Or you could take the King’s Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City.

But that is not the way I have done it, so far.

I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked.

Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back.

Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there.

I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley.

And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.”

From Jayber Crow (2000)

This one hit hard.

Yes, he leaves a legacy. I can read him anytime. Yes, he was ill and quite old, so maybe it was something of a release to be set free from the curse of disease to the peace of wild things, but my heart breaks all the same. The loss of a beloved teacher leaves one feeling adrift, unmoored. But maybe, he says, it’s okay (maybe even preferred) to feel that way.

What did he teach me? I am remembering a big Kansas hay barn where a hundred of us, farmers, poets, conservationists, sat listening to him read an essay on building community around love for the land - love enough to be dangerous, love enough to gladly accept the risk of defending it.

He taught us how to see the world while wandering in it, to have no destination in mind. He taught us how to rejoice in being contrary and what it is to mourn the loss of connectedness to the natural world.

Wendell, who signed his letters and emails “your friend,” taught us why it is important for the human soul to embody Creation in word and work, how we are all related - creature, tree, river, child - kith and kin. Friends All.

Wendell leaves us with all the questions. Where to from here? How are we supposed to feel? What are we to do with what we have to make the most of this all too human encounter in this time and place?

When the first Audubon print on canvas arrived in the midst of a tornadic thunderstorm, I dashed outside to catch the flat cardboard box swirling around the porch. Already soaked through, the package nearly ripped open in my hands as I grabbed it from the wind.

“What just happened?!” the wide-eyed Passenger Pigeon seemed to say as I carefully pulled cardboard and plastic away from the wet canvas. Thunder rocked the house. John James Audubon’s painted portrait of the bird with its rich plum-colored breast and grey-blue nape shimmered in the green atmospheric light that signaled a tornado was forming.

I did not run to the safest part of the cabin. Instead I sat with the canvas, carefully drying its front and back, meditating on the spiritual and physical meaning of extinction. Seemed like a logical thing to do at the time as tornado alarms blared from my phone and computer.

To meditate on one’s own end is hard enough, but to sit with the extinction of an entire species once so common in our great grandparents time, it was harder still to think these birds in their billions could ever just disappear.

The story of how the Passenger Pigeon became extinct is well known. I’ve told it over and over to students in my conservation management classes, to public audiences, at conferences and workshops. It goes without saying it was all our fault and much of what was done could have been avoided by thinking differently about our responsibility towards the environment.

It wasn’t as if some didn’t try to stop it, just that by the time the great dwindling flocks had been half reduced by habitat loss and mast-bearing woodlands had been harvested, commercial hunting arrived on the scene made easier with the coming of the railroad. But, it was already too late.

As I held the canvas in my hands, admiring Audubon’s work (knowing that he shot the birds he painted and used their prepared skins as models) I sank even deeper into the story as a prayer began to form around the words written by Aldo Leopold. “I will remember the living wind.”

Memories take on new meaning as events of the present blend with layers of the past, personal experiences, experiences of place and time lived by our ancestors.

In 2014, I stood with colleagues and friends at the rededication of a historic plaque erected in 1947 on a bluff overlooking the Wisconsin River. It commemorated the killing of the last wild Passenger Pigeon in Wisconsin in 1899. This killing happened at a time when the first of ideas of ecology (the science of relationships between living things and their ecosystems) were just beginning to challenge utilitarian conservation science which itself was forming in response to the nationwide devastations of industrial exploitation of land and waters of the 19th century.

It would be another twenty years and a World War later that ecological thinking would truly infiltrate conservation sciences to include changing relationships to wild predators, prioritizing goals for multi-species diversity restoration, and developing strategies based upon eco-centric stewardship.

The rededication ceremony included a revised reading of Aldo Leopold’s essay “On A Monument to a Pigeon” read to the crowd by Dr. Stanley Temple. Near the end of the reading I looked out over the wide braided Wisconsin River. Two generations ago people would have gathered on this bluff to watch rivers of Passenger Pigeons in their darkening flocks descend into the oak-beech-chestnut woodlands for evening roosts and to feed on their nomadic wanderings.

When Dr. Temple finished his reading, the crowd assembled there stood silent. From the top of the 500-foot bluffs we could hear wind stirring in the treetops across the valley where the Wisconsin and the Missouri converge. Clouds began to dim the sky the way flocks once dimmed the sun. The bird is gone.

I am back in my kitchen emerging from memories mixed with the sensation of flight, blending of silence and breath and a brightening sky. Emotions began to bubble and churn and with a few tears I placed my hand over the canvas. “All dry,” I said matter-of-factly. “I’m glad I didn’t lose you this time.”

Over the next few days the rest of the prints arrived (without storms) and I assembled them on the kitchen table. I sat with all of them, this small sample of animals extinct in Pennsylvania. Carolina Parakeets. Red Wolves and Fox Squirrel. Eastern Cougar and Eastern Elk. Wood Bison and Heath Hen. Some like the Red Wolf cling to life in North Carolina (with our help) while extirpated in PA in the 1890s. There are rumors of the Cougar’s returning to North Central PA and sightings of the big cat have increased in number and credibility. This gives me hope.

I revisited Wyalusing State Park a few years later while attending a conference about Aldo Leopold in Baraboo. I was with a friend from the conference. We stood in silence as we had five years before.

“Do you remember,” Alison asked, “at the end of his reading Dr. Temple asked a few questions? I wrote them down in my notebook, here.”

She thumbed through her well-worn travel notebook to the pages where she wrote thoughts and quotes during the day of the rededication. I noticed a little pigeon sketch in the lower corner of the page.

“If we had acted in time to save the passenger pigeon, could we have then coexisted with it in the modern world? Or would we have switched from killing them for commodity to killing them for the damage they could do to crops or other reasons of general nuisance?” (Temple)

Is extinction the inevitable outcome of our age, the Anthropocene? The last Passenger Pigeon on Earth died in captivity in 1914. “Who could have imagined?” a shocked American public cried.

Do the stories of extinction of species like the Passenger Pigeon serve as landmarks in our own human pilgrimage to reconcile with nature?

Indeed, the end of the Passenger Pigeon triggered the start of a new conservation movement in America. The Audubon Society was among the first among those groups to form for purpose of pressuring state and federal agencies to enact serious conservation policy. Their efforts helped reverse the trend of decline among dozens of other North American bird species.

The end of the Passenger Pigeon marked the end (for the most part) of the American environmental belief in an infinite nature, too big to fail. It ushered in an era of commemoration, a public longing and mourning for lost animals as victims of American industrial scale expansion and exploitation.

American Bison were immortalized on American currency, architecture, and art. The Great Egret was made the Audubon Society’s iconic symbol for bird and habitat conservation, still universally recognized. Monuments were erected to the memory of an American wilderness and its lost inhabitants, icons of extinction.

Many of these animal monuments have become destinations to those walking environmental or ecological pilgrimages, just as religious pilgrims walk to shrines and temples. My visit to the Wyalusing monument was exactly that as I wandered all over Wisconsin that summer visiting important sites of conservation history.

I sat with the prints for a while longer, feeling privileged to have them on my kitchen table before they get passed along to our marketing team for framing and wiring. As another storm rolled in and the lights flickered and went out, I lit a candle and placed it at the center of the table.

A heavy downpour pounded on the cabin’s metal roof. This was the sound of a million Passenger Pigeons passing over, wrote tribal leader Simon Pokagon, “ a thundering of wings.” (Patawatomi) The flickering light brought life to the eyes of the lost animals.

Notes:

“The Passenger Pigeon: How the Most Numerous Bird on Earth Became a Memory” Commonplace Fun Facts -a good telling worth your reading time.

Greenberg, Joel (2014) “A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction”

In a Tree of Life scenario, the destruction of a grove of 300-year-old old Arizona Freemont Cottonwoods to build a segment of double border wall represents the socio-ecological collapse of entire ecosystems and the human communities integrated into the cottonwood prairie landscape. Activists like tree sitters and demonstrators who block heavy equipment use the predicament of the old trees to create powerful symbolism to communicate the severity of crimes against nature.

Dendrolatry is the veneration of trees. Associated globally with ideas of fertility, rebirth, and immortality, pilgrimage to sacred trees builds powerful connections to the non-human world for both individuals and societies. Here, the surviving cottonwood, the last of the old grove, is now venerated, decorated, and physically protected by human bodies.

This current situation has ancient roots, themes that echo back through time.

The Bishnoi of Rajasthan in north-western India celebrate their 500-year history as Indian’s first environmental movement with annual pilgrimage to Mukam in the Thar Desert to honor the memory of Maharaja Jambheshwar (1451-1536). They pay tribute at the tree where he preached after many days of walking through the scrub desert, the shady place where he announced how people should live with nature and not against it.

Jambheshwar’s Twenty-Nine Principals inspired the formation of the Bishnoi sect, a faith tradition that blends Hindu and Muslim practices and centers upon environmental spiritualism as the tie that binds. Bishnoi make pilgrimage to Mukam to participate in prayer, tree veneration, communal meals, and the tending of sacred fires. As a researcher of ecological pilgrimage, I find the Bishnoi walk one of the most powerful examples.

There is an element of sacrifice associated with ecological pilgrimage, whether strictly symbolic, based in past events, or brought about by current circumstances. Sacrifice and martyrdom in defense of nature is a common thread but so is the sacrifice of land or other-than human beings to the vices of humanity such as greed, capitalism, colonialism, and war. There may also be an element of endangerment associated directly with the pilgrim who may be taking physical risks to carry a message/prayer/plea for the defense of nature.

The Bishnoi pilgrimage incorporates the veneration of guru and holy Khejri trees as well as mournful recognition of the massacre of over 350 Bishnoi women and men who sacrificed themselves at the hands of heavily armed soldiers, ordered to cut down a Khejri forest in order to build a lavish new palace for the minister. Led by environmental protestor Amrita Devi in 1730, family after family refused to allow the soldiers access to the community forest and offered their lives in place of the Khejri trees. Dozens of villages emptied out, all walking to the site of the ongoing massacre and offering themselves in peaceful resistance, elders followed by mothers followed by children. The soldiers killed anyone and everyone who stepped forward in protest and by the time the minister had learned of and angrily ended the killings, 368 Bishnoi had been murdered.

Amrita Devi and the Bishnoi Forest Martyrs inspired the 20th century Chipko Movement, a community-led forest defense group spread throughout Northern India, still active today. Annually, the Indian Government awards the prestigious Amrita Devi Bishnoi National Wildlife Protection Award while September 11 is the national day of observance for Forest Martyrs Day. The idea of “tree huggers” comes from the Bishnoi and the term is often used negatively against people with environmental concerns.

I cannot tell you how often I am called a tree hugger in a way meant to be derogatory but I thank them for it, happy to represent a long history of forest defenders.

While the Bishnoi practice of environmental defense and advocacy has been a feature of their faith tradition for 500 years, the pilgrimage serves to strengthen participant’s commitment to their environmental ethics in a time when modern threats to natural resources in their homelands of Rajasthan have increased exponentially. At the same time global recognition of sacred groves and trees has increased as huge economic, political, and climatic pressures are placed on forested landscapes. As conservation movements, Bishnoi pilgrimages and the Chipko “tree hugging” actions inspired by them provide a model for concerned communities around the world. Pilgrimage can be employed as both religious observance and environmental activism. Cultural stewardship ethics are shared and reaffirmed by people in the face of increasing environmental threats.

As I finished Martin Goodman’s excellent book My Head for A Tree (2025) this week, I had to sit back and think about what it takes to move people towards defense of an ecosystem or to protect non-human member(s) of a socio-ecological community. The idea of an environmental movement - a call to move - spurred by a single event or current concern hangs heavy in the air in this country in this moment.

