Save or savor?

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

—E.B. White

I come across this quote in Yoga International magazine, early one morning. The day’s hours stretch before me, adding up to the sum of how I choose to “spend” my life. And like White, I find myself challenged by this dilemma.

It seems that everywhere I look, something begs for my attention. Animals and plants are approaching extinction. Box stores, strip malls and parking lots are not. A multi-acre mountaintop forest is leveled for a “Fun Station.” Another clear cut appears on a hillside along Route 6, near Honesdale, PA.

Children and teens spend their days indoors, trying to learn about life through television and the Internet, while losing connection with the air, earth and water outside their schools and homes. The homeless lie on street grates under cardboard canopies. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and we know who gets the tax breaks. Meanwhile, global warming continues its insidious creep, threatening existence somewhere down that shadowy road we call the future.

What is one to do? The million worthy causes call for action. I make my plans to save the world, take steps to see them through and fret over how little I’ve accomplished. Eventually, I remember that my time here is a gift for which I owe a debt of gratitude. If I only worry about the many woes around me, I lose one of life’s finest opportunities—the chance to “savor the world.”

In her poem, “From the Book of Time,” the poet, Mary Oliver, ponders the possibility that, “…maybe just looking and listening / is the real work.”

And so I walk. It is unseasonably warm outside and the balmy gusting winds toss clouds about, producing a constantly changing skyscape—now moody, now bright, suddenly hazy, then lilting with light.

Wavery bleached grasses are plastered across the path, and the forest to either side is highly variable, brambly here, meadowy there, with dramatic twisted trees and lichen-tattooed rocks mottling the view. I investigate a gnarly wetland studded with dead snags and grassy hummocks. Something lies in the path. It proves to be the spine of an opossum, intact from skull to tail tip, though only part of one leg remains and most of the ribs have been gnawed away.

The path winds and arcs soothingly, rounding a kingly white pine with earth-sweeping boughs, then sloping downhill to reveal a narrow body of water in the distance. It ends suddenly at the base of a hill in an area probably preferred by snakes in the warmer seasons, a lightly forested rock field of secretive holes and good sunning spots.

I examine a boulder much bigger than my Jeep. It overlooks the distant water and is draped in mosses and leathery ferns. Its body has split and fallen forward; into this crack, slabs of flat rock have piled in a roughly arranged staircase. The wind toys with my hair and wakes my sense of smell to rising spring essences, wondrous scent messages of thaw and memory.

Ensuing days of looking and listening reveal red-tailed hawks perched in trees along highways, wood frogs calling from forest pools, turkey vultures riding thermals and a heron returning to its swampy pond. A hole dug into a bank and fronted with a dusting of snow reveals the going and doing of some creature not trying to save the world, but just to be in it, contributing its small song, whose notes I savor.