The Stray Sod

Cnoc Cúin (The Quiet Hill)
Caóilfhionn Murphy O’Hanlon, 2021

Irish folklore tells of the fód seachráin, the stray sod: a piece of enchanted ground upon which a traveller can suddenly lose all sense of direction. There is nothing to distinguish it from the earth around it. No marker warns you away. You simply step on the wrong patch of ground and a place you thought you knew becomes unreadable. A familiar road seems to lead nowhere. Landmarks that should orient you somehow fail to do so. You may wander in circles, unable to find your way out of a place in which, by every rational measure, you are not actually lost.

That is the part of the story I find most unsettling. The traveller has not been transported somewhere else. The road remains where it was. The wall still divides the field. Home may even be nearby. What has changed is the traveller's relationship to the landscape. I know this place. Why can I no longer find myself within it? There is something almost psychedelic about it: the world remains recognizable, but the familiar coordinates no longer seem to work.

The traditional remedy is wonderfully peculiar. Stop walking. Take off your coat. Turn it inside out. Put it back on. Somehow, the spell is broken and your bearings return.

I am less interested in whether anyone ever believed this literally than in the wisdom hidden inside the ritual. The lost traveller is not told to walk faster or search harder. The first instruction is to stop. Then something familiar is removed and deliberately reversed. The coat that normally protects the body from the world is turned inside out, exposing what is ordinarily hidden: lining, seams, hems, worn places, alterations and repairs. Nothing has been added to it. It is the same coat. You are simply seeing how it was put together.

There is another turned coat in my family. My Nana Keating, raising four children during the Depression and war years while her husband was away on the Italian and North African fronts, once reversed a coat because the elbows had worn through and there was no money for another. I grew up hearing it as one of those family stories about scarcity and ingenuity: you made do. Beside the fód seachráin, I hear something else in it now. When something could no longer function in its familiar form, she turned it over and found another way to wear it. The worn places did not disappear. They simply ceased to determine the usefulness of the whole garment.

The stray sod has stayed with me because grief can produce its own kind of disorientation. Not only bereavement, but estrangement, migration, trauma, the loss of a relationship, a community, a role, or a future we assumed would be ours. When losses accumulate, what disappears is not only the person or place itself. The identity we constructed in relationship to those things can begin to shift as well. We can be standing in a life we recognize and no longer quite recognize ourselves within it.

It is difficult for me to separate an Irish story about becoming lost on familiar ground from the history of the ground itself. Land in Ireland has never been merely scenery. It has meant livelihood, family, inheritance and belonging, and who was permitted to possess it—or driven from it—has shaped centuries of Irish history. The fód seachráin predates An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, and I am not suggesting that the catastrophe created the folklore. But I find it hard to believe that generations marked by dispossession, eviction, hunger and emigration would not have understood something about the feeling the story describes.

As a child, I knew the simplified Irish-American version of the Great Hunger. The potatoes developed a blight. People starved. Our ancestors came to America. My mother used to say, “Anybody who could leave, did.” I understood that sentence then as an explanation for why our family was here. I understand it differently now. The potato crop failed catastrophically, but Ireland did not simply run out of food. Food continued to leave the country while people starved. Evictions continued. Families disappeared through death and emigration. What I had learned as a story of immigration increasingly looked like a story of displacement.

My mother's sentence now leaves me with two questions I could not have understood as a child. What did it take to leave your family, your village and perhaps the only landscape you had ever known, carrying what you could, knowing you might never return? And what did it take to stay?

I have stood in the ruins of a Famine village near Carlingford, and there is something difficult to describe about being there. Walls remain. The outlines of houses remain. The fields stretch around them. Yet the place does not feel empty in the ordinary sense. It feels marked. Calling that an energy makes it sound more mystical than I necessarily mean it to be, but you feel something there. You feel the loss. There is a certain stillness about it.

Standing among those ruins, I find myself thinking about the people who remained. What happens when your neighbors have died, your family has scattered, houses stand empty and people you love have boarded ships that may never bring them home? The geography has not disappeared. You may still know every road, field and stone wall. But the human world through which you understood your place in that geography has been torn apart.

You have not moved, and still you have been displaced.

That seems to me larger than sadness. Place helps tell us who we are: whose child we are, who our neighbors are, where we belong, what stories are ours, where our dead are buried. When enough of those coordinates disappear, grief becomes entangled with identity. The question changes from How do I live without them? to Who am I here now?

