Yellowstone's Quiet Gospel

What measure of the world drives a person’s sense of being? And when does it disappear? Is there a purpose to the disappearance, or do we only find ourselves when we let go and cease searching?

For a while, I was scared because I wasn’t writing. I didn’t know what to write about, because I felt like less than I had ever been. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be. And my words come from my deepest self - I have no words when I’m not sure who my own self is.

When I arrived in Yellowstone for my seasonal job, it was like starting over. I didn’t know the land, didn’t know the people, and was less sure than ever of who I was without my normal environment to reflect me. For the first time in a long time, I felt lost. I questioned what I was doing here, why I thought I could presume to know better than the society around me and live a different kind of life. I wasn’t immediately struck by the beauty of the barren, hot land, like I thought I would be. Words on paper have always been my way out, but I was at a loss. My spirit had nothing to say and I didn’t know why she was so quiet, when normally I am an explosion of life and burning passion.

Desperately, I searched for an answer, thinking there must be something I was missing, some piece of my surroundings that if I could just find, I would be alright.

I never found it.

What I found instead was an absence.

An absence of self, of all the things that I had built up to serve my own image and what I thought I should be. These things no longer mattered in a place where I was unknowing and unknown, and they fell away like dust off my shoes. I didn’t know what to fill the empty space with.

One night, some new friends and I packed up a car at dusk and drove to Mount Washburn, a small mountain that looks down into Yellowstone’s canyon. We hiked up as the sun was coming down, soaking and staining the mountainous horizon in vivid color. At the top, we watched the sun disappear below the horizon on one side while the moon rose over the other, the natural world’s quiet and beautiful shift. At the top of Mount Washburn sits a telescope, and I looked through it at the full moon, letting it become so large in my vision that everything else grew smaller. And I began to understand.

Through seasonal work, I got to experience this wild land like very few do. The night drive back from Washburn across the plains yielded geyser smoke reaching towards the sky with grasping steam, lit up white in the light of the full moon. The stars spread above me, horizon to horizon, seeming like I could dare to reach up and grab them, although they would never deign to let me.

Mid-August brought the Perseid meteor shower. Once again, friends and I packed everything we needed and some wine in a car and headed out towards Shadow Mountain, the best dispersed camping area to be found near the Teton mountain range. There is a certain keen freedom to be found in not knowing where you will be tomorrow, or even that night. We rolled up and down the treacherous mountain road, hollering with our abs clenched against the bumps and rocks, but it seemed everyone had the same idea as us. So we struck out to find any campsite we could, ending up on Gros Ventre Road. Upon finding a site, a friend yells for us to check out the cave near a river below the site. We decided to set up camp inside the cave, sitting on the lip and passing the wine bottle back and forth as we listened to the river rushing below us and watched the stars blaze, beautiful in their falling. Becoming something new in the journey. They were so bright, so close, that we could hear the sizzle of them blazing and see them burn red, ripping through the inky blackness of the sky. I have never seen anything like it. And, caught up in the beauty, once again I found a quiet sense of contentment in the absence of self. In a complete surrender to the living world around me.

The season started to turn in September, my favorite time in the park. Summer had been all pine greens and dusky gray on the hills, a landscape marked by the heat of July and August. But autumn brought an unexpected explosion of color in the form of the changing aspen trees. Suddenly and boldly they traced a path like fire down the jagged rocks. The grassy fields became the most brilliant gold and the bushes turned red, a reflection of the lazily setting sun. I hiked Seven Mile Hole (which is in fact ten miles), down into the canyon and back up, grueling to say the least. But the journey was beyond worth it - winding through white sinter fields and opening up into rusty rock walls rising on either side, evidence of the alien-like geological features in the park.

I’ve been thinking less in words and more in images - flashes of color, snatches of beauty. An impression of a massive expanse of land with an interconnected spirit greater than mine. Without even realizing it, I started to notice the small things again. These things, windows into this giant spirit, strike a deeper chord in me when I’m not desperate for them to mean something. They just are.

I had the privilege of speaking to a scientist who had been working in the park for decades. She told me that the aspens had been returning to the park since wolves were reintroduced in the 1990s. Why? Because the wolves started hunting elk again, and so the herds were forced to resume their migratory lifestyle and stop mowing the edible shoots, the aspens, to the ground. There was a reverence in her voice as she repeated, again and again, “everything is connected”. Nothing in nature exists isolated from its environment. Every part of the living world relies on the other parts, an intricate system unobserved by the casual eye. Every stage of the cycle plays a necessary part.

At first, I could only see all the things Yellowstone was not. But it’s beautiful in a different, ageless, pine-in-the-snow kind of way. Old Faithful erupting in the light of the stars, whether anyone is there to view it or not. The sulfur from the heart of the earth dripping like molasses down the hillside, carving a path over generations. The geysers giving off steam as rays of the setting sun shoot through the haze. A steady, healing energy, bubbling up in Grand Prismatic in an array of stunning color.

I missed these small miracles because I was too busy looking for some grand sign, forgetting that even the most massive trees of the forest start as seeds. I am built to be a large being like them, with a soul expansive and deep as a well. My mind and my spirit will not allow for otherwise. That growth takes time. Instead of fighting it, I can flow into it like a river coming down from the mountains in springtime.

The act of letting go, of leaving space, is natural and sacred, a surrender to the moment I’m living and the land I’m living it in. It’s the only thing that allows us to be truly present and realize what’s around us. When I let go of what I think should be, I’m embraced by what is.

The older pines must fall before the saplings can grow in the revealed sunlight. Everything begins as it ends and ends as it begins. This is the law of nature, its very foundation. The vacancy I feel now is by design, as every turning of time’s wheel in the universe is. It’s making room for what’s to come. My soul is slowly growing into who she’s going to be, and I’m grateful to be able to give her that time. I don’t know exactly who that is or what the end of my path looks like. But I’ll be watching the bursts of color on the trail along the way, giving reverence to the fact that I’m alive enough to wonder.

Sincerely,

Esther