The Great Remembering

Peter Forbes
From his book The Great Remembering
Published by Trust For Public Land, 2001

Text of chapter entitled “The Practice of Listening”

The cold waters of Tebenkof Bay lap against my legs as I stare down into a tidal pool. At first, I see nothing other than rock and kelp, but patience slowly reveals forms and colors. Then I am startled by the presence of movement everywhere. The barnacles are feeding in the current. Almost every small shell starts to move and becomes a creature. The beautiful pattern of reds, browns, grays, and whites becomes twenty-five different crabs. The long piece of kelp, I now see, is food for hundreds of tiny fish. I am no longer blind.

Two ravens fly up the beach toward me, and as they pass overhead I can hear the beating of their wings and the exhalation of their breath. Later that afternoon, friends and I sit by a fire on the beach listening to sea otters crack shells on their stomachs. At dusk, a flock of geese flies overhead, calling out to us. As I lie down to sleep on the gravel beach, I hear the soft but constant beating of a drum coming to me from the islands across the bay. It echoes in my ears with the sound of the winter wren and the loon and the no-see-ums, and I realize it is the beating of my own heart.

What I found so moving in Tebenkof Bay was not its wildness, but its completeness. More than any other place I’ve been, this place feels full of life. The humpback whales are there and the black bear and the eagles and the wolves and the massive schools of salmon are there. In every inlet, they are there. But also there is the ancient totem pole left by the Tlingit people that we found still standing, held by the branches of a hundred-year-old Sitka spruce. And I’m thankful that we are there, and for how we are there: traveling in kayaks, respecting the silence, leaving no trace.

Being in Tebenkof Bay for just a week made us different people than when we arrived. We need to protect this awareness, this sympathy we have for one another and all of the life here, as much as we need to protect the place itself. Seeing Tebenkof Bay through the eyes of listening and being aware made me want to return to my own home and love it better, to be a better father, and a better member of my own community.

Traveling to southeast Alaska helped me see the connection between the experience of the wild and what we are now engaged in learning at Trust for Public Land. We are engaged in contemplating and exploring our greater purpose as an organization. It is the journey of becoming more self-aware. It is the practice of listening. And we know that we cannot find self-awareness within TPL without first seeing it in ourselves. Three years ago, TPL began an exercise in discovering our highest values by having open discussions about our mission, by exploring our individual lives and motivations, by bringing into our community the best thinkers and social critics, and by adopting several important tools that have helped us think and see more clearly. For example, over forty of our staff have participated in weeklong retreats in the wilderness that combine silence, meditation, and discussion. It is through this practice, and the discipline of our everyday work, that we have begun to envision a new future.

Albert Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it.” We have encouraged an environment of learning that will enable us to overcome the inevitable obstacles that might keep us from acting on our values. This journey continues to ask each of us what in our own life requires healing, why our culture struggles, and how our work in land conservation has the potential to heal our country and ourselves. The practice of listening and being aware is helping us to develop the humility, sense of fairness, and wider view of the world necessary to create the magnitude of change that we aspire to. This is a time for reflection and absolute boldness. This is a time to experiment without sacrificing any discipline. This is a time when we must allow what we care about most to guide everything we do. To be wild, they say, is to be bold, untamed, and free. This is a time for us to practice our wildness.