Holding the Current

Fear by Kahlil Gibran

It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river can not go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that's where the river will know it's not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

I’ve been treading water in that place Gibran writes of—where the river meets the sea—fighting the currents, unsure of what comes next. The fear, of course, is not the water itself, but the moment you can no longer remain where you are and cannot yet find your way forward. There is fear too in losing your bearings—no longer knowing yourself as you did before.

Water is the beginning of life. We are held in it before we are born. Our waters break to bring us into the world. Across religious traditions, water signifies cleansing, renewal, and transition—whether in baptism, ritual washing, or practices like Loy Krathong, where offerings are set afloat and carried downstream. These rituals remind us that without water there is no life. It regulates climate, sustains ecosystems, and makes all life possible.

And yet water is not benign. It can carry disease, flood cities, pull us under, take our breath. It resists control. It reminds us how dependent we are and how vulnerable. Even where it sustains life, it is never fixed. It rises, recedes, shifts direction. It does not conform to our expectations.

Some theologians and ecological thinkers have suggested that returning rituals like baptism to living waters—rivers, lakes, and streams—can deepen our sense of connection to the ecosystems that sustain us. To stand in moving water, to feel its temperature and force, is different from encountering it conceptually. Perhaps ritual does not create the sacredness of water so much as give us language for what we already sense.

The tension between water as release and water as containment—is highlighted in the film Water: Hindu widows live out their lives along the river—surrounded by a symbol of purification and release. They are also confined and marginalized by their religion and society's constructs around identities defined by loss. The story centers on a child—widowed before she has even grown into the life she was assigned—absorbed into that system without consent, without any path back to who she might have been.

That dynamic feels familiar to me. I am not widowed as society defines it, but the tragic loss of my daughter's father places me within that condition—the way a life's memories and hopes are reshaped around absence. It is a narrowing under the weight of what has been taken, even when the loss doesn't fit neatly into the categories we use to name it.

When loss fits a recognized form, people know how to respond. There are rituals, language, roles that organize care around those who are grieving. When it does not, there is a kind of silence—not intentional, but felt nonetheless—where structures that might hold you simply do not appear.

In that absence, one is left holding what is still as real but less easily named—suspended in that place where the river meets the sea, swirling without direction, unable to find the current.

My own relationship with water has never been abstract. I tend toward motion—body and mind always active. But when I sit beside water—a river, a reservoir, the ocean—something shifts. My attention settles into the movement of the water—the ripples, the current lapping the shore. The sound envelopes me and I find solace within it.

A deeper sense of peace comes from time spent with the people I love. Those moments—rare, fleeting—when everything aligns and you feel held within something larger than yourself, where nothing needs to be added or explained. Those are the moments I have spent my life trying to return to. Memories of such moments often overshadow any of the mistakes or misunderstandings that shaped the relationship.

Lately, water has become the place I go when I don’t know what to do with what I've now been carrying for far too long.

There are times when this feels less like forward movement and more like trying to hold position in something that will not settle. Not drowning, but not being carried either. The river does not get to stop. It meets what comes—rocks, bends, barriers—and finds a way through or around. It continues, regardless of conditions.

There is another kind of place water gathers—the place Gibran names in his poem—where the river meets the sea but does not yet become it. Estuaries are not calm. Tides push in as currents pull out. Fresh and salt water mix unevenly, and salinity shifts constantly. Nothing stabilizes. And yet life exists precisely because of that instability. Species that survive in estuaries are not fixed; they adjust continuously to changing conditions, to what the water brings in each moment.

I recognize that kind of place now—not as a crossing, but as a condition. Not having arrived, not having let go, but living inside the mix of what was and what is. It is not stillness. It is not resolution. It is the movement toward discernment and whatever comes after loss.

