This week marks the second week of the month of Ramadan, a month often characterized as a month of starvation. For me, this Ramadan has been far different than any other. This year Ramadan has fallen in the summer, and though the hours are long, incredibly long, I've taken a different approach to the month. For me, it isn't about what I've often been told it's about-- to feel for the hungry, to avoid temptation, to practice the "rules." For me, this month is about grounding myself, learning to really live.
We started our Ramadan at Glacier National Park. Though we didn't fast for the week,I felt the essence of Ramadan more than any other year.
Living a city-life, one is programmed to believe that man is the eternal prophet, that any message the earth has to give or any task that must be done, can be and will be done through us. We change what we please to create what we need. But, as I stood surrounded by vast snow covered mountains, on earth covered in wildflowers, only steps away from the most pristine, limpid lakes, I saw the dynamics shift before my eyes. The place of man swept down from the top to where it belonged, with the rest of wildlife.
Here we were the prey. And there were no rules we could set or plans we could make definitely.
One night we pitched a tent and made a fire. We went to sleep, and left the fire to finish the last log through the night. In the dead calm of night, just as I was falling asleep, a wind swept through the mesh of the tent. It was followed by others. In an instant the still night had been overtaken by a storm. We rushed out to pin down the tent cover and put things away. I poured water over the fire and just as I turned around the wind lifted the flames again.
Throughout the park were "Grizzly Bear" warnings. "Entering Bear Country," they read with a picture of an angry bear, jaws open, below the warning. Bear spray sold out instores across the park. We are not used to feeling our place in the food chain. But these bears with four inch nails, that were feared so much and were depicted so viciously, filled themselves with berries and fish!
I have locked certain images and scenes from this trip in my heart and in my mind. This Ramadan, I want to meditate on the still lake and the sound and image of water, stars in the sky against a backdrop of owls calling. This is my goal--to breathe every breath through this view, to understand how much of nothing and how much of everything I am, like the small, red rock rock against which the creek slides against that nudges it down to the river, to the fall, to the lake...
