Is It Personal?

I have a private counseling practice, in addition to my work at the University.  I've been doing that for about 20 years; so I've had plenty of time to watch as my approach to being with people in that setting has changed.  I was surprised the first time I heard myself telling someone, 'What you're experiencing is deeply personal, it is about you.  On the other hand it isn't personal at all.  What you're experiencing in your life is what is happening in everyone's life, one way or another.  It's your part of the suffering that's in the world right now, your share of the world's suffering.' (Trust me, the person I was saying this to was in a position to hear and use that perspective.)

Our time, this end, this transition from what has been to what will be, is a deeply wounded time.  Put your own personal angst and pain aside for a moment.  Put the guilt aside.  We are ever and always, living or dead, a part of everything else that exists on this planet.  We are made up of the planet.  We will return the borrowed pieces that are our individual life to the planet someday.  What our civilization has done and is doing to our one and only home we are doing to ourselves, to each other.

I think a time is upon us when we will be greatly tempted to pull even more within, a stance that seems to be one of the hallmarks of this civilization.  As the water becomes scarcer, as the changes to the climate make the day to day of our lives more challenging, we'll find ourselves thinking all the more about our needs, our suffering, our piece of pie (sound familiar).  The more altruistic of us will focus on the needs of those humans most immediately effected by these changes, those who have virtually no buffers in their lives.  We will want to do what we can ameliorate the suffering of these people.

It seems very difficult, even for the most enlightened of us, though, to extend that same care to the earth itself, to our brother and sister animals and plants and insects, the rocks, and the wind which is our breath and the breath of all other breathing things.  The voice in our heads that relentlessly demands that we must think of people, we must take care of people, that people must come first is that voice which heeded has created this nightmare we all experience so deeply, so personally, so helplessly.

Do all you can to let your focus move from all that is human, all that is human-related.  Let your vision begin to shift.  We are lost because our vision is almost always on that which is human and human-related.

The Lost Tribes or the Tribe of the Lost

I heard a bad joke many years ago while living in Berkeley:  There was a group of people who wandered about in a perpetual state of lostness.  They came to be know as the Fukarwe because they were always exclaiming, 'W'ere the fuck are we?'

I've always wanted to walk up to some unsuspecting student on Red Square (the central plaza/hang-out/migration space on the Seattle campus), her ears plugged with disembodied music or animatedly on her cell phone with some other dis-em-body.  I'd walk up and gently get her attention.  Then I'd ask her to stop, close her eyes... and tell me where she is.

If I were actually able to orchestrate such an implausible event, what might her response be.  She would probably describe where she thinks she is based on what her vision told her prior to closing her eyes, or her memory of where she was going, maybe her memory of what she noticed when she last almost bumped into someone or stumbled a bit on the uneven ground.

Try it yourself.  Especially outside.  Stop mid-stride someplace, close your eyes.  Use all your other senses, just standing there, to know where you are.

You are where the sounds are...
You are where the smells are...
You are where the feelings against your skin are....
You are where the air tastes like....

We tell ourselves where are all the time.  It's generally some kind of internal monologue describing to ourselves where we are--and more and more of us seem to require some kind continuous soundtrack or ever changing theme song.  Generally, I think, we do not use all our senses to let us know where we are.  We don't really know where we bodily are.  We let our minds interpret for us where we are, in the context of things we're mostly not even aware of.  We are in this place relative to where we were before (the past), where we need to get to (the future), what we're attempting to do (or not do), what our emotions are--not where our animal bodies relay to us.

We don't know where we are most of the time.

Try it again, but this time in a pleasant, comfortable, safe, outdoor space.  Notice what happens inside your mind.  See if you can be where your senses tell you you are.  Try with your eyes closed.  We rely so much on our sight, which is more closely tied to our unquestioned cultural vision, than our other senses tend to be.

Doing Something Practical (whatever that means)

Be forewarned, this is definitely a parenthetic posting.  (And it's long, too.)

