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
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
2 comments:
My answer to the visualization question: It's realizing that the "empty" air in front of me contained tiny moths, mayflies, thistledown, cobwebs--all set gleaming in the bright autumn rays.
I will remember the hawk. Collectively, the group all stopped and stood still. We all watched her flying above us. Together, our bodies moved as we rotated to see her. We were united, though we did not speak. We all watched the hawk in her beauty.
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