“Taste and see – I am spare”

Tags

art, entelechy, human consciousness, identity, Philosophy, poetry, Sohan Qadri, spirituality, writing

That age-old question “who am I?” haunts us from birth. We sense we are more than what we seem to be, more than the sum of our parts, more than this thread of life that spans so short a distance.

Sometimes a felt-sense of that “something more” emerges in consciousness with a ring of clarity–then fades just as quickly. Sometimes if we are quick or lucky or persistent, we capture what we sensed in a word or image, a poem or song.

What we capture is always an echo of what we’re trying to get at, a finger pointing to the moon, not the thing itself.

The following poem is trying to capture that “something more.” I titled it “entelechy” which is a philosophical term that denotes both the perfect essence of an object or person, and that which propels it toward self-fulfillment. This is the closest I could come in finding a word to capture what I was after.

Entelechy

I am spare

I am clean uncluttered space

I am a fine line curving inward and out

I am a high sweet note wrung from the still air

I am a cup of cool water drawn from the clear stream

I am bone bleached and bare, tossed upon a windswept shore

Taste and see

I am spare

In some ways, this poem is like a prayer. When I am confused, or out of sorts, or besides myself, I turn to it to remind me of that something more or something deeper that I am at heart. Meditating upon these images brings me home to myself.

I am not sure if the poem will mean anything to anyone but me, but I wanted to share it here.

The artwork by Sohan Qadri that precedes these words captures for me, so beautifully, that same essence. I wrote another post about his artwork and what it means to me here.

The Art of Sohan Qadri

Tremble of a Leaf, Balancing Interior and Exterior Lives

Tags

Experience, finding balance, human consciousness, Nature, Oneness, poetry, reality, Zen

I wrote this poem as a grad student while living in that highly interior world of academia. I’d been feeling out of balance and needing to reconnect to the world around me. Then I saw a leaf tremble in a light breeze “and saw more life in it than in me.”

I wanted that. That ability to be spontaneously receptive and responsive to the world around me. To tremble deliciously in the breeze’s embrace.

Tremble of a Leaf

The tremble of a leaf awoke me.

So far inside I had gone,
 Where id and ego threw
Long shadows across my mirrored face
To mystify me.

Where I dug odd relics
From a befuddled past,
Gazing long to find some answer
That escaped me.

Where men were but some
dark puzzle, pieces
I never bothered to make whole—
Only analyze.

Where Nature herself
Roused no awe in me,
Needing only to be computed
To comprehend.

So far inside I had gone
That when the wind passed over me
I moved not—

Only to see a leaf tremble,
And see more life in it
Than in me.

We are constantly navigating between the interior and exterior world, but sometimes one gets privileged over the other and we feel off-balanced. This happens in the world of academia with its classrooms and labs and libraries and constant reading and writing and talking. It also happens to us as writers, bloggers, gamers—this plugged in generation, with all the texting and tweeting, the TV viewing, internet surfing.

So often I see people, young and old, walking down the street wearing ear buds, listening to music instead of the wind blowing through the birches, talking to someone on a cell phone, rather than connecting with the children playing on the lawns they pass.

Sometimes we try to get out of our heads and into our bodies through sports or working out, yoga and dance, digging in the garden, taking hikes. Travel helps too, because it takes us into the unfamiliar and makes the exterior exotic, interesting in a way it has ceased to be at home.

But even then, if our heads are filled with constant chattering—thinking, worrying, weighing, measuring, planning, remembering, anticipating—we’re still in our heads, the interior dialogue is drowning out the exterior, acting as a filter to keep us from being as spontaneously responsive to the world around us as we could be.

That’s why I like to practice “no-mind,” having no thought, as I move through my day. Turning out the interior chatter allows me to experience the exterior world with no filters, nothing coming between me and it. Pure experience. It’s like when we try relaxing, concentrating on releasing the tension in each part of our body until we finally go limp. Emptying the mind is like that. The body is still there, the mind is still there, we are still there, but we experience a sense of clarity and peace that seems egoless, bodiless. A surrendering to “what-is,” not unlike surrendering to the water when floating on our backs, letting ourselves melt into its flexible support. Body, water, one thing.

Ironically, the letting go of the interior chatter, letting go of the filters that divide us into I and Other, this and that, here and there, this pure unfiltered experience of the exterior, enables us to realize that “in reality” there is no interior and exterior. It’ all one thing, one be-ing, not an “it” but a continuum and a spaciousness, a wall-less sense of self that includes everything around us. Interior and exterior merge into a single co-existence. Like moonlight on water. Interior and exterior reflecting each other.

This sense of oneness never lasts very long, alas. Like floating on your back or going limp, an orgasm or the scent of orange blossoms. It’s all fleeting. But it’s nice to know we’re not fleeting. We’re the flow. And all these fleeting things flow with us. Not two.

