Return from Wilderness: Three Pains

Introduction

I used to commute. It was generally a very long drive, most of the day in fact. Luckily, I only had to do it on the first day of work, and then 9 weeks later, on the last of day of work. My job was to bring university students out into the wilderness, backpack with them as part of an environmental studies field class, and then bring them back to campus at the end of the quarter.

In my busiest years I would do this for three seasons—spring, summer, and fall. So that is six commutes in a year's employment.

Yes, I was lucky. Besides the rarity of the commutes, I was also living on a daily basis with the wild beauty of the earth and in the close company of an enthused group of students, who were soon to feel as lucky in their circumstance as I felt in mine. But the job would not suit everyone. For example, you are sleeping on the ground for 9 weeks. There are no hot showers. For a season at a time, you are entirely away from family and friends. You cannot go down the block for a beer or a burger. You are not teaching a class in a lecture hall and then going back to the solo routines of your office—you are with the students as your community 24/7. You are not only professor, but also dorm officer, risk manager, first responder, and psychological services.

Still, tough hombre that I am, I gritted it out for 27 years. Nine weeks at a time camped in some of the most beautiful places on earth. Hiking everyday. Reading good books and discussing interesting ideas with students. Swimming in rivers, singing around a campfire, waking to the dawn chorus of birds. Oh, did I mention hiking everyday among rivers, mountains, and meadows?

But what I want to address here is the return, when we all hiked out of the wilderness for the last time, got in the vehicles, and made the long commute back to campus.

Juxtaposition is a powerful tool in perception. Advertisers use it abundantly, as in before and after photos: before the kitchen remodel, after the remodel; before the diet, after the diet; before the earthquake, after the earthquake (buy insurance!). The return is an exercise in juxtaposition. We have spent 2 months in wild healthy ecosystems and in small-group living, and now we are returning to parts of the earth that have been much more heavily impacted by humans.

I am aware that the level of juxtaposition experienced by myself and the students is exceedingly rare. But perhaps we can consider that our experience has parallel to much more common experiences: returning from a weekend backpack, or from a weekend car camping excursion, or even from an hour hike in a local park. The experiences are different in intensity, but not necessarily different in kind. That is my premise, at least: to use the magnification of an exceptional experience to highlight what may be latent in ordinary experience.

Based on my decades of leading these programs, the return from backcountry to frontcountry is rarely easy. The difficulty can be almost immediate, and it can continue for months. As an ecopsychologist, I have come to identify three levels of pain. Curiously, though the evidence was there from the first trip, it took more than half of my teaching career before the patterns were clear enough and I was able to come up with this fairly simple way to organize and examine an emotionally disruptive return experience. Once I had the contextual tool of the three pains, it proved very helpful in preparing succeeding groups of students for the return each would necessarily face. I share this tool now in hopes that return from some level of backcountry type of experience, expanded now to include even an afternoon stroll in a park, is common enough that my analysis is relevant and useful to an audience beyond a Sierra Institute group.

Pain #1: What Have We Done to the Earth?

This one can hit like a sledgehammer. It is pretty hard to miss, even with a well-developed psychic defense of denial or habituated acceptance. For 9 weeks, we have been in places where our camp of maybe five or six tents was the largest visible impact of humans. We adopted practices to keep our effects minor, such that a camper coming in even right behind us might find little evidence that we had been there. Other than our temporary village, it was pretty much plants, animals, and watersheds going about their usual businesses, all of whom seemed able to accept and absorb us if not as family, then at least as minimal disturbance.

Everything changes on the commute home. We leave the designated wilderness area, and all the rules that protect and preserve it. Now it is open hunting season on the earth, and our economic system brings out the heavy guns. It becomes starkly evident that our overall societal structure, at least in its mainstream consumer and industrial scale, is set up almost entirely to support human enterprise. For most of us, myself and the students included, in our common everyday lives, we take the human dominance and effects for granted. Nothing happening here, folks, move along.

