on Feb 1st, 2008Deep Presence PDF

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Deep Presence Essay

on Jan 22nd, 2008Where Many Rivers Meet

Rivers are the circulatory system and life blood of the Puget Sound Basin. That’s why I chose the three great river deltas that flank Whidbey Island to the east as the destination for my first Circling Home walkabout. I’ve included David Whyte’s fine poem Where Many Rivers Meet, written from his own home on Whidbey Island, as a portal into the journey.

Where Many Rivers Meet

All the water below me came from above.

All the clouds living in the mountains

gave it to the rivers

who gave it to the sea, which was their dying.

And so I float on cloud become water,

central sea surrounded by white mountains,

the water salt, once fresh,

cloud fall and stream rush, tree roots and tide bank

leading to the river mouths

and the mouths of the rivers sing into the sea,

the stories buried in the mountains

give out into the sea

and the sea remembers

and sings back

from the depths

where nothing is fogotten.

David Whyte

from Where Many Rivers Meet

Copyright 1990, 2004 by David Whyte

uses by permission of the author and

Many Rivers Press

Like any real life pilgrimage, this walking trip started as a pretty good blend of the ridiculous and the sublime. Here’s a beginning at describing where I went and why I went there.

It might help to zoom out for a moment, and get the big picture. If you follow the Cascade Mountain range north from its inception in southern Oregon, the range unfurls itself from the North American Plate like a storm gathering fury the further north it goes. Part of the Pacific Rim’s Ring of Fire, the Cascades are dotted with volcanic peaks at regular intervals along the way, some of which (as Mt. St. Helens recently proved) are still very much alive. Just north of Glacier Peak in central Washington, the Cascades go on steroids, expanding east and west in a widening wedge that climaxes in the North Cascades, a range that has been aptly called “the American Alps”.

These are the mountains I see on the eastern horizon from my home on Whidbey Island. Looking east from the shores of Saratoga Passage, the skyline is dominated by a wall of granite that rises out of the Puget lowlands from sea level to a height of over 10,000 feet. Monte Cristo, Whitehorse, Three Fingers, Pilchuck, and Index and are among the first wave of sentinels that greet the eye from this vantage on a clear day. The glaciated volcanic domes of Mt. Baker (called by local native tribes Kulshan, or Great White Watcher), and Glacier Peak rise above them all, and both are easily visible further back in the range. These two volcanic summits stand exactly 100 kilometers from my house, crown jewels in the circle that I have chosen to define my year of local exploration.

moonlight

Everett, WA, framed by the Central Cascades as seen from the Whidbey Island ferry

A very young range geologically, the Cascades create a stunning ecological rift between the eastern and western slopes, making Washington one of the most diverse climatic zones in the world. It is a place of stark contrasting extremes. On the western slope, temperate moisture-laden weather systems sweep in off the North Pacific and pile against this wall of peaks, dumping their load of rain and snow as they rise to pass over the mountains. Emptied of moisture, the water feast quickly turns to famine on the eastern slope, yielding some of the most parched landscapes in the continental United States.

The transition from temperate rainforest to Ponderosa pine to parched sagebrush desert happens breathtakingly fast as one moves east across the mountains. It is a bio-regional potpourri that could scarcely be more diverse. As a Northwest native, I revel in this diversity of climate and terrain. But always in my heart I am a child of the western slope. Strictly speaking, the Northwest Coast temperate rainforest extends from the redwood groves of San Francisco Bay all the way around the arc of Alaska through Prince William Sound and the Kenai Peninsula. It is far and away the largest temperate rainforest on earth, with much smaller versions occurring in southern Chile, Norway, New Zealand and Tasmania.

Puget Sound lies mid-way in this long, narrow band of ecological exuberance, sandwiched between mountains and sea. As it happens, Western Washington brings the biological productivity of the region to its apex. The greatest mass of living matter per acre anywhere on earth occurs on the west slope of the Olympic Mountains, just over the hump from Puget Sound, where annual rainfall tops 200 inches and the temperature rarely drops below freezing. The world record for annual snow pack also occurred here on the slopes of Mt. Baker. The Puget Sound Basin is the very definition of rain country, a hydrological poster child, and a place where countless rivers converge on one inland sea. There are more than a dozen major river systems and thousands of tributaries and smaller streams that flow into Puget Sound from the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. Three of them, including the two largest, originate in the North and Central Cascades, and enter the Sound in the eastern embrace of Whidbey Island. The estuaries of these three great rivers - the Snohomish, Stillaguamish and Skagit - interlock fertile fingers in a near continuous delta of superb productivity that stretches from Everett north to Mt. Vernon and beyond.

Pouring over maps of my home region through the lens of ecological significance, it soon became obvious that this is where I needed to start my own pilgrimage back into the geography of home. These rivers were the summer homes of Whidbey Island’s first inhabitants - the Snohomish and Snoqualmie peoples, and the tribes of the lower Skagit basin. The Tulalip and Swinomish Indian Reservations - home to the contemporary remnants of these tribes - lie within these three deltas. Some of the first cities of the American Northwest located here, for the same reasons that the Indians were here before them; for the bountiful salmon runs, huge conifer forests in the valley bottoms, rich soil for farming and gathering in the flood plains, and ready made transportation corridors into the interior of the region. Today these rivers struggle to do their essential work beneath the competing layers of urban sprawl, heavy manufacturing, industrial logging and farming, and international shipping and trade. Icons of a resource-rich past, these deltas are symbols of an older Northwest left behind by the rise of modern high tech industries that could just as easily exist any place else as here. Yet estuaries are the repositories of natural capital that we dismiss at our peril. Estuaries - the intertidal zone of bays and rivers where fresh and salt water mix - are the most productive habitat on earth. 75% of all species depend at some point in their lives on estuaries like these. An even higher percentage of commercial and sport fisheries could not exist apart from estuarian habitats. The way of life of coastal communities has been rooted in this dependence for millennia. In the era of global warming and species extinction, these local rivers and estuaries are reasserting their place as essential guardians of economic as well as ecological health. The recent listing of Puget Sound chinook salmon on the Endangered Species List has raised the public profile of estuaries, water conservation and spawning habitat as top level political issues.

A series of catastrophic “500 Year floods” over the last few years in Cascade Rivers has reminded us also of the awesome power of these rivers, and how impossible they are to control when that power is unleashed. Rising rainfall, shrinking glaciers and diminishing snow pack have emerged as early warning signs of global warming in the region, and have seriously altered the water cycle already. Our legal obligation under the Endangered Species Act to restore our threatened salmon runs, and the catastrophic impact of recent floods, have awakened the Northwest to the need for big changes in the way we manage growth and ecological health in Puget Sound.

