by Paul Gibb,
Delivered October 14, 2007 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder, Colorado
"Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware."
~attributed to Martin Buber
I was feeling like a conqueror on that sunny day in Wyoming – a conqueror like Alexander the Great. I felt so proud of myself – using my strength and skill and daring to conquer every rapid and eddy and to read the river perfectly and execute every maneuver just right. There I was, accompanied by Meri, my life partner of 37 years, and (in the other canoe) the best of friends -- with the sun on my back, breathing wonderful air, cruising down a magnificently scenic river and taking in all the sights and smells and sounds. Yes, I was Alexander the Great, having triumphed in Macedonia, Persia, Babylonia, India, Egypt – and now Wyoming!
Up ahead I could see two adult Canada geese swimming along with their five very tiny goslings. Now I was not a bird watcher. On an excitement scale I would have put birdwatching somewhere between crocheting and doing laundry. But Meri was an avid birder and so I steered the canoe over toward the geese – both to give Meri a better look and to show off my canoeing skills. My triumphant reverie was abruptly punctured, however, with the words “Paul, what are you doing? We’re not supposed to get this close. That’s why they invented binoculars!”
The Mighty Conqueror/Navigator, trying to remain unperturbed in the midst of this unexpected impertinence, failed to notice a significant eddy up ahead – a significant eddy that would cause the canoe to make an abrupt 90-degree left turn – and aim directly at the goose family!
Nothing in my life prepared me for what I was about to experience. The canoe slid right in between the five little goslings, who were on the left or upstream side of the canoe, and their parents, who were on the right or downstream side. The little goslings were these tiny little yellow creatures with button eyes that seemed to have been pasted onto the long fuzzy yellow sticks that were their necks. Each of them was tiny enough to fit in the palm of my hand – and they were right there next to my end of the canoe. I could have picked them up and held them in my hand, just like that.
Mightily the goslings struggled to keep from colliding with the canoe or, even worse, being sucked under it by the powerful current. Although their little vestigial wings were of no help, they were fortunately provided with big webbed feet, with which they paddled furiously. Never in my life had I seen anything that was both so vulnerable and so resourceful – and at the same time both so ugly and so unbelievably cute!
As the canoe passed between them and their babies, Mama and Papa Goose honked loudly and flapped their wings mightily as they took off and headed north. I expected they might fly 100 yards or so up the river and then come back. But to my horror, they just kept on going – flying north in perfect tandem until they disappeared into blue sky. I wanted to yell at them “Come back! Come back! Don’t abandon your babies!”
Suddenly ... the warm sun on my back became – global warming. Suddenly the row of white bubbles next to the canoe became – fertilizer from farmers’ fields. Suddenly the train whistle I could hear up ahead became – the First Transcontinental Railroad that brought so much devastation to the Sioux and the Cheyenne, and from the vestibules of whose coaches countless buffalo and antelope were senselessly shot.
And suddenly, I was not Alexander the Great. No, I was Darth Vader. A stranger in a strange land, an intruder whose ancestors came from another continent, harming everything as they marched across this continent, including now this goose family.
In a matter of seconds I had gone from elation to deflation, from self-congratulation to self-deprecation!
And I did something that I often do at moments when I have no idea what else to do – I remembered a Far Side cartoon. Entitled “Colonel Sanders at the Pearly Gates,” it shows an elderly man arriving at the entrance to heaven. At the gates where one would expect to see St. Peter is – a chicken! The little balloon over Colonel Sanders’ head says simply “Uh-oh.”
And I imagined a Far Side cartoon of myself arriving at those same Pearly Gates. (Yes, we UUs may not believe in heaven, but just in case there is one we sure as hell want to be the first in line.) In the foreground of the cartoon would be these five baby geese whom I had almost run over and whose parents I had driven away. There they would be, with their little vestigial wings on their hips, looking at me kind of – squintingly.
And there, on either side of them, would be all the cows and chickens I’ve eaten. (Gary Larson is great at drawing cows and chickens and I’m sure he’d have put plenty of them in a cartoon about me.) And right behind the cows and chickens would be the Native Americans my Puritan ancestors killed in the 1600s. Beside them would be the African-Americans my sea captain ancestors brought over as slaves. And in the foreground would be all the children I might have adopted but didn’t, not to mention all the homeless people to whom I didn’t even give a quarter.
