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