Tag Archives: Henry David Thoreau

Praying the Hours (4): Terce

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This is the fourth in a series on the canonical hours, the ancient Christian practice for living a mindful day. The first, “Reclaiming My Time,” gives a general introduction, with a list of helpful resources for your own practice of prayer and meditation. This fourth reflection concerns Terce, the first of the “Little Hours.”

St. Isidore (kneeling at right) was a farmworker criticized by his boss for spending his mornings in church instead of doing his job. When an angel was seen to be filling in for Isidore in the field during mass, the boss relented. Although he is the patron saint of farmers, his legend speaks to all who seek to balance work and prayer. (Anonymous Bolognese painting, 17th century).

The design of Prayer . . . is not merely to make us devout while we are engaged in it, but that its odor may be diffused through all the intermediate spaces of the day, enter into all its occupations, duties, and tempers. 

— Hannah More, Practical Piety (1812) 

Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will.

— The Book of Common Prayer

The “Little Hours”—Terce, Sext and None—are the most challenging for a personal prayer practice, because they span the middle portion of the day, the “9 to 5” when we are most occupied with our business in the world. Unless we are professional contemplatives, our days involve more doing than being. We are busy with whatever it is we do, with little chance for prayerful pauses. Even the monks who created the canonical hours kept their daytime devotions short, or “little,” to allow sufficient time for work and study. 

During his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau managed to renounce working and doing for long stretches:

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.[i]

An entire morning given to reverie is an enviable use of time, but for most of us, including Thoreau, it is hardly sustainable as a daily practice. A viable spirituality for the Little Hours must come to terms with the demands and obligations of the day. As Benedictine abbot Cuthbert Butler (1858-1934) put it, “a contemplative life does not lie in the absence of activity, but in the presence of contemplation.”[ii]

How then do we nurture a contemplative awareness as we perform our daily work? How may we “remember God and eternity in the midst of [our] business” so that the fragrance of prayer “may be diffused through all the intermediate spaces of the day?”[iii] Let’s examine each of the Little Hours in turn, beginning with Terce.

Terce (“third”) is the 9 o’clock hour, when the working world is getting underway. Whether resuming ongoing projects or conceiving new ones, we launch into the morning with fresh energy and commitment. In the Book of Acts, Terce is the hour of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit filled the disciples with the power of enthusiasm and possibility. This “third hour” invites us to engage each new day’s work—our own Book of Acts—in that same spirit. 

Come, labor on!
Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain,
while all around us waves the golden grain? [iv]

Wendell Berry sets a high bar for our labor when he says it “defines us as we are; not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone.” Even when our work is less than ideal, or only a means to an end, it may still be possible to honor our tasks with the mindfulness and care of a Brother Lawrence, who found joy in the humblest employment: “It is not necessary to have great things to do,” he said. “I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God.”[v]

Of course, not everyone’s day may feel like participation in the divine task of repairing the world, or the cultivation of human flourishing, or the fulfillment of personal vocation. There are some jobs which should not even exist, because they bring harm to the planet, society, or the worker. There are many people whose sense of purposeful time has been diminished by unemployment, retirement, or illness. And there are those who suffer days of perpetual affliction and sorrow. At such negative extremities of human experience, can prayerful awareness still flourish? Can we still cry to God “out of the depths?” Or is consciousness of transcendent presence and divine impulse only for the fortunate or the serene?

In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested for political activities. After seven dismal months in prison, he was taken out to be executed by a firing squad, or so it seemed. It turned out to be a cruel charade—there was a last-minute reprieve. The rifles were lowered and the condemned prisoners were returned to their cells. But having looked death in the face, Dostoevsky realized the utter preciousness of life under any conditions. Back in his cell, he dashed off a letter to his brother.

“When I look back on my past,” he wrote, “and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness!”[vi]

Dostoevsky’s revelation from the depths of human suffering would sustain him through four years in a Siberian labor camp, and bear fruit in his visionary writings about the power of divine compassion to humanize a heartless world. Even in the abyss, we can be surprised by joy. Even at the grave, we make our song.[vii]Praise to the Giver! Praise to the gift! 

