One of the highlights of a week at SV Poetry are the early morning nature walks on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday with David Lukas, a naturalist, writer and cosmic earth guy. David has spent months in the Arizona desert living on what he could find there, hiking and camping in Borneo for a year and countless days, months and years roaming the Sierra Nevada. The “walks” are more like strolls with multiple stops along the way to pull out the telescope, zoom in on a squirrel perched on a rock sounding out an alarm or to turn over a leaf where ants are busy herding and milking aphids or to discuss the lava and granite rock formations or the “batholith,” the mass of rock underneath the Sierra Nevada range of mountains.
David taught us how to walk, one foot in front of the other, so that we could be balanced, so that our eyes would be free to look up, not down at our feet. He spoke of the three levels of being in nature: Concentration: where you are taking in information, cataloguing, cognitive thinking. Attention:tuning in to the surroundings, accuity of the senses, letting yourself be affected by nature, a sensory experience. Thirdly is Awareness where you lose yourself, there is no barrier between what is outside or inside the self, a spiritual experience. Awareness in nature is not easily achieved and may take years of meditative practice OR it’s possible that it is an innate ability of some to be so attuned. I imagine this was natural and necessary for the Native Americans as they lived with the land in order to survive and live as comfortably as they could in the ever changing environments.

There were always a lot of questions and the walks ended too quickly for most of us. We had only gotten the tip of the iceberg of all the knowledge that David had to offer. One day someone saw a Clarks Nutcracker (named after Clark from Lewis & Clark) in the top of a tree happily pulling pine nuts out of pine cones. This bird, David told us, is one of the smartest animals known and is responsible for the forestation of most of the Sierra Nevada as it caches untold thousands of pine nuts every year, a good many of which are never eaten and consequently germinate into seedlings. Over a ten-thousand year span of time the Clarks Nutcracker alone was responsible for foresting the entire state of Nevada with pinon trees. This was just one of the many “nuggets” David shared with us on our short forays into the woods. I think I can say that for the majority of us who walked with him, that it was not so much the information he shared, but more his wisdom and understanding of the great web of life we see in nature. There are connections that are obvious such as sunlight-water-photosynthesis-plant growth, etc. and then there are those connections, such as the mycorrhiza web of fungus under the earth that feeds the billions of hairlike roots and stretches around the globe, that we are oblivious too unless we chance upon the information. It was the magic and the mystery, and ultimately, the deep respect that David imbued in us for nature, as well as how we could be advocates for preserving it, that affected us all and made these walks a kind of prayer, a walking meditation.

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This is an incredible book. The photos are like nothing you’ve ever seen. You can buy it at Amazon.

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I didn’t take a lot of pictures on the walks. It seemed intrusive somehow and it was so easy to get lost in listening to David speak and scribbling what I could down in my little notebook. He has a wonderful website which you can access by clicking on his name in the first paragraph and two of his books I have are Wild Birds and one he co-wrote, Sierra Nevada Natural History, which is the “bible” of the Sierra Nevadas. Two books about birds that David highly recommends are: Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberger and The Singing Life of Birds by Donald Kroodsman. You can email David at david@whatbird.com. He does nature walks, guided tours in the Sierras, lectures, etc.

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Clarks Nutcracker can find its cached seeds under many feet of snow.

David & me–No, that’s not a partial eclipse. The shutter on my camera was stuck. We thought it was a nice artistic touch.

The mountain in Squaw Valley–granite and lava meet.

Stewart is ready for the nature hike–very suave poet!

The gathering in the parking lot before the walk. Scribbling down notes as fast as we can.