Perhaps that is one reason displaced people hold so fiercely to the things that can travel. Names. Songs. Food. Religion. Photographs. Stories. Ireland entered my own childhood in Connecticut through these fragments. In the basement of our house were boxes of dog-eared photographs and tarnished tintypes, and I spent hours studying the faces of people long dead. Did I have those eyes? What were they like? What made them laugh? I wanted to understand what and who had made me, me.

Years later, while teaching an identity unit to eighth graders at the United Nations International School, I asked students to write “Where I'm From” poems. They were Third Culture Kids whose lives stretched across countries, cultures and languages, and the apparently simple question Where are you from? quickly became something much larger. My 12-year-old daughter's poem began, “I am from books and boxes, airplanes and passports,” and eventually declared, “I am from everywhere.” In another poem she wrote about what happened after every move: her heart would break “over, and over, and over again.”

Both things can be true. A life can be extraordinarily rich and still require something from the person living it. Being from everywhere can also complicate the question of where one belongs. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that we belong wherever we find ourselves.

I understand that differently now too. International life teaches us to expect disorientation when we cross borders. We know that we will have to learn new systems, establish relationships and find our bearings again. Coming home can be stranger still because we do not expect the same uncertainty there. I have returned to the Connecticut landscape of my childhood after spending much of my adult life elsewhere. I know these roads. I recognize the landmarks. I know where I am. And sometimes I have no idea where I am.

That is the fód seachráin I recognize: not being lost in an unfamiliar world, but losing your sense of yourself in a world you know perfectly well. Grief can do that. So can displacement. So can returning. The road has not disappeared. The traveller's relationship to the road has changed.

Which brings me back to the coat.

Turning it inside out cannot restore what has been lost. It cannot repopulate a village, return an emigrant, resurrect the dead, repair every relationship or give us back an earlier version of ourselves. But it does ask us to stop walking in circles long enough to examine what we are carrying. Turn it over. Look at the seams. What was inherited? What was chosen? What has worn through? What was repaired? What no longer fits? What has been stitched together, sometimes by our own hands and sometimes by the loving hands of others?

A seam does not necessarily mean something is broken. It is also the place where separate pieces have been joined.

The Irish language carries an intriguing parallel. Tá brón orm is commonly translated as I am sad or, depending on context, I am sorry, but its construction is closer to sorrow is on me. Tá áthas orm: joy is on me. Tá eagla orm: fear is on me. The emotion is real, but the language places a small space between the person and what the person is experiencing. Irish carries this relationship between loss and distance elsewhere  too. Deoraíocht, exile or emigration, echoes deora, tears. Leaving seems to carry grief within the language.

 I miss you works differently as well. Airím uaim thú can be understood as I feel you away from me or I feel your absence from me. There is something painfully precise about that. Missing someone is not simply an emotion contained inside the person who remains. It is the felt presence of an absence. Someone once occupied a particular place in our world, and we can still feel the space where that person is not.

Maybe that is what I feel in the ruined village too.

There is something powerful in a language that can acknowledge the full weight of sorrow without requiring sorrow to become the identity of the person carrying it. English so easily gives us I am sad. I am lost. I am broken. The condition attaches itself directly to I am. I don't know that language determines how we grieve, but I have begun to wonder what changes when we alter the construction.

Sorrow is on me.

The coat is on me.

But underneath both - I am.

The old folklore promises that turning the coat will break the spell and restore the traveller's bearings. Life offers no such guarantee. Reorientation is not restoration. Some losses remain losses. Some absences remain. Beginning again does not mean returning to the person we were before them. The coat may always show where it was worn through, and perhaps it should. The purpose of turning it over is not to pretend that nothing happened. It is to see more clearly what happened without confusing what we carry with the whole of who we are.

A therapeutic exercise I once learned makes the same distinction almost absurdly simple. Begin with the way we often speak when an emotion has become large enough to consume the landscape.

I am sad.

Create a little space between the person and the feeling.

I am feeling sad.

And then, without denying the sadness, the loss, the history, the seams, or those we can still feel away from us:

I am.

The Horseshoe Crab

The sound of the waves in the distance lulled me to sleep after I climbed into the back of my car to catch a few hours of rest. The crunch of tires on the sandy beach access road kept pulling me awake. At two, three, and four in the morning, fishermen drove past in both directions, coming and going with the tide. Each time I woke with a start and lifted my head just enough to look through the window. Another truck rolled slowly past, fishing tackle swaying in the back and gravel grinding beneath its wheels, before I slipped back into that fitful space between sleeping and listening.

