Dawn breaks, bringing into view a cluster of cotton candy pink clouds. A lone hawk announces the new morn with a heartbreaking cry. The beginning of a brand new day is upon us. Anyone who steps foot into the mountains and valleys of Lake County can’t help but to fall in love with the land.
Throughout the late essayist and nature writer Barry Lopez’s last work, ‘Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World,’ he explained how the love of place can sustain life. Most of us can certainly relate to that comment. Lopez gave details regarding his thoughts by outlining the reciprocity that the lands put forth by sustaining us in myriad ways. The lands we love, he explained, have ways to teach us, shelter us, feed us and so much more.
Lopez spent his life trying to understand this planet we inhabit while traveling from pole to pole, winning awards such as the National Book Award for his work along the way. His journeys enriched readers as he delved into cultures in six regions of the world in some of the most extreme and desolate corners in order to present some meaning and purpose in these trying times. We can all use that.
Novelist, environmentalist, essayist and poet Wendell Berry is another writer of terra firma who expresses his true devotion to the land. He lovingly holds our attention through stories of hope and healing in the use and care of the land. He has a way of portraying the peace that the wild can deliver. It is evident in this excerpt from his book, ‘Selected Poems of Wendell Berry:
I go in pilgrimage
Across an old fenced boundary
To wildness without age
Where, in their long dominion,
the trees have been left free.
Writers such as those mentioned above, along with the twenty women nature writers cited in Outside Magazine’s January 2018 issue, including Rachel Carson, Ann Haymond Zwinger, Mary Austin, and Annie Dillard, are certainly not definitive, however, their love of the land is contagious. These writers raise our appreciation for and help us examine our view of the lands upon which we live and love, while deepening our personal connections to nature. They remind us of the ebb and flow of the world around us.
My word of the day has to be ‘geophilic’. A geophile, according to Wikipedia is ‘someone who loves the earth, sustainability or green initiatives’. We who value the landscape play the game of dot-to-dot as we connect to the sources of the natural world, its mysteries, shocks, splendor and solace that show up each day if we choose to look.
Love is where magic begins for us here in Lake County. Throughout the seasons we hold our reasons for loving the land. From spring’s luminous greens across orchards and vineyards, carpets of kaleidoscopic colors of showy wildflowers, summer visits to the sparkling and ancient gem that is Clear Lake, fall’s scarlet and golden tones that never cease to astound us, to the precious rains of winter months. We bear witness to the ongoing cycle of life that plays out in front of us with love and gratitude.
