National Parks

Last night PBS aired the first of Ken Burns' 6 part series National Parks: America's Best Idea. Like many of Burns' past documentaries, he focuses on something with American origins, such as baseball or jazz. As PBS shares, "It is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone." The first 2 hour segment focused on the foundations of National Parks, specifically Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks. As a whole the documentary had a very positive, feel-good aura to it, emphasizing the spiritual and religious appeals the parks had on the people who visited. I especially liked the segment on John Muir and his eccentric habits.

Though only briefly touched on, it was the role of the Native Americans and the parks that really interested me. Natives were first mentioned in the segment on Yosemite. The local Miwok tribe called the area Awooni, meaning "large gaping mouth," which I found to be not only a literal description of how the area looked, but also an example of their deference to nature. Directly contrasted, in 1851, L. H. Bunnell of the Mariposa Battalion, thought to name the park Yosemite, which he thought sounded very AAmerican yet ironically, in the language of the local Miwok tribe translated to "those who kill." Is this story an illustration of the origins of our National Parks, which though an ingenious idea, forced out and brutally murdered many natives in the area. As an Native American park ranger in the documentary said "Yosemite didn't need to be discovered, it was never lost." While proposing National Parks was one of our nations greatest acts, was it also an act of violence? Does this taint our experience, or does it add to America's ever controversial history?

Imagine

northeast shore in autumn
fireside of the pond
summer's last embers

--from "House-Warming", Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

For a day, ensconced in a weekend, we made this place our home. We tend to externalize the meaning of home, but metaphors begging for the interiority of home abound. A Christian saying suggests if you don't keep your home--the seat of the soul--swept clean, the worst possible influences will work their way in. Old Buddhists say if you haven't cleaned your bowls and swept your house--as the Buddha would say--"I am not done yet".

I think the whole idea of home is central to who we are as human beings.

--Terry Tempest Williams.

The public lands are in effect our communal home. While we may not be Native in origin, our country has given us the opportunity to cultivate together a place, however diminished from ancient times, where we can live from time to time collectively, in solitude, and with relative freedom.

I really believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among...The notion that we can extend our sense of community, our idea of community, to include all life forms--plants, animals, rocks, rivers and human beings--then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home.

--Terry Tempest Williams

We often conceive of home as the place where we feel most secure, the place we know most and best, the place where we are most deeply tied to landscapes, family and community. We think of it as the place we defend, the place we protect, and the place we honor.

I had thoughtlessly accepted the common assumption...that the world is merely an inert surface that man lives on and uses...that summer, I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here...It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness.

--Wendell Berry, exerpted from "The Long-Legged House", in Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature

Our more recent forefathers have not been good to this place. David Orr's urgent lecture left out the damage that our carbon-intensive and synthetic lifestyles have and are wreaking on the ecosystems that make up perhaps the best--and certainly the most necessary--part of our home. Grand Teton National Park is expected to be hit and hit hard by global climate change, along with a number of mainly Western national parks and ecosystems.

US Fish and Wildlife Service
Global Warming Video

Losing Ground: Western National Parks Endangered by Climate Disruption
2006 Report

The world really is a very feminine place, a mother's place, conceptive, brooding, nourishing; a place of infinite patience and infinite elusiveness. It needs to be lived in more or less feminely, and the chief reason why we have never succeeded in being quite at home in it is that our method has been almost exclusively masculine. We have assaulted the earth, ripped out the treasure of its mines, cut down its forests, deflowered its fields and left them sterile for a thousand years. We have lived precisely on the same terms with our fellows, combatively, competitively, geocentrically. Nations have not struggled to make the world a better place, but only to make a more advantageous place for themselves. Man invented the State in the key of maleness, with combat for its major preoccupation, profit the spur and power the prize.

--Mary Austin

In Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams simultaneously recounts the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Refuge and her family's experience--most poignantly her mother the generations of women who have succombed to breast cancer--living downwind of the Nevada nuclear testing site.

Sad to say, this most precious and sublime feature of the Yosemite National Park, one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the uplifting joy and peace and health of the people, is in danger of being dammed and made into a reservoir to help supply San Francisco with water and light...The proponents of the dam scheme bring forward a lot of bad arguments to prove that the only righteous thing to do with the people's parks is to destroy them bit by bit as they are able. Their arguments are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of the first garden...

--John Muir, "Dam Hetch-Hetchy!"

