Skyearth Letters

July 31st – suppertime. A wolf howl – not the yippy kind but a long descending moan fills the air when I step out the door. As I sit to write, a mixed cacophony arises – barking, moans. I've seen the cages they are kept in. The wolves are generally quiet during the day, but late afternoon-early evening is when they cry. The two dogs that I am visiting always stay quiet during the wolves' talk, even though the barking of other dogs will rouse their voices in reply. They know wolf power.

The wolves should not be here – in cages – among the houses that fill the mostly wooded areas of this valley and ridge. They should not be captive.

In last week's news, the Appeals Court has heard the arguments and will be issuing a decision regarding the wolves that now live in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. What a mix of messages that case is! The conflict lies with the wolves that were reintroduced there in 1995-96, with the special condition that if individual wolves killed cattle, ranchers were permitted to kill the particular wolf with impunity. Since the reintroduction, however, wolves have also migrated naturally into Montana from Canada. One could think that the music of wolves in Yellowstone echoed far enough to draw their northern kin. The problem is that the in-migrating wolves have the full protection as an endangered species – in other words, no killing by human hands.

If the judge rules one way in the lawsuit, the Yellowstone wolves that are the original and progeny of the introduced pack are supposed to be removed or eliminated. While about half wear radio collars and can be tracked down, the non-collared ones may well be killed to fulfill the edict, if that is the court's decision.

Doesn't the irony make you want to vomit?

It is this kind of torturous environmental scenario that Scott Russell Sanders could have been thinking of as he wrote his book, Hunting for Hope (Beacon Press, 1998). I had read one or two articles by Sanders in magazines such as Orion, but I hadn't read any of his books (and he has quite a few…fiction, non-fiction, and children's). Last Saturday, I was gazing at the 7-day bookshelf in the library when his name attracted my attention. I read it this week.

Hunting for Hope is Sander's response to his teenage son's question: if things are so polluted, so wrong with the environment and so hard to get changed, why should I go to college, work, even live? He earnestly desired to know if there was any hope in his father's outlook, any hope at all in the world.

That question and the obvious anger behind it caused Sanders to look very deeply into what caused him to want to live, to discover what gives him hope in the ultimate survival of the earth.

First, he sought to define hope and invoked Emily Dickinson's poem about "Hope is the thing with feathers…", restating it as "flighty and frail but also tough, resolutely singing on stubbornly through fat times and lean." He notes

that hope and hop come from the same root, one that means "to leap up in expectation"…. When we leap up, what do we see? If we see nothing but shadows closing in, if we expect only disaster, we may well quit leaping altogether. We may hunker down in the present, sink into momentary sensation—not as a way of experiencing the fullness of being, as mystics would have us do, but as a way of avoiding tomorrow.

He goes on to say that "the first condition of hope is to believe you will have a future; the second is to believe there will be a decent world in which to live it."

In the year that followed his son's question, he discovered several qualities of life that seemed to be part of hope, although he observes that when people believe that the only thing to look forward to is some sort of reward in heaven, such belief is a form of despair. It also becomes a form of not caring about the earth because they are so sure they will ascend to heaven or that God will soon come to judge, that it doesn't matter if, for instance, all of the forests are cut down. Sanders then takes reflections from his daily living and weaves them with essays on the qualities that he has found to be part of hope.

Wildness, he believes, is an underlying theme. The screech owl burring through the early evening of a late winter snowstorm from a hemlock near his home, the Hyakutake comet that swept around the earth in an 18,000-year journey, his beloved wife's heart beset with racing spasms from childhood rheumatic fever, the snowstorm itself,

"all are wild, beyond our will, obedient to their own ways….the original world, the one that makes us rather than the one we make. I hunger for contact with the shaping power that curves the comet's path and fills the owl's throat with song and fashions every flake of snow and carpets the hills with green. It is a prodigal, awful, magnificent power, forever casting new forms into existence, then tearing them apart and starting over.

He talks about the "body bright" as another form of hope: the wonder that our bodies' millions of cells know what to do when hurt, know how to keep us alive against sometimes great odds, is so intricately tied together between physical body and emotional body that, as we have finally understood, our thoughts do indeed influence our physicality. Likewise, he believes:

We are one flesh with the planet and with all our fellow creatures. When the land is ravaged we suffer, when the land flourishes we rejoice….our health, our wholeness, our sensual delight are grounded in the beauty and glory of the earth. Since Creation puts on a nonstop show, we may relish the world without exhausting it. And that is the challenge for anyone who seeks genuine hope—to discover, or rediscover, ways of entertaining and sustaining and inspiring ourselves without using up the world.

