| The 1980s were a decade of despair for me...despair
brought on between the contrast between our perceptions of a prospering
economy and a peaceful world, and the reality of our growing national debt
and arms race. The worst part was that we busied ourselves fulfilling the
American Dream while we ignored the rate at which we were unraveling the
biological fabric of the planet on which we depend.
During these years I became a social activist and
then I studied meditation with the hope of creating an evolutionary change
in human consciousness. None of it seemed to help. I was burned out and
discouraged when I arrived at Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park
on a late September eening in 1988.
I rose the next morning long before the dawn to wander
up the mountain. Along the way I stopped at a pinyon pine and sat beneath
it to watch the sunrise. Then, as if the dam burst, my pain and hopelessness
poured out as I wept and pleaded for an answer. I just wanted to know what
I could do to help. I was flooded with the day's emerging sunlight when
I noticed a pinyon pinecone filled with seeds. Underneath that pine came
a simple vision of hope.
A little over a year later I found out about the
upcoming Earth Day and that one of the goals was to plant a billion trees
across the planet. I learned that the Lone Peak State Nursery had 2,500
Rocky Mountain junipers which could be purchased for $1,500. I contacted
the Salt Lake Watershed Management Department and they were enthusiastic
about planting trees on disturbed watershed sites. So letters were written
requesting money and help with planting. The project took on a life of
its own, as we also purchased 1,500 ponderosa pines.
April 21st arrived with around 400 volunteers, shovels
and water buckets in hand. We could have planted many more trees if we
had them.
In the seven years since that day, there have been
dozens of restoration efforts, planting projects, and I've also been working
with school children to help them learn how to preserve and nurture their
involvement. Through these projects and others, I have found and shared
in hope.
This hope feels untouched, untainted by dispair,
sorrow or anguish, but is present within them. Perhaps describing the bristlecone
pine could help point out what I mean: Bristlecones dwell at the very uppermost
reaches of the timberline, under the harshest of conditions, in relatively
sterile soils, punishing blizzard winds, summers of drought. They somehow
weave these almost insurmountable adversities into hauntingly beautiful
living sculptures that live for thousands of years. You can feel their
presence, their mystery, and you are left humbled.
This hope somehow weaves the harshest adversities
into visions of unimaginable beauty. This hope was in the bristlecone pine
seeds I gathered, it was in their seedlings that sprouted with the help
of friends at the State Nursery, it was present as I planted the seedlings,
and it's in the young bristlecone pine trees that have now grown from those
seedlings. This hope dwells within the land and within all life forms.
This hope is the land, and all its creatures. When we come home
to serve the land, we are graced to feel its presence. Then we remember
our relationship to the land. In this remembering, there is the re-awakening
of community, and with community comes the commitment to do the necessary
work of restoring the sacred web of life.
-- Vaughn Lovejoy, Salt Lake
City
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