Sad to say, home seems at times the place where we confront our darker selves, where we live under conditions beyond our control, and where we must play the hand we are dealt.

US Fish and Wildlife Service
Draft Plan to Confront Global Warming
Appendix

Our duty, living in this place, what Gary Snyder has called our Earth household, is to reclaim it from our own degradation, remediate its wounds and restore both wildness and our sense of home to these places, places such as our narrow valley in Grand Teton National Park.

Grizzly Shot by Hunter: Teton Cub?
Jackson Hole News

And we are empowered to do so.

Bears Get Protection
Jackson Hole News 2

Exercise
Get in a comfortable place. Meditate for about five minutes, relaxing your breath, letting your thoughts come and go, contemplating the visual moments that softly come to mind from Saturday's journey. Now, visualize three other places, one at a time, as fully and deeply as possible, where you have been most happy or content. One way to do this exercise is to link three other natural places. But a potent variation is to link places where you feel most at home: a chair, your bed, your car, scenes with friends. For each one, touch your thumb and a finger of your writing hand. The fourth finger is reserved for the foot of the Tetons. Continue rotating these images until the emotions return with strength for each of these recollections.

Question
Of all the places that you will dimly remember, what visualization from Saturday's journey will you be recollecting most often?

Gladly we see the flies dancing in the sun-beams, birds feeding their young, squirrels gathering nuts, and hear the blessed ouzel singing confidingly in the shallows of the river,--most evangel, calming every fear, reducing everything to love.

--John Muir, "Yellowstone", Our National Parks

It may be far more parsimonious, today, to suggest that mind is not at all a human possession, but is rather a property of the earthly biosphere--a property in which we, along with the other animals and plants, all participate. The apparent interiority that we ascribe to the mind...[has] more to do with a sense that you and I are both situated inside it--a recognition that we are bodily immersed in an awareness that is not ours, but is rather the Earth's.

--David Abrams, "The Air Aware"
Orion Magazine

Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waving...Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song and trememdous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.

--John Muir, "Mountain Thoughts"

What we attend to is what we experience, and what we experience becomes our life and world. If you want nature to be a part of your live and world, then you have to pay attention to it. There are no substitutes or shortcuts. Theory and policy won't work. But for a day last week all of us did indeed attend to that wonderful river bottom riparian area near the Snake River. I noticed some things I have never noticed before, and I believe most of you did too. When your life is looking grim or you are being e-mailed to death, recall the peace and contemplation of our day together. Then go out and practice it on your own.

--Jack Turner, e-mail, Friday September 25, 2009

into the forest
a hunter at first
then leaving the gun behind

--from "Higher Laws"
Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

Thanks
David M. Hoza

Identification

a dandelion
now and then interrupting
the butterfly's dream

--Chiyojo, Far Beyond the Field

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of species were present or had passed through the open spaces we walked through, sat in, contemplated and meditated on. Many annuals had already died; trees whose spirits had left their bodies fallen and decaying back into the earthen floor, and those that had not. Insects frenzied with the soon to be dawning purge of their lives in the harsh bight of cold and the dark, frigid mantle of winter.

We are born in the minds of mountains. They hold our eyes on the horizon, shape our imaginations, and draw our gaze upward. We climb their peaks and touch clouds. We linger in the creases of their canyons and sit by streams and dream. Waterfalls. Wind rustling through the leaves.

--Terry Tempest Williams, The Range of Memory

The wild godesses and gods live in the wild plants. Once, all of our godesses and gods were plants and animals. The allies are the ancient goddesses and gods, their wisdom the ancient substrate of our volition; they are the maternal transmitters of our vision and dreams. Anthropomorphic goddesses and gods were the children of plant deities. that is why destroying wild habitat is parricide, because the goddesses and gods cannot live without their habitat, and it was the deities that made us, and gave us our culture.

--adapted from "On Wildness in the Plants", Pharmako/Poeia

At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarities among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that aroused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries...

--Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Weasel! I'd never seen one before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, any more than you see a window.

--Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

What I mean to say is I have come to depend on these places where I write. I've grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes...I consider myself lucky beyond words to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow.

--Barbara Kingsolver, "Knowing Our Place", Off the Beaten Path

When you take me from this good rich soil
to slaughter in your heavenly shambles,
rattle my bones until the spirit breaks;

no heart of mine will scurry at your call
to lie blank as a slug in the ground where
my hips once rocked and my long legs willowed.

