Garden of the Gods

Garden of the Snake

Every now and then I get possessed with the desire to have a different texture of experience for a short while, don’t you? The spontaneous urge to sleep outside, to be deprived of creature comforts like running water, a soft bed, electrical light at nighttime, to see what you find there in the absence of such conveniences. So much of my life is lived in the tension between staying and going, comfort and travel, novelty and routine. My partner had planned to come with me to camp down among the unruly rock cliffs of the Garden of the Gods Wilderness in southern Illinois but when he got sick the day before our scheduled departure I decided to go on my own anyway - after all, it was my birthday.

I like keeping a birthday tradition of solitude, which may seem counterintuitive - birthdays are usually big party days for many folks. But there’s just something so satisfying about uninstalling Instagram from my phone and heading off alone into the woods on the anniversary of another trip around the sun, to eat dehydrated refried beans over a camp stove, to go a little feral for a while. It feels right, I can’t explain it.

Southern Illinois is a wild part of the state, which you can immediately see and feel as you approach it. Cornfields and cornfields and cornfields stretch as far as the eye can see for hours of backroad driving and then suddenly: hills and forest. It may not be anything like the mountains of the western part of the country but the drama is in the juxtaposition. Garden of the Gods is just beyond where the glaciers halted their southward march about 130,000 years ago. ‘The Remnants of an Ancient Sea,’ as the plaque will tell you at the most popular scenic overlook, are what accounts for the rolling, textured, undulating rock formations that stand looking into the forested valley.

I set up my tent at one of the nearby campgrounds and settled in to the sounds of other campers and their dogs and children doing camping together. Two twin wishes that I was doing this differently, that I was having a different experience than the one I was having at that moment, arose in me. From the peals of laughter from a group across the way rose the wish that I had planned a big, festive party camp-out with friends, like the ones we used to have in our early twenties (except with perhaps fewer party drugs and less getting repeatedly scolded by our campground neighbors to keep the noise down, for god’s sake).

The other wish was its photo negative: that instead of car camping here with all the normies I was carrying all I needed on my back and setting up my lightweight tent in the middle of the woods, somewhere decently off the trail (”dispersed camping,” as it’s called) and having an experience of true solitude, true communing with nature. I have done plenty of backpacking at this point - enough to know well how this romantic idealization in my head glosses lightly over the brutal physical realities of multi-day backpacking trips that mostly do not feel like “communing” with fuck-all. And yet the appeal is still there, pulsing in a buried crevice. Beloved podcast Desert Oracle put it this way:

People unaccustomed to just walking out the door and never coming back often find an external reason for just strolling off the job of being a worker-bee producer of goods or services in the pointless grind of the global economy or a care-taker or whatever it is that locks you down…but in the original walkabout we see something of our original form as free people traveling the lands by foot in a state of near-constant spiritual intoxication, alive to everything from the beauty of the world to the struggle to stay alive. Life and death, visible and meaningful, seen and felt and heard and experienced. A sacred walk with a set goal and a point of return, that really hits the sweet spot.

I notice in myself a slight tendency towards extremity when it comes to, let’s say, the seeking of transcendent experiences - although the forms that that takes in my life may not seem extreme to some of you. The forms have been many over time, some of them more culturally sanctioned than others. I notice that I am drawn towards duration, whether it’s meditating for eight hours a day for five days during sesshin at my local Zen Center or (currently aspirational) through-hiking a trail like the Long Trail in Vermont, or maybe the Camino in Spain.

I wonder how much the very act of seeking itself gets in the way of me being fully present with nature, feeling like I am not separate, as it were. I know that my preoccupation with documenting everything I do and think gets in the way. I wonder how much I miss when I am writing everything down, taking pictures, documenting obsessively. I am so invested in capturing (what a revealing word that is in this context) the experience that I am not fully available to it, to what is right in front of me to be communed with.

Who is this documentation for, anyway? There is something that feels like safety when I take a million pictures of the way the rock curves like that - maybe it’s because of how terrible my memory has always been - if I have a picture that means it isn’t lost to me forever.

I did try to just sit for a while in the Garden of the Gods, on one of the quiet rock outcroppings overlooking the forested valley. I bring so much baggage to sitting, too! Does it even count for anything if I’m not doing formal Zen meditation posture and practice? Don’t I need to “clear my mind” or something?? Why do I feel like I’m doing it wrong, why does this feel stressful???

So, I don’t know, I momentarily stopped caring about all of that to just look instead at the incredible scenery that I came all this way for, and to not ask anything else of it. The sandstone cliffs of the ancient sea are rounded into these waving, wrinkled formations that defy what it seems like rock should be able to look like. They are covered in lichens. The place where I sat is surrounded by juniper trees whose branches are loaded with their tiny blue berries right now. This one juniper tree gave me the feeling of wanting to leap from the cliff into the embrace of its branches, a high-top bear hug. One then two then three turkey vultures circled over the valley. The wind moved through the trees on the ridge across the valley from my sit-spot and I lost track of time watching the way this happens continuously. I lost time, I lost self, I lost everything except for the way the wind is moving the tops of these trees.

What else could I ever have been wanting to encounter, what state could I have been hoping to attain, other than this? I needed to do nothing but to really, fully look at the world in order to be in it.

Heading back to the main trail I crossed paths with a snake. She was about three feet long, black and shining in the sunlight. She and I moved away from each other but continued to regard the other. I felt, along with the thread of fear, a thrill of excitement. There’s an evolutionary theory that human eyes have evolved to be able to immediately recognize snakes - our eyeballs became special built-in Snake Detection Mechanisms (the theory is literally called the Snake Detection Hypothesis) because of the danger (or perceived danger) that snakes can pose to primates.

I have been reading Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels on this trip (”Really? This is the single book I grabbed on my way out the door?” I said to myself once I had set up camp the night before) and had just read this passage about snakes - as in, The Serpent in the Garden of Eden - in which Pagels recounts some gnostic alternatives to the story of the Old Testament written in the first century or two after the death of Jesus (i.e., some very spicy heresies).

In these passages, the serpent - a very ancient symbol of divine wisdom - is the teacher who opens the eyes of Adam and Eve to the tyranny of their jealous god. This particular passage from The Hypostasis of the Archons struck me: “Then the Female Spiritual Principle came in the Snake, the Instructor, and it taught them, saying, ‘you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open, and you shall become like gods, recognizing evil and good.’ …And the arrogant Ruler cursed the Woman…[and]…the Snake.”

In both the gnostic text and the scientific theory, the snake brings the gift of perception, of material and spiritual sight, of necessary recognition. I bask in the sun-baked heat of gratitude for this gift and its bringer, I let the radiance of it warm me all the way through.