Every now and then I have the recurring fear that someone (maybe you) is going to ask me what I'm doing to make a difference, given the relentless topic of my postings on this blog.  So I'm going to be preemptive about this (because, obviously, I don't think I'm doing very much).

I recycle and compost assiduously.  I try to buy organic (and natural--whatever that means) when it's not prohibitively expensive to do so.  I try very hard to be respectful of water (not using too much of it).  I try not to drive too much.  When I drive I will put the vehicle in neutral when going down steep hills to cut down on gas usage and engine noise.  I don't generally watch the TV news or listen to the radio news (I relate better to the world if I listen more to wind, birds and insects rather than the 'news.').  I don't get caught up (if I am vigilant) in political or socio-political discussions (arguments usually.  They seem so pointless, generally, just people taking the opportunity to rev up the adrenaline.).  I talk about all this with anyone who shows the slightest interest.

Now, to me, none of that seems like very much (except maybe, the talking to people about all this; even I can concede that that's probably of some importance, maybe a lot); in fact, some of it seems pretty silly (coasting my car downhill for God's sake!).

Anyway, my friend Jon is trying to produce some of his own food:  chickens for eggs, turning his living room into a greenhouse for his vegetable garden starts, using his hands and intellect to build things.  He also talks about all this to other people, too.  I have no idea whether he coasts his car on downhill slopes or not.

Someone who is a 'follower' of this blog (Nageshuu) also follows the blog of Kate and Adam in Nigeria.  In relationship to what they have done and seem to be doing, I feel ineffective and uninvolved (check it out, if you didn't actually click on that link).

Here's the question (finally. I know you were beginning to worry):  what constitutes doing enough about all this?  What  constitutes doing anything at all about all this?  To some extent, maybe even to a great extent, the best intentioned of us gets bogged down in that endless helplessness of what could I possibly do that would matter?  I think this needs to be brought out into the open.  Many, many of us are stuck in our quiet despair or resignation (or both) about all this thinking that there's nothing we could do that would really matter.

Now, if you've been even a little inclined to jump in with a comment or thought, let this be the time.  We all need to hear from each other.

Hammering the Nail

I continue to look for the most basic tenet that explains what it is we lost--what changed that allowed us as a human group to do what we've done to our home over the last 10 to 15 thousand years--and I keep coming back to the same one:  it was when our vision changed.

When we simply were, without question, part of the community of life our vision was just that:  we were a part of everything.  When some of our ancestors chose the path of agriculture and pastoralism, our vision changed so that we started to exercise control over the growing of plants and animals, disregarding the determinism in each of the life forms we attempted to control, in favor of our own 'survival' (read preferences).

At that point of 'success' our vision was no longer as a part of everything.  We had taken dominion over some things, a slippery slope to be sure.  Once we started trying to control some of life, we had no choice but to either abandon the notion altogether or attempt to control all of life (we had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil).  Obviously we chose the latter.

We could no longer be a part of the rest of life.  We were now a part from the rest of life.  The die was cast.  We have not retreated ever since.

Vine Deloria Quote

Who will find peace with the lands?  The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.  Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land?

- Vine Deloria, God is Red

Response to Kay's Comment to the Previous Posting

In the previous posting of the quote by Raymond Chipeniuk, the key sentence for me is this:

We must make ourselves indegenes, natives returning to a lost landscape still somewhere in our hearts and minds, the Paleolithic ideal, a country of abundant wildlife, rich in fruitful native vegetation, pure water, and fresh air.

The italics and bold above are mine.

It's very difficult for us to step outside the literalness of our culture.  I don't think Chipeniuk is suggesting we all go back to some previous time and place, a time and place that clearly does not exist in most of the world any more and could not exist for many of us, given how many of us there are now.

The emphasis I would place in asking the questions we're all contemplating here is how do we allow ourselves to once again fall in love with the earth, our one and only home, the home we share with countless other expressions of life that are not human?  How do we follow the genetic drive within us to be on, in, and of this earth?  How do we allow, once again, that dying is part of living?  We kill to eat.  We will one day be eaten.  How do we allow ourselves to seriously question what it is we really need?

