In my youth and early adulthood, I spent my summers working up in Yosemite at various family camps. These were my wonder years. A series of devastating fires wiped out one camp, damaged another, and destroyed acres and acres of land that I called home (and in my heart still do).
Just outside the camps, there is a vista point. When you sit on the edge of the wall looking out to the vast forest that lay in front of you it’s as if you were sitting on the rim of the world. Over the last several years, the Sierras have been decimated by fires. My mother’s home has been threatened three times and just recently the home of one of my best friends (who just moved to her mountain home days before) was evacuated. This letter is in response to that destruction, an apology and resilience.
Dear Mother Nature;
Time travel is possible. No one understands how by the mere sight, sound, smell, and feel of your unbridled ability to take structures and make them breathtaking yet in the same breath destroy all that has become known, seen, felt, and tasted by those who dare tread.
Waking from an uninterrupted slumber in the back of the old Datsun not sure where I was and fumbling out of the car I managed to gain my traction only to be greeted by standing at the bottom of nothing but sheer rock towering over an ant-like presence, like myself, and my heart skipped a beat and I fell in love. You served as the backdrop of my initiation into adolescence & early adulthood. You gave a wide birth and laid the foundation for who I am. You showed me to let go and do what scares me most (even if it means STILL being grounded). You showed me that a life not well lived is not a life at all.
From the age of 15-21 I’d spend months in your blanket. Waking up to the smell of trees that have been sprouting long before I even could walk, taking in the fresh clean air permeating my lungs and giving me a new appreciation for life and experiencing your frigid yet refreshing mountain waters as I dip into the welcoming pools of liquid euphoria. You played a big part in me finding acceptance at a time in a young teenagers life where anxieties, the need for fitting in and learning about life, love, and what it means to belong is teetering on the high wire between finding bliss and self-loathing. The gifts you have bestowed are never far from my memory or heart.
Now, as you are raging in anger we, the human race, have failed you in our ignorance and disregard for all that is within your realm. Unable to make sense of how one structure is brought to its knees while another structure a short distance away sits idly by singed and frayed with remnants of what was and seeing images of tall ghosts impregnating the ground blackened by fire and left smoking whispers of white is a reminder of your wrath but for the most part, those structures are left untouched.
I agree that it is important to not have attachment and I don’t, physically, but I can’t seem to sever my spiritual attachment to you. My heart is aching for you, Mother Nature and I fear that as time passed and life went on our connection is quivering; a mere mirage of a waking dream. You set a new kind of fire, one within me that was extinguished by materialistic thoughts and objects of which I am just now beginning to question. That part of me that was wild, untamed, while seeing with eyes wide open is slowly re-emerging pleading to not let fear become an adversary against possibilities.
That same feeling of awe of that first visit that ignited something within me that afternoon so many years before holds a white hot flame and every time I revisit that memory my heart skips a beat and I fall in love all over again. I am that! I am the shear granite rock standing bursting from your feet in front of me just as it did so many years prior. I am slowly but surely and on my own terms climbing El Captain.
With mad adoring passionate respect,
Romny
Balancing Cat 