Relationship to place is an interesting thing.

In our younger years, we did a lot of hiking and backpacking. We happily embraced the approval offered by an NPS ranger: we were park visitors, not just park tourists. We had guidelines for what purchases we allowed ourselves at park stores: we could only make a significant purchase—a park-branded t-shirt or Nalgene bottle—if we had actually hiked a trail in said park.

Yosemite was our go-to park for many years. We day-hiked from the Valley, from Wawona, from the high country. We backpacked from all of those as well. We rolled our eyes at “hikers” on the Upper Falls trail wearing Uggs and carrying tiny plastic bottles of water. We relished our filthy, sweaty, smelly selves amidst the cleanliness of day visitors. We were (albeit mostly to ourselves) insufferably smug.

For several years, we chaperoned an annual week-long AP Biology class in Yosemite. We offered students lessons on the ins and outs and unmentionables of leave-no-trace. We were delighted to learn more about ecosystems, especially meadow succession and fire ecology.

We cared deeply about the parks we loved—and by extension, all forests and wild areas. We were convinced that our many trail miles and hours of reading trail guides made us experts in wilderness and how it should be left alone.

After decades of living in the city, we were finally able to purchase a home north of San Francisco. It had a deck and a small hillside that had borne the brunt of essential house repairs. We worked with the owner of a local native plant nursery to help us rehab the hill. It was a transformative experience: we learned about native plants and delighted in the near-immediate visitation by birds. We planted a garden in Earthboxes along the deck. The mentorship provided by our tiny piece of land turned our caring about and visiting the natural world into actual, hands-and-knees-in-the-dirt caring for a particular bit of that world.

Fast forward to retirement to our woodland in Vida. Although we knew nothing about any requirements for woodland owners (little did we know there was actually a book of rules to follow!), we felt secure in our self-assessment that we certainly knew how to care about a small forest. That said, as former educators, we realized we could always learn more and enrolled in Extension classes.

We lived temporarily in Springfield as we navigated Lane County land-use and permitting, and we traveled up to our woodland and wandered. Snowmaggedon had left a lot of blowdown in its wake. We took our wilderness-friendly hand tools and gradually opened up trails. We learned that trees need growing space—like carrots or kale needing to be thinned—and spent hours removing small (generally already or nearly dead) trees, thanking them for their life energy that they were contributing back to their cohort.

When the Holiday Farm Fire came through, we had logged hundreds of hours in our 18 months of ownership. And something unforeseen had happened: in learning about and caring for our woodland, we had come to know it differently, more intimately, more relationally. The reality of caring for our property had gradually altered both our sense of “our” land and our sense of ourselves. We were a lot less smug about what we knew, a lot more grounded in what we still had to learn. In the anxious days of waiting to be allowed back on the property, in the heart-wrenching walks amidst the blackened trees and yellow-toned needlecast, we realized that we had been profoundly changed by the experience of caring for our woodland. When we considered whether it made sense to start over elsewhere, we knew that not only were we responsible for our land, as woodland owners, we were also responsible to it, as people in a relationship. How could we walk away from our land now that it was hurt? And so we stayed. And so we stay.

Caring for is a lot harder than simply caring about. It is less abstract and more hands-on. It demands more humility. It calls for more effort and intentionality. It relies on being able to try something and then adapt, allowing us to loosen our hold on the certainty we enjoyed as wilderness-loving backpackers.

The following words, attributed to Pedro Arupe, former Superior General of the Jesuits, are an apt touchstone for our circuitous path to caring for:

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
that is,
than falling in love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination
will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read,
who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you
with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love,
stay in love,
and it will decide everything.