I was parked on the narrow barrier between Quonochontaug Pond and the Atlantic by Weekapaug Beach, the salt pond behind me and the ocean just beyond the dunes. After finishing a late night of wedding catering nearby, I had found what I hoped was a place to stealth camp for a few hours before sunrise. Without quite intending it, I had settled into another kind of caol áit—a thin place where the boundaries between land and sea, darkness and dawn, sleeping and waking, seemed less defined.

Southern New England's barrier beaches were formed thousands of years ago as glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Waves and longshore currents gradually reshaped those glacial deposits into narrow ribbons of sand that separate the Atlantic from the coastal salt ponds behind them. They are living landforms. Storms breach them. Currents rebuild them. Salt marshes absorb wave energy that would otherwise erode the coastline. Their resilience lies not in remaining fixed, but in responding continuously to change. They survive because they move. 

Human beings have always looked to the natural world for orientation. Before ecology became a science, Indigenous peoples understood that careful observation of the more-than-human world carried knowledge. The Narragansett names that remain on this coastline are reminders of that relationship. Quonochontaug—the place of the blackfish. Weekapaug—at the end of the pond. They are names born from paying attention to the land, the water, and the creatures that lived there. I had chosen to sleep on a landscape whose very existence depends upon adaptation.

Before dawn I drove to Watch Hill and walked to the place where I scattered my mother's ashes. The previous week had left me emotionally exhausted. Birthdays during estrangements leave little to celebrate. For months I had been carrying the same questions. How do I keep doing this? How does one show up with love when love itself no longer seems to be recognized? How does one live inside a story that hardly resembles the life one lived?

I sat facing the Atlantic and began chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo as the first light slowly spread across the cloudy eastern sky. My emerging Buddhist practice has quietly reshaped the way I move through difficult moments. In Nichiren Buddhism, the self and its environment are not separate realities but expressions of the same life. Chanting changes my response to the circumstances I find myself navigating. We do not leave our inner world behind when we step into nature; we encounter it there. And so I sought solace in the sunrise by the sea.

That morning I wasn't asking for my circumstances to change. I sought alignment with whatever strength remained beneath fear, grief, and confusion. If the environment truly reflects the life of the person encountering it, what might the shoreline at sunrise reveal to me about myself?

Had my endurance reached its limits? Does there come a point when continuing to show up with love simply hollows a person out, the same way gulls hollow out a horseshoe crab shell? Sitting where my mother's ashes had entered the sea, I asked as honestly as I knew how: How do I keep going?

When I finished chanting, I stood and began walking back along the beach. The tide was moving out. Gulls worked the wrack line while sanderlings flitted ahead of me between the waves.

Then I saw the horseshoe crab.

At first I assumed it was another empty shell or flotsam that the tide dragged up to shore. Horseshoe crabs have always been part of the landscape, usually upside down and hollowed out, their soft bodies long since picked clean by gulls until only the shell remained. As children my brother and I occasionally carried them home, much to my mother's horror, until the unmistakable smell convinced her they belonged back outside. Familiarity had rendered them almost invisible. I had spent decades noticing what remained after death without ever really seeing the living animal itself.

This one was alive.

Its shell was dark, almost black, polished by the sea and crowded with barnacles. A thin sheet of water slipped over its body before quietly retreating with the tide. I knelt beside it, resisting the urge to touch it.

The barnacles immediately caught my attention. For a fleeting moment I wondered whether they were harming the animal. Later I learned the opposite was true. Barnacles settle only on mature horseshoe crabs after they have stopped molting. Juveniles regularly shed their shells as they grow, leaving behind the empty exoskeletons that most beach walkers mistake for dead animals. Adults—some surviving for forty years—eventually stop molting, and the years begin recording themselves differently. Barnacles, algae, slipper shells, and other marine organisms gradually colonize the carapace.

What had first appeared to be burden or decay was, in fact, evidence of survival. I had assumed the barnacles were something to be removed, a sign the creature had been somehow diminished. Learning otherwise, the phrase bonnō soku bodai—"earthly desires are enlightenment"—ceased to be an abstract Buddhist teaching and became something I could see. What I had mistaken for damage was, in fact, inseparable from the life that had endured. Beneath its armored shell lay a creature surprisingly soft and vulnerable, protected not by invincibility but by the life it continued to inhabit. Its shell carried the visible record of a life. The barnacles testified to endurance rather than failure. I had come hoping suffering could somehow be left behind. The horseshoe crab suggested something more demanding-- and somehow more hopeful. Perhaps wisdom does not arrive after hardship has ended, but through the life that continues to carry it.

