A MOUNTAIN VIEW

A Mountain View

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

Last week, over at the swimming pool, I listened in wonder as Mrs. Ziegler described the divine smells issuing out of her family's rural land.

The deep and ancient incense of hemlock groves and oak forest. The sweet soap smells of daffodils, breathing this holy fragrance out of plain old dirt. The exhilarating, glad smells of towels and shirts and quilts pulled off a clothesline and bundled into the house.

She also described the sounds of twilight owls and the strange colors of the land. “A hemlock forest looks so black from a distance!” she marveled. “And you could go into this old forest and the ground would be clear and clean as a floor, without undergrowth.”

These hemlocks were dying, from the invasive woolly adelgid aphid, and this was a sorrow for the Zieglers.

Loving anything alive—because you have seen and felt, heard and breathed it into your system, and it has become part of your being—also brings the ache of grief. Joy and grief are two sides of one condition—being a waked-up, connected human being that is not here to avoid pain, but to be alive.

So although we were indoors, Mrs. Ziegler's eyes lit up with joy like the sky, when describing the sights and sounds and airs and feeling of this beloved land. It was part of her own life.

It seemed to me, listening, that if people could be encouraged again from a young age to get out from the four walls and connect to the greater world, through our God-given senses, there might be less despair, addiction and jadedness.

People who feel numb, cut-off from the flow of things—an increasing epidemic in our day—might inhale that sun-baked T-shirt smell, that dark, mysterious, richer-than-coffee-grounds leaf-mold odor of a forest floor, and stir with life.

They might feel the strange cool updrafts of a mountain hollow, or hear the piping loud “hup-hup, huh-WOOO” of an owl calling from the evening woodland shadows, and feel a corresponding flutter of ancient awe from within, connected to the great, unseen mystery of this universe.

They might look up into the glitter of pre-historic constellations, zooming the mind outward and backward until the numerous, tangled ropes of human trouble in our day grew small and insignificant in that vast picture.

When the sensory doors open to the beauty and majesty pervading this universe, connection flows, and it is not so necessary to pipe in 500 channels, play video games or fill the garage with “toys.”

This week I heard an insurance ad announce that toys were the purpose of growing up in this universe.

“You loved them as a kid, and you love them now. The only difference is, instead of a box of Legos, you now have a garage loaded with motorcycles, jet skis, speed boat and four-wheelers. You love your toys,” reasoned the announcer. “Shouldn't you protect them as you do your loved ones?”

J. Matthew Sleeth, a former emergency room director and chief of medical staff, thinks that the grownup human species, charged with care of this planet, has a greater, more adult calling—to protect life on earth. Life is far greater, lovelier, more sacred and valuable than a toy.

The kind of doctor who, like Paul Tournier and Albert Schweitzer, easily saw the vital connection between nature's health and human health, Sleeth became alarmed by our increasing human oblivion of anything beyond our cars and buildings and toys.

“While teaching a group of local youths last week, I passed around a picture of a Hummer,” he wrote in his book, Serve God Save the Planet.

“Out of three dozen teens, all but two could immediately identify it. Then I passed around a large sugar maple leaf...the most common hardwood broadleaf tree in the northern forest...Only two students could identify the leaf.”

It troubled Sleeth, since for countless ages past, humans depended on keen awareness of their living environment—in order to respond wisely. Thus, they survived.

But today?

“We increasingly live in a man-made world,” Sleeth writes, “And that world is making us ill.

“When the psalmists advise us how to heal spiritually, they do not tell us to purchase a television, car, house, self-help book or exercise equipment. God, they say, is to be found in the natural world....filled with the grandeur, beauty and peace that are so often lacking in our material world.”

Sleeth asks us: “Can you identify a greater number of trees or cars? Do you know in which direction the Milky Way traverses the sky?

“Maybe we're paying attention to the wrong things. If this is our Father's world, maybe we should pay more attention to it.”

Liza Field can be reached at wcfiell@wcc.vccs.edu.