I spent this past weekend in Lake Placid with some of my oldest and dearest friends, a group of gently kind, music-loving, hilarious guys from college. We were blessed with unseasonably warm and sunny weather, so on Saturday we took a break from jamming on guitars and went for a short-sleeved hike up Cobble Hill, just a short walk from our host’s home.
After ascending some 460 feet, we approached the bald-faced cobble at the summit, from which we would be able to see some of the Adirondacks’ grandest residents, including Algonquin Peak and Whiteface Mountain. But we saw something else first: a battered, weather-worn sign someone had nailed to a tree, by appearances decades ago. On it they had carefully drawn an arrow pointing back down the hill and scrawled the first line of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” The entire poem reads:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Poetry in the woods is nothing new, I realize. Another New England poet, Robert Frost, titled one of his most famous poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Still, the appearance of the sign and that line from Dickinson caught me by surprise. Maybe “shock” is too strong a word, but it caused me to stop, just for a moment, the flurry of thoughts buzzing in my head and appreciate the beauty of my surroundings, the absolutely gorgeous weather, the decades-long friendships with my companions and the ease of being among them.
Given the state of mind I had been in, it amounted to a mini-shock to my system.
And then, aided by the mountain views from the top of Cobble Hill, I experienced a kind of awe. I found myself remembering hiking to the top of Algonquin Peak in 1980 on a day off from my summer job in Lake Placid as a dishwasher—in cheap-cheap running shoes and paper-thin socks whose scratchiness I can still recall. The blisters on my feet lasted for days, no small thing when you’re a dishwasher. But the awe I experienced then, as now, was palpable. This time, gazing at Algonquin from a distance, I said to myself the words I’ve always said when I’ve reached a summit and have looked out over a massive field of verdant green and majestic rock—where, in the absolute silence, I can imagine no trucks banging down the street, no sirens wailing, no people bustling and no bad news happening: “God’s backyard.”
Long, long ago, about a thousand thousand years before the common era, another group of guys would sometimes venture into God’s backyard for a similar communion with nature and the divine, but they were not post-hippies like us; they were Hindu priests. These sages would go into the forest to conduct a ritual, a debate to see who could best define Brahman, the ultimate reality in Hinduism.
Each challenger would try to define Brahman using poetic and enigmatic language such as that found in The Vedas and The Upanishads, Hindu holy scripture. His opponents would listen carefully and then respond, each trying to move beyond what the challenger had said to get closer and closer to a definition of Brahman, whose essence is beyond all knowing, beyond all deities, beyond the beyond and yet within us all. Ultimate mystery. Impossible to define.
Who won? I heard the religious historian Karen Armstrong describe how the winner was determined during an interview with Terry Gross some years ago on the radio show, “Fresh Air.” A former nun, Armstrong has written many books, including A History of God, The Lost Art of Scripture, and more recently, Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Bond with the Natural World. She described the competition in the forest to Gross and then said:
[The] winner was the priest who reduced everybody to silence. And in that silence, the Brahman was present. The Brahman was not present in the wordy definitions of the divine. It was present in the stunning realization of the absolute powerlessness of language and speech to describe this.
And that is an authentic model of religious discourse. A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do…. All religious language must reach beyond itself into a sort of silent awe.
A sort of silent awe. That to me is an appropriate response to mystery, whether the mystery is Why are we here? Is there a god or gods? What happens after we die? or choose your own. We wonder about these things. We would love to have answers. Or maybe we just think we do.
One of the reasons I perform magic is to remind others but mostly myself that mystery is a good thing. Sometimes I forget, however, that pursuing magic—or guitar jamming or any one of the dozen other things I love to do—is not enough to hold mystery in the center and just let it be. There need to be silences as well. In fact, when there is not enough quality silence in my life, and by that I mean silence in which I can contemplate the infinite and arrive at a silent awe, I find myself unable to perform magic, play music, sing songs, or haul the trash, recycling and compost to the transfer station each week (which I actually enjoy and find therapeutic).
So silence may be golden, but it is also necessary.
As for that sign in the forest where my companions and I did not debate Brahman but surely experienced it: I’m guessing some thoughtful hiker from long ago nailed it to that tree as a blaze, a trail marker. Or it had been an actual sign placed by the Adirondack Mountain Club back around 1979 when the club was founded (and, coincidentally, the year my friends and I first met), and the original sign had weathered away, and a fan of Emily Dickinson scribbled those words with a Sharpie or a grease pen for a lark.
No matter. The sign, complete with that carefully drawn arrow, did not ask a crumb of me. It simply did what it needed to do. It pointed the way home.
Loved it. Magic abounds in the woods.