No heaven could please me as my love
does, nor match the bonfire his incendiary eyes
spark from dead-coal through my body's cabin.

When, deep in the cathedral of my ribs,
love rings like a chant, I need no heaven
Though you take me from this good rich soil,

where I grew like a spore in your wily heat,
rattle my bone-house until the spirit breaks;
my banquet senses are rowdy guests to keep...

--Diane Ackerman, from "Earth", Jaguar of Sweet Laughter

La Mariposa--Butterfly Woman
adapted from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves
may be found in the post directly below.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders.

--Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

Exercise
Find a list of 10 plants, animals, birds, matter, insects, whatever, that you have 'botanized', identified, from Saturday's journey. If you have the time, memorize it. Sit in a quiet place the same way you did at the foot of the Tetons, and relax and breathe, using the list as a mantra. As you recite each of the identifications on the list, try to visualize them as you did when we were doing Kinhin through the narrow valley. When the visualizations become vivid, let them go.

Question
Can you identify 10 plants, birds, insects, matter, snakes, whatever, from Saturday's journey?

And so at last I climbed
the honey tree, ate
chunks of pure light, ate
the dark hair of the leaves,
the rippling bark,
the heartwood. Such
frenzy!

--Mary Oliver, "The Honey Tree", American Primitive

Oftentimes the Forest Woman, Sacha Huarmi, will appear, a vegetalista, a brilliant macaw headdress, nine necklaces of toucan feathers, twelve bracelets she wears, a skirt woven of bark, a feathered lance, and a little iron pot filled with medicines...

--adapted from "Plants as Teachers", Pharmako/Poeia

With a field guide in hand, our grandmother shows my cousin and me how to identify wildflowers. The flower before us is purple with a large green leaf that spreads out like a star and holds a droplet of water at its center. "Lupine--" she says. "Lupine--"we repeat.

--Terry Tempest Williams, The Range of Memory

lost in the woods--
only the sound of a leaf
falling on my hat

--Tagami Kikusha, Far Beyond the Field



David M. Hoza

La Mariposa: Butterfly Woman

Many people have lost touch with their ancestors. They often do not know the names of those beyond their grandparents. Spiritually, this situation causes sorrow--and hunger. So many are trying to re-create something important for soul sake. Here, the Anasazi once called to each other. Tribes came together here to dance themselves back into lodgepole pines, deer, eagles, and Katsinas, powerful spirits. Now, the hungry come to see something not everyone will be able to see, one of the wildest of the wild, a living numen, La Mariposa, the Butterfly Woman.

As the sun begins to set, the drummers begin to drum, drumming the sacred butterfly rhythm, and the chanters begin to cry to the Gods for all they are worth. She is old, very old, like a woman come back from dust, old like old river, old like old pines at timberline. One of her shoulders is bare. Her red-and-black manta--blanket dress--hops up and down with her inside it. Her heavy body and her very skinny legs make her look like a hopping spider wrapped in a tamale.

The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine. Butterfly's hair reaches to the ground. It is thick as ten maize sheaves and stone grey. She wears butterfly wings. Her footsteps leave echos. She fans the earth and the people of the earth with the pollinating spirit of the butterfly. Her shell bracelets rattle like snake, her bell garters tinkle like rain. The spirit world is a place where wolves are women, bears are husbands, and old, lavish women are butterflies.

She carries the thunderworld in one breast, the underworld in the other. Her back is the curve of the planet Earth with all its crops and foods and animals. The back of her neck carries the sunrise and sunset. Her left thigh holds all lodgepoles, her right thigh all the she-wolves of the world. She cross-fertilizes, just as the soul fertilizes mind with night-dreams, just as archetypes fertilize the mundane world. She brings opposites together. Transformation is no more complicated than that. The self need not carry mountains to transform.

--adapted from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

David M. Hoza

Andy Ross

Identity

I only went out for a walk,
and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,
for going out, I found,
was really going in.

--John Muir

Narcissus saw himself in a still pool of water, and fell in love. Snow White's queen asked again and again, "Who's the fairest one of all?"--satisfied with but one answer. Perhaps we should re-think our traditional relationships to nature and reflection. If I grow so still inside and very present, and the I that I know vanishes, the Other filling my sense, what then?