Thankfully, most of our lives are less dramatic than Dostoevsky’s, but whether our story be sweet or not sweet, may we perform each day’s work mindful of time’s gift—the opportunity to make a difference, to add more goodness, truth and beauty to the world. Where there is hatred, let us sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is injustice, action. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy.[viii]

The spirit of Terce is oblation: as our day begins to unfold, we offer it up as expression and embodiment of the divine impulse. An old eucharistic prayer puts it this way: “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.” Elizabeth Rooney’s devotional poem, “Oblation,”[ix] posits self-offering as a daily practice:

I hope each day 
To offer less to you,
Each day
By your great love to be 
Diminished
Until at last I am 
So decreased by your hand
And you so grown in me
That my whole offering
Is just an emptiness
For you to fill
Or not
According to your will.

As we dive into the flow of the day, Terce reminds us to keep God in mind and heart and body. Our hours belong to God. Receive every moment, every labor, every encounter, every delight, every challenge as divine gift. 

Prayer isn’t just a momentary act. It is a stance toward reality, a state of awareness. It may involve words, chant, ritual, or pure silence—an attentive pause to listen for whatever needs to be heard. And it always involves breathing. “By following your breath,” says Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “and combining the Full Awareness of Breathing with your daily activities, you can cut across the stream of disturbing thoughts and light the lamp of awakening.”[x]

Pray at the door of morning … pray as you go … pray as you labor.
Want what God wants. 
Be thankful.
Do love’s work. 
Refuse despair.

In 1960 New Orleans, a six-year-old African-American named Ruby Bridges became the first black person to attend an all-white elementary school in the segregated South. On her first morning, she was met by a shouting mob of white people. At first she thought it must be some kind of celebration, like a Mardi Gras parade. But she soon realized the screams were directed at her. Federal marshals protected her from physical assault, but the hateful words and jeering faces were terrible enough. A few years later, Norman Rockwell painted that little girl’s courageous walk to school for a story in Look magazine.

Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With (Look magazine, Jan. 14, 1964).

Ruby Bridges was met at the school door by Barbara Henry, the one teacher who was willing to teach a Black child. Years later, Bridges would write about that moment, “You cannot look at a person and tell whether they’re good or bad. Evil comes in all shades and colors. That is the lesson that I learned from the teacher that looked exactly like the people outside that threw things, spit, and yelled—she looked exactly like them, but she was different, and I knew that at six years old, because she showed me her heart.”

For a while, Ruby’s first-grade mornings—her Terce—always began with the taunting mob. One day, she paused before going inside. Her lips were moving, but the shouting drowned her out. Her teacher later asked her why she had stopped to talk to the crowd. “I wasn’t talking,” she said. “I was praying. I was praying for them.”[xi]

[i] Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), from the 2nd paragraph of “Sounds.”

[ii] Dom Cuthbert Butler, cited in Rowan Williams, The Way of St. Benedict (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020), 112. Butler was a Benedictine abbot and patristic scholar. 

[iii] “remember God”—John Gother (1654-1704), cited in Gordon Mursell, English Spirituality: From 1700 to the Present Day (London: SPCK 2008), 34; “may be diffused”—Hannah More (1745-1833), in Practical Piety; or, the influence of the religion of the heart on the conduct of life (1811), cited in Mursell, 118. Gother was a Catholic priest who catechised the London poor; More was an Anglican writer who stressed the inseparability of prayer and social action.

[iv] From “Come, labor on,” a hymn text by Jane Laurie Borthwick (1813-1897), #541 in The Episcopal Hymnal 1982. This was often sung at chapel during my 6 years at an Episcopal school in Los Angeles, where self-motivation was strongly encouraged!

[v] Citations from Karen Speerstra, ed., Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart (Sandpoint, ID: Morning Light Press, 2005). Wendell Berry, p. 520; Brother Lawrence  (from his 17th-century text, The Practice of the Presence of God), p. 521.

[vi] Cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 181-182.

[vii] This beautiful statement of resurrection faith is from the Eastern Orthodox Memorial Service, sung as part of the Burial Kontakion in The Episcopal Hymnal 1982, #355.

[viii] From the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis, although the earliest traceable source is from 1912. I added the injustice/action line.

[ix] Elizabeth Rooney (1924-1999) was an Episcopal poet and a member of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. 

[x] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (1987), cited in Dennis Patrick Slattery, Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 40.

