Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World 

I have just started reading a remarkable book that I want to share, because it resonates deeply with some of the feelings and experiences that inspired the founding of Röam - particularly the desire to create opportunities and experiences that take people outside of themselves and connect them deeply with something much greater, the natural world. “Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World” explores the connection between people and place, observing in incredible detail the astounding beauty and fragility of our planet, and the immense therapeutic power of natural spaces on the deepest elements of our psyche and our soul. Lopez describes an intimate relationship with wild and natural places that he recognizes as central to indigenous cultures, and the way in which this relationship frees them from feelings of isolation, loneliness, and anxiety that we often struggle with in our “modern” and hyperconnected lives.

The following passages poignantly capture the beautiful message of this book. A message that lies at the heart of all that we seek to do and create through Röam.   

The love of place can sustain a life, and we usually talk as though it's an unreciprocated love, a one-way street. But places love us back in how they steady and sustain us, teach us, shelter us, guide us, feed us, and that old image of the Earth itself as a mother is a reminder that we depend upon the unearned bounty of the biosphere. So, in a sense, in learning to love the Earth and particular places in it, we are learning to love back what loved us all along. We learn to love these places, by studying and understanding them, by immersing ourselves in them. 

Those of us who write about the natural world cherish some sense of being fed and cared for and protected by places and the living things in them, of a communion with the non-human world that matters on corporeal, ethical, emotional, imaginative, and spiritual terms. Which is why we have often tried to talk about both how these realms are being objectively threatened by climate catastrophe, extinction, exploitation-and disappearing from our consciousness, as human beings become more indoor, urban creatures, and what kind of loss the latter is.

The leads us to consider that the presence of some “divine force” is to be found in many places and phenomena. It is found in the here and now, not in some disembodied heaven. This presence manifests in and as places, mostly wild and remote ones where the natural order seems intact, and as specific moments of witness, in particular encounters. We see places not as passive stages that life moves across but as lives in and of themselves. As all the presences, living and otherwise, in a place - its animals, plants, weather, geology, and hydrology, the lay of the land, the human presence, and how they all interact. 

If there is a Holy Grail within this cosmology it is the journey, the search for something outside of oneself. The Grail is not just the travel to these places but the stillness and patience after arrival. It is the act of paying attention to things that exist within a place, of entering a state of concentration, of focus, a state of being open to epiphany and rapture and communion. It is a seeking, so to speak, of the capacity to seek, with a kind of devotion that steadies the concentration. You arrive at a place, then you arrive at an awareness, then perhaps arrive at an understanding, which opens the world to you and opens you up to the world. 

Central to this is the sheer luxury of time and the way that the old ways were the slow ways, and that this slowness is what it takes to know something, whether you wait for hours for the animal to appear, or you return to a place over and over to know it under many conditions. In that sense, it's an act of resistance to our hurried, harried, distracted era that allows you to finally arrive at a relationship with that place, and a new understanding or yourself.