I am drawn to explore these particular watersheds because they are my own neglected back yard, because they remain indispensable building blocks in any kind of sustainable future for the region, and because I know that my continuing ignorance about them contributes to their decline. I also know these rivers are forces of immense spiritual as well as physical power, worthy of our deepest respect. Though I have lived here all my life, I have never made these rivers my own by giving them the gift of my careful attention. I’ve never explored them at the level where it counts, on foot and by kayak. This trip will be a first attempt to remedy that situation.

Day One: Beginning the Journey Saturday, January 19, 2008 I chose a terrible day to start my inaugural Circling Home walkabout. It was 37 degrees and pouring rain when I hoisted my pack, left my house and headed for the ferry this morning. For the first time in the fifteen years I’ve lived on Whidbey, I walked the four miles to the ferry, and that was just the beginning. My hiking boots were soaked before I even reached the ferry landing, my hands were numb, and my mind was rebelling against the whole idea. What was I doing this for, again? Something about global warming? And my grandchildren? What was the question again? And how does freezing in the rain constitute an answer? I thought about turning back and waiting for a more auspicious day to begin. But I’d been thinking about this moment for so long, I wasn’t going to admit defeat quite yet. I got on that ferry to the mainland, and a half hour later I was trudging through the affluent neighborhoods of Mukilteo, skirting the bluffs north toward the working class city of Everett. It would be awhile before I saw any rivers. For several hours it seemed like all I was ever going to see was expensive houses and cars. I’ve done my share of lugging a backpack in the rain, but always on remote backcountry trails far from the congestion of the city, never on busy urban thoroughfares. There are hoards of backpackers in the Northwest. We are an major tribe of the region. But our cherished domain begins at the trailhead. Ours’ is a sharply divided world, split between ever-shrinking natural sanctuaries on one side (where we long to be), and ever expanding fingers of urban sprawl on the other (that we long to escape). Embarking on my anomalous adventure as a lone hiker in the Kingdom of Cars, I sensed immediately that I was committing an oddly blasphemous breach of cultural etiquette. I felt conspicuously out of place on foot, hugging the narrow concrete shoulder of a busy highway, pummeled by a steady stream of SUV’s and pickup trucks that are still the vehicles of choice in this region? From the outside, this stream of traffic felt annoying and faintly menacing. I had to work to quell the voices of judgment in my head. Never mind that I’ve been inside that stream my whole life. Our cars are more than just a convenience, after all. They are also our private sanctuaries. We use them to get away from the pressures of our lives as much as we use them to travel from place to place. Inside a car I can close off the noise, close out the world, and lose myself in the important work of getting somewhere else as quickly as possible, while enjoying being away from it all. When I’m inside my car, I can plug in my iPod or tune into talk radio to hold off the nagging suspicion that this really isn’t working very well. It isn’t taking me where I really want to go. But then everyone else seems to be doing it too, so it must be unavoidable. Isn’t this just part of what it means to be an active American? Today I’ve been testing another theory, and the early results are mixed. It felt good to be walking, but my paltry three-miles-an-hour seemed silly and out of place, and not a little bit dangerous, in the face of this relentlessly clamorous train of vehicles. I felt assaulted through all my senses by the noise and fumes, and by the hard set of the faces that met my eyes in the brief moment of passing. Clearly my presence on their highway was assaulting something in them too. What was it? The discomfort went both ways. For the first eight miles of my journey, I had no choice really, because only one road went where I was going, and all the cars had to use it too. I had a new and more visceral vantage on what it means to be so deeply intwined in a car culture. Still, walking is its own mysterious balm. Before long I fell into a groove, more or less oblivious to the rain and cold and traffic, enjoying the faint inner glow of a body doing what it is designed to do. As I put some distance behind me, I could feel a quiet exuberance welling up, despite the traffic and rain. I was actually doing what I set out to do. Though I had no clear idea where I was going, or what route I’d take, it was enough for now just to see how far I could get before dark. Without a doubt, this was a strange way to begin a pilgrimage. And a strange kind of pilgrimage to begin with. But I don’t know another word that can encompass the scope of what I’m trying to do here. Websters Dictionary defines pilgrimage as “a journey, especially a long one, made to some sacred place as an act of devotion.” When we hear the word, most of us think of Mecca or Jerusalem or Rome, exotic far off places that hold the founding stories and artifacts of our cultural heritage. I’ve been on enough long pilgrimages to know that there is something to this. I’ve visited the great cathedrals and monasteries of Europe, and the famous Zen temples in Japan, and I know the feeling of deepened connection to these sacred traditions that come from the physical act of being there myself, and participating in the essential rituals and ceremonies in their places of origin. But my current pilgrimage turns this definition on its head. I am not seeking the distant and the exotic, but the near and the ordinary. I am seeking, as Emerson once described it, “the miraculous in the common”. In the end truth finds us where we are, or it doesn’t find us at all. “God is in this place and I did not know it”, Jacob declared in Genesis 28. Zen Master Hakuin said, “Not knowing how close the truth is, we seek it far away. What a pity!” I was born by the shores of Puget Sound. This is the landscape that raised me up, sank its teeth into me, and showed me what it is to be human in a world shot through with beauty. The pilgrimage I’ve begun today is focused on the path itself, and not the destination. I want to know what it means, for better or worse, to truly belong in the place that I’ve always called home. My walking route took me north along the shores of Possession Sound, named by Capt. George Vancouver on June 4, 1792 in a ceremony near present day Everett claiming possession of this new land for King George III and for Britain. I wonder what Vancouver would have made of the MacMansions that now dot the shoreline along this stretch of Possession Sound, or the industrial sprawl of Everett? The rain came in spurts through the afternoon, and the deep gullies that punctuated the bluff did not lend themselves to shortcuts. My efforts to get off the main road let me into several dead ends, so it was a relief when I finally came to the working class neighborhoods of Everett, where I could pick my way through the quiet back streets that have seen better days, but still have their dignity intact. Like Mukilteo, Everett lost the railroad sweepstakes to Seattle in its bid to become the terminus for a new northern railroad in 1893. Ever since, Everett has been Seattle’s poorer cousin to the north, with solid working class roots that are still written all over the city. The Everett Massacre of 1916 still lingers in the annuls of labor organizing, and is remembered here to this day. I made my way past the Navy Base, past the huge pulp and paper mill and the complex of marinas and boatyards that make up Everett’s working waterfront. Boeing’s 747 plant is located in Everett, and today’s Everett is a magnet for a growing immigrant population from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Central America and Africa. The nature of its challenges has shifted over time, but Everett still struggles to keep its place in a changing economic reality.

