The Howl

by

At a seemingly random hour of the night, a chorus of yips, yaps, and howls suddenly commences, echoing across the canyon.  With crescendos and diminuendos it continues, raising the follicles on our backs in primal wonderment, until, as if at the wave of a conductor's baton, it just as abruptly stops.

Now, hiking along the bosque of Sespe Creek, cottonwoods flutter a commonwealth of gold.  Papery leaves fallen on creekbed pebbles crunch under bootsteps.  The river willows waft a promise of occulted water. 

Up the bank and onto the trail, and on either side of the dusty track, yucca stalks quake in the breeze, rattling their dried seed pods.  A huge blank slate of pale rock tilts against the flank of Pine Mountain to the north, offering an invitation to the imagination. 

In muffled puffs, bootsteps march down the canyon, over bouldered drywashes, past thickets of dried, deep-red buckwheat and gnarly chaparral, toward an outcrop of limestone.  A tailing of white scree spreading down to the trail, upon examination, is littered with oyster shells nearly as intact after 44,000,000 years as if they had been plucked and dropped by seabirds yesterday.  Begging the question:  in the geological record, how thick will humanity's strata be?  How far will our buried trace be carried up and away, tipped at giddy angles by inexorable forces through inconceivable time?

When holy awe follows, it is good to be confronted with our thin place in the order of the world, and with it to awaken to the vastness of our ignorance.  Is there a grace in not knowing why coyotes howl in the night?  And alongside it, is there grace in a way of knowing that leaves awe intact?  Padding down the Sespe Creek trail, the question sinks deeper.  How this urge to know why?  Why this urge to know how?  And can this urge get in the way of being with what is, as it is? 

Is this not the work of wilderness on the soul made tame by conventions of perception?  - to step out of what things are to us, and open ourselves to engaging with things as they are, or might be, to and in themselves? 

Howl, O coyote!  Howl, O my soul.

Retired senior associate dean of religion at the University of Southern California, the Rev. Jim Burklo begins as part-time pastor of the United Church of Christ of Simi Valley on Oct 30. This post is republished with permission from his new blog, The Sespe Howl, local manifestations of the universal, contemplations, observations and compositions from the lands shadowed by the Sespe Wilderness above Ojai, California.