['Lake Tahoe Dawn' by Basil 7/29/06]

I retreated to my parents’ place in Lake Tahoe last Tuesday to recuperate, and will remain until the 30th, the day before my second chemotherapy infusion. It is my haven; blessedly free of the Internet and television, filled instead with books and reflective quietude.

I’ve been coming here since I was eight, first with family, then with my husband Basil and our friends. Three generations of my family have holidayed here, and every nook and cranny of the house is filled with sweet memories and the echoes of children’s laughter.

I’m a city girl at heart. I live right smack dab in the middle of The Most Beautiful City on Earth (TMBCE) and thrive on the constant flow of people, ideas, and events. But there’s something about being surrounded constantly by man-made splendor that tightens the heart and soul.

The endless streets, cars, anonymous crowds, and harried lifestyle often lead me to focus inwardly upon myself instead of outwardly onto others or onto God. When objects wrought of the human hand stretch in every direction obscuring the sunlit trees and night sky, it’s easy to feel a smug pride at being the pinnacle of creation and forget the true North, and our place in the immense universe.

But driving up the four hours from TMBCE into a land more densely populated by pines than people, I felt something release deep within me, like the slow unclenching of a fist in my stomach. The air is scented with living things here instead of chemical fumes, and the occasional car rumbling by only serves to accentuate the sounds of the forest, birds, and water.

I love nature - at a distance, as an idea, an ideal. My citified reserve takes a few days to disappear. The first couple of nights the crawling or flying bugs that wandered in had me leaping onto sofas in disgusted fright; now I lean in close to study the pale beauty of the moth resting on the mirror or the ants crawling near my sandals. The screeching of the blue jays just after sunrise annoyed me to no end initially; but now I smile drowsily as I hear them jabbering away before I fall right back to sleep. What a joy it is to be woken up by the rays of the sun streaming in, rather than the commuter traffic on Bush Street.

The day begins with walking onto the balcony and breaking bread with creation. The pieces of bread fall from my hand into the clearing below and almost immediately a flock of blue jays, chipmunks, and squirrels gather to feast within inches of each other. In feeding them, I recall and praise the Sustainer, who nourishes me mind, body and soul. In sharing the rizq (sustenance) He has given me, I find a renewed awareness and gratitude for it.

Watching them, I remember that as humans we were created by God as the khulfa (caretakers) of the earth, not to enslave creation to our insatiable desires but to nurture, study, and cherish it down to the smallest creepy-crawly for what they teach us about our Creator and ourselves. I am deeply interconnected with these other living beings chirruping and arguing below and all around me.

If they are dependent upon my conscientiousness, curiosity, and caring, I am dependent upon them in biological cycles that scientists have only just begun to map, in which the disappearance or change in one species impacts all others in ways that we barely understand.

Cities give us a sense of self-sufficiency, though they are totally dependent on the land around them to survive. Being surrounded by nature gently reminds us of how dependent we really are; without this rich earth we cannot exist. Nature reminds me of how much we as humans have yet to discover about the world around us and that coexistence, not domination, on all levels is necessary for our collective survival.

The sky is so huge here that it makes me feel small. No building can obscure this horizon. The high mountains, massive sun-drenched clouds, and the huge blue lake filled with 37 trillion gallons of icy water shrink humans to a scale that no city can – intelligent, but miniscule when set against this magnificence.

The mountainous skyline was sculpted by glaciers scooping out valleys and shearing rocks a million years ago, and though we can certainly blast our way through a mountain, rarely is the result as lasting, beautiful or eloquent as this valley.

At night, blackness descends, afire with more stars than I remembered existed, those that are usually obscured by city lights. Silence stretches in every direction, popping the eardrums, freeing the soul to rise up and expand into the vastness. It is then that I realize that though the body may be small, the soul has the capacity to become as immense as the universe, given a green, contemplative, quiet place to grow.

As Basil and I walked, guided mostly by starlight, at first I felt afraid. The black trees seemed to crowd in on us, and the occasional glints of animal eyes in the bushes made me walk cautiously in the middle of the empty street thinking of hungry bears and cougars.

But as we walked on, a curious feeling grew within me. It was as if God was whispering to us through His creation, through the beauty and magnificence that He created all around us, speaking across the vastness of the more-than-I-could-ever-know.

Walking in that warm night, relaxed and unafraid now, I felt His cherishing, protective love that is deeper and greater than I can imagine. Instead of mapping my direction by the man-made grids of TMBCE, I found a new longitude and latitude here. I was suffused with a sense of belonging to Him, and of knowing my true coordinates: between the earth to which this body will return, and the heavens to which this soul aspires.

As I was thinking this, Basil dropped a tiny black stone in my palm. He told me that if we were to compress the total size of the universe (as calculated by scientists based on the Big Bang theory) to the size of the Earth, a grain of sand would represent the percentage of the universe that we have detected so far.

Standing under the awesome night sky, under the humbling and uplifting splendor fashioned by our Creator, looking at that small black stone on my white, starlit palm, it also represented the little that we know of the beautiful mind of God, as compared to the infinite amount that we do not know.

Thinking that, I found myself leaning in toward Him with love and gratitude, longing to know more.

If a tiny black stone has so much to tell, think of what else lies out there for us to discover.

“Truly, in the creation of the heavens and earth, and in the alternation of night and day, there are Signs for those with understanding. Those who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down on the sides, and think deeply about the creation of the heavens and earth, [saying]: ‘Our Lord! You have not created this without meaning or purpose. Glory is to You!’”

(Al-Qur’an, 3:190-191)