Make Yourself
Small
A Sermon by the Rev. Aaron
McEmrys
Delivered to the Unitarian
Society of Santa Barbara, August 15, 2010
Early one morning a few weeks ago
my son Alex and I were ambling through a mighty stand of Redwoods. Ours was not one of the commonly visited
groves, and to get there we’d had to drive along miles of pitted gravel road
that took us high above a silvery blue ribbon of river and then deep into the
shadows of tall trees.
As was often the case in the
Redwoods we mostly hiked in silence, quieted by the ridiculous grandeur of the
trees. Our chins were up much of the
time, like stunned exclamation points and after a while our necks got tired
from all that craning.
And so it was that we stopped for a
while next to a little stream burbling.
We drank our water, munched our trail mix and, perhaps for the first
time that day, we looked down.
And there, lying at the feet of the
redwoods, those blue whales of the forest – we discovered another world. “A
Lilliputian landscape – a carpet of clover-like red sorrel covered the ground
like thousands of trees in some tiny forest.
Here and there a smooth yellow violet rose a few inches off the ground
to tower over the deep green sorrel.”[1]
A tiny, exquisite world: a
blue-black beetle with bright red eyes marched by with a bit of leaf in his
mandibles like a ceremonial palm frond, a line of ants trooped along with all
their cares like rush hour on Highway 101 and a butterfly the size of a dime
landed on my hand and it was like being brushed with a tiny feather. A great lumbering creature emerged in slow
motion like a glacier – it was a banana slug, so stately in its sheen and
towering over all the other creatures in this tiny world like a sleepy escapee
from a Japanese monster movie.
It was a revelation: that all this
time we had been blithely hiking along without ever noticing the mindboggling
wonder that lay at our feet, every square foot a glorious world within a world
within a world.
After that I began to see the
small, the tiny and the diminutive everywhere – and my children grew impatient
with me for getting lost in the way the late-afternoon light made a spider web
glow or the way I had to stop at, in their words, “every single Indian
Paintbrush” in the whole park.
How right was naturalist John Muir
when he wrote, “How strangely we are
blinded to beauty and color, form and motion by comparative size! For example we measure grasses by our own
stature, and by the height and bulkiness of trees. But what is the size of the greatest man, or
the tallest tree that ever overtopped a grass?
Compared with other things in God’s creation the difference is nothing.”[2]
A few weeks later, as Eliza and I
sat breathing heavily on top of Cloud’s Rest in Yosemite, which is a mountain
top a full thousand feet higher than Half-Dome, I had to look through my
binoculars to make out the hundreds of people climbing up that famous granite
wall. Even through powerful lenses they
looked like so many ants in an ant-line in their bright colors, expensive boots
and high-tech fabrics.
I looked back down the mountain and
saw other people climbing up the way we had come, also in a line, as everyone
who rides or drives or walks usually is – and they were so tiny I could barely
make them out. Startled, I looked at
Eliza and we looked at the vast sweep of granite and light and air around our
mountaintop perch – and I laughed to realize how very much in common I have
with ants, water bugs, chipmunks, sparrows, alpine flowers, banana slugs and
all the other little creatures of the Earth.
For no matter how big and important
our lives may sometimes feel, we are pretty darn tiny in the big scheme of
things. And so as we hiked back down the mountain I found myself paying
attention to different things than I had on the way up. As Ralph Waldo Emerson observes, “a leaf, a
drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the
perfection of the whole. Each particle
is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.”[3]
It’s no wonder I didn’t notice them
until I went to the woods, my tiny sisters and brothers. Our society has long been fascinated by the
Mighty, the Powerful – the Big. Turn on
your TV for any time at all and you are sure to be bombarded by big, bigger and biggest – big SUVs, big
hamburgers, big soft-drinks, big houses, big breasts and big bombs that make
even bigger explosions! We want
everything to be supersized: even love and loss must be blown up to epic,
operatic proportions to sell tickets or win ratings and every child can tell
you the names of all the big
dinosaurs, but very few of the little
ones.
Part of our obsession with hugeness
surely has to do with marketing, as more and bigger is often more profitable
than less and small. But I think there
is more to it than that.