And every one of these beings would be, just like the baby geese, looking at me kind of – squintingly.
And above the figure of myself would be three balloons. The first: “But I gave to the Nature Conservancy!” The second: “But I gave to the Native American Rights Fund!” And the third, “But my cat loves me!”
Then I remembered having experienced the same dark feelings once before – when I was five or six years old and found Indian arrowheads around the house. It was blatantly obvious that the land we lived on had been stolen from the Indians, and the only right thing to do was to give it back! So I hatched a plan. We would give our house to the Native American woman who cleaned our house and did our ironing, and we would move back to Cleveland – wherever that was – where my mother had grown up. Or maybe we would move to Scotland, where my grandfather had been born. I have a definite recollection of asking my grandmother if there had ever been Indians in Cleveland. To which she responded, with her subtle wit, that the Indians in that part of Ohio all had the good sense to live farther inland from the lake, but that they had hunted by the lake. ... And I remember asking my grandfather if we had relatives we could stay with just in case we ever visited Scotland. To which my grandfather replied that my Scottish ancestors had been driven from their homeland near Loch Lomond by the British lairds, that they had lived in terrible poverty in the highlands for centuries, until some of them had escaped to America, and that any relatives still in Scotland would probably be too poor to put us up, if we were even able to find them.
My sense of hopelessness was almost as bottomless that moment when I learned the truth about Cleveland and Scotland as it was at this moment on the river. And I again looked upriver to see if Mama and Papa Goose might be flapping their way back toward their babies. If they would only do that, then maybe I could start feeling better about myself. But there was only blue sky.
As I was looking upriver I had a tremendous sense of having been in the same place before. And I had! This was the same stretch of river where Meri and I had had another close encounter two years earlier. A close encounter of a very different kind, in which we were the near-victims.
That was the trip when the water level seemed awfully high when we began but I, feeling so proud of my canoeing skills and perhaps a little addicted to danger, insisted that we proceed even though we both had misgivings. Of course the water level got higher once we got underway and, like the river that Scuffy the Tugboat experienced in the children’s story, scarier. That was the trip when we noticed there weren’t any other canoes on the river. That was the trip when the big black clouds and the booming thunder came suddenly over the canyon wall and kept cycling back around for nearly fourteen hours. That was the trip when we couldn’t find a safe place to land, and when we did finally land I had to jump in the water to keep the canoe from tipping over when my end of the canoe was pulled under an overhanging branch. That was the trip when we put up our tent just before the rain began, only to realize our campsite was not that many feet above a river that could rise rapidly during a storm. And then, before we had time to move the tent, thunder and lightning and torrential rain began. We knew enough not to pitch our tent under a tree and we also knew enough not to pitch our tent out in the open, but where exactly were we supposed to pitch it? It rained and thundered, with only a few brief respites, from 3:00 in the afternoon until 5:00 the next morning. As we lay shivering in our tent on top of our partially wet sleeping bags, with our arms and legs sometimes raised up to reinforce the tent poles that were bending precipitously in the strong gusts, knowing we were probably 10 miles from any public road or house or shelter, my heart felt like it would stop any second. At each thunderbolt, anxiety welled up inside me as if it were going to engulf my entire being.
When I remembered those emotions from that trip of two years before, the guilty sensations eased up. If I can be a victim, then to what extent am I a perpetrator? Will the final judgment on me, there at the hypothetical Pearly Gates, be Victim or Perpetrator? Or simply Human Being?
As I pondered these difficult questions, I looked up and saw something flying south. (You didn’t think I’d leave them hanging in the air, did you?) After what must have been a 5-minute interval, Mama and Papa Goose reappeared in the sky, this time going south – in perfect tandem, unhurriedly, majestically. And I looked back just in time to see them plop down next to their babies. A few minutes later I could barely see in the distance the five baby geese darting joyfully about in the gleaming waters next to their parents on this most beautiful of beautiful days.
The resilient goose family had survived my clumsiness. They were unscathed. I was the one who had been injured in our near collision – at least my bubble had been burst. Why, tomorrow those geese might not even remember the big orange canoe and the clumsy guy who was imagining he was Alexander the Great. But I , I – would I ever be quite the same?
++++
One of the ways I’ve changed is I’ve stopped eating chicken.
And I carry a few new books around in my car ... and a pair of binoculars.
But this isn’t a sermon about becoming a vegetarian or a bird watcher. No, this is a sermon about muddling through the attitudes and emotions which keep us disconnected.
