--Andy
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
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
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
Monday, September 21, 2009
Impermanence
From Kumuka.comTrying 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
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
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
Thursday, September 17, 2009
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
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
"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
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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:
-Michael McClure
...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
-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
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