But not today. Today is one of juxtaposition. Over 9 weeks, our normal has become the backcountry, and now we are being jammed back into a new normal that initially feels alarmingly abnormal. We pull into a gas station, get out to stretch our legs. In other circumstances, it would never occur to us to take time to imagine that this acre, let us say, that is now gas station was once an acre of backcountry, an acre that might have hosted our temporary tent village for a few nights. But today we cannot help but imagine the place as it may have been several hundred years ago. Quiet, peaceful, not paved over, wind in the trees, and birds and animals moving about in customary ways. Most likely there were people here too—the original human inhabitants, for whom this was their beloved homeland—and they would have been comparatively few, and their impacts on the earth comparatively minor. It is perhaps reasonable to expect that their pain, and that of their living descendants, at what has become of this acre in question might utterly eclipse our pain.

Nevertheless, I do not want to minimize, brush off, or ignore the validity that is our pain, this returning university group. The subsumption of wild earth by proliferating humanity is a grief even nonindigenous peoples are qualified to feel. And to that grief we must add another layer, that our very love for this land sits on the mirror of the cultural devastation and genocide of the native cultures that preceded us.

In our case, even though we have only been separated from the frontcountry for 9 weeks, and in that time, never really weaned from it, our pain is real, and it can press upon us with a heartbreaking intensity. Part of this pain's character is that without the juxtaposition, it can easily become invisible, simply absorbed into everyday normalcy like the clothing we wear. Thus this first pain can seem to others a bit like grieving the passing of Abraham Lincoln. You are not still holding onto that, are you?

We live today in a world changing at an ever-increasing rate, and the young born each new year grow up taking the world as they find it to be perfectly normal. This is the adaptability of the human race. You could stand at that gas station with your arm around a young one and say, “you know, there once were elk here and trees big around as a car.” But the child would feel little pain, since they have no direct experience of what is missing, no juxtaposition.

Dasmann (1965) wrote a book called The Destruction of California, in which he outlines aspects of the devastating environmental transformations that have utterly reshaped the state from its precolonized condition. Another book—one more recent and more accessible—is State of Change by Cunningham (2010). She is a scientist and watercolor artist who researched how California likely looked in precolonial times, and describes it from a natural history perspective and additionally provides an abundance of painted images. Similar to my gas station example, she shows how a scene looks today, with its buildings, highway passes, and parking lots, and then she paints the same location from the same perspective as it may have looked long ago. You get the juxtaposition immediately—before, after.

Back to the highway, back to that sort of gasp, that sudden inhale as we look out the windows and are involuntarily compelled to consider what have we done to the earth. I can remember a sort of numbed silence as we drove through California's Central Valley, endless vistas of earth converted to linear and monocrop agricultural purposes, a haze of dust and pollution permeating the air, and a steady and relentless stream of trucks and cars roaring along beside us on the highway, each student gazing out the window in their own cloak of grief. Not uncommonly, one student or another would sob for a while. We might say that our extended wilderness time had moved us toward the function of the canaries once brought down into coal mines. We were newly sensitized and thus able to register conditions and possible dangers that otherwise go unnoticed.

This first pain is one of seeing the favoring of the human at the expense of everything else—soil, water, plant, animal, and ecosystem. For most of the long drive, everything we see has been incorporated into the human project. Whether it is structures for business or residence, vast tracts of agricultural expansion, or land converted, as in golf or theme park, for recreation, in all cases the native plants and animals have been largely supplanted, and the landscape is so radically transformed from what it may have looked like in 1491 that its recreation in mind becomes an exercise in creative imagination and wishful thinking.

Aldo Leopold (1949) expressed his land ethic quite succinctly: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” I have always appreciated that Leopold kept beauty as one of his criteria, even though unlike stability and integrity, it is not measureable in a scientific way. But it is the devastating loss of beauty that features so prominently in this first pain. The destruction of California.

