February | 2026 | Our Lives In Nature

I read a post from Diana Butler Bass about the wilderness, saying she hated it. My impulse was to go on to something else, because someone who hates wilderness could not have anything meaningful to say to me, right? Bass is a Christian writer (I would say among the progressive Christians) and she was writing in part about the temptations of Jesus after spending 40 days in the desert. But she was particularly interested in the wilderness as a liminal space, an in-between transitional borderland that may feel so unfamiliar as to be disorienting or frightening.

Most of my experience with the wilderness has been in the Big Bend region of Texas, with deserts and mountains relatively untamed by modern humans. Yes, there are roads and visitor centers, but not many. Yes, the Basin is a tourist destination with a resort and hiking trails up into the Chisos Mountains. But in the Big Bend it is easy to get to a place where you are unlikely to encounter anyone, it is quiet, and smartphones are mute and useless for a time. How can you hate it?

I admit that the prospect of spending 40 days there with no car and no easy source of water or food makes me uneasy. But in my mind those are just practical considerations; being in that wilderness is something that otherwise sounds wonderful. But I think I understand where Bass is coming from with her talk of it being a liminal place. She says,

The wilderness is an encounter with what is otherwise unknowable. We contend with that which the cozy and familiar obscures. … And there is no wilderness without danger. There is no liminal space without danger. This is the fearsome holy, the unsettling sacred. – Diana Butler Bass

The “fearsome holy” and “unsettling sacred” sound to me like ways of talking about awe. That emotion – awe – involves being taken out of that familiar perception of “having it together” and knowing what’s going on. We generally think of awe as a good experience when confronted with things like beauty or moral courage. The psychologist Dacher Keltner, in his wonderful book about awe, defines in this way:

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. – Dacher Keltner, Awe, p. 7

Bass talks about the wilderness opening us up to whatever “the cozy and familiar obscures.” After you strip those things away, what then? She recalled sitting in Wyoming among petroglyphs and thinking about the people who, over a thousand years ago, went into the wilderness. Perhaps they had visions, or maybe, out there with only themselves, they had spiritual experiences that cut to the heart of who they were and what they would do if tempted to be someone they were not. Was their belief or their identity tested by an impulse to throw themselves down from the mountaintop? Was this a place of testing, discovering the strength or limit of who they were and what they believed?

I’ve been to the Big Bend plenty of times, and experienced awe frequently. Not necessarily a primal testing of who I am or what I believe, but the stripping away of the cozy and familiar so that you feel yourself in some more essential way, and you might reconsider how you fit within that vast, beautiful space.

In Mindfulness in Texas Nature, I wrote about places where we can look for miles without seeing houses and cars:

…places where, when we look around us, we do not see a mirror reflecting ourselves. I think there should be places where we are able to say, “This is what nature is like if we leave it alone.” When almost every place reflects back something about ourselves, does that foster an unhealthy self-preoccupation? We are estranged from, and many of us are a little afraid of, truly wild places. – p.123

I wish we could, all of us, come to love wilderness and vow to protect it for each other and for its own sake. Wilderness as a liminal space, a place that brings us back to our essential selves, where we can experience awe or even some dislocation as we get a perspective about who we are and maybe where we want to go with ourselves.

I shared part of a weirdly warm winter afternoon at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve with a wading bird who was hunting fish in the pond. As usual, on the way to the pond I found strange and beautiful shapes in the winter grasses and forbs*.

Winter highlights some of the graceful and interesting shapes that we can find in plants. For example, the leaves of switchgrass remind me of curled ribbons. Many of them arc downward in graceful twists. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center describes switchgrass as one of the primary native grasses of the tallgrass prairie, growing an amazing three to ten feet. You can get a sense of that at Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge. There are places within the demonstration prairie where the fine, slender seedheads of switchgrass tower overhead.

I also saw one of the Mexican buckeyes that grows on the preserve. The trees are typically small and are recognizable in winter by their clusters of big, three-lobed seed pods. By now the pods have cracked and the toxic seeds the size of small marbles are still inside. Parts of the plant may be toxic, but the clusters of pink flowers that will emerge in a month or so are beautiful.

