Burning Bush Adventures

'Wilderness' has a deceptive concreteness at first glance.  The difficulty is that while the word is a noun it acts like an adjective.  There is no specific material object that is wilderness.  The term designates a quality ( as the '-ness' suggests) that produces a certain mood or feeling in a given individual and, as a consequence, may be assigned by that person to specific place.  Because of this subjectivity a universally acceptable definition of wilderness is elusive.  One man's wilderness may be another's roadside picnic... Wilderness, in short, is so heavily freighted with meaning of a personal, symbolic, and changing kind as to resist easy definition.

Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash, third edition; pub. Yale Univ. Press, 1967.

The more a person thinks of the infinite number of interrelated activities taking place throughout the natural world, the more mysterious it all becomes – the more meaning a person finds in the May blooming of the lilies, the more awestruck a person might be in simply looking out over some little patch of meadowland.

It is impossible for human intelligence to comprehend God, yet certain places may allow people to experience the necessary risk that opens them, body and soul, to what their minds cannot entertain....[l]iminal places are able, symbolically if not physically, to put people on edge, driving them beyond all efforts to control reality (and even God) by means of the intellect. (p. 65)

Belden C Lane, Solace of Fierce Landscapes; pub. Oxford Univ. Press

"I have often said that the wonder and beauty of the natural world is the only way in which we can save ourselves.  Just now we are losing our world of meaning through our destruction of the natural world wherein the divine spark speaks to us.  The more we are absorbed into our own selves, the less competent we become in our patterns of communication with the outer world.  So too the more shriveled we are in our inner world".

Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe:  Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty First Century, published by Columbia University Press, NY

If a voice from the clouds suddenly addressed me, speaking my name in trombone tones, or some angel suddenly addressed me in an aura of blue flame came floating toward me...I think I would be more embarrassed than frightened --frightened by the vulgarity of such a display.  That is what depresses me about the mysticism of Carlos Castaneda and his like:  their poverty of imagination.  As any honest magician knows, true magic inheres in the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday, the mystery of  the obvious.  Only petty minds and trivial souls yearn for supernatural events, incapable of perceiving that everything --everything! --within and around them is pure miracle.

Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road, quoted in Solace of Extreme Landscapes, by Beldan Lane.

"No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” Edward Abbey,

Desert Solitaire; McGraw-Hill

How do I share about the hidden dangers of electronic waste?  I find it hard to stare directly at this information.  I’d like to start with a meditation from Reb Nachman of Breslov- his images from a hunchback beggar that depict a little that holds a lot.  First, silence- the little that holds a lot.  Next, let’s remember the life giving land- filled with fruit trees that become dwarfed by the bounty of fruit- the little that holds a lot.  And only now do I turn to Reb Nachman’s nightmarish image of the mountain of excrement and waste- produced by one small man and his refuse- the little that holds a lot. To read the rest of this posting go to http://www.jewcology.com/content/view/The-Little-That-Holds-A-Lot