Imagine pulling a coated seabird out of oil-spill sludge. The return commute, amid tears and silence, is like that: we see and empathize with wild nature still alive but suffocating under the onslaught of 21st century human enterprise.

Pain #2: What Have We Done to Our Human Culture?

It can appear very naive, almost to the point of absurdity, to presume that the baseline of the human condition could be an on-going sense of well-being, of contentment, and good fortune. We have come to take for granted that to be alive means difficulties, compromises, adjustments, frustrations, annoyances, postponements of pleasure, compartmentalizing, etc.

Anthropologically, if one reads enough first-hand accounts of time spent with little-disturbed indigenous peoples living before significant colonization, it is very common to hear of a fundamentally happy relaxed people and social order. I am generalizing, of course. Buddhism may be right, that all human life is characterized by suffering. And anthropology is also replete with analysis of warfare, disease, slavery, mental illness, etc., even among precolonized peoples. I am not fantasizing an absolute perfection when I look back to the forager or hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but I do think we need to consider that human cultural history, and its concomitant happiness quotient, may not be the clear linear ascent of progress that Western apologists assume.

Nor am I trying to hold up the Sierra Institute (which closed in 2015 due to a decline in sustaining enrollment) as a glorified ideal. It is clear, for example, that the American culture that comes under some critique in this essay is the very culture that enabled Sierra Institute to happen. Students, whether from employment, loans, or parental support, had to come up with money for the experience, a requirement that certainly excluded many. The camping gear we carried required advanced manufacturing facilities to produce. The road system we used was bulldozed into the very earth we were seeking, and we burned a lot of gasoline, contributing to the warming of air at even our most backcountry location. There was economic and racial privilege permeating our experience. All of these factors, and others, are worthy of lengthy inquiry, deconstruction, and critique in other essays.

(For an interesting and promising perspective on how the demographics [more ethnic diversity] and the overarching concerns [more environmental justice] of environmental studies students may be changing with Generation Z, please see Ray, 2020.)

Evolutionary biology and social psychology tell us we evolved as a primate species living together in bands with fundamental and on-going intimate earth connection. This heritage might make us accommodate naturally to being in small groups as on a Sierra Institute program. Surrounded by natural beauty, removed from the stresses of cars, appointments, errands, crowds, scheduling, phone interruptions, internet demands, and temptations, we fell into a simple mode of being. Our possessions were only what we could carry on our back. Housekeeping was a quick upside-down shake of the tent. Laundry was taking a swim with our clothes on. Air conditioning was ambling over to the shade. Heat was gathering some sticks for a fire. We had a day hike with a stop somewhere for class in the morning, a free afternoon (with some reading and writing assignments), and a class again after group dinner. Because of this simplicity, the overall tone of our days was spacious and relaxed, such that our faces softened, our modes of interaction became more patient, more kind, and importantly, more full of humor.

Hillman and Ventura (1992) wrote a book called We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World's Getting Worse, in which they comment on the unhappiness of modern people, and how it tends to get blamed on individual psychology. The assumption or bias in the psychological profession is that unhappiness or complaint brought to the therapy office means maladjustment of the client. What is the neurosis, what is the faulty inner process, that is leading to unhappiness? But wait a minute ask Hillman and Ventura, as did Fromm (1955) and Laing (1967) before them: what about the social order, the structure of modern life, its demands, its pressures? Perhaps it is the encompassing culture that has the pathology, and by adapting and accommodating to it, the individual and the populace necessarily express symptoms.

The Sierra Institute offered a temporary respite from some aspects of contemporary culture, and as such it may have had some similarities to traditional precolonial cultures. These similarities would include the already-mentioned lifestyle simplicity of backcountry camping and the connectedness of small-group living. In addition, let us not forget the ever-present backdrop, the context of our days, which in this case were the mountains, rivers, meadows, and unroaded Pacific coastlines of the wild earth. Everson (1982), one of those West coast earth poets who found a warm welcome in the 70s, wrote: “I believe that the stability of the human race depends upon its relation to nature…. I have a certain naïve faith in nature, a faith that if you can live in the immemorial presence of its abiding forms, a kind of holiness rubs off on you.”

