“Healing is impossible in loneliness, it is the opposite of loneliness.  Conviviality is healing.  To be healed, we must come with all other creatures to the feast of Creation.  Together, the above two descriptions of suicides suggest this very powerfully.  The setting of both is urban, amid the gigantic works of modern humanity.  The fatal sickness is despair, a wound that cannot be healed because it is encapsulated in loneliness, surrounded by speechlessness.  Past the scale of the human, our works do not liberate us – they confine us.  They cut off access to the wilderness of Creation where we must go to be reborn – to receive the awareness, at once humbling and exhilarating, grievous and joyful, that we are part of Creation, one with all that we live from and all that in turn, lives from us.” – Wendell Berry, “The Body and the Earth”, The Unsettling of America.

I had the opportunity to spend sometime this past August and Labor Day in Utah and Wyoming.  In Utah, I found myself waking up before Dawn, unassisted by the shrill ring of the alarm clock, drawn to ascend Empire pass to watch the sunrise.  I’d race up the canyon, trying to beat the sky that was lightening at first slowly, turning from blue to dark grey, and then more quickly as the sun ascended in all her glory above the Wasatch.  I’d spend the next hour or so running along the trails gleefully, I couldn’t get enough, it was like I was high on the negative ions that cluster on mountain ridges, lending a charge to mountain air.  I frolicked with the chipmunks, who tittered endlessly, bickering about who got what seeds.  I’m always curious what messages the animals are sending us, so later I looked up what “animal medicine” chipmunks offer humans, turns out the offer creativity as well as a reminder to play!  I have been putting off writing for months on end, despite the fact that I enjoy putting my thoughts to paper, thanks to my little encouragerers.

The following weekend I headed North into Wyoming’s Wind River Range to camp over Labor Day.  I was amazed that something as beautiful as the granite formations at the headwaters of the Green could not only be so beautiful but so empty.  We shared our campground with a few other campers, but largely had the area to ourselves.  Here we were in a valley as beautiful as Yosemite, but with 35 visitors, not 7 million.  We spent our days hiking and swimming in alpine lakes.  At night we’d sit around the campfire, drink beer, tell ghost stories and make skillet stew.  One ambitious night we made lasagna, after a 15 mile hike, it tasted like manna from heaven.  The deep peace and joy I found in this natural wonder was priceless.  I have spent countless hours and dollars trying to find the same type of happiness in the city through yoga classes, adoration, church, meditation, speakers on topics of interest, dinner at some trendy restaurant, but I would trade all of them for just one restorative night in the mountains.

Now, having spent the past few weeks back home in San Francisco, I find the urban landscape grates on me.  The cacophony of fire engines sounding off in the middle of the night, the backfire from a motorcycle, the endless clanging of the cable cars (which I once found charming) now is a ceaseless reminder of the discord between my heart and the environment I live in.  No longer does the city nourish my heart, but diminishes it. I long to be in the outdoors, the mountains, to sit peacefully on a back deck looking out at deer silently nibbling aspen leaves.  To know and feel the peace that nature so freely offers us daily, if only we will take the time to walk in her.