terrible at meditating. I have been told that such an intervention is helpful. My wife is great at it. I, however, become super distracted and my mind wanders. Honestly, I think that a certain percentage of the population is not great at meditating. I further think that meditation does not help a subset of our species. Mediation as a “cure all” is kind of a dumb idea as has been documented here and here.
The exception for me is in the setting of nature. For some reason, a quiet day in the wild puts me immediately in the “meditation phase” and bypasses the “concentration phase” — again, I’m not really sure how scientifically rigorous such terms can be. I live in the Intermountain West of the U.S., so there is still the ability to get away from civilization relatively quickly.
Such an experience occurred at the Great Basin on Saturday. We were in a meadow where several small streams were leaving the mountain ranges and heading to terminal lakes. There was a bit of cloud cover. We are at an altitude of 9000 feet. The temperature was cool. Three hours into our hike, we came to a clearing. I stared at a small field there with the wind moving the leaves of the Aspen right behind me. Boom. Immediately I lost myself in this little bit of quiet nature.
As always, the picture does not do the actual area justice.
This event caused me to think about God. I believe God is around us / nature, in us / nature, in time with us / nature (panentheism). Consider 1 Kings 19 in the setitng of Elijah’s interaction with the divine. The story is mythic but also perceptive. The wind, the earthquake, the fire and then the still, small voice… Perhaps there is a corrolary to my experience in that field. It was a pleasant wind in the Great Basin that was formed by volcanic activity, earthquakes, and fire. The majesty of natural creation 25 million years ago lead to the quiet field that I was standing in on Saturday.
In such experiences in the wild, I always am struck by the of immensity of deep time, the imperceptable changes in geology over millions of years, and the flicker of the human life span. I wonder if God, although everywhere, retreats to such little fields to enjoy the creation of events. I imagine such peaceful areas exist throughout our cosmos.
I feel that God was with me at that moment in time and at that location in Nevada although God is always around all entities at all times. The experience of sight / hearing / smell in that little field combined with my neurotransmitter reacting to my senses appeared to make my awareness of God much more focused yet confused. God was there but what was God? It will never be known.
Loren Eiseley once wrote: “Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it… We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.“
My time is limited on this little rock. I won’t see all of the possibilities of nature in my lifetime. I see the blackness of night and consider the infinity of space that I will never understand.
I can only experience what happens in my little bit of time and location in the universe’s reality. I do have the ability to let others in this bit of spacetime — and by others, I mean all entities — be themselves in their fullest form. This fullest form is equatable as creativity and love. Love neighbor. Love God. Ergo, love nature and appreciate all that I can see in such quiet, time-limited experiences.
I left the field and walked back down the mountain.
image by Meta AI
Phi-The-Sci: Equilateral Musings 