Flowers only grow where they are planted, and the only thing that will allow anything else to appear there is neglect. Need to build a house with a basement? Make a hole in the ground. Need to build an exit ramp for the overpass? Putting up a nice slope will do the trick. A hill got in the way of your road? Blast right through it, and put fencing on the rocks to keep them from avalanching down onto traversing vehicles.
No stone goes untouched from human hands. Even "wilderness" is only there because we have allowed it to stay, and it ends in a straight line where the corn fields must begin. Our fingerprints are on every piece of earth.
There really is nothing wrong with all of this. Civilization must progress. Cities must grow with the population. Farmland is crucial. For the majority of my life, this is all I've ever known.
In 2013 I experienced something much different, something much more powerful and mighty and ominous: the power of the land.
I left my concrete world and entered one of mud and trees. I saw snow-covered mountains for the first time. I saw a glacier. I saw the land in a much, much different way.
For the first time, I saw how humans must yield to the land rather than the other way around. There is no road going in or out of Juneau; the only way is ferry or plane. Why? Because the mountains, ice fields, and ocean get in the way. A road simply cannot be built. No major cuts were made in the rocks for highways to plow through. Houses were built on mountainsides rather than nice, flat neighborhoods. The only way up a mountain was the most natural, primitive way: on foot.
If someone didn't like that mountain there, there was nothing they could do about it. It's not going anywhere. Neither is the glacier. Or the ocean. Or the bears. Or even the trees. You can chop one down, but the mountains are positively carpeted with them, and no machinery could even begin to sift through them.
Because of this massive power of the land, the locals have a much different attitude toward the land than I am used to. That summer, the city decided to build a round-about right between the docks at Auke Bay and the university. It made sense, as the fork in the road that existed was over-trafficked. But in order to move forward with construction, a tree in the fork had to be removed. I remember my bus driver fussing about that, and he was among many of the locals who were upset. This tree had no particular sentimental meaning that I'm aware of, but the idea of unnecessary killing a tree was quite upsetting to them, even though they had innumerable others! They respected and wished to preserve the land.
This is one thing I greatly miss about that place. I miss simply facing the awe-inspiring power of the land beside my powerlessness on a daily basis.
Recently I have noticed some degree of the power of land here in my home, state, however. My grandparents' house is crumbling before their eyes due to erosion, despite many hired attempts to "fix" it. I didn't even know until today that I live on a fault line, making the destruction of earthquakes feasible. And although they can blast a hole in a hill to make way for a highway, they can't move that hill or flatten it. Besides, the weather is uncontrollable everywhere in the world. We are at its mercy.
The devastation that land can bring, with all its might, is horrifying. Why do I love it so much? Why don't I grasp for control?
I suppose it's because I know that God is the only one who can protect me from himself.
God's wrath is absolutely necessary, but when we trust in him, he shields us from it. God's might does not terrify me, it delights me. Of course, I am (almost) speaking metaphorically in comparing him to the land. After all, the earth is simply a manifestation of this attribute of his.
I intend to dance among the trees that cannot be moved.
God bless.