Intelligence with the earth
myself partly leaves
and vegetable mold

--from "Solitude", Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

Des identified with the places she'd skied, Diane with the White Tara of Compassion; Steve with David Abrams, Dylan or Jack or Bryan with the native Shoshone songs of his tribe, Brooke with Yoga and the cycles of the moon.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself


Mark identified with charismatic megafauna, no one to my knowledge identified with the wasps; many of us identified with a good beer. I identified with landscapes I call home, and the names and places of stories that have grown dear to me.

The Murie Center
in partnership with Grand Teton National Park

After 30 seconds, a twittering bird is added to the ambience.

I had stopped to rest on a boulder on top of a low butte at the north end of the Elk Refuge. It was one of those fresh-cool days of early spring when you just walk out among the aspen trees, looking for things--anything that confirms what you already know.

--Olaus Murie, Wapiti Wilderness

The whole parade of plants, animals and birds goes on from this date, too fast, too many to count, too many keen impressions to chronicle. Yellowbells and purple phacelia by the garden, green grass, green buds everywhere, first robin, first yellow warbler, first sound of ruffed grouse drumming. Evening is the enchanted time...Suddenly we stand still and listen.

--Margaret (Mardy) Murie, Wapiti Wilderness

Exum Mountain Guides
Jenny Lake, Wyoming

Better to live in the presence of the wild--feel it, smell it, see it--and do something that succeeds, like Gary Nabhan's preservation of wild seeds or Doug Peacock's intimacy with grizzlies...We only value what we know and love...

--Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild

Teton Science Schools

I got to hold a live Great Horned Owl! Roger Smith, a former Teton Science Schools faculty member and founder of the Raptor Fund (based in Wilson, across the valley) visited the graduate students. Roger brought a few friends: Owlie the Great Horned Owl, and Ruby the Red Tailed Hawk. It was an incredible experience to hold these powerful and majestic birds. It totally spoke to the power of personal experience with wildlife--all of us were completely enthralled and wanted to know every single bit of natural history about the birds; I can imagine even a less-inclined crowd couldn't ignore the magnitude of having a bird that close to you. So cool!

--Maggie Bourque, Teton Science Schools Graduate Student

Exercise

Using nature as your mirror, take a walk through your favorite natural, feral or wild space and, letting go of your thoughts, walking in the style of kinhin, breathe in the self that you see, and breathe out relaxation and lovingkindness. Repeat until it's time to do something else.

Question

What did you most identify with on Saturday's journey? How do you see that as part of yourself, a part of your self image? What might be the significance of having that as part of the makeup of your identity?

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I am driftwood in the stream
Indra in the sky
looking down on it

--from "Solitude"
Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

David M. Hoza

--Andy

Immersion

picnic at the river
where wolves came down the mountain
became human

Winona Baker, from "Summer", Moss Hung Trees: Haiku of the West Coast 1992

You may remember that Jack Turner through readings and commentary pointed to the tragedy of commodified attention. Twitters and blogs, I-pods and Blackberries, cellphones and the internet shatter our oneness with the present, forever mediating our direct experience in ways that may ironically make us long for Turner's "poor substitutes".

We began our trip in the city, and wound through mountain peaks and sagebrush plains, meandering from state to state, immersing in the conversations of the day, the speedgoats, those busty Tetons, the hunt for wild game.

Psychotherapists and Eastern practitioners alike by the mid 1980's and 1990's recognized the waning capacity for immersion, that place where Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi located the experience of flow, the place where we become one with our environment and our activity, and attention is no longer divided. Thomas Moore in The Soul of Sex--a book not about the act of sex as about the relationship of Eros and Psyche--too recognized that in our sped up and divided lifestyles we were no longer attending to the rituals, journeys, images or sensations that bring us into a place of fulfillment and satiation, a place where craving gives way to deep satisfaction, where longing and desire are quenched with experience.

In The Desert Quartet, Terry Tempest Williams takes us on a journey--a journey rooted in place--descending into deep canyons, cave pools and the journey to the soul. Much alike, our journey began on a sagebrush plain, hiding in its crook the folds where forest and river preside, nuanced eco-regions living side by side, juxtaposing dryness and moisture, dessication and life-giving springs. Through a series of elementals we are swept into and out of Ms. Williams' experience, one not intended to mediate, but to exemplify and endure as sign in the absence of direct experience. A passage of depth into the tranquility of nature-based place and back from nirvana.

Present.
Completely present.
My eyes focus on one current in particular,
a small eddy that keeps circling back upon itself.