[xi] Ruby Bridges, cited in Marion Wright Edelman, “Lessons from Ruby Bridges” (Oct. 26, 1918).

What Would Samson Do? — Finding Trump in the Bible

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Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.

— Henry David Thoreau [i]

[T]his president and those in power—those who benefit from keeping things the way they are—they are counting on your cynicism … Do not let them take away your power. Don’t let them take away your democracy. 

— Barack Obama [ii]

 

When the previous American president called out the most dangerous man in America at the Democratic Convention, he broke the presidential norm of speaking softly about your successor. “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t,” said Obama. “And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.” [iii]

Three years ago the press would have worried more about the broken norm than the words themselves. No longer. Democracy is on fire, and even some former White House officials are grabbing the nearest hose. In normal times, the Senate report detailing Trump’s extensive Russian collusion would bring an Administration’s swift collapse. But amid the ongoing maelstrom of misdeeds, it’s barely noticed. In normal times, a reporter would not be inviting a president to refute the conspiracy theory of his secret plan to save the world from a satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. And in normal times, the president would not respond by wondering “is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?” [iv]

Coincidentally, in recent weeks the Episcopal Daily Office has been taking us through the Book of Judges, one of those disturbing texts that won’t let us mistake the Bible for a handbook on exemplary behavior. It’s a collection of ancient tales—legends with historical origins—from Israel’s history after the Exodus, when the refugees from Egyptian slavery were establishing themselves in a Promised Land. That land’s existing occupants were not so thrilled with the immigrants’ aspirations, and the narrative accounts are filled with appalling violence. It’s not a book I’d care to preach on.

When a later editor wove the stories into the Book of Judges, he sought to make a larger point about the Israelites losing their way as a people whose identity and survival was rooted in the divine Deliverer. Judges begins with stories of charismatic leaders who rise up as needed to guide their people through a formative time. But charisma proved an unreliable form of governance. Judges ends with several tales to demonstrate a need for a more stable political system, as the tribes devolve into civil war. The story of Samson is the turning point.

While Sunday school teachers have long cringed at the sex and violence of the Samson saga, children (and Hollywood producers) have been captivated by his superhero powers and comic-book adventures. Outnumbered by those Philistine bullies, he always gives them their comeuppance. BAM! POW! OOF! Not even a lion can beat him. And though tricked and weakened by a femme fatale, he still brings the house down on the bad guys in the end.

But to what purpose? He has no particular interest in the greater good of his people. All he cares about is himself. He is driven by impulse, not thought. Revenge and lust shape his choices. Although we are told “he led Israel … for twenty years,” he shows no leadership skills, and generates considerable hostility among his own people. However, he does excel at destruction—what Robert Alter calls his “anarchic impulse”—so cruelly exhibited when he ties torches to the tails of three hundred foxes to set Philistine fields and vineyards ablaze.

Finally captured and blinded by his enemies, he refuses to admit defeat. If he has to go down, he’s going to take everyone else down with him. In a famously spectacular finish, he pushes “powerfully” against the pillars of their temple, and the great structure collapses, killing three thousand men and women, including himself. The narrator ends with a chilling summation: “And the dead that he killed in his death were more than he had killed in his life” (Judges 16:30).

As Alter notes, the Book of Judges goes on to relate further episodes of “unbridled lust, implacable hostility, and mutual mayhem,” not to mention “dishonesty and deception … venality and the ruthless pursuit of personal and tribal self-interest.”[v] It’s a disheartening book, whose final sentence conveys the total disintegration of social bonds and the common good: “Every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

Sound familiar? Three years ago, few of us imagined how fragile and corruptible our own political institutions would prove to be. As Barack Obama warns us, we are on the verge of losing our democracy—and so much more. The current president’s small hands are pushing hard against the pillars of America. He’d rather kill us all than be the only “loser.”

It’s a stressful time to be an American, even without a pandemic. To paraphrase Thoreau, the “remembrance of my country” is spoiling my summer. Serenity is a rare commodity these days. And that is perhaps how it must be until we expel the demons from White House and Senate. Keep our eyes on the prize and hold on!

In Thoreau’s essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” his dark thoughts about America’s sins are succeeded by the memory of a walk when he chances upon a white waterlily. The flower becomes a redemptive epiphany:

“It bursts up so pure and fair to the eye, and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of earth … What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower!”