And that is also part and parcel of his belief that beauty is intrinsic to hope. Beauty as encompassed by his daughter, particularly on her wedding day, the fierce light of stars spangling the night sky, a "bird song or Bach cantata, or the purl of water over stone…a line of poetry, the outline of a cheek, the arch of a ceiling…."

He asks if the resonance within himself caused by the observance of beauty "reveal[s] a kinship between my small self and the great cosmos…?" And then concludes:

The swirl of a galaxy and the swirl of a gown resemble one another not merely by accident, but because they follow the grain of the universe. That grain runs through our own depths. What we find beautiful accords with our most profound sense of how things ought to be.

Sanders believes another quality of hope is simplicity: the richness that comes from choosing to have only things which enhance a "gathered and deliberate life" – a life that has "lightness and purpose." As he looked down at the western landscape while flying from Denver to Indiana, he

realized that nothing will halt the spread of human empire, nothing will prevent us from expanding our numbers and our sway over every last inch of earth—nothing except outward disaster or inward conversion. Since I could not root for disaster, I would have to work for a change of heart and mind.

He points out that we, as a species, have been always wanting more and more and asks how can we change something that seems inherently biological. His answer is that restraint (his word for what needs to be undertaken) must come out of the culture--learning to accept limits, getting to 'enough' more quickly, changing our standard of prosperity to a materially simpler life. Most of us, as he says, "are living nowhere near the edge of survival." And that gives him hope, because we could choose to cut our consumption of resources and not suffer deprivation, and so "increase the likelihood of peace by living modestly and by sharing what we have."

Another quality that gives him hope is skill—the skills that have more and more been passing from use but can still be found, if you know where to look. He writes of his mother's knee replacement and that climbing steps was the only difficult thing for her to manage. He has two sets of them outside his home, and so found a metalworker, one who had learned the trade from his father and who was exceptionally skilled in his art, to make railings for the steps. Like the carpenter who treats wood as a precious resource, the gardener who grows great food and flowers, the farmer that understands the tilth of soils and the love of domesticated animals, these tend to be skills that tie humans and the earth together.

He finds hope also in fidelity. Loyalty, perseverance, the action of restraint are encompassed in his discussion of fidelity, and also a vision of ultimate reality. "The challenge for all of us is to find those few causes which are peculiarly our own, those to which we are clearly called, and then to embrace them wholeheartedly." Fidelity is also the apple orchard in a stream-fed valley in the Superstitions of Arizona planted nearly a century ago and still bearing fruit. (And I can think of the lilacs that bloom beside long-empty cellar holes on long-abandoned roads.)

His essays weave his family throughout, and it is not surprising that family is a portion of his hope. He describes the values within families that he finds worthy:

...among these are generosity and fidelity and mercy, a sympathetic imagination, a deep and abiding concern for others, a delight in nature and human company and all forms of beauty, a passion for justice, a sense of restraint and a sense of humor, a relish for skillful work, a willingness to negotiate differences, a readiness for cooperation and affection….. While the family is not the only place where we might acquire such habits, it is the primary one. And above all it is the place where we are most likely to learn the meaning of love.

I believe that we could all find ourselves desiring the qualities which he believes desirable in our communities: peacefulness; caring; fostering health and happiness; respecting other creatures; treasuring its beauty; with a modest sense of its needs (and supplying many of those locally), yet recognizing its links to the whole world; aware of its history and valuing continuity; filled with public-spirited citizens, not consumers; a community that "aspires to leave a wholesome place for others to enjoy, undiminished, far into the future."

It is a relatively short book and filled with thoughts that reached into my heart and found resonance there. I found myself wanting to underline and then reminding myself that it was a library book. I found in the skimming and rereading to write this, that I wanted to reread it and let the music of his writing be repeated again and again.

I…waded out to a flat stone in the middle of a rapids. There I sat, enveloped in mist and rushing water-sound. Sunlight broke through the canopy of trees, filling the ripples with scoops of silver and pressing a warm hand against my back. Everywhere I looked, the push of water against rock formed shifty yet durable shapes…. I felt like a water-shape myself, flung up on that boulder….I started humming, moving up and down the scale until I struck a pitch that sounded in my skull the same as the river. Soon I felt the water flowing through me. Time slowed, circled, came to a halt.

Time, in a way, has come to a halt for the caged wolves that are nearby as I write this. They do not know the richness of running water throwing light into their eyes; they do not know the riffle of wind through their fur by dint of running; they do not know the hunt.

What is their hope?