"Beauty strips" are narrow fringes of trees that grow alongside the highway in states where timbering is a major industry. The purpose of these slim, illusionary swaths is to hide the vast acres of cleared forest that lie just on the other side. The implication is that this borderland contains some symbolic beauty, a token of the forest that once thrived in the area,
and that what stands behind it is too ugly to inflict on
passing motorists.  

 

 

Do we really need to be protected from the sight of a clearcut forest? What would happen if we dared to look--dared, even, to spend some time there in that apparently forbidden territory? It is well known that real transpersonal change is possible only when a person confronts the dark side of his or her psyche. What if we citizens of Planet Earth were to take this good psychological advice as an inspiration to experiment with a new perspective on the environment?

 

A few years before founding Radical Joy for Hard Times, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places, I took a small group of men and women to a clearcut forest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to discover what spending a week in a clearcut forest would be like.

 

It was a long journey, in both the inner and outer senses. I picked the four participants up at the airport in Seattle, and we drove up the Olympic Peninsula, camping the first night at Olympic State Park. The following morning, we took the ferry to Victoria, Vancouver Island, where thousands of acres have been clearcut, and from the port we set off on a four-hour drive, about half of it on unpaved roads.

 

When we first entered the clearcut area, a shocked silence fell over the van. A few minutes later, as the van reached the top of a hill, I stopped and asked people to get out. I then invited them to spend a few minutes in silence, simply taking in the landscape that was all around them: an uninterrupted panorama of stumps, graying on every hillside that rippled above, below, and all around. On the ground the debris of torn limbs and bark was so dense and deep that nothing green could grow from within it. As we continued the drive, the silence among the members of the group turned to expressions of dismay, sadness, anger, and guilt. However, as we would all soon discover, those feelings underwent dramatic transformations after we spent not less, but more time in the clearcut.

 

I had learned from previous programs that it is too difficult for people to adjust to and see more deeply into a wounded place if there is no respite. The mind and the heart need some relief and a chance to renew. Therefore, for the next five days, we spent daytimes in the clearcut and evenings at a primitive campground in a beautiful, protected old-growth forest on the western edge of the island. We quickly developed a pattern. In the morning after breakfast, the group gathered at our campsite to discuss different aspects of attending to nature in its broken state:

• the wisdom (and difficulty) of confronting what we tend to avoid as a way of opening up to authenticity and empowerment


• the responsibility we all have for the demise of nature and the emotional attachment we also all have for it--and hence the invitation to regard no one as completely blameless and no one as completely guilty


• nature as a mirror for the psyche


• broken nature as a ground for exploring complex feelings of grief, anger, and loss


• the Buddhist practice of "sustaining the gaze" as a path toward accepting our reality less fearfully and more compassionately

Everyone made bag lunches, and then we set out to spend the day alone in the clearcut. People were free to return to the campsite when they wished. We had dinner together in the evening, and then gathered at the foot of a gigantic 800-year-old Sitka spruce, where we told the stories of what had happened during the day.

Excerpts from those stories follow:

• "I didn't want to be there. It was too uncomfortable looking at all that ruin. I wanted to leave and go to another part of the forest. But then I heard a voice within: 'Sit a stump.' And I recognized that this is what I always do. When something gets uncomfortable, I leave. I saw that I was doing it at home with my wife. As soon as we got into something unpleasant, I wanted to escape. But now I was hearing: 'Sit a stump.' So I did. I kept sitting in that one place. And as I did, I got to know it, and it became familiar to me, and then it became beautiful."


• "I wept. To me that broken forest was my youth. I was grieving for the trees, and at the same time I was grieving for my lost youth and all that had happened. I was awash in sorrow. And yet, at the same time, it was like those Truth and Reconciliation Commissions they had in South Africa, where people confronted their crimes as a way to heal. That forest allowed me to confront my own past and grieve for it in a way I never had. In the days that followed, the grief eased. I began to make altars on the stumps. I apologized to the trees, and at the same time I apologized to myself. In the process I forgave the people who had cut down those trees. I forgave myself. I forgave my parents."


• "I kept seeing beauty. At first I thought, Oh, that's not appropriate here--as if I was only supposed to see ugliness. But it was there! Even the colors of the dead limbs were beautiful. The huge stumps, some so big I could lie down on them, they had a beauty. One day, as I was sitting in the clearcut, a mother black bear and two little cubs went tripping over that mass of litter as lightly and gracefully as can be."


• "I was wondering about the men who cut down the forest. When we first arrived I hated them. I thought about the eco-terrorists who would vandalize equipment that was destroying the land, and I wished I could do that too. But then I began wondering what it meant to them to see all this destruction, if it made them sad too. I thought about all the cardboard boxes and magazine inserts I use and never think anything about and that must have come from forests just like this. Maybe this very forest. And I just couldn't hate those men anymore."

On the afternoon of the fifth day, the entire group did a ceremony in the clearcut. We sat on the stumps of some of these huge trees, and sang a song of simple tones into the forest.

 

We sang for many things: for the trees; for the birds and animals that still, miraculously found a way to live there; for the men who had cut the trees and those of us who used the paper products that had been manufactured from them; for all the beautiful places on Earth that had been and would be destroyed because of the needs of humans who were mostly innocent of what they were demanding of the natural world. When we stood again on the road, ready to get into the car for the long drive back to Seattle, everyone had tears in their eyes. "I have come to love this forest," said one of the women. And we all nodded in agreement.

 

"When the Earth hurts, we hurt with it," wrote Theodore Roszak, in The Voice of the Earth. What is also true is that, when we confront the Earth's hurt, we confront our own. When we receive and make beauty in wounded places, we find compassion, forgiveness, creativity, and community in profound and lasting ways.

 

Trebbe Johnson is the founder and director of Radical Joy for Hard Times, a non-profit organization whose mission is to find and make beauty in wounded places.

* * * * *  

 

Perspectives, Issue No. 9  

Powers of Place Correspondent:
Trebbe Johnson

January 2012