Proverbs 3:5 – “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”
I could see god everywhere.
We had left the Lickers the day before and were headed up Silver Pass. It was day four. I felt fully immersed in the wilderness as I usually do after a couple of days of sleeping on the ground and not showering. Each day leading up to this one had inspired in me such awe that my mind was a corridor of life altering thoughts. Having the space to truly think was not lost on me. The ideas that typically filter through my brain and I train to snag to revisit later now had the time and space to blossom.
That and there was very little oxygen.
On day four, I couldn’t stop thinking about god and what that concept meant to me. My surroundings inspired me and I felt like I could see god in everything, but what was inspiring me was chaos. Unadulterated natural space that had not been skewered by man’s attempt to organize, control and dominate everything. There were no perfect circles, no straight lines, no boxes to reside in. The only thing that was organized was the trail we were following and luckily it still hasn’t been paved.
No, the Sierra Nevada has trees that grow sideways. Some of them have been hit with lightning, split open, burned and then regrown in ways that only made sense in knowing they worshipped the sun. Climbing above the tree line approaching massive granite peaks that had boulders moving, sliding, scattered across them and somehow the rocks stayed in place while we moved through. We could see where the recent earthquakes had damaged the man built trail placing rocks right in our way.
I could see chaos everywhere.
Growing up in a religious home, I am no stranger to the idea of god or to Christian scripture. From my experiences in a Christian dominated world, there are three levels of god espoused in our times.
The first is the most basic. There is a belief in the Bible as the word of god. Seeing that it is the word of god, it is meant to be taken literally and is. Therefore, god is the creator. The world is 6,000ish years old and their god is in control of everything. He is the architect. The world is his design and everything has a plan.
This god falls apart quickly for me. Even if you ignore the young earth issues, I can’t see order, a design or even the semblance of a plan playing out in our lives, in nature or even in the broad scheme of the universe. Maybe I just don’t understand, but I can’t believe something I feel I can observe to be false.
The second starts down that slippery slope that believers in the first will warn you about, maybe there is some nuance to this Bible thing. There is still a belief that the Bible is the word of god, but maybe we should consider some of its claims. After all, the book was written thousands of years ago in a couple of languages, has been transmitted through people who weren’t necessarily the most inclined to preserve its contents and has been translated many times. That’s a pretty heavy dose of filtering done on god’s word by man.
This god I can at least understand. There is still a creator, a design and a plan, but it allows for nuances. It allows for a belief that the Bible is the word of their god, but the world isn’t 6,000 years old. There’s too much evidence to the contrary so maybe the history pre-Adam just wasn’t recorded. Maybe the seven days of the creative periods in Genesis are meant to simply be time periods not literal days. It even allows for the idea that maybe not all of god’s words were contained in the Judeo-Christian book that was handed down to us.
And then there is the third. Which uses the basis of the the evidence that causes the 2nd group to stray from an absolute belief the Bible as the literal words of god to their logical conclusion which is really, we don’t know. There is too much evidence for too many points to follow blindly along. There is still a god, but maybe we don’t know what that means exactly. Maybe (s)he the impetus for creation and then life came along without further interference. Maybe (s)he is more of a force. You could even call god by a different name, like nature, physics or just energy.
Maybe this is what I call chaos.
From chaos springs order.
My mind wondering, my body wandering through the Sierra, these concepts and ideas become thought experiments to sort out what was a big question for me for a long time. Is there a god? What is god if there is one? And what does that even mean or matter to me?
As these thoughts bounced around my skull, the oxygen got thinner, the vegetation almost disappearing. The chaos of the granite scree fields almost made my brain hurt and at the same time, put me in a state of awe. There were two things that made perfect sense to me. God did not put these rocks here. (S)he doesn’t have time for that and why would they? Second, from every piece of this chaotic natural world, springs an order. It’s too complex of an order for most of us to recognize, but it’s there. The fragile symbiotic relationships that must exist for life to have occurred are amazing, chaotic, but awe inducing. You could even say perfect.
We peak out on Silver Pass and Lynda is waiting for us. She has her shoes off and some tortillas sunning next to her. We had just passed a guy with an umbrella strapped to the top of his pack shading a cat. Yes, you read that correctly, a cat. It was warm and we were pretty high.
After some time taking in the views from our vantage point, we descend off the other side to a lake a bit below us for a swim. As I try to warm my body back to the point of not having any goosebumps, I sit in the sun and my mind wanders back to all the questions bouncing around in my skull.
One of the amazing things about the John Muir Trail is that it exists at all. To have an unimpeded 215 miles of inaccessible by motor stretch of land is a treasure. Man has a thirst for domination and an insane appetite for destroying these stretches of land mostly so we can continue to be fat and comfortable moving ourselves around in giant machines.
The perception that chaos is the spring from which all of this has been generated makes me think about the scripture quoted above. This place of untouched land is perfect. All the relationships and systems are more or less untouched by man and they work together perfectly. Every time man tries to create more order, to dominate that which was already created, he screws it up. Realizing that he has screwed it up, he tries to fix it almost always creating even more destruction and chaos from his efforts to organize everything into straight lines, squares and perfect circles.
We’ve worked for thousands of years trying to suck as much as we can out of the chaos overcoming food scarcity, overcoming cold/heat, overcoming the need to do anything really. And I can’t help but wonder if there is divinity and there was divine inspiration for that Proverb, if this is it? That we were supposed to learn that everything was already perfect, the more we try to organize it, the more disorderly it will become and the harder it will be for man to survive.
Trust not in man or his order.
I don’t know if god exists or if (s)he doesn’t. I don’t know if the force that I see is what you could call god or maybe is what you call god. All I do know is that chaos seems to provide everything. Maybe we should try trusting it.
Peace. Love. and Revolution.