Around and around,
a cottonwood leaf spins,
a breeze gives it a nudge,
and it glides downriver,

this river braided with light.

Terry Tempest Williams, Red, 2001

It's not by accident
that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears
as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades.

It is not so coincidental
that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women
have similar reputations.

--Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, 1992

Haiku Moments
When the writer's sense of self
dissolves into egolessness
a dropping away of the boundaries between
self and world

the attempt to place us
in the world itself

As if the writer and her language
were not even there
intervening between us
and piece of the world
under consideration

adapted from Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku, 2009

There were numerous moments when we were immersed. Recall the moments spent chopping cucumbers, peppers or chicken. Recall Allison immersed in the process of dinner. Recall Meaghan speedgoat in a unitard, the shooting stars of the sky, the moodiness of our departure, the solemnity of our first steps, the settling in to the rhythm of the day.

Sit. Stand. Walk. Observe. Listen. Smell. Sit.

Recall the fanning out of our pack, the slow motion of our tribe through tall grasses, through the dead and evergreen trees, across turquoise rocks wet with spring and river water. Recall Brooke immersed in stalking Jack Turner as if stalking her prey, recall descending shallow drains, ascending shallow rises, overlooking the bearded trees of a hidden wild place of beauty and moisture and forgotten histories of fingerling fish and winged ospreys. Recall the joyous breaking of the fast of silence, the evening's pliable communion, whetted with the Dionysian liquors of comraderie.

I
have often wondered about the rituals the Ancients used to prepare for the ceremonies that led to anthropomorphs and other petroglyph and pictographic images. An LA Times writer who recently spent time in Range Creek Canyon with members of our own Western Soundscape Archive pondered the possibilities of the sounds that scaped the world of the Ancients, whose rituals of gathering plants, preparing the dyes, chiseling the tools, and entering into the sacred space of oneness with the tasks at hand surely would have immersed them in the sounds of the canyon that may have influenced the images they left behind.

The Sounds of Range Creek Canyon

La Loba
Wolf Woman

They say she lives among the rotten granite slopes, though they say she has been found all over. She is known to collect and preserve especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world. She creeps and crawls and sifts through the montanas, the mountains, arroyos, riverbeds, looking for wolf bones. And when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing. And when she is sure, she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it, and sings out. That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf begin to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. Wolf Woman sings more and the wolf breathes, breathes, then runs down canyon. Whether by speed or splash in the river, caught in sunlight or the black of the new moon, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon. If La Loba takes a liking to you--count yourself lucky! She just may show you something of the soul.

--adapted from Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

Exercise

Thomas Moore in The Soul of Sex cultivates something of the spell of the sensuous. If you have a partner, sit with your partner just the way you did at the foot of the Tetons. Relax. Breathe. Let your thoughts come and go. Close your eyes to sharpen your sense of touch. Let go of anything sexual, and immerse in the sensual. Holding your hands and forearms over your partner's, gently touch the crook of the elbow. Slowly and lightly, ever so lightly, brush your hand across their forearm. Get to know the hairs intimately, get to know their fingers, each joint, the jutting of the heel of their hand, the crotches of the fingers. If you have no partner, try one hand on the arm of the other, and see whether the left--or the right hand--arouses a greater sense of intimacy.

Question

We had a number of moments when we were immersed in experience. Recall a moment in detail where that sense of immersion was most vivid.

Simply allowing
the affairs of the human world
and the doings of the natural world
to resonate with one another

Haiku
eschews metaphor
and figurative language
to attempt to see
nature on its own terms
--not in terms of something else.

--adapted from Ian Marshall, Walden by Haiku

The Clouds. One's self then
becomes a wilderness, clouds
being within us.

--An Painter, A Coyote in the Garden, 1988

David M. Hoza

Impermanence

From Kumuka.com

Trying to hear
what is in the wind
I lose my own breath

...from "Economy", Walden by Haiku, Ian Marshall, 2009

As we communied in circular fashion 'round the yellow eye of campfire Saturday night, we mused our preoccupations and challenges from the day's near-unmediated experience in the feral lands footing the Tetons. Jack Turner in asides assuaged impermanence, the so-called truth of life and death; all things come into being and cease to exist; experience emerges, falls back into nothing.

Yet the week's end too wore a surprising array of juxtaposition and irony: scorching jet planes against wild nature; our birdsong of conversations as against the deeper immersion in the text of feral nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson bemoaned the fleeting, ephemeral nature of experience in his landmark essay.