I think we all know, on some level,
that we are not as big and powerful and safe as we pretend to be. Rather, we wake up in the dead of night
afraid that we are none of these things: we are not Tyrannosaurus Rex – more
like that weird little dinosaur who is the primordial ancestor of
chickens! We all suspect, deep down,
that we aren’t Hummers or Escalades, but rather skateboards, Vespa scooters, or
perhaps, on our biggest, toughest days –Volkswagen bug.
How big, how safe, how in control
and how important we are is all relative, and so there are really only two
things we can do to plump ourselves up: we can either make ourselves somehow
bigger, tougher and more secure, which in truth we have a limited ability to do
against the vast sweep of life and death– or by making the people and things
around us feel comparatively smaller, weaker and less important than ourselves.
We are small, fragile and most
frightening of all, temporary, creatures – and it terrifies most of us to admit
this. American culture is organized to
deny the truth of every one of these facts.
“We are not small, we are the most powerful nation on Earth”, “We are
not fragile, we can fix, treat or replace almost anything about you that starts
to age or break” – “and hey, haven’t you heard, we’re learning how to clone
human organs in the bodies of sheep and pigs, so soon, very, very soon – anyone
with a big enough bank account will be able to live practically forever!”
One of the things nature does, when
you really open yourself to it, is remind you, in a thousand ways, of just how
small, fragile and temporary you really are.
I find this beautiful, even comforting, but many people do not.
I suspect this is one of the
reasons we do so much violence to the Earth.
It’s not enough to log forests for wood; we have to clear-cut. Not enough to mine for gold; we have to strip
mine, to blow the tops off of mountains.
It’s not enough to hunt for food, we have to exterminate whole species,
mount their heads on our walls and leave their bones piled to the sky like
buffalo mountains on plains that no longer echo to the sounds of the herds.
We can argue that these are all
merely more efficient ways of “extracting” what we need or want from the world
around us, but I don’t buy it. The
language we use to accompany these actions is full of subjugation and
anti-environmentalists frequently misinterpret the Book of Genesis, claiming
that God gave us Dominion over the Earth, meaning (to them) that we are supposed to use and abuse creation
however we please, even to use it all up if that is our whim – and so the
monstrous crime that is a clear cut or the ecological apocalypse of an oil
spill are just a routine part of our divine inheritance.
Can anyone hear the phrase, “drill,
baby, drill” and not hear the blood thirst, the overweening need to dominate,
to subjugate and to control?
For when we finally bring nature
itself, the most powerful force we know to heel like a little dog, then we are
finally all-powerful, all-controlling, finally safe from all that threatens us,
even death.
But all of this is delusion, of
course.
In the end, we are what we are –
human beings: a medium-sized, if precocious, mammal that has only been around
for an eye-blink in the big sweep of things.
We are so very breakable, in both body and heart; we are forgetful,
often foolish and we know very little about most of the things that matter to
us the most.
When we walk in the woods, however,
our delusions begin to slip off our faces like a pair of ill-fitting
sunglasses. Paradoxically we cannot
discover our own true beauty, worth or place in this world until we let go of
the need to be big and embrace our own inherent smallness, that part of us that
is more snowflake than snowfall, more waterdrop than waterfall. For, as John Muir said, it is not until we
“try to pick out anything by itself, that we find it hitched to everything else
in the universe, and one begins to fancy that a heart like our own must be
beating in every crystal and every cell.
Indeed, there is really no such thing as a fragment in nature, for every
relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious thing in itself”[4]
One day, as my son Nathan and I
were walking along the Hoh River in Olympic National Park, he asked, “Why is
everyone so much nicer on the trail than they are in regular life?”
Of course I didn’t have an answer
for him right then, but we discussed it on and off as the week went on and here
is what we came up with.
One obvious component is that
people are so much more relaxed on the trail.
They are on vacation or otherwise away from the strain and stress of
everyday life.
Another component is the natural
beauty surrounding us. It’s hard to be
grumpy, ironic or world-wearily sarcastic when a rainbow-scaled wild salmon
leaps out of the water right in front of you or you step out of the shadows
into a wild meadow full of big lazy bees and swaying flowers.
