Never Alone or Weary of Life:
CONTENTMENT. That is always the goal. All seek it. No one, of course, can be content all the time; probably most would not really care to figure out what percent of the time contentment is actually their state of mind. Money, fame, sex, titles, friends, kids----none of these can realistically be shown to bring lasting contentment. On the other hand the total absence of these sort of things can make contentment unattainable. Whatever the machinational meaning of life, clearly the creative process of life is not geared up with any goal to make each of us content. Even if a lot of things go our way a lot of it has little to do with us but are attributable to things beyond our control---like parents, place of birth, the neighborhood within which we grow up, our physical attributes, our personalities, etc.
The trick then, is to find some contentment within the context of your own peculiar reality. All this praying to bring contentment to yourself or to others for whom you are concerned seems to be a waste of time. Either that, or God is kind of a sadistic cruel bastard. I think those who have a strong sense of justice, for themselves AND others, seem to reach the highest levels of contentment. Those who have high tolerance for diversity seem to reach higher levels of contentment. Those who build their lives around something other than the accumulation of wealth, fame, sex, titles, friends, kids, etc seem to reach a more consistent and higher level of contentment. This is not to say one can ignore these natural tendencies and achieve contentment. But they are not an end to themselves.
Whatever the source of contentment, it seems to vary from one person to another. This is clearest in matters such as sex, music, hobbies, etc. We can babble on and on about the sanctity of marriage, but let's face it---longevity of marriage has more to do with compatibility than any specific rules of engagement. "What God has put together let no man put asunder" is an absurd attempt to claim God is somehow sanctifying the marriage. Please. Let's be real. With the divorce rate hovering around 50% let's not dump it all on God. He couldn't possibly be that inept. Either God sanctified the marriage or He didn't. I think, myself, that if He did, the marriage would last, period. So I say He didn't. Sorry.
The nature of life is such that contentment is never a constant state. A good deal of our time is not going to be any endless zippy do dah sequence of moments. The best we can do is to find things which we can turn to for some contentment, once in a while, for a little while, which give us the strength to carry on. Without these moments we will not be able to successfully withstand the varied personal tribulations that thrash us around. Some people get thrashed around more than others.
For me the greatest contentment is to be found in nature itself. My favorite area of nature are the redwood forests. Rachel Carson advised, "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are NEVER ALONE OR WEARY OF LIFE." The biggest redwood trees are 2000 to 3000 years old---they go back to the days of the Parthenon. Wow. The existence of redwood trees predated human existence. Some go up 35-40 stories high---that is almost 4 times higher than my 11th floor condo. Redwood forests are quiet, extremely quiet, eerily quiet, religiously quiet, motivationally quiet, and when I want to admire the sanctity of life, I look to these giant forms of life that live a lifetime lasting almost the length of our entire human history. The biggest are probably gone now, and certainly most are gone. Americans didn't just eliminate the Indians as an exercise of our manifest destiny, but 97% of the redwood forests were cut down in just a few decades of time. I hate that humans are so selfish and destructive of nature. Humans cut the biggest ones first just to watch them fall. 3000 years of history wiped out for amusement. Sometimes I just hate the American Way, which, after all is said and done, is identical to the Human Way.
I try to get out each day now and spend time in nature, alone---and it rarely fails to recharge positive feelings about life, others, and put me in a contented state of mind. I can't wait to get back to the Redwood forests and the Pacific coastline after a two or three year absence. This is a world which still exists just as it was created, untouched by human intervention. Just the size of redwood trees sort of puts your own existence in perspective. Spending a lot of time walking through the varied wonderlands of nature is good exercise for the body and soul. For me, the best highs in life come from communication with nature, some sort of mystic connection with a timeless evolution driven by God's creative forces. Individually we are clearly insignificant, but the totality of species existence is at the apex of astonishment. All other highs are transient, tarnished, and come with varied risks and negative down sides. Recreational drugs, sex, dogmatic religious notions, food, money, power, sports, gambling, winning, kids, internet surfing, and all the other kinds of addictive pursuits in life are highs which are unsustainable---not evil or criminal, but lacking in fulfillment to the extent that ultimately, in varying degrees, they leave us disillusioned, left with a vague sense of failed nirvana---a kind of 'there must be more to life than this'. You can always tell those addicted to these transient highs by the level of their desperation to achieve new heights of some high, but trapped mostly in the lows that follow the infrequent peaks. These are the fussers, the haters, the angry, the on edge addicts of this or that, living lives of tense desperation. False addictions always do that, lead to tense desperation. To paraphrase Barry, 'moderation in the pursuit of justice, tolerance, and self improvement is no virtue. Extremism in the defense of personal liberty, in the absence of harm to others, is no vice."
