Embracing Nature: An Atheist’s Path to Solace and Sacredness – KASHA Forum 2024/11/17

The Unsettled Settler By Don Gayton

I am working on a book manuscript, entitled Settler Stories. The book’s initial premise was this: Indigenous peoples around the world use story as a means to connect with their local nature and ecosystems, but we Settlers do not have equivalent stories. So I began an attempt to write some, but soon veered off into the complex realm of the sacred.

My religious upbringing was minimal. I grew up in southern California; my folks were very moral persons, but didn’t go to church. The one time they took my sister and I to a church service, we both started giggling uncontrollably and were promptly escorted out. The closest I came to conventional religion was in grade school, where once a week we students were picked up and given an hour of religious instruction, “not on public school grounds.” My instructor was a young, carefree woman who drove a convertible. We would proceed to a nearby ice cream shop, order double-scoop cones, and then drive around the suburban neighborhood while she spoke blithely about saints and disciples. I think that experience may have contaminated my approach to religion but in a good way.

By age sixteen I considered myself agnostic and by eighteen, a happy atheist.  In my early twenties, I joined the US Peace Corps and spent two years working with peasant farmers in Colombia. Upon return, I received a draft notice, which meant I would be killing peasant farmers in Vietnam. So I filed for Conscientious Objector status. That was an abject failure since I had no religious background, so my wife, two young kids, and I moved to Canada. We have been proud Canadians ever since.

But back to stories. Some Settler land stories do exist, but they mostly take refuge in children’s books and university libraries. One very durable set of stories are the biblical ones, that assert man’s dominance over nature, that women created sin, and that we all go to either heaven or hell. Indigenous creation stories, on the other hand, see nature as female, and humans originating from earth and rejoining it when they die. That story offers no comfort to us Settlers since we see Earth as a trivial entity that we either fly over en route to a Caribbean holiday, use as an ATV playground, or as real estate for big box stores. Not a very compelling repository for birth and death. No wonder Christianity is such a strong force among us. Being an atheist without a land-based creation story is a tough road to hoe.

Placing spiritual beliefs on mountains and coyotes does seem rather silly, until we compare them to virgin birth, resurrection after death, Eve, the apple and the snake, heaven, hell, and the gates in between. Spirituality and belief is certainly part of the human condition, but it is malleable.

I need to touch on another category, the creation story. “Creator” is definitely present in some Indigenous stories, but is not fleshed out in human form, like it is in the Settler creation story. This of course ties in to the delicate subject of religion. The word sacred, in Settler terms, defaults automatically to Christianity, and that presents a problem. If we attempt to transfer “sacred” from theistic religion to nature, we have to pass through the uncomfortable terrain of atheism. So how do we push through this, given that we are unlikely to become disciples of some new nature prophet? Can the sacred actually exist without prophecy?

The prolific American writer David James Duncan makes explicit the connection between Christianity and the commercial over-exploitation of nature’s resources:

“Capitalist fundamentalism, I still believe, is the perfect Techno-Industrial religion, its goal being a planet upon which we’ve nothing left to worship, worry about, read, eat, or love but dollar bills and Bibles.”

There is a psychological phenomenon known as the primal bond. A newborn creature tends to create a strong bond with the first creature or object it has a close association with. I have a primal bond with grasslands, that started in the semi-desert grasslands of Southern California, and has been with me ever since. This primal bond has led me to grassland travels, grassland jobs, grassland research and, in the end, this complex spiritual/emotional grassland attachment that I struggle to define.

To say that nature—including grasslands—is my religion is a trite generalization, but it does open a door.

We of the atheist persuasion do face a number of challenges. On which mental coathook do we hang serenity, contemplation, beatitude, bliss? Atheism conflates with hard-nosed pragmatism: a worldview guided by observed reality, skeptical of anything non-rational.  And yet, I think it is fair to say that we atheists, like the larger population, “want to be part of something bigger.” Nature is certainly big, in both geographical size and complexity, but we have yet to define how it is “bigger” in the spiritual sense.

This I think is where random bits of nature, in the form of a tiny pond, a grassy hillside, or a lonely beach, can help us define that spiritual side. Thus I continue to visit these actual and remembered landscapes, searching for the undefinable. Here I go again with yet another co-opted term: I am looking for revelations.