But this holiness does not rub off on us instantly. Greenway (1992) has written that it is easy enough to put on a pack and hike across the wilderness boundary, but he says it is a more subtle and challenging matter to successfully cross the “psychological wilderness boundary.”

On the spring programs (early April to early June), we often started with a backpack into Death Valley, to a place selected because it had reliable surface water, associated cottonwood trees, and other oasis-like features. I can remember a kind of confusion in the students for the first 3–5 days. The landscape of the desert highlighted and compounded the feeling of spacious openness, of lack of familiar structure, and lack of days broken down into compartmentalized time blocks. What to do with ourselves? No cell phone to check or internet to cruise. No familiar context of home and friends to use as base for fallback avenues of activity and entertainment. There was no shopping to be done, and so our identities as consumers drifted away in the winds. There was a void, a blank space, into which boredom, even malaise, commonly entered. Students wondering whether it was such a smart idea after all to sign up for this field program.

But after that passage, that crossing of the psychological wilderness boundary, a new liberation began to set in. Maybe we do not always need to have something to do, an agenda, a prescribed schedule, and a parade of errands. I think the liberation that I would see students experience was one first of tolerance, then acceptance, and ultimately moving even to celebration of the blank spaces. Many somatic psychologists might call this a shift from “doing” to “being.” We were settling into a different way to constellate the self, one in which, though it may sound trite, to simply “be here now” was enough.

I also think about it as a shift from life as work to life as play. Our culture tends to promote expectation and demands of productivity, accomplishment, and doing. We are what we achieve. But in the great vistas of the desert, in the spans of exposed geological history, in the sharp views of the stars without any competing light impingement from population centers, notions of human achievement are thrown into question. How important are those achievements, who is setting their value, how long do they endure? What if there is nothing to prove? What if we can cut beneath that cultural conditioning and discover life with a fundamentally more playful ambience? Unlike work, play is not about getting to the goal, getting an objective done. Play is about the present moment, and it has a lightness, a delight.

Students began to transition into this backcountry modality of being, of play, of delight in life itself. This is the personal restoration that we all find (or at least hope to find) on vacation. On a briefer scale, it is what we may find taking the dogs out for a walk. A relaxed moment to breathe and be, a reset, and maybe a little pang of wishing more of life could be this comfortable and nurturing.

However, I do not want to imply that an overarching ambience of ease and play meant that our days felt frivolous. It can actually be quite the opposite. The self, relaxed, and freed of the usual mind clutter can move toward a deeper encounter with the present moment. This can be awe inspiring and even border on the mystical—taking in the vast landscape and feeling earth's participation in the yet larger landscapes of time, space, and existence.

Furthermore, these were college students, thus at the age in which adult identities are being formed. It is a questioning and exploratory phase in the human cycle; values are examined for those who will guide life choices into the future. The extended backcountry time allowed for fresh perspective on self and society. There was space for introspection, for soul searching. In addition, the environmental study classes (slanted in our curriculum toward the humanities) provided us with a context of readings and seminar discussions geared toward engaging and relevant topics in literature, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and some natural history scattered throughout to help us get to know our neighbors. The intent, which I think often succeeded, was that the academic component of our days would blend seamlessly into the personal growth toward adulthood that the overall program fostered. To some extent, we were in the company of the many traditional cultures that include a journey out into the wilderness as a rite of passage.

In addition to the personal growth happening within individuals, again and again on Sierra Institute programs, I saw the remarkable human bonding that arises in the unavoidable intimacy of an extended small-group camping trip. We seem to fall back into this paleolithic social dynamic like fish returning to familiar water.

