The following Zen saying has been much on my mind lately:
First there is a mountain,
Then there is no mountain,
Then there is.
A more narrow version of this, quite apropos to the Snow Range, would be:
First there is a forest
Then there is no forest
Then there is.
These offer a more personal 'Zen' to the experience of watching billions of mountain pine beetles kill vast numbers of lodge pole pines and Engleman spruce in the Medicine Bow forest. The original Zen statement about mountains is (I presume) a trick for getting the mind to comprehend the Buddhist concept of emptiness. It's not that a mountain doesn't actually exist, it's that even a mountain, as impressive as it might appear, has no intrinsic, unique existence. It is, instead, a sum of many things, all of them contingent on many interlocking processes, and it-- the forest -- is most definitely not an enduring permanent reality all on its own. So, if one learns to see even a mountain as a 'thing' that is conditional on many other things, then one can begin to view it in it's changeable reality. Things are essentially, intrinsically empty. What matters is what actually is...without labels or mythic values.
The idea takes some getting used to. I used to see the Snowy Range as something that was and would be forever. After reading about John Love's descriptions of the geologic forces that molded these peaks, and that will eventually grind them down into something entirely different, I now know that this beloved range is anything but permanent. It is as it is right now, and even right now forces of water, wind, and underlying geology are subjecting 'it' to constant change. The fact that I cannot easily track these changes in the course of a very brief human life doesn't mean that the change isn't underway. Even the mountains, even the Snow Range are not forever.
And so it goes with this forest. I thought the Medicine Bow forest, as I knew it as a child and young adult, was forever. When the beetles started killing vast numbers of the trees that in their many numbers constitute this forest, I mourned the end of what I'd loved with pain and no small amount of bitterness. "How Dare This Forest Do This to Me!" To me? Well, not to me, or anybody else for that matter. Not even to itself. In fact, there is no 'itself.' The forest simply is, and as such change will inevitably come to it. We can debate what caused the explosion of beetles that killed all these trees: climate change, severe drought, lack of logging of older trees. Fingers are pointed in all directions attempting to affix blame. As if knowing who or what to blame would do any good now. What I've learned is that change, even cathartic change, is part of the life-cycle of any forest. Fire, insects, drought, men and their machines -- all are part of the the interconnected contingencies that shape the lives of the plants and animals that make up the 'it' of a living forest. What the beetles have forced upon me is the opportunity to watch in the span of a few years, the kind of change that in geological time takes millions of years for the underlying structure of the equally changeable mountain upon which this forest lives.
The forest that was, is no more. And yet, there is a new forest on the way...that is a thing I, in my very brief human life, can see happening already. In this very present, the forces that formed the old forest are already at work creating a new one. It's hard to see what's happening in the winter, but a quiet walk -- in the moment -- in early spring as the snow recedes reveals the regrowth, the resurgence of the myriad of arboreal systems that, altogether, make a forest what it is: a living, changing, dying, and renewing system of many many things, living, dying and non-living.
Whatever a forest is, it is what is happening at this and only this moment. And this moment always is. Change is part of this moment and it is always underway...in an instant it is a different forest, a different mountain, always now, and always forever becoming something different, something new. There's a Zen to all that.
First there is a forest,
Then there is no forest,
Then there is.
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