National Parks as Shrines

Today’s offering comes to us from Meagan Fischer, an emerging writer by trade and an edge-cultivator by life purpose. She is a current Community Ministry Certificate student with Cherry Hill Seminary and earned a Permaculture Design Certificate from Earth Activist Training with Starhawk in 2009. A lifelong student of the listening arts and group facilitation, she is a current co-host of the BUILD Community of Practice for conflict engagement practitioners working on pro-democracy efforts. Her writing has appeared in other faith-focused publications and her local newspaper, where she strives to make her right-sized contributions to collective trauma relief.

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I’ve been an eclectic Pagan since I was a teenager, and a nature mystic probably since I was born. I have often wished for a temple where the sacred as I most deeply connect with it is honored. Like many of us nature-spirituality folks, I find elements of this sacred space everywhere. A redwood grove in my local park certainly bears cathedral-like qualities. But the element of community is missing. And in places where others do not share my spiritual orientation, I had best keep any openly spiritual practices under the radar or at least unobtrusive.

How can I convey the yearning for a temple? I don’t want a place to slaughter cows.

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Let me share a story about a shrine.

While visiting the city of Mt. Shasta as a feral, hitchhiking teen, I came across a public water fountain that was different from its stainless steel cousins. It was set into a mosaiced tile stand. Previous visitors had left little offerings of jewelry and stones in and around the fountain. Moved, I left something of my own, perhaps a necklace acquired in my hippie travels.

Later I was sad to see that all the offerings had disappeared. I said something about “the shrine” to a passing officer of the law (what on Earth was I thinking, I now wonder, drawing attention to my houseless self?). He told me there was no shrine.

Looking back it is clear that he was living in the more widely-shared reality of the general public and the institutional powers-that-be. Some individuals had temporarily re-envisioned this water fountain as something else, something for which I also longed. We weren’t offering these things to any particular deity or religion, although the choice of location may indicate a reverence for water. I recall that impromptu shrine as a space that honored beauty and sacredness itself. But the majority of people around us were not holding that vision.

I accept this more now. Separation of church and state implies that a water fountain in a public park should not favor any particular religious expression. The leaving of small beautiful offerings was not agreed upon by all of the city’s residents.

And yet my desire for shrines has endured.

Let me tell you a story about a pilgrimage.

My family – my aunt, really – once owned “undeveloped” property in the northern California valley, where orange poppies blanket the green hills every spring. By summer the hills are yellow and dry, but in March and April, water trickles through the landscape, nurturing miner’s lettuce and lupin. My adolescence involved a lot of instability, of housing and otherwise, but this land offered a refuge, a place to bask in beauty and restore myself. I bathed in small waterfalls, covered myself in mud, tattooed manzanita and poison oak on my soul.

Eventually this land was sold and with it my place to journey for spiritual renewal.

But my desire for pilgrimage has endured.

For my 35th birthday earlier this year, I visited the Rosie the Riveter National Historic Site in Richmond, California. While this visit was interesting in itself, its true significance was in my purchase of a National Parks Passport book.

I am a collector at heart. State quarters, pennies from each year I was born, stamps, trading cards – all these things have called to me. And here in this passport book was an opportunity to collect something new, not things but places I could go: experiences.

As I began to plan trips to the national parks in my Northern California region, I realized that they might be the temples I have always wanted. They are, or can be, shrines for the spirits of the land, and in some cases that includes the spirits of humans and significant events that took place in those places.

This summer I have had the honor of visiting many of these temples. I camped at Point Reyes National Seashore, hiking three miles from my parking spot. Is this not a pilgrimage, especially for somebody with my physical challenges of chronic foot pain and general struggles with physical stamina? Is this not a way to embody my pantheist devotion, and reap its rewards, such as the sighting of dozens of whales spouting in the coastal waters?

I wandered through the trails of Muir Woods, and listened to a ranger talk about the deep relationships the beings here have formed over millennia, how the trees communicate and share resources through the mycelial web underground, even across species. They know that their own well-being is predicated on the health of the whole forest. She spoke of salmon bringing nutrients from the ocean and the carcass of a deer slowly returning to the soil. This talk, attended by diverse congregants from around the world seated on trail benches, now holds my personal designation of “best sermon I have ever heard,” with regrets to many Unitarian Universalist ministers I deeply appreciate. I came to see that park rangers may be priestesses (a term I use gender-neutrally from time spent with Reclaiming Witches).

