Seeing the orange sky and feeling the 103°F heat index on a day in the summer of 2023 I also observed that the people around me were proceeding with business as usual, oblivious of the climate crisis that, after decades of warnings, was finally upon us in force. This was just my latest experience of being alone in recognizing a problem and urgently wanting my community to respond to it. Over decades I have participated in and organized numerous campaigns to mobilize people on a variety of issues. While some have succeeded and others have failed, what I have mostly achieved were partial successes, giving birth to my motto “If you reach for the stars, you’ll at least get a cloud.” In any case, with my time, skills and contacts, I refuse to sit idle while the climate crisis escalates. Therefore I have undertaken to get people engaged in climate action. On my own I am reaching out to target people and applying organizing tactics with the aim of weaving threads together into a tapestry of community climate consciousness and action. I call navigating among different people and creating connections between them and with myself “waymaking.”
As several action models came to my attention I considered how realistic they were for my target population. Finally one seemed to fit, so I adopted it with the knowledge that some modification was inevitable. Such consideration and judgement involved bringing my knowledge of the community and experience to bear on the question, Would this work? Several components entered into my deliberation which amounted to imagining possible moves on various fronts. Thus when I read an article using the term “waymaking” I saw it as the perfect word for my work.
My ensuing Google search directed me to the book Waymaking, an anthology of writings by women about their experiences of mountaineering and other bold adventures in nature. A review referred to two related earlier volumes – Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and Gwen Moffat’s Space Below My Feet. These last two books provided me with wonderful insights and an excellent analogy for describing my own waymaking.
Shepherd’s work is an especially intimate description of a great variety of phenomena that she encountered on and around the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. Her method of discovery was akin to that taught by the Nature Institute – careful examination of natural objects that reveals visual details that were initially unnoticed. As this last process is repeated over time earlier perceptions condition later ones to progressively enrich the latter. Yet not satisfied with just sensory perceptions of objects, Shepherd sought to consciously go into those things, gaining awareness of her unity with them.
Waymaking involves experiencing things in the right way relative to one’s particular purpose. For the Nature Institute the purpose is to discover the detail and relations among natural phenomena. Shepherd wished to discover the interior life as well as the living relationships of the objects she perceived. She therefore distinguished elements that include the geology, water, frost and snow, air and light, plants, animals and humans, all of which are organic parts of the whole living mountain.
While her waymaking was extensive exploration of the Cairngorm Mountains, a related form of endeavor is presented by Gwen Moffat in her stories of mountain climbing adventures. The key difference between her waymaking and that of Shepherd is the bodily component – along with seeing and feeling, there is also physically making one’s way to the summit of the mountain. This additional aspect emphasizes that seeing and conscious experience in general anticipate action.
Shepherd’s elements figure prominently in Moffat’s climbs: there is of course the physical mountain, but it often rained, while snow, ice, wind and fog were frequently present. Light was further crucial as climbs usually took longer than the daylight hours, and the quality of light affected visual perception, even sometimes creating illusions. In addition the human factor was significant, for she mostly records climbs with one or more other people using guidebooks, maps, compasses, ropes, ice axes, pitons, headlamps, warm clothing, rucksacks, sleeping bags and supplies of food. Along with these things the climbers carried their skill, experience and intention which they applied to every motion of their bodies.
Thus they moved up the mountain with the aim of reaching the summit, seeing the surface before them as the route indicated in the book. On rock faces they looked for and found hand and foot holds. As they saw these they moved their bodies accordingly, although sometimes they had to brush away snow, chisel away ice or even cut holds into the rock. Attempts to follow certain paths weren’t always successful, in fact Moffat records many diversions, slips, emergency bivouacs and cancellations due to weather.
In thought it is tempting to separate the mountain and the climber, but Shepherd’s insight is perfectly applicable to them. As a person moves their body over the mountain, it in turn supports them in all of their motions. A protuberance or crack is first seen as a hand hold, then serves as one, and a ledge similarly functions as a foot hold. While the climber holds on to the mountain, the mountain holds on to their hands and feet, in fact their whole body as they lean in. Moffat’s experience was essentially the same as Shepherd’s – attaining a certain unity with each mountain.
Both women loved their mountains and wrote at a time when destructive human impact on them was minimal, although Shepherd lamented the decimation of the Great Caledonian Forest by our species. Love of nature now has a different character: Robin Wall Kimmerer has written,
“To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.”
Acting to heal the world is like climbing a mountain – it is a task to perform with a definite goal. The analogy isn’t exact because although the goal is singular, the tasks, like ascending several mountains, are plural. While the mountaineer approaches the mountain with the desire to climb it, we need to regard the world as the target of our desire to heal it. Thus, as the climber looks for and sees potential routes, holds and so forth, we must look for opportunities for our actions. Since seeing useful things incorporates the climber’s intention, experience, skill and judgment, our experience embodies the same for us.
Mountain climbing involves planning a series of steps as well as frequent, sometimes continual, decision making. Should the climb proceed as planned or be cancelled because of the weather? Once begun, it may have to be decided whether the climbers should continue, retreat, take a different route, use this or that technique or equipment. In such cases decisions must be made; inaction is absolutely not an option.
While the elements I have enumerated refer to the relationship between a mountain and individual climbers, another factor is the relationships between climbing partners. Norms are observed among them, often along with warm fellowship. They have an ethic of mutual aid for not only members of their own parties, but all climbers, as Moffat describes full rescue mobilizations. Still, there can be disagreements and even mid-climb defections, some instances of which she relates.
Healing the world is mostly a matter of waymaking among allies, opponents and decision makers. One not only navigates about them like on the mostly solid mountain, but also modifies them, as climbers cut paths through snow and ice, chisel holds and insert hardware into rock. One must assemble a team of people by identifying potential recruits and organizing them around a specific objective with appropriate actions. Like the atmospheric factor in mountain climbing, one must grasp and deal with any number of ambient influences affecting people and act accordingly.
The principal point of my analogy with mountain climbing is that, as the climber projects their intention or desire onto the mountain, their perception reveals the ways that they might move, indicating more, less or no feasibility. As I have explained in Being Alive: A Guide for Human Action conscious experience is the functional conjunction of an active subject and an equally active object. While the subject functions as seeing, the object functions as visible, and the conjunction of these two potentialities is the actual perception. As the climber looks for very specific kinds of things, the mountain possesses infinite potential to form functional conjunctions including the one that actualizes the climber’s particular perception. This incorporates not only the climber’s intention but the mountain’s as well. Shepherd speaks of her mountains as friends, and Moffat remarks that on a certain day, “The mountain was kind.” Nature sometimes obliges our wishes, is with and for us, and sometimes it does not, instead being indifferent or firmly against us.
So we make our way through the world, seeking opportunities for action which the world presents to our consciousness as mutually supportive. In the broadest sense this includes an action such as hammering a piton into a rock face, something that the mountain permits but is of benefit only to the climber. When a person has the more universal intention of healing the world the latter responds by producing perceptions of more and less fitting opportunities directly and by way of media and conscious deliberation.
As we desire to heal the world the world truly desires to be healed, but, as Moffat found, the immensity and complexity of the mountain makes climbing it both difficult and perilous. Nevertheless the lover of the mountain accepts the challenge and, with skill, experience, tools, perseverance, and help from her friends, she reaches the summit.
