There is no room in my life for faith. My world can be explained quite sufficiently through logical deduction and the advances of modern science. The complexity of life? The long-term result of gene mutation and the selective processes of evolution. The diversity of plants and animals? Adaptation and evolution rather than divine creation. The miracle of life? No miracle at all, but the result of complex biochemical reactions, each one reducible to constituent elements and which can be altered by their addition, subtraction, or alteration. There is no room in my life for faith, and no belief in the divine. And this is no apology for my positions, no platform to denounce the devout; this is the account of a moment of challenge, my one flirtation with the belief in a God.
I was only in-country for a month, and only four or five days in the crater. We had started in Tarangire (tare-an-GEAR-ee) National Park, northern Tanzania, a day or two drive from Lake Victoria. Tarangire is a lowland plain, a grassy expanse of prairie, baobabs, palisades, and the Grumeti River. The park itself is only a day's drive from the Serengeti, with the crater lying straight between them. From the park, we drove northwards, into the heavy treeline of the NCA - the Ngorongoro (n-GOR-on-goro) Conservation Area. The NCA covers an area encircling a caldera, the corpse of a volcano that collapsed some two to three million years ago, the belly of which lies 2,000 feet below the rim and covers more than 100 square miles. From the rim, the opening is about nine miles wide - a nine mile wide bowl scooped out of rock and tree and cloud line. But those are the numbers, and numbers are dry and interchangeable.
There's no easy way to scale the caldera's sides from the south or the east, save for a lone jeep trail that winds and switchbacks its way to the top. The drive was hairy, a one-lane dirt road cut into the sopping wet mountainside and dense vegetation, supply trucks and safari-equipped Land Cruisers passing each other in opposite directions, rumbling vehicles lumbering past each other at odd intervals on their way up and down the mountain. More than once, I gripped the support arms that lifted our Land Cruiser's roof, white-knuckling those moments when I could have sworn we were about to collide. Western driving sensibilities, I guess. It took nearly an hour to crawl the muddied road to the rim, and to the first easy breath of the drive. And suddenly, there it was.
Out of the Cruiser, onto the soft red earth. We were in the cloud line, and the clouds were lifting. After a few moments of grey waiting, the skies cleared and the clouds rolled back to uncover the caldera floor. From my vantage on the rim, the whole crater was visible, the whole width of the floor, the yellow acacia forest just below me, the Lerai Stream that feeds the forest draining into Lake Magadi, and the flat open grasslands, all 2000 feet below. Clouds were still breaking overhead, streaming light in iridescent shafts that splashed onto the crater floor. The air back in Tarangire was hot and arid; up here, there were cool misty breezes that culled off ribbons of cloud, pulled them down to sweep around us on the crater rim. The rim was a narrow band, barely 200 yards at its widest, only maybe 50 yards where I was standing, but it was the line between two harshly opposite worlds. Coming from the arid grasses of Tarangire, the dusty outer strips of Serengeti, Ngorongoro was a living cauldron of Eden, a lush enclosure of impossible paradise. The NCA encompasses the nearby Olduvai gorge - the site of some of our oldest known ancestral remains. From the lush garden of Ngorongoro to the arid, rocky lowlands around it - could this have been our Eden, our true first paradise amidst the harshness of the African grasslands? Maasai herders have been known to live here seasonally for at least the past 3000 years, so could it be more than a simple coincidence? Biologically speaking, mankind had its genesis somewhere within a few day's hike from here. Could our first mothers and fathers have passed down some tale, some information to their successive generations to call them back to this one perfect spot, to tell them that we came from a perfect beginning, an unspoiled heaven of rains and fruits and animals that move in abundance in and out of the crater's north slope?
It couldn't be. There's no way it could be, but still - there's no room in my life for faith, but there's never enough for that kind of wonder.
5 comments:
Wow--what powerful imagery in this post! I really enjoyed reading it. It seems like this experience could lend itself to a much larger piece of writing.
I also appreciated your circular comments in the post about faith and wonder, and they way you closed that loop at the end. I couldn't help but be struck by your differentiation between the two: interestingly, I have also heard it said that wonder is not possible without faith.
I was just reading a piece today by Charles Pierce about Faith and Belief, and how it can be taken down to even the smallest concept. His example was knowing how many coins one has in their pocket but not knowing yet which coins will be used for payment. That question is one of Faith. Then, one determines the number of coins. That answer is Belief.
There is a difference between faith and wonder, especially in the context that you present here.
Sometimes faith and belief is what we create in our own minds, we can be "spiritual" but by our own definitions, not necessarily spiritual with a higher entity, but simply with our surroudnings. I especially feel this way when I am in nature, as you seem to be in this entry. I like that you began with a sort of disclaimer at the beginning and then referred back to it at the end.
This post begins and ends so strongly for me, and is full of a lot of great images. I get a sense of vulnerability when reading this piece.Nice.
Sorry. My sister in-law was on my computer. I am "Megan" but not literally.
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