Kate Scott, who watches over the surviving old-growth Freemont cottonwood has named the tree Grandmother. She gives lots of attention to getting the word out that Grandmother is the last tree standing after an assault of tree removal equipment scoured the San Raphael valley border wall site in her community of Lochiel. Her voice, the kin-making of the tree, and the ongoing, increasing threat have created an informal but steady pilgrimage of concerned people to Southeast Arizona who want to bear witness to the destruction with the Grandmother tree to be venerated. Naming the tree as a relative has engendered a mutual concern for the safety of all plants, animals, and springs of the region. A tree sit protest, campground for protesters and pilgrims, and an aid station have developed on the high elevation prairie.

Like the story of entire villages coming to the defense of Khejri trees as Amrita Devi gave her life, communities up and down the valley converge on the Grandmother Cottonwood. They are even coming from the UK, Germany, Canada, and South Korea. Many of these pilgrims come from places where environment is part of culture, a long past of spiritual connection with nature as family.

People take turns sitting in Grandmother’s branches. Others form human barriers around her to protect against oncoming trucks and heavy equipment. Meals are cooked and served. People sing and tell stories and stand together.

I wondered if the border wall construction with its heavily armed soldiers and destructive machines, misguided king and power-hungry minister, isn’t something of an echo of the Bishnoi movement that holds that trees are more than things to be used up, exploited and gotten rid of. I pray there will be no martyrs.

Thank you, dear readers, for your support and patience! As I cram as much work as I can into these last few months before retirement, it seems like I’ve let off the gas pedal for this blog. But rest assured that once I am on the road doing this pilgrimage thing (walking, research, practice) once full time work (x 2) is off my plate, I’ll be more attentive to this project. There is so much to do. So many stories to tell. In the meantime, get out there and walk to a favorite tree, give it a hug, sit a while, write about it, take a nap.

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The Forbes Road stretched 200 miles west from Carlisle. Along this route a chain of stockaded forts was constructed in which to base supplies, gather troops, and secure lines of communications. Fort Ligonier and Fort Bedford, along with Fort Loudon, Fort Shippen, Fort Dewart (redout), Carlisle Fort, and Fort Juniata were constructed from the materials the wilderness provided. It was a build it as you go operation.

By November 1758, Fort Duquesne at the Forks fell to the British just months after Fort Ligonier was built. It had served its purpose as a staging area for the final push into French-held territory. The war ended in 1763 and by March 1766 Fort Ligonier was abandoned.

Over time abandoned forts all along Forbes Road were scavenged for materials by settlers and townspeople and the sites built or farmed over. Physical remains of Fort Ligonier, however, were never lost even as the town closed in around its trenches and crumbling remains of its buildings and walls.

With years of careful archeology beginning in the 1930s, the community rallied around the idea that maybe the fort could be rebuilt and serve as a living reminder of the events and people who contributed to the history of the war. The fort was rebuilt over decades and a museum constructed - very impressive!

Fort Ligonier is a treasure, a fine example of long-term commitments to community-based historic preservation. Despite its original purpose of serving as a temporary staging area for a specific military action, the fort today is a permanent fixture of living history. After touring the fort with my friend who lives nearby (and is a member) we sat in on a museum talk about a recent archeological discovery regarding the friendly fire incident involving the young British-American officer, George Washington. I love how archeology helps us tell our stories.

General Forbes may well have imagined a victory over the French because of the financial support that made possible his road and an impressively large military force. He may have shared the excitement for expanded British Colonies that would add wealth and power to the British Empire. But as I have learned on this series of forays into the landscapes of the French and Indian War, imagination is certainly needed today for finding remains on and in the land.

As you walk up the paved walkway to enter the fort, a narrow strip of granite edging stone crosses the path. It reads ‘Forbes Road.’ It couldn’t get any easier, I thought, when there’s a helpful marker.

If I can actually find a long track of wagon ruts to hike, it’s my lucky day. More typically, however, I have to start my search with historical sources, journal descriptions from the day including old maps. I arrive to a site thinking I have done my best to identify the visible landscape but I find more times than not that the land holds its story well out of sight.

Finding 18th century British forts has been somewhat easier than finding the military roads even though most are long gone. Were it not for historical markers I would never had found Fort Shipp the footprint of which is buried beneath a residential street in Shippensburg. Carlisle Fort is somewhere in the area of the main streets of Carlisle, but exactly where is still a mystery.

Landscape archeology has taught me to read the lumps, bumps, ruts, and swales and using landscape assessment technology helps ground truth my finds. I used a combination of satellite and LiDAR to find the Forbes Road and small redout Fort Dewart built atop the Allegheny Front. Google Maps has been helpful for tracing the overlay of both Forbes and Braddocks Road with modern highways. What a great excuse for driving sections modern Rt. 30/ Lincoln Highway or old Rt. 40 to discover 18th century taverns and ordinaries still standing along the way, though it can be still be like looking for ghosts in a fog.

Exploring reconstructed Fort Ligonier was definitely not a ghost hunt. It is downright monumental as far as wilderness forts go. Walking around the interior and looking over the bastions, I thought my first encounter with French and Indian War history on my foray along the Ohio River in Illinois. I remembered the conversation I had with one the state park ranger interpreters and one the questions I was left with (that started this present journey) “Who tells the story and who listens?” As Becky and I clambered down the steep stone steps original to the powder magazine, I wondered about the passion the town of Ligonier has for this place. In a dark corner of the subterranean bunker, looking several feet down at a preserved archeological dig pit, Becky explained that the history of that passion is as interesting as the fort itself.

“It goes beyond the patriot’s story and the mythology of what would become the American Revolution in these parts” she said, “and becomes more about being able to relate to the everyday lives of the people who built and maintained the fort as well as the common soldiers who quartered here then marched out to fight in the final push against the French in Pennsylvania. The fort represents the stories of the people who stayed behind to build the town and the stories of local folks who invested in preserving and rebuilding the site.”

We stopped to talk to a period-dressed interpretive volunteer who turned out to be an experimental archeologist whose questions included how defensive walls were built and maintained with the roughest of materials local to the site. He has several college students, history and archeology majors working alongside him during demonstration weekends and everyone is charged with engaging directly with visitors. “Making and applying mud and daub, hauling everything in handcarts, digging with period-style spades and tools,” he said, “Everyone gets involved and everyone helps add something to the questions we have.”

Everyone gets dirty, hot and sweaty. No privileged officer class here. The folks who helped build the fort may have been the same folks who stayed on after the war to build the town and the settler culture that surrounded it. “You have to do it to understand the reasons why they did it the way they did. I don’t doubt that buried in the walls of some of Ligonier’s oldest structures are walls made just like this that have stood the test of time.”

We visited a washer woman scrubbing linen shirts and aprons. She explained the process of removing the dirt and grime and sometimes blood that camp folks would have need of removing and whose job it was to heat the wash water over fires, who made and used the lye and soaps, and who repaired the rips and tears. Young women received the brunt of the work and often endured the pain of chemical burns (lye) and scalding, she said.

I looked up from her demonstration site to see a line of laundry stretched across a yard, waving in the late summer breeze on the modern residential street just outside the fort. Unlike many historic sites that sit outside the realm of everyday modern life, segregated - even disembodied - from daily experience, Fort Ligonier is embedded in the living town.

The life stories of the fort’s first builders and civilian settler inhabitants are embodied in the real life townsfolk of Ligonier, one of the roots of passion that rebuilt and maintain the historic site today. No ghosts.

Where the great British fort once stood is now a quiet backyard park hidden down a side alley behind a busy main street in town. A reproduction timber palisade stands for a short stretch interrupted by a walkway with steps down to the river front. At the bottom you turn left along the walking path and follow the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River and soon you’ll come to another reproduction - a large 1958 log-built blockhouse that is the Fort Bedford Museum.

We were greeted inside by an enthusiastic volunteer who proclaimed it was the season for being open every day now that Memorial Day Weekend is here. Camping at nearby Shawnee State Park, this fort visit had been on my to-do list as I continue to put together my understanding of the extent of French and Indian War actions in Pennsylvania, the war before the Revolution.

The museum helped explain the progression and presence of the British military presence as it built and followed the Forbes Road from supply bases in the east to the French Fort Duquesne (which became Fort Pitt) at the Forks of the Ohio in the west.

England’s massive investment began in 1757 with William Pitt (soon to be British Prime Minister) who managed funds from London. This investment ensured that military actions followed his vision of empire and military superiority in America, a turning point for the war against France after a bloody, disappointing year of failed military engagements. With money pouring into the effort, the two-pronged ground war was fed by supply lines on the Braddock and Forbes Roads that enabled a well provisioned British Army to sweep into the western wilderness. In 1758 Fort Bedford grew quickly from a small encampment along the river to a sizeable star-shaped palisaded fort with multiple stock and store buildings, troop barracks, and blockhouses. The town of Bedford eventually grew into and over the Fort once the war had been won and the land secured.

Pitt’s investment in the American theater of the global Seven Years War signaled not just a turning point in the fight between two world powers for colonial claims to land and people, it also cemented the notion of money as empire and the critical role of economic drivers, debt and taxation, and regional trade routes. The economics of this war set the stage for the American Revolution.

I’ve just begun a deep dive into the concept of capitalism, war, and imperialism and have a few books lined up for summer reading that no doubt will challenge some of the myths of our country’s founding. Just a chapter into Andrew David Edward’s brilliant new perspective Money and the Making of the American Revolution (2025) and I’m looking at the Forbes and Braddock Roads supply lines with a new angle for revolutionary economic history.

As Fort Bedford and its beautiful little town come once again to the forefront of our nation’s history, I wondered what the economic impact of all those American history pilgrims (like us) will have on this place. New exhibits were going in as well as new lighting. A summer’s worth of events and programs were planned. A Semiquincentennial is no small thing!

As the volunteer docent offered a quick overview of all the summer’s events in Bedford to mark the 250th, my eye kept returning to the map display that showed the linkages of forts and roads, many of which have transitioned over the centuries to bustling towns and cities as well as interstate highways and railroad routes as our country continued to grow in economic might.

I was also drawn to an original British Red Ensign that hung over the main hall of the museum, mentally readjusting how I thought about the economic symbolism of that flag (thanks to Edwards) and the imperial powers that Pitt unleashed into the American Colonies with his huge infusion of money for the war effort. It would have to be paid back, he promised his creditors, thus the first flames of revolution began to flicker a decade before the War for Independence.

The shift from private finance to the public burden to repay forged the core of the argument over taxation without representation. The financing of the French and Indian War became problem of collecting the debts that Pitt had accrued. Katie Moore writes in her book, Promise to Pay: The Politics and Power of Money in Early America (2024), “Military aims - not market forces - informed when and how colonial governments issued paper currencies.” This, she argues, contributed directly to the consolidation of British control over the Colonies and the expansion of capitalism, colonial resistance, and slavery with those first flames emerging.

Added to my understanding of how the French and Indian War fanned the flames of independence is the revelation that nothing is really new, but the kings may be different.

Following an old road to see where it goes is an exercise in paying attention. The track appears then fades into earth or development only to re-emerge miles away as a walking path or back alley. Here in the U.S. what old roads we do have come and go like our attention for noticing them.

I’ve hiked old Roman roads in Spain and England, rambling in awe of their antiquity and preservation (or loss). I’ve followed centuries-old drovers ways and cart paths in Scotland and Wales for days on end. In Europe, I’ve walked ancient pilgrimage routes and even followed prehistoric game trails for hundreds of miles.

Whether walking in the imprint of herds or in the wheel ruts of Celtic chariots and peat wagons following old roads where you can find them is addictive and fascinating. It is a bit like time travel where one must use both navigational skills and imagination.

On a recent camping trip to Shawnee State Park near Bedford, PA, the site of an impressive 18th century palisaded British fort, I encountered the Forbes Road. One of two major military roads built by the British Army to connect the Susquehanna Valley with the (then) contested wilderness lands of the Ohio Valley, the Forbes Road emerges and disappears like a portal into a different time. There are plenty of clues on the landscape that should inform us of its presence but in these times there are so few people searching it out, ignored or erased from memory. To find it (and know what it is) can be a real treat for the history buff armed with navigational tools and old maps.

