Few of us manage for long to deny the reality that eventually we die, all of us, even those who for one delusory reason or another consider themselves too special or irreplaceable for extinction (or are simply too anxious at the prospect of nonexistence and unwilling to face it) and so seek routes of escape (cryonic preservation, anyone?). I die. They die. Everybody dies. Consciously and more often unconsciously this fact affects the way we live. Whether the prospect of one’s death is anxiety-ridden or not, its eventual reality is always a presence in one’s life, and we manage to get by in its shadow (and, with occasional wisdom, not only get by but are changed and deepened by its integrated awareness). Presumably, the failure to locate counterfactual examples helps with this. But our knowledge of eventual death is incomplete for life does not come with a scheduled end-date. No one knows when the day will arrive (unless they schedule it themselves), bleakly for some but with relief for others.

I wonder if our living in the shadow of X-risks does not have much the same quality as living in the shadow of our dying? Extinction by one or more existential risks lacks the certainty of my death, while sharing the uncertainty of its timing, but they are abundant with potential to facilitate it. Both are subject to denial. The X-risks I am thinking of here are primarily nuclear war and anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), which differ mostly in the time they take to turn risk into reality. Both are indisputably the result of human choice. Nuclear war and ACD are under our control, unnecessary, irrational…and both march onward to their destined conclusions. The U.S., in fact, has committed to spending around $2 trillion on building new and improved nuclear weapons it claims never to want to use. War is rooted in fear, power lust, mundane inertia and unimaginative thinking; ACD is rooted in a similar mundanity combined with greed and hypertrophic materialism. The majority of Americans do not seem deeply concerned about either of them.

So, I write for the minority who see what’s coming and lack confidence they can have much effect on its course and who think the nature of our socio-political and economic systems is such as to empower those with the highest risk tolerance (on behalf of the most desperate hunger for power and/or wealth) in the country. A risk tolerance that includes its necessary self- and other-deceptions which from my minority’s view so far exceeds prudence and any prospective benefits as to constitute culpable heedlessness. Yet, they are in control and the majority passively accepts their version of the ethical and existential calculus. What is the minority to do? To be clear, some of them remain deeply involved with efforts to eliminate or mitigate the risks but as realists they recognize the odds against success are steep and time is limited. Activists, too, face the question of how to live with their knowledge of looming disasters.

Following the analogy of living in the midst of X-risk with living in the knowledge of your own inevitable death, and noting the minority that intends to live good lives even in the face of ultimate X-risked calamities, I seek principles for how to live good lives in the midst of these prospects—one imposed by Nature, owing to human disruption, through still not fully imaginable climatic disturbances, and the other by the unaccountable socio-political establishment that  steers the ship relentlessly toward the reef of nuclear disaster. Humans yearn to create and discover sources of meaning and purpose in a Universe that I believe has its own sources and leaves ours for us to discern. I add that the minority’s anxiety or hopelessness isn’t rooted in narcissism or lack of care for the commons—just the opposite. X-risks do not exist independently of the culture, and in the minority’s eyes that culture is so distorted by the forces that led to the Risks and so resistant to honest self-awareness and the changes that could follow from such insight that it does not elicit respect. If there is to be salvation from the Risks, the minority of which I speak would not want it to be a return to the present status quo. They seek meanings that the culture doesn’t support and therefore must find ways of operating counterculturally in the presence of its existential risk accompaniments along with its myriad failures—in the world, but not of it.

(Note: I speak of “the minority” not with any defined sense of who they are or how many; they are at present more a postulate than determinable group. I see them out there, am acquainted with some and familiar with their general characteristics, assume there are more, and am a member myself but know that we lack the numbers or power to alter entrenched cultural ways.)

In 2013 philosopher Samuel Scheffler published Death and the Afterlife[2]. The afterlife for him referred to the Earthly future following one’s death (not personal transition to a metaphysical state), meaning the continued existence of humans but without the deceased, i.e., “after-his-life”. Scheffler’s reflections convinced him that our knowledge that people will carry on with the business of living and culture was of crucial importance to our finding value in our present lives and projects even knowing that we face our own inevitable demise. In his words, “…the existence of an afterlife is a condition of many other things that we care about continuing to matter to us.” And, “…I will argue that the importance to us of the afterlife can help to illuminate what, more generally, is involved in something’s mattering or being important to us, or in our valuing of it” (pp. 15-16). Although I’m not convinced he’s right, at least not mostly, it is provocative to consider. He uses P.D. James’ The Children of Men for one model of a disappearing humanity. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and George Stewart’s Earth Abides are other examples of the genre but not ones he mentions. None entertain Scheffler’s questioning but each stimulates the imagination as to the effects on an ever-diminishing (or already diminished) population of humans witnessing the disappearance of their conspecifics, leading possibly to a last man or woman. James’ version of human extinction is via infertility, Shelley’s and Stewart’s through pandemic.

Scheffler wonders what it means to a person to know that life will go on after his death, while I wonder what it means to that person to know they inhabit an Earth and a society that could essentially end within an hour, or more slowly but with equal finality over a few decades. My question is how to live with that knowledge—the uncertainty of when life could become unbearable combined with the prospect that society is in any event crumbling into nihilistic emptiness. Simple observation of the renewed nuclear arms competition and its absurd rationalizations combined with fossil fuel executives continued social acceptance even while methodically deceiving members of the society their products will surely wreck…unsavory affairs, both of them, and sufficient to make many of us hopeless that these kinds of people in this culture will ever voluntarily change or that other power centers will require them to. Thus, again, how do we and our like-minded cohort choose to live worthy lives when the larger world is going to hell. What follows is what comes to mind as I consider what seems to me a realistic rendering of what has to be dealt with if one wants to go on, or out, responsibly.

As I begin, I realize that the people I’ve spoken of as the minority probably don’t need me to write about this (maybe no one does since none may think alternative ways are necessary or possible). In their own multifarious fashions, I expect most of this minority are well on the way to knowing how to live honorably and purposefully within any conditions, but particularly in perilous times within a feckless society.­ Others who are still looking may be drawn to those already on a way and find guidance. I often read words from people working hard to stem the forces of climate change that say “despair is not an option.” My response is that it’s exactly the appropriate option, but not as a place to stay. The feeling of despair needs to become a catalyst for thinking and acting with the understanding it can provoke. Some may decide, after facing the dark wall of despair, that even knowing they will in all likelihood fail, they will choose to continue the struggle against ACD or the existence of nuclear weapons but without false hope and with equal determination to live a good life anyway, focused on factors of being that are still meaningful, including action that does not depend on success to be worthy. Or they might abandon the contest and, like people who feel they had a productive and satisfying career but are ready for change, resign and engage with other sources of meaning. But, again, who am I to write about this? I am satisfied it might turn out that I write, in the fashion of Marcus Aurelius, notes “to myself” with no further effects (not pretending to his greatness, only his intentions).