This particular crab—neither true crab nor horseshoe—had lived long enough for other lives to attach themselves to it. Most of its existence had unfolded beyond human sight, returning to shore only briefly each year with the rhythms of the moon and tide. Like so much in nature—and perhaps in ourselves—the greater part of its story remained unseen. It occupied a place in many Indigenous traditions along the Atlantic coast as a symbol of continuity, reciprocity, and the interconnectedness of life. It was not simply an ancient animal. It was a part of a larger web of reciprocal relationships. Its annual return signaled renewal. Its eggs sustained migrating shorebirds. Its presence reminded people that life depends upon cycles of giving and receiving rather than domination or control. It belonged to a living relationship between moon, tide, marsh, shorebirds, fish, and people. Horseshoe crabs have survived for more than 450 million years, long before dinosaurs appeared and long after they disappeared. Yet a single crab remains vulnerable. A wave can overturn it. Shorebirds depend upon its eggs during migration. Biomedical research depends upon its blue blood. Entire ecosystems are connected to a creature many people walk past without ever really seeing.

For centuries the horseshoe has been associated with protection and good fortune, hung above doorways in the hope that blessings might gather there or be poured upon those who walk beneath it. Chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is understood as aligning one's life with the Mystic Law, the deeper rhythm that connects all existence. I had come asking how to endure. The shoreline had answered with one of Earth's oldest survivors.

The horseshoe crab did not promise that suffering would disappear or that estrangement would somehow resolve itself. It was a reminder that beneath grief, uncertainty, and the visible scars of a life fully lived, something fundamentally whole remains. Horseshoe crabs have endured nearly 450 million years of planetary upheaval and survived four mass extinctions. Their resilience lies not in avoiding change but in continuing through it.

As I knelt beside that barnacle-covered shell, another Buddhist teaching quietly came into focus. We often imagine enlightenment as the absence of suffering, yet bonnō soku bodai suggests something far more demanding: our struggles themselves become the path. The barnacles were not a defect to be scraped away but the visible record of survival, accumulated because the creature had lived long enough to carry them.

That realization reached beyond the horseshoe crab. How often do we mistake the visible accumulation of another person's hardest years for the whole of their life? We rarely encounter another person's whole life. We meet them in the middle of a story already in progress. We see only the surface—the scars, the burdens, the rough edges—and assume we understand the story beneath them. Familiarity can become its own form of blindness. Like the horseshoe crab, most lives unfold beyond our view. We encounter only brief moments that wash ashore while the greater part remains hidden beneath the surface.

I had come to the beach believing endurance meant somehow becoming stronger than my circumstances. The shoreline suggested something different. The barrier beach survives because it yields to storms instead of resisting them. Salt marshes absorb energy rather than deflect it. Horseshoe crabs persist not because they conquer change but because they remain in relationship with tides, moonlight, seasons, and the countless other lives around them. Endurance, it seems, is less about toughness than about acceptance.

The Narragansett people understood these relationships long before ecology provided scientific language for them. Nothing on this shoreline exists in isolation. Marshes shelter juvenile fish. Horseshoe crab eggs sustain migrating shorebirds. Tides reshape beaches. Glaciers left the raw material from which the coastline emerged. Every part of the landscape depends upon something larger than itself. Perhaps human lives do as well.

I left the horseshoe crab to wander farther down the beach as the eastern sky brightened from gray to pale gold. The questions that had brought me there had not disappeared, nor had the circumstances waiting for me once I returned home. They would still be there tomorrow. The relationships that grieve me remained unresolved. The future remains uncertain.

But hope had quietly changed shape. It was no longer the hope that everything would somehow return to the way it had been. It was the quieter hope that beneath grief, disappointment, uncertainty, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, something fundamentally whole persists and that love remains. Chanting had not changed the shoreline. It had changed the way I encountered it. The landscape became not merely scenery but teacher and healer.

I thought again about the barrier beach where I had slept only hours earlier. It exists because glaciers retreated, tides continued their patient work, storms rearranged the coastline, and salt marshes softened the force of the sea. Its identity has never depended on remaining unchanged. Its endurance comes from responding, adapting, and continuing. Standing in the presence of one of the oldest surviving species on Earth, I realized that resilience is not simply surviving hardship. It is allowing hardship to deepen rather than diminish our participation in life.

