“I stood and began walking through the mammoth trees, keeping the river in sight. There was a hush in the forest as I entered it. The trees seemed to absorb all sound. It reminded me of reverence, like when you enter a church and voices grow dim and respectful. Except church was the exact opposite of this, as tamed and repressive as this was wild and expressive.
This really is Eden, I thought. This is the earth the way it was created, before Europeans came along and destroyed much of it.
But it was in the name of God that they destroyed it, I recalled with anguish. Destroyed it, and the Indians…This felt like the soul of the planet, the heart of Mother Earth–not the creation of God but God himself, alive and breathing.
I stopped walking in a cluster of towering evergreens. My eyes followed the long trunks to the top of these magnificent timbers where they framed a piece of sky. Streams of sunlight poured down on me. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, as though I could inhale the spirit surrounding me and feel it through my whole body. There was no way I could experience this sitting in a church pew or reading the New Testament that I still carried in my jacket pocket. Maybe that’s what this trip across Canada was teaching me, that I needed to move close to nature. I had been expecting people to have the answers, when this deep, primeval need in me was outside the realm of humans. God wasn’t in a book that had been written two thousand years ago. He was right here all around me, in the pulse of the river and the layers of soil beneath my feet.
He and Mother Earth were one and the same.”
A Burd in Flight 