I took a walk a few days ago out on the Rodota Trail, a lovely foot and bicycle path linking Sebastopol and Santa Rosa.  It goes mostly through a oak savannah
filled with big spreading gnarly old oaks.  This time of year most everything else is a golden brown, lying dormant until
winter’s rains arrive.  I needed to
get out in nature and clear my head.

As I walked I pondered the fate of this savannah, where
sooner or later Sudden Oak Death disease will kill most or all the coast live oak  trees that stand so beautifully
today.  Long ago, long before
humans brought this disease to this continent, this region was filled with
enormous oaks, and the beauty I admired would then have
seemed eternal. 

Then I realized that long ago I would not be taking this
path, had it existed.  Probably not
alone anyway, and certainly not so relaxedly.  Back then the California grizzly was abundant, and encountering
the wrong grizzly at the wrong time was a way to quickly be able to answer many absorbing metaphysical questions.

If scientists worried about global warming are right, and
the irrational opposition to their warnings proves effective, this scene will
be very different in another 100 years. 
It might even be under water, as an arm of San Francisco Bay moves up
here. I was walking within a snapshot in time. We all do, from our earliest ancestors to our last descendants.

This got me to meditating on two points.  This land today is beautiful to me, and
I am at home here.  Whatever the
afterlife might be, I most hope it will be a place like this earth,
without the cruelties and idiocies too many people who should know better
impose on the planet and on one another. 

I am, all of us are, inseparable from the earth.  Our eyes evolved for an earthly place,
our metabolism fits this place, our senses fine tuned to what make it possible
for human beings to live on this planet. 
Our brains reflect our environment as much as our hands and lungs. Whatever a disembodied intellect may be, if it never had a body it would not be anything like us.  We are earthlings in the most basic
sense of the term.  Our home is
worthy of our love and devotion.

But different landscapes at different times were as
beautiful to those living then as ours is to us. 
The Pomo Indians who lived here long before whites came saw their land as sacred, even with its
grizzly bears.  Plunk one of the
old inhabitants down and they would not be pleased by all the changes they saw,
though perhaps by some. 

We who were not here then do not remember what has
passed. We never saw bunch grass flower fields in the spring nor a sky filled with waterfowl nor a truly healthy oak savannah.   Nor do we know what the
future holds.  If this area goes
under water after things have stabilized, assuming they do, the climate will be
different.  But those here will
probably find it beautiful as well, perhaps as we find Baja beautiful.  Beauty is intrinsic to this world. 

As our chant goes, “She changes everything She touches and
everything She touches changes.” 

The point I carried away at the end of that walk was to try not to
lose sight of the beauty of the moment even while fighting to preserve what we
love.  Don’t let the struggle get
in the way of remembering why we struggle, why we seek to honor, preserve, and
love this place. 

And very importantly don’t forget that the best guide for
honoring and preserving is to love it without grasping it, because change will
happen and is part of the very nature of existence.  There is a very wise Buddhist teaching, that if we are wise
we look at our favorite cup as already broken.  Keeping this in mind, we can enjoy using our cup without
letting our concern with its destruction get between us and our enjoyment.  Of course we take good care of it, but
sooner or later it will be destroyed.  Taking care of it is enhanced with that knowledge because it is the
taking care, the loving attention, that matters most, not the eventual outcome. We never take it for granted.

For as Samhain approaches we know all things pass, and that
this is a feature, not a flaw.