Mount Kobau, near Osoyoos, is one of those places where I search. The Syilx name for this mountain is Txasqin; no one knows for sure where the name Kobau originated. One theory is that the geologist George Mercer Dawson assigned the name during his explorations here in the 1870s. There seems to be no precedent: Kobau as a place name is not found anywhere else in the world, nor is there a famous person bearing that surname. Kobau does represent the number nine in ancient Chaldean numerology, a system which connects numbers to letters. It is said that when everything is perfectly aligned in the mystical Chaldean system, the letters vibrate. Geologist Dawson was widely read, and privately a bit of a mystic, so the Chaldean explanation for this mountain’s name is possible.

At 1870 meters, Kobau is a minor peak by Canadian standards, but it stands quietly alone, towering over its two low-elevation valleys. At the summit, eyes–and mind–wander from the Kettle Range to the east, over to the Cascade Mountains to the south, and on to the Cathedrals on the west. The Kobau Summit is one of the best dark sky preserves in southern Canada, and it hosts an annual week-long Star Party, attracting astronomical geeks from far and wide. They look upward, for knowledge and meaning and joy. As an ecological geek, I tend to look down, for much the same reasons. In the words of the eminently quotable historian Simon Schama, I am practicing “vegetable theology.” Schama also describes the almost universal connection between altitude and beatitude. He shows us that virtually every culture has examples of mountain sojourners seeking spirituality, blessedness, humility, timelessness or some other lofty sentiment, upon a summit.

My own sojourn towards a nature bond is a difficult one. To one side of my very narrow path is Syilx knowledge and culture; to the other side is religion. As honorable as these two worldviews are, they are out of bounds for this agnostic honky Settler. To add to the difficulty, I am not sure if I am trying to uncover a pre-existing, subconscious bond, or if I am creating a new one. So I eke out a solitary path as I go along, assembling random bits of ecology, literature, and personal insight.  The emerging notion of “two-eyed seeing” gives me some hope that Indigenous and Settler societies will soon be able to respectfully share insights about the natural world.

Am I in the process of uncovering a nature bond that was already there, hidden somewhere inside me, or am I creating a totally new one, from whole cloth? I don’t know, and there is yet another problem. Many of the words I use as in the struggle to define my nature bond have traditional religious connotations. Sacred, spirituality, beatific, humility, sublimity, epiphany: these and similar words, like taken, transcendent, and worship, are effectively co-opted. All these words have secular meanings, but as soon as they are used in a personal, reflective, or philosophical sense, religion automatically pops up. Even the word itself—religion—has an almost automatic Christian connotation.

“Sacred” seems to imply a “higher power,” a phrase which figures into to my quest. Higher than what? More powerful than what? I ask. The answer to both these questions I assume is: us. Higher and more powerful than us humans. I note that the phrase does not specifically refer to a being; the power could also be some kind of “life force.” This quest of mine is so entangled by words.  Or perhaps the entanglement is testimony to the unprecedented and profoundly difficult nature of my quest.

Another term I wrestle with is cloistered, the feeling of voluntarily confining oneself in a space that is intimate, safe, and esthetically pleasing; a space that encourages reflection. That is a very apt description of how I feel when I am in a grassland, or walking alone along a  creek with tall cottonwoods overhead.  Yet these places have absolutely nothing to do with the word’s root meaning, an outdoor space within the confines of a religious convent or monastery. My alter ego says to me, Gayton, if the word bothers you so much, delete it and find a synonym! To which I reply, as a certified verbomaniac, there isn’t one. No other word comes close.

Another obscure word I have stumbled upon is vastate. It is the opposite of devastate, but the actual meaning is much less clear. So I have assigned my own meaning: to feel purified by the vastness and complexity of nature. In the rare moments out in nature when I manage to put everything else aside, I can feel simultaneously cloistered and vastated. I don’t know of any other way to produce that feeling, and it is certainly a cheap drug. Mildly addictive, but with no negative side effects.

But how can I envision nature itself as a higher power, when our scientific knowledge says it is simply a massive network of genetic accidents and subsequent adjustments, playing out in diverse terrestrial and marine habitats and climates, over time? I have spent a good part of my life studying nature and dissecting it into component parts, so I have no trouble acknowledging its infinite, ever-changing complexity. But does the absolute peak endpoint of scientifically verified nature complexity then become the higher power? Is the final result of scientific reductionism a vastation?

On my Sunday morning walks in our small town I am always gobsmacked when I pass a local church. One of the more fundamentalist denominations, its large parking lot is packed and overflowing. This church obviously offers something that people in our town want. Then I think about my own undenomination. Do we atheists offer community, personal support, and hope, like that church does?  The answer to that question is obviously no: atheism at this point in time is a solitary negation, and that needs to change. Maybe nature can help.

Don Gayton is an ecologist and author of seven books of creative non-fiction. He lives in Summerland, BC. More on Don at www.dongayton.ca