Sometimes it feels like being caught in an eddy—circling, moving but not progressing, pulled into a pattern that does not release. The panic there is different. It is not the shock of impact or the force of a breaking wave. It is the realization that you can keep moving and still not go anywhere. That you may remain there longer than you thought possible. The fear Gibran writes of is not the sea. It is where the struggle to orient ends. What I fear is becoming caught in the circling, unable to find the current again.

The way out is not force. As with riptides, fighting an eddy will lead only to exhaustion—not escape. The only way out is at the seam—the place where the circling water meets the larger flow. And finding that seam requires something that is not instinctive in moments of fear. It requires a steadiness of attention—the ability to remain present enough to notice where movement is still possible. If I am overwhelmed, I miss it. If I am avoiding, I never reach it. This is the work now—not to force resolution, not to become numb to what I feel, but to remain steady enough to recognize the moment when something shifts.

This week marks one year since I’ve seen my daughter, heard her voice, hugged her and made her a morning cup of tea. Today marks four years since her father was hit by a car and never woke up. We have had some trouble learning to live with that. Loss does not only take people. It takes the imagined future alongside them. The version of life you thought you were moving toward dissolves, and with it, the self that existed within that future. I had imagined that over time he would have become a more consistent and meaningful presence in her life—that there would be shared moments: graduations, rugby matches, milestones, where we would stand together as her parents. Having lost my own father at twenty, I only ever had an imagined version of what that might be like. That story is gone, and my heart aches for what she has lost. And now, even the version where it would be just the two of us—or just me, alone, cheering her on as it always has been—has fractured as well.

There are losses that are visible and named, and others that are not. There are moments when your role is to hold space for someone else’s grief, to ensure they are supported, while your own goes unacknowledged. That absence does not pass quickly. It settles. It leaves a residue, a shadow over everything else.

Since my return here, I have been drawn back to a place I used to go as a teenager—Reservoir 6—where I would sit and watch the sunset, where I would jump from the rocks in the summer. When I visited the other day, I noticed a bowl of fruit left on the stones near where I sit and chant. It seemed an offering of sorts. It reminded me of the spirit houses I had seen in Thailand, where people leave small tokens by water. Months ago, I had left a small feather there—an offering of my own. It had been a small attempt at a symbolic release of someone I once loved. When I came back again, the wind had carried the feather away, and flowers had been arranged in its place.

I am not the only one who comes to that water carrying something. I am not the only one seeking solace there. That shared instinct—to pause, to leave something behind, to mark a moment—feels sacred in itself. Perhaps ritual does not make water sacred so much as help us recognize what is already present. Across traditions, people return to water at moments of transition—birth, loss, renewal—not only because they are taught to do so, but because something in those places holds their heart.

I am still in that place where the river meets the sea. The currents pull in more than one direction. There are moments of turbulence, moments of circling, moments where I cannot see what comes next. But there are also moments—brief, subtle—where something shifts. A faint pull at the edge of the circling. A moment to catch my breath.

Out of the confusion, where the river meets the sea, something new will arrive.

Safe for Navigation

As a child of literary parents growing up in West Hartford in the 70s, some of my earliest memories of Hartford revolve around visits to the Mark Twain House. My mother was a high school English teacher and loved that Twain’s house was so close. Whenever visitors came to town—especially during the holidays—that was where we went. On the house tour you can see the desk where he sat to write Huckleberry Finn. My mom dressed as Twain for her students, complete with a white suit and gray mustache. Before school one morning, I recall spraying gray into her wig as she transformed into Samuel Clemens for her class. I wish I had a photograph of her like that now.

My brother and I embodied her enthusiasm in our own way. One afternoon, bored and looking for something to do, we began reading passages from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aloud, experimenting with the dialects of Twain’s characters. We recorded ourselves acting out the voices. When my mother discovered the tape, she was delighted—not only because we were reading Twain, but because we were doing something creative instead of causing mischief.

At the time I had no idea that Twain’s house had overlooked the North Branch of the Park River. The neighborhood where he lived—Nook Farm—took its name from a bend, or “nook,” in the river that bordered the community. From his Hartford home, Mark Twain once looked out across wetlands and floodplain along the river’s edge.