Considerable effort has gone into understanding the alienation, anger, and nihilism of present-day Republican Trumpists who embody one expression of despair. I won’t add another exegesis but do suggest that part of their feeling may be that in experiencing the anonymity and injustices of this society and seeing the impediments to having their voices mean anything, they fail to discern ways of living that don’t require toppling the power structures (laudable though that might be), indulging in conspiracy theories, lapsing into victimhood, or moving full-tilt into an ends-justify-any-means mentality, and instead to live as if the existing structures do not matter insofar as possible. In other words, turn from victimization and scapegoating to an alternate form of agency. The sense of victimization is a dangerous brew to drink deeply of and seems to have produced the intoxication of endless grievance, which can become addictive and preclude thoughtful alternatives, especially when the alienated succumb to the sway of demagogic cultivators of grievance. Clever cultivators turn grievance into a community of the aggrieved and the mutual reinforcement can become too comfortable to step aside and experiment with alternative ways. Even their “god” can be drafted into the community and give it legitimacy, to the point where former moral strictures become disposable for the sake of the power goal. All of which is to say that both my minority and the nihilists want a good way of life but the former are better positioned to create it, among other reasons because they haven’t imposed so many additional impediments on themselves, nor committed themselves to a state of permanent estrangement, anger, and defensiveness as, it seems to me, the others typically have. Grievance and helplessness are close cousins.

First thought about a way of living before the abyss: I suspect that if most of us lived within strong communities built on ethical or authentic religious commitments we wouldn’t be talking about existential risks and the effects of their presence on choosing ways of life since such risks probably wouldn’t occur (“probably” being a crucial caveat since all human associations have a built-in potential for going awry; we may be exceptional compared to other species mostly in the wide range of our flaws). Such communities aim to protect and nourish their people and want to know, for example, how it is that more war-mindedness with more nuclear weaponry is good for the soul and good for peace, international relations, or social existence. Why do we find ourselves as a nation so regularly and frequently at odds with other peoples, so reliant on the hammer of force for persuasion, and so determined always to be on top? And of course, much more can be said, but the point is that my minority will want for themselves and their families and associated others to help create and sustain communities of mutual care and peaceful aspiration in the midst of this conflictual, alienated world, which is manifestly impoverished of organic communities; questions large and small must be reflected upon. Their focus on their community will carry substantial emotional weight, but I don’t picture it closed, oblivious to conditions outside, near or far, uncaring about injustices suffered half a world away. They aim to be restorative, within and without, as far as possible. And to a large extent they will have had to separate themselves attitudinally from existing societal and especially political norms in order to succeed. If community is to be a vital presence in lives it will start small and may stay there; good ones are good models for wider society but I don’t see “missionary work” as part of their mission. Rather, they represent foundational duties and values that allow stability for whatever individual or group aspirations may follow. The political realm is a necessary, albeit too often a tawdry, one and at present it is hard to imagine it becoming a source of normative inspiration, rationality, or societal improvement. Like corporations it has become too big and unaccountable and mostly an arena for conflict, ambition, and grasping after power and wealth. Until that begins to break down from its own contradictions and the frustrations of an alienated populace—expressed in ethical and responsible ways, one hopes—voting for the best of the worst in hope that the balance between them will slowly shift, may be all we have. Despair momentarily redirected.

Community serves its own vital interests because it must in order to thrive and serve its purposes, but it responds to those of its members at the same time—they are, after all, its reason for being. Its rituals and shared endeavors strengthen the communal body and as well relationships with fellow humans through which many of the chief goods of existence derive: relationships, it should be clear, that are not chiefly transactional, functional, or merely convenient but that compose friendship and mutuality, loving action and reliability. Furthermore, brief observation of the present social world writ large reveals the toxicity of lost trust and the lost commitment to truthfulness on which good communities stand. They aim for restoration of diminished ethical and intellectual goods, for the satisfaction of communal needs, and the well-being and integrity of participants.

The word community is so commonplace that I need to give its use here more depth. After all, we hear people speak of the business community or the academic community and we know it only means that community members have a common occupation and may rarely act as a community at all (except in the former case through lobbying). We also speak of the community of Houston or Mayberry and know they each are defined by geographic boundaries but have little more in common. Even so, we’ve identified the first element of community, which is internal commonalities, which in richer versions of community become deep and interwoven. Elements of one’s identity, shared values, mutual care, certain practices, rituals, and aspirations, all of these creating a solidarity felt in shared responses to communal joys and tragedies. There has to be enough sameness to bind along with enough diversity and freedom mixed with respect and responsibility to ensure the community’s stable and satisfying existence through time. There is nothing novel in this description; everyone’s familiar enough with the concept to use it frequently, casually, and usually haphazardly. But when Americans get past the pabulum of “healing our divisions” and speak specifically, the decline of community and responsible civic-mindedness in our splintered, antagonistic public sphere are identified as culprits more often than any other factor I am aware of. Resilient communities are essential to everyday convivial existence and even more so in the face of the great Risks. Years ago, as a marital therapist, I remember talking to couples about weighing the dangers of winning arguments while losing, through competitive behavior, the marital foundation and the respect and confidence necessary to sustain it. People in communities that aim to thrive remember this as well; no issue can be more important than retaining the ties that bind, mutualities of care that are fostered within community. Families can reflect communal solidarity as can neighborhoods, towns, and so on, formally and informally but small is usually better.  Most of us, I believe, require some elements of conscious community to protect meaning, especially in the midst of nihilistic, X-risked times. And perhaps the most distinct indication of its presence is that its members know implicitly it is always there for support while still holding them accountable for how they live.

A distinction comes to mind between How we live and What we live for. With or without existential risks I think the How answer should be unchanged except as self-reflection moves it toward more depth in the face of threats. (And existential risks, we have to remember, are not just threats to existence but to meaningful existence, which certainly broadens the field.) At our best—a realm we rarely spend enough time getting to know—the ancient prescription to practice virtue and pursue wisdom is excellent and flexible as to the details. Living toward Truth, Beauty, and Goodness speak for themselves, however lonely the ideas may have become. But no prescription is any better than the assiduity of one’s compliance. The notion of living each day as if it were your last seems to me vacuous. But whether living with the expectation of finding paradise or knowing that calamity, sooner or later, is always a possibility and perhaps a certainty, how one lives rightly, because it is right, should be unchanged from our ideals. As for the What, under the shadow of X-risks we don’t find clarity about the end time that we find in Scheffler’s thought experiment; rather, we are presented with a certainty without a date. Which means that we aren’t confronted with the limits faced in his scenarios, limits as to what to engage with that isn’t dependent on duration. The time dimension need not be a factor in choosing what is worth living for. So if finding the elusive cancer cure captures your mind, I see no reason not to go forward even if the cure turns out to be only a short-lived blessing. The search would be good in itself and who knows how long it would be useful. X-risks do not affect, for me, what to regard as essential and meaningful. What does come to mind, though, is something like the awareness of an aging person that time is shorter than she’s always counted on and that even before it runs out her capacities will diminish. Second chances are few to nonexistent and careless delay not well advised. The degrees of urgency that may accompany this aren’t replicated exactly in an existentially risked world, but there may well be a sharpened awareness of what is important. And more than that, in the process of separating out the unimportant from the important. Not, I wouldn’t say, as intensely as in the aphoristic “The prospect of one’s imminent hanging tends to sharpen the attention” (to paraphrase Samuel Johnson), but still a regular reminder that nothing can be counted on as fully as the integrity and satisfactions of right living, a good life whatever worthy purposes it is lived for and for however long, and we should get on with it.

