`Goatwalking' On A Spiritual Path -- Author Resists Urge To Tame Nature, Learns To Treat No One As Alien

His editors warned him not to talk about symbiotics, but Jim Corbett can't resist.

After all, it's the focus, the "organizing principle," he says, of the book he's just written. Called "Goatwalking," it's the story of Corbett's spiritual journey, one that begins with understanding the importance of adapting to nature and ends with his risking prison to help undocumented refugees.

How he got from goats to God, going from there to become one of the founders of the movement to give sanctuary to those refugees, is not a tale everyone would tackle.

Corbett, a Harvard-educated retired rancher, a Quaker who often thinks of himself as Jewish, is a complex man. He's been called eccentric, saintly and a genius. He's humble and a little shy; a twinkle in his eye and a quick turn of words the first clues to a headstrong and idiosyncratic intelligence.

That odd word, symbiotics, Corbett says, is a way of explaining his core principle.

"The etymology is pretty clear: `living together,' " he notes. Different organisms or communities, which might be originally antagonistic to one another, learn to live together and be mutually beneficial.

It means learning to uncompartmentalize some of those things we've put into separate categories - spiritual versus carnal, for example. It means thinking of the earth as an "undivided communion" in which every person, every creature, is a co-communicant, he says.

Corbett believes that many things fracture communion among human beings or between human beings and nature.

"At the personal level, and at the basic community level, and at the societal level, we have all kinds of friend-enemy divisions, we have all kinds of ways we separate those of us we consider the people from the `others' who are the aliens, or surrounding objects for our use," he says.

"So the question then, is how does one open up, to be aware, in a very fundamental sense, that there are no `others' in this radical, alienated sense? That there are no aliens, we're all part of one community?"

The answer, Corbett believes, is "goatwalking," or something like that. "One learns to adapt to nature, the wildland community, rather than to reconstruct and control and reform and tame one's surroundings," he says, in contrast to industrial civilization, which has adapted by trying to control and reconstruct its surroundings.

Goatwalking, says Corbett, also brought him in touch with the Bible. "Goatwalking re-enacts the history of the prophetic faith," he writes, and opened the way for him to read the Bible in the present, to become a participant.

Grandson of a full-blooded Native American, Corbett talks in his book about the Hopi people, who in ancient times wandered over the North American continent in search of a place to practice a sacramental way of life that preserved the universe, finally settling in the high desert.

In the mid-'60s, Corbett and his wife, Pat, began raising goats. About a decade later, through a Quaker secondary school, they began offering students a wilderness educational experience. Along with studying anthropology and the evolution of humanity from the hunter-gatherer stage to the industrial society, the students lived as a band of pastoral nomads with a band of goats in the desert.

Learning to live by adapting to an ecological niche - such as goatwalking - rather than fitting into a "dominance-submission hierarchy" is the best way to open awareness to another kind of society, he believes.

That isn't to say Corbett is a pacifist, despite being a Quaker. He doesn't like gun-control laws, and his book includes a section succinctly titled "On Killing and Eating One's Friends." Still, he seeks to live nonviolently, he says.

"To be at home in deserts, a gentle, peaceful people must also be ruthless," he writes. "Sentimentalism is a luxury of the rich and violent."

Throughout "Goatwalking" (Viking, $19.95), Corbett insists that wherever there is a fracture between humanity and nature or within humanity, there are ways to bridge those fractures.

Full communion can't exclude anyone or anything, Corbett believes. "That's the basic quest."

At first, when he was exploring the notion of adapting to wildlands, he found that Taoism and Buddhism were his best "conceptual foundation," he says. But gradually, in his middle to late '40s, he began to believe he was reliving the books of Moses. Finally, through the sanctuary movement, he discovered the wider church, he says.

The Hebrew Bible emphasizes one covenant, speaking of community rather than an individual approach, Corbett says. "The covenant is that we're to become a people that hallows the earth. This `one covenant' theology means I don't see any radical division between me as a Quaker and the very core of the Jewish experience, the Jewish outlook."

He often attends reform Jewish synagogues, he notes. "I feel that the Jewish prayers, generally on Friday evening or Saturday morning, are a reaffirmation of the ancient covenant. . . . I feel that what I am doing as a Quaker and personally is grafting onto this ancient quest. In some ways, I'm no less Jewish than Quaker in my perspective on this."

The Sabbath, too, is an important part of Corbett's philosophy.

"It seemed clear to me that the . . . commandments concerning the Sabbath try to do for a community exactly what one attempts in the Taoist or Buddhist tradition to do as an individual; that is, to end all the intervening in things, all the busyness, to enjoy the great goodness of the untamed creation."

While the Babylonians' idea of Sabbath was to hide indoors from the wild forces abroad, Moses urged a celebration, Corbett says, but cautioned that it was a day to stop trying to "bend the world toward your will." Rediscovering the Sabbath, Corbett says, is what "Goatwalking" is all about.

In 1981, in the midst of all his soul-searching and developing belief in the convenant, Corbett was approached by a Quaker friend. He had picked up a hitchhiker, a Salvadoran, who had been seized at a border-patrol roadblock.

He and his friend agonized, and Corbett began making connections in his head. "Just when I was ripe, all of a sudden a refugee appears, and I have to discover the church," he says.

The "alien" in his midst also led him to ponder the need for laws and the power of the state, something he didn't dismiss lightly. "All of us sometimes and some of us most times must be coerced into civility," he writes. "All of us in civil society need police protection from one another. And, for a nation-state to exist at all, governmental organization must maintain the national borders by repelling attackers and excluding unauthorized aliens."

But in the end, it was the "aliens" themselves, including a year-old baby, that led Corbett back to something he believed was basic and timeless - the covenant to hallow the earth, and to treat no one as an alien. "Religio," the word from which religion is derived, he notes, means "binding together." And covenanting, he believes, is the key to the future.

"Covenanting across the divisions that separate `the people' from `the aliens' is the way to establish universal human rights, which national governments will then, eventually, have to recognize."