"Experience"
http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-2nd_Series_2_Experience.htm

We are those who imagine the places we have been along with the ethics and practices that would preserve them for future generations' experience, yet another juxtaposition, another irony exists in the way we are called upon to make abstract signals and gestures that evoke--in what Thoreau might have called wild image and sign--the way to direct experience and the protection and sustainable use of our wild, feral, natural, open, communal spaces.

Exercise

Take five minutes or 20. In the first segment, sit more or less as you did in one of the places we took the time to sit and meditate. Imagine the bell ringing again, and use the triggers of recollection to re-situate yourself in that moment. Breathe. Try to recall the temperature of the still and breezing winds on your bare skin, the prickle of the plants beneath you, the sights, smells and sounds in as rich and vivid detail as you experienced them. Whether you can fully recollect, memories are embedded in your memory in exact and compelling detail. Remember that. Relax. Breathe. Close your eyes. Recollect the way your body felt from the wind in your hair to the feeling of your toes in sandals, shoes or bare, and all points in between. Recall the feel of the sun and distinctness of shadow, the sounds of the crickets and other insects, the bristling of the dead Western purple coneflower leaves yet living and yellow at their centers, in the gentle gusts of wind. Recall all the sensual details, as you would a body scan meditation, breathing in and our in the elbow, in the left heel, in the stomach, at the top of the head; just so, the view from that seated position, the smells, sights and sounds, specifically, one...and then another. Then let go. Breathe in, recollect. Smile. The neurochemistry may help you remember. Breathe out. Let go. Just breathe, meditate, let go of your thoughts, let them come and go, relax, let go.

--Diamondpoint Coaching

Question

The question for the day is this: Though we are apparently doomed to forget this experience, its meanings and epiphanies waning in the wake of what Ralph Waldo Emerson--or perhaps it was Thoreau--referred to as the tyranny of Now, what shall we remember most and most often? What will you bring back from our time at the foot of the Grand Tetons?

Thank you
for your attention and patience.

From "Economy", Walden by Haiku, Ian Marshall, 2009...

A striped snake
lying still in the pond
as long as I stay there

David M. Hoza

Neozoon...fur coat graffiti

www.neozoon.org
While on the road to our Tetons field-trip with Jack Turner, these women came up in conversation. They use old fur coats, cut into the shapes of various animals, to 're-inhabite' urban environments with non-human animals.

Dylan

Boundary in Human/Non-Human Relations

In nomadic societies a boundary marks a sacred site where the being of power dwells, where its power is strong and its children are protected. These sacred locales and sanctuaries are everywhere in Aboriginal Australia. In societies where village life is more rooted, there is a tendency to situate the boundary between nature and culture. In either case, this separation of the mysterious and the familiar has a practical advantage. It segregates the world of mystery from the world human beings have control over. Without that boundary, the world of mystery does not stand apart from the world of human making; each world contaminates the other. On this side of the boundary, a space needs to be held open for ordinary human ingenuity and predictability: it cannot become dense with superstition. On the other side of the boundary there must be room for intelligent nature to behave in all of its wild unpredictability: that realm can never become uniform with the human capacity to remake the environment, as on the maps of explorers and colonizers. The societies that have not survived are the ones that have not respected boundary or that have had their sense of boundary obliterated.

Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers pg. 102

Dylan 9/17/09

"Wilderness is the red carpet to Socialism"

Somewhere in eastern Utah, there is a bumper-sticker that reads “Wilderness is the red carpet to socialism.” I’m not sure what this statement is supposed to mean. I have never, personally, thought there was anything ‘socialist’ about wilderness. The Wilderness Act of 1964 passed the Senate 73-12, the House of Representatives 373-1, and was signed into law by President Johnson. Say what you will, but it’s a stretch to say that the US had 73 Socialist Senators and 373 Socialist Representatives in 1964.

I don’t see environmental issues as political or economic, and am always frustrated when they are framed in such a manner. I see wilderness as something that nourishes the soul, among other things, but never as such a base issue of monetary gain or political power.

Dylan 9/16/09

For the last few months I have been casually compiling quotes about reading one's surroundings, or communication in some sense. Here are a few of these:

...we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

-Thoreau

The field has eyes, the wood has ears; I will look, be silent, and listen.