So many moments in this week’s Democratic Convention have provided a confirmation of my own hopes: the determined voices of those who transform personal suffering and pain into commitment to the common good; the joyful spirits whose ideals still burn bright; the splendor of so many diverse and shining faces; a passionate yearning for beloved community; and the uplifting video segments which burst “so fair upon the eye.”

 

[i] H. D. Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Collected Essays and Poems (New York: The Library of America, 2001), 346.

[ii] The 44th President’s speech at the Democratic Convention (August 19, 2020).

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/donald-trump-qanon-conspiracy-2020-election-a9678946.html

[v] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Volume 2: Prophets (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019),

Solitude (Part 1)

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St. Onuphrius

St. Onuphrius

Go, sit in a cell, and your cell will teach you everything.

— Abba Moses (4th century)

Great liking I had in wilderness to sit, that I, far from noise, sweetlier might sing, and with quickness of heart likingest praising I might feel.

— Richard Rolle (14th century)

A man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a Sparrow upon the House Top, and like a Pelican in the Wilderness.

— Thomas Traherne (17th century)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

— Henry David Thoreau (19th century)

In the seclusion of a cell… the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world.

— Patrick Leigh Fermor (20th century)

I wondered how I could stop feeling attacked by the elements, and then remembered that I came here to be shaped by the experience of solitude in nature. In that moment, I relaxed my grip on who I think I should be and how the world should treat me, and opened myself to the process of change and growth.

— Robert Kull (21st century)

We don’t know the names of the first hermits, or exactly what drove them to flee their social world for the solitude of wilderness. Not every reason was spiritual, nor did every hermit aspire to higher consciousness. The woods and wastelands have seen their share of outlaws and misanthropes. But for many whose names we revere (such as Moses, Buddha and Jesus), as well as for countless saints who have successfully achieved anonymity, the desert, the mountaintop, the island and the forest primeval have been crucial habitats for the work of the soul.

You go to the wilderness both to lose and to gain. You lose habitual patterns and social roles, along with addictive comforts, clocks, calendars, distractions, noise, news, and the various stresses of public and personal life. You gain time, silence, solitude, freedom, wild nature, and the occasional attention of both angels and demons. If you don’t leave too soon, you may also discover a voice which has kept you company since the day of your birth, a voice which has waited patiently until your inner silence grew deep enough to hear it.

When Robert Kull was a young man, an American expatriate living in Canada, he quit his logging job and paddled a canoe deep into the interior of northern British Columbia, where he lived alone for three months. Psychologically and spiritually unprepared for such extended isolation, he almost “lost it” out there, consumed with fear of the vast unknown as his stable sense of self began to crumble. One night he left his campfire to lie down unprotected in the forest darkness. When a bear drew near, he was terrified, with no recourse but to call upon a higher power. “In that moment of surrender, I felt lifted and found myself floating in a pool of clear light. Looking down, I sensed myself lying peacefully on the forest floor. The world was no longer a hostile alien place, but my home. No true separation remained between me and the world.”[i]

During the weeks that followed, Kull felt so joyful, so “deeply integrated into the universe,” that he resolved to spend an entire year in wilderness solitude at some future time. But soon after returning to the world, “I lost my way, and the clear inner light faded.” It would be 25 years before he would keep that promise to himself, a long stretch during which he sought to recapture that original but elusive state of grace through meditation, self-analysis, and spiritual exploration.

Finally, in February, 2001, Kull set up camp on a remote island off the coast of southern Chile, where he would spend a year alone in the Patagonian wilderness. An abridged form of his journals, interspersed with later reflections about the experience, was published by New World Library in 2008 as Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes. It’s a marvelous read. By shunning a grand narrative thread or an authoritative single voice, Kull let his recorded thoughts, observations and experiences stand just as they were written, paragraph by paragraph, full of changing moods and contradictory voices. This documentary restraint allowed me to be in the moment with him. Each time I picked up the book over the past few weeks, I was immediately returned to that island solitude, its hardships and its beauties, its frustrations and its revelations. When the “year” was finally up and I resumed my accustomed life, I was left with the same question that Kull returned with: what happened out there, and has it left a permanent mark on me?