The tremble of a leaf woke me to the need to be responsive to the world around me, to experience it unfiltered by thought. But it’s nice to know that no matter how far inside we go, how interior we become, the exterior is only a touch, a glance, away. A mere turn of the head, a pause between thoughts that widens, a stillness that cuts through the clutter of our minds, and we feel that breeze, and tremble in its embrace.

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The Art of Sohan Qadri – Tapping into the Unconscious

Tags

art, human consciousness, meditation, Sohan Qadri, spirituality, Visual Arts, writing

When I first encountered one of Sohan Qadri’s paintings, I was plunged like a pebble into a still pool, radiating ripples of bliss.

An overstatement? I don’t think so.

The effect was profound, even if the words I use to capture it fail.

“A synthesis of emptiness and peace, radiating power,” is what Qadri is trying to express in his art, he writes.

”Art can have the same effect as meditation,” he tells us, “but only if we drop our constantly interpretating mind and learn to simply see . . . . This can happen if you grasp the painting at a subliminal level, let it filter in through your pores.”

With me at least, he succeeded.

His work is made from thick soft paper deeply saturated in brilliant colors, punctuated by ragged tears and rips, wavering furrows and trails of tiny pinpricks, like scattered drops of light–or bread crumbs — leading toward the vast unconscious.

“When I start on a canvas,” he explains, “first I empty my mind of all images. They dissolve into a primordial space. Only emptiness should communicate with the emptiness of the canvas.”

“People are always interested in dreams. I am interested in the question: ‘Who is the dreamer?’” Qadri writes. “I would like to know: ‘Who is the artist behind the artist?’”

When I entered his painting, I felt the presence of the artist behind the artist.

I think I was drawn to his work because when I’m writing, in some way, I am always trying to do that as well, tap into the writer behind the writer.

At my best writing, I feel as if it’s not “me” writing, but something writing through me, beyond me.

As writers and artists, I think we are seeking to move beyond ourselves, dip our pens and brushes into the deep storehouse of the unconscious, the rich field of the imagination, where colors and forms and images and emotions flow.

We tap into it and let it flow out through us, filtered by our experiences and sensibilities, onto paper or canvas.

Readers and art lovers are also seeking to move beyond themselves, to be swept away into other worlds–magical realms or gripping tales created by words, or rich fields of form and color beyond conceptual thought.

The best writing, the best art, for me is when we feel the presence of the creator behind the creator, and recognize, if only for a moment, the face of our larger selves.

Lightness of Being, Unbearable and Otherwise

Tags

human consciousness, Milan Kundera, Philosophy, short story, Unbearable Lightness of Being, writing

I fell in love with the title of Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” before I ever read the book. The phrase seemed to identify something I had long felt but never put into words—a sense of being lightly tethered to the “real.”  While at first it was experienced as something negative, later it morphed into a much more positive feeling.

Even as a child, there always seemed to be some disconnect between “me” and the world around me. It was more than a sense of shyness, or not fitting in, or being different. It was more like a hyper awareness, or extreme self-consciousness—as if I stood outside myself, watching myself as I moved through the world and interacted with others. Other people seemed to live in the moment, embedded in experience. I always felt somewhat removed, disconnected, as if I floated above experience and not in it.

I don’t know now if this was a continuous feeling, or something that I felt so deeply and strangely at different times growing up that I identified with the feeling—of not being quite grounded in “reality,” the reality that others seemed to experience and take for granted.

I wrote about the experience in a short story called “Fine and Shimmering” which referred to the tenuous thread that tied Sheri (the main character) to the real and kept her grounded.

It was curious, this sense of separation she felt whenever she tried to blend in with a crowd, of always rising to the surface, alien and exposed, the way oil will when mixed with water. All her life Sheri had struggled with this lack of gravity and the need to be grounded in something more substantial than herself. Even in high school simple things eluded her, set her apart. How to walk, how to talk, how to laugh out loud.

Later she describes it this way:

[S]he felt unusually light-headed, as if she and her body, always out of sync, had reached some new height of disjunction. Once when Sheri had read a book on astral-projection she was startled to learn of that shimmering silver cord that supposedly tied the astral body to the solid one. What startled her was the awful realization that all her life she had been attached to reality by a similar, tenuous thread, let out so far that she seemed to float above experience, never in it. She had always to be so careful, to move so still, so as not to break that fine thread.

Like Sheri, I felt I was in the world but not of it, tied to it but floating above it. Like watching a film where I was a character in the story, so there was always two of us, the watcher (distant and removed—the “real” me) and the watched, the character I was playing as events unfolded (the actor, the role-player, the “pretend” me).

This could have evolved from being a quiet child who was a keen observer of life. As an observer, you are always once removed from the things observed. There is always a distance between you and those you are watching, or the events as they are unfolding. This experience is disconcerting, to say the least. It‘s like trying to carry on a phone conversation while hearing the echo of your own voice. Like living in an echo chamber. Or feedback loop.