In my observation, it has a lot to do with a sense of belonging, of being seen for who we are and accepted, and welcomed as that unique person. In such a small group, everyone is significant. There is no sitting in the back row of the lecture hall being anonymous. Everyone receives attention and support as they need, and in counterpart measure, everyone feels useful and needed by the community. This togetherness involves exposure and risk, and with each group there was abundant evidence for the uplifting liberation a student can experience as they let go of the defenses involved in psychological hiding. An accumulating and expanding group happiness could develop as we all contributed to the natural delight of living with others in a context that supported individual expression and universal inclusion.

I remember a striking example. We had a custom, though it was always presented as optional, in which students could adopt a “trail name.” This would be a name that would come to represent their backcountry self, and it would highlight the temporary separation we were making from the frontcountry world and our identity therein. Names often oriented in directions uplifting and natural. But in one case, a student requested that we call him “Asshole.” There was understandably a lot of resistance in the group. We did not want to have to always say “Hey, Asshole, please pass the salt.” More importantly, we did not want to have to think of him with that bias, or to encourage him in seeing himself that way. But when this individual came to present his reasons, what he said was instructive. He said that he did in fact not uncommonly think of himself as an asshole, and that to be directly called that name by a group that he could feel nevertheless still accepted him, well, that was exactly the healing he needed. So we cooperated, and the healing ran its course, and in time, he asked us to start calling him “Ocean” instead.

Again and again, I was amazed at the depth of community that consistently developed, affirming for me through the decades to conclude that our evolutionary history has imparted within us an inherent hunger for it. Still, despite this proclivity, it might require program intention and a few appropriate methodologies to allow the inherent hunger to fulfill itself.

Foremost among these methodologies was what has come to be called Council, or Talking Stick Circle. I believe this ritual of relationship and community building is widely known and practiced, so I will not say much about it, other than to emphasize how indispensable it was in letting each person express as little or as much of their sincere inner workings as they so chose. Besides self-expression and self-disclosure, Council was also an exercise in nonjudgmental listening, in how to cultivate an open curiosity and acceptance as each person revealed themselves.

In addition, beyond the decisions such as safety protocols and academic requirements that had to be made by leadership, we operated to a considerable degree by consensus. Occasionally a decision process in this manner became quite tedious, but in the long run, I am convinced that respectful listening to every voice led to a profound sense of unity.

Council and consensus: two specific methodologies that helped us toward unity and group bonding. I always felt that the “best” groups were not those that never encountered frictions and disputes, but those that persevered through problems and used open communication to reach mutual understanding. In this way, we developed resilience and an earned confidence in what we might call our community immune system.

Important as these methodologies may have been in terms of group bonding, they were supported, and perhaps surpassed in importance, by the simple day-to-day shared activities of being together in the wilderness. Learning the trees and birds, spotting a bear, jumping from a high rock into the river, climbing a peak, passing our bowls around at dinnertime to be filled with the one-pot meal, singing songs while the fire burned down to embers, and talking in class about a Mary Oliver poem or a reading in ecofeminism. And of course there was a whole and substantial component of student bonding, very important, that I can say little about, because it was composed of the esoteric matters that occurred in their interactions when I was not present.

So often, by the time Closing Circle came around, when we passed the stick and each took a turn or two to express our thoughts and feelings at the near end of our journey, I would sense in the faces and bodies of the whole group, and hear in their words, how far we had come into the happiness and fulfillment of an openhearted and bonded group.

In the juxtaposition of return, we are forced to see that many of the qualities of life we had enjoyed (intimate community, closeness to nature, a pace of life almost as easy as the marmots lounging in the sun outside their dens) are very difficult to sustain in the structure and constraints of the contemporary world. The first pain is compassion for the earth. This second pain is compassion for the species: what have we done to our human culture?

Pain #3: What Is Happening to Me?

Paradoxically, in among the first two pains, there can often be some personal excitement upon return. For example, we know that our food options are about to take a big leap into greater freshness and diversity. Beyond gas stations, after all, it is a world of grocery stores, restaurants, and refrigerators. I will take the special, please. We are also able to be with family and established friends again. We get that shower, we get that soft bed, we can go out to a movie, see a concert, and get caught up on Facebook.