(I speak of the risk of nuclear holocaust as if its conversion into catastrophic reality were a certainty because I believe it very likely is and for several reasons. First, it’s been with us for nearly 80 years, which comforts those committed to its eternal value as a peacemaker, but not those who read the meaning of this differently. We appear to have learned nothing during this period about the waste and uselessness of Mutually Assured Destruction as a strategy [if you knew that deterrence had failed and that a massive strike was on its way to our country, what would be the point of reciprocating in kind since the perpetrator had already fouled his own nest and nothing would be gained for us by fouling it more extensively?] and the supposedly deterred Russia, for example, still finds it useful to publicly toy with the idea of throwing a nuke or two into the Ukrainian conflict. The story of 80 years of near accidents, barely avoided misinterpretations, and saved-at-the-last-minute surges of good judgment doesn’t evoke confidence for the long term. Second, the longer a Risk exists the more normalized it becomes and the less likely to elicit appropriate anxiety and caution and the greater likelihood of disaster happening, either intentionally or not. Since we don’t hear the obvious questions asked—“What could possibly be worth the costs of failure?” and “Aren’t you putting a wee bit too much faith in consistently good judgment under pressure than history and our knowledge of human psychology would recommend?”—the legacy of misguided nuclear war-fighting scenarios continues apace. There is very serious doubt as to the need for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and no doubt as to its immorality, but there was momentum from years of cruelest war and I imagine feelings of novelty, pride, and vengefulness. Momentum tends to close minds and is always potentially present; in war it becomes callous. Lastly, while it might be irrational, unspeakable, and catastrophic to use the damnable things, people have always been known for launching irrational, unspeakable, and catastrophic acts so it would hardly be unprecedented except in scope.)

As I write I begin to sense more strongly that paths to right living with X-risks hanging over us may not be so different from what they would be at any other time. Yet, recurring to my aphoristic mention of the effects of his hanging on the mind of the condemned, it may well be that these Risks, since we can’t wave them away, could have the beneficial side-effect of focusing our attention. I live on the North Coast of California and have watched for years how fires have destroyed regions I have camped in and loved along with many others; I have breathed the smoke and seen darkened skies. More than once, I have been driven from camp by wildfire. I have come to believe that climatic change will eventually precipitate the end of almost all these forests by heat, drought, and wildfire, if nuclear holocaust doesn’t get them first. Across the country people have been flooded, burned, and blown away by weather extremes, though many still refuse to make the connection with ACD. Denial is a powerful force in many minds, especially those that haven’t had their attention sharpened as mine has been (which, it might be said, has had the effect of my own version of expecting to be hung). At least not sharpened yet. But for those who are ready for it, and for whom imagination, objectivity, and foresight are still not thought conspiratorial, the power of the Risks we face becomes ever clearer. So prudent, protective preparation along with identification of their most valued people and objects leads many to reflect on the same things that interest me here.

Among other things I hope our eventual “hanging” will provoke: re-remembering that we live within Nature and that we owe it gratitude and love for its gratuitous blessings. Blessings that are of course all threatened, along with us, by existential risks. My main consolation is that while my kind and many other forms of life will perish, Nature will persist and in time (perhaps millions of years) return to health, preferably without the presence of any who are apt to forget where they came from and what they owe it. Most of us have books that we return to periodically over the years, always finding new meanings. One of these for me is The Consolation of Philosophy. Written 1,500 years ago and having nothing to say about Nature, its focus is on what ultimately matters, not surprising since the author, Boethius, an upper-class Roman who finds himself imprisoned and condemned to execution (that duly arrived), is looking for solace in his grief and anxiety. He finds it remembering the essentials of what makes for the highest goodness and happiness, which are internal and spiritual and depend on self-sufficiency (rather than wealth, status, etc.) and equanimity. Contingency is native to life, as both Boethius in his cell and we fenced around by X-risks well know; we hope to learn soon enough, along with him and what we see in Marcus Aurelius’ “notes” (otherwise known as his Meditations, which is also old, about 1,800 years), and in our much younger reflections, which are remarkably similar to theirs…what we really must learn are the ideas and commitments that can supersede contingency.

I put our relation with Nature in the same set of categorical meanings and values as our human relations. Over the centuries we have separated ourselves from Nature, wanting for some reason to feel residents of a higher realm, sufficient to ourselves, superior, and in control. There is a mountain of books on the history of our attitudes toward Nature (that mostly intend to demonstrate our existential uniqueness) and what most amuses, when it does not alarm me, is modern scientific work that is constantly surprised at animal capacities often followed promptly by efforts to hedge them in as still inferior. The concept of anthropomorphism has been drafted into discounting anything that reeks of “attributing human qualities to animals,” seemingly unable to alter their assumption and imagine that all animals, including humans, partake in their own ways from the host of capacities offered us by Nature. A certificate of human ownership of such qualities has not, as far as I know, been found, and there is something almost pathetic in the scrambling to maintain a sense of human separateness and superiority. I suppose the “great chain of being” is with us still, with only the fully ethereal possibly superior to us, but maybe not, we wish to arrogantly imagine. Humility would help; our existential risks could well serve to stimulate that too rare human attitude, but I won’t count on it.

Nature is our birthplace, home, and greatest source of beauty, inspiration, and spiritual nurturance, not to mention all the essentials of biological life. Experiencing palpable connection and allowing its movement toward a reverential sense of engagement and love…I would say that Nature like God (speaking of whom metaphorically) composes every particle of every whole and its unified being. It cannot but distort humanity to deny its dependent connection, its immersion within, a natural world. All that’s necessary is remembrance and active respect. Yet, firmly as I believe and have experienced the truth of these ideas, I know that for most Nature has subsided into leisure and touristy, decoration and trivia, background and servitor for human yearnings. But for those who take our circumstances seriously and wonder at the anomaly of intelligent beings choosing so unintelligent a path as those Risks entail, Nature feels like solace and “Mother” and risking her feels as wrong as risking ourselves, and perhaps more so since she is the victim in this tragic melodrama. Mutuality in community finds in mutuality with Nature a place of equal goodness. Native Americans regularly have to remind exploiters that certain mountains and rivers are sacred to them, a foreign notion when bulldozers seek financial returns. My only question for the Natives is where sacredness ends, what are its limits? Certainly, some natural settings have special meaning that stands out in their history and culture, but I find it impossible to delineate a line between sacred and profane Nature just as I do between supposedly ensouled Homo sapiens appearing within a Universe occupied otherwise by only unensouled matter and machinelike life.