The sections within the park are exactly a wagon’s width from rut to rut but the lake nearby is distractingly beautiful that the old military road often goes unnoticed. Standing on its rolling treadway, I imagined the crack of axes against old oak and hickory trunks but soon I was drawn towards the sound other hikers talking loudly, checking their phones, dogs barking, traffic.

I met a older hiker once during a winter hike in Forbes State Forest and he lamented the fact that the old Forbes Trail which he did annually with his troop of Boy Scouts in the 1960-70s no longer exists. “It followed the old road pretty well and it was a great experience to hike as a pilgrimage to our pre-Revolutionary history. I’m sad to say that trail is all gone now.”

I lament the present and future cost of not experiencing the stories of walking this old road. Granted, there’s not much of it left to walk, but I lament the loss of stories anytime they fade from recent memory, especially the disappearances of the places that hold them. This road holds for contemplation the stories of indigenous encampments, Indian footpaths, and invasions of settlers. It holds the tales of its building and the forts that were constructed alongside as soldiers moved into and through the Ridge and Valley, the Appalachian Mountains, and up the steep wall of the Allegheny Front.

The pace of life today outruns the slow progress of carving a wilderness road from the forest by hand. Fast cars and trucks zip past the trailhead. Hikers faster than me breeze by recording their step count on fitness watches or zip along on e-bike when the old road blends with the lake loop trail that encircles the huge reservoir.

Even in the short discontinuous sections of walking Forbes Road within the park, I felt myself fractured for attention. I’m quickly overstimulated by how reliant I’ve become on my phone for using the various apps that allow me to identify and record my plant and animals observations. The lightening fast relay of digital information and the dominance of small screen interaction during this short hike overrides my relationship with the old road.

I’m not out to suffer publicly the woes of the digital age for all of us. Its my own distraction I rant against. I want to be present for the road. I want to be able to hear its stories, to feel them under my feet. I feel disoriented and disconnected from what I love most about intentional walking, the sojourners space. What to do?

“Talk of mysteries - think of our life in nature - daily, to be shown matter, to come in contact with it - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” - Henry David Thoreau

“When the Civil War began in 1861, Barton quit her job and made it her mission to bring supplies to Union soldiers in need—among them, men of the 6^th Massachusetts Infantry. This started a life-long career of aiding people in times of conflict and disaster…”

- from the Clara Barton Biography page, National Women’s History Museum

“Who the heck was Clara Barton?” asked a young cyclist upon reading the large white marble monument with a group of friends. The only woman of the group of 20-something guys pulled up the bio (above) and began reading aloud. After her cyclist friends got their answer, off they went to continue their ride while she was left petting my dog. “Quick history I guess. I thought everybody learned about Clara Barton in elementary school.”

With that, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a coin, placing it at the base of the Clara Barton monument at Antietam National Battlefield. “I earned a merit badge in Girl Scouts by writing a report on Clara Barton then reading it to my fifth grade class,” she said. “Can you imagine the decisions she had to make when she got here? How to organize the wounded? Where to put the dead? How did she decide what she had to do?”

I imagined Clara arriving at Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 16, 1862, with barely enough space in the little town to contain the large wagon train she’d brought with her. She moved on to the Poffenberger Farm the next morning as battles commenced between Union and Confederate forces spread out across the undulating valley farmland at Antietam. During the height of the battle, along with her volunteer corpsmen and their mule-drawn wagons loaded with supplies for field hospitals, her immediate presence on the battlefield inspired both soldiers and residents of the countryside.

Near the Poffenberger Farm were 8,200 casualties North and South combined that lay about or struggled to leave the 24-acre cornfield that had been engaged in frightful combat since the early morning hours. This battlefield, one of six sights of heavy engagement at Antietam, is known today as The Cornfield.

Before rifles had even ceased their firing, corpsmen began to collect the wounded. Fencerows were set up to support tents to shield soldiers from the blazing autumn sun as they awaited triage. Clara Barton coordinated their care, ordered camp materials and medical supplies brought to aide stations and multiple field hopsitals assembled in the barn, farmhouse, and outbuildings. She assigned teams of nurses and medics to assist where needed the most. She arranged rest for the doctors and found their replacements.

Her decisions were based on a prioritized system for immediate, short term and long term care for Union survivors. For the dead and dying, she organized parties of aides to collect their identities and personal effects for transport home or for local burial.

Joining Barton in the days following the bloodiest day of the American Civil War were fifty nuns from the Catholic Daughters of Charity in nearby Emmitsburg, Maryland, as well as a hundred women serving as nurses and relief workers from the Ladies Relief Society of the U.S. Sanitary Commission from Washington D.C. When Lee invaded Pennsylvania again at Gettysburg the following year, 300 Daughters of Charity and a thousand women from the U.S. Sanitary Commission were on that battlefield within hours of the first skirmish applying the same triage decision-making system developed by Barton at Antietam.

As I walked a ten-mile circuit at Antietam on this early spring day, I thought deeply about the kinds of decision-making that take into, through, and out of war. The current situation with our country and Iran heavy on my mind, I thought about what kinds of considerations (if any) are added to the weight of making decisions about waging war. There is nothing more frightful than considering the fact that you may make the wrong choice no matter the situation, but war hits differently. Who hasn’t been so frightened of making an important decision that you wind up making no decision at all? The regret and inability to forgive oneself for a poor or no decision may persist over a lifetime and, in the end, serve to dismantle a person’s feeling of having lived a meaningful life. These conditions existed throughout the day at the Battle of Antietam.

On the scale of deciding life or death, Barton’s choosing to get involved at all in battlefield medicine was a choice made beyond herself, above any fear she might have harbored for leaving behind forever the comforts and certainties of life up to that moment. She was an extremely shy person but with regards to war and the needs of battlefield relief, she followed her calling to serve those in need. She exuded confidence and conviction even as those around her floundered with what to do.

At Antietam, Barton witnessed the horrors of indecision on the battlefield and in the field hospitals. She watched it throughout her work to establish the Red Cross in response to wars and disasters occurring all over the world. Painfully, she wrote, she had witnessed important world leaders fail to deliver on promises to end their wars with reasons based on such vainglorious efforts as to uphold the ego’s fragile facade while men died on fields of battle to so. Barton did not allow her decisions to become themselves battlefields of second guessing or non-action, colossal impediments lack of willpower.

Clara Barton chose as her life’s work to help the deeply wounded world.

Barton was no mystic. She did not envision heaven or hell or any of their mysteries nor did she have any religious association to ground her sense of duty to God or spiritual tradition, though later in life she would associate with the Christian Science movement. Her fervent commitments as a young nurse/organizer flowed from an inborne aversion to war and the human wreckage it caused.

But for those who worked with her during their many engagements in the American Civil War claimed that at the heights of battlefield confusion and suffering, she seemed electrically charged with a sense of pragmatic purpose that others came to depend on. If anything, Barton exhibited “a fierce protection over her aides and nurses” that “outshone her pragmatic nature. It inspired her network of brothers and sisters in care to do extraordinary work in the face of the most severe adversities. “ (Pfanz, 2022)

She was no saint, either. She proved a difficult person to work with. For all of her later administrative work forming the Red Cross, the post-war years garnered Barton harsh criticisms. That determined decision-making of the war years? It morphed into authoritarianist tendencies over the ideas and process for developing her international aid groups that drove many supporters away. Controversy and accusations over mismanagement followed her every decision on how to grow and maintain an international organization. As she grew older her penchant for exaggeration and self-promotion obscured her mission. She was furiously steadfast, even onery, when declaring her decisions final and unquestionably correct.

Still, I wondered as I walked edge of Antietam Creek towards Burnside Bridge, the weight of decision-making in this place at that time must have been like for any other soul. It must have been unbearable, paralyzing. I picked up a small stone along the edge of the creek as Amos waded and sipped its cold waters.

As I looked down at the waters flowing towards the bridge, the site of one of the most heartrending battles on the field that day, I considered the decisions made by every officer and infantryman whether to advance, retreat, or hold one’s ground.

I walked where 800 men fell in a see-saw battle across the deck of the stone arch bridge over the creek, then up the farm road and past the Otto Farm where some of the most brutal back-and-forth rearguard action took place and 3600 casualties combined lay wounded, dead, or dying. Union General Burnside decided his brigades had suffered so much loss that to continue on, even while holding the upper hand, was senseless. He called withdraw from the field of engagement. Every foot of hard won ground was lost as the U.S. pulled back and the Otto Farm fell again into Confederate hands. A decision so difficult, so counter to the flow of progress towards routing the enemy, Burnside was criticized for the rest of his life for having prolonged the engagement for so many more hours and that cost both sides many, many more lives.

The Otto Family, members of the German Brethren Dunker Church and the scene of brutal fighting at dawn in at the West Woods, would later rebuild and forgive hungry, desperate Confederate soldiers their rampages upon the farm in search of food and loot, but not every family could or would find forgiveness in the ruins of their farms. The wreckage of looted farmhouses, butchered livestock, and the loss of fields ready for harvest were devastating for local farmers.

I noted that only those farmers whose properties suffered damages caused by U.S. forces received small compensations while those whose properties or livestock loss were caused by Confederate forces received nothing. Jotting notes in my field journal from the placards and signs felt obligatory and urgent. Let no one forget, I thought, the aftermath of war and its own brand of suffering.

The afternoon was heating up on this mid-March day. As I topped the hill with the best view into Sharpsburg and not a little knackered, Amos and I sat down on a low stone wall to rest in a shady spot under some red cedars. In the scant mile between that hilltop and the town the scene of the final battle of Antietam unfolded. The final push to run the Confederates off the field and back across the Potomac into Virginia occurred from here from mid-afternoon until dark. The battle fizzled at sundown, however, with no clear victory as Union forces withdrew again and Confederates walked through town and filtered down through the woods and bluffs to the river crossing unharried. The final day’s battle left over 12,500 combined casualties. Barton and her teams of surgeons, nurses, and aides arrived during the night to begin hospital work and assessments of the human toll.

As with every major battle of that day, win-or-lose military outcomes were indecisive at best. This contrasted with battlefield organization of field hospitals and relief aid stations, most of them directed by Barton and her staff with rapid response efforts which seemed in hindsight to be the most assured actions of the entire campaign.

I returned to the truck with a tired coonhound who quickly spread himself out in the backseat to rest. I drove back to the monument at the Poffenberger Farm and laid my little creek stone at the base, thinking of how times have changed and how they haven’t in matters of war and peace. I thanked Clara Barton for giving me such inspiration of thought on our ten-mile hike and remembered her for those attending to the casualties and aftermath of war today.

Notes:

“Women at Antietam” https://www.nps.gov/anti/learn/historyculture/women-at-antietam.htm

Donald Pfanz (2018) Clara Barton’s Civil War: Between Bullet and Hospital https://www.westholmepublishing.com/book/clara-bartons-civil-war-donald-c-pfanz/

My sister had a heart attack at 60 last fall. My brother had a serious heart attack in his late 40s twenty years ago. It nearly killed him. I’ve outlived both parents and knew I was potentially next in line for a cardiac event. My sister’s cardiologist recommended that all of us, siblings and children, get screened for Lp(a).

Lp(a) has nothing to do with diet or lifestyle choice. Recent genetic studies revealed that 1-in-5 people (dear readers, this includes you) carry the damaged code for the protein pump with no off switch. When, in the last decade, research finally linked Lp(a) to family histories that included sudden cardiac death and stroke, the genetic condition was moved to forefront of inherited heart disease drug trials to develop new mRNA treatments that will rewrite the genetic code for that bad switch.

So nervously but super curious, I went to see a cardiologist and asked for a screening. It’s just a simple blood test to see if you have the Lp(a) marker/ number but you have to ask for it - it’s not part of a standard blood panel, yet.

Turns out I have very high Lp(a) and the doctor wasted no time. “It’s a good thing you came in for this screening, “ he said. “You are very lucky.” Soon I had a whole cardiac team! They moved fast.

In a whirlwind of CT scans, more blood work, and an interventional heart catheter to prevent an immanent heart attack, there is now the promise of future attention to my liver (work on that faulty protein pump) with one of the new mRNA drugs that will be available either at end of this year or next (2027). In the meantime I count myself very, very lucky indeed.