I swam into the brisk, calm Atlantic and floated quietly on my back, watching the clouds drift overhead. For a few moments there was nothing to solve, nothing to defend, nothing to explain. Only water, sky, breath, and the steady rhythm of the tide.

The shoreline had answered my question in the only language it knew. Endurance. Acceptance. The willingness to return again and again with the tide. To remain part of relationships larger than oneself. To carry the visible marks of a life fully lived without mistaking them for the whole of the story. 

Mount Massive

Mid July I found myself sitting beside Reservoir 6 in West Hartford beneath a smoky summer sky. The smoke from wildfires burning in Ontario had drifted hundreds of miles south, softening the afternoon light and turning the sun into a muted orange disc behind a veil of gray. It was an unsettling reminder that landscapes we imagine as separate are often connected in ways we cannot see. The smoke carried the story of another forest along the jet stream into this one. 

As I watched it settle over the water, I found myself thinking about another landscape and another fire—a mountain in Colorado I had climbed with my daughter nearly six years earlier, and a wildfire now burning through the forests below it. The smoke that drifted across Connecticut had begun near Leadville, Colorado close to the trailhead where Niamh and I started our climb in July 2020. As firefighters worked to contain the blaze and nearby communities faced evacuation, the mountain I remembered as a place of celebration had become part of another story—one of drought, fire, and an increasingly fragile landscape.

Long before it became Mount Massive on modern maps, this landscape belonged to the Nuu-ciu (Ute), whose seasonal movements followed these mountains for generations. The name Sawatch is generally understood to derive from a Ute word meaning "blue earth," later adapted through Spanish before settling into English. Even the names remind us that landscapes accumulate stories layered upon one another.

Unlike so many of Colorado's fourteeners, whose names commemorate explorers, politicians, or institutions, Mount Massive is named simply for what it is. A massif is not a single mountain but a massive body of the earth's crust, a compact block of connected peaks formed through immense geological forces over unimaginable stretches of time. Mount Massive, the second highest peak in Colorado,  takes its name not from a single summit but from the five fourteen-thousand-foot summits that together form the mountain.  Its identity lies less in claiming the highest point than in the breadth of the whole. 

Mount Massive is the highest summit of that massif, but it is the massif itself that gives the mountain its name. The granite beneath our feet began forming nearly two billion years ago before tectonic uplift, glaciation, erosion, snow, water, and fire sculpted the broad shoulders that distinguish it from so many of Colorado's sharper peaks. Long before the Willow Fire appeared in newspaper headlines, periodic burns were already part of the mountain's ecological rhythm, clearing forest floors, recycling nutrients, and creating conditions for renewal.

The spring and summer of 2020 offered an unexpected interruption to ordinary life. Like many, I found myself with time that had not existed before. We were living in Summit County, Colorado, so I made a plan to climb a few of the state's fifty-three fourteeners while I had the opportunity. Turning fifty invited a kind of reckoning. Milestone birthdays have a way of asking us to pause—to look back over the life we’ve built, to measure ourselves against the hopes we once held, and to consider what remains possible. It seemed a good excuse to test myself against something that required preparation, endurance, and humility. Climbing a Colorado fourteener felt like an appropriate way to honor the moment and to set a tone for whatever came next. In ways I could never have imagined--it did.

The previous summer, my daughter had completed a six-day Outward Bound expedition around Mt. Massive Wilderness. Her group's summit attempt had been thwarted by stormy weather, and although she returned stronger and more confident, I knew she was disappointed not to have reached the top. My fiftieth birthday was the perfect excuse to try again together. The previous summer, while Niamh was on her Outward Bound expedition around Mount Massive, I climbed Quandary Peak—one of Colorado's most accessible fourteeners. Having summited it with relative ease, I assumed I understood what climbing a Colorado fourteener required. I mistook one mountain for all mountains.

By July 2020, life had become uncertain. I was quietly preparing for another international move, this time to Morocco, while selling furniture, packing boxes, and procuring a cat visa, all while navigating a world that was closed for business. Much of the early summer had been devoted to caring for my brother as he navigated a difficult period in his life. I arrived at my fiftieth birthday somewhat depleted.