I began writing these thoughts with the idea that self-imposed existential risks signaled a matching and enabling existential emptiness in the culture. This led me to wonder if such a bizarre situation didn’t indicate a need to think about how best to live in the shadow of possible mega-calamities that could kill and wreck beyond imagination. I now see more clearly what I had already surmised: the terms of right living and good lives are the same whenever and wherever I look while allowing for differential response and expression related to cultural variables. Whether life is expected to go on in more or less the same conditions as now, or whether something on the order of Scheffler’s thought experimental endings were anticipated, or whether, as in the present reality, existentially apocalyptic potentials have been created to satisfy the cravings of what I consider the most powerfully addictive drugs there are—power and wealth—fundamental values can still guide lives. They are pole stars for serving and expressing essentials of the good and the right, those qualities that are good in themselves and still matter the most. But my perception, or my interpretation, is that while tolerance of existential risks expresses something central to who we have become, action and belief without a “pay-off” do not much matter. Instead, self-interested ends justify any means toward getting them, and it seems as if the getting is the only measure—it has moved into the center of a morally evacuated space. Distinctive today, with our historically unique X-risks, we see societies willing to be lured into quiescence and often even affirmation, societies that are failing at their most crucial tasks in tandem with citizens doing the same. And if this is true, those who are aware of the existing and potential losses and who retain visions of distinctive forms of right living may need to withdraw insofar as practicable from prevailing norms, and when possible, find others with like-minds to define and achieve separation. What should be emphasized in this movement: ethical and spiritual views, acceptable occupations (both for making a living and for living), family focus and its structures, physical and philosophically-based living arrangements whether in rural or urban settings, desired degrees of insularity and openness, and so on. I’m not talking about traditional notions of a commune but of “intentional communities” that may take an array of forms of varying cohesion, and may not even look like a community from the outside, but that are characterized primarily by their rejection of much that they find objectionable in present attitudes and ways of living. Good examples of what is already being done can be found at https://www.ic.org/ (Foundation for Intentional Communities), https://www.bruderhof.com/ (a unique religiously based residential community), and https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/weave-the-social-fabric-initiative/.

Although not consciously intentional, I have moved into a paradigm I have long considered the best general conception of ways, means, and aims for living deeply and caringly. It emerged from my engagement with Martin Buber’s work in the 1960s beginning with the seminal I and Thou. The crux is relational mutuality and care that have their realization in relations with fellow humans, Nature, and “forms of the spirit,” that is, experiences and perceptions that evoke distinctive, spiritual expression. Three things stand out for me when I picture the realm of ethics that are consistent with this paradigm: they arise wherever a person comes into relation with others, any others; they are ineluctably engaged with any significant endeavor and have primacy; they point toward and often express the mysterious (and I would say spiritual) domain in which existence is invisibly immersed. If we are to move slowly toward a more hospitable and convivial world—always limited by our meager capacities as humans, but surely superior to what we have now—realistic ethical vision added to rejection of nihilism and the great Risks that we have burdened ourselves with will be part of it.

[Craig Brestrup, Dec. 2024]

[1] “The End of Our World,” unpublished but available at https://www.caminobaybooks.com/the-end-of-our-world/.

[2] Oxford University Press, 2013.

I’ve thought more about my encounter with the fellow in Malmo who rescued me from being lost, and also about how many times on this trip I have relied on approaching people on the street asking directions. Ordinarily I’m not in this position and by nature I usually prefer to find my own way. I also realize, if I had a handheld device and had mastered it (two improbabilities for the price of one!) I could have looked up where I was and where I wanted to be and found a route without trouble. But being over here in these new to me countries and frequently at a navigational loss and lacking the device, I’ve become a gatherer of other people’s directions. One observation is how poorly most people either know their communities or how to give directions to locations within them. The more important one, though, is that almost everyone tries and is friendly and accommodating, even lone women at night. And I realize that if I had the mastered device in hand, I’d have missed these encounters and this realization of comity. I’d not have known how far a stranger like the car dealer would go to help a stranger in need. So, my interpersonal world expanded as did my recognition that despite what I believe modern social and economic systems do to human sensibilities, there remain threads of kindness, ethics, and willingness to be bothered spread widely, at least on my travels. I don’t know how influential it is that I’m obviously an aging foreigner depending on foreigners who speak English for help—How many Americans would have responded to me with the same desire to help? But whatever the answer, I think this demonstrates one more loss that the convenience of these devices extracts from human relationships. I already hypothesize that consciousness and social relationships suffer for the absorption of owners in their devices. (I see people not infrequently walking sidewalks staring into their device and I want to stop them and ask what at that moment it is that has their attention. Because I can’t help wondering what could be so entrancing to so many.) There is compulsion in much of this, for sure, and social expectation, not to mention that increasingly those of us without them are at a disadvantage in all those situations where apps and QR Codes substitute for the paper versions of history and, for me, the present. The point of my thinking is the costs to those who have thrown in with these devices and I intend to stay aware and observant to see what else I can discern.

Photo by Stephan Mahlke on Unsplash

Many readers will recognize the above ethical declaration as a paraphrase of Aldo Leopold’s well known “Land Ethic.” I came to know and respect Leopold’s work over thirty years ago but haven’t had occasion to revisit him for quite some time, until recently when I began thinking about writing this essay. He spoke about the land and biotic community, and I realized that it’s only a short step from land and biome to Earthly existence as such, which is why my use of “others” in the declaration intends to be inclusive. I am seeking to frame an ethic that would seem a natural partner to my conviction that existence itself and all of its expressions merit human reverence (see Reverence for Existence: A Way of Knowing)—in fact, that they evoke reverence from those open to it. A way of reverence naturally implies ways of acting consistent with it.

Reverence is a concept I use without its usual religious trappings, which is not easy and is bound to travel somewhat parallel to spiritual views, but I was drawn to the word because of its unique power to express deep respect, even a kind of piety (again, minus religious notions), love, mutuality, loyalty, care, and perhaps more. However unsatisfying conventional religion may be to me, it claims by tradition the strongest language possible for speaking of spirituality and ultimate dimensions. I needed to borrow from that to say what I wanted to say.

A sense of reverence arose out of my experiences in the natural world, places where I often found myself in wordless communion and deeply moved: identified and bound-up with, united, one with…where I was. A spiritual realization of what felt as close as I expected ever to come to awareness and experience of fundamental reality. I’m comfortable thinking of it as mystical but rarely use the word due to the myriad understandings and misunderstandings of what it suggests. Since I have studied Martin Buber’s perspectives about I-Thou relations for several decades, it was natural as well to frame my experience as Thou-relation with Nature. (He also described Thou-relations with humans and forms of the spirit [as expressed through art, poetry, music, and such], but it’s always been clear to me that those are not my preferred métiers.) In finding myself in such relation with natural settings—and eventually generalizing to other settings, other life, existence—it was without conscious aspiration or plan. It just emerged and I took it seriously.