Live and let live. He/she who behaves otherwise cannot reach contentment. I always get the urge to grab dopeheads, corporate greedheads, religiousbetterthanthouheads, familyvalueheads, foodheads, patrioticflagheads etc. and just shake some sense into them, make them stop their addicted madness, and just get real. Live and let live, appreciate diversity, see the humor in all our varied frailties, level the playing field for as many as possible, spend time in nature striving to acquire the sense of being a part of creative forces beyond our comprehension. Ask not what God can do for you or for anyone else, but seek to be in tune with the creative process, and for the short miniscule time we exist, be able to smell the roses, to side with those less fortunate, to share wisdom or wealth with those in need, to see nature and all those living forms in nature as treasures, gifts of wonder, as part of the family of life. To me, therein lies the source of a more lasting contentment. Always keep a certain distance from the noise of the world. Noise that is static. Noisy static. Avoid all the huffing and puffing over contrived selfish greed for wealth, power, and putting others in, or keeping them in, their place. Share, tolerate, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We know all this in theory but too little in practice. If there is any singular trend worldwide today it is for differing groups to disrespect each other with increasingly perverse vengefulness. Killing and persecution has become the mantra which gives meaning to life for more and more people. The Bush mentality of kill before 'they' get a chance to kill you is spreading across the globe with only the 'they' differing. More and more have found their some sort of 'they' to go after. We live in a world of intensely personal diabolic crusades driven by an overpopulated human population competing for limited natural resources. The absurdity of the waste and extravagance of some is matched only by the hopelessness and dire poverty of the many.
The westcoast redwood is the tallest species of tree on the earth. The tallest of the ones surviving today are between 350 and 380 feet tall. The tallest ones are not necessarily the largest ones in terms of mass. In the absence of a constructed path it is very difficult to walk through any redwood grove. You don't just step over fallen logs which are way over your head and the underbrush is brambly, thick, and the footing unstable. Those who seriously study redwood forests are typically young, smart, rough hewed loners---the Daniel Boone type. Climbing a redwood tree to the top is a real dangerous proposition. One mistake and you are dead. A fall more than 50 feet is invariably fatal. These rough hewn guardians of the redwood forests would view the likes of me with disdain. I am hardly any Daniel Boone. More a gentleman (if I can use the word loosely) punk who likes to sort of tiptoe along nice little paths in the forests for the day followed by a sumptuous meal and plush bed to sleep in. The real redwood forest guardians sleep in the canopy of the redwoods. Showoffs.
A redwood can go from a seed to a large tree in about 600 years. I planted a Dawn Redwood tree in the yard of my former home about 18 years ago. It is not yet impressively big. Maybe the new owner has already cut it down. In terms of volume of wood the largest species of tree living on earth is the giant sequoia, not the coast redwood. But let's not fuss over a few feet. Besides, from the ground, looking at one of these tall trees no one can accurately judge how tall it really is. Interestingly, you never find giant sequoias and giant redwoods in the same forest. The largest living thing in the world today is a giant sequoia named General Sherman. It is 27 feet in diameter at chest height and 275 ft. tall. Redwoods are evergreen and keep their foliage all year. Each leaf of a redwood lasts about 7 years.