The disconnected state of mind I experienced before running into the goose family is, I believe, more or less the default state of mind for me and I suspect most people in this country. It involves a certain amount of self-congratulation. Got the kids to school on time, made the sale, impressed my students, impressed my boss, lost weight, exercised, navigated the car down the highway without going more than five miles over the speed limit, and so forth.
But we all easily tip into another state of mind just below the surface: guilt, self-deprecation, shame. Didn’t get the kids to school on time, didn’t make the sale, didn’t impress that one student, gained a few pounds, forgot to exercise, got a speeding ticket. It’s usually easy enough to get away from these icky feelings – simply resolve to do better next time, make some little change, get up earlier, go to Weight Watchers, slow down!
But the guilt we feel when we look at the world outside of middle-class America – when we see the suffering out there – that guilt isn’t so easy to remove. A donation to the Nature Conservancy or the Native American Rights Fund might help for a while, but still, just below the surface, we feel some ickiness. At least I do.
The thing to recognize about guilt is its close relationship with egotism. The first word in both “self-congratulation” and “self-deprecation” is “self.” Both have to do with the issue of whether and how much we allow ourselves to like ourselves – and whether we’ll get through those Pearly Gates we don’t believe in. But are we and our salvation what life is really all about? When do we ever get out of ourselves and have an out-of-ego experience? When do we stop asking “how am I doing?” and start asking “how are you doing?”
But guilt is still very real, and it’s as dangerous to deny it as it is to wallow in it. The answer is that we need to steer a middle course – acknowledging and confronting our guilt in such a way that we can work through it. Forgiveness cannot come too quickly, for then we will just slide too easily back into our ego bubbles. But forgiveness also cannot come too slowly, for too much guilt can be caustic to our souls.
The bottom line is that we need to go more deeply into our emotions to discover our connectedness. We need to exit that place called Self and wade through the Swamp of Guilt and the Morass of Fear on our way to that place called Other. And along the way we will find forgiveness for being human – not pat-on-the-back forgiveness but forgiveness that comes from deep awareness of what it really means to live on a planet that sustains us but gives no guarantee of a long or healthy life.
I believe some of this forgiveness can come when we discover in ourselves the deep love of life – and the concomitant terrible fear of losing life – that we share with creatures like those baby geese (and this baby crane). And fear of dying is not a terrible thing. Fear of dying is simply another way of saying love of living.
Creatures like those baby geese do not go through life needing to feel good about themselves or wondering whether they’ll get through some sort of hypothetical pearly gates. They are happy just to be alive in a beautiful place surrounded by loved ones. Heaven is here and now. And they are endowed with tools that usually allow all this to happen: a beak with which to eat, feathers to keep warm, oil to keep afloat, and big feet to escape from canoes that make wrong turns and other natural hazards. And some day their little vestigial stumps will grow into mighty wings that can carry them all the way to Cancún without the need for Orbitz or Arab oil.
We too have the same basic desire to be alive in a beautiful place surrounded by loved ones. And we too have tools to help us achieve that goal. Although we may not have feathers or webbed feet and although our vestigial stumps won’t ever grow into mighty wings, we’ve got opposable thumbs and four neat little appendages that can do all kinds of things geese can’t do – make beautiful music on a piano or violin, hold a canoe paddle, bring food to our mouths, make warm clothing, hold hands. And we also have big brains to help us get out of trouble ... when they’re not busy getting us into trouble.
So let us row our boat gently down the stream, knowing we share this river – and knowing that each of us, human or otherwise, is part of the strangeness and mystery and incredible wonder of this beautiful beautiful beautiful planet on which we are so blessed to live for a while.
And may we know that the stream of life in which we paddle is not a museum nor a zoo nor even a cathedral, not a sports arena nor a slalom course, not an object to be conquered, not a temporary dwelling place enroute to an eternal one behind some gates somewhere.
Instead may we see our souls reflected in the waters of that stream, and in the eyes of creatures like those baby geese, until we know deep inside that this world is where we came from, this is where we live, this is who we are.
Hallelujah, amen, amen, namaste, may it be so.
For discussion – Will experiencing nature in a transcendent, mystical, and/or personal sense make us better environmentalists?
Copyright © 2007 by Paul Gibb, PO Box 986, Niwot, CO 80544
« Back to Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder Home Page