Experience was enough and for me flowed naturally into an ethic, which might be summarized as Do no avoidable harm. And further, with more positive intent, Manifest care for existence—those others that exist—insofar as I practically could. But I needed to move beyond soul, so to speak, and into intellect. What could I learn from ethicists and other philosophers to add shape and rationality to what felt indubitably true but needed words for explication. The literature in animal rights was helpful, as was that of eco-philosophers, deep ecologists, and eco-feminists. There is also a body of work in the area of “moral considerability,” the realm in which philosophers try to delineate and delimit those deserving of our moral reckoning when we act in ways that affect them, as we necessarily and frequently do. Not surprisingly, I never found an exclusionary notion (one that would justify morally disregarding certain others when one acts), whether based on lack of reason, agency, intelligence, or whatever, that didn’t seem arbitrary and coincidentally (?) mostly identified with only one species, the one that promulgated the ideas: Homo sapiens. Eventually I found what is considered a seminal essay from 1978 by Kenneth Goodpaster in The Journal of Philosophy entitled “On being morally considerable.” His conclusion: “Nothing short of the condition of being alive seems to me to be a plausible and nonarbitrary criterion.” (italics in original) I agreed, with the proviso that there remained room for nonliving forms of humanly created beauty along with mountains, rivers, deserts…the land, that also merited consideration.

My purpose here is to sketch out some ethical substance and detail to make meaningful this idea of universal moral considerability and its relation to reverence for existence.

What does it mean to take another into moral account? What is the good that morality aims to promote? How can it be so inclusive as to cover existence? Would we do better to speak less of moral rights and more about vital needs and interests? As indicated above, my responses to these questions began in my experiences of Nature as encounters wherein relations of striking depth emerged, a place where innate value was palpable and indubitable. I was regularly shaken and made joyously tearful. And the more sensitized I was by these experiences the more generalized became the sense that there was no natural boundary to a person’s capacity to relate to anything with the awareness and care that spring from reverential (or Thou) relationship. If we affect something through our actions, we are obliged to consider how we affect it and whether that effect is harmful or disrespectful. This is what it means to take another into moral account. The goods that it wants to promote concern the one who acts, the social context, the values expressed, and the act’s impact on whatever it affects.

If we accept that no unnecessary harm and beneficence when possible are reasonable moral injunctions toward those one considers morally considerable and, as I advocate, you accept universal considerability, the injunctions become universally applicable. They function as an attitude, a way of being-in-the-world. These will be uninteresting to anyone who does not already experience nonegoistic concerns for others and a desire to do a little good or at least not do avoidable harm. Moving beyond ego is, I believe, the crucial step toward taking seriously both ethics and spirituality. Excess of self portends and promotes deficiency of others in one’s consciousness. Respectful relations depend upon a degree of self-forgetting and focus upon the good of the relation and the good of the other. It assumes that there is no intrinsic contradiction between the moral good of self and other, that in caring for the world I care as well for myself as citizen of the world and its relevant local communities.

I asked above about how we take another into moral account, but another consideration springs to mind as I think about that: Whenever anyone speaks about practical ethics it usually follows that they hope to be sufficiently persuasive to alter the behavior of those who are not distinctly ethical in their approach to things, or for those who are to expand or refine their way of considering moral matters. I accept that we want to speak good sense and in a persuasive manner but am not terribly optimistic that anyone not disposed to serious thinking about ethical matters is likely to be moved. We go to the trouble of thinking, talking, and writing about these things because it pleases us to do so, and it seems to add value to the world in the form of careful thinking about serious matters, and in time it might even filter into educational and parental settings and have good effects on learners. Human moral progress is fitful to say the least, even over long periods. We may, for example, reject slavery but centuries later are still prone to racism and prejudice, oppression and exploitation. Improvement, certainly, but still with a long way to go morally. I would even say that that change was less motivated by morality than sociopolitical factors, and in the American instance by war. So I believe it important to clarify our thinking about these things—after all, what is more important than ethics?—but am sobered by what I know about human openness to moral change. Such change might be called whole-of-person change in that it entails new thinking, feeling, and behavior, and may cost the one who changes friends and other relationships.

Returning to the question, taking others into moral account (relating to them as morally considerable) is little helped by first considering what sort of other they are and with what characteristics. Even for those most like humans in one way or another or having evident intelligence, sensitivity, family feeling, etc., zoos, slaughterhouses, hunters, factory farms, and more are standing evidence that society is little moved when habit, preference, and convenience are at stake. Taking another into moral account won’t begin in the intellect alone for intellect typically aims more toward self-gratification than truth. We will only take the other into moral account when we are moved to do so (partially because intellect and ego have stepped aside or were caught napping): when an inner signal composed of fellow-feeling, ethics, empathy, and care for the moral texture of existence speak to one who is willing to hear and to act accordingly. The person might be said to feel an obligation or duty to act this way but prior to that, prior even to thinking much about a present situation, they are moved almost automatically to offer what the other needs (though they may avoid or suppress it). At a minimum, they will not add to or support the other’s harm. This can arise from a sort of existential piety, a reverence for existence, a recognition that actions matter and the life one has in the place it happens are wonders, mysteries, blessings, and that to walk softly guided by care for what one has been given is the appropriate thing to do. So giving moral account, being morally accountable, originates in character and soul and receptive awareness; words and philosophies follow.

If everything is worthy of ethical attention does this ask too much of people? Even if true, does it need paring down a bit in recognition of our finitude and flaws? Should we focus only on “the really big things” and leave the rest to good will and happenstance? I don’t think it asks too much or that, as with a rheostat, one can adjust for convenience. Character doesn’t work that way nor do we act with these cautions in mind about other of our prevailing convictions: patriotism, say, or religious belief, a philosophy of life, and so on. Well-founded ways of being that reflect an accurate account of reality become second nature, part of our self-definition and the central orientation that guides our unconscious direction-setting (which composes the majority of human existence) and, when needed and called upon, our more conscious grasp of the rudder. Reverence, care for being, is not an add-on; it is a Way just as its opposite is a way, but one that depletes and damages existence.

Discussions about how to conceive or apply ethics almost always raise both the issue of what makes another worthy and which ones possess the magic quality and have a right to be considered worthy. What I describe here, which is the experience of reverence for existence and care as the active ethical response, is not concerned with either of these markers of worthiness in routine living. Everything is worthy and rather than rights I prefer to speak of vital needs and interests. Whereas rights are too often considered contingent, it seems to me that the needs or interests of another are innate and usually clear, and as a foundational consideration about existence it seems uncontroversial that vital needs have a strong claim to respect. (This speaks of living others; nonliving but ethically valuable others will come up shortly.) Vital needs do not refer simply to the basics of food, shelter, and security. The need to flourish, to have opportunity to realize one’s inherent capacities, is also vital for a well-lived life.

