Connections

Riff Raff, by Michael Tilley
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It was when encamped at Yosemite National Park with a small group of U.S. Marines and Naval Corpsmen that I achieved my most “religious” experience.

We were less than 75 in number on that cold October night in 1993, and huddled somewhat precipitously atop Cloud’s Rest, finding narrow crevices and crooks in which to stuff ourselves into sleeping bags for a few hours of sleep. The public is not allowed to camp on the ridge without the receipt — difficult to obtain — of a wilderness camping permit.

Resting in the sleeping bag, the sky was as black and the stars were as bright as any I had experienced in my many years of camping in the various parts of nowhere in Arkansas. Outlines were amazingly precise of commercial jets flying into and out of San Francisco. The passage of satellites were frequent and, after a few passes, predictable.

There are places in rural Arkansas where light pollution is minimal, but nothing in our Natural State compares to the cosmic clarity provided from a perch of almost 10,000 feet above sea level.

Day and night in this remarkable patch of planet equally provoke emotion and perspective. It does not require the training or words of a physicist or philosopher or poet to be moved by the visions of nature that wholly consume the visual experience in this unique place in the world. Only a soul vastly ignorant of natural fundamentals or vastly consumed by the rigors of religion would fail to consider the almost infinite universal, elemental and planetary events that resulted in the bumping electrons and energy of the eyes connected to the brain and the body nestled snuggly in the military-issue sleeping bag.

The dichotomy of cosmic size and connection becomes no less impressive than the remarkable granite forest that is Yosemite. One is aware of their personal nothingness in the big scheme of universal and planetary reach, and simultaneously consider that the carbon of their bones and blood and brains is a fundamental component and catalyst of what stretches away from us in trillions and trillions of light years.

We are inconsequential to and inseparable from our physical worlds in the same moment.

It is this personal religious moment that rushes through my brain with each recalled memory of Sept. 11. Just a few hours after the horrible events of that day, my brain began the attempt to trade the image of falling towers and rising smoke with the image of the falling waters and rising granite towers of Yosemite. The mental switch initially sparked guilt; that it was a superficial and selfish coping mechanism preventing acceptance of the horrible reality.

Maybe it was. And is.

But it also may be part of a belief that we are indeed inconsequential to and inseparable from our physical worlds in the same moment. Such is why we should carefully consider connections in our remembrances and retributions.

We are connected beyond our awareness to what we build and maintain, to what we destroy and oppress, to what we fear and loathe and to what we love and nurture.