As the Lenten journey into metaphoric wilderness looms near, I want to explore the implications of Kull’s spiritual experiment for the rest of us. I will do this over the course of a few posts. Let me conclude this first installment with some thoughts about his approach.

Raised as a fundamentalist Christian, Kull eventually migrated to Buddhism. He still uses the word “God” at times, but speaks more often of a felt Presence, Something Greater, or mystery. His favorite term is alive or aliveness, always rendered vibrant with italics. Shorn of traditional theist attributes which might divorce the divine from the given world, this Presence is often interchangeable with “nature” or “universe.” Sometimes it has a voice, and responds to our attention, while sometimes it seems a more impersonal, all-embracing flow.

But constructing a coherent systematic theology is not Kull’s design. While he brings his own presuppositions to his observing, as do we all, his aim is ontologically humble. He is not trying to make an objectively comprehensive model of Being, but to describe his own experience when he opens himself to larger spiritual realities. While he draws on the wisdom of various teachers, his knowledge remains largely personal.

As he tells us, he wanted “to explore, through living, the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual effects of deep wilderness solitude.”[ii] Formally, his project was an academic study for a doctorate at the University of British Columbia. But as he later wrote, “although my intention at the beginning of this retreat was to explore solitude through a purely secular lens, [I] have had to admit that I cannot fully live nor write about what is happening without using spiritual terminology.”[iii]

A Christian of the last century, having spent considerable time praying in a cave in North Africa, said that “the trouble with going to the desert is that you risk meeting God there.” And as the series of epigraphs at the top of this post demonstrate, there have always been a few of us willing to take that risk. Those who stay home are all grateful for anything they can tell us afterward.

What Kull learned on that Patagonian island is valuable for several reasons. One is the sheer length of his solitude. The Desert Fathers had visitors, and said mass together on Sundays. Thoreau also enjoyed visitors, and dropped off laundry at his mom’s house in town. But Kull had only one brief visit from park rangers. The rest of the time he was entirely bereft of human presence. He thus provides an uncommon source of data about human consciousness.

Such data is hard to come by. I once heard the scholar-writer Stephen J. Pyne read a brilliant paper on the otherworldly environment of Antarctica. White on white, often without any visible separation between ice and sky, the polar landscape is stripped of the visual cues and details by which we orient ourselves in space. Being there is like dwelling in an abstract painting. I asked Pyne whether prolonged exposure to such strange phenomenology might produce interesting forms of consciousness. Shouldn’t the polar outposts be treated like monasteries where the far edges of human perception could be explored? “Maybe,” he laughed. “But the fact is, everyone just stays inside the sheds watching videos and drinking.”

Kull’s experiment is also valuable for his suspicion of preconceptions. He tried to stay open to whatever happens, as free as possible from abstract ideas about the nature of psychological and spiritual experience. Of course this is not entirely possible. We are all products of culture, language, personal history, social location and other contextual factors. But while I would be interested to see what a theologian could do with the raw data, I am glad it was Kull and not the theologian (myself included!) who did the empirical work. Fewer ideas to get in the way.

Finally, Kull’s report is imbued with his own frailty and vulnerability. He’s neither saint nor guru, just a slob like one of us. Afflicted at times by feelings of spiritual failure, and liable to follow an experience of the oneness of all beings with an angry swipe at his whining cat, we feel the camaraderie of a fellow beginner. When he comes across Merton’s sweeping assertion that the “hermit’s whole life is a life of silent adoration…. a prolonged communion … ever in the presence of God,” Kull can’t contain himself: “[N]owhere does Merton’s statement find support,” he argues. “On the contrary. The mind and heart are all over the place, from the most trivial, mundane, and negative to the joyful, peaceful, and sacred. Solitude is like the rest of life, only with less opportunity for escape into diversion.”[iv]

I like to imagine Merton laughing in agreement.

To be continued in the next post …

[i] Robert Kull, Solitude: Seeking Wilderness in Extremes (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008) xiv

[ii] Kull, 54

[iii] Kull, 214

[iv] Kull, 103

The ministry of nature

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I am losing precious days… I am learning nothing in this trivial world.
I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.   – John Muir

Every year I observe two holy weeks. One is the Christian Holy Week, the densely liturgical mimesis of Jesus’ last days of mortal life. The other is an annual solo backpack in the mountains of the American West. Both are total immersions into the sacred without which my year would be incomplete.