By the time I got to north Everett I’d walked fourteen miles, it was getting dark and I was tired. I took a room in a cheap motel on Broadway, stripped off my wet clothes and enjoyed the most satisfying bath in recent memory. Afterwards I did some yoga stretches to relieve my strained muscles, did a period of sitting meditation, then rustled up a teriyaki dinner from a take out joint in the deserted mall across the street. I had survived my first day on the urban trail. I wrote awhile in my journal, then fell into a deep and satisfying sleep.

Day Two
Sunday, January 20, 2008

I woke in the morning at 6:30, did my usual morning meditation practice for a half hour, the headed out at first light around 7:30 AM. Yesterday’s rain had passed over, and the temperature dropped during the night. But for hiking, I’ll take the cold over the rain. Within a mile I’d come to the edge of the Snohomish River delta, one of the largest and most complex estuaries in Puget Sound. The Snohomish results from the joining of two other great Northwest rivers fifteen miles inland; the Skykomish and the Snoqualmie, which drain Steven’s Pass and Snoqualmie Pass respectively. The four mile wide Snohomish delta separates Everett from Marysville to the north, and is crossed by three sets of bridges - one railway, one interstate, and the old Highway 99. Lacking a boat, Highway 99 is the only way through for someone on foot.

As a kid my family lived in Vancouver, B.C. for several years, and we’d drive the 150 miles between Seattle and Vancouver on Highway 99, before the interstate was built, passing tediously through each of the town centers along the way. Everett and Marysville were two of those towns, separated by a maze of wetlands and sloughs. Memories from those trips came flooding back as I made my way on foot across the islands and sloughs whose names I had never known until now; Smith Island, Spencer Island, Union Slough, Steamboat Slough, Ebby Slough. I passed the rotting docks and weathered fishing boats huddled in the sloughs, smelled the pungent blend of salt marsh and sawmill, mingled with the distant plumes of the pulp mill. Over the light Sunday morning traffic I could easily make out the flutey call of redwing blackbirds in the cattail marshes, and I paused to enjoy the antics of buffleheads and mallard ducks and mergansers feeding in the wetland ponds. These glimpses of a vibrant nature still thriving in the shadow of industrial neglect made me yearn to come back in my kayak later in the spring to explore these channels and wetland sanctuaries farther away from the commotion of the highways.

When I got to Marysville, I found the only cafe on Main Street that was open on a Sunday morning. Don’s 24 Hour Cafe is festooned with American flags inside and out, and declares from its sign on the highway that “The Lord is near for all who call on him.” The parking lot was full of pickup trucks, and the restaurant was packed with locals who seemed to have their own assigned seats. It would be an understatement to say that I was a conversation stopper when I walked in and hoisted my heavy pack to the floor. I found one of the few empty booths where a waitress filled my mug with coffee while I looked over the menu. It was the kind of old style, rot gut restaurant coffee that would get you excommunicated in a heartbeat from Seattle’s Starbuck Nation. My impression was that they served it with pride for just that reason. Antique kitchen implements hung from every beam and wall. A neon sign behind the counter sang the praises of Mountain Fresh Rainier Beer. My eye was drawn right away to the pies in the pie case, which looked grand. There was something unapologetically nostalgic about the place that made me miss the working town atmosphere of my other home in Petersburg, Alaska.

The plump, middle aged waitress was less than friendly as she took my order of pancakes and eggs, over easy. She was in a hurry, and ignored my attempts at cheerful banter. The conviviality of the place just didn’t seem to extend to me. So I sat back and enjoyed the scene while I devoured my breakfast and suffered through my coffee, undeterred by the fact that no one seemed remotely curious about who I was, or what I was doing there with my backpack on a Sunday morning. I was a foreigner, that much was clear, and not much more needed to be known.

Jonathan Raban, a British born writer based now in Seattle, was asked in an interview once how he, as a Brit, could be such an astute interpreter of Seattle’s cultural scene. He replied, “North Bend is further from Seattle than London.” (North Bend is the first rural town you come to as you head east into the mountains from Seattle.) The same could be said about Marysville, a timber and farming town with a fierce working class ethic, just outside the growing ring of suburban development. The sharp line between Red and Blue America is alive and well in this town.

After breakfast, I shouldered my pack and headed west beneath I-5 and into the Tulalip Indian Reservation. The public face of the reservation is a lavish casino-hotel complex along I-5 that makes a big visual splash and does a lucrative business. Until today, that was the only face I’d seen, whizzing by on the freeway. The life of the reservation is a life hidden away from mainstream view, separated by another sharp line, this time between affluence and poverty. The Tulalips share a common legacy of social dislocation with tribes all over North America, and this was evident as soon as I entered the tribal land. I’ve always felt there is a defiant streak that lurks beneath this surface poverty, when I’ve been privileged to attend native gatherings in the Northwest. One senses an invisible but resilient thread of living connection to the world of their ancestors and to the spirit of the land that is starkly absent from the rest of our culture.

The highway through the reservation hugs the shores of Port Susan for fourteen miles before it leaves the reservation and drops down into the Stillaguamish River flats south of Stanwood. There are no services, lodging or campgrounds inside the reservation, so I had no idea where I’d sleep for the night. I made it the six miles to the Tribal Center on Tulalip Bay, with

its large ceremonial smokehouse, tribal headquarters, and marina filled with the tribal fishing fleet, but it was almost deserted on a Sunday afternoon. The huge cedar canoes used to transport tribal members to the annual Canoe Rendezvous of tribes up and down the Northwest coast, held at a different native community each summer, were here as well. While there were few humans around, several ravens held council on the beach in front of the smokehouse, and a mating pair of bald eagles landed in a large Douglas fir tree by the tribal headquarters - the only bald eagles I saw on the trip. These birds are prime clan emblems that have defined the lives of these people for millennia. I never saw another raven or eagle on the trip.

With no place presenting itself as potential lodging, I pushed on, resolving to get as far as I could before dark. I walked another couple hours north in the fading light, then tucked myself away into the forest to camp when there was barely enough light to see. It was obviously going to be a cold one. With no camp ground or fire pit, I didn’t build a fire, and I had only the crackers, cheese and water I was carrying. I put on all my layers of clothing, wrapped my sleeping bag in a tarp, and settled down to make the best of the long darkness. A full moon shone its spotlight on the forest all night, and the owls and coyotes let me know they were here too. I slept fitfully, and though the temperature dropped well below freezing, I stayed tolerably warm. With the first glimmers of dawn in the morning, I shook the ice off my bedding, chewed on a few more crackers and raisins, and headed back out onto the highway.