Twain knew rivers. Before he became a writer, Samuel Clemens worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. His pen name—“Mark Twain”—came from riverboat language meaning two fathoms deep: water that was safe for navigation. To pilot a riverboat required more than steering a vessel; it meant learning how to read the currents, depths, and shifting channels of a river. Rivers were not simply scenery to Twain; they were living landscapes that shaped human life. I returned to my hometown to live beside his little river to pause and reflect upon the currents, depths and shifting channels of my own life.

Long before Twain arrived in Hartford,  the rivers of this region flowed through the homelands of Indigenous peoples including the Podunk and Wangunk. The Park River is one tributary within the watershed of the Connecticut River, a river system that has shaped life in this region for centuries. Indigenous traditions across North America emphasize relationships with particular places and landscapes. As Vine Deloria Jr. explains, Native understandings of land differ sharply from Western ideas of wilderness: land is not an empty backdrop for human activity but a living presence within which human life unfolds.¹

By the late nineteenth century Hartford’s relationship with the Park River had changed dramatically. Once known as the Hog River, the waterway became heavily polluted by mills, factories, and urban sewage. Seasonal flooding added to the problem. After devastating floods in the 1930s, city planners turned to engineering solutions. Beginning in the 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers buried much of the river in massive underground conduits designed to control flooding and protect development. The project succeeded technically, but it also removed the river from everyday life. What had once been a visible feature of Hartford’s landscape became infrastructure hidden beneath streets and parking lots.²

There is an unsettling parallel here. The same society that buried the Park River beneath concrete has also struggled with the truths Mark Twain tried to surface. Huckleberry Finn, written in this very neighborhood, has become one of the most frequently banned and challenged books in American classrooms. Often, the justification centers on Twain’s use of the N-word. Yet that reasoning obscures the deeper purpose of the novel. Twain used the language of his time to expose the moral failures of that society, not to endorse them. Jim, the enslaved man at the center of the story, emerges as the most humane and morally grounded character in the book. Like the river, the novel forces a confrontation with what lies beneath the surface. And like the river, it has been easier to contain, censor, or redirect it than to fully face what it reveals. What we bury—whether waterways or histories—does not disappear. It continues to shape the world above it.

What happened to the Park River was not unusual. Throughout the twentieth century many cities buried rivers in concrete channels or underground conduits in order to control flooding and make room for roads and development. In recent decades however, urban planners and environmentalists have begun reversing this trend through projects known as ‘daylighting’, which restore buried rivers to the surface. Cities such as Seoul, London, and Yonkers have uncovered waterways once hidden beneath highways and streets, demonstrating how rivers can again become living parts of urban ecosystems.³

A similar transformation has taken place only a few miles away. In neighboring West Hartford, Trout Brook--one of the tributaries that eventually feeds the Park River--has been revitalized over the past two decades into a green corridor with a walking and biking path. What was once a neglected drainage channel is now a vibrant community space where people run, cycle, rollerblade and walk. They can encounter the small ecosystems that persist along its banks. Seeing that restoration makes it easier to imagine what might still be possible for the Park River. Maybe HIU can adopt this stretch of the Park River and do seasonal cleanups as a community to restore access to what it once was. Becoming at home in a watershed may begin with something as simple as noticing the river beside us. However small acts of stewardship embody regenerative future in this place. Our environmental ethics class hosted a guest speaker, theologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, who described this kind of shift as the work of moral vision: first seeing clearly what is happening to the Earth, then imagining regenerative futures, recognizing the collective power to move forward in hope, and finally learning to see the beauty that calls us to protect what remains.⁸

Since my return to my hometown in July, I live on Lorraine Street, less than a mile from Twain’s house, at the edge of Hartford International University of Religion and Peace. Just across the street, the North Branch of the Park River still flows above ground for a short stretch before disappearing into the tunnels beneath the city. It's green, dark, and overgrown. After many years living beside rivers around the world—from the Chao Phraya in Bangkok to the Toyohira in Sapporo, the East River in New York, to the Liffey in Dublin and the Tiber in Rome—I realized that another small river was flowing just across the street from where I now live. It is interesting to compare and contrast all these rivers and how they have been incorporated into the societies around them, for better or worse.