But the glitter can turn out to be pretty thin. Before long, we come to feel that we are losing something. Not as easy to identify as the previous pains, we feel the loss as something large and amorphous, as though a cloud has come overhead and cast a gloom or even a doom over us. On our own now, separated from the group and the wilderness, we seem to be deteriorating from our prior status of well-being and belonging.

Upon return, we are indoors again, in human-created spaces. Four walls, electric lights. Water comes from a faucet, rather than the river, creek, or lake. Where is the larger background, the context, the earth, and cosmos of which the human is just a part? We are losing what had been our ongoing and uninterrupted direct connection to the land, the stars, the moon, the sounds of birds, and the wind in the trees.

Now we no longer want our senses as open as they were. We have to shut down the noises, the smells, the commotions, the sights of ugliness in the world, the alarming news on television, internet, or popping up as notifications on our phones. We tense up, stress out, and are more on guard. Our state of mind leaves the place of calm, poise, relaxed bodily awareness, physical engagement, and connection with the abiding presence of a reassuring earth. We seem to become more distracted, more driven, head lowered, and plowing along to accomplish tasks, chipping away at the to-do list. There certainly is more automobile time, which can be so full of hurry and ethical compromise, as opposed to the world of walking. We lose a sense of the spaciousness of time, of time happening calmly of itself, a vast dimension floating us, even dissolving us, in its eternity. In accommodating back to society, we gradually replace that sense with one if ourselves as an agent of time, handcuffed to the human fabrications of calendar and clock, muscling our way down a constrictive corridor. Life and our days become compartmentalized: time defined by our agenda, rather than feeling ourselves undefined in time's lack of agenda.

There can also be the loss of the physical health and vitality that an extended backpacking trip can foster. Hiking everyday, often off-trail over mountainous land, builds strength, balance, and endurance. There were no desks and couches out there, so we were protected from the postures those furnishings might impose. Since all food must be carried in, we tended toward simplicity and just enough. Without the electric lights of indoor spaces, our circadian rhythms adapted, and we tended to wake up early and also go to bed early enough to get a long and peaceful sleep. Over the 2 months, positive feelings developed of health, embodied self-awareness, and physical capability.

In sum, for better or worse, we have returned to a consumer-oriented and technology-mediated reality, and at least initially, it feels like a fall from grace. Moreover, friends and family, who are comfortable in the status quo of contemporary life, find it almost impossible to relate to the sensitivities of our return experience. We might feel alienated, and yet there is simultaneously the compelling desire to fit in, to belong, and to be accepted. This generates internal pressure to compromise from our backcountry self, buckle down, sober up, get over it, and just transition back to our former frontcountry self as quickly as possible, and preferably without any fanfare.

The third pain provokes us to inquire: what is happening to me, what is this confusion and anguish I am experiencing in the loss of the village of tents set up under the trees by the river?

Conclusion: Grief and Gratitude

Biologically speaking, the primary function of pain may be to move us away from its source. Step on a sharp stone in Death Valley, pull the foot away. But in returning to the frontcountry after an extended stay in the wilderness, we are stepping, with both feet bare and vulnerable, back into a cultural context full of the sharpness of the three pains.

Sometimes, in conversation with other Sierra Institute instructors, we wondered whether our programs were inadvertently cruel. When, as we hoped, the Sierra Institute students learned during their 2 months to love the beautiful wild earth in a deep and embodied way, then it follows that upon the juxtaposition of return to the massively impacted frontcountry environment, the first pain would likely afflict them, and the very intensity of the pain might be the very marker of the depth of love that had developed. Similarly, beyond our readings on group dynamics and social process, when the student actually experienced the beauty, belonging, and connectedness of community, then the second pain might arise upon reimmersion in a culture in which we rarely have the pace and attention for quality time together. And finally, in the 2-month context of gratitude for nature, community, simplicity, as the students came to feel themselves alive in new and vital ways, then grief may follow when they are separated from that vibrant self and from the human and more-than-human enfoldment that had nurtured it.