While I was lying very still following my heart cath procedure I noticed a little blue plush toy sitting on the nurse’s computer table where she monitored all my vitals. “Who is that?” I asked my nurse.

“Oh, that’s Herman. He’s a lucky water dragon. Do you want to hold him?” Of course I did. I could only use my left hand, however, because my right arm was all bound up with a pressure pad, tubes, tape, and IVs. “Is he yours?”

“No, I’m taking him around while his mom is having her procedure done. She’s pregnant and very nervous and he’s her good luck dragon. She told me not to leave him alone in the empty room next door. She said to have him share his good luck with others while she’s having her cath done. Do you mind watching him for a while, that way I won’t forget him.”

So I sat petting the blue water dragon for about an hour then saw through a crack in the curtain that my neighbor was returning from the operating room. I heard people saying “Well done!” and “You did great!” and “Baby is absolutely fine!” along with some tears and laughter.

“Where’s Herman?” the patient asked.

The nurse came in and thanked me for watching him. She gently wiped him down with an alcohol towelette and gave him a little touch up. She explained to the mom next door that he’d been visiting with me and I heard her voice call through the wall, “Thank you for taking such good care of Herman! I hope he’s brought you all the luck you need to live a long, happy life!”

Here’s a wonderful swimming dragon Qigong stretch and flow that I absolutely love before and after a long hike or daily walk. Herman the Lucky Water Dragon highly recommends.

Just to note - I had no symptoms of an impending heart attack but the doctor assured me it would have happened within the year if not sooner. I argued with the cardiologist that I have always eaten well. I gave him all the things - that I prefer Indian/Mediterranean cooking at home, plenty of fruit, veg, whole grains, and chicken/fish protein in moderation. I exercise with weekly hiking, and daily yoga and Tai Chi/Qigong practice. “I ride gravel and road bikes. You can never have too many bikes!”

How could a cholesterol be at the root of this? He nodded along as I protested.

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s genetic. But by doing all these things for most of your life (excluding the sedentary job I held for over ten years) you are a very healthy and very young woman in your 60s.”

He patiently explained that there are different kinds of cholesterol and this is one is not connected to anything I am doing right or wrong but what I was doing in that moment, getting screened and acting on the results as quickly as possible, was the best thing I could have ever done.

So once I stopped being mad - which I was for a few days - and just accepted the list of critical tasks that he needed me to do, he assured me that I would “live a long and adventurous life.”

I pray we as a society do not lose our capacity for outrage, even as outrageous things are happening daily, maybe hourly. More importantly our capacity to act on that outrage is critical whether it is letter writing to our elected officials, showing up at protests, or speaking up at town meetings and public hearings. Acting upon outrage is what has propelled so many into public life. The act upon outrage inspires people join peace and justice movements. A purposeful walk, the written word, a courageous voice, are ways to funnel the emotion of outrage into meaningful action.

Outrage has launched a thousand pilgrimages for peace over hundreds of years to including walking to raise awareness and show solidarity with the people who suffer the conditions of war. Pilgrims walk to bring awareness to famine, cultural and religious persecution, and environmental degradation (or the threat of it) brought about by conflict.

While walking for peace, the pilgrim is going in two different directions at once, into the inner journey and outward through the world of events and conditions. As Robert Frost said we can walk both roads as one traveler.

The recent Walk for Peace completed by a group of Buddhist monks who walked from their monastery in Texas to Washington D.C. touched the hearts of millions. They demonstrated that the journey within to find peace in the present moment is achievable while also walking 2,300 miles to reach their destination, a seat of military power and political influence capable of waging war and promoting peace at the same time. Raising awareness of both the inner quest for peace and for the outer journey to end war at home and abroad, the monk’s pilgrimage changed many of us as we traveled to meet them, listened to their teachings, or followed them on social media.

Long before there was the Walk for Peace there was Peace Pilgrim (1908-1981) who walked for peace and against the wars of her generation. She was asked what inspired her. “The war in Korea was raging and the McCarthy era was at its height. . . .There was great fear at that time and it was safest to be apathetic. Yes, it was most certainly a time for a pilgrim to step forward, because a pilgrim’s job is to rouse people from apathy and make them think.” She walked through two major American wars, Korea and Viet Nam, 28 years over 43,000 miles.

She never found the conditions for where conflict did not exist but she continued on to inspire thousands of people who met her along the way. She encouraged people to adopt the practices that allowed her to hold incarnate the inner soul journey of peace as a way to join her in the spirit of her pilgrimage. When asked about her inner journey on a local radio program, her response was so detailed, practical, and loving that the host and listeners knew that they were in the presence of a great teacher.

The transcripts of this radio program can be found here. Better yet, find a copy of her book Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words which expands on her ideas of practicing pacifism and pilgrimage.

When asked about war, Peace Pilgrim said “Among mature people war would not be a problem - it would be impossible. In their immaturity people want, at the same time, peace and the same things that make war. However people can mature, just as children grow up. Yes, our institutions and leaders reflect our immaturity, but as we mature we will elect better leaders and build better institutions. It always come back to the thing many of us wish to avoid - working to improve ourselves.”

A writer penned this tidbit on social media this morning after the president’s war declaration announcement - “The head of the Board of Peace, recipient of the FIFA Peace Prize, man at the center of a child trafficking crime ring, and who is also building concentration camps to hold immigrants and their kids, just bombed a school full of young women in Iran.” I read it twice, two directions being the operative phrase for the day I suppose, that mixes immaturity of policy and immature leadership with the hypocrisy surrounding prior stated commitments to no more war and promoting peace.

I reach for my copy of the Peace Pilgrim book and have it snuggled against me now, exercising my outrage in the best way I know for when I can’t just up and walk to Washington D.C. by writing.

It is a beautiful spring day and I should be out there but am sidelined with illness and doctor’s orders to “take it easy - nothing physical - NO exertion.” But I know that walking would be the best thing for me especially with the purposeful reason that today brings. I’ll read about Peace Pilgrim today instead and reflect on how the Walk for Peace may manifest now in the millions of people who loved the monks and their message. I wonder how many will commit to a walk of two directions.

In preparation I’d read John Dougherty’s “Madwoman or Prophet?” review in the Jesuit journal, America. I read as much as I could find on the Evangelical Revival period in England and the American Colonies. I skimmed biographies and watched too much YouTube. I felt I was as prepared for the historical context of the film as I could be but then I heard from a friend, a Methodist pastor in Texas, who explained that it was nothing I could prepare for. “It’s an experience, not a movie,” he said almost as a warning.

He wasn’t wrong.

The story of how the Shakers, an offshoot of the Quakers in England, came to the English Colonies under the guidance of “Mother” Ann Lee is the plot line. Then it goes off the rails, a weaving together of the tradition of mysticism and Christian pilgrimage into a tapestry of great cultural and religious upheaval. It echoes the mystic women’s journey throughout Christian history and offers the viewer the rawest possible glimpse of life was like for the suppression of women under patriarchy in industry, church, and society. It is not easy to watch if you have, dear sisters, ever experienced the violence of suppression for having been born female.

As I watched the film unfold in all of its physicality, choreography, and rhythmic sound I found myself lost to Doughtery’s question, “ How much of their faith comes from genuine religious encounter, and how much from the magnetic force of Ann Lee herself?”

Women mystics throughout Christianity share with the story of Ann Lee the anger of revolt against a patriarchal church that included suffering civil and religious persecutions. Her story shared with theirs the emotional and mental afflictions of the spirit, soul, and mind. The film gives us a good sound dunking in the sea of doubt. Is she a cult leader? Is she an extremist? Should we be afraid?

Amanda Seyfierd’s incredible portrayal of Ann Lee is incredible. Within minutes of being thrown into a violent encounter with her sex starved husband, I began to see parallels with the story of Margery Kempe who I’ve written about many times in this space (see Archive). Ann Lee’s escape mechanism opens into visions and the heart-wrenching desire to cast her lot to a higher power for safety and meaning.

I began to experience Lee as mystic and, like many Christian women mystics like her, witnessed through Seyfield’s performance a desire to enter the ecstatic state of release, expressed as “the vocation of a shaman not ordinarily compatible with maternity.” ( Atkinson, 1983)

As I watched Mother Ann Lee on the screen I could not help but make the comparison to Margery Kempe again and again screaming out against the horrors of their own lives trapped within the abusive patriarchal confines of Church and State, while urging for systemic change as disregarding punishment for the potential of women beyond the accepted roles of obedient domesticity and powerlessness.

The film’s consistent element of the pilgrim’s journey parallels those Christian women mystics who cast their lives to the mercies and dangers of the wind or to the exhausting trudge of an uphill road (hence the name of this blog) in order to break with tradition, cultural norms, and persecution. Endangered, the mystic enters this stage of pilgrimage’s sacred journey as entering the labyrinth to include a dangerous ocean crossing, wandering in the wilderness, and the encircling of places to call home.

Cast into the context of American history, newly established Shaker communities avoided the aim of colonial desires to be free of monarchy and King. Because of their pacifism and unwillingness to bear arms and engage in the war for independence (except to read the news of it), this element of wandering a labyrinth of wartime political and economic expectations designates the movement as outcast and suspect. Somehow and strangely (at first) working in the framework of a musical, this wandering works because it is labyrinthic as the story folds back in on itself, repeats themes, and simultaneously casts out from its outermost fringe the idea that this version of Christian faith rings truer than the nationalistic Christian vibes of then (and now.)

As “Shaking Quakers” (their formal sect title was United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing or just Believers) they were an apocalyptic utopian group believing the rapture was close at hand. Their exhaustive floor-pounding marches, shouted call-and-return prayers, and exuberant hymns provided the groundwork for this film’s rich musical soundtrack and choreography. As a radical spinoff of the Quaker faith tradition, Shakers were known for their ecstatic dances and mantra-like chants during communal worship. Contrast that to communal Quaker silent worship, you get the idea that maybe even 17th century Quakers of the time on both sides of the Atlantic thought this bunch was a little too wild for their Meetinghouses. But, if you’ve ever had the privilege to hear Shaker music sung live and in person, you’ll know it to be a true gift to the American spiritual songbook. Song and dance was so important in the Shaker quest for reunion with the Almighty that many of the group’s enduring hymns, performed so well in the film, seem like safe harbor in our storm of political and social unrest. “I Hunger and Thirst” was so exquisitely performed in the film that I could hear the tears flowing in the audience around me.

The film is packed with symbolism and myth but astonishingly so relatable to the real world we live in today, that I came away a little more mystified myself. We are told by authorities to believe otherwise and not to believe our own eyes. There are martyrs and there is mayhem and none of it seemed beyond belief considering the times we are all living in, dreamlike yet every inch of it real.

At the roll of credits the cinema audience sat stock still. There was no chatter, no comments. Not even a sniffle. All was silent as woodcut illustrations of the Shaker Communities of New England rolled along, embedded within segments of crews and international cast. Below each illustration was noted the number of members each community achieved and the final claim that only two Believers remain. Ann is gone, and so too is the Shaker movement. Or is it true that this is not be the end of the Shaker story? The sect is experiencing a revival of late. The number of avowed Shakers has risen to 3 as of last year and includes a thousand member attenders at the Sabbath Day Lake Shaker Community in New Gloucester, Maine.

I asked my pastor friend Howard (who has been to Sabbath Day Lake on retreat in 2024) why the renewed interest in the Shakers? “Because there is a revival among the American faithful for working for justice,” he said. “This is the premise of the Shaker faith - all are equal in the eyes of God. Women, men, children. All are made equal in the hands of the Creator.”

So, would I recommend you go see the Testament of Anne Lee?

Yes, if you know something of the story before you go. Otherwise you’ll be lost from the start and continuously startled as it goes along. Take my neighbor in the theater, for example. “What the hell?” she kept mumbling. “What in the actual hell am I watching?”

