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
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
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Life is short, go slow.
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