It is a short walk to the south pond, but these things hijack my attention and so the walk takes some time – and it is time well-spent.

The great egret was wading the pond when I arrived, searching in the water for small fish or the bigger invertebrates that live there. Spotting me, he (or she) flew a little further away and continued his fishing. What an amazing bird! The great egret spends time in shallow water, mud, and algae while remaining white as snow. The bird moves forward in the most deliberate, stealthy way, with those yellow eyes watching and a bill like a long, yellow dagger ready to stab into the water, propelled by an impossibly long neck.

*Great egret with a sunfish held in its bill*

Sometimes the egret was motionless, a bright white ghost seen through dried yellow and brown reeds and brush. And then he moved like an apparition, lifting one black leg and taking a step, and then the other, soundlessly gliding across the shallows. Without warning the yellow dagger stabbed into the water and brought out a small sunfish.

If you have noticed sunfish, you have seen that there is a dorsal fin on top of the fish, and that fin starts with a series of tough, sharp spines. When caught, that fin is pulled forward so that it is erect, hard and sharp. The fish itself is tall, not bullet-shaped, so that it is painful to imagine swallowing one. But that is what great egrets do.

There was a minute or so in which the bird’s neck twitched, perhaps as the fish struggled going down or as that long neck tried to shift the fish to a more comfortable position. I figured that the egret had been able to get the fish into a head-first position in its mouth, because any other way seemed so much more difficult.

And then the egret resumed that patient, slow strategy of fishing, moving like a ghost into some emergent vegetation and remaining motionless.

It was time to walk up the hill to visit all the familiar spots, the oaks and “toothache” trees, the bee tree, and all the rest. At the base of the hill a mourning dove walked the trail and then flew up into a tree. He called that familiar, soft call: “oo-woo-oo” followed by “oo-oo.” The notes sound as though they might be made by an alto recorder, that wooden, flute-like instrument you hear in some baroque and renaissance music.

The call is very musical and we usually hear it as lonely or mournful, and so the bird is called a “mourning” dove. If we heard those notes from a human voice, low and soft, dropping a little, most of us would hear some sadness and loss. That is how our brains are tuned to recognize emotion in voices, but it’s good to be aware that it reflects our brains, not a dove’s brain. Perhaps the bird is saying, “hey, let’s hang out together, maybe get a pizza.” We can still be moved by hearing mourning doves at sunset, imaging a lonely voice in the gathering darkness singing about the weight on its soul. I’m sure the doves don’t mind.

From the top of the hill, one trail threads past some boulders on its way down, and I sat for a while soaking in the low sunlight reflected off sandstone, bare trees, and dried grasses and forbs. I will miss this quality of light as spring arrives and the sun stays higher in the sky. I also noticed another smaller trail that disappeared under the trees and low juniper branches. And I imagined other lives in other bodies using that trail, the raccoons or the occasional fox or rabbit who wander this place, mostly when the people go home.

I wonder what they think of the big people who share this space with them, who seem not to hunt, not to fear predators, but just move among the trees and prairie patches. Some jog, some walk their dogs (triggering wariness and fear among the animals that live here), and some go from flower to tree, from dragonfly to moss, stone to bird, as if they cannot get enough of this patch of creation. “Oh hi, rabbit – I see you watching me. Thank you for being part of this place.”

So that was another day wandering this little patch of creation for a while, having the privilege of sharing the pond with the egret and seeing some of the beautiful shapes and forms of plants in winter. It never becomes repetitive, and hopefully these words and photos convey some of that freshness and beauty.

* That word, “forb,” is not one that most of us easily recognize. Nature folks may know it, and certainly botanists would know it. According to Etymology World Online, forb comes from the Old Norse word “forbær”, which meant a fodder plant. Back then it referred to any of the plants used for animal feed, but later it came to mean a herbaceous plant other than grasses and sedges.