Quotes from 'Coming Home to the Pleistocene'

Conservationists are actually doing harm by trying to convert the lay mind to the view that human artifactual reality is part of nature.... We must make ourselves indegenes, natives returning to a lost landscape still somewhere in our hearts and minds, the Paleolithic ideal, a country of abundant wildlife, rich in fruitful native vegetation, pure water, and fresh air.  Otherwise we will remain what we have been for ten thousands of years:  a sort of perpetual exotic, never ceasing to invade, disrupt, and degrade the pre-existing natural landscapes.

- Raymond Chipeniuk

'Coming Home to the Pleistoscene,' p. 168

Our human ecology is that of a rare species of mammal in a social, omnivorous niche.  Our demography is one of a slow-breeding, large, intelligent primate.  To shatter our population structure, to become abundant in the way of rodents, not only destroys our ecological relations with the rest of nature, it sets the stage for our mass insanity.

- Paul Shepard

'Coming Home to the Pleistocene,' p. 169

What an odd day I'm having

I read quite a bit of Paul Shepard's Coming Home to the Pleistocene over the long weekend.  This book is not an easy one for me to read.  The man was very erudite.  First time in awhile I've read a book with so many words I don't know.  The context from which he wrote about us is so inclusive, that my culturally conditioned mind finds veritably no avenue of escape.  There are no excuses that work.  There is no need for excuses anyway, no purpose in them, except as a futile effort to not see what I actually do see.

Today I am experiencing another set of scales having been lifted from my eyes (how many layers of scales are there!).  Today for the first time, I seem to be really seeing us as animals.  How very strange it is, too.  I see us as animals walking around in these weird disguises, striding around inside these strangely thin veneers of disguises.  How odd it is to see us all trying not to look like animals.  We walk funny.  We sit funny.  We look at each other and talk to each other in ways that don't really make sense.  We seem to be acting as though what we are doing is terribly important, when it clearly is not.

This is all pretty disquieting today.  Here I am at work.  Interacting with quite a few people, sensing this whole other scale of being which is completely, almost entirely incongruous to how we are acting.  I tend to be a very nice person (most of the time).  I err in that direction (most of the time).  I'm going to be the first one to say hello when we meet.  I will ask you how you are doing or how your day is going...and I'll really want to know, if you really want to say.  Today, it would feel more natural to simply match you gaze for gaze, simply looking at and taking you in.  Not using words unless absolutely necessary.  Letting you go with no further need, unless another need presented itself.

Too many words. We use too many words. We talk too much.  We write too much (I know, I know).  We think we are communicating...and we are.  But is it needed.  Is what we're communicating needed.  We loose ourselves in communication.  We might leave it alone a little.  What if we had an international day of silence?

What are Universities About?

From my current perspective, I cannot very easily separate the various aspects of this global human culture from every other aspect.  But I spend much of my awake time each week at a University; so most of my observations about us, my interactions with others of us, my own sense of what I am or am not accomplishing in my life is experienced here.

A few years ago I went through a period of questioning what I was doing for money (aka, my job, my career); and even though there were far more aspects of my job that I enjoyed than not, I still wondered if this was what I really wanted to continue doing.  As I quandered over other options and possibilities, I ultimately ended up telling myself that 'at least I was doing no harm' in my work here at the university.  My argument ended up not being very convincing to my self.

I looked around me at the students, faculty, and staff here, many of whom I had very rewarding relationships with, and realized that, even so, we were really all about keeping the cultural machinery going.  We were still engaged in the business of keeping the embers of rememberance thoroughly doused...most of the time.  I think this was the point at which I consciously decided that, given every opportunity here, I would inspire as much doubt as I reasonably could without running the risk of alienation (even though I do feel like a member of an alien nation).

Daniel Quinn's My Ishmael gives a very interesting perspective on the system of education that has evolved in this culture.

