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One of the reasons that
I think the BWCAW is sacred ground is the very difficulty
I have in explaining why.
Any kind of God talk doesn't
come easily. We're forced to use analogies, similes and
metaphors.
And if we are lucky and
find a really good and strong metaphor, we usually end
up qualifying ourselves with "but even more than that."
For example, I want to start out saying that I experience
God in the BWCAW, and immediately I find that I want to
qualify it by, "but not merely as Creator and Sustainer
of life", or in "the beautiful sunsets and sunrises" or
"but in the totality of the wilderness." I experience
the divine in the life itself: in the very landscape of
rock, water and forest.
It is the very wildness
of it all, it is a place that is not under human control
or management. It is life in the raw without the trappings
and protections of civilization. A canoe trip, a journey
into the BWCAW is a journey into life; It's like taking
off all our clothes and plunging into the cold deep and
clear water of Kekekabic Lake. Holding our breath, we
ease below the surface, to find a vision underwater that
is incomparable in any other lake. The water is so clear
that we can see further underwater than we ever dreamed
possible. So too in the BWCAW we see clearly the interdependence
of all things as "inclusive community", and we see life
as homeostasis or the harmony as the process of achieved
balance. It's so clear and so welcoming. Like the good
hospitality, it comes to us. And yet, like the horizons
of underwater lake Kekekabic, there are shadows of unknown
drifting off in all directions. They come to us as fear
and sometimes even terror, and so we surface gasping for
air and safety, with the new knowledge that life is far
more than we dreamed and that the unknown surrounds us
with mystery.
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