Day Three
Monday, January 21, 2008

A beautiful sunny morning dawned as I walked the cold highway, laced with frozen puddles and frost. It took a couple hours to pass out of the reservation, and I stopped at Kayak Point Park

on Port Susan for - you guessed it - more crackers and cheese. Still no stores or restaurants anywhere along the way. Not even a place to get hot water for tea. I really hadn’t expected to be caught so short over such a long distance, thought the brightness and clarity of the morning made up for it. The view west over Port Susan and Camano Island with the Olympics in the distance was stunning, and a whole new perspective on the Sound.

From Kayak Point I walked the beach for several miles beneath the bluffs, then rejoined the highway at Warm Beach, where I had gone to church camp as a teenager. The Stillaguamish mudflats filled the north end of the bay at low tide, then yielded to rich farm land across a wide expanse of delta leading up to Stanwood. By this time I had blisters on both feet from three days of walking, and my lets were telling me I’d had about enough for this first round. I decided that Stanwood was as far as I’d go today.I had to push myself down to the bridge over the Stillaguamish River, then along was seemed an interminable slog through the flats before I finally reached the outskirts of Stanwood, a farming community settled by Norwegian immigrants who really knew how to pick their land. Here the Stilliquamish delta to the south presses up against the Skagit River delta to the north, creating a land bridge all the way out to Camano Island, and soil of unsurpassed fertility. At a bus stop outside Stanwood I approached an elderly woman at the stop, one of the only people I’d seen since I left Marysville the day before. I asked her where the nearest lodging and restaurant might be. She said there weren’t any motels between here and the freeway, several miles away. It was also some distance to any kind of eatery. I was seriously ready for a room and a hot bath, but there was no way I could imagine getting any more miles out of my body today. I took off my pack and eased myself down onto the bench. The woman looked me up and down for a long moment, then said, “My ex-husband used to say about people like you out walking with a pack, ‘There goes a person on vacation.’” I took in this bit of wisdom as gamely as I could, then looked at the schedule by the bus sign. As it turned out, there was a county bus all the way to Everett Station leaving in a half hour. This got me thinking. That would get me home easily by dinner, and I could take the same bus back here to resume my walk next week. I was proud of what I’d accomplished on this trip, and figured I just needed to scale back my expectations a bit about how far I could walk in a day, if enjoying the trip is one of my objectives. Over the next half hour waiting for the bus, I learned a lot about this woman’s life. I learned, for example, that when she got out of prison she’d had a hard time finding a place to live. She ended up out here on Camano Island. I learned that her neighbor on one side plays the guitar really well and is drunk a lot, and that her neighbor on the other side has a “problem with his sexual orientation”. I learned a fair amount about the plight of her children as well. After I’d heard as much as I needed to hear, I decided to take a risk and talk about what I was doing. I told her why I was out walking, and about my vow to stay car-free for a year. I even told her it was my way of responding to global warming. To my surprise she shook her head approvingly and said, “I know what you mean. I’ve lived without a car for years. They’re a lot of expense and hassle, and the buses take me most places I need to go. Sometimes I get stuck, but I then I just walk. It works out okay most of the time.” I didn’t ask her the question that was also on my mind. I didn’t ask her where she finds hope in her life. That just seemed like too much of a stretch. But I wish now that I had. I think her answer might have surprised me, and I probably would have learned something. Next time I think I will.

on Jan 15th, 2008Into the Current

map

Circling Home Boundary - 2008

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

We had one of those slashing, ripping winter windstorms last night that has become all too common in the Northwest lately. My house is nestled in a thick stand of conifers, and the fir boughs were flying past my window like rain. The roar of a gale whipping through this kind of forest is one of the more humbling experiences I know - exhilarating and scary at the same time. A storm like this on Whidbey Island means that it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” the power will go off. Last night the lights went out at 6:00 PM, just after it was thoroughly dark. In my neighborhood that means DARK. There is part of me that loves this kind of storm surge, even if the other half of me is waiting for the first Douglas fir giant to crash down on my house.

Soon after I’d gotten the candles lit and the fire going I heard a knock on my door. It was my next door neighbor, who needed help getting her smoke alarms turned off. She lives alone, and of course I was glad to help her. While I was there our neighbor on the other side showed up to help also. Once we’d disarmed the smoke alarms, we sat down and had tea together in the candle light, catching up on news from the neighborhood, our kids and our own lives. It was a sweet moment, something that I rarely make time for these days. So often it takes something out of the ordinary to get neighbors together like this, but I’m always struck by how satisfying it is to step back from my far-flung virtual community in cyberspace and actually get together with real neighbors. I’m also struck by how pleasant it is to spend more evenings at home with a good book or home movie. Being without a car has meant that I’m much more likely to cash in on the down time of an evening at home. I have to think more carefully about the constant stream of options for going out at night, because it is no small assignment to get around in the winter darkness by bicycle when there are no buses running. Last night that paid off with an unexpected good visit with my immediate neighbors.

My wife Sally was in Seattle for the night. A dear friend of ours’ died early yesterday morning after a three year fight with breast cancer. Sally has been holding a vigil with Sue at the hospice center for much of the last week, and stayed over last night to help get Sue’s body ready for burial. I was able to see Sue one last time a few days ago, and both Sally and I are sitting with the poignance of this moment - Sue’s passing, the frailty of all our lives, and the tragic upsurge of diseases like breast cancer that are the result, at least in part, of our toxic lifestyles. In so many instances, from breast cancer, auto-immune disease and birth defects to global warming, the bills are coming due on a culture that plays fast and loose with the life support systems of our planet. Sue’s death brings it home to us in a very personal way.

Last week I had the opportunity to be interviewed about Circling Home on our Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW, for a Northwest affairs show called Sound Focus. It was fun to see how these shows are put together in the studio, and I really enjoyed my conversation with Megan Sukys of KUOW. I’m gratified that my personal efforts to respond to climate change seem to be striking a chord in the community. I know that means that I am far from alone in wrestling with these questions, and that’s reassuring to me. If you’d like to listen in on the conversation, here is a link to my twelve minute interview on KUOW.

These days it is a fair journey for me into Seattle from the island, so I combined my KUOW interview with a final visit with Sue and my weekly trip to the Veterans Hospital on Beacon Hill to teach Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). I teach a three hour class once a week to veterans that uses meditation and yoga as components of stress management. I am privileged to teach this class with Dr. David Kearney, an MBSR colleague and a gastroenterologist at the VA Hospital. This work with veterans is an important grounding rod for me during a year when I am temporarily on sabbatical from much of my teaching in other parts of the country. The VA Hospital brings into sharp focus many of the forces in our society that are out of balance, and the long wake of suffering that our veterans seem to bear far out of proportion to the rest of us. The VA is a big shift in context from my work with professional leaders in other contexts, but I’m always surprised by how common our human experience is when we get down to the basic ingredients. Mindfulness practice is a great tool for doing just that.