In situations requiring choices that will infringe others’ needs, triage or defining acceptable nutritional sources, for example, characteristics of the other become relevant even if often difficult to assess. Both plants and animals are living beings with needs and preferred ways to persist, but since eating animals who ate plants is doubly destructive of life and since plants appear more limited in consciousness and sentience than animals, vegan or vegetarian choices are less hurtful overall. (Even if it were possible to subtract the factory farming methods of causing animal suffering as the prelude to animal slaughter, the calculus remains cogent. On the other hand, subsistence ways of life, barely existent anymore, or hunting/fishing that are ecologically based and balanced are another story but in the big picture not relevant.) All choices, however, according to the ways advocated here, are approached with seriousness and gratitude. Eating anything always involves the direct and indirect death of other creatures and efforts should be made to mitigate harms. What’s left then is gratitude for Earth’s beneficence and remembrance of what’s been taken.

Another way of approaching the ethic I want to describe is through analogy with artistic creation. The process that runs from inception of artistic envisioning through execution cannot be depicted adequately in step-by-step fashion but sometime near its beginning artistic receptivity is approached by forms, ideas, visions, images…out of which artists fashion something sensorial that expresses their response to what was spoken to them. Mind and spirit shape the inchoate into material or energetic form, an outcome of the meeting between person and vision. What I am speaking of ethically is a similar outcome of a meeting between person and an aspect of reality that their action (or inaction) will affect. I sometimes use the terminology of Buber in I and Thou: They are addressed by a person, situation, aspect of Nature, a thing, and they respond with affirmation, sometimes love. They do not grant value to the other but recognize and respond to value that is already present. Most often this dynamic involves our encounter with something living, a person, animal, forest, but we also encounter beauty in myriad forms from human creations to natural expressions, and experience confirms that beauty itself is sufficient to evoke moral respect. Anything that adds to or expresses the goodness of being, any action that morally elevates the actor—these are primary goods that morality aims to enhance while serving in its quotidian way as the attitude and theme for a human’s role in existence, which is to protect and augment what’s good through stepping into the mutuality of engagement with what’s present.

I don’t consider this an ethic that requires us to live the life of an anchorite or ascetic. But it does imply renunciation of the license to do anything humans want whenever and wherever they want. It generally seems that under the present societal regime we are permitted anything monetarily profitable or beneficial to humans even as astounding, although largely disregarded, costs to land/air/water, biodiversity, and climate stability mount up. Earth keeps its accounts even if humans do not. I recently read an article that illustrates the difficulty faced when the present human-centered regime is challenged. (“The Elephant in the Courtroom,” Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, 7 March ’22) The issue discussed was whether an elephant could be granted rights, i.e., be treated as a “person” in the eyes of the law, so that legal claims could be made that solitary zoo captivity was harmful and she should be moved to a large elephant sanctuary. She lost; the judge sympathized but didn’t consider that the law permitted it. The outcome saddened but did not surprise me. What was astonishing was Wright’s account of the pre-judgment assertions of those who opposed claims made on the elephant’s behalf and who submitted amicus briefs or otherwise stated their position. This is a selection from his citations.

• …granting personhood to one elephant would flood the courts with similar appeals for other animals and for broader rights. “The question is ‘How far do we go?”’
• “What about the slippery slope?…we’re going to erode our enthusiasm for the healthy degree of rights that we afford people who have severe cognitive impairments,” he said.
• If the elephant were granted rights “…farms, zoos, and aquaria would be at risk to a plethora of similar lawsuits…[The Plaintiff] seeks nothing less than to uproot and overturn the social order.”
• “Should the Pandora’s Box of habeas corpus be opened on behalf of animals, New York’s multibillion-dollar agricultural industry would be at risk.”
• “This Court cannot magically convert legally-defined property like [the elephant] into non-property.”
• “…if an elephant can be deemed a person, ‘why not a pig, a cow, or a chicken?’”
• Extending habeas rights to animals would “impede important medical breakthroughs…”
• “Without the use of animals…the world might have been deprived of a discovery that promises to save innumerable lives.”
• Granting the elephant rights would “completely redefine the human-animal legal relationship” by undermining the status of ownership.
• Another person who didn’t weigh in on the case specifically still was “wary of blurring the line between humanity and other animals.”

This is a lengthy list and I wouldn’t have given it so much space except, as I said, I was astonished by it and had several strong reactions to what is said. (Having spent time writing about animal rights and working in animal protection I wasn’t surprised by what I read but found its agglomeration in a single article and the almost ingenuous frankness of the sources startling.) They didn’t address the situation as a moral question or with apparent awareness of the elephant’s (or other animals’) vital needs; their concerns were utilitarian and indicated how much a great many people depend on animal exploitation for their living. Anthropocentrism is not always so bold in confessing its aims. And second, there was an obvious panic reaction going on. Having been closely involved with the question of companion animals being killed in animal shelters, erroneously labelled “euthanasia,” I surmise one aspect of the panic—to acknowledge animals’ rights would mean people, the ones spoken for, had violated those rights and caused unjustifiable harms in doing so, and that’s a heavy burden to bear. (It’s impossible not to hear echoes in this of men being challenged by women over the gendered caste hierarchy, or of Whites and Blacks, or colonists and the indigenous colonized. Power differentials never give way easily, and who knows how much a part guilty conscience plays?) Also, the boundary between human and nonhuman animals has been an issue for a great number of people for a very long time. Some are apparently jealous to maintain, and insecure about, human preeminence (self-asserted) in the hierarchy. To this day, scientists, philosophers, and many others continue laboring over just what makes humans special compared to other animals. It’s an absurd quest, in my view, that serves no positive purpose yet it won’t go away. Germane to the present essay, the panicky reaction is indicative of how high a mountain one would have to climb to discover a socially accepted ethic of care for all beings. No matter how unjust a situation may seem, those who benefit from it will have a hard time seeing its injustice.

In finishing I think about the continuity of these ideas with the notion of the sacred. I speak of ours as a sacred Earth (within a sacred Universe) and as with other such terms I abjure religious overtones and intend here to denote what is deeply venerable and worthy of a corresponding regard. Affirmation and mutuality in the Earth-relation reveal mystery along with other components. Mystery linked to goodness within the deeply distinctive forms of Earth-awareness feel to me signs of the sacred, meaning: Earth as extraordinarily special and spiritually expressive. At the same time, I don’t mean to imply that a more vigorous and inclusive ethic is only available to the spiritually minded. It is altogether possible to recognize humans’ reduced but more fitting place in the Earth community, with an attendant acknowledgement of the need for (or the right of) beauty and flourishing lives to persist in self-fulfillment, and a commitment to support and protect that without reference to spirituality or sacrality. To stop there; life receives its due.