We camped beside a stream near the trailhead the night before my birthday climb. The sound of moving water should have made for restful sleep, but headlights swept repeatedly across the tent as climbers drove the rough road toward the trailhead hours before sunrise. Every time another vehicle rumbled past and dust drifted beneath the rainfly, I woke wondering whether we had overslept, whether everyone else was already ahead of us, whether we had forgotten something important. Between the 10,500 ft altitude, the mountain chill, the anticipation, and the logistics of an alpine start, neither of us slept particularly well.

In the dawn light we made breakfast, organized our packs, checked our water one last time, and drove to the trailhead just in time to claim the final parking space. Immediately I began second-guessing myself. Were we starting too late? Had I underestimated the distance? Misjudged the route? Every mountain climb begins long before the first step on the trail and planning and preparation are the most important step of all.

The lower trail winds gradually up through dense lodgepole pine and spruce, and for several miles the mountain keeps much of itself hidden. Unlike peaks that reveal their summit almost immediately, Mount Massive unfolds gradually. The forest narrows your field of vision until your attention settles on the immediate landscape: the next switchback, exposed roots, loose rocks, birdsong filtering through the trees. Only after climbing above tree line does the horizon suddenly open in every direction. The alpine tundra stretches toward distant ridges, and you see glimpses of the summit.

It was not until I began studying eco-chaplaincy that I encountered research helping to explain why experiences like this remain so vividly embedded in memory. Neuroscientists have found that novel environments recruit more of our attention than familiar ones, creating stronger and more durable memories. Hiking at altitude demands constant physiological adjustment. Oxygen levels decrease. Breathing deepens. Muscles fatigue differently. Working memory becomes occupied with balance, hydration, weather, footing, and pacing. The brain has little capacity left for distraction because it is fully engaged with the present moment. Here I found my explanation as to why I do not remember spending hours contemplating life's deeper questions as I hiked along. I remember almost none of the miles themselves.  I remember paying attention—to the trail beneath my boots, to the changing weather, to my breathing, to my daughter's comfort, and to the growing awareness that the mountain was asking more of me than I had anticipated.

That attention also sharpened something I had not expected. Throughout Niamh's childhood I had usually been the one encouraging her forward—breaking long hikes into manageable pieces, suggesting one more bend in the trail, one more bridge, one more hill before we stopped. But she had grown into a teen now capable of carrying not only her own weight but, in small ways, mine as well. A summer spent trail running with her cross country team in Summit County had prepared her well for this massive mission.

By the time we reached the final ridge, I was tired. The granite narrowed, steep drop-offs fell away on either side, and every step demanded complete concentration. I have never been particularly comfortable with exposure, and standing on that ridge made me acutely aware of how little separated secure footing from open air. Somewhere along the final approach I noticed that Niamh had begun leaving single M&Ms on rocks ahead of me, just as I had done for her five years earlier while we hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc through France, Switzerland, and Italy.

On our Alps adventure I had scattered those bits of chocolate ahead of her when she was tired, turning the next stretch of trail into a kind of treasure hunt. Now she was quietly returning that kindness. That moment has remained with me. Her willingness to notice that I was hesitant, to encourage me without drawing attention to it, told me something about the young woman she was becoming. Whatever else I questioned about my parenting over the years, standing on that ridge I remember thinking- perhaps I got something right.

The summit was breathtaking, but it was not triumphant. It was humbling. I gazed out across the Sawatch Range, trying to absorb a landscape so vast that my imagination could scarcely contain it. I was equally aware of my own fatigue, the exposure around us, and the long journey back down. Reaching the summit is only the halfway point. What overwhelmed me was not simply the view but the perspective it offered. The trail that had occupied my attention all morning became one thin line across an immense landscape. Mount Massive itself was only one mountain among many mountains. Our climb was only one day among thousands of days in our lives. The scale of the landscape quietly recalibrated my own worries.

After photographs and contemplative moments, we turned around and began the descent. The only thought that remained was to keep walking before darkness reached the trail. After hours spent exposed above the alpine tundra, the shelter of the forest felt protective again. Clouds had begun building over the ridge behind us, and although there were still miles to walk, I knew the most exposed part of the day was over. Much of the descent has blurred with time except for one brief moment of exquisite relief when I sat beside the icy Willow Creek and plunged my aching feet into the water while the sound of the rushing creek drown out the chatter in my head. I allowed myself to imagine floating away on it. The mountain had been harder than I'd anticipated. Expectation can become its own form of debt. We pay for it whenever reality refuses to honor the stories we’ve already told ourselves.  By the time we trudged to the trailhead around six o'clock that evening, ours was the last car remaining in the parking lot.