The process of learning to navigate my life without a car definitely takes more time and planning, but it is also delivering some unexpected pleasures. One is the obvious health benefits of doing a lot more walking and biking. I arrive where I’m going with more energy and focus rather than less, more awake and juiced than if I’d had several cups of coffee (but without all that cafeine). I’m also struck by how energizing it is to be in greater contact with the elements. Even in our Northwest winter, the typical wind, rain and exposure are not nearly as intimidating in reality as they always seem from the inside of a building or the back side of a car windshield wiper. A dash of grit and resolve, and the simple act of plunging in, and I immediately feel a resurgence of aliveness and control over my circumstances. The extra time enroute would be spent doing what? - writing a few more emails? - worrying a little more about all the work I’m not going to get done anyway? Besides, I arrive where I’m going in a more productive frame of mind.

I’m also enjoying the serendipity of getting from Point A to Point B. For anyone who has experienced the pleasure of being footloose in Manhattan, Boston or San Francisco, try Seattle. The moment I get off the beaten path of the I-5 corridor or the endlessly clogged Seattle thoroughfares, the magic of the city opens right up. Seattle is filled with quirky, colorful neighborhoods, gorgeous vistas, lots of greenways and hideaway parks, and lively public gathering places. On foot or bicycle I can dodge my way through the neighborhoods with a lot of creative license, and I have time to notice the unexpected gems hidden in the nooks and crannies. I feel as though I have more time rather than less, because I no longer write off the time it takes to get where I’m going. The whole process tends in the direction of adventure rather than hassle, and I am nearly always more available to my task at hand when I do arrive.

And this is still the “dead of winter” in Seattle, where people tend to engage in a strange war against the water-driven climate that makes the Northwest coast so special in the first place. At this time of year, conventional wisdom (and local media) hammer on a false choice between seasonal affective disorder and flight to sunnier places. I’ve never bought it. I grew up in this bioregion, and therefor I am a creature of its version of the four seasons. When winter comes, my body still remembers the instinct to pull back on the throttle, even if my culture drives me to maintain full velocity. My choice to step outside of the prevailing car culture this year (and more directly into the elements) has helped me reconnect with what I love about our Northwest winter, rather than making it more daunting and difficult. This is for me an encouraging confirmation of the wisdom inherent in place.

on Jan 8th, 2008Soleducs

Soleducs

I had my first serious travel adventure of the year this past weekend, and a chance to work out some of the bugs in my car free diet. For fifteen years now I’ve been part of a men’s group that meets once a year on the Olympic Peninsula on the first weekend of January. It has become an annual ritual that we plan our year around, and it is rare that any of us is absent. Our group of eleven includes a range of professional backgrounds, including an attorney, two ministers, an architect, a psychiatrist, two commercial fishermen, a veterinarian, and a carpenter. We range in age from mid-forties to mid-seventies, so we also represent different stages of life and career. We call ourselves the “Soleducs”, named after the house on Sequim Bay where we have traditionally met. Our gatherings always include a blend of outdoor adventure and in depth conversation about the years’ issues, projects and passages. We are an ordinary group of guys who have build an extraordinary legacy of friendship that feels all too rare in today’s world.

soleducs post image 1

This year the sixty mile trip to Sequim Bay was my first major excursion off island since I began my Circling Home experiment. It was a stormy day, with gale force winds that nearly shut down the ferry from Whidbey Island to Port Townsend. We had a wild ride across Admiralty Inlet near the confluence of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While the rest of the guys carpooled, I made my way by bike, ferry and bus, arriving sometime after the rest of the group.

On the way I visited my friend Nathan Gilles at his carving shed in the Jamestown-S’Klallam Tribal Center on Sequim Bay. Nathan is a premier carver in the Northwest Coast native tradition. The carving shed where he works produces some of the most spectacular totem poles anywhere on the coast.soleducs post image 2

It is a highlight of my year just to be in the presence of such monumental work, which still carries within it for me much of the soul of Northwest culture. Nathan showed me around the works in progress, describing some of the differences between the Haida and Bella Coola native styles that he is currently working on.

After my visit with Nathan, I rode the last five miles to our retreat house in a driving rain and gale that threatened to blow me off the road. It was an exhilarating ride. I couldn’t resist hooting and hollering as I made my way in fading light to the outer end of the peninsula. What a way to kick off the New Year. My friend Rick Jackson had stayed back at the house to wait for me, and we immediately headed out to find the others, who were far out on the spit celebrating the storm. John Muir couldn’t have asked for a better welcoming party.

