Last Tuesday I was walking down Alum Cave trail from the summit of Mount LeConte. It was my second day of summiting the mountain and the fourth day of hiking over a five-day weekend. I was feeling clear, balanced, grounded, a bit tired, and interestingly…decluttered.
It suddenly struck me, on that beautiful trail, that there were no signs, no billboards, no modern-day clutter on that trail…on any trail in the Smokies. Rather than be bombarded with mental clutter advertising ridiculous possessions none of us even need, Nature offers plants and trees and rocks and vistas and moving water and sky and wildlife—something we are part of, instead of an artificial world of gadgets that utilize resources that will be forgotten within weeks or less and tossed in the trash.
I gained clarity on that hike. I don’t just hike the trails to be in Nature, I hike to escape an increasingly chaotic materialistic fake world that is soul-sucking. I go into Nature to be renewed, restored, and decluttered.
While social media can be helpful and connect people, these days it seems only to create more chaos within us and divide us even more. So, unplugging on the trail is a big part of why I hike. Of course, I can do that every day as I attempt to declutter my mind by limiting time on social media and taking Nature breaks during my work days.
During these times of intense collapse and renewal…and yes, it’s happening at the same time…what are you doing to declutter your mind and heart? Find what works for you and make it a daily practice. And maybe turn your attention to the renewal part of the world stage and focus on what you want to create. When we declutter, we create more space to live in a more harmonious world. Let’s built that world together.
Back-to-back hikes the past two days gifted the healing power of flowers. Purple ones, blue ones, white ones, yellow ones, pink ones, fringed ones, striped ones with waves of wild blue phlox fragrance wafting on the breeze. That mixture of jasmine and lavender smell is intoxicating, or seems to be, as I wandered through woodlands laughing with joy.
Today I forgot my phone in the car. I use it as a backup camera for my Nikon or take videos with it. There were so many videos I wanted to take today and yet, it was very freeing not having that distraction. There was no cell service, so not from texts or anything, but just another gadget to keep up with. Somehow not having it freed me to be more present and open to a different way of seeing. A different way of being and more available to listen…to the wind stirring the forest, the bees buzzing, to the heart of the mountains as they whispered…Welcome Home.
I was recently listening to a podcast called Living Myth by Michael Mead. He was talking about change and how we crave it yet have within us a fear of change and so push against it. I reflected on how much change is needed on a political scale in our country and around the world…the corruption, the evil that perpetrates deeply into the foundations of governments. We want this to change, we want the truth to come out. And yet….seeing the truth, as it arises, is quite shocking and we might…for a moment or two…wish we didn’t know what we know.
Unfortunately, we have lived too long turning our heads and hearts away from the despicable, abdominal, immoral acts of those in leadership positions because sometimes…many times…it’s easier to simply look the other way. If we pay attention, then we have to change.
I don’t believe an elected official or group of officials will create the change from depravity to morality we seek. That change must come from within ourselves, each of us taking responsibility to see and acknowledge the truth about ourselves and the world in which we live. And then adjust our trajectory in life so that it aligns with the world we truly wish to create.
It’s not a time to hide from the ugly truths emerging, but rather a time to shine our inner light, no matter how small we believe it to be. Daily acts of kindness, compassion, and love generated within each of us is what will create the change we wish to see in the world. We no longer have the luxury of time to wait on the next president, the next Congress, the next world leader. It’s up to us.
Imagine our Sun, in about 5 billion years, expanding into a red giant star. After it uses the hydrogen at its core, it will swell dramatically and engulf Mercury, Venus, and most likely Earth. Before then, the Sun will brighten gradually at about 1% every 100 million years. This will make Earth’s surface too hot for liquid water within 1 to 1.5 billion years. Imagine this, if only for a moment. The unimageable beauty here….lost.
That’s what I think of, what my heart aches about. It’s long after everyone I know dies and most likely long after humans exterminate ourselves from our toxic ways…emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual toxicity. But the mountains, oceans, wildlife, plant life…unimaginable loss of beauty.
With this ending of life as we know it a billion years or 365,242,500,000 days away, it makes everything here so much more precious, so sacred. And yet, since 1760, when the Industrial Revolution began, 266 years ago, we have systematically destroyed entire ecosystems. Between 1500 and 2004, 784 species have been listed as extinct. Over 160 species were declared extinct between 2010 and 2019. 2024-Slender-billed Curlew; 2023 eight different species of honeycreeper birds and eight different species of freshwater mussels. In 2020 31 species were declared extinct in a single update including several freshwater fish species and the Splendid Poison Frog. 2011…the Western Black Rhinoceros. The list goes on….