No, if strange films aren’t your thing. It’s not quite a story that fits neatly within our current cinematic storyline. It’s way more rebellious than trying to fit into a conventional film experience. It lingers on the edge of experimental and is indeed an experience to be felt rather than watched.

Yes, if the idea of Christian women’s mysticism and pilgrimage interests you. Think Margery Kempe fever dreaming the making of a movement and Ann Lee is one of her spiritual descendants.

No, if you can’t handle the violence of patriarchy. If you have experienced it, then you’ll get it and fit right in. If not you’ll think this is science fiction, something that can never happen in the real world. If that’s what you believe then I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you may be one of the reasons for it.

Yes, if you love the power of devotional music and symbolism and the way these two things can lift us into Light or cast us down the Pit to reconsider our life choices. Combined with the symbolism of the tree and all its forested, log building and crafting woodworking scenes, I so appreciated the scope of The Testament’s long history of religious women and its reach, a very long story indeed that spans all of Christianity as well as pre-Christian acknowledgement of the Female Divinity.

Notes:

Clarissa W. Atkinson (1983) Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. Cornell University Press.

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village The current (and last remaining) Shaker community’s website is a joy to read.

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community WBUR story on its newest and oldest avowed members.

I’ve been doing much the same. After coming home from protest marches and funeral processions, and switching off the fire hose of internet noise about all that is going wrong in our world, I return to some old stories for comfort. The story of the Three Wise Men is one of my favorites because of the way pilgrims and pilgrimage make me put the world into perspective and it teaches me how to feel grounded and safe in uncertain times. As a pilgrim and one-time-only Wise Man, I find as sense of peace in these old stories especially during times of upheaval.

I played pretty much all the parts in our Catholic school nativity plays, except for the part of Mary for whom tomboys like me were not quite the virtuous fit. My favorite part was playing a donkey in the third grade when I learned how to make big grey felt ears and attach them to white headbands with the help of Sister Ruth. She said I was very good at making things, so she assigned me the task of making all the ears for all the livestock players. I made thirty pairs of ears that year.

In third grade I was an ass and I loved it. I cocked one eyebrow up when the narrator told the Christmas story and I was like, yeah, no, that didn’t happen. I was a skeptic from early on but still loved the Christmastide stories because of how they made me feel - warm, safe, at ease even in troubling times.

This year has been a hard year to believe in much, however. My comfort stories fall short. There are riots with tear gas and rubber bullets. There are American Nazis holding once high, principled seats of democratic process and governance. There are mothers and fathers and children being torn from each other. There are the killed and their killers, murderers lifted up as victims and heroes. What would a wise man say about all of this? What advice would he give to someone like me who so desperately wants to believe there is a Light in here somewhere?

In my life I’ve participated in so many marches and rallies. I’ve marched in D.C. more times that I care to remember. I’ve walked small town sidewalks with signs, chanting slogans and singing songs. This year alone I’ve participated in as many rallies and protest events as I have in my entire life yet my heart is so heavy. I choose to practice Quaker Witness yet I look at others who have choose to remain low, even invisible, and I can almost feel that apathetic silence creep in to make me question the path of peaceful encounter and participation. Does any of this matter?

The old stories assure us that there will always be murderous kings who wage violent wars against their own people. Herod himself, a paranoid, vainglorious old man, now sits (and snoozes) in the Oval Office. There will always be a real life Herod.

There will always men who, like obedient Roman soldiers and guards, will move in lockstep to follow orders and do the king’s bidding with their violence and oppressive tactics, no matter how unethical or wrong.

There will always be The Other, the hated Other. I believe that if three Magi were to show up on the streets of the Twin Cities right now they’d be thrown to the ground, put in headlocks, pepper sprayed, kicked around, cuffed-and-stuffed, and possibly sent off to some detention center or prison camp. There will always be hated, The Other, and they will be persecuted.

It will also be true that the old stories will adapt and change as we need them to. This sometimes works for the oppressor who seeks to rewrite narratives that try to convince people to believe not what their own eyes have told them is true. It doesn’t work for long, though.

I know that humor is a proven way to fight back. What Herod doesn’t hate a satirist? Laughter can help rewrite a story, alter an outcome, even expose something or someone hiding in the back that turns out to be the remedy or cure for what ails us. Pilgrims love humor for its ability to lighten loads, correct a course, and put into perspective what feels to be a very bad situation. I’d like to believe that the Three Wise Men had a great sense of humor, especially standing before Herod who demanded to know where they find the new king. He ordered them to come back to him and make their report. They already knew that the return trip home would avoid going anywhere near the palace, one heading east, one going south, and one going west. I want to believe that their conversation after meeting Herod involved some ribbing, a few jokes, maybe a punchline that left them in stitches.

I played Melchior in fifth grade and it was only because the boy originally assigned that role, Louis, had gotten very sick with polio. The Viet Nam War was raging and our parents, witnesses to the toll the war took on our rural community, were in a dark place. Dad, an organist and mom, a choir member, had just served in yet another funeral mass for a fallen soldier. When I told them that I’d gotten the part in the play, they laughed and clapped their hands. “Good news!”

The night of our final performance arrived and everyone was there. The performance hall/cafeteria/basketball court was packed with people hungry for good news.

All I had to do, said Sister John, was stand there and hold a glittery shoebox and “look like a boy.” I wore a bathrobe with a silk scarf wrapped around my head. It was Robbie as Caspar who said our only line “We come bearing gifts for the newborn king!” Jesse, who was the only black student in the school played the part of Balthazar (every year). On the word “newborn” Balthazar was to hold out his glittery shoebox then open it. As he lifted the glittered box towards the holy family, it brushed against my silk scarf turban and stuck to it. The weight of it pulled unwound the scarf down over one eye. I looked like a pirate which I rather liked. The box tumbled to the floor right behind Michael who as Joseph who blurted out “What the hell?!”

The Virgin Mary started to giggled while Joseph bit his lower lip. The donkeys brayed and the camels threw their heads back and cackled. Caspar started to laugh but it was Balthazar who let loose. I as Melchior the Pirate laughed at Balthazar who was having such a belly laugh that he was crying. The sheep jumped up and down with glee. The shepherds slapped their thighs and banged their staffs on the stage floor. Within seconds the whole nativity scene was roaring along with Balthazar.

Families laughed while the narrator and a nun tried to reposition us and fix the scarf and shoebox. Sister Ruth jumped up and corralled her donkeys with a smile that lit up the room. “Shepherds! Come help contain the donkeys!”

Ever stoic, the Angel on her stepstool looking over the manger scene announced to the hall “It’s just a story, so this is the funny version! We roared even louder.

The Star of Bethlehem meanwhile started dancing in circles behind everyone with her silver spray-painted crown of sequins and golden tinsel wig catching the lone spotlight like a disco ball showering the hall with sparkles. The piano player began to play “Joy to the World.”

My parents said that the performance was the highlight of a dark year. Whenever we felt sad or overwhelmed in the heavy year to come, Mom or Dad would say profoundly that it was time we looked for the dancing star and we had a good laugh.

The final truth of the Three Wise Men story is that there will always be the possibility that in some version of the story humor plays a role in changing world events. It will certainly help to shift attitudes from anger to grace. Humor will also penetrate darkness like a ray of bright light.

As we followed along in a line of a hundred cars driving slowly through the shore towns of Delaware as part of the procession to honor the memory of mom and witness Renee Nicole Good, the morning’s cloudbank began to break apart spilling rays of sun that splashed across the back bays. “The star is dancing,” I thought. “Balthazar is laughing at Herod.”

In the Catholic tradition January 6 is the Feast of Saint Balthazar, who at age 112 passed from this life in 55AD on this day. He was one of the Three Magi, kings or wise men who traveled to Bethlehem to pay homage to the infant king.

Their pilgrimage was noted by King Herod who entertained the Magi briefly when they mistook Herod’s palace for the place where they would find the new king rumored to be found under the bright star appearing in the winter sky. Upon hearing their story, Herod demanded they come to him with news of this new King of the Jews on their return to their homelands. Where could he find this infant king? Who were his parents? What was his kingdom like? Did he have a palace? Did he have a throne?

Balthazar was said to be an Ethiopian raised in Babylon who returned after visiting the Holy Family to all the places that raised him to be a speaker of many languages, a student of the night sky, and a trader at one of the busiest cities along the Silk Road. A pilgrim missionary of the new faith. He did not return to Herod, but instead continued his great pilgrimage to spread the Good News.

Stories from the time of Christ’s birth say that when Balthazar returned home he immediately began to build what would become the Christian faith in Ethiopia where today the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is considered one of the earliest (and still thriving) Christian traditions.

The pilgrimage tradition of bringing gifts is as old as the hills and in Balthazar’s story we learn that he is the bringer of myrrh, a rare and expensive oil used as a burial perfume. It was known as the perfume of heaven and symbolized the cycle of birth and death and resurrection used mainly by royal embalmers for kings and queens and high priests in preparing the departed for the afterlife.

Myrrh holds a sacred place not only in the tradition of Epiphany but in the living pilgrimage traditions of Orthodox Christianity. It is still considered a gift of great spiritual wealth and healing.

Just a few hours from home here in Pennsylvania, Saint George’s Eastern Orthodox Church near Scranton, welcomes hundreds of pilgrims every Wednesday evening throughout the year to receive blessings from a myrrh-streaming icon of the Blessed Mother, Kardiotisa - The Tender Heart Icon. As the doors open to welcome pilgrims from around the world at 6pm to Saint George Church, the odor of myrrh spills out into the night. People travel to venerate the miraculous icon from around the world. It is said that veneration of the myrrh-streaming icon has cured the ill, helped the distraught find peace, and brings comfort to the traumatized.

“The gift of Balthazar,” said the pastor with whom I spoke about visiting the church sometime this month. “to the Holy Mother who passes his gift on to us. ”

The image of Balthazar has had a interesting journey of its own throughout the development of Western Christian art and it is not until the late Middle Ages that he was portrayed finally as a young Black man. By the Renaissance, painters and iconographers were presenting the Magi as a collective of cultural representations of how far Christianity had spread through Europe, Africa, and Asia. The presence of an African man - a young man of great wisdom and wealth - allowed the realm of Christianity to belong to Africa as well as Europe.

Mysteriously, Balthazar is recognized as one of the earliest pilgrim missionaries of the African Christian Church yet not recognized as a saint in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church as he is in the Roman Catholic Church. Instead he is regarded as a fabled cornerstone King of the Kingdom of Aksum (Ethiopia) who brought the gift of Christianity home.

To make it even more mysterious, Balthazar isn’t named in the Gospels. None of the Magi are. It wasn’t until 6th century Emperor Justinian commissioned a series of elaborate mosaics installed in churches in the Italian city of Ravenna that the Three Kings (all portrayed as 6th century costumed Persians) that they are given names for the first time.

It seems that maybe Balthazar and his companions are part of the living legend of Christmas not part of its verifiable history. To many critics and skeptics of the history of Christmas, the legend of the Magi is just that, one of the many piety tales that took root during Medieval times, elaborated upon as the centuries passed, much like the Tales of King Arthur and even Santa Claus/Saint Nicholas.

Yet the Book of Matthew does contain verification that the Magi had traveled to see the child and family with a short mention that “Magi from the East had come to Jerusalem. They asked at the court of King Herod, ‘Where is the one born king of the Jews? We saw his star and have come to worship him.’ The Magi it seems as holy men, shamans, kings, or simply diplomats were making a courtesy call. They overjoyed finally to have found the young family after their pilgrimage to pay homage not to some stable but to a house in Bethlehem where the family had settled.

Also in the Book of Matthew is the mention that these three wise men returned home and avoided going anywhere near the old, paranoid, mean King Herod’s palace. And that, say those staunch critics, is all we know and all we can historically accept. Believe me when I say there are a LOT of skeptics who will die on this hill. Their published papers, books, and other content could fill a library.