The forest canopies of the earth are believed to hold roughly half of all the species in nature. With the widespread destruction of forests across the globe all sorts of species are becoming extinct before they are even discovered. All of us have a bit of President Bush in us---ignorant brash mindless trashers of anything in our way, and what we want at the moment we just take, to hell with consequences or the impact on others. Might makes Right. In 1850 the Redwood forests amounted to about 2 million acres of virgin, old growth forest stretching from Big Sur to southern Oregon. In just 150 years 96% of these forests are gone. No matter, we could plant new trees and poof, just like that, thousands of years later we would have new ones. In an age of live fast, love hard, make your perceived enemies die young, redwood trees are out of place.
Here's a useless but oddly interesting observation: humans are the only primates who spend no time in trees. That is too bad for the redwoods. We probably wouldn't destroy what we live in. The trouble with liking trees is that one doesn't live long enough to really see a tree mature and become the giant many trees can become. The natural human tendency is to like action packed instantaneous adventures. Not too many are like me and love to spend the day watching redwood trees in action, again using the word action in very loose terms. The massive depopulation of the redwoods has come with a trade-off. In 1900 the world's population was 1.5 billion. In 2000 it was 6 billion and we are rapidly heading for 10 billion. Next time Presidential candidates debate listen real carefully to any mention of this. Hey, who really cares, we are on a reproductive and technological roll, a roll out the barrel let the good times roll mindless binge.
I guess to most, wandering around a redwood forest is a useless dull adventure. Maybe so, how can I speak for anyone else on such a subjective manner. But for me, it seems to change the way I feel and think and see life. Your mood generates the kind of things you think about and how you perceive life. A day amongst the redwoods changes me because it creates a mood for contemplation otherwise unattainable. Everything seems so vast, so quiet, so eternal. I never feel as much at ease or in touch with the essence of life as in a redwood forest. I would elaborate but words fail, as I am sure everyone experiences this in their own way under certain conditions. Some sort of inapplicable brilliance, an approach to some sort of mystic appreciation of the creative process of which we are such a miniscule part. In a sort of non threatening way one realizes personal goals and nuances of life are irrelevant, simply transient self limiting bursts of pleasure/pain.
Redwoods don't die and then fall, they fall while still alive. There is a message therein but I am not sure what it is. There are so little redwood forests remaining that one might assume there are no unexplored groves left. Not true. Getting through a virgin redwood forest is a difficult task. Those that do this sort of thing, once discovering some real tall ones, never approach their found trees the same way so as not to leave any path. Many of the tallest redwoods are known only to a few who keep their location secret. I don't blame them at all. Man cannot be trusted. Let these giants live in peace. Like many of us, these giant trees are in their terminational years----the ever exploding global human population will find and destroy them soon enough.
One of the biggest coast redwoods studied has 222 trunks. The crown takes up 31 thousand cubic yards of space. The top is so dense with foliage that one could put on a pair of snowshoes and walk around on top---maybe come face to face with some of the many unknown species living up there. It takes water from the ground 2 weeks to get to the top of the tree. There are very few birds in the canopy of a redwood. These trees produce poisons in their wood which discourage insects and without insects, the birds stay away. When I first hiked in redwood forests I was puzzled why there were so few birds.
Somewhere in all of the above are found the reasons I see truth in: "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are NEVER ALONE OR WEARY OF LIFE."
While all the above might work for me, this aspect of life as a means of achieving any sort of meaning of others to their lives is almost extinct. I can walk the trails of Morton Arboretum on a late Sunday afternoon and rarely pass more than 3 other parties on the trails. Sometimes I pass no one over a 3 hour period. Even though I live in a metropolitan area of millions, nature is really a forgotten irrelevant aspect of modern living. There is no way I can pass any judgment on what others seek to give meaning to their lives. Clearly I don't like the results of whatever people are using to form the dominant views of interpersonal and international relationships that abound across the globe. It all saddens me. I don't want to get caught up in it for my remaining years. NATURE BATS LAST. Nature, which we all are a part of, is God's creation. To the extent humans can find a way to fit in, to protect our natural resources, to find harmony amongst differing groups of ourselves--- peace, justice, and prosperity are possible. To the extent the current self centered madness prospers, the lives of all are endangered, the needs of no one will be met, and the corrective power of nature---the final arbitrator---will rule the result.
