6twentyseven2thousand21

The other evening, while checking on the rain from my window, I noticed a black garden ant crawling down the trunk of a maple sapling growing in the neglected landscaping next to the house and was immediately transported forty years into the past where I lay face down, my head hanging over the edge of a plastic chaise lounge in the backyard of my childhood home, watching ants work in the grass. This is something I did often as a kid, but what struck me most about this particular memory was my visceral experience in the present of the sheer absence of the concept of time in the mind of the child I once was. There was no ego-filter between the observing consciousness and the activity of the ants: no schedule, no agenda, no politics or religion, no I.

On New Year’s Eve, 2019, I took a flight to California, where I would ultimately spend five days hiking and camping through the backcountry in Joshua Tree National Park. En route, I happened upon a National Geographic article online about how, due to climate change, Joshua trees are on course for extinction in the next fifty years or so. The yucca moth, with which the trees share a symbiotic relationship, is disappearing from the park. In order to backpack among these trees, I had driven my car from Kalamazoo, MI, to Michigan City, IN, so I could ride the South Shore Line into Chicago, where I took the EL from downtown to O’Hare, flying then to Las Vegas and finally Oakland, CA, where I booked a Lyft to my friend’s house twenty-two miles away in Lafayette. In the morning we drove all day to reach the park, spent five days in the backcountry, then I repeated that itinerary almost exactly in reverse to arrive home ten days later. That’s a lot of fossil fuel. And a lot of dead trees.

Nothing breaks down that ego-filter like an extended stay in the wilderness, though. And, as countless writers from Whitman and Thoreau to Gary Snyder and Wendell Barry attest, there is much more to the experience than simple recuperation from the frenetic pace of our consumer culture. To be so nakedly conscious in the face of such glorious and frightening reality is to disengage from your socially cultivated sense of a self. It is to become, in a very real sense, the sky, the forest, the mountain, the river.

John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Barry Lopez are among the best writers for conveying this sense of connection to place, but reading their work today is like reading eulogies for the landscapes they describe. Muir’s California, Abbey’s Southwest, and Lopez’s Arctic literally no longer exist, and, of course, countless species of fauna and flora in those regions face ever growing threats to their existence each day. Wildfires and extreme weather occurrences are increasing at an exponential rate, and, in terms of climate catastrophes, apparently, we’re only just getting started. (Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction or Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist for a forecast of more unavoidable loss yet to come.) The future for the planet looks grim, indeed.

And, yet, as any good student of history can tell you, we humans have been more or less living through continual apocalypse since the dawn of our existence. Disease, famine, and war have been mainstays from the beginning. We can build bigger, faster, more efficient means of distraction, but suffering and death are not going away, and there’s no legislating our way out of that. So whether the world burns or I’m hit by a truck, the outcome is ultimately the same: I cease, perhaps painfully, to exist.

Still, returning home from Joshua Tree was depressing. I’ve always felt acutely estranged from the culture at large, but that feeling has sharpened since the advent of social media and streaming TV. Not to say those aren’t useful tools, but what I see mostly happening is that the filter through which people perceive reality is becoming increasingly opaque. This is most obvious in the polarization of political views in recent years, but more subtly, and perhaps most insidiously, it strengthens the barrier between the observing consciousness and the natural world; that is to say, it strengthens the ego, which is, after all, an illusion.

One of the first signs of civilization on the road home was a strip-mining project, and I felt, for the first time, real pain for what I’d previously considered to be inanimate earth and rock, and, simultaneously, I realized I’d only ever appreciated indigenous people’s attachment to sacred lands intellectually, that’s to say, through the filter of ego. Five days of naked awareness in the desert can unify one with the landscape, which sounds beautiful, but coming back was disorienting, and living here since has, at times, felt like being trapped at the fringes of a virtual reality nightmare; the world that I love, that loves me, being tortured and dying.

But here’s the thing: the universe, the earth, has always been changing, been dying, and, so, too, every moment of my life is my death. To paraphrase Heraclitus, I can never be alive in the same body/mind twice. Anger, fear, hope are all transitory. Certainly, there’s a lot of hate and ugliness in the world, but there’s a lot of ineffable beauty and tenderness, too. There’s music and art, and, occasionally, true poetry. And we really all only have just barely a second here to enjoy it, if we’re lucky. Yes, the history of the world is the story of humans destroying the earth—and each other—while trying to make it a better place, so we lose desert trees, river valleys, white rhinos, and coral reefs, but as Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, “While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment […]. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.”

I’ve spent so much time in the virtual world of my ego, hoping to recover the past or to improve the future, to achieve something close to perfection, to attain enlightenment, justice, success, to cheat death for as long as possible, but I have no time left for any of that. I’m giving up on the strategy of accumulation—of knowledge, experience, money, and gear—and I’m going outside with a bottle of water and, maybe, a snack, and if Death comes tomorrow, I’ll be waiting out here in reality watching the ants.