“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” – Thich Nhat Hahn.

Hey Folks,

Well, with all the comments about landscapes versus bear photos on the last few pages, I thought I’d try a compromise. I know, I know, compromises end up pleasing no one, right? Well, so be it.

This is possibly the last photo I took on my trip last month, a sunset over Naknek Lake – I was hoping for some nice clear skies the following morning – and actually had a big sunrise – but then it clouded over, very soon afterward, and no good light was had for the morning shooting. Then I had to pack and get ready for the plane to come pick me up. The trip was all over too soon.

The photo is one exposure, so no real photoshop trickery – I even left the gull in the bay (@ Ron 🙂 ).

The real reason I wanted to post this photo was, honestly, a talk I went to listen to tonight, at a local bookstore, by a great Alaskan writer, Bill Sherwonit. His newest book, ‘Changing Paths‘, has just been released, and this was kind of the ‘release party’. He spoke about the book, the making of the book, the subject of the book, and read a few sections from it. It was a great presentation, and a real treat to hear someone so in touch with the wild and wildness talk about his experiences, and share part of that with the audience. I enjoyed it a lot, and recommend the book.

After the talk, Bill opened the discussion up to questions, and I asked him to elaborate a little on something he’d said about ‘the current wilderness debate’.  Essentially, it’s a very academic discussion surrounding the construct of wilderness, what that is, and how we relate to it. One of the observations, Bill noted, some people make is the point that the “preservation of wilderness” tends to lead to a “dismissal of non-wilderness”; a lack of middle ground, in that we ‘care about this land’ (wilderness), and don’t care about that land (non-wilderness). This is an issue Wendell Berry (another favorite author of mine) has written about. I think this is largely a function of our dichotomous way of perceiving the world; we lose the middle ground, we see ‘this and that’ .. wilderness and non-wilderness .. and has nothing to do with what wilderness itself actually is. But – it carries enormous consequences for the environment. Wilderness advocates often push hard for certain areas to be designated wilderness, to be “protected” from human impact, and this implies, to the dualistic Western worldview, that non-wilderness areas can then be exploited and turned inside out at our every latest whim. It was interesting to hear Bill talk about this a little. The question of how to avoid this is a fascinating one.

Another issue he raised was the idea that wilderness, as we’ve come to define it, typically leads us to understand that wilderness means a place people are only visitors; a construct which, not only is incorrect, but one that has hurt various different indigenous peoples throughout the world, including in Alaska. (NB: Alaska, through the Alaska Lands Act (Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act , or ANILCA), has managed, so far, to preserve some wilderness areas that allow for subsistence lifestyle by those fortunate enough to live within the prescribed boundaries of certain areas. It’s a unique situation in this country, today, and an interesting one. Perhaps I’ll write more on the specifics of ANILCA and Alaska’s wilderness later. It’s a contentious issue, for many, here). Jack Turner wrote in ‘The Abstract Wild’ that wilderness involves not the number of people who might exist within a given area, but how those people relate to the place they live within (Jack’s essays in that book are the best discussions on the subject that I’ve ever stumbled across). I think too often we fall for the very Western (and recent) construct that wilderness means “no people”; we lose sight of the fact that we not only evolved within the wilderness, within wildness, but that wildness exists inside our selves, just as it does in the deepest mountains and darkest forests. Gary Snyder calls it ‘the wildness within’. I do love me some Gary Snyder!

Back to the photo: to me, this photo speaks of wilderness, of wildness, the wild. The root of the relationship between the photo and Bill’s talk was Bill’s closing commentary, the caption beneath the photo, and my favorite quote by Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn. It (the quote) relates directly to the quality of wildness; I thought this might be be a good photo to post after attending Bill’s talk tonight, so here it is. Hope you like it.

I’ll end, as Bill did, with Thich Nhat Hahn:

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” – Thich Nhat Hahn.

Amen, brother.

Cheers

Carl