Today I looked back in one of the notebooks I keep and found something from a couple of years ago when I was camped in Warner Valley in Lassen Volcanic N.P.: “Crossing a stream I saw a large rock with smaller ones embedded within it as if having arrived when it was molten. I had a striking awareness that that rock had a story that told of its origins and movements and arrival in this spot. And so did the tree it leaned against and the shrub across the stream and every blade of grass and busy insect. A world full of stories intersecting here but not ending here. There will, as always, be more change.” I could have added the flowing water and myself observing. There’s nothing terribly profound in this, especially considering this is volcano country with a long history of eruptions and landscape alterations: When was it ever the same for very long? But I remember my imagination erupting in its own way and picturing all the movements, destruction and creation, comings, and goings, that preceded the peaceful scene in which I stood. Momentarily, I had a longitudinal awareness that I don’t commonly access. I was moved by it. Today I’m moved in a different way by more fiery change, this time a massive wildfire that started many miles to the south of the Park and has worked its way north. As best I can tell on the fire maps, it may well engulf that Valley, a place I’ve camped many times and hiked many miles, one of my favorite places. If the fire continues north—and what’s to stop it? —it will almost certainly burn through another of my favorites, Butte Lake, where I camped only a few months ago. As I’ve said before, if these fires were just Nature doing what it does according to natural contingencies, I’d be saddened but accept it as the way of the Earth in forest lands. But there’s no avoiding the knowledge that humans set the table for these fires and before many decades pass a large part of California will burn. Natural incendiary conditions have resulted from unnatural human nature as it now presents itself, a nature that lays waste and kills so much for so little.

Part III on Thursday

Photo by Jesse Dodds on Unsplash

Once I embraced a giant pine in order to sniff its bark. Jeffrey Pines are said to smell a bit like vanilla but I couldn’t detect it. I did the same another time with an incense cedar, hugging and sniffing. Both times I noticed as I drew my face back an involuntary stroking of my hands on the tree, gently, as I would a loved person. It seemed simultaneously strange to find myself doing this and yet utterly appropriate. Strokes are for the doer as much as the recipient; I felt tender toward those trees and their silent, solemn aliveness.

I think it nearly impossible to pay close attention to trees, whether individually or as forests, and not be affected. So steadfast and graceful, they easily become companions. It seems a miracle they can stand so high, waver in the wind and remain upright. Were I the creator, I’d never have had the imagination to try something that seems so improbable. A freshly fallen, still living tree evokes sympathy and a frustrated wish to make it right again. While a long dead “nursery” tree supporting a linear stand of youngsters makes me smile and say thanks on their behalf.

As John Muir followed sheep up into the Sierra Nevada on his initial foray 141 years ago, he mentioned that “Another conifer was met today—incense cedar…” That “was met” tells that this was encounter with individual life and recognized as such. “I feel strangely attracted to this tree…It would be delightful to be storm-bound beneath one of these noble, hospitable, inviting old trees…”

Earlier than this, in the seventeenth century, an adolescent was converted and brought to God by a tree. He became Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a monk admired for his steady “practice of the presence of God” and his humility. Almost four decades after his conversion he described the experience to his Abbe who recorded the conversation. “One winter’s day he saw a tree stripped of its leaves, and considered that sometime afterwards these leaves would appear again, followed by flowers and fruit. He then received a lofty awareness of the providence and power of God which never left him.” Well, of course. Who wouldn’t tend to react that way if he really thought about it? Botany and theology become one. (The Practice of the Presence of God)

J. Krishnamurti seems once to have spent the entirety of several days entranced and enlightened by a tree. At sunrise it became golden leaves filled with life, and “…as the hours pass by, that tree whose name does not matter—what matters is that beautiful tree—an extraordinary quality begins to spread all over the land, over the river.” Each hour reveals new tree qualities: brightness, liveliness, somberness, quietness, dignity. One may sit in the shade beneath it, “…never feeling lonely with the tree as your companion.” At sunset finally the tree rests. “If you establish a relationship with it, then you have relationship with mankind. You are responsible then for that tree and for the trees of the world. But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity…” Later, ending a meditation on the human propensity to kill, he extends this thought: “If we could, and we must, establish a deep, long abiding relationship with nature—with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass, and the fast moving clouds—then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever.” (My apology to the publisher from whose book I drew these thoughts; I have lost the reference.)

Even Martin Buber, who recognized Nature as a distinct realm of Thou relatedness without being very comfortable there himself, spoke about trees. He knew they could be “It,” a species, a botanical member of an ecosystem, just lumber. “In all this the tree remains my object…It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it.” And more: “The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it—only in a different way.” (I and Thou)

To paraphrase an old television commercial, “These are not your father’s trees.” (The vast majority of those have been clear-cut.) But they are real trees and possible relations. I have been to the forest, and with Muir and the others, I have met these trees.

Photo by Akshay Nanavati on Unsplash

How I love these mountains and their displays of Nature’s artistry and power. I sometimes wonder that I’m not completely overcome by it, as if I’m missing something inside that prevents my bursting with ecstasy. I walk everywhere and see each time the same granite walls and surmounting domes, columns, spires, and waterfalls. I marvel and bow.

Photo by Ned Dorman on Unsplash

Later, another fine touch. Walking down from Nevada Fall on the John Muir Trail I come to an area where trail descends with high granite wall rising almost vertically to one side and steep falling slope on the other. Water flows gently down the wall. A narrow lip transects the wall fifteen feet above me and drinking-straw-sized waterfalls arc out, descend a few feet through the air, strike granite, and shatter into bursts of droplets that spread gaily out, some in free fall and others back onto the wall. These too captured the sun and shone diamond-like. Even more enchanting, the granite wall had a multitude of tiny garden spots all the way down, anywhere there was moisture to nourish them. A slit here where purchase could be got, a hole there, and often moss and lichen had gathered sufficiently to lay down a welcoming bed. A bit of grass, a tiny flower—these were randomly scattered over the surface and all seemed to flourish in their precarious perches. Such liveliness… What happens in a few weeks, though, when the water dries, how long can they last? I suppose they get their work done quickly—sprout, seed, spread their energies around; enjoy their floral being and allotted time; bedazzle passersby with their courage and beauty and improbability. And then pass on.

If someone asked if trees and flowers could grow out of a granite bed, what would you answer? Obviously not, you’d probably say. But the Sierra Nevada proves otherwise. Look at domes high above and you see they have tree “follicles” where none would seem possible. Up close I have seen 50’ high trees sprouted out of what appeared inhospitable rock. All over these granite mountainsides and mountaintops I see exuberant growth. It astonishes. Again and again, look!

As with the physics of light, botanical and geological science can explain all this. The nature of these plants is to reproduce; birds and wind scatter seeds; water and minerals and sunlight do their jobs. I understand all that and appreciate what it has to teach me. But I hear more, for empiricism is only one party to the conversation. Why the exuberance, this clear determination to spread life and beauty to the four winds? Why does Nature bother? What is the point? I don’t know for sure, probably life is its own purpose, but as I stand before that wall, water droplets falling on my face, eyeball to tiny leaf that homesteaded this granite wall, feeling (strange to say) a responsive love for that water, that rock, that sunlight and air, that adventurous, eager little plant, I do know that a lot goes on – on this Earth that doesn’t fit our categories, but for which I earnestly give thanks.

