What the Rockies Have Done For Me Lately

“Look at that…just miles and miles of emptiness!”

“But Mom, what we’re seeing is not empty at all…it’s full-up with Nature.”

This is, more or less, how a bit of conversation between my older son and me went as we were driving through the vastness of Wyoming last week. Conversations were few in that car, actually, as we all just tried to drink in the dry spaciousness of what we were seeing, mile after mile. Small talk seemed, well, particularly puny.

My son was right, of course; and then, ever generous, he reminded me that I had actually been the first among the four of us to point out that we were in a place where the Earth—rock formations of all shapes and colors and heights, creatures and plants everywhere to see— definitely ruled, where humanity in general came in a distant second. This way of seeing really wasn’t the same as seeing emptiness: it was instead a kind of power shifting, a recognition that the near-absence of one kind of thing (people and all of their accoutrements) allowed for the full grandeur of what had been there for ages to rise up.

There are panoramas, and then there are P A N O R A M A S.

Ever since I went, at age eight, to a ranch in Montana with my family, I’ve had a kind of visceral connection to the Rockies and their close neighbors, the Tetons.

While I have nothing against California or the majestic Pacific Coast, I find it weird how often Americans leap from one side of the country to the other, gazing down at these spectacular mountains out of their tiny plane windows only if they’re sufficiently awake. To me, the jagged peaks have always evoked a feeling something like the one in Beyonce’s song, “XO” or “Love Me Lights Out.” They make me dizzy, set my heart a-spinning, let me lose myself while gaining a connection to something definitely bigger. And I’ve felt compelled to bring my kids out there to tap into the raw beauty, too.

This may not be “religious” pilgrimage in the classic sense, and I wouldn’t say that any particular set of beliefs in a certain Creator – beyond a feeling of awe for Nature itself– is propelling me, but there are certain similarities.

This time, as it happened, I was also reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Living with a Wild God. Prolific as all get out, she’s mostly known for her bold writing on class issues, the status of women and social justice. Her account of what life is like for low-wage workers, Nickel and Dimed, became a blockbuster. In this latest book, a memoir, she’s up to something very different: trying to figure out what on earth was going on inside herself back when she was a girl, on her way to becoming a scientist, asking a lot of really deep questions about the nature of existence….and at the same time, following in her family tradition, staying apart from anything smacking of religion.

Not to spill all the beans for you, but the climax of the book involves a kind of mystical (she does use that word) experience she had as a teenager. In that instant, just walking along a road by herself, everything changed – KA-BOOM!

At some point in my predawn walk – not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time—the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it….Everywhere, “inside” and out, the only condition was overflow. “Ecstasy” would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.  (Twelve Books/Hachette; 2014, p. 116)

Strong stuff from a self-proclaimed atheist, that’s for sure. Through the decades that followed, she grappled with this cataclysmic experience and is still trying to figure out what to make of the “Other”—that’s what she calls it—that came out and engulfed her then.

I’m rusty on my Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I’m pretty sure what she’s trying to describe here isn’t that far off from his concept of “The Oversoul” – the universal spirit that Emerson saw running through all things, all of us.

Frankly, I’m not sure I get it, completely. In Wyoming, I almost saw a “blazing everywhere” when we were in Yellowstone, gazing at endless acres of trees charred by the Great Fire of 1988. But in that case, I was conjuring up what had in fact been an enormous conflagration, probably started by lightening. Or when we walked out to Grand Prismatic Spring, near Old Faithful, and saw the mind-blowing colors in the pool there, brought about by ancient microbes. This place is strange indeed, but it’s also undeniably real, created by a combination of natural forces that have nothing to do with our particular species.

For me, anyway, a return trip out West brought not one electrifying experience—ZAP!– but a whole collection of calmer moments when I felt woven into the huge tapestry of whatever this mysterious life is all about. And one thing I can say for sure: empty, it’s not.