In frustration I turned to Fr. Dwight Longnecker who writes an explanation of this mysterious situation. The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men which for me was a rather refreshing read. The book is like a pilgrimage of its own, an adventure to unravel the mystery while safeguarding our popular legendary tales. Yes, he says, you can still display your nativity scene and keep the three wise men and their camels - although the camels were probably horses. Longnecker unravels the mystery in good form and assures us that

But the naming of the Magi is another twist to the mystery and as Longnecker guides us through the murkiest early medieval literary waters. We leave those fantastic 6th century mosaics with Emperor Justinian and arrive in 8th century Ireland and the Celtic Christian writers - all good story tellers, right? In this period even the Venerable Bede makes an appearance in the musings of these writers who ask who the wise men were and if we don’t know, let’s invent them. Marco Polo adds to the story as does the 14th century monk John of Hildesheim whose work naming the Magi and filling in some details of their legendary lives really gets the story rolling. By the 16th century, the legends were so convincingly believed that all three Magi were made saints by the Roman Catholic Church, feast days and all.

So today, January 6, raise a glass to a legendary pilgrim and to all travelers bearing gifts.

Douglas Park is a popular place along the small harbor where the big ferry boats come and go on the crossing to Delaware from New Jersey. In winter the winds can be fierce, building big waves across the twenty-mile fetch of open bay at the mouth of the Delaware River.

Paul, a quiet and humble man from the north section of the Victorian-era coastal resort town, decorated his little wind driven Eastern Redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) and had started a tradition. Now almost 20 years later folks come out to decorate their own road side junipers in honor of family and friends no longer with us, to memorialize the strip of road leading to the ferry watch at the windy point.

As my sister and I were returning to Delaware after an adventure day in the New Jersey Pinelands’ Belleplain State Forest, we arrived a little early for our crossing time. So we drove around the ferry terminal area to see more of the Delaware River and the Atlantic Ocean when we wandered into Douglas Park just as families were adopting and decorating their wild trees. The town of Cape May has also adopted the tradition, too, and has made this Friday the day when folks can decorate using “wind proof decorations.”

As we drove out to the point, people waved and wished us a happy holiday. Large sparkly baubles and balls danced in the wind. Garlands of silver and white streamed out from their anchoring limbs into the cold breeze while tightly fastened treetop stars and pink bows were bent sideways in the gusts.

From this evening until Epiphany, January 6, local folks will make the drive or walk down Douglas Park Road to see the trees and share in the memory of friends whose names are written on golden ribbon or painted on clear plastic ornaments with pictures tucked safely inside. Large ribbons in green, pink, blue, and yellow - colors representing various awareness group for cancer, Parkinsons, and other diseases that claim so many of our loved ones - snap and flap in the wind.

For six weeks the pilgrimage of remembrance will continue, growing over time to include people from towns beyond Cape May. Some people cross the Delaware River from Lewes to mark the occasion.

While my sister and I just happened upon this sandy, gusty back road, we knew right away we’d come into something special, time-honored and community-based, a newer pilgrimage tradition when community members convene in a place for a time to celebrate, mourn, and hope together among the wild junipers sculpted and shaped by constant wind, symbolic themselves in the evergreen winter traditions.

https://www.capemaymag.com/feature/a-christmas-tree-story/

Whether or not you think of yourself as a pilgrim, we all are travelers through this brief period of time we have on the planet. The distances we cover in our quest to see the world before we can’t may be just enough to get a sense of where we fit into planetary story.

The purposeful walk of a pilgrim can last a lifetime.

John Francis identifies as a pilgrim and something of a prophet for the planet. In his 2008 memoir Planet Walker: 17 Years of Silence, 22 Years of Walking he describs the circumstances and the evolution for his life-long pilgrimage as infused with meaning and revelation that underscores his vow of silence.

Meaning is hard-won, however. Sometimes meaning is hidden. Sometimes it is so richly experienced that we barely begin to understand it, thus it becomes mystery. We think back on these experiences all our lives and each time we derive more or different meaning from the pilgrimage trail. Sometimes it just gets more mysterious and that makes us want to do it more.

In 2024 John embarked on a pilgrimage to walk the 5,000-mile-length of Africa at age 78. He can’t stop walking. He describes it as more than compulsion, greater than desire, and as more people learn about his walks, he gathers more company to walk with - in silence - which he can’t explain either.

Maybe we all just need to listen more as we travel the planet on our swings around the sun and if John is right about this, all will be revealed to us in the great quiet places of the heart out on the vast expanses of wild earth.

Some good listening here…

Walking in Kindness for the Earth

For Me it's a Sacred Journey

On a recent walk in a PA forest I met a young man with a ragged-looking military external frame pack who seemed worse for wear. He smiled at me as we passed each other and I figured, given our current times and situation here in the U.S. that he was going through something. Without a second thought I turned and called back to him, “You alright then? Need anything?”

It was if a rainbow had suddenly appeared over our heads. He stopped - turned - and gave me the biggest smile and walked a few steps back towards me. “Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Now if my kids knew that their mom had picked up a rough-looking stranger and given him a ride to the Dollar Store and back to the trailhead, they would give me the lecture titled “Mom! You know better!”

Actually at the time of our passing each other on the trail, I sensed a deep sadness with this backpacker and trusted my gut when I turned and called back. This is one of the senses of being a pilgrim yourself. You seem to know.

When my friend Esmerelda, a pilgrim I met on the Camino de Santiago in Spain (she had walked from Copenhagen), sensed trust and a willingness to help from a large, wild dog-looking animal, she allowed it to lead her back to the correct path after hours wandering lost in the mountains of Galicia.

She shared with me that she had always had a deep fear of stray and feral dogs and getting attacked and that this fear was something that almost kept her from walking the Camino. But this encounter was different, she said. Her fear was overridden by a deep sense of compassion emanating from what turned out to be an Iberian Wolf. It led her, at times walking beside her, back to the lonely intersection in the forested pasturelands where she had mistaken the wrong path that led her away from her intended Camino route. She said she felt not only immense joy as they wolf headed back into the hills, but “a feeling a wanted to be forgiven for my fears.”

As I waited for the bedraggled backpacker to emerge from the Dollar Store with his resupply of instant foods and other supplies, I felt an overwhelming sense of shame for all the times I’d judged people, especially when my own fears of people acting strangely or wearing something tattered or very old, caused me to quicken my pace away from them. When he climbed into the truck with his yellow plastic bags piled in his lap, I apologized.

Twenty-seven years old, Paul explained that he was on a LASH (Long-Assed Section Hike) of the Appalachian Trail. He told me driving in to town that he’d been out for over a month with another month to go, hiking between seasonal jobs with PA State Parks. His main bit of kit, that ragged old military-looking external frame pack, was probably fifty-plus years old when he’d spotted it at a charity shop. It was stuffed into a corner shelf and looked smaller than it actually is. Inside the top flap was written in black marker was “Earl S.”

You must be an Appalachian Trail devotee to understand the meaning of the name Earl in relation to the history of the trail, and I am one of the those people. I sat up straight in the driver’s seat. “Earl? Seriously?”

“I don’t know if it meant that Earl, though, but I thought what the heck, why not use it instead of my expensive ultralight pack and see if it felt like Earl would have carried this pack.” He named the pack Earl and set off, leaving his expensive ultralight pack behind. We had a great big laugh.

I asked him what he thought of it so far, with a month in and a month to go. “Will you and the pack make it through without falling apart?”

The backpacker nodded, “Yeah, we’re making it through just fine!”

“I’m sorry I judged you, back there,” I said. “That pack made you look - scary. Plus I’m coming off of a twelve day stretch of workdays. That’s my excuse.”

“Right?” he said.

“I noticed from the start of this LASH. People look at Earl and decide I must be homeless or something. I’m not a serial killer, I promise. I was just thinking ‘What if it was one of Earl’s backpacks?’ especially since he lived not far from the town where the used clothing store is.”

I had to ask why he seemed sad. That this was my next impression of him once I got past the scary bit.

He said that he’d dedicated this year’s LASH ( his third in three years) to his mom who had passed away a month earlier from years of living with cancer. He framed this year’s hike more as a pilgrimage to her memory.

“When we passed each other out there,” he said, “I looked up and saw you - and you reminded me so much of her that I wanted to cry. You taking me to the store is something she would have driven hours to do for me on my two previous hikes. Having this talk right now is so like her. Maybe it’s just that I am missing her so much and there you were. Thank you for taking care of me today, this is exactly what she would have done."

Pilgrimage has taught me that the fear of others, human and other-than-human, comes from so far down inside us that returning to nature is how we learn to let go of those primal concerns of being watched, hunted, and attacked. That’s not to say the natural world isn’t dangerous; it very much is and it takes attention and experience to avoid the worse things happening.

But the natural world is much kinder than we give it credit for and for me and probably all those long distance hikers out there, it’s one of the main reason we do it. There is so much evidence to prove that spending long periods in nature changes us, usually for the better. Compassion and empathy grows within us with every mile. We build community, steward the land as we go, (dare I say ‘love' ?) and it may explain why, upon ending our long distance walks or pilgrimages, we feel down about returning to the “real world.”

After every one of my long distance walks I’ve experienced (thankfully) short-lived depressions. They last a few weeks before I can reorient myself back to the world of day-to-day modern life.

I notice that as I emerge from my post-hike blues that the work-a-day world also brings me back to holding again those feelings of disappointment and mistrust, fear and judgement. I’m sensitive towards the many ways people create unnecessary drama and chaos. I avoid people except when I’m at work.

On the path, call it compassionate intuition or a deep ecological need for belonging, it’s a real shift in thinking and responding to the living world, especially to fellow travelers. What would have been a fear of strangers, transforms into a concern for their well-being. By leaving a confusing and frustrating existence behind we open ourselves to a more intentional way of thinking and being.

Here’s to Paul’s third LASH (he’s somewhere in Virginia as I write this) and the lesson I learned - again - about the transition from “real life” to life on the path. This is something I crave, yearn for. I count down the months until I can retire, at least from full time work, so I can rejoin the community I love the most on the trail, on the path, out there.

Notes:

The latest Hidden Brain podcast with guest Marc Berman gives insight and science behind the change in the human mind when out in a natural environment.

https://www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-nature-heals-us/

In my hours of roaming and hiking the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area and Wilderness I couldn’t shake what I had initially encountered on the Cowpasture Trail #253. Yes, I was in botanical and birding heaven as I explored this high altitude bog system, a 3,500’ bowl valley surrounded by heavily wooded mountains of the Monongahela National Forest. Yes, I was serenely enjoying my nearly unpeopled landscape made even more unpeopled by the government shutdown that had closed all the visitor centers, nature centers, even rest stations in this vast Appalachian Mountain conservation area.

Within minutes of stepping on to the boardwalk that loops through the three-part bog system within the botanical area, I was escorted along by two American Woodcock as they threaded their way through the mucky leaf layer below an alder and winter berry thicket. A Green Darner Dragonfly on its migration south to the Gulf of Mexico hovered around me as I knelt on the boards to study a tiny stream where a group of Appalachian Pearl Dace minnows flashed. I was surrounded by one of my favorite landscapes, a frost-pocket of bog and boreal more akin to long ago scenes of the Pleistocene, which West Virginia really excels at. I sat and sketched the broad wet meadows of Cotton Grass and the fringe of Red Spruce. This was my pilgrimage for the week to this place that, like moth to flame, I seem to gravitate towards in my travels. Ancient places full of landscape memory, wetlands built on peat, acid waters, carnivorous plants, and maybe the preserved bones of a Wooly Mammoth.

I ventured out on to the Cowpasture Trail to make a seven mile loop through and around the valley. Within the first mile I stepped on a overgrown patch of concrete sidewalk. What? Only a few steps further and a helpful interpretive sign answered my question. This was the site of the Mill Point Federal Prison Camp that once held all manner of criminals from moonshiners to thieves for decades from the 1930s through the 1960s. But a second interpretive panel explained who and why prisoners were sentenced to this cold, wet, place during the Second World War and during the Korean War. I drew a quick breath when I realized I was looking at a black-and-white photo of a group of African American conscientious objectors and among their faces was someone I recognized, civil rights activist and one of America’s greatest prophets of the practice of nonviolence, Rev. James Lawson, Jr. (1928 - 2024). When Lawson passed away last year, I picked up a library copy of Raymond Arsenault’s book Freedom Riders (2007). I vaguely remember reading about Lawson’s years in prison for refusing to register for the draft. I didn’t realize that prison had stood here.