There are sometimes funny little paradoxes on the trail. I looked down toward the Merced and saw a placard on a stand in what appeared an odd location. So I diverted and made my way down. It looked as if it had been there a long while, a quote from John Muir posted on it: “…rocky strength and permanence combined with beauty of plants frail and fine…water descending in thunder, and the same water gliding through meadows and groves in gentlest beauty.” A few feet away, on another stand planted on the riverbank (amidst boulder and steep slope and trees—a lovely spot, no wonder someone chose this place to put Muir’s placard) was another: “CAUTION: Slippery rock surfaces.” Someone feared that Muirian lyricism would make people careless.

At the top of Vernal Fall, a bush reaches out over the cliff and looks down 300 feet. Among the leaves and branches, foraging obliviously (and making me nervous) was one of the ubiquitous ground squirrels. After a few minutes he returned nonchalantly to rocky solidity. I want to know how he appraised the danger. Brave and agile, he may not think it worrisome.

Photo by Ursi Schmied on Unsplash

Today I carry a liter of it in my pack while its generous source sails past as I walk upstream along the Merced. The trail is dusty, shaded, littered with horse droppings. The flow is rapid in this stretch and frequently squeezed along even faster by bouldered constrictions. It is absolutely transparent to its rocky bed and beautifully reflective of its surroundings: Stream flowing over bed of rocks that came from elsewhere and are now settled in place, stabilized though immersed in change. Water astonishes with its protean, forgiving, implacable nature; its manifold generosity seems endless, though 21st century humanity sorely tests it.

As I sit watching, it reminds me of a film reel, scene changing slightly with each frame. The ancient notion that “you never step into the same river twice” seems true only in a limited sense. Coursing water molecules are new every moment but they are only partial representation of river being. River begins in hidden notches at its highest reaches, gathers, welcomes feeder streams and meltwater all along the way, follows its bed (which persists even when water has temporarily dried), and forms a braid of continuity from beginning to end. It is whole with shifting aspects. I meet the same, though changed, River whenever I visit.

Zen master Shunryu Suzuki visited Yosemite Valley several decades ago. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, he speaks of Yosemite Falls and how it recalled to him other streaming water in his Japanese homeland. The book is a collection of his teachings, and one, “Nirvana, the Waterfall,” has had special meaning to me since I first read it. He tells of his former monastery and of two practices there: when Dogen-zenji dipped water from the river he always returned the unused portion back to the river; and when monks washed, they filled basins only partway and then emptied the water towards rather than away from their bodies.

This expresses respect for the water. This kind of practice is not based on any idea of being economical. It may be difficult to understand why Dogen returned half of the water he dipped to the river. This kind of practice is beyond our thinking. When we feel the beauty of the river, when we are one with the water, we intuitively do it in Dogen’s way. It is our true nature to do so.
…When we see one whole river we do not feel the living activity of the water, but when we dip a part of the water into a dipper, we experience some feeling of the water, and we also feel the value of the person who uses the water. Feeling ourselves and the water in this way, we cannot use it in just a material way. It is a living thing.

One knows: Water is, all that it is. I understand this response.

As I walk the two miles toward Vernal Fall the grade steepens, the bed narrows, and car-sized boulders become more common. Water is white with turbulence and alive with energy and grace as it surmounts and circles, bends to the rocks’ demands. Pools, eddies, chutes, and then at the Fall, splash, spray, mist; I’ve traveled from silence to cacophony, from transparency to prismatic colors as the rising sun plays with floating droplets.

I don’t remember when water began to affect me as it does now. It is difficult even to describe the effect. The material nature of water seems to manifest spirituality more than other substances, even when they assume the most striking forms. Valley wall formations, backcountry peaks and domes, forests and wildflower meadows: there is no resisting any of these, no doubt that they also speak clearly of invisible forces and realities (and of the water that has shaped or fed them). But there is something more in water that eludes me, something totemic.

Since I came upon it a couple decades ago, John Muir’s account of raindrops has remained my favorite expression of enchantment with water. He was enjoying his first time in the Sierra Nevada, in the high country north of Yosemite Valley; it was 1868. Thirty years old, he had recently arrived in California after a long trip begun by train from his home in Indianapolis to Louisville, followed by a long walk across Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and into Florida. Laid low with malaria, he delayed for recuperation, and then continued by boat to Cuba where he stayed several weeks. Then to New York to catch another boat which took him to Panama, crossed the isthmus by train, and then on to San Francisco. Altogether, about a seven- month journey.

Muir had been in the mountains six weeks, a time of daily rapture as he immersed in the landscape, when a rain storm thundered in just after noon. “How interesting to trace the history of a single raindrop!” Two pages of lyrical transport combined with immense attentiveness to raindrop travels then follow. He reflected that the first such drops, geologic ages ago, fell on barren granite, but now they have peaks and domes, forest and garden, to receive them. Some join streams and lakes, falls and cascades, while others merge with meadow and bog where they “…creep silently out of sight to the grass roots, hiding softly as in a nest, slipping, oozing hither, thither, seeking and finding their appointed work.” Some sift downward through leaf and needle of tall trees while others attach to minerals and shine upon mates drumming through broad-leafed plants of countless varieties.

Some happy drops fall straight into the cups of flowers, kissing the lips of lilies. How far they have to go, how many cups to fill, great and small, cells too small to be seen, cups holding half a drop as well as lake basins between the hills, each replenished with equal care, every drop in all the blessed throng a silvery newborn star with lake and river, garden and grove, valley and mountain, all that the landscape holds reflected in its crystal depths, God’s messenger, angel of love sent on its way with majesty and pomp and display of power that make man’s greatest shows ridiculous.

Then the storm ends, “…and where are the raindrops now—what has become of all the shining throng? In winged vapor rising some are already hastening back to the sky…” Others are nurturing plants, or if they fell in the highest mountain reaches have locked into ice crystals; and finally many, through spring, stream, and river, make their way to ocean. “From form to form, beauty to beauty, ever changing, never resting, all are speeding on with love’s enthusiasm, singing with the stars the eternal song of creation.”

No one but John Muir can talk like this and get away with it. This and much more in similar vein are found in his My First Summer in the Sierra, which was my earliest encounter with him and it. I was enchanted and have remained so. When Martin Buber speaks of “hallowing the everyday,” this is one instance of what he means. When we speak of gifts and reciprocity, this exemplifies; mindful adoration is its highest expression. Water falls and flows, is drunk and absorbed, cleans and cools, moves in and out of countless forms and conditions, and yet, so far, it abides and continues to replenish. I sit by the Merced River, honoring the mystic flow.

Photo by Photo by Cedric Letsch on Unsplash