David Abram Quote

This is from the linked interview in the posting below:

London: What happens to a culture bereft of magic?

Abram: One thing is that its relation to the natural landscape is tremendously impoverished. In fact, by our obliviousness, by our forgetfulness of all of these other styles of awareness — the other animals, the plants, the waters — we have brought about a crisis in the natural world of unprecedented proportions — not out of any meanness, but simply because we really don't recognize that nature is there. It seems to us, in our culture, to be a kind of passive backdrop against which all of our human events unfold, and it's human events that are meaningful and what happens in nature, well, we don't really notice it, it's not really there. It's not vital.

How different that is from the awareness of a magical or animistic culture for whom everything we do as humans is so profoundly influenced by our interactions with the earth underfoot and the air that swirls around us and the other animals....

...I don't think there is a way for those who work in service to the earth — for environmentalists, ecologists — to really woo our culture back into a reciprocal or sustainable relation with the land until we draw folks back to our senses, because our sensing bodies are our direct contact with the rest of the natural world. It is not by being abstract intellects that we are going to fall in love again with the rest of nature. It's by beginning to honor and value our direct sensory experience: the tastes and smells in the air, the feel of the wind as it caresses the skin, the feel of the ground under our feet as we walk upon it. And how much easier it is to feel that ground if you allow yourself to sense that the ground itself is feeling your steps as you walk upon it.

About Blogging

This is my first blogging experience...and a singular experience it has been.  It's way too much like talking to myself.  I think that this is partly because there aren't very many readers leaving comments, but it's also just the medium.  More than anything, I guess, it feels like talking to myself.  And I'm fine with that.  I do it all the time.  But it's not altogether satisfying.

I miss the dialogue.  I miss seeing the eyes of someone I'm sharing this with, the body postures, the breathing.  All the things my senses require to actually close the circuit between you and me.

I'll have to say, though, it's also a bit like my experience of writing poems.  Poems generally come to me in a way that feels like a gift...from the muse, from some deeper/broader/more complete awareness than is my usual.  I generally get to savor the poem after (and during, but that's different).  Even then, though, after the poem has been given, my greatest yearning  is to read it out loud, and then to read it out loud to someone else.  It is the spell of the sensuous.  (My deepest gratitude to David Abram for having written this book.  No finer book have I ever read.)

Feel the freedom of sharing your thoughts with me and with the others who might read them here.

Too Many of Us

I couldn't wait to get tomorrow's posting up.  So I'm just going to throw this one out there.  It seems to be the biggest sticking point for many of us:  What to do about the fact that there are simply too many people on this planet?  Is it really too many people?  I don't think so.  There aren't too many Navajo people.  There aren't too many Bushmen of the Kalahari.  There aren't too many Ladakhi.  There are too many people like ourselves who do not know how to live on this planet without killing it.

Try noticing what happens inside your own mind when you consider this question.  Try to very honestly notice what gets in the way of looking at this question from the largest possible perspective.  Notice all the 'yeah, but' thoughts that arise.  Notice that we don't necessarily have a hard time considering that maybe there are too many mosquitoes or too many rats or too many 'harmful' bacteria or, perhaps, too many dogs or cats.  But too many of our own kind?

Run with this one a little....

Asking the Right Questions

In Kay's comment to the last blog entry, she asked, "Where do we go from here?"

When I have conversations with people about all this, it's not unusual for this question to be asked; and I generally beg the question.  I don't know what you need to do next.  In most ways I don't even know what I need to do next.  I seem to be pretty good at asking, raising, formulating the questions.  I don't think of myself as being much of answer guy.

For me, my own life is so full of what seem to be contradictions, that at times, I can barely stand the seeming hypocrisy of even keeping this blog going, keeping the conversations going.  Like most of us, I'm 'on the grid' for almost everything:

1. I have a job for which I work 40+ hours per week
2. My paycheck goes directly into my checking account
3. I use that money to buy food, water, shelter, heat, electricity, an automobile, gas, bus transportation, medical care, entertainment, telephone, insurance (there's an odd one), someone to pick up my garbage and recycling

Where in all that am I not reliant on some other corporate entity, even if it's governmental?

