Family Hiking

Indian Paintbrush

THE STREAMS OF GOD ARE FILLED

You care for the land and water it; 

you enrich it abundantly. 

The streams of God are filled with water 

to provide the people with grain, 

for so you have ordained it. 

You drench its furrows and level its ridges; 

you soften it with showers and bless its crops. 

You crown the year with your bounty, 

and your carts overflow with abundance. 

The grasslands of the wilderness overflow; 

the hills are clothed with gladness. 

The meadows are covered with flocks 

and the valleys are mantled with grain; 

they shout for joy and sing. 

~Psalm 65:9-13 

This Psalm is a harvest hymn of thanksgiving, likely sung during the Jewish autumnal festival of Tabernacles. After our national (USA) feast day of Thanksgiving last week, we’ve had opportunity once again as a people to consider the good gifts of home, family, friends, food, feasting! What a sweet joy it is to raise our voices and sing songs of thanksgiving together as a people!

Psalm 65 celebrates “streams of God filled with water”. Translate that as the gift of rain. On the north Oregon coast, it is a favorite pastime of locals to complain about rain. We certainly have an abundance of this gift! We average 76 inches (over six feet) per year. God has ordained rain as a gift given to all creatures to remind us of heaven’s abundance. Next time it rains, go outside, turn your bare face skyward, and soak in the gift of God’s presence in the “streams of God”. Offer a silent prayer of thanks for the wetness of grace.

If you’ve ever traveled to an arid climate, you’ll know what a gift rain is for people, land and animals. The meadows, the fields, the valleys, the mountains, the flocks, and the people all sing for joy at the sight and sound of falling rain, the “streams of God”. Psalm 65 offers a beautiful vision of creation “singing for joy”. The Bible tells us creation sings for joy. See for example, Job 38:7, describing this celebration at creation, “while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy.”

According to the ancient songwriter, God’s goodness is so abundant that all creation flows forth with the song of God’s goodness, as rains fall from heaven, drenching furrows newly plowed and planted by farmers. The “streams of God” level the ridges and soften the land with showers.

A decade ago, we hiked by a gushing spring coming out of the side of a mountain ridge in Olympic National Park a mile above sea level. This spring emerged just below the top of the ridge, sending pure water cascading down the mountainside, watering the valley below, allowing myriads of wildflowers, shrubs and trees to prosper in the gift of water. I’ve been deeply moved by that single spring, evidence to my soul of the abundance of water pushed a mile upwards within the heart of the mountain by the upwelling water table of God’s goodness.

May the streams of God fill our life this Advent season, softening hearts, leveling our ridges, filling our hurting furrowed hearts, and germinating the good seed of God’s Word planted in our hearts, overflowing our lives with God’s gift of abundance!

Mountain of Gratitude

Tusind tak ("two-sen tak") is the Danish phrase for a thousand thanks. Thank you for following this blog and all the encouragement along the way. A Tusind Tak.

Universe in a Pond

Rain on the Lake

One might consider this as level 10 rain - showers.

Martin's Frog

Olympic Mountain Goat

Olympic Mountain Goat in front of Mt. Olympus

Into the Midst

SPEAKING UP FOR SILENCE

Let them trust in God who does not fail those who seek Him with a simple and righteous heart; nor will He fail to impart what is needful for the way until getting them to the clear and pure light of love.... The attitude necessary...is to allow the soul to remain in rest and quietude even though it may seem very obvious to them that they are doing nothing and wasting time.... They must be content simply with a loving and peaceful attentiveness to God. ~St. John of the Cross

Make a little experiment. Walk outside your house. Try to find one square inch of quiet in your corner of the woods unbroken by human noise. How far would you have to travel to get to such a place? For the past 25 years, this has been the quest of Emmy award winning sound recorder, Gordon Hempton, who has recorded the sounds of nature on nearly every continent.

Sitting on a moss covered log in the heart of the Olympic National Park, Hempton, sets up his sound recording microphones and meters to listen, claiming the Olympics to be the quietest of all our national parks. According to Hempton, our silent spaces are dwindling. “In 1985”, writes staff reporter Lynda Mapes of the Seattle Times, “[Hempton] recorded 21 places in Washington state where natural quiet was unbroken by noise intrusions from 15 minutes or more during the daytime. By 1989, there were only three.”[i]

The most aggressive invader of natural quiet spaces? The jet airline industry. Alaska Airlines alone accounts for more than 30 flights over Olympic National Park per day. By happy accident, Olympic National Park happens to lie west of most of national and international flight patterns. Still, the scarring sound of jet engines accounts for the most disruptive human sounds heard in the Olympics.

Over the past few years, our family has enjoyed fifty-mile backcountry treks into the heights of Olympic National Park. We practice “leave no trace” camping, packing out all our garbage and literally leaving no trace of our presence, preserving the space for the next camper. The jet airline industry does not believe in “leave no trace”. During our recent week-long family vacation in the Olympic backcountry, the natural quiet was interrupted several dozen times a day by jet airplanes. Long after their five minutes of roaring had cleared the skies, their vapor trail was still evident as it dissipated thousands of feet above our heads.

