Honoring the Wilderness of Grief
Submitted by WWF Board Member Oliver Mesmer
📷: Berit Kirkegaard
“Sorrow helps us remember something long intuited by indigenous people across the planet: our lives are intricately comingled with one another, with animals, plants, watersheds, and soil. For the last several centuries, we have envisioned a split between our inner lives and the surrounding world. Psyche, however, is not confined to the deep interior of our lives; it overlaps with the wider world and perhaps, in these times, is most evident in the sorrows and suffering of the earth itself.”
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals and Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
On Tuesday, August 26th, there was a lightning storm here in the Railroad Creek Valley. A bolt struck a dry tree up by Holden Lake, and by the next morning, there was a new wildfire. Two miles northwest of us here at Holden Village - the wilderness retreat center I’ve been living and working at for the past three months.
It’s been a busy summer. Twelve weeks of programming, hundreds of guests arriving and departing every week. I’ve been working as both the village Audio/Video Associate - facilitating the A/V needs for our teaching faculty presenters - and our resident Jacuzzi technician, a job that many would argue is equally, if not more, vital to the well-being of the village community. We live here at the edge of wilderness, a two-hour ferry ride from the rest of society. We depend on one another for our basic needs. We abide in community, engaging in rituals both profoundly silly and deeply heartfelt - sometimes both at the same time.
The staff community had been preparing to wind down from the summer season and enter into a more relaxed rhythm with the advent of “small-village”: the dramatic drop-off of guests and programming. And then the lightning hit. During our Tuesday evening Eucharist service, we heard it. Several rushed outside to see. No evidence yet. Not until the next day when we got the news. Since Wednesday, it’s been a blur. Fire crews bussing up into the village - decked out in their gear. Level one evacuation warning. Fire at thirty acres. All guests evacuated Thursday morning. Fire at sixty acres. Level two evacuation warning. Pack your go-bags. Be ready. Get set… Thursday evening, we gather for Prayer Around the Cross - our weekly candlelit service. Thin, wax candlesticks lie on the table. Light them and place them in boxes filled with sand for your prayers. Sit in front of the bowls if you would like the support of the community. We gather and place our hands on the shoulders of those grieving, forming a chain of prayer that fills the space. We hold the grief together, for this evening.
Some staff decide to leave Friday. Many more depart as scheduled, their summer contracts completed. We wave goodbye at bus departure. On Saturday, it’s announced that the village school is being moved down-lake to the Holden B&B. Not safe for kids. All hiking trails are closed until the fire is contained. We’re confined to the village. Now it’s Sunday. The village does not rest. The fire burns on.
The psyche of the valley is complex. Our village exists because of the mine drilled into Copper Mountain across the creek. We have inherited the legacy of a sacred wound in the earth, and we take care to live with conscious stewardship of the land, as best we know how. Mountains flank us to the north and south. The valley stretches west to east. Drive eleven miles east and you reach Lake Chelan. You can take the ferry up to the remote community of Stehekin or down to the tourist town of Chelan. Hike twelve miles west and you get to Cloudy Pass, where the valley rises up and the mountain ridges meet. Drop down and you’re in another watershed. The landscape transforms; the personality of the land shifts.
Two days before the lightning hit, I travelled to Cloudy Pass for the first time. This may have been the deepest I had ever been in the wilderness. It was undeniably otherworldly. And yet, at the same time, it was no other world than this one. Intimacy with the wilderness is our birthright. We are born to know ourselves as belonging to the wilderness - that is, the ecosystem of creatures, plants, fungi, and bacteria that populate the biosphere. Our built village here is home not only to us humans, but also serves as a home and refuge to countless species, of which our closest kin the mammals include Hoary Marmot, Mule Deer, Cascade Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel, Yellow-Pine Chipmunk, Long-Tailed Weasel, and American Marten.
Our safety here is tender and precarious. Mother Nature has her own rhythms of creation and destruction. The Divine has brought us into a world far more vast than we can comprehend. And yet, it is a world rife with wonder. If we can learn to deepen into the sorrow that surrounds us, the sorrow of loss and suffering of the animate earth, perhaps we can awaken more fully to the wonder at the preciousness of life that we collectively inhabit.
