Don’t Lose Sight

The day was like a watercolor painting, everything softened and translucent, washed by the silvery light of a distant storm. I walked briskly and purposefully, uphill and down, overriding the ache in my leg, walking for the sake of my mental state, walking to get calm, walking to dissolve the border between myself and the landscape, walking for the balm of it. In time, the present grew plump with the past, but I rode the emotions that my memories carried to me, and eventually I found a state of neutral coexistence with the universe, and walked on.

A few days earlier, I had gone into the local mountains with my friend Donna to visit our former colleague, the legendary Marc Kummel, affectionately known as Treebeard. His wife Julie led us down a steep gravel road to the canyon where we would find him. A sign said “SLOW DOWN Photographer at Work” and there he was, taking pictures of insects. It sounds weird, but it’s one of the quiet loving ways the man is bearing witness, documenting, tending to the planet.

A naturalist, musician, and general Renaissance man, Treebeard led groups at the Outdoor School near Lake Cachuma forty years before he began teaching at Dunn Middle School in Los Olivos, where his science classes involved fire and philosophy in equal parts. Many former students remember him best for his weekly after-school hike club, during which he led kids out into the wondrous world of nature, where they climbed mountains, splashed in creeks, and were shown the little miracles they might not have noticed on their own. It was pure play, a release from adolescent angst, and a form of learning that offered kids a different way of being, and I am certain it changed a few lives.

I learned a lot from Treebeard too during the years when I was lucky enough to teach at the middle school with him. At graduation ceremonies, he used to give a traditional ‘science experiment’ speech in which he demonstrated a law of science which then became a metaphor for living life. The students liked it best when he blew something up, but I appreciated his less explosive presentations, such as the way he demonstrated the concept of balance using a broom and a walking stick.

First, he showed how he could balance each of these objects horizontally by sliding his fingers along, correcting and overcorrecting, until the center of gravity was reached. Next, he balanced the broom on one end, and balanced it again with the addition of a weight, first high and then low, subtly correcting and counter-correcting whenever the broom began to fall. It turns out that finding balance is a dynamic thing. Also, it was easier to balance when the weight was placed high.

“It’s like life and growing up,” Treebeard told the students. “If you keep your problems and worry too close all the time, and your goals and expectations too low, you can’t maneuver. You need some space. Expect a lot, aim high, but adjust your balance when you have to -- that’s how it works.”

I have certainly found this to be true. And when I’m stalled or feeling precarious, I remind myself that I may just need to reposition, shift perspective, and give myself the space to adjust my balance, as it were.

But my absolute favorite of Treebeard’s experiments was a mathematical demonstration on probability and paradox and the unlikelihood of everything. There were perhaps a hundred people gathered together at this particular graduation ceremony, and he began by considering the various paths and factors at play in our convergence, and calculating the odds.

"What's the probability of all of us being here today for this occasion?” he asked. “How many separate events and decisions over the years does this moment depend on? That's easy. Probability: zero. Absolutely impossible. And yet here we are."

I think about this every single day. I really do. All of what is happening is implausible, even impossible, yet here it is, happening.

And for me, what that means for the future is that anything is possible, including the most wonderful of outcomes. Especially if we hold on to that realization and aim for the good.

In 2018, I attended the inaugural On Being Gathering at a conference center nestled in the redwoods of Scotts Valley, California. Hosted by Krista Tippett, guests included Naomi Shihab-Nye, David Whyte, Maria Popova, and other inspiring people. I was honored to be there, but I was also bracing at the time for a very scary surgery the following week, and I did not focus and participate as much as I wish I had. However, another guest, a woman named Bonny Mcclain, noticed my shyness and reached out to me. You can google Bonny ––she is described as a geospatial author, data analyst, social anthropologist, and human geographer, and she’s so brainy I can’t always understand what she writes about, but I like to think of her as my On Being friend. We sort of stayed in touch, and I follow her substack. I bring all this up because this week she wrote a piece I actually understood. It was about infinite hope, and in it, she introduced an Icelandic term, sauðljóst, concluding with words that were like a little poem to me:

sauðljóst

It means, “at dawn when there is just enough light to see your sheep”…

Keep your tender heart and all that matters to you close. 

Don’t lose sight of your “sheep”…

Isn’t that a lovely concept? And isn’t that what we are all doing now, or trying to do?

Meanwhile, we’ve had some extremely low tides this week, and I, a non-swimmer, walked pretty far out on the ocean floor and looked back at the land from a distance and angle I could never have imagined. Now rain is predicted and the sky seems to be gathering itself together for the spectacle, presenting a prelude of shifting light––for a shard of a moment, everything is green and bright, a flash of storybook picture, a Kodachrome slide, and then comes the shadowing, with a sigh of moisture, and a few passing drops, the leaves trembling in anticipation. Again and again, the magnificence of this impossible world surprises me.

Let us keep doing what we do, following the thread, tending to our friends, grateful for the gifts, not giving up.

The rain has come.

Let us not lose sight of our sheep.