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

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