A Gentle Breeze

by Richard Seifried

Signal Hill Musings

January, 2003

“It is 3 a.m. Do you know where your children are?”

A few minutes after 2 a.m., I stepped outside of our bedroom door and onto the wooden deck that overlooks the wide Kings River Valley (near Eureka Springs, Arkansas). My purpose was to observe the Geminid meteor shower. Neither my father nor my mother would be surprised at my behavior. Their eldest child has always been a little unorthodox.

Sometime before I stepped into the cold darkness, the half-moon had set in the west. Our Ozark sky was black, clear, bedecked with all the constellations and stars, hinting that millions of unseen planets were out there too, gleaming dully, invisible to even our most powerful telescope, the Hubble. I don’t know many constellations by name, but there, almost directly overhead, hung the faint, lovely Pleiades, my favorite. Smiling my personal, secret thought, I sent a greeting to that lovely Seven Sisters star cluster.

For two weeks, ten evenings, two hours each night, my Jean and I have watched Steven Spielberg’s TV epic Taken. Within all of that fantasy and drama were not-so-subtle messages for watchers to consider.  As the occasional white short-streak of a Geminid “shooting star” brightened the night sky, I watched, not in wonder. We know about meteorite showers and how disappointing they usually are. We expect sensational displays, hundreds of fiery streaks, but see only occasional trajectories of light. My mind went back to Spielberg’s epic.  One of the characters, a scientist, said something like, “We wonder what is beyond space and, of course, there is nothing.” He paused. “Space goes on forever.”

Now, over an hour later, I recall Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astronomer emeritus at Northwestern University, attempting to explain to me how parallel dimensions exist. Something else, incomprehensible, is out there. Perhaps. The soul goes somewhere, that I know through experience.  This, the universe and all, is so huge, immense, overwhelming, that our very limited knowledge is quite unable to comprehend even a fraction of what reality is.

During the winter of 1998-99, Jean and I worked for the National Park Service at a little-known national monument called Organ Pipe Cactus in Arizona, right on the Mexican border. Our few months there gave us some of our fondest memories.

Somewhere around the first of the new year, the federal government sponsored a training program for naturalists in several agencies of that area. Another interpretive ranger, Robert, and I were assigned to attend the one-day session. We drove the long distance to Tucson, mostly in pre-dawn darkness. Our destination was the western sector of Saguaro National Park, situated on a west-facing slope of the Red Hills.

Our instructor was a gentleman, possibly in his 50s, who was highly respected for his skills in outdoor education. We learned much that day and enjoyed the experience immensely.

One exercise that we did was to go out, alone, into the desert landscape, sit down at a place of our choosing, and draw a map. We were the center spot on the map. Then, we sketched or indicated where cacti and trees were located, from which directions bird songs originated, the direction of breezes, any natural experiences that were part of our environment. We also recorded the exact time of all events.

So I did as instructed, and as I sat there, a noisy fly came buzzing in from the northwest, passed over me, and continued on its erratic way. I drew its route across my map. My fellow ranger from Organ Pipes was sitting a short distance away. When the exercise was complete, he and I compared notes. My erratic fly had passed through my domain just a fraction of a minute before it buzzed across Robert’s station. We thought that to be quite significant. The same tiny speck of life had made an impression on both of us.

On another assignment we wandered up through the prickly vegetation to select individual sites where we sat for about twenty minutes. Our assignment was to create verses or paragraphs, letting our minds absorb and our hands record what the desert was revealing to us.

Toward the end of the short winter afternoon, by then rather hot, even under the weaker seasonal sun, our teacher assembled all fifty of us, men and women, outdoor educators of all ages. We sat in the sandy soil and listened.

Our teacher told us that he had placed small pieces of paper all along an arroyo. Each piece was clipped to a cholia cactus, a willow, or some sort of desert vegetation or geological object. We were to walk up the desiccated ravine, each person a minute or so behind the preceding individual. Upon each paper we would find and read an environmental statement by some famous person: Aldo Leopold, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Chief Seattle, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, and many others.

When we reached the end of the message trail, we were to sit or stand, silent, until the last person arrived. Our instructor would then turn on his CD player. It would emit special music that was complimentary of our environment and the messages we had just read.

Sometimes, we were told, at that very moment, while the music was playing, something special, unexplainable, would occur. Once, he said, he had been teaching on a high slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. All day a fierce, black sky had threatened the mountainsides and the valley below. Just as the music began, the clouds split asunder. Fantastic, brilliant silvery shafts of light illuminated the scene that lay before them. He related another even more non-coincidental circumstance along the seashore. I don’t recall now what it was.

So, we did our exercise, reading many quotations, some quite profound. I joined the waiting group, me squatting on the hard, lumpy side of the arroyo. Others stood or sat, not looking anyone in the eye. Our minds were filled with the experiences we had just encountered: significant messages, remarkable desert vegetation, stark scenery. Oh, we didn’t remember all of the readings, but the mood they had created in our minds and hearts was wonderful to feel. The last person finally arrived. The music began. We were silent, unmoving in the late afternoon heat.

Then, ”Shissssssssshhhhh.”  Soft, gentle, unhurried, a refreshing breeze whispered downhill, caressing us with its softness. We all felt the coolness. We all knew that we had been given a gift, a sign, from someone, some thing.

At the most, the experience had lasted but five seconds — just one wave of gentleness, no more to follow. Our music ended and fifty people walked quietly off to their vehicles. No one mentioned what had transpired. On the way back to Organ Pipes, I mentioned the breeze to Robert. He gave me no response. He didn’t want to discuss what had happened in the arroyo in the western section of Saguaro National Park. To do so, Robert would have to admit that there was something supernatural, unexplainable, existing in this world that we all inhabit.

There is a connection between this morning’s meteorite experience and the cool breeze of Saguaro’s tiny canyon. Somehow, an explicit bit of knowledge penetrates my mind. The message is there, always waiting for us to recognize its meaning.

The constellations, the meteorites, a cool breeze, and yes, even the erratic buzzing path of a tiny fly, are all equally important. They are, we are, all integral parts of whatever it is that we call reality.

We belong to each other.

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