I have discovered how national parks can be places of retreat and spiritual renewal that I deeply need as I struggle to stay grounded in these tumultuous times. I have discovered that parks help fill a void for me, of finding community in my devotion to the web of life. After years of frantic activism, I am learning to care for myself for the long haul, to surround myself with beauty.

In addition to my yearning for shrines and pilgrimage, another question I wrestle with almost daily is: what can bring us together as Americans at this time? I ask this question about groups of people at other levels too – from small groups to my city to the whole world – but insomuch as an American identity exists, I want it to be a healthy one.

Can national parks, as sites of rituals and seasonal festivals, many of which carry forward cultural memories that might otherwise be lost, help us with this?

There are the more light-hearted place-based celebrations, such as the Festival of the Sea near Aquatic Cove, associated with the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. Performers sang traditional sea chanteys on stage as I slipped into the water naked (with only encouraging reactions from passersby; it’s San Francisco), twenty yards from a seal peacefully co-existing with other swimmers and boaters. The mermaid with a violin on festival flyers sure seemed like a respectful nod to magic and mythology.

Then there are more solemn rites. If Port Chicago had not been declared a national historic site, I would not have learned about the 1944 Port Chicago munitions explosion that killed 320 people, largely undertrained Black sailors, and that this eventually led to the racial integration of the military. I would not have attended this event’s 81st Commemoration this summer, where we celebrated that enlisted men who refused to work in the same working conditions that led to the disaster had finally been exonerated of mutiny charges the previous year.

I happened to be working through the “Ritual” module for Cherry Hill Seminary’s Community Ministry Certificate the same month I attended this commemoration. Exploring the significance of ritual across cultures greatly deepened my appreciation of this event. It helped me recognize that I do not need or even want rituals to cater to my every spiritual idiosyncrasy. A primary value of ritual is bringing a community together. Secular rituals like the Port Chicago commemoration provide a pluralistic way for Americans of many religions or none to come together and seek healing for the wounds in our collective history, wounds that continue to tear us apart. Some of us struggle to have the legacy of old pain recognized; some of us find such pain too difficult to look at. Could such rituals provide a container in which being with this pain is manageable instead of overwhelming, leading to integration and maturity rather than a sense of the dissolution of American identity?

This ritual was not religious in nature, and neither are national parks as a whole. They are not Wiccan or Druid or Heathen or Buddhist or Christian, but all of us may find solace and spiritual renewal in such places. I am an American Pagan and pantheist, and pluralism is one of my deepest spiritual values, so this pleases me.

How might land-based reverence, whether we think of it as worship of the land spirits or stewardship of a creator deity’s work or any other spiritual framework for Earth relations, be enough of a shared value to bring enough of us together?

America is imperfect and messy, and those of us who are descendants of colonizers and immigrants are still learning to live on this land. We and our ancestors have in many cases heartbreakingly subjected the land and its inhabitants to our learning curve, but that curve is still curving. When I visit national parks and I see all that “my” people – other Americans, this hodge-podge identity invented a couple hundred years ago – have learned about ecosystems and coming to terms with our mistakes, I am inspired. I am proud. I have seen how the interpretive signs have evolved in my lifetime to give more and more recognition to the truth of history, the intricacies of ecosystems. We are learning.

But as much as I have found inspiration and solace in these places, they are not an escape. I am still confronted with broader contests over values and cultural stories, as with the signs put up after Executive Order 14253, which ask visitors to give feedback on “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”

So I take pictures of displays about climate change and the history of discrimination in places like the Sutro Baths (at Land’s End in Golden Gate National Recreation Area). I integrate these realities into my being as Guy Montag memorized books in Fahrenheit 451. I know others are taking steps to preserve this knowledge at grander scales. I’m doing my part at a scale that works for me at this moment in my life, and I want to invite others to do the same. To show that amidst funding cuts and the selling off of natural resources, we value our national parks and will show up to them. It is a quieter form of activism, one that I did not even conceive of as such when I started this journey.

This is all the more difficult in this uncertain moment of government shutdown, when many parks are closed and others may be open and understaffed, leading to vulnerable places being left unprotected. I have not been able to fully digest what is happening with parks during this time, as each place is different and the situation is changing as the shutdown lengthens. But I will continue to plan trips to these places, continue to witness the beauty and the life and the ruptures that occur here. Even if the gates are shuttered, I know they are there.

I have my passport book. I’ll find my way.

 

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