So, in other words, humans are doing quite a fine job of destroying life on Earth long before the Sun vaporizes all water on the planet. In fact, we have been speeding up the process by shifting from traditional energy to burning fossil fuels and creating massive deforestation, both of which release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. Since 1850, this has increased atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 419 ppm, causing a rise in temperature. This creates climate instability which intensifies weather events such as droughts, wildfires, and floods. It’s estimated that switching from human and animal power to fossil-fueled machines established a 50 times faster rate of warming compared to previous natural variations.
Since I documented the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster from April 2010 to April 2011, I have been keenly aware of the damage humans do to our planet. I felt shame at being part of a species that in its greed for more, more, more is destroying such a precious jewel of a planet—a rare place that we take for granted every single day.
Sunset Gulf Shores, Alabama 2014 with iPhone
It’s beyond my capacity to understand how humans, as a collective, can create so much destruction and not understand the consequences of our actions. Many of us are awake to the reality of how every action we takes has an effect, for good or bad. But the rape and pillage of Earth continues. More! More! More! is our chant and as more species are lost, more catastrophic weather events occur, more deforestation occurs, we are truly creating what we focus on. Though perhaps not the ‘more’ we wish for.
I didn’t intend to write a depressing essay on the death of Earth. My intention was to write something that somehow illustrates the depth of love I have for this planet and all life here. And yet, to do that, I must share what is at stake: beauty so profound, life so sacred, that even with astronomical observations over the past 100 years, we have found nothing like it within or outside of our solar system. That’s not to say it’s not out there somewhere. But so far, life as we know it exists here. Now. The depth of grief I have over our collective destruction of it is immeasurable.
But when I journey into the grief, I find a depth of love and appreciation so profound, it lifts me into ecstasy. I remember looking a baby humpback whale in its massive eye as it swam past with its mother. I remember a sea turtle and I diving together, sharing a morning swim in Bonaire…a sea lion and I exchanging acrobatic play in the Sea of Cortez…a deer emerging from the forest, walking up to me, and licking my hand while gazing into my eyes…a juvenile manatee chewing my hair while its mother took my hand with her flippers and placed it on her heart…a baby manatee resting its head in my hand as tears of love filled my mask (and roll down my face as I remember now)…a spotted dolphin pushing against my body to help me keep up with the pod…fog hovering over the creek as sunlight created a golden color that transformed the world….a double rainbow filled with golden light that caused me to stop my car and dance along the side of the road with joy….the aurora as it illuminated the sky in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and caused me to laugh hysterically at midnight as the wind carried my voice up the mountain at Kuwohi…the bear emerging from the steep bank with his 350+ pounds and allowing me the grace to back up and allow him to cross my pass as my knees knocked…the snowfall in Canyon de Chelly that transformed a hike down the trail into a magic so powerful it forever changed me…the birth of my daughter that showed me what love truly is…all of these moments of beauty and countless more, come from an appreciation of beauty, a realization of how rare and unique life is and a willingness to feel the grief and choose love. Choose life. And do whatever I can to raise awareness of beauty and how freaking lucky we are to live on a planet that is a precious, rare jewel in the Cosmos.
Today is a special day for me. My love ‘letter’ to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is being released. It’s filled with passion, adoration, and love.
As a child my family would come here on vacations and I never wanted to leave. In fact, I’d get emotionally distraught when it was time to go home. It felt like roots grew from my feet and like the high elevation fir trees, I was anchored here.
I grew up on the Alabama coast and moved to North Carolina when I was in my early 30’s. But that was the Piedmont area. I eventually moved to Asheville, but it still wasn’t the Smokies, even though it’s just an hour or so away from the park. I moved back to the coast for a while but the mountains called me home.
I spent over a year looking back in Asheville and the surrounding area but found nothing. Then, on a trip back up to Asheville, I got to the intersection coming out of Dillsboro where you go right to Asheville and left towards Cherokee and the national park. I stopped in the ‘V’ and heard very clearly: Where have you always wanted to live? Search there! My answer was near the national park.
So, just before I turned 60, I moved to a beautiful little mountaintop that has a winter view of the ridge that runs through the national park. I didn’t know this when I purchased the home, but after the leaves dropped I got out my big topo maps and was astonished to see I landed in the middle of exactly where I’d wanted to live my entire life. It’s never too late to follow your dreams.
After living here over six years, I’ve had amazing adventures and experienced unimageable beauty in the park. While composing the music for this album, I closed my eyes and imagined the places for which the songs are named. I hope it in some way honors these places as the gems they are and the beauty, majesty and magic they are.
Thank you mountains, trees, rocks, wildflowers, wildlife and stewards who protect this amazing biosphere.
You can listen to Great Smoky on all streaming platforms and on YouTube. Just search Simone Lipscomb and look for Great Smoky.