We spend days of hiking, carrying all our gear and food in backpacks, in order to arrive at serene alpine meadow, twenty-five miles from the nearest parking lot. There we sit, listening to the footsteps of a Great Blue Heron stalking frogs along the lakeshore. We hear the peeping of a Water Dipper chick looking for her mother and the tune in to the symphony of bees gathering nectar from alpine wildflowers in that pristine wonderland. 

A jet airplane flying overhead in such a place is like a kid burping for five minutes during a church service. It’s like that annoying person sitting in the seat behind you at the symphony, the guy who keeps clearing his throat and finally gets out a throat lozenge, only to spend several irritating minutes crinkling the wrapper before getting the lozenge into his mouth. It is like a group of kids noisily giggling over magazines in the corner of the public library while you’re quietly trying to do some research. You get the idea. 

Sound invasion goes on all the time. According to Hempton, natural quiet is so rare that most people under age of thirty know nothing of the experience. “Whenever someone tells me they know a quiet place, I figure they have an undiagnosed hearing impairment, or they weren’t really listening,” admits Hempton. “Most people believe they know what natural quiet is, but they have not had the experience; it is not the same thing as sitting in an empty theater, a church, a library.”[ii]

 

Sound engineer, Ron Sauro of Tacoma, Washington, convinced me that we are raising a whole generation of young people who are hard of hearing due to listening to loud music through earphones. He explained to me the physiology of our sense of hearing. Sound waves vibrate the meadows of cilia in your ear canal, setting off signals which are sent along to your brain. When you expose your ear canal to intense decibels of sound for too long, the cilia break off and do not grow back. Oddly, the hearing most commonly lost due to excessive exposure to high decibels is the middle range, the range of the human voice.

In my experience, humans tend to be uncomfortable with silence. Try it out the next time you get into a good conversation with a friend: experiment with periods of silence from your side of the conversation. See how your friend responds to the gap, how quickly he attempts to fill the gap with words. In quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it (Isaiah 30:15).

Spiritual seekers welcome silence, both the outward form of natural quiet in places such as the Olympics as well as that inward form of creative silence found through such practices as meditation and journaling. “We spend our lives in containers”, observes Hempton. “Cars. Buildings. Planes. Natural quiet is in open, living space. It’s alive.” His current campaign is with airline executives, attempting to reduce the number of flights per day over the Olympic National Park. Like those visionary folks who set apart our national parks in the last century for future generations, Hempton strives to preserve and protect the gift of silence, declaring to anyone who will hear: “Quiet places are the think tank of the soul.” There we begin to learn not only to listen but to truly trust in the Voice of the Shepherd of our souls.

 

[i] Lynda V. Mapes, The Seattle Times, August 1, 2005 (Seattle, WA: Seattle Times Co., 2005), A1.

[ii] Ibid., A9.

Dosewallips River

Drip!

Multimedia: Fingerprints of God

Sunset on Upper Lena Lake

Growth

RAVEN

While on a backpacking hike in Olympic National Park last month, I wrote the following raven poem.

When you're lonely and needing a haven,
When the image you value is graven,
You can make a new start,
Taking heed with your heart,
By considering the song of the raven.

GUARDIANS OF SILENCE

Reflect with me on one of the most common plants found in the Pacific Northwest, the Western Sword Fern (Polystichum munitum). This plant grows in abundance in the western regions of North America, especially as understory in coniferous forests. Something as common as the Sword Fern can easily be overlooked. What then is so unique about the Sword Fern?

Tough and Adaptable: Sword Ferns are found as far north as southeast Alaska and as far south as southern California. This plant has found a way to adapt and survive in very warm and very cold environments. Though Sword Ferns prefer wet, temperate conditions, growing best in rich, organic soils, they also survive in eco-systems with little moisture, and can live through intense dry periods. For gardeners, they are great for low maintenance landscaping. Sword Ferns are also very disease and pest resistant. Well-designed for reproduction, this plant repopulates through rows of reddish spores, or sori, found on the undersides of every frond. A single spore develops into a new organism through asexual reproduction. Sword Fern rootstock, a rhizome, anchors the plant into the soil by means of a hairy root-system through which it gathers moisture and minerals. Part of the tough quality of the Sword Fern may be seen in the reddish-brown scales covering and protecting the rhizome.

Balance and Beauty: The Sword Fern has found its way into millions of backyards across western North America, often without any work or cultivation on the part of the gardener. Along the moist, shaded north side of our home on the Oregon Coast, Sword Ferns planted themselves. As the native plant guide for King County declares, “This is the king of northwest ferns. Its stately appearance and adaptability for almost any site condition, make it one of the most useful of all native plants.” (1) The fronds, which can grow to six feet in length, reveal a repeating pattern of serrated leaflets, or pinnae, with each leaflet a miniature pattern of the overall frond. From base to tip, leaflets also gradually tapers, forming the pattern of a sword. Evergreen in color, this plant provides year round color to forest and backyard, as well as an eye-pleasing symmetry and harmony. Though seldom used for any other purpose today than landscaping, the Sword Fern has had a long history among native populations, providing bedding, medicinal uses, cooking uses, and even eaten as food.

