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