What I mean by 'on the grid' is all the different ways in which I work just to make enough money to buy the things I either need or want.  I don't supply any of my own electricity.  I don't really know where my water comes from nor the natural gas that heats the house I live in.  I live far enough away from the job that pays me my salary, that I have to rely on someone to get me back and forth from there to where I live.  I don't grow any of my own food and probably never could grow enough, even if I were more ambitious in this regard than I am.

In all honesty, even as much as I enjoy my job, if asked what I do for a living, I'd have to say, 'I make money.'

 You see where I'm going with this.  How much are any of us able to step off the grid, stop relying on the corporate entities for what we need?  This seems to me to be the most consequential thing any of us can do...that and of course INSPIRE DOUBT IN OTHERS!

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

There's are rendition of this song by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole  that I find so haunting, I can barely stand it.  I listen to it and it possesses me and won't let me go.  I can't remember the last time a song effected me this way.

What is that longing, that almost completely naked yearning in this song?  It's there regardless of who sings it, I think. It's in the song.  In the movie Finding Forrester, there is a minimalist, instrumental version by Bill Frisel, that also haunts...in its own way.

Still, there's something about Is' version

I can't imagine that there is anyone who has not experienced that bittersweet melancholy of longing for something we imagine we once had or once experienced.  Depending on our personal makeup, we either get caught up in the feeling and get lost for awhile; or we may dismiss it as sentimental and move on.  Either way (or one of the millions of other options for experiencing this that lies between those two) most of us know that feeling.

What if that is in the nature of this particular human culture of which we are a part.  What if it is inevitable as the result of having turned our backs on being an animal, so that no matter where we are, who we're with, what we are doing, we are missing the knowing of being home.

Invocation

And all is seeking death
Death to the normal, the ritual sameness
Of the every day
Death to the tranquility of the no-disruptive-pleasure

I wake from dreams in which I cannot breathe
I cannot breathe from choking on what is requisite
On what is needed, what is there
And I cannot have

I fear I may no longer be content with
I did the best I could
I fear the time comes when my best is no longer enough
I must do better
I must somehow do less

All is seeking death
The vessel longs to be broken
All longs to be spilt upon the earth
To seek the lower places, the lowest
Where gravity calls

If the picture were to be painted
Purple would prevail and dark violet
And the deep red of fresh blood just released
What scarlet could would find itself
Splattered in bright rosettes
Blurred beyond its edges
Undefined
Remnant

I am not Death come to free you
You have lived the nightmare of freedom for too long
I am come now to bind you up
To embrace you, to hold you fast
I am come to you now of necessity
Of yours
Of mine
Of ours

I am the divine
What is holy, fecund and pure
I am your one and only redemption
Your little life always and ever has been mine
I always have held it safely entwined
Bound in the webby stream
Held in cloud droplets
In the color that reaches the eye
In the tang and taste of molding leaf and worm

I am the rhythm, the rhyme and verse
The insect song and leafy chime
And beyond the blue and black to star
And thought subsiding and rising
And sinew clasping bone
I am and all that is
Come dancing
Round me dancing
Joy dancing
Home

Adam C. Hall
July 5, 2008

Farming

...If there is a single complex of events responsible for the deterioration of human health and ecology, agricultural civilization is it.  At its worst, agriculture is industrial and corporate, poisoning the whole planet with chemical compounds not found in nature.  It has made plants and animals into what geneticist Helen Spurway calls 'goofies,' the deformed animals whose wild genetic homeostasis has been destroyed.

- Paul Shepard

Coming Home to the Pleistocene

N Scott Momaday

I hope you women reader's won't take offense to Momaday's use of the male nouns and pronouns.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

...as one would a lover (my words).

~ N Scott Momaday 
The way to rainy mountain