What appears to be a small overgrown stream beside the road is actually a part of a much larger system. The Park river watershed stretches across roughly seventy-eight square miles from the Metacomet Ridge-- where I often hike and where legends claim King Philip once roamed--down to the Connecticut River, gathering water from towns across central Connecticut before disappearing beneath Hartford.⁴

In the summer heat, the shaded river corridor acts like a natural air conditioner. Sitting on the covered Victorian porch, you can feel cool air rising from the riverbank and drifting across the street while birds fill the trees with early morning song. My landlady, the mom of one of my childhood friends, who has lived in the neighborhood for decades, remembers when there was once a walking path along the river where she’d  walk her dogs. She described a time when the river was far more open and accessible than it is today.

The river corridor is more alive than it first appears. One morning a black bear wandered out of the overgrown riverbank, ambled up through the brush, and continued calmly down the street toward a yard with a hummingbird feeder. Having just lived in Jackson, Wyoming—where we had to worry about grizzlies getting into garbage cans—the sight was  surprising. Never in my life growing up here did I imagine there were bears moving quietly through my hometown shadows. Yet the river still carries a thread of wilderness through this neighborhood on the edge of the urban center.

Paying attention to this small stretch of river has changed the way I think about the place where I live.  Robin Wall Kimmerer compels us that ecological relationships begin with learning to notice the life around us and recognizing that flourishing depends on reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world.⁵ Writer Barbara Kingsolver underscores the idea that human beings become truly “at home” in a landscape when they begin to learn its patterns, histories, and living rhythms.⁶ Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh sagely advises that awakening begins when we see that we are not separate from the Earth itself.⁷

Cities often forget the rivers that shaped them. In Hartford, much of the Park River now flows unseen beneath the streets. Yet standing on Lorraine Street, where the North Branch still moves quietly through a shaded corridor beside my home, it becomes clear that the river has not disappeared. It still cools the air on summer evenings. Birds still gather in the trees along its banks. And occasionally, a wandering bear still follows its hidden path through the city.

Samuel Clemens once learned to read rivers for a living. From his home in Nook Farm he looked out across the floodplain of the Park River while writing stories about life along the Mississippi. Today that same river flows mostly unseen beneath Hartford’s streets. Yet the water continues its quiet journey toward the Connecticut River, moving through the city whether we notice it or not.  I am taking Thich Nhat Hahn’s advice and making a point of paying attention.

Learning to belong to a place may begin with something simple: learning how to read the water and thrive in harmony with its currents.

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Notes

1. Vine Deloria Jr., “American Indians and the Wilderness,” in American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Vine Deloria Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).

2. Bushnell Park Conservancy, “The Park River.”

3. Ethan Arcata, “Revitalizing Rivers: The Park River’s Legacy,” ArcGIS StoryMap, November 29, 2023.

4. Park Watershed, Inc., “About the Watershed,” https://www.parkwatershed.org/about-the-watershed/

5. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

6. Barbara Kingsolver, “Knowing Our Place,” in High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (New York: HarperCollins, 1995)

7. Thích Nhất Hạnh, The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2008).

8. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023).

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Bibliography

Bushnell Park Conservancy. “The Park River.” Hartford.
https://bushnellpark.org/about-2/history-2/the-park-river

Deloria, Vine, Jr.  “American Indians and the Wilderness.” In American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Vine Deloria Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Arcata, Ethan. “Revitalizing Rivers: The Park River’s Legacy.” ArcGIS StoryMap, November 29, 2023.  https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/72398371e8b24912903bc30653a95cd6

Kadinsky, Sergey. “Park River, Hartford.” Hidden Waters Blog, September 11, 2024.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Kingsolver, Barbara. “Knowing Our Place.” In High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Park Watershed, Inc. “About the Watershed." https://www.parkwatershed.org/about-the-watershed/

Thích Nhất Hạnh. The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2008.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1884.