-Hieronymous Bosch

The man failed to sense that here was something more than a bird call, that here was a secret message, calling not for rendition in counterfeit syllables, but for translation and understanding.

-Aldo Leopold

ALL THE WORM TRAILS UNDERNEATH THE BARK

OF A GIANT FOREST

write a name in a script

I cannot translate.

And I do not care to.

-Michael McClure

There's an art of attending to weather, to the route you take, to the land's marks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don't stop to read it.

-Rebecca Solnit

Dylan 9/15/09

Last weekend, I floated down the Green River, from Little Hole to the mouth of Little Swallow Canyon, with the BLM and various other state and federal agencies on a Bio-Blitz. There were two reasons for the trip: to eradicate teasel, and to map populations of Ute Ladies’-Tresses.

Teasel is an invasive species, introduced to North America from Europe as early as the 1700s. The plants are rather attractive in a prickly way, and are sometimes used in flower bouquets. The stems were previously used in fabric production, the thorns being used to raise a nap on wool. A single plant can produce over 2,000 seeds with up to 80% viability, so the plants quickly overwhelm other species, creating a monoculture. There are still relatively few of the plants along the Green River. An attempt is being made to remove them before they become a serious problem. Mostly, we removed the flower-heads from the plants so that they could not produce seeds. Some of the younger plants were dug out and pulled. There are plans to continue removing seed-heads, and a possibility of spraying the plants.

The Ute Ladies’-Tress is a native orchid. As a threatened species, attempts are being made to determine the full size of its population and range. It is not an especially showy flower, particularly when compared to other orchids. They blend easily into the grasses and sedges around them. However, like most things, these flowers reward closer inspection. Rooted in sodden, sometimes submerged soil on the edge of the river, the plants we charted had a spike of white, waxy flowers, rarely over six inches tall. The shape of the flowers reminded me of dragon heads on Viking ships.

Many of the people I worked with were botanists. They told me the stretch of river we were working on was in relatively good shape, considering all that had happened there. Flaming Gorge Dam altered the flow of the river and amount of silt in the water from 1958 through the present. This adversely affected the Cottonwoods, who do not reproduce as well as they once did. Tamarisk, Teasel, Russian Olive, Phragmites Bull Thistle and a non-native vetch are common, but still controllable. On the other-hand there are also healthy numbers of Buffalo Berry, American Licorice, and willows. Along the portion we floated, there was only a short stretch of private property that was overgrazed. All that grew there were Tamarisks

One of the biologists mentioned that it is sometimes nice to go places that are completely unknown to him, so that he can look at the landscape and see the beauty of the place, instead of the number of invasive, non-native weeds.

While on the trip I saw many Prong-horn, Mule Deer, Ravens, Turkey Vultures, Mergansers, Leopard Frogs, Horned Larks and Gray Jays. Also I saw Osprey, a Golden Eagle, a Coyote, Canadian Geese, Sand-hill Cranes, big Rainbow and Brown Trout swimming beneath our raft through the clear water, and a Great Blue Heron who I startled on the edge of the river in the dark. Other members of the trip saw a family of seven river otters.

The Nearer Your Destination

The Need for Science, by Katharine Coles

—for Chris, on the anniversary of moving into our house, August 14, 1989-1994

1. Invisible Weight

[I]f appearance and essence were the same thing, there would be no need for science. —Michio Kaku

Or microscopes, telescopes, steam machines
for stripping wallpaper—remember
that bathroom, navy blooming with pink

irises the size of my head?—poetry, news
analysts, physicians, the FBI, dating
services. The perfect match, we meant

ourselves for each other, at first sight
(allowing for the collapse

of what seems no time), so made
ourselves, over,
took

each other's measure, lip-to-lip,
did not count seconds speeding up

our heartbeats, washing
over our bodies—the past emptying

out the future's rush and roar
dimmed by the sound of our breathing, the hum
of his old air conditioner, heaved

down one set of stairs, up another. Every touch
left its smudge, its slow, cumulative,
invisible weight.
We'd had to wait

an age for each other. And we had
what still looked like forever.