As a shared project this past year, each of us had written a short meditation on “hope”. We spent time together assessing the results of our work, which we self-published in time for Christmas as a gift for our families and close friends. The results were so satisfying that we agreed to further polish the work in the coming weeks, and make it available more widely through our websites and networks.
There were definitely some unexpected challenges for me. With no bus service on Sunday, I had no choice but to stay over Sunday night after the others had left. I turned this solo time into a mini-writer’s retreat, and stoked the fire late into the evening as my writing juices kicked in. The next morning I rode my bike back out to the highway in plenty of time to catch the morning bus to Port Townsend. But I discovered that being on top of planning and scheduling isn’t always enough. I went to the wrong bus transit area, only to watch the bus go barreling by without slowing down.
I couldn’t believe this had happened, and I was furious. The first thing I did, of course, was curse and jump up and down and shake my fist at the bus disappearing down the highway. That didn’t seem to produce any results. Then I called the transit lady and chewed her out for not having the bus stops more clearly marked. She told me not to talk to her in that tone of voice, and that the next bus was in three hours.
So what do you do when you’re stranded twenty five miles from the ferry you need to catch, you can’t hitchhike, and you have three hours to wait for the next bus? I thought about finding a cafe to wait it out, but that wouldn’t get me home until late in the evening, and I was too frustrated to sit around for that long. So I climbed on my bike and started riding . It wasn’t what I had in mind at all, but it turned out to be a good choice. It took me a little over two hours to get there, and I made the ferry after the one I was scheduled to take. I definitely worked my frustration out on the ride. This is, after all, what I signed up for, right? I ended up tired but happy that I’d had this unexpected adventure, and this chance to experience the Olympic Peninsula in a more intimate way.
Livelihood
So how am I going to pull this off from a livelihood standpoint? It’s one thing to decide I need to make some changes. It’s another thing to figure out how to support myself through the change. I have no easy answers here. Being self-employed with an unusual blend of skills is both an asset and a liability. It is an asset in that my time is my own to allocate as I will. I have well-honed skills as a commercial fisherman, carpenter, wilderness guide and meditation teacher. Different as they are, each of these skill sets continue to play some part in my livelihood structure, and I can configure them as necessary to meet changing circumstances.
The liability is that the moment I back off on the throttle of my work, as I am this year with my Circling Home experiment, the money stops flowing. There is no salary to tie me over. I can take a sabbatical if I want, but nobody is going to pay me to do it.
Staying local for the year means I won’t be going to Alaska for the summer. This cuts me off from my main sources of income as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide. I could kick back in as a carpenter, but that would defeat the purpose of my primary intention to explore and write during the coming year. On the other hand, my career as a meditation teacher is on the upswing, but it pays poorly, and has been taking hold mostly outside my home region, so it rests heavily on jet travel. It is this growing weight of travel, and its indisputable connection to climate change, that has prompted my decision to stay local this year.
So no matter how I slice it, I am going to have to dip into savings to make this work. I am fortunate that my wife has a good source of income, that she supports my intention and is willing to help pull up the slack financially.
I’ll be using this year to ramp up my teaching in local venues, including work I am doing one day a week at the Veteran’s Hospital in Seattle, teaching meditation and yoga as components of stress reduction. I’ll also lead some contemplative retreats at the Whidbey Institute and North Cascades Institute, and see what else emerges. livelihood image 1
The other leg of my livelihood stool this coming year will be a month of commercial salmon fishing next fall with my partner Dave Anderson on the gill net boat we recently bought for Puget Sound. This may be a departure from my low-carbon diet, but it’s what I have to work with, and it has the added advantage of teaching me about my home region from the vantage of working on the water. For so many years I’ve traveled a thousand miles to the north to experience what used to be the heart and soul of my home region. While many of the salmon runs in Puget Sound are badly depleted, the chum salmon run is still strong and commercially viable, and the fishing lifestyle is an excellent way to become better acquainted with the ecological fabric of the Sound. Fishing for salmon has been basic to livelihoods in Puget Sound since the retreat of the last ice sheet. It is a way for me to bridge the skills I already have with the place I actually live.

There is no point in shying away from the contradictions and points of friction that all of us will be facing in our efforts to reinvent our lives in response to climate change. There is no magic bullit. We all will have to do the best we can with what we have to maintain reasonable livelihood options, even as we strive to change the way we live and work. One of the obvious challenges for me this year then will be to strike a realistic balance between ongoing livelihood needs and an honest break from patterns of work that are no longer sustainable. My “sabbatical” will really be a number of mini-sabbaticals sprinkled in among bits and pieces of work to keep me going and keep me grounded. I hope to gain some insights into how this might be accomplished on a longer term basis, closer to home, by the time this year is over.

on Jan 1st, 2008The Practice of Place & The Practice of Presence

It has been ten days now since the solstice, and I have been realizing an unanticipated benefit of having begun my Circling Home year on the solstice rather than the calendar New Year. For this brief span between the two, I have been far from alone in pulling back on the throttle. Even in our harried culture of never ending work, the week between Christmas and New Years is a time when people do slow down, if they are ever going to. This has made for a more companionable beginning to my journey than if I had begun on the 1st of January, just as everyone else is diving back into work and school. The contemplative tone of this pause between works in progress is still widely shared within the culture, even if we have to dig for it underneath the relentless consumer frenzy of the season.
I am lucky to live in close proximity to much of my immediate family, and among friends who remember how to use this time for its intended purpose. Walking or biking between gatherings of family and friends has only deepened my enjoyment of this pause in the turning rhythms of our lives.
One of the many extraordinary people with whom I share local community is the poet David Whyte. In his recent newsletter he spoke to many of the sentiments that have inspired my current experiment in local living:
“We are creatures of desire. Even those deeply desired, desire-less states we seek in times of contemplation seem to require enormous amounts of wanting, discipline and energy to achieve. We are built to want and to follow our wants to their end, sometimes to our satisfaction but also many times, to our destruction. Little wonder then, that our effect on this planet through the accumulated wants of over six billion individual lives are providing a reflection not only of humanity as a whole but on the very nature of human wants and necessities. Innocent individual desires such as a meal or a Trans-Atlantic journey need now to be seen in their magnified multiplied effects; this, at a time when many feel besieged by post modern life and want simply to be left alone to get on with it, whatever it might be.

Almost all of us have an intuition that we live at a break point in history; that those understandings we may have nurtured about the human condition will not survive the coming years; and that we are on the edge of some kind of proving ground. We intuit a threshold, a line beyond which we will reveal ourselves to ourselves, and there is an unspoken fear that we might not like what we find, but there is also a sense that we may be forced to unearth inner resources previously neglected.”
I share both the wariness and anticipation that David speaks to here. It will take real courage to enter this new and perilous “proving ground” in which the very nature of what it is to be human must be reexamined? Yet we can also expect help from “inner resources previously neglected”. We should not underestimate our native resilience and audacity in the face of such challenges. What are these inner resources, and how can we bring them to light and put them into practice? This question is key to my own inquiry during the coming year, and key also to the whole question of how we might forcefully respond to this “break point” in our history.
As one who was born and raised along the shores of Puget Sound, it has always been my deep intuition that the relationship we have with the places we inhabit is far more important than our current popular culture recognizes. American culture doesn’t care where we live, as long as we always want more than we have, and look forever beyond our own shores to fulfill those wants. We have been rendered a homeless people who are continually urged to bypass what we truly need in the quest for what we merely want. Already drowning in excess material possessions, the latest commodity to be exploited has become our attention itself. The commodification of attention, amplified by our exploding Information Technologies, overwhelms our capacity to focus on one thing at a time, or enjoy what we already have, even as we are driven to chase the latest crop of manufactured desires that advertisers so skillfully plant in every nook and cranny of our shared perceptual commons.
The Practice of Place
totemThe practice of place is a crucial antidote to both this culture of consumption and this attack on attention. By “practice of place”, I simply mean the act of returning our attention continually to where we are in the physical and sensual landscape. Constantly renewing contact over time with the specific places we inhabit is an act of sustaining wholeness. Plumbing the depths of immediate geography, weather, seasonal progression, native ecologies and local culture brings us back to our senses, and connects us to the profusion of life that shares this place on earth with us. There is a deep companionship in the act of returning our attention to where we are as the strongest base from which to navigate our world.
“There are a thousand ways”, the poet Rumi has written, “to kneel and kiss the ground”. None of them should be attempted at sixty miles per hour, let alone six hundred miles per hour. A world that is whizzing by is not a world we can accurately see or attend to. We first have to slow to a human pace that will allow our senses to meet the world on its own terms. Walking is the oldest and most universal way to access the hidden riches of both our physical and psychological terrain. The poet Gary Snyder has said, “Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices ecology on the level where it counts.”
My first walking excursion of the year will be a 100 mile loop in mid-Janurary through the Skagit River delta from Mukilteo to LaConner, then back down the fifty mile spine of Whidbey Island from Deception Pass. Along the way I will pass through the Tulalip and Swinomish Indian Reservations. These are the traditional peoples who inhabited Whidbey Island prior to European contact. I will seek out the huge flocks of snow geese and trumpeter swans that winter over in the Skagit River delta on my way through. This route will follow the east and west flanks of Saratoga Passage and Skagit Bay. It will cover the ecological backbone of Island and Skagit Counties, dissected by the Snohomish, Stillaquamish and Skagit Rivers, yet almost invisible to the ordinary traveler along the I-5 corridor to the east. It will take me through terrain I have barely touched upon in all the years of living here, terrain which is nevertheless basic to an ecological and cultural understanding of this place I call home.
The Practice of Presence