The sacredness of the American landscape has long been a powerful theme in American thought and feeling. To see the sacred in a Massachusetts pond, a Southwest canyon, or an old growth forest is not a denial of the physical in favor of a spiritual “elsewhere,” but a penetration to creation’s inherent depth. The material is not the opposite of spiritual, but its mediation, its container.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the American landscape painters known as “Luminists” made their canvases glow with a divine transparency, while the literary circle of Transcendentalists translated nature’s otherness into language. Emerson insisted that “the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as an apparition of God … A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.” And when Thoreau withdrew from contemporary society to his Walden refuge, he found “something true and sublime,” where “the morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted.” Is not everyone who ventures “outside” seeking a similar epiphany?

I keep my walking stick by the front entrance of our home, a daily reminder that the path to God-knows-where is always just on the other side of the door. Two weeks ago I tossed the stick in my car, along with my backpack, and headed for Montana. After a couple of days hiking into the Beartooth mountains north of Yellowstone, I reached a large alpine lake, set in a rocky bowl above treeline, with splendid views of several 12,000’ peaks. From there I made a joyous ramble into the high country beyond the lake, where cumulus shadows glided slowly across immense sunlit walls. Three bald eagles circled over a stream-watered basin. Lush gardens of paintbrush, bluebells, asters and buttercups occupied the hollows vacated by melting snowfields. I dangled my legs over a precipice for a better view of the world below. I lay back in the fragrant grass to consider the radiant sky. I knew again the plenitude of summer, that timeless contentment where one feels, as Wallace Stevens felt, “complete in an unexplained completion.”

That night around 1 a.m., I got out of my tent to see the stars, but clouds had gathered since sunset, so I secured the rain fly over my tent and crawled back inside. I had just drifted off when a couple of large animals entered my campsite, their heavy footsteps awakening me to full alert. The rain fly only allowed a narrow view directly forward from the tent, so I could not identify my visitors, who were off to the side. I could only listen as they explored the camp. I heard breathing just beyond the tent’s nylon wall, a snorting sound that put an image of a bear in my mind. Was it a black bear or the more dangerous grizzly?

Then one of the creatures jumped past the front of the tent. The moon had not yet risen, so I saw only a shadowy blur. It was the size of a large dog, probably a juvenile. And its coat seemed to reflect light, even in the gloom. Could it be the white of a mountain goat, or the light gray fur of a grizzly cub? I just wasn’t sure, and I decided to remain still and silent within my tent rather than provoke an encounter by sticking my head out for a look, especially since I was now situated between parent and child, never a good thing with wild animals.

Imagination and solitude are a potent combination in the middle of the night. I breathed. I prayed. I tried to remember what I had read years ago in Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. I thought about St. Francis making peace with the wolf. I had enjoyed the wildness of the place as a spectator in the light of day. But now the wild had come to call on me directly. In the dark of night. What did it want to tell me: You don’t belong here? Your precious subjectivity is meaningless to the appetite of carnivores? What did you expect to find, so far from your human world?

Or: Be not afraid.

After a long hour and a half, the creatures departed. Just before they did so, I saw the silhouetted head of the juvenile, backlit by the rising quarter moon, pop up from behind a rock. It bleated, then vanished. No ursine growl, only a rather playful goodbye. When dawn finally came, I found tufts of fine white wool snagged on the branches of shrubs around my camp. Mountain goats indeed.

I drove out of the mountains through Yellowstone National Park, where wild animals are often visible along the paved roads – bison, bears, deer and elk. At every sighting, people abandon their cars, running toward a vantage point with their cameras and phones to collect a digital simulation of wilderness – something to keep and take back home. This commodification of the wild as consumable experience is a fascinating spectacle that only underlines our everyday alienation from nature. I can’t criticize. I did it too. I got a nice shot of a bull elk when the skittish tourists fled out of frame while I stood my ground.

But wildness can’t be adequately encountered a few feet from your car, or in short stops at viewpoints along an asphalt road. You need to go deeper, further, dwell in its otherness for a time, risk its strangeness, wait patiently until it is ready to deliver the news.