The Pathway to Silence: Finally, I invite you to consider the Sword Fern as guardians of the forest along the pathways to silence. Though found ubiquitously among many noisy neighborhoods and highways along the western states and provinces, the Sword Fern is also found in the quietest places of tranquility. Gordon Hempton, a sound recordist who has been recording silent places of North America for years, noticed the encroachment of human noise upon natural sanctuaries such as our national parks. His book, One Square Inch of Silence (Free Press, 2009), articulates his passion for preserving the gift of silence in natural spaces such as Olympic National Park. Surrounding Hempton’s “one square inch of silence” in the Hoh Valley of Olympic National Park, you’ll be sure to find a whole regiment of Sword Ferns standing guard over the gift of solitude and silence.

1. Sources: http://green.kingcounty.gov/gonative/Plant.aspx?Act=view&PlantID=37; http://bss.sfsu.edu/holzman/courses/fall00projects/swordfern.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polystichum_munitum; http://www.nwplants.com/plants/ferns/pol_mun_index.html

2. For more on Gordon Hempton and ‘One Square Inch of Silence’, see http://onesquareinch.org

Light Through the Trees

THE ENCHANTED VALLEY OF THE SOUL

In returning and rest is your salvation,
In quietness and trust is your strength,
But you would have none of it.
~Isaiah 30:15

A few years ago, on the second day of our annual backpacking adventure into the back country of Olympic National Park, we left O’Neil Creek Camp around eleven in the morning and had been moving in and out of the shade all afternoon. For the Olympic Penisula, it was hot, in the low 80’s. Part of the trail followed a dry riverbed, filled with glacial silt. My soul felt like that riverbed, dry-mouthed, dusty, a bit gravelly and irritable. We rounded a bend in the trail and were greeted by a cool wash of air. If air had a color, I’d say this wind was emerald green, charged with soothing refreshment, a welcome reprieve from the long afternoon in the heat.

My aching shoulders relaxed. My heart started to race with the crazy delirium that comes from too much physical exertion when you’re out of shape. I spoke out loud, what I was thinking: “We just entered the Enchanted Valley.” My wife agreed, having no idea where we were on the map. Both of us were ready to get rid of the backpacks, and take a nap in the shade under an evergreen tree. Within minutes, we crossed over a suspension bridge marking the boundary into the Enchanted Valley, Washington state’s version of Yosemite, a glacier-carved valley half a mile wide, bordered by 4000 foot cliffs, also known as “The Valley of a Thousand Waterfalls”. After shedding our packs, we sat down in dazed wonder. We drank from the cool waters of the Quinault River and refilled our water bottles, as the cliffs invited our eyes and hearts to look upward. At the head of the valley, high above the meadowlands and trees, as though enthroned on the Quinault Glacier, Mount Anderson ruled in serenity. We had entered a strange land, a place where people remember they are human beings, not human doings. The Enchanted Valley broke the spell of worldly enchantment, calling me back to my heart’s true home, a place of restoration and quiet, a place of returning and rest.

The world kept flying overhead. I heard dozens of jetliners speeding overhead that day, odd little darts of silver filled with busy people dressed in suits and ties, bound for big cities across oceans, where people in glassed in high-rise office buildings engage in high-speed commerce and every form of commercial profiteering. The Enchanted Valley knows nothing of that world, the world of fast food drive-thru lanes, text-messaging, cell phones, iPods, broadband, or multi-tasking. The meadow in this valley quietly invites weary travelers to come and rest. The Quinault River ceaselessly sings a river song for thirsty people while deer graze nearby unfazed by human visitors.

Sure, thousands of tasks are taking place minute by minute all across the valley. Ptarmigan mothers cooed at their young to stay close and watch out for predators as they walked right through our campsite. Bees collected nectar from sun up to sun down. There are always camping tasks to be done. Put up the tents. Build a fire. Prepare dinner. Roll out the sleeping bags. Stow away gear for the night.

Somehow, such tasks take on a different dimension in the Enchanted Valley. The tasks which seemed so important two days ago back in "the real world" all seem somehow lightweight and less important up here in the cool clear air of the Olympics. The Enchanted Valley invites a soul into an unexpected adventure; something like Alice falling through the rabbit hole into Wonderland or Lucy stepping through the old wardrobe into Narnia.

Call me a romantic fool. Consider the Enchanted Valley idyllic nonsense. Or take that hike thirteen miles up the East Fork of the Quinault River into the Enchanted Valley and taste it for yourself. There is water there to satisfy a person’s deeper thirst. There is sky there that holds the radiant light of evening well past sunset, an enchantment of lavender skies stretching miles across the great inner canopy of the soul. Long after I left that valley, I realized my mind kept sneaking back into that realm, quietly in my memory, as though on tiptoe, seeking to feel that cool wind on my face once again.

These blog essays are about human being, not human doing. They are an odd assortment of invitations into a life of returning and rest, no R.S.V.P. required, welcoming you, nudging you, and encouraging you to return to that place of soul refreshment. Read these blog essays as signposts at the trailhead on the way to the Enchanted Valley of the soul.