The practice of presence is the internal dimension of this encounter with place. How we pay attention, how we come toward the territory we inhabit, is as important as the qualities and character of the territory itself. Presence emerges out of the intersection between the two. It grows out of a continuous interpenetration of human nature and wild nature. The cultivation of presence is a conscious journey of the heart and mind in continuous conversation with elements of wild nature that enfold us, if we are paying attention, everywhere we go.
There are many pathways into the cultivation of presence. No one way is right for everyone, but my experience is that some form of spiritual discipline is most helpful here. The practice of listening, of withholding judgement, and of paying attention to what we are doing while we are doing it, is basic to all these forms of practice. My own primary path has been Zen Buddhist meditation. I have studied Zen for twenty five years, working with a number of teachers. For the past dozen years I have studied with Shodo Harada Roshi, a Japanese Rinzai Zen teacher who has established a Zen monastery here on Whidbey Island. It is an extraordinary opportunity for me to work with one of the best living Zen Masters right here in my own neighborhood, and one of my goals for the coming year is to avail myself more fully of this opportunity by participating regularly in the life of this practicing community.
zendo spaceI also have a small outdoor meditation hut I built in the woods behind my house where I begin my days with sitting meditation. I do this at about the same time every morning, and it is the best way I have found not only to anchor my daily practice, but to stay in close touch with the changing seasons and changing phases of light. During the winter I bundle up with a blanket and sit by candle light in the dark, with the only sounds being an occasional owl or coyote from the surrounding woods. In spring and fall I sit through the change of light, and follow the changing composition of migratory birdsong that the seasons faithfully dish up. Summers I also sleep in my zendo, and enjoy the whole symphony of sounds that accompany summer nights and early dawns on the island. The simple act of sitting in silence for a few minutes each day out in the midst of these elemental presences is tremendously grounding for me, and deepens my sense of belonging to this particular place.

on Dec 21st, 2007Beginnings

December 23, 2007
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
- Wendell Berry
After all the anticipation and planning, the winter solstice has come and gone, and I am now several days into my Circling Home journey. I’m off to a really satisfying start.

I love the symbolism of this beginning at the moment of least light and greatest darkness here in the Northern Hemisphere in the annual circle of our earth around the sun. I marked the precise solstice moment at 10:08 PM on Friday night, Dec. 21, with a small group of friends in the Whidbey Institute sanctuary, a short walk up the hill on a trail through the woods from my house. We sat in silent meditation as the moment approached, then walked the circular maze of a stone-lined labyrinth on the nearby Institute land under a nearly full moon.

The next day I invited friends from the community to join me again at the sanctuary to help mark the beginning of my Circling Home year. Thirty friends and neighbors took time from their busy Holiday schedules to attend my little home made ceremony. We again sat in a circle in silence together, then I shared some poems, a few songs, and a period of open solstice reflections. It was a deeply grounding and gratifying expression of community. I felt such gratitude for this support, and for the way my community has embraced the spirit of this endeavor. It really sent me out with wind in my sails.
Here are a couple of the poems I shared during the ceremony, and that I share with you now as we begin the long turning back toward the light.
The Peace of Wild Things

(by Wendell Berry)
When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty
And the great heron feeds
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief
I come into the presence of still water
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light
For a time I rest in the grace of the world
And am free


Lost
(by David Wagoner)
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
December 25, 2007
For the first time in years, Christmas was a genuinely relaxed time. I rode my bike the six miles into Langley for the Christmas Eve candlelight caroling service at the Methodist church, then on to my mom’s house to spend the night. Christmas day was full of the usual convergence of aunts and uncles and neices and nephews, grandchildren and great grandchildren, with four generations of Hoeltings assembled at my mom’s for the day. Sally and I took a long walk after brunch, dropping in on friends for a bit of holiday cheer. It actually snowed for a spell in the afternoon, and the Cascade Mountains and foothills were white almost down to tidewater. This was the closest to a white Christmas we’ve had in a long time.
I have been surprised how good it has felt to walk and bike everywhere during the hectic build-up to Christmas. The fact that I live in the country at five miles from the nearest store or services is so far proving less daunting than I expected. Even riding these distances at night when it’s raining hasn’t felt like a burden. It is actually a relief to have eliminated the option of using a car. Because I have given myself no choice but to ride or walk, I’m just doing it, and already I can feel the slower rhythm beginning to take hold. I feel some strength flowing back into my body, and I find the contact with the elements surprisingly welcome. I’ve spent so much time exposed to the elements during my life as a commercial fisherman, wilderness guide and outdoorsman that it’s not that big a stretch to add this contact back into the domain of transportation. I find myself wondering why I’ve waited so long to embrace this shift.
I’m surprised by the interest my community is taking in what I’m doing. Everywhere I go around the island people seem to know what I am up to, and want to talk about it. Partly I think it is an accident of timing, with the recent devastating floods in Western Washington on the heels of the Bali Climate Summit and Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize speech. New data from the IPCC showing that the polar ice cap could be completely gone now in as few as seven years puts an exclamation point on the mounting level of concern. I sense a palpable change in people’s awareness of the climate crisis, and I’m gratified that my efforts seem to be challenging many of my friends and neighbors to think harder about their own choices. I would be doing this even if no one was taking notice, but the fact that it is striking a chord really helps fortify my own resolve to dive into this experiment with as much determination as I can muster. I’m really quite excited to be underway, and to see where it goes from here.

on Dec 13th, 2007Circling Home - Welcome to the journey

CIRCLING HOME 2008
An Online Journal
by Kurt Hoelting
Winter Solstice, 2007

Dear friends,

Welcome to my online journal for Circling Home. I officially begin this journey on the Winter Solstice December 21st. These are my opening reflections, which I will update regularly during the year. I am taking this travel sabbatical in 2008 as a personal response to the challenge of climate change. I will go car-free during the year, traveling primarily on foot, by bicycle and kayak on a pilgrimage into the heart of my own home region, staying within a 100-kilometer circle of my home on Whidbey Island until Winter Solstice in 2008. My essay Circling Home, which appeared in the Sept. / Oct. 2007 issue of Resurgence Magazine, tells more about the vision and motivation behind this experiment, so I won’t repeat that story here. To read the article, go to here<.

