Slowing Down, Paying Attention on the Frontier of Death

Review Essay of Gerald G. May, The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature. Forward by Parker J. Palmer. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. 194 pages. Notes. ISBN-13: 978-0-06-084540-7, $24.95.

In the last year of my father’s life, he became confined more and more to his bed and grew more distant, turning inward, away from the world around him and toward the quiet drift into death. He knew it and I knew it, but the rest of my family fought against it in denial, bolstered, I think, by fear. Not so much fear of my father’s dying but, perhaps, their own, or, more pointedly, death itself. The times I was able to sit with my father alone, usually at night and in the dark, I became curious, even fascinated, with his journey and less concerned with his death than with his life, the entire journey that brought him, and, by extension, all of us, his family, to this final departure. Watching my father die underscored the simple fact of death as an inevitable part of the life process but, also, in thinking about the phrase, life process, I discovered that it is in that process that we learn to die, if we pay attention. From that point on, when I sat with my father and watched him turn ever more inward, I thought less about his dying and more about his life and the way he lived it—and he lived it well— all the time teaching me to do the same; if I paid attention.

Gerald May in The Wisdom of Wilderness teaches us to pay attention. He sets off into the frontier of death by looking back over his shoulder into the wilderness he opened himself to by learning how to live both in this world and in his own body and soul. In this book’s series of memories, often based on earlier journal entries, May revisits and recovers the lessons he learned in the wild, in nature, that brought him to harmony with the world and himself. He says, “outdoor Nature acquainted me with my own inner nature: how external wilderness spoke to my internal wilderness, and how it healed me and made me more whole” (p. xx).

Like Emerson before him, May acknowledges and decries the ever-widening distance between nature and us and, consequently, our distance from our own nature and our own wholeness. He wants to convince us that when we fail to acknowledge or admit that we are all “inevitably, intimately, and irrevocably part of Nature rather than apart from it,” we lose something essential to our own nature (p. xx).

With this motive, he gives us a last book that guides us into a way to recover at least something of our own “true” nature, and through that

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recovery, a way to recover the world itself. The book specifically engages us with finding our own wisdom in the wilderness, but a ghostlike subtext also suggests that at least one of the outcomes of our discovery could be, should be, an increased awareness of and caring for the world in which we live—a world many say is dying. As we hear more and more about global warming and its impact, we become concerned and look, too often, to politicians and scientific theory to either quell our fears or fix the problems without giving much thought to our own nature and how that, more than anything, would open the door to the adjustments and realignments needed to repair, even renew, our world. “Before we can effectively heal the wounds we have inflicted upon the rest of Nature, we must allow ourselves to be healed” (p. 170).

Gerald May’s key to that healing comes in his discovery of what he calls the Power of the Slowing (p. 16), a deeper form of paying attention, much like contemplative prayer, that requires an unconditional openness to our surroundings and our personal reactions to whatever we encounter. Even after “naming” this new “sense” of awareness, interconnectedness, he has “no idea what it means” (p. 16). “I cannot get my mind around it— and that also feels absolutely right. It mystifies me, and I am further mystified by my enjoyment of being mystified. Here’s something I am feeling so strongly, and I don’t understand it all. And I don’t need to—a great relief for a psychiatrist. I have been beautifully, exquisitely mystified” (p. 16). From that point forward, he takes the reader on a journey of further discovery of the Power of the Slowing through a series of personal experiences and encounters in the “wild” or “wilderness.”

May holds nothing back in relating his own journey—a journey always of the spirit—into a greater relationship with this new power that opens him to a clearer awareness of himself in relation to the purity of nature, or what he comes to call ultimately the wisdom of wilderness. “So Wisdom guides me into situations and through circumstances where I learn the ways and the wonder of inner and outer Nature” (p. 46). His intense, personal accounts lay bare his willingness, even need, to accept more than confront the intertwined facets of inner and the outer Nature, including fear and violence. Of fear, he says, “Let me neither tighten myself against what I’m feeling, nor be paralyzed by it, but let me live into the bright, sane responsiveness that fear makes possible” (p. 47). Discussing the human need to explain and have reasons for violence, he states simply, and honestly, “there will always remain a violence that just is, just exists, just happens. It is a quality of destructiveness that is completely wild, unreasoned, unforgiving, relentless, and inexplicable” (pp. 118-119).

This knowledge, if not always understanding, of inner and outer nature, fear and violence, and our place within and relationship to it all, culminates in May’s own frank discussion of his illness and impending death and, here, we find his ultimate lesson—that paying attention, allowing ourselves to open to the Power of the Slowing and its eventual transformation into the wisdom of wilderness, leads us into a richer, fuller life. We learn this because even in telling us about his illness and the debilitating effects of his chemotherapy, May stays focused on life and the life-affirming knowledge he came to by way of the wisdom of wilderness, especially when he tells us he saw his cancer cells as part of the “natural ‘isness’ of things as they are” (p. 186). Death like life just is, it’s part of a larger whole and to “fight” or “battle” against it separates us from that whole. “I think it was wholly my experience of the Wild that made such warlike references feel wrong for me” (p.186).

Throughout the telling of his story, May strives to learn how not to war against the whole so that he might take his place within it. He takes us along on his journey and by doing so leaves us with a gift. “What the Power of the Slowing taught me is what the Source of the All constantly yearns for: that each one of us will know without doubt that we are loved, and that we are intimately, irrevocably part of the endless creation of love, and that we will join with full freedom and consciousness, the joyous creativity that is Nature, that is Wildness, that is Wilderness, that is Everything” (p. 190). Each of us can, indeed, come to know this if, like May, we learn to pay attention.

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