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.