One friend described Circling Home as an attempt to chart a rite of passage between the world as it has been, and the world as it will be. This is a commission I can accept. In the coming year I will voluntarily embrace changes in life style that may well be on the horizon for most of us anyway. By stepping into these changes now, I hope to reclaim a sense of purpose that is lost when our actions fall out of alignment with our intentions, or when our deepest convictions are cut off from the way we actually live. I am weary of feeling powerless about this crisis. I am weary of feeling that I have no choice but to continue wounding the world by the way I move through it.

I think we live in mythic times. How else can one describe the planetary emergency of climate change that is now unleashing itself on every region of the globe, caused in large part by the excesses of our very success as a species. This is a crisis never before seen or even imagined, in which everything worthy of our love is literally on the line. Our culture, our freedoms, our families, our livelihoods, our posterity, and the very foundations of life on earth are all on the line now. With such immense stakes, even our most ordinary human choices take on a mythic significance. Every action counts. We can no longer rely on “experts” and politicians to solve this crisis for us. Each of us is being called to make fundamental changes, here and now, in the way we think, and more importantly, in the way we live.

It is the urgency of this need to enact personal change that lies at the center of my Circling Home experiment. But I do not embark on this pilgrimage out of guilt, fear, or despair. Quite the contrary. I see huge opportunities now to change and grow in directions that will benefit all of us. I enter this year as a celebration and deepening of my connection to my own home place, and to the local community in which I am privileged to live. I am animated by a hope not only that we are capable of making the necessary changes, but that we will ultimately be better off for having made them, that we will live richer and more satisfying lives as a result.

THE TRAVEL CONUNDRUM

It has been a full year now since I first conceived of Circling Home, in the wake of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It has taken all of this time for me to set the stage for such an ambitious life-style change, as I navigate my own complex web of work, family and personal obligations. Ironically, all three strands of that web are calling for increased travel, even as I’ve come to better understand how much our collective dependence on travel is accelerating the advent of climate change itself. I claim no moral high ground here. I travel a lot in my work, and I also understand the magnetic pull of far-away places that are increasingly available to us in this jet age. I have been a full participant. If we are lucky enough to have the means, it is pretty hard to resist this magic carpet. The call to hit the road is an ancient impulse that jet travel has merely put on steroids.

What is clear now is that there are dragons lurking under this mountain of mobility, and they are generating a lot of heat.

On the eve of my Al Gore-inspired travel fast – (I cannot tell a lie. You might as well know the truth.) - I squeezed in one last trip to visit my daughter Kristin, who is a Fulbright scholar living in Norway this year. I couldn’t quite stand the thought of not seeing her for an entire year.

It was an inspiring trip, even as I felt some ambivalence about this added indulgence. Our visit ended in Oslo just as Al Gore was arriving to receive his Nobel Peace Prize. Sharing the headlines with Gore on the European news channels that day was Australia’s surprise decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, leaving the United States as the only industrialized nation left in the world that has refused to take that step. That same newscast from my hotel in Oslo told me of devastating floods back in my home state of Washington, with speculation of links to global warming.

Norway gave unexpected new impetus to my Circling Home aspirations. Throughout my visit, the streets of Bergen and Oslo were remarkably car-free, even during rush hour. Bikes, buses and pedestrians filled the streets, where swarms of automobiles would have greeted me in any comparable city in America. Adding the true costs of gas consumption into its price at the pump has encouraged Norwegians to create a vibrant culture that is remarkably less dependent on cars than our own, even as they are one of the top oil producing countries in the world. Not content with small steps toward oil independence, Norway’s Prime Minister recently committed his country to becoming fully carbon neutral by 2050. The contrast to the United States could hardly be more striking. My Circling Home project began to look less daunting in the company of these robust Norwegians, who think nothing of plunging into the December cold and dark on their bicycles.

Flying home from Oslo the next day, musing about these contrasts, I glanced out my window and was knocked breathless by what I saw. While my fellow passengers sat transfixed by the twitching images on their personalized DVD screens, I was ambushed by one of the most beautiful spectacles I had ever seen. Below me, in real time, lay the deep cut fjords, peaks and glaciers of Greenland’s west coast, locked in December sea ice, and bathed in a soft winter light under a clear blue sky. So unprepared was I for the impact of this heart-rending beauty that my eyes filled with tears. I experienced a wave of grief in knowing that these very glaciers are among the first conspicuous victims of climate change, and that they are melting much faster than expected. The impact of their melting on rising sea levels, and on the ocean currents and salinity that drive the climate of the North Atlantic, is only beginning to be understood, and ranges from the calamitous to the catastrophic. I was left to contemplate the double binds we all face now as we try to comprehend the tide of danger that is rising all around us. Here I had flown half way around the world to visit the daughter I love, whose future is put at further risk by the very act of flying to see her. I was returning home to begin my travel fast amid a perfect storm of contradictions.

Vaclav Havel said, “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” This sentiment seems to me a pretty good place to start my journey back toward home. There is so much to be done, and almost certainly dark days ahead. I have no illusions about that. I also have no idea whether my efforts at carbon-free living in the coming year will do any “good” when measured against the enormity of the challenges we face. I have no idea what I will learn on this “narrow path to the deep interior”, as Basho called his own travels on foot through the mountains of Japan several centuries ago. But I do know that my heart swells at the thought of entering this path. I continue to recognize a persistent voice beckoning me to begin. I know the biggest dragon of all may be my own restlessness of spirit. Taking on this restlessness is itself a mythic act of defiance. How can we hope to slay the dragon of climate change if we aren’t willing to contend with the forces of distraction and restlessness that drive us to look everywhere but in front of us for meaning in our lives.

To all of you who are reading this, and who wish to accompany me on this journey, may the coming year be a time of deep discovery and growth. May we learn from each other, take risks together on behalf of our wounded planet, hold out a hand to each other, and seek inspiration in small acts of restoration and love. May we take comfort, as always, in the return of the light.

Happy Winter Solstice!

Kurt