Badlands
28 – 31 July
Elevation: Changes
Stormy

The name “Badlands” is imposing enough, let alone for this magical South Dakota national park. Online, the ‘bad’ is traced to French Canadian fur traders who called it "les mauvaises terres pour traverser," or "bad lands to travel through.” Extreme temperatures, lack of water, and ravished terrain would certainly lend to this perception. Yet, we also read, at the visitor’s centre, that the Lakota Tribe also call it ‘bad land’ for the mere fact that you can’t plant anything here because the land is in a constant state of erosion. This hills and jagged mountains are made of clay—not stone.

As such, the rain easily tears into its surface and pulls thin layer upon thin layer down into ever expanding gullies and valleys, exposing layers and layers of differing deposits left here millennia ago. It is one of the most dynamic and alive landscapes I have ever seen. It changes with each and every rain, with each breath of wind, with each stomp of foot. It looks so fragile, in fact, that I was amazed that the park system allows people to climb it, to tromp around on it. They know that it doesn’t matter. It is all being eroded. It is bad land in that we cannot grow crops in it, we cannot build on it, we cannot push it around to our will. It is only there to remind us of how stunning and amazingly beautiful the Earth and its endless currents can be.

The themes for this last post came rushing down on me just as the rain slashed at the ancient mountains of sacred clay and mud. This pandemic tore through our cities first, the primary centers if our interactions, where we have flocked to love and live, and then it spread out across the arteries of our countries, toward the desolate and lonely, spreading out as does all rain that pummels the earth.

COVID-19 is not some alien thing. It is not an interstellar abomination from a sci-fi film. It is from and of nature. It is natural. It is as much a part of Mother Earth as we are and as much as the slow mud and clay that moves from green to crimson to orange to purple to grey. Mother Nature is reminding us, screaming at us, to be humble in her presence for we are nothing but cosmic dust within her ancient annals, borne to be eroded away, just like everything else. And, lest us forget, this is not a terrible fate.

Our problem—or at least one of our problems in this context—is that we are always so damn set on constructing meaning, on explaining everything! We need to eat this way, think that way, look that way, not do this, do that—it is all exhausting. We are pounding ourselves into oblivion by thinking that there is some magical riddle that if we solve then everything will become clear. Everything will be explained. Everything will have meaning.

One of the fundamentals that drives this—drives me—is the endless patterns that exist in the chaos. The thinking goes that the cosmos cannot be meaningless because there are so many intricate patterns within it, from the cycle of the planet around the sun, to the cycle of life amongst all of us, to the number of petals on a flower, to the patterns of waves against a beach. We love our BIG DATA because it lets us identify more and more patterns and thus, we figure, more and more meaning. We just need to crunch the data and the patterns will all come into focus.

That’s where we get it wrong. That’s why Mother Nature is screaming at us. These patterns are not the source of meaning. They are the source of beauty. And that is awesome. We love beauty. It makes us oogle and chuckle. We love things that shine and soar. And my goodness, we are surrounded in every nook and cranny with beauty. It is within the tickle of a toe in hot sand as much as it is in the swing and spray of Vernal Falls. It is everywhere, if we look.

This pandemic has forced us to fall inwards with our closest family and friends and, for the luckiest of us, outwards into the boundless bosom of Mother Nature. It pushes us away from crass consumerism and the massive spectacle of commercialism. It pushes us toward baking bread at home and teaching our children new skills. I don’t mean to be a Pollyanna. I know the pain and suffering that comes with this disease. I know the loss. I think about it and work toward helping those who are suffering from it every day. Yet, as we often say in humanitarian action, never let an emergency go to waste. The emergency here goes beyond the disease. It is a clarion call to all of us to get our houses in order, to make sure our priorities are right, and to remember that life is filled with beauty and that it is incumbent on us to see and spread that beauty to as many, many people as we can.