Dreaming the World

A chilly day, the cloudless sky casting bright sunlight off a spreading of snow. Sunday night we had enough snow that we had to have the driveway plowed for the first time this year. The snow was heavy and dense, so it stuck to the trees, making for a truly magical morning landscape. A few trees lost major limbs but we managed to keep power.

I was reminded yesterday that while we humans have an oversized impact on the world for now, we are just a blip on the planet’s timeline.

The cause for this thought was a memory of running a small ranch deep in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. The ranch lay in a narrow box canyon that ran roughly north and south. The canyon walls rose pretty much straight up, 200-300 feet, so there were at best just a few hours of sunlight each day.

We were near the top of the watershed (there was one ranch above us) and a small river ran through the property. That river had almost certainly carved out the canyon over an unimaginably many years. Our human dramas, as well as all the other dramas being played out by livestock, pets, and an abundance of wild birds and animals, were important to all of us but probably did not even register in the awareness of the river and canyon.

There was amazing ecological diversity in the small space that constituted the ranch, including trees and other plants of considerable age. Those, too, were insignificant in the lifespan of the valley.

Thinking back to that time in my life brough an odd sense of stillness to my mind and heart as I put the anxieties of my life, and our age, in context.

Of course, our hearts hurt to witness so much harm and loss as our dramas play out in what Hutchinson called “the ecological drama played on the geological stage, in the the evolutionary play”. Yet, in the long view, our lives, so important to us, take on a bigger, more complex, meaning. Rather than being unimportant or meaningless, they become simply part of a mysterious, unfurling whole.