2. Visible Weight

By simple rotation, we can interchange any of the three spatial dimensions. Now, if time is the fourth dimension, then it is possible to make "rotations" that convert space into time and vice-versa. —Michio Kaku

If I could turn a Kenmore washer into time
I could rotate it through this door
elaborated by a Victorian mind

that wouldn't have conceived it. Or
that I would want it, a hundred-

some years down the line. I have
misread again, willfully,

not only science, but history—
it is so hot, and the machine

so unwieldy in its space,
who could blame me for reducing theory
to mere machine?
The physicists,

clucking collective tongues
recisely measured. Their voices

take just so much space in my mind.
Call it x. In time,
they'll shrink to nothing, small matter

converted into energy I could use, now,
resting my back against dusty woodwork,

while this physicist watches over his glasses.
All before we married. He considers

matters of space and time,
machine
versus merely human mind. Counts
complications. The move, the wedding: all

sooner undertaken, sooner finished.
Since then, we've learned a thing or two,
have buried friends we held,

a mother who held us. We recover
nothing: holding each other, we hold

each other's absence. We are turning
into the past. In retrospect,
I would prefer to take my time.

3. Anniversary

Newton, writing 300 years ago, thought that time beat at the same rate everywhere in the universe…. However, according to special relativity, time can beat at different rates, depending on how fast one is moving. —Michio Kaku

Another finished orbit. Recollections
past, or passing, by the time we mark

a heartbeat, a line—anniversary
and universe both contain that turn,
the rhythm we walk. Long

days rush us through
the universe, the universe
through us: another year, or the nightly throb, his pulse

against my pulse, starlight's insouciant wave
rippling the screen. The blind

flaps in arid wind, the heatwave
we confuse with
five years back, summer

beating down two years before,
repeating
a house-of-mirrors' endless trick
reflections. Hell, it's only time. The day we fell

it must have seemed to him I stood still,
my hand resting on a book, composing

my response; but my mind moved
so fast he'd have seen its blueshift
if it were a star, he a star gazer watching

space collapse between us. It must
have seemed to him, but I don't know.
We move through different spaces, different times,

the same space and time differently—
I love the distances, roughnesses,

rotations, odd warps and woofs
we travel to touch each other.
On my birthday
two years after we met we moved in here;

in between, a love at first sight
took two years to ripen

then was there. It is my birthday today.
How long has it been? we ask each other. Yesterday,
forever. The bathroom's eggshell walls

needing paint again, a couch gone dingy, paired
chairs we sit on, staring
into space: all collapse, give

way to mystery. I still love,
over time, even the damage
time has done to him, though, minute-

by-murderous-minute, he looks the same;
though we move so fast
we only seem to have stood still.

Don't I Know You From the Cinematographer's Party?

Last night I coined a new aphorism: "If you can make a donut, you can make a cat."

This is not the point. The point, of course, is to talk here about the greatest and most famous of all aphorisms: "Know thyself."

Actually, no. Strike that. The point is to talk about the aphorism untold, but nevertheless present, in the previously mentioned ancient saying. What I'm trying to get at:

"Know thy place."

To ask: "Where am I?" seems to me to be more or less asking: "Who am I?" By which I mean to say that one of the ways we conceive ourselves, one of the ways that we create and then understand our identity is to know where we come from, or where we live--both the social and natural community which we are a part of.

But how? How do we know where we are? Know a place with the intimacy that will make us care about it? Or care about what it says about our own identity?

Perhaps it is an issue of seeing. Thich Nat Hahn writes: "When reality is experience in its nature of ultimate perfection, an almond tree that may be in your front yard reveals its nature in perfect wholeness. The almond tree is itself truth, reality, your own self. Of all the people who have passed by your yard, how many have really seen the almond tree? The heart of an artist may be more sensitive; hopefully he or she will be able to see the tree in a deeper way than many others. Because of a more open heart, a certain communion already exists between the artist and the tree. What counts is your own heart."

Annie Dillard after failing to draw a horse: "The point is that I just don't know what the lover knows; I just can't see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct."

So is knowing a place--seeing it--an issue of love? Must I become infatuated, falling head over heels for a place before really being able to recognize it, before being able to understand its inner qualities? And then will I know myself?

But love--true love--must of course come from true seeing. I can't fall in love with New York by watching all the movies that are set there (though probably actually filmed in a place like Winnipeg, Manitoba), can I? I've got to know what I know, not the artificial product of a secondary-source. (Though I will allow that these secondary sources can lead a person to a more authentic investigation.)

In the end, I think that to know a place you must occupy it--and only the devoted (the lover) will acheive occupancy. Only the lover will commit herself so entirely as to be able to see a place in its real self--and in turn to see herself more clearly in relation to that place.

By Andy, age 25