Watersheds without borders: Microplastics, Place, and Eco-Justice

I had long imagined living in one of the most wild places in these places in United States. When I accepted a position at the Teton Science School in Jackson, Wyoming, my daughter and I were also seeking a place where we might begin to heal from the tragic loss of her father. The Tetons felt like the kind of landscape that could hold that hope — mountains rising sharply from sagebrush valleys, rivers running clear from alpine snowpack, wildlife moving across open ranges in ways that made human concerns feel briefly smaller. The beauty is breathtaking, and it invites the assumption that such grandeur must be untouched. Yet living there complicated that assumption. Beauty does not equal immunity. The idea of pristine wilderness is often less a reality than a story we tell ourselves about places we long to preserve.


Yellowstone and the greater Jackson Hole region now receive millions of visitors each year, and increasing tourism has become what National Geographic describes as a stress test for park ecosystems and infrastructure.¹ Sustainability initiatives such as the Jackson Hole and Yellowstone Sustainable Destination Program have emerged precisely because ecological, cultural, and economic pressures converge there. ² Even well-intentioned stewardship operates within a tourism economy dependent upon travel and consumption. Wilderness is not and cannot be separate from human systems anymore. While sustainability initiatives and scientific monitoring are important steps, they address symptoms more than structural causes. Reducing plastic production and rethinking consumption patterns would be necessary to meet the demands of ecological and intergenerational justice more fully.

Long before tourism campaigns and national park boundaries reshaped the Tetons, the valleys and rivers surrounding Jackson Hole were seasonal homelands and travel corridors for Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, and other indigenous peoples whose lives followed migration routes and watershed cycles. the creation of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park depended in part upon narratives of untouched wilderness that obscured this presence and restricted traditional subsistence practices. Many Native communities connected to these landscapes were relocated to reservations far removed from the ecological abundance visitors now associate with the region. Any conversation about ecological justice must therefore ask not only how landscapes are protected, but who has historically borne the cost of that protection. 

 At Teton Science School, ‘place' is approached through ecological, cultural and economic perspectives, encouraging learners to examine both the past and future of the landscape. Living within that landscape complicated my own assumptions. Place was no longer scenery or refuge but relationship--layered with memory, labor, economy, and responsibility. For example, the ski resort where I worked on the weekends had a season that adhered to strict closing dates in order to accommodate animal migration patterns. This awareness was sharpened when my colleague at Central Wyoming College, Professor Kirsten Kapp, documented microplastics throughout the Snake River watershed, including alpine environments many imagine untouched.³ Microplastics have also been identified in Grand Teton National Park lakes and in fish inhabiting those waters.⁴ When contamination appears at the headwaters--where rivers begin--the illusion that harm is local collapses. The watershed itself becomes a record of connection. It carries not only snowmelt and sediment, but also the consequences of how we live.

Christoph Stueckelberger asks a difficult ethical question in the context of ecological crisis: "Who dies first? Who is sacrificed first?" He writes that "those who have contributed least...suffer first and most," insisting that justice must prioritize vulnerability rather than convenience.⁵ His framework of ecological, distributive and intergenerational justice clarifies what is at stake. Intergenerational justice, he argues, requires that we not live at the expense of future generations." ⁶ Microplastics drifting through alpine snowpack suggest that sacrifice has already begun--quietly and without consent. 

Shamara Shantu Riley similarly refuses to separate environmental harm from systems of domination. She argues that "environmental degradation and the oppression of people are interconnected," emerging from the same mentality that permits extraction without accountability.⁷ Riley's insight also reframes the history of conservation itself. The displacement of indigenous communities from landscapes later celebrated as pristine wilderness reveals how environmental protection and human exclusion have sometimes emerged from the same structures of power. Plastic fragments found in Wyoming snowpack may originate hundreds or thousands of miles away, carried atmospherically before settling into alpine ecosystems. Ecology, Riley reminds us, is always a justice issue. 