Sitting beside Reservoir 6 beneath smoke carried across a continent, I returned to that mountain again—not because the climb itself had changed, but because I had. Between fifty and fifty-six, life accumulated in ways I could never have anticipated. There were deaths and departures, international moves, disappointments, unexpected beginnings, career collapses and pivots, profound heartbreak, and a year spent examining grief in all its forms. In retrospect-I can see now that the real prize wasn't reaching the summit. It was sharing that milestone with my daughter. From the summit I could see far more than I ever could while climbing toward it.  Had I stood at the trailhead that morning and seen the entire route at once, I might have balked and gone for birthday pancakes instead. The mountain reveals itself only as you become capable of receiving it. Perhaps, mercifully, life does the same. At the time I hadn't considered that it would be one of our last birthday adventures together.

When I read about the Willow Fire burning through the forests below Mount Massive, I found myself reading about fire ecology as well. One of sixteen active fires burning across Colorado and one of hundreds across North America, it has consumed nearly 7,100 acres since igniting through human activity on June 28 and remained only partially contained. 12 people have been injured fighting it. Somewhere in those burning acres were the forests through which we had climbed before crossing South Willow Creek and leaving the Colorado Trail for the long ascent above treeline. The granite endures while the landscape changes.

Fire destroys, but in many western ecosystems it also belongs. Some forests depend upon periodic burns for renewal. Heat opens cones that would otherwise remain closed. Nutrients return to the soil. Light reaches seedlings that could never have survived beneath a dense canopy. Fire does not erase the mountain. It changes what grows upon it.

During the past year, my chaplaincy studies required me to conduct an honest inventory of grief. That work became something much larger. Grief was only one layer. Beneath it lay decades of choices, relationships, losses, risks, mistakes, joys, sacrifices, and moments of grace. I kept excavating, hopeful that if I dug deeply enough I might grasp how those layers had shaped the life I had lived. Perhaps healing is not another excavation. It is allowing the undergrowth of regret to burn away until the granite that has always been there is revealed.  No single decision, heartbreak, success, failure, or loss explains who we become. 

Watching smoke drift across New England from fires burning hundreds of miles away, I wondered whether there comes a point when excavation itself reaches its limit. Reflection has value, but so does recognizing when enough layers have been uncovered. Some things ask to be understood. Others simply ask to be seen clearly.

Sometimes the granite remains exactly where it has always been, while everything growing upon it learns, season after season, how to begin again. It is a lesson I continue to learn.

Bears and Bereavement

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain...

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

The first bear appeared on Mother's Day last spring. I was circling Jenny Lake beneath the Tetons, carrying a grief I could neither resolve nor avoid. It was a season marked by uncertainty, loss, and remorse. Walking through nature is my way of moving through questions that have no answers. Eco-chaplaincy is teaching me how to take that personal practice and use it to accompany others through their grief.

There is a place along the trail where the trees part and the Grand Teton draws your attention upward. When I lowered my gaze, a grizzly was crossing the trail ahead of me—close enough to make me reach for the bear spray on my hip. I held my breath and watched. The bear moved without urgency, entirely unconcerned with my presence. I felt the awesome and visceral fear that being in proximity to a bear evokes. Then it wandered uphill through the sagebrush.

By the time I returned to my car, the vast, blue Wyoming sky had turned dark. Wind and a wall of rain swept across the lake. Hail pelted my car. The landscape I had walked through only hours earlier had transformed completely. The Tetons were enshrouded by clouds.

A year later, on Mother's Day, I hiked Bear Mountain in New York with my daughter. The name did not escape me. Just twelve months earlier, I had been circling Jenny Lake wondering whether I would spend the rest of my Mother's Days alone in sorrow. Now I found myself on a mountain that carried the same symbol that had followed me through that difficult year.

One week later, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of my father's death, another bear appeared. I was circling Reservoir #6 in my hometown of West Hartford. As a teenager, I trained there, dreamed there, grieved there, and returned whenever I was home. My father had walked those same trails decades earlier while battling the leukemia that eventually took his life.

The fear that had defined the previous year had softened. Hope had begun to return, though uncertainty remained, now tempered by hard-won patience and wisdom. As I walked along the shoreline, I saw a black bear bobbing in the water, cooling off on an unseasonably hot spring afternoon. He ambled out of the reservoir a short distance ahead of me on the trail, and I followed slowly behind him, my fascination outweighing my fear.