From this perspective, as instructors, we were put in the double bind where the very success of the program meant that students would be thrust upon return into the challenges and possible torments of the three pains. Furthermore, the success of the program also meant that a standard of possibility in microcosm had been set that might be difficult to equal in the frontcountry. This is a standard of high happiness and fulfillment, that human life can be characterized by an on-going sense of well-being (a standard, as mentioned earlier, that may have been exemplified by precolonial indigenous cultures in a much more holistic and sustainable manner).

But if the success of the program led directly to the three pains, we as instructors could still advocate that the pains not be a final position. We would not wish that on ourselves or any student. Nor would we recommend an antidote of denial or numbness to the damaged earth or to damaged human culture. There may be another option, a graceful swing, as in aikido, where the oncoming energy of pain is spun by its own momentum into something else. Or perhaps we could liken it to a seesaw, in which the very weight of the pain lifts the opposite side, which we recognize in this Sierra Institute case to be gratitude: gratitude for the rivers, trees, night skies we were lucky enough to live among; gratitude for the affirmation and direct experience that humans can live intimately and honestly together; gratitude for the enthusiasm that can course through our individual bodies when we are fulfilled personally and socially.

This perspective on grief has significant parallel to the work of Macy (1991), Somé (2003), and Lertzman (2015). We only feel the pains because they are juxtaposed at the other end of the seesaw by gratitudes. As revealed in the enduring human trait to reverentially construct memorials, grief and gratitude are paired. In 1947, a plaque was erected at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers in southwestern Wisconsin, dedicated to the last passenger pigeon shot there in 1899. Clearly, it is a memorial of grief, perhaps even shame, but enfolded within it is also gratitude, and to stand there with head lowered and hands clasped is to feel the plaque's testimony to love of the lost bird, love of the wild earth, and its plenitude of species.

Hopefully, unlike the pigeon, everything that was the Sierra Institute experience is not extinct. There may be few among us who can get such a large dose, such strong medicine, but the restorative and healing values of time in nature are available to us in a myriad of smaller and more accessible ways. In an article called “Nature and Human Health”, the authors (Frumkin et al., 2017) provide a framework for discussing nature connection in terms of spatial and temporal spectrums. Within this organizing field, valid and relevant activities can range from a few potted plants in the urban apartment, to an afternoon walk in the park, to living in a neighborhood with consciously designed and implemented green elements, and to participating in a guided mindfulness and nature-connection wilderness program.

In the polarity of backcountry and frontcountry, there is no simplistic “good” juxtaposed to “bad.” We need our cities, and we need to bring ecological insight and environmental justice to our frontcountry world. What I am describing here is not separate from those intentions. It is not about escape to a supposed pristine nature or a condemnation of all things human and modern. Nevertheless, since most of us are necessarily living on the domesticated side of the physical and psychological wilderness boundary, we have to expect the grief of the three pains. We have to learn to live with them, which, as in the seesaw, can mean not only feeling their down side, but also feeling the lift of the corresponding gratitude.

Native elders are perhaps our wisest spokespeople on the pains, the gratitudes, and the importance of actions to preserve both earth and the best in human culture. Expanding beyond the elders, in the face and passionate words of Greta Thunberg and other young people, we also see the pains. Like wounded animals out in the darkness beyond our houses and streetlights, the three pains call for our attention. But even as we feel them, even as we confront the rawness of the wound, the seesaw can tip, the aikido grace can absorb and transform. In that ceremonial moment, like standing at the plaque to the passenger pigeon, we can simultaneously acknowledge the reciprocal. Along with Greta and Native elders, our pain, and any associated anger and activism, reflects love and gratitude for an earth still present to be protected from climate change and other ravages. Within all of us, the grief we feel is testimony that we love the wild earth that is our home.