I could never figure out if this was a characteristic peculiar to me, or if others felt the same way. Do we all live in this echo chamber, this constant feedback loop? Or only me and a few other odd ducks? I still don’t know. Either way, it was experienced as something undesirable, something that set me a part, and created a distance between me and the “immediate,” “the real,” an “authentic” self.

Looking back, in some ways, it’s not surprising I felt this way, disconnected from the world– it’s a wonder we all do not. After all, we come into this world understanding that our time here is brief and tentative—any moment we can be torn from it through a fatal accident or tragedy or disease or violent event. And even if we have the good fortune to live a very long time, when the end comes, we realize what a brief moment in time it actually was.

We also come to see that this “I” we identify with is constantly changing. We are not the same “I” as an infant as we are as a teen or a parent or an elder. And any manner of things can change us or warp us or shape us along the way. Our identity is tentative and temporary at best.

And where is this “I” located? In our personal history? The labels that identify us? The many hats and roles we play in life? Does it reside in our heads? Our hearts? Our bodies? Does this “I” stop where our skin ends? Or does it move within and without us, like our breath? Does what I see, hear, feel, become part of me in the act of holding them in my thoughts, becoming part of my mind, my brain, my experience, my memory? Do observer and observed become one? Two parts of one indivisible experience?

Is it a wonder I felt lightly tethered to the “real,” to this human experience where “I” am constantly changing and impossible to pin down or separate into a distinct entity?

Sheri experienced this “unbearable lightness of being” as something oppressive that she rebels against. In the end though she learns all that’s needed to be free is to let go:

To take that fine and shimmering thread between sharp teeth and snip it clean through. To drift aimlessly, like the merest wisp of cloud, a lingering trace of dawn, upon an otherwise immaculate sky. Awaiting that final dispersal, into the blue.

Sheri experienced “letting go” as drifting off into an unencumbered void.  Mine was quite different.

When I finally learned to “let go” it was truly liberating. It was letting go of a sense of “twoness” and embracing “not-two.”

When that wall of “otherness” disappeared, I felt deeply connected to this ephemeral world. I felt a lightness of being that is “unbearable” only in the sense of being too sweet, too rich, too beautiful “to bear.” And so I didn’t try to hold onto it. I just let it wash though me.

I’ll write more about this in another post.

In the meantime, if you’d like to hear more about Sheri’s story “Fine and Shimmering,” you can read it here: Fine and Shimmering 0513 pdf

“A Scattering of Rocks” — Zen in the Garden of Eden

Tags

beauty, human consciousness, Nature, Pago Pago, poetry, writing, Zen

Sometimes there’s no other way to capture a moment–a way of seeing or being in the world–than through poetry.

So while I prefer writing prose (I know I’m no poet), I find myself returning again and again to certain poems I have written, as if they were traces in the sand leading me back to the very time and place where something singular and significant rose briefly to mind.

I think of these as my Zen moments.  A sudden clear perception of something so extraordinary and subtle, it can only be experienced in faint, fleeting whiffs.

But the scent of it lingers in mind long afterwards, as if waiting to be re-released, like rosemary or thyme planted along a garden path waits to be crushed underfoot.

It’s like the story of a student begging his master to explain the meaning of Zen. But the master, cruelly it seems, keeps putting him off until one day as they were walking together through the mountain laurels the master suddenly exclaims, “There!  Do you smell it?” So happy at last was he to help his young student grasp what he was after.

It’s like that. Nothing after all was ever hidden.  It’s just waiting to be crushed underfoot.

The poetry I write attempts to capture some of that, or at least to trace the footsteps leading to the moment where it all came together, where the heel of my foot accidentally, spontaneously, released the scent of something rare and fleeting and not to be forgotten.

I’ve shared a couple of these poems already on these pages, in “Walking Among Flowers,” and “Night Howls.”  Although what I experienced and tried to capture in those poems was something more visceral than a mere whiff, more like the thwack of the master’s cane coming down on my back, although just as fleeting.  The poem I share below, “A Scattering of Rocks,” captures something more like that walk through mountain laurel.

We were living in Pago Pago, American Samoa, aboard our sailboat La Gitana.

My husband and I were working to supplement our cruising kitty, he as a welder in a local boatyard, while I tutored Korean children who lived in small communities scattered among the foothills.  Every afternoon I would row ashore and walk back through the lush green mountain valleys along dirt roads to the children’s homes.

I loved those walks.  Often I practiced what I called “no-thought,” emptying the mind and just letting sights and sounds and smells wash over me wordlessly.  But more often I was overcome by the spectacular beauty I saw all around me and my relative insignificance, humble in the midst of such awesome power. And then one day it happened.  I smelled it.  A scattering of small rocks along the wayside was the trigger.

          A Scattering of Rocks

Many times I walked this way, