OUT AND ABOUT : Mama Nature

If nature has its own cult or religion, the self-appointed clergy for this great outdoor cathedral are surely the writing naturalists.

Or so it would seem, to hear the nature writers who visited Los Angeles in January.

At the Pacific Design Center, a beatific Terry Tempest Williams reads from “Desert Quartet,” a new work with four parts: Earth, Water, Fire and Air. Her goal is to eroticize the landscape and, well, she endeavors to do exactly that: She rubs up against canyon walls. She opens her legs to the rushing water’s “fast finger that does not tire” while holding a rehydrating dead frog in “the cleavage of (her) breasts”--all, apparently, in the service of generating copy for this book.

Then, in the Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium, Barry Lopez kicks off the new (sold out) reading series, Racing Toward the Millenium, a joint venture between the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles Library. Bones, antlers, a seashell, fetish and feathers garnish the stage. Deena Metzger delivers a lengthy, reverential introduction while Lopez sits unmoving as a rock face and almost as inexpressive, but for a deepening shade of pink (making us wonder if some of these events don’t wind up being more about the mortification of authors than the edification of listeners).

Eventually, Lopez is allowed the podium, where he dedicates the reading to his mother and reads short fiction from his new book, “Field Notes.” In one story, a school teacher, dying of cancer, weaves her own splendid shroud; in another, “Pearyland,” an anthropology student finds himself in a place where the shadowless forms of wild animal souls await rebirth. Perhaps the habits of nonfiction die-hard, for Lopez’ stories are as freighted with lessons as any Sunday sermon.

Spiritual counsel is doled out more directly on a Saturday night at the Bodhi Tree Annex where authors Sharon Salzburg (“Loving Kindness”) and Joseph Goldstein (“Insight Meditation”) speak to a packed house. Salzburg describes the Buddhist practice of Metta , or loving kindness as a way to befriend oneself and all beings and not, she stresses, to deny or repress everything unpleasant. Chuckling, she says she might call her next book, “The Tyranny of Loving Kindness.”

Goldstein adds that the essence of the practice and experience of loving kindness is the cultivation and development of a sense of inclusion as described in this haiku: In the cherry blossom’s shade/There is no such thing as a stranger . Gamely and deftly, Goldstein then fields questions.

Q: Does he have any tips for developing a daily meditation practice?

A: Yes. A sure-fire one: Everyday, at least get yourself into meditation posture. And yes (laughs), you can get right back up.

Q: When the Buddha was becoming enlightened under the Bo tree, was he concentrating on his breath or on his thoughts?

A: (Big laugh) I have no idea.