Canoes & crosses

Religion, spirituality, and Nature

You can listen to me read this post if you like…

Before school the other day Clara (6) asked me what a pastor is and I told her a pastor is the name for a religious leader for certain religions. On the matter of which religions have pastors, I stayed quiet. She considered. Her head tilted and her brow furrowed. So I elaborated, ‘A pastor is a religious leader who speaks in a church in front of people.’  

So Clara asked what a church is. 

“Church is a place some people go to connect with God.” 

“Do you go to church?” 

I paused. 

“I connect with forces and powers bigger than me in Nature. That’s my church.” 

She said nature is her church, too. 

Her indoctrination in our family offers few alternatives. I feel good about that. 

This conversation all happened between the kitchen door and buckling Clara into her car seat (no doubt Nora (4) was up to some stalling shenanigans buying us some time for casual early morning theological explorations). 

My religion

I used to tell people with straight-faced earnestness accessible only to adolescents, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Next, I’d touch the small silver canoe pendant that hung from a delicate chain around my neck. 

“A canoe is my cross.”

As much as my face flushes when I write those words out loud, I realize my worldview hasn’t drifted far from that.

I grew up a religious mutt, with a recovering Catholic mom who wanted to raise her children anything but Catholic and a Jewish dad who grew up across the street from a synagogue but somehow my mom – the Gentile – knows more about Jewish rites and rituals than he does. My brother and I both technically converted to Judaism through a Jewish-baptism-thing called a mikvah (I am certain that calling it a “Jewish baptism” is not the right thing, but it’s evocative enough). Our family lived in a town in northwestern Wisconsin with a sparse Jewish population. Along with Ben White, with whom I attended Homecoming dance my freshman year of high school, my brother and I made up exactly 2.5 Jews out of nearly 2000 students. 

Given the ratios and heavily Christian context, I attended church many Sundays and CCD on Wednesday nights. I just learned CCD stands for Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, which begs the question, “What is a confraternity?” so I looked that up too. It’s a brotherhood — one that apparently welcomes young women. Anyhow, for me CCD was a mid-week social gathering to hang out with a few popular kids. Both CCD and Sunday church visits far outnumbered my attendance at our local synagogue where a traveling Rabbi, Yoshi Gordon, who wore the rabbi stereotype quite authentically, would come once a month. But, our family mostly only went for high holy holidays like Yom Kippur and Passover.

I don’t remember much about synagogue. There were some vegetarian homeschooled kids the same ages as my brother and I. They and their parents looked like they had hopped out of the pages of The Littles book series. I imagined them sitting down at home on spools of thread for stools. One had a rat tail that bothered me so much I considered bringing scissors and snipping it off during a service. Fortunately for him (and probably for me), we didn’t go frequently enough for me to act on that inclination. 

In high school I developed an interest in Buddhism and attended classes at the DoJo in Menominee with a boy I had a crush on. And in college I took a course called “Readings in Eastern Religions” where we explored the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching and another class called “Storming Heaven: Christianity in Conflict in Early Modern Europe.”

In adulthood I’ve mostly focused on Mother Nature. And in our household, up to now, Eric and I have taken to a secular religious education through food for our daughters, by preparing dishes featured in the NYTimes Cooking App’s curated collections for a Passover Seder or Eid or Easter and adding some light-touch learning about the religion while we eat. And then there’s all the time we spend with our kids outdoors communing with Nature. 

Goddess Mother Nature

I came to the canoe-cross earnestness honestly.

By the time I turned 25, I had spent a total of 206 days (give or take – probably give) traveling in canoes and sleeping on the ground under stars (or under twilit skies above the Arctic Circle where the sun orbited around us, never fully rising or setting, but just ducking under the horizon for an hour-or-two-long cat nap each “night”). I had spent another 89-or-so days backpacking or kayaking on days- and weeks-long excursions.   

When I was 17, I used my meager earnings from my first summer working at Camp Manito-wish YMCA (where most of my canoeing days to date have taken place) to do two things. First, I bought a used, sixteen foot, Old Town Tripper, expedition-style canoe. Then, I paid for a speeding ticket I got on the drive home from camp. Sad panda. At least I had a canoe. 

I had (have?) lots of opinions about canoes (among other things). About their rocker (depends on where I am paddling; rivers, more rocker; lakes, less), chines (soft, always), and keels (none), materials (flatwater: wood and canvas – though I bet I would say birchbark if I had ever had an opportunity to paddle one; whitewater: polyethylene), brands (Old Town then; I’m flexible now), and looks (the more classic, the better). I wanted to be called a “canoeist” not a “canoer” which my then boyfriend (also a canoeist!) impressed upon me. I’m pretty sure he drew this seemingly-semantic-but-evidently-substantive distinction from the book The Path of the Paddle (the canoeing Bible or Torah or what have you) which describes canoeing as an ‘art not a hobby.’ 

About my religious conversion though, here’s the skinny:

One cannot spend as many days as I have cradled in a canoe – under skies so big you can see the curvature of the earth on the horizon as you paddle freshwater infinity pools – and not gain perspective about our – human – place on the planet, about the vastness and unrelenting beauty and complexity and wonder of more-than-human-nature. One cannot see and experience and touch and smell and hear and sense with all 22-33 senses identified by scientists and surely others – our gut sense, our somatic knowing, the unknown sense anachronistically called the “sixth sense” –  these non-human parts of Mother Nature and not develop empathy – love – for the whole Earth – her boulders and stones and sands, her microbes and insects and plants and birds and – and – and…

All that to say, it makes sense I landed on canoes as a symbol for my abiding belief in the only religion that has ever made sense to me: Nature. And that I go to pray, in a forest or lake or mountains or in my backyard – from the base of a tree or the seat of a canoe – to Goddess Mother Nature. 

Drifting

These days living in Kenya, surrounded by freshwater mostly full of hippos and crocodiles, my opportunities to drift or to purposefully paddle a canoe – and to connect with a higher power in this way – are few and far between. 

I did get to go canoeing this past (North American) summer when I returned to Wisconsin and my childhood home. One early morning paddle on Lake Monona with Erin and Mo before the Children & Nature Network Conference, one Eau Claire River excursion with Sara and Laura (with whom I once led a 50-day canoeing expedition in the Canadian Arctic), and once again, with Laura and her husband Larry plus my family Eric, Clara, and Nora. The last one was cut short because a thunderstorm rolled in. 

Nowadays, I mostly visit Karura forest, an urban, magical oasis of greenery nestled amidst Nairobi’s traffic and diesel fumes, to commune with Mother Nature. I have also re-learned to find her in our garden and backyard, just as I did when I was a child. She’s in the chameleon Clara discovered in a bush and let crawl up her arm. In the giant sunflower that grew more than twice as tall as Clara in just three months. In the millipede Nora gently (mostly) pokes so it instinctively curls into a protective fetal position.

Still, writing this, I am overcome in an All-The-Senses way: It has been too long since I traveled by canoe.

Maybe Eric sensed this from me. Just yesterday at dinner he and Clara shared their ideas for a canoe trip, painting a picture of our family on a multi-week arctic expedition and sizing up the feasibility of all four of us traveling in one canoe on such a trip. Someday.

I’ll push for two canoes though.

For now, we will probably start out on some lakes in northern Wisconsin. 

And, I’m wearing my canoe necklace again.

❤️,

B