Bear Creek Nature Preserve

Will you stand with me? It takes becoming an activist, cultivating an activated spirit, working intentionally to save wild forests, waters, deserts, mountains, and all their wild inhabitants. This Work becomes more noble and necessary every season, in service to the Divine, and to our children’s future. The ultimate Ziraat practice! Preserving the Divine, the Wild in Nature, so our descendants have a chance to live in grace.

When Hazrat Inayat Khan spoke what became Nature Meditations in France during1921, Europe was still recovering from the devastation of World War I. Towns, villages, and cities were being rebuilt. Forests replanted. Roads and reservoirs repaired. Minefields eliminated. Missing people accounted for, or not.

While agriculture re-established its mission of growing food for the people, many had to rely on their own efforts, growing a cottage garden in a town or village. Country folk rebuilt their homesteads, growing fruit, vegetables, grains and livestock. Transportation of goods and food outside of urban areas still plodded along with horse and oxen-drawn wagons.

For many people of that era, getting out into the garden to grow their own food and experience a little patch of nature became a therapeutic activity to recover from the chaos and destruction of war. People naturally related working in the garden of their heart to traditional gardening, as complimentary healing practices.

A century ago, really wild country was generally avoided, except by adventurers, explorers and mountaineers. The Wild was actively embraced by the mystics, as Hazrat Inayat Khan writes, “But to the mystic Nature is everything. No wonder that the mystics, sages, and prophets of all ages sought refuge in Nature from all the disturbing influences of daily life.” These mystics did not just sit in their gardens. They pilgrimaged to power spots in the wilderness, where Nature stays strongest, and where the physical manifestation of divine creativity shines pure, undiminished by detrimental human activity.

The major avatars, prophets, and holy people of all religious paths had one thing in common: they all went into the wilderness to receive their divine inspirations. Think Moses, Jesus, John the Baptist, Buddha, Krishna, indigenous vision questers, and medicine women, herbalists and curanderas of yore. They left their communities and went off into the desert, the cave, the jungle, the mountaintop, flower fields, high seas, forests. They ventured out to some wilderness location, received their divine down-loads, often returning to their communities to rebel against the religious status quo.

Consider Jesus, returning from a wilderness fast, full of divinity, coming home and confronting the religious establishment by overturning the money changing tables in front of the temple! Or Moses, returning from the burning bush on the mountain with his stone tablets of commandments, smashing them in disgust at finding his people worshiping a golden calf! And Buddha, rising above the sufferings of his day through his conversations in enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree.

I understand that the natural world, what is left of it, serves as the most direct and powerful connection to God. Indeed, Nature itself, the living community of all life on earth, represents the fabulous physical manifestation of divine creativity and intelligence! I realize that by knowing, contemplating, and experiencing Nature, we come to know God more deeply and completely than through any other study. To paraphrase Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, “There is one holy book, the sacred manuscript of Nature.” Indeed, I like to think that G.O.D. stands for Great Out Doors!

In this last century, the wild places have shrunk under the relentless industrial assault of our lovely planet by greedy corporations and the wealthy who own them. The only winners are corporations and the elite 1% as they devastate the environment for profit, growing ever richer and more powerful by extracting increasing amounts of irreplaceable Creation. Meanwhile the rest of us, and this blessed planet Gaia, grow poorer as climate change is exacerbated. Extractive industries lead the charge to increase the speed at which forests are logged, minerals mined, oil and gas drilled, fish and animal populations extirpated, and the soils that feed us are chemically killed, depleted and eroded away forever. Because all these activities increase the rate, scope, intensity, and acceleration of climate change, I side with Life, with Conservation, with a healthy future, and with the “Preservationists” against the “Devastationists” and their assaults on Nature.

Will you stand with me? It takes becoming an activist, cultivating an activated spirit, working intentionally to save wild forests, waters, deserts, mountains, and all their wild inhabitants. This Work becomes more noble and necessary every season, in service to the Divine, and to our children’s future. The ultimate Ziraat practice! Preserving the Divine, the Wild in Nature, so our descendants have a chance to live in grace. After all, conservationists and environmental activists make for wonderful ancestors, striving to save what’s left, restore the rest, and leave the future a better habitat!

To get started, settle into Nature somewhere special: 


~ After reading Nature Meditations, go find your location to become deeply acquainted with Nature. It may take a few attempts before you discover your spot, a place where you feel an opportunity and ability to connect with Nature, free of distractions. Your spot might be a quiet corner of a local park or cemetery, or a long hike to a truly pristine spot in a vast wildland; more likely somewhere in between. Bring something to comfortably sit upon, to lean back against; also water, munchies, comfy clothes, insect repellent if needed.

~ Introduce yourself to all the life forms (even to the rocks that look dead, but have slow geological processes living inside). With a prayerful demeanor, gaze upon each one, then close your eyes gazing within, then repeat until within and without begin to merge. Open to your feelings about each new Nature acquaintance you have met. Allow them to woo your senses.

~ Return to your Nature spot with gear to record your experience: a suitable volume to enter your nature journal, drawing tools (e.g. colored pencils, watercolors, brushes, pastels, pen and ink), and a camera. Draw and/or photograph everything you see. This may take several visits! Begin with stationary objects and work your way up to wildlife you see visiting your spot.

~ Using guidebooks you bring along, or open once you’re back home, try to identify each plant, rock, tree, track, bird, critter you have met at your Nature spot. Using a photo submission site (like iNaturalist), a community of naturalists can assist you with identifications. Once you’ve identified something, you’ve opened the door to a relationship with that life-form and are ready to learn all about its existence and its interactions with everything else in its habitat. Natural History is the study of these elements of Creation, our companions on “lifeboat” Earth, Gaia, our protective envelope, as we all travel together with the rest of the Milky Way, in a learning living loop of love.

~ Next, begin to investigate if plans exist (or are contemplated) that could diminish or destroy the Nature existing at your spot. Is a pickle-ball court complex targeting your quiet corner of the park? A massive mausoleum in the secluded spot in the cemetery? Or threats to your wildland location: logging the forest, damming the river, mining the mesa, placing a toxic waste dump in the meadow where you sit, or an OHV playground in the quiet wild canyon where coatimundi congregate around ephemeral pools.

~ Lastly, find like-minded people to share Nature with and find out about threats to destroy yet another patch of our natural world, our divine heritage. Locally, look for a hiking club, birding group or wildflower enthusiasts who are willing to take you along on field trips, where you can learn more. Local environmental activists may live near you, already working to save Nature. Their groups often have names beginning with “Friends…of Bear Mountain, of the Crooked River, of the Shenandoah, of the Wolves, of the Whales, of the Hummingbirds, of the Silence…..” Look for state-wide conservation groups with a chapter near you like New Mexico Wild. Also, you may have local chapters of Audubon, Sierra Club, and the Native Plant Society to help you learn more about your local wildlands and opportunities for field trips to explore them.

~ People you meet and befriend in these organizations can serve as instructors for your involvement in activism, and help you evolve into an effective activist, learning about the places to protect and save. They’re all sacred places because they have manifested from the play of divine creativity!

I wish you godspeed on your journey into activated Ziraat! Gaia and her inhabitants will welcome you into their reality, the sacred manuscript of Nature.

Chant lives at the Southwest Sufi Community, where he serves as volunteer director of conservation and ecological restoration. The community lives embedded in a vast wild natural landscape, remote pages in the sacred manuscript of Nature.

Chant
Conservationist & SSC Resident
Chant: chant@mind.net