The encounter felt no less improbable than the grizzly had the year before. Two bears. Two bodies of water. Two anniversaries. Two moments when I was trying to orient myself within a life that no longer looked the way I had hoped or imagined.

The third bear appeared during a week-long immersion in death and dying as part of my chaplaincy studies. We had been asked to write a letter to our loved ones to be opened after our death. It was a beautiful June day, and the classroom felt too small to hold the weight of the question. I carried my notebook to a picnic table near the trees along the Park River—the same river Mark Twain once looked out upon while writing Huckleberry Finn, the same river the Podunk and Wangunk once fished.

As I sat there, I found myself thinking about grief and the things people carry after loss. We carry people. We carry memories. We carry unfinished conversations. We carry hopes for futures that never arrived. We carry questions that have no answers. We carry these invisible things within our hearts: regret, guilt, fear, anger, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all. We carry these gifts that remind us of our capacity to love. Halfway through my letter, I looked up and saw a black bear in the woods. It paused beside a tree, scratched its back, and continued on its way. Construction workers were jackhammering a block away. A dog barked at the postman. Car horns beeped. The bear seemed completely unconcerned by all of it. My letter was forgotten as I watched -mesmerized-until it disappeared.

For a long time, I thought the significance of these encounters lay in what the bears symbolized. I wondered too, why my initial inclination was to ask --what does it mean? Eventually, I became less interested in interpretation and more interested in what happened when I noticed them.

Each encounter provided a sacred pause. 

My grief loosened its grip. My breath came easier as my attention shifted away from heartache and toward what was actually present. The bears did not answer my questions. They did not resolve my grief. They didn't judge my mistakes nor were they concerned with my religious piety or practice. Sometimes symbols and stories give us a way into conversations we struggle to approach directly. We begin by talking about a bear and discover we are talking about grief. We begin by talking about a landscape and discover we are talking about belonging. That realization explains why eco-chaplaincy resonates so deeply with me.

Human beings have been seeking meaning this way for thousands of years. Long before we built seminaries, hospitals, and universities, we gathered around fires or cups of tea and tried to understand what frightened us, sustained us, and broke our hearts. We buried our dead. We watched the movement of the sun and stars. We built places like Newgrange and aligned them with the winter solstice. We left offerings beside rivers and springs. We told stories about bears.

The details differ across cultures and centuries, but the questions remain remarkably consistent. How do we live with uncertainty? How do we continue after loss? How do we find our bearings when the map we were carrying becomes obsolete? I do not know what bears imagine. They just keep living. Noticing patterns is part of what human beings do. We connect stories, places, anniversaries, and encounters in an effort to understand our lives. The bears that crossed my path became part of that process. Yet they were not only symbols. They were also real animals moving through changing landscapes.

The black bear wandering through my Hartford neighborhood was following the Park River corridor through a changing ecosystem. Connecticut's bear population has expanded dramatically during my lifetime, and bears are now found in every municipality in the state. The same encounter that invited reflection on my own life also raised questions about habitat loss, development, climate change, and coexistence. Eco-chaplaincy asks us to hold both realities at once: the personal story we tell about an encounter and the ecological reality in which that encounter occurs. Perhaps we have always been seeking orientation rather than certainty.

Years ago, while earning an M.Phil. in Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin, I studied the root causes of conflict and the pathways toward reconciliation. I learned that most conflicts are not really about the thing being argued. Beneath positions lie stories. Beneath stories lie fears. Beneath fears lie needs for belonging, dignity, safety, recognition, and love. Chaplaincy asks many of the same questions, but on a more personal scale. What is this person carrying? What loss remains unnamed? What story are they telling themselves about what has happened? Before people can make meaning from suffering, they need someone willing to witness it. Chaplaincy requires learning to listen beneath the surface of a person's story, noticing the fears, losses, and longings within it. Eco-chaplaincy is not about finding answers in nature. It is about cultivating the pause that allows discernment to emerge. The work is not to provide answers or impose meaning. It is to listen carefully enough to distill what lies beneath the story being told.

My path to eco-chaplaincy began long before graduate school. It began beside reservoirs and rivers, within forests, and on top of mountains. It began through loss, wonder, noticing, and accompaniment. Eco-chaplaincy simply gave language to something I had been practicing for much of my life: the privilege of witness.