Thich Nhat Hanh offers a different response, not through prediction but through attention. '"We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness."⁸ The Earth is not something outside of us but something we participate in continually. I have sat beside the Snake River and Reservoir no. 6 in Connecticut's Farmington River watershed,  chanting the same words over very different waters. Today, reflecting on the many rivers I have lived beside--from the Chao Praya in Bangkok, to the East River in NYC--I am reminded that water refuses borders. Snow becomes runoff. Runoff becomes river. River becomes ocean. The Atlantic and Pacific eventually meet through global circulation whether we acknowledge it or not. The practice does not change the current, but it changes the way I understand my place within it.

 There are forms of ecological damage that cannot be undone. Microplastics already circulate through oceans, soil, snowpack and our bodies. Some thresholds have already been crossed. Yet Yellowstone also tells another story. Research shows that bison herds restore grasslands through nutrient cycles that redistribute fertility across the landscape.⁹ Within ecological systems, what appears to be waste becomes nourishment. Plastic pollution represents the opposite relationship--accumulation without return. Eco-chaplaincy asks us not only to witness harm but to relearn participation in renewal where it remains possible. Sitting beside a reservoir whose waters will eventually join an ocean without borders, I am left less with certainty than with responsibility, and with the uneasy recognition that I, too, live within the systems I critique. A watershed moment is not only a crisis point; it is also a turning point. 

Footnotes (Chicago Notes Style)

1. National Geographic, “Booming Tourism Becomes a Stress Test for Yellowstone,” National Geographic Magazine, May 2016.

2. Sustainable First, “Jackson Hole & Yellowstone Sustainable Destination Program,” accessed February 2026, https://www.sustainablefirst.com/sustainable-destinations/americas/jackson-hole-yellowstone-sustainable-destination-program/.

3. Central Wyoming College, “Tiny Plastics, Big Problems,” 2024, https://www.cwc.edu/about/2024-2025-news/tiny-plastics-big-problems/.

4. Mike Koshmrl, “Microplastics Found in Fish in Upper Snake River Watershed,” Jackson Hole News & Guide, 2024; and “Microplastics Found in 2 Grand Teton National Park Lakes,” Jackson Hole News & Guide, 2024.

5. Christoph Stueckelberger, “Who Dies First? Who Is Sacrificed First?” 48.

6. Ibid., 52.

7. Shamara Shantu Riley, “Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too,” in This Sacred Earth, ed. Roger Gottlieb (New York: Routledge, 2003), 413.

8. Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm (New York: HarperOne, 2013).

9. Natalie Krebs, “Bison Poop Is Restoring Yellowstone National Park,” Outside Online, 2023.

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Bibliography

Central Wyoming College. “Tiny Plastics, Big Problems.” 2024.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm. New York: HarperOne, 2013.

Koshmrl, Mike. “Microplastics Found in Fish in Upper Snake River Watershed.” Jackson Hole News & Guide, 2024.

 “Microplastics Found in 2 Grand Teton National Park Lakes.” Jackson Hole News & Guide, 2024.

National Geographic. “Booming Tourism Becomes a Stress Test for Yellowstone.” 2016.

Riley, Shamara Shantu. “Ecology Is a Sistah’s Issue Too.” In This Sacred Earth. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Stueckelberger, Christoph. “Who Dies First? Who Is Sacrificed First?”

Sustainable First. “Jackson Hole & Yellowstone Sustainable Destination Program.”

Krebs, Natalie. “Bison Poop Is Restoring Yellowstone National Park.” Outside Online, 2023.

Between Flash and Thunder

The Maroon Bells–Snowmass Wilderness sits outside Aspen, Colorado. Above tree line, the forests fall away. At 12,000 feet there is no shelter. Just rock, tundra, and sky.