Both of these things make us more
inclined to be kind and generous to one another, but I think there is something
deeper and more primal at work as well.
People seem to become nicer, and
more open the farther away from the visitor center, parking lot or trailhead
you meet them. And this is not just
something I observe in others, but in myself too.
It’s hard to describe how good it
can feel to bump into someone on a trail when I am in the wilderness.
The farther I go from the
trailhead, the thicker the forest, the steeper the mountain and the less clear
the way forward – the more aware I become of how small, fragile – and how
profoundly dependant I am upon my fellow beings, especially other people - when
I look around and realize that one wrong step, stumble or fall could mean very
serious trouble.
This not just some kind of primal
survival-awareness of how I need to be on good terms with my fellow creatures
if I break a leg so far from home. The
Fellowship of the Trail, and it is a fellowship, goes deeper than that.
It always delights me when, while
pausing to catch my breath after what feels like the zillionth switchback of
the day – another hiker who happens down the trail from the opposite direction
smiles knowingly and says, “Don’t worry, the hardest part is almost done. Just two more switchbacks and you’re there –
and it will be SO worth it!”
These little morsels of
encouragement are like drops of gold, because whether the advice turns out to
be true or not, in that moment I am connecting with another human being whose
muscles ache just like mine, who knows what it feels like to be uncertain and
unsure if she can make it to the top of the mountain. These are moments of true connection, of
seeing one another clearly through the shared experience of climbing into the
unknown.
A walk in the woods reminds me more
potently than anything else I know, that we are always a part of everything, not apart
from everything. We are part of the
landscape, the sky, the ancient trees and trickling streams – and we are part
of each other.
The first time John Muir climbed
the mountain he later named Cathedral Peak he exclaimed, “This I may say is the
first time I have been to church in California!”[5] Just as churches like this one exist to help
us remember who we are, how we want to live, and why our lives matter in the
first place – so it is with wild places.
The Book of Nature reminds us that
we don’t have to go global, speak before thousands or discover electricity in
order for our lives to matter. We just
have to be ourselves and play our parts truly.
Indeed, observes Muir, “nothing goes unrecorded. Every word of leaf and snowflake and particle
of dew…as well as earthquake and avalanche, is written down in Nature’s book.”[6] And that includes us.
As Emerson reminds us, “Nature is
made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.”[7] This is
why I go back again and again, a pilgrim making his way to a great cathedral;
because I forget - all too easily, and need constant reminding.
Fortunately we don’t have to go far
afield to find the wilderness we need, we can find it all around us if we just
slow down and open our eyes. Emerson
wrote these words about what he could see from his front porch in Concord:
I see the spectacle of morning from the hilltop over
against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions, which an angel might
share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson
light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to
partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and
I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a
few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of
emperors ridiculous.[8]
At one of our last campfires
together, my son Nathan asked, in that dreamy, rhetorical way we all talk
around campfires – “What would the world be like if everyone was this nice at
home too, just in regular life?”
Ah the wisdom of a 12-year
old.
We don’t have to leave the
Fellowship of the Trail in the woods.
All of life is a trail, my friends,
and we are all a long way from the parking lot.
Find your place, and learn to appreciate the small, the fragile, the
simple and the fleeting - because that, despite our occasional moments of glory,
is exactly what we are.
Be kind on the trail and accept
kindness. Be generous with your food, water
and smiles. Strive to see the people whose paths you cross as if they are all a
honeymooning couple who hand you their camera to take their picture next to the
most beautiful waterfall in the world – see them this way – and do not for a
moment forget that the beauty of the waterfall is not one whit greater than the
beauty of the strangers standing next to it.
[1] Jerry and Gisela Rohde, Best Short Hikes in Redwood National and State Parks (Seattle: The Mountaineers Books, 2004) p. 98
[2] John Muir, Florida Swamps and Forests, in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) pp. 102-103
[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (New York: Library of America, 1983) p. 29-30
[4] John Muir, from My First Summer in the Sierra (1869), p. 211
[5] John Muir, from My First Summer in the Sierra (1869) p. 336
[6] John Muir, from John of the Mountains (1938) p. 88
[7] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (New York: Library of America, 1983) p. 33
[8] Ibid, p. 15