I’m hiking up the McDowell Mountains this morning as the sun wakes up, trying to clear my head after mistakenly watching the ugliness of the morning news. Nothing but hate, controversy, possible corruptness, childishness, you name it. Being a couple of miles east of Scottsdale, AZ, the mountains repose in peaceful tranquility except for a slight, distant hum of traffic trying to pollute the airwaves.
It is, dare I say it, a spiritual experience.
Indigenous people tend to believe nature and spirituality are one and the same. Civilized societies have viewed this as primitive, naïve, and yet the natives are not the one’s destroying the planet. They revere it, respect it, are part of. Not so much the “civilized.”
So who is it that is really disconnected from reality?
Out here in the mountains, there is much to be heard through stillness. Nature doesn’t trust the movers and shakers, and when I’m quiet and still it becomes painfully obvious how disconnected most of us are from the planet, and how that leads to so many of our senseless societal problems. Occasionally a fellow hiker passes by and proves it, the ears of nearly every one of them blocked by headphones, lost in their little worlds. They’re here for the exercise, not for nature, not to reconnect, and they miss much.
Some bird I haven’t been formally introduced to yet, hanging out across a green valley on the next mountain over, fills the valley with hysterical laughter, probably at our foolishness. This is your reality, he says, not the ugliness you all create. The sun kicks off its covers and lights up the tips of the laughing bird’s mountain with its wakening yawns while dark clouds move in from the south. One is bright white except for a black belly, loaded with muscular power. It reaches a mountain peak and mauls it with hoary hands. Rain showers streak over the distant horizon as I make my descent. Beyond Laughing Bird Mountain the sound of a drill rises up, like a woodpecker, but it lacks the serenity of beak against wood; instead it’s grating clang signals metal against metal, coming from some distant development, like Rump’s voice, stealing the tranquility.
I return home to more news. More email controversy, possible corruption, and rump’s grating drill calling our president the founder of ISIS, proud of his new phrase like the 12-year old he is, everything emerging from his mouth coated with ugliness. If he was any more disconnected from nature he’d fall off the planet. His brand is supposed to be high-class, the best of the best, but that’s a con. It’s ego, it’s boastfulness, it’s ostentatiousness, it’s crass and cynical and nasty. It’s violent. Everything he does is supposed to be amazing, and yet he can’t even run a convention or a campaign. Both have reflected the soul of its candidate.
His supporters lap up the vitriol as entertainment, as reality TV, oblivious to the consequences should he succeed. They are the bigger problem. He wouldn’t exist without them. They laugh alongside him, enjoying his vulgar campaign.
They defend him. They say he’s not politically correct and tells it like it is, but they don’t understand the difference between political incorrectness and indecency.
They need to take a long walk up Laughing Bird Mountain, not to exploit it or use it in any way, but to stop and to listen and to understand, to soak up what nature has to say.