I was there as a new teacher at a Rocky Mountain boarding school, leading ninth and tenth graders on their orientation trip. We were hiking part of the Four Pass Loop. Long miles. Heavy packs. Thin air.

It was our third day on the trail. The students had already climbed steep switchbacks, slept two cold nights above 11,000 feet, and learned how hard it is to carry weight at altitude. Blisters had formed. Shoulders were raw.

It had rained all night.

In late August in the Rockies, afternoon storms are common. I suggested we take the longer route down through the valley. More miles, but lower and less exposed. The pass promised better views and a quicker exit. So up we went.

We climbed for two hours. Step by step. My eye on the clouds rapidly rolling in.

Near 13,000 feet, the sky split open.

The thunder did not roll. It cracked.

Rain slanted sideways. There was nowhere to hide. We were the highest things on the ridge. The gap between flash and thunder was closing.

“Spread out!” I yelled. “Stay low!”

We moved into lightning position. Packs on. Crouched on the balls of our feet. Heads down. Spaced apart along the trail.

Even crouching, you feel exposed. Your legs shake. Your calves burn. You try to make yourself small in a place that does not shrink. The rain whipped my face and dripped off my nose as I stared at the grass and counted out loud.

Gary Snyder writes that “the wilderness can be a ferocious teacher, rapidly stripping down the inexperienced or the careless” (The Practice of the Wild, 25). That day, the lesson was simple. The mountain did not care about our plans. It stripped us down to breath, bone, and the ability to endure.

Some of the students were crying. The wind stole their voices.

“Count with me,” I shouted over the wind.

1-1001.
 1-1002.
 1-1003.

Three seconds. Too close. Stay down.

Counting gives the mind something to do. It creates order inside chaos. There were moments when it felt as if we were inside the storm itself—when the pause between flash and thunder was too short to measure.

Val Plumwood calls her crocodile attack “a cautionary tale about survival and our relationship with the earth, about the need to learn to recognize who we are in different terms that acknowledge our own animality and the ecological as well as ethical context of our lives” (Being Prey, 91). On that ridge, I felt the limits of the ethical sphere alone. Staff hierarchy, confidence, even gender—those belonged to our cultural world. Lightning belonged to another order.

The rain the night before had been a warning. Wildness speaks. The question is whether we listen.

1-1001.
1-1002.
 1-1003.

Thomas Berry writes that “we are most aware at such moments of transition that the world about us is beyond human control” (The Wild and the Sacred, 7). Waiting between flash and thunder, I felt that in my body. The storm was not punishment. It was weather moving through a system in which we happened to be standing.

Eventually the interval widened.

1-1001.
 1-1002.
 1-1003.
 1-1004.
 1-1005.

Five seconds. Farther away.

We sighed. We stood. Legs stiff. Packs heavy. We crossed the pass. The views were there. No one stopped to admire them. The march down to the trailhead was humbling. We were a cold, wet, tired line, putting one foot in front of the other.

 A week later, I learned that the nausea, the headaches, and the deep fatigue I blamed on altitude were something else. I had assumed the thin air was responsible. I kept walking. The students were watching. Leadership meant steadiness. One foot in front of the other. Again and again.

My body had already begun building another life.

On that ridge, crouched against the lightning, I was not one body but two.

I did not yet know the story that was beginning.

The sacred shifted for me that day. It was no longer the triumph of standing high and looking out. It was the humility of lowering myself close to the ground. It was the counting. It was the responsibility of keeping fragile bodies safe—my students’, and unknowingly, my own child’s—in a world that does not bend to our pride.

Above tree line there is no hiding. Not from weather. Not from illusion. Not from the truth of who we are. I carry that kind of courage with me still—the kind that lives between flash and thunder.


Citations

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, p. 25. Val Plumwood, Being Prey, p. 91.
Thomas Berry, The Wild and the Sacred, p. 7.