The Mill Point Prison was an isolated facility built so deep within the marshy, mucky valley that it required no walls, no barbed wire fences. The surrounding environment was harsh, dangerous, and cold. It was many miles to any road and many miles more to any point of shelter and so, claimed the prison administrators, the likelihood that an escapee would survive a few days out in this wilderness were “slim to none.”

From 1951 through 1952 Lawson worked hard labor at the prison camp. On Sundays he was joined by dozens of other conscientious objectors and men considered political foes of the government including Howard Fast, a young writer and member of the American Communist Party. As soon as Lawson was paroled, having had plenty of time to think about what he would do without his college degree or his prospects of ever holding a job with a felony count again him, he traveled to India and studied Gandhi’s non-violence movement as a missionary with the Methodist Church. When he returned to the U.S. in 1956 he became a pivotal voice and “a noble man” (King) in the Civil Rights Movement through his work at the Oberlin School of Theology and Vanderbilt University. He met and began working with Martin Luther King in 1957.

I can’t say how long I stood there staring at Lawson’s photograph, or how long I wandered around the fields finding bits and pieces of the old prison grounds - a stone-lined well, a foundation wall and bit of chimney, random pipes, even the very trail I was following was an entrance road built by prisoners. As I walked on, Amos the Coonhound giving me a steady tug to keep up the pace, I remembered a few of the interviews I’d watched after reading Freedom Riders last year. His gentle voice describing how his sit-in projects and protest walks became major tools of the non-violence movement. I can’t say how his voice stayed clear in my mind a year later. When I returned to my campsite later that evening I pulled up one of those interviews again and watched clear through before I even thought about making supper.

Walking many more miles through these Appalachian Highlands before the week was up, I thought about Rev. Lawson and his legacy and how badly we still need the lessons of non-violent resistance. Maybe more now than ever. It seemed no coincidence, then, that as I was finishing up my last hike of the week, coming down off Spruce Knob Mountain - the state’s highest peak - I met up with two elder hikers steadily making their way upwards along the rocky Huckleberry Trail. I stopped to let them past me, to navigate on a rickety stone ledge of flat stones, and instead they stopped with me. Catching their breath and smiling into the bright sun, the eldest of the two hikers patted my backpack and said “Never stop walking, especially when it gets hard. It’s the only way things get better, inside and out.”

Notes:

Raymong Arsenault (2007) Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice

James M. Lawson, in - The Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute

National Park Service Home Front Incarceration/Conscientious Objectors

A Conversation with James Lawson, Nashville Public Television (2009)

Bogs and swamps are some of my favorite places on earth and, along with prairies and tundra, are cosmically energized environments, intimately personal. Maybe it’s in my DNA to be drawn to places like this with a heredity that stretches back to landscapes that include high peatlands and bogs of Scotland and Ireland. Maybe its the connection with transformative memories of place and people, alive in our hearts. No matter why, know that as you read this I am in one of those places that make me want drop to my knees both to botanize and to give thanks. A friend of mine says that her botanizing is her way of praying so maybe they are the same.

When I was young, a student in a Catholic school wearing a uniform of blue-green tartan, I was asked to chose a saint to serve as my patron through life in preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation. In our religion class (taught by a rather strict, old-school nun) I recall going forward to tell her about my choice, St Francis of Assisi. Her eyes got wide and she crinkled her brow. “No! No! That’s a man. You are a girl. You are a silly girl. You must chose a woman saint! Go back to your desk and keep reading,” the nun said. Truth is, the Little Book of Saints we were given to research our choice of saint patrons, lay unopened on my desk. I knew years before that St Francis would not only be my patron saint but I had already bonded with him and felt his presence in my life daily. But the nun, who went by the name of a male saint, grumbled as I returned to my seat, added a little jab at the end “Not allowed!”

Guess what?

I made a deal with the parish priest that he use St Francis at the moment of the laying of hands at my Confirmation ceremony instead of the name of the obscure female saint pushed on to me by Sr John Joseph or Paul (?). He was happy to make the deal and when I stood before him in the ceremony, he and my dad (who was my sponsor) and I all had a little smile on our faces when Father gave me my Confirmation name Margaret Loretto Francis Smith. He assured both of us that there was no rule for choosing female or male saints according to the candidates gender, and that Sr John Joseph Paul Matthew James Patrick had not advised me correctly. Still, I loved the idea of being the kid who pushed back.

My relationship with St Francis however started when I was a lot younger when at eight years old I stood on the edge of the Great Cypress Swamp in Delaware with my grandmother. She and I were wide-eyed at the sight. Massive cypress trees with their knees poking above the shallow tannin-stained water, plumed egrets perched in the canopy near their noisy rookery, dragonflies drone-winging across the open pond, my hand in hers.

We stood under the shade of a stand of Black Gum while my mother smoked a cigarette in the car. “Have I told you about St Francis?” my grandmother said. “This would be a good time to learn about him - and that beautiful birdsong by the way is a Hermit Thrush.”

And she told me the story of a very unorthodox little monk, a mystic branded a fool, who preached to the birds and pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable by the 13th century Church. This was the first saint I’d ever learned of. I was smitten. An outdoors kid, a tomboy, I fell in love with this Francis who talked to wolves and walked in wilderness. My grandmother’s story being told at the edge of the Great Swamp annealed my almost instant love for Francis with the sensory experience of that magical place - one of several transformative memories that have influenced the spiritual and lived path of my life.

I’ve been so many protected swamps and bogs where land and water blend, where I’ve felt the pull of some great wisdom that combines the practical known world of plant and animal species with a cosmic fullness of what it means to be alive. And mind, these are not easy places to be alive in. Acidic water and oxygen poor soils favor only a subset of plants and animals that can cope with harsh growing conditions made more difficult by cold climate (bogs) or prolonged drought or flood seasons (swamp). And yet it is in these places where I experience such an abundance and vitality of life that I cannot help but think it miraculous. This impoverished water-land interface brims with such a wealth of beauty and diversity of life that it boggles my mind while exploding my heart. The paradox of an alternative unorthodoxy, to be poor is to be rich.

Know, as you read this while I am away, that I may have tucked a few quotes into my sketchbook to accompany me on my exploration into the Great Cranberry Glades Wilderness Area. Here’s one -

In other words, she was not following the script of those learned male theologians of the medieval Church, envisioning instead a united body of mortal, divine, and created world. Her view was an all inclusive non-hierarchical and deeply personal relationship with and within God. When I compare Mechthild’s personal philosophy to those women we read in a contemporary course I teach on feminist political ecology, she certainly fits the definition of a feminist-religious.

Her visions and writings were intentional acts of resistance against traditional patriarchal Church teachings. She was lucky she was not burned at the stake.

Mindful that Mechthild joined the Beguines, a dispersed women’s religious lay community when she was a young woman, her personal understanding of a holistic relationship to the Divine reflected a hallmark ideal of that association. Women independent in thought, dedicated to a praxis of prayer, Beguines did the hard work of communal care and in the poorest of poor communities, in cities and across the Northern European region.

They did not answer to Church clerics or accept any Church oversight although they did seek spiritual guidance from local monks or priests as necessary to their formation. Their clusters of shared private homes were often situated near a local parish or church. They were independent, protective of their freedom in an otherwise oppressive-towards-women society, and accordingly they frightened the pants off the guys who described them as hysterical, crazy, and all-around nuts.

The Beguines continue this way of living in modern times. They have never been recognized (nor want to be) as an official order of the Church. Their simple communities can be found all over the world in urban settings and in pastoral and farming regions. They work in communities with the greatest needs and abhor artificial systems of control and structure that impedes this vital work.

In Mechthild’s time young women chose to enter orders of women religious or lay organizations like the Beguines to opt out of married life, to study and serve, to make spiritual discoveries and generate awe as was their mystical tradition.

Today, in the modern Beguine movement, it is elder women who enter communities after lifetimes of professional careers, marriage, and raising families. They feel they have much more to give to the world and so chose Beguine community life as a way to exercise and express their independence and freedom while dedicating their skills and knowledge to service and faith. Many Beguines today serve well into their 80s and 90s as medical professionals, educators, environmental and land workers. There is much more emphasis on environmental work than in Mechthild’s day and many modern Beguines consider themselves environmental activists and advocates.

Now as then when elder women are no longer able to live independently they enter the care of local Dominican, Franciscan, Cistercian, or Benedictine monasteries - or return to late-in-life care with their families. In her old age, Mechthild entered the care of a Cistercian monastery where highly the educated nuns of Helfta (Brussels) assisted her in her day-to-day living and illness and also helped her finish her one book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead.

It was at a Benedictine monastery where I first met a “retired” Beguine sister - amazed that they still exist! Sister Uma sat uncomfortably in a wheelchair, recuperating after hip surgery. She wriggled and winced.

“I’m not in pain,” she insisted, “I just want to get out to the garden and do something about the weeds! I can’t just sit here.” We had a nice lunch together then I helped pull weeds and she told me about her twenty years in “active service retirement” as a member of a rural Beguine community in France. She holds a degree in toxicology and soil science. Her work with the Beguine community included helping communities clean up brownfields in city environments and convert them to food production.

This is something I find I connect strongly with - the idea of an active elderhood in service of a good cause. I am thinking about how I will spend my post-retirement years in active service and have taken a lot of inspiration from women like Sr. Uma. I am thinking a lot lately of how not only to give back but how to inspire and mentor young women in their conservation interests. Thinking about how women think about environment and nature has led me back to Mechthild.

I have been drawn to walk with the words of Mechthild these past few weeks mainly because I am at a loss to describe the chaos of mind I have been experiencing while witnessing what is happening to our world. But I am not at a loss for the conviction I hold for places and beings that cannot speak for themselves and so need our care and attention and protection. The mystic’s perspective helps me smooth the hills and valleys of my roller-coaster brain as I hike and walk my way out of despair.

Today we said goodbye to Dr. Jane Goodall, who I always considered a modern mystic. She was awarded a Templeton Prize in 2021 where she was recognized for her life’s work in conservation and for her extraordinary philosophical encounters with the wider, wilder world. I think she and Mechthild would have been very close friends had they lived at the same time. Her personal mystic experiences are what gave her the drive, motivation, and inspiration for her global conservation work.

How many young women did Dr. Goodall inspire? I was one of them, for sure. So now I have packed into my sketchbook - the little one that rides in my backpack for hikes and walks - a few quotes from Jane Goodall. Maybe on my next adventure into the wilderness of the Monongahela National Forest next week, I will be inspired by the places and words of my mystic sisters to feel better - more hopeful? - about where we are and where we and I should go from here.

Notes:

Laura Swan, a Benedictine sister residing in St. Placid Priory in Washington, wrote a beautiful book that I’ve just finished, The Wisdom of the Beguines (2016) that attracted the attention of a modern community of Beguine sisters in Koln, Germany. Sr. Laura was overjoyed to hear from an existing community (who really enjoyed her book) and followed up on an invitation to visit. You can read about that visit here.

Who will I walk with today? Whose voice will I hear roaring over the mountains?

In her life’s work of studying the great women mystics of the Middle Ages, Hope Allen rediscovered 13th century’s Mechthild of Madgeburg in the 20th century light of defining the practice of mysticism. Moreso, Allen elevated Mechthild’s life as a Beguine (and very late in life as a Cistercian) one who was ever on the edge of danger. Her outspokenness against corruption in the Church and in civil life during a time of forceful social control by local and Church authorities made her a target of the patriarchy.

For Mechthild, an independent woman thinker who vied for female autonomy within the Church, her views reflected uncommonly deep convictions that leveled long-held ideas about domination in religious and spiritual life. She articulated through her visions and dreams a different Orientation of Being that infused God within and around the sense of community, belonging, and integration.

As I hiked along I was feeling less than sure of my steps on very rocky ground. I was feeling a little off. A little dizziness set in, a symptom of an upcoming illness I would spend the next four days in bed with.

“Here comes a time when both body and soul enter into such a vast darkness that one loses light and consciousness and knows nothing more of God’s intimacy. At such a time when the light in the lantern burns out, the beauty of the lantern can no longer be seen. With longing and distress we are reminded of our nothingness...”

Allen mentions that one of the defining characteristics of medieval mystics was having deeply intimate relationships with God, relationships that marked the mystic as something of a heretic, dissenter, rebel.

Mechthild’s heretical ideas involved her intimacy with God and all of Creation, all of nature - plant, animal, mineral, and the forces that bind them together - a deep sensual experience of the Creator and Creation.

Mechthild described herself as “an unruly woman of God.” Her ecstatic visions and teachings of spiritual union between carry across centuries of religious suppression and control that dominated Western histories. She dared to say (and did so publicly) that we strive daily to recognize that God, Nature, and We are one in the same - that no one man or man’s contrivance of ideas or rules supersede this truth.

“Effortlessly, love flows from God into man, like a bird who rivers the air without moving her wings. Thus we move in His world One in body and soul, though outwardly separate in form.
As the Source strikes the note, Humanity sings –The Holy Spirit is our harpist and all strings
which are touched in Love must sound!”

I rested next to a Black Rat Snake who found me as interesting as I found him. He explored the folds of my backpack and poked his nose into the open section where I’d removed a trail snack. I held my hand out to him and he tasted my sweat with his slow tongue, gathering molecules of scent that proved I was no threat. Nothing to fear, nothing to escape from, he rested with me on the edge of the old wagon road until it was time to move on. With increasing sinus pressure and a new headache forming, I found it slow going to stand up. The gentle snake raised his head to watch me, as if saying “Easy does it, friend. Mind how you go.”

Another two miles to complete the loop path I’d planned. I knew I’d be okay just to take it slow and the young trees that lined the trail made good hand holds and leaning posts when I needed them. What a gift their support was to me as I passed from one to the other.

“I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me. If you want me to leap with abandon, You must intone the song. Then I shall leap into love, from love into knowledge, from knowledge into enjoyment, and from enjoyment beyond all human sensations. There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.”

Even though I was steadily feeling sicker, the hike continued to become even more beautiful and the woods deeply entrancing. Going slow and steady rather than at my usual hiker’s pace allowed me to absorb more of what the rocky ridge was trying to show me. Color, wind, a feeling of unity with every living and unliving thing. It was a belonging both elemental and elegantly simple, even - and maybe this was the fever forming in me - a little like an embodied vision.

I’ve studied the Christian mystics for some time now and have always found their formation experiences, usually as children, a fascinating look into their early encounters with enormous spiritual and religious ideas. Mechthild began having “interior visions” at the age of twelve that she described to her Dominican confidant and spiritual director later as conversations with the Holy Spirit. Her single volume of writings serve as a collection of those revelations that persisted well into old age. The Flowing Light of the Godhead contains letters, diary entries, poems, and reflections on a lifetime of spiritual relationship tied intimately to daily life as well as deep examinations of her mystical experience. She acknowledges her partner in conversation, the mystical other with whom she speaks with almost every day of her long life as simply “Love.” In these conversations, she is not called by name or by profession, except as “Soul.”

Like many Medieval mystics identified by Hope Allen, Mechthild of Madgeburg contains a boundless integration with a world much greater and mysterious than the rest of us mere mortals can ever hope to attain. Allen likens the personal philosophies of many Christian mystics of that time as akin to others of the great Abrahamic mystic traditions, and to read Mechthild’s flowing poems to her Love, one feels the atmospheric uplift of the great Sufi poets that transcends scripture and theology, sometimes shockingly erotic, sometimes on the verge of complete silence.

Revelations that involved the merging of human heart, body, and mind with Divine Nature were often viewed by church authorities as scandalous if not dangerous. Creaturely love combined with spiritual intimacy was cutting it close for some, the steep edges of heresy…

Soul:

Fish cannot drown in the water,

Birds cannot sink in the air,

God cannot perish

In the refiner’s fire.

This has God given to all creatures

To foster and seek their own nature,

How then can I withstand mine?

I must to God—

My Father through nature,

My Brother through humanity,

My bridegroom through love,

His am I for ever!

Think ye that fire must utterly slay my soul?

Nay! Love can both fiercely scorch

And tenderly love and console.

Therefore be not troubled!

Ye shall still teach me.

When I return

I will need your teaching

For the earth is full of snares

What wilt thou Lord?

LOVE:

Thy SELF must go!

Soul:

But Lord, what will happen to me then?

LOVE:

Thou art by nature already mine!

Nothing can come between Me and thee!

There is no angel so sublime

As to be granted for one hour

What is given thee for ever.

Therefore must thou put from thee

Fear and shame and all outward things.

Only of that of which thou art sensible by nature

Shalt thou wish to be sensible in Eternity,

That shall be thy noble longing,

Thine endless desire,

And that in My infinite mercy

I will evermore fulfill.

What was so heretical about these revelations, I wondered. In this judgement Mechthild does not sit alone. Many early and medieval mystics were pinned as heretics for similar expressions of holistic spiritualism, revelations that put humans not only on par with a godhead but part and parcel of a divine presence. Some who preached on the unity of God, Man, and Nature were removed from the Church entirely while many others were removed to suffer community shunning.

What was the threat to church leaders and enforcers of spiritual union with all of Creation? Did it cut too close to the old religions that Christianity displaced? Did the idea of love, lover, and the slippery slope of spiritual eroticisms cause Church fathers to blush and shift around a bit in their upholstered, lofty thrones?

It is easy to feel unity with nature when out in it, especially when the mind and heart are weary of the world of man/men. Read that for how you will. We long for unity as we want to belong to a family or a community that helps support and affirm us. Nature does that. If holding hands with helpful trees and having lunch next to a big, muscular black snake who is interested in kissing my hand with his tongue can be thought of as scandalous, then I’ll take it. The only hierarchy out here is one of deep time as the wise, old outcrops in their hundreds of millions of years of experience of existence on Earth may make them akin to those most ancient of turtles all the way down.

As I pulled my dizzy self into the truck for the drive home (and to bed) I plopped my backpack into the passenger seat and pulled out my sketchbook. Here I’d slipped a copy of some of quotes from The Flowing Light of the Godhead from a reading I’d been doing online. I made some quick, wild sketches around one of the quotes. A few rocks, nothing fancy, just shapes and shadow, letting my imagination take the lead.

Unruly, indeed.

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I approached the little round timber fort from an old CCC picnic area over the far hills on a rocky hiking trail that became a mix of meadow and woods edge. All along the way early migrating birds flitted in and out of cover filling their crops with berries and seeds and bugs, all of high calorie/ high fat foods to fuel their southward movement. An Eastern Copperhead lay half on/ half off a grassy section of trail and I stopped to admire its beautiful colors and patterns - one of the prettiest I’ve seen. A sunlit White-tailed Deer buck with a four-point rack of antlers watched from an opposite hilltop as I began my second steep climb of roller coaster dip-and-hill. When I happened on the Great Meadow I was struck by the yellowing greens of the late summer fields abloom with purple aster and ironweed.

The Great Meadow where Washington had built his little vertical log fort had been the focus and opportunity for retribution (a term we are all too familiar with this year). Across its expanse Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, on a mission to drive the British out of this contested land, led a contingent of 500 French Marines and 100 Indian allied fighters into the woods to take positions for attack and to avenge the death of his brother Joseph Coulon de Jumonville.

I explored the little fort, its trenches, and the tiny log built storehouse inside. Of course these are all reproductions, but landscape seemed to find fit with them being at once a focal point as well as an aspect of the Great Meadow that seemed timeless.

There are reminders that we must decide how and which narratives of American history should be told. There are plenty of interpretive panels to give military history, the landscape itself tells the story of early American open lands that fell so easily into pasturage use and eventual decline of native species, and there is a single story pole to suggest Native American accounts of the actions that rainy, miserable day.

I visited on a weekday when visitation was low and for a while I sat beneath the shady maples with my dog watching the few visitors came down the hill from the interpretive center. A family with three curious children stayed a few minutes in the fort but were more interested in petting Amos. They explored the woods and the meadow’s edge for insects and flowers. A middle-aged man came through, read the signs, looked over at the fort in the wavy hot air, and returned up the hill without going in. Another man came down the hill and walked directly to the fort. He stayed so long inside I forgot he was there. When he emerged (surprising me) some time later he came over to the shady spot and sat nearby.

“Isn’t it interesting that history is made of all these little events,” he said. “When we put them all together we have a years-long war or empire-building or a centuries-long cultural collapse.”

There is no iconography here. No statues to adorn the battlefield. No memorials to mark the spot where so-and-so fell or which unit stood and fired. Like Jumonville, the battlefield is conserved to feature its natural history in which the human history of events was nested. A robust set of field research is going on here that focuses on the natural history - weather monitoring, the Appalachian Cottontail, invasive plant inventories, bird surveys, tree mapping, phenology.

Given the naturalness of the site, you can almost hear the sound of British soldiers trudging off the field in muck and mud and blood after their surrender to the French. You can imagine the hidden fears of Captain Coulon who worried about losing control of his Indian fighters. They wanted badly to finish the job with the fallen British soldiers. Coulon forbid any desecrations of dead and wounded. A far cry from what had happened at the glen weeks before where Coulon had witnessed the decaying, headless bodies himself on the way to the Great Meadow, left exposed and unburied - his brother among the rotting corpses.

Demanding the Indian fighters stand down, he promised Washington he would allow the Redcoats to leave with honor and without Indian harassment or further violence. The Indian fighters were frustrated and angry, storming off the field of battle in disgust. This was one of those little events.

“Can you imagine the tension?” the man asked me as he offered Amos some water in this hot day. “I’m Bob.”

Bob was a retired park ranger who lives nearby and comes often to see his old friends and to hike the trails fir his daily exercise. He’s a history nerd and birder, too. We hiked together up the park road to where he left his truck at the top of the roller coaster hill. We talked about my pilgrimages to French and Indian War sites (among others) and he liked the idea as it added depth and meaning to the visitor experience. “Makes you stop and think a lot more. Appreciate what this history has given some of us and taken from others.”

At the top of the mile-long road I said my goodbyes to Bob, another friend made on pilgrimage - which happens a lot more than it does for just being a tourist. “We should visit again sometime and I can tell you some good stories about working with the park service.” That was nice. I wanted to hear some good stories, especially this year with the NPS under so much political pressure to tell “the proper story,” firings and layoffs, and defunding. Bob retired a few years ago when things were really looking up for the NPS. “It was the best job in the world.”

I took the wooded trail back to the old CCC picnic area, down a rocky path on a steep slope. Amos and I took turns slipping and once I almost tripped over him as he stumbled against my hiking pole. I stopped to steady the both of us, Amos panting loudly. It was so hot. “Nearly there, old boy.”

Hiding in plain sight all around me was the lay of the land, steep hills, deep valleys. Places where several hundred attacking soldiers could gather out of view and earshot of another group of soldiers preparing their defenses. The rise and fall of hills hides hidden histories, too, of indigenous people who fought to stop the invasion of both colonial powers across their lands by siding with one or the other. It is instantly relevant to what is happening all around us today in our beloved historical parks. Erasure of stories, the packing away of unpleasant narratives that do not fit the mold of a nationalized history being recast (again) to favor the mythologies of the victorious.

Amos and I lingered on the hill long enough to find our feet again. Soon we were at the bottom in a grassy cove with picnic tables and a dilatated pavilion. The water I let flow from the truck’s water tanks is refreshingly cold and after his thirst was quenched Amos climbed aboard into the cool shady cab and immediately began a long afternoon nap.

Notes:

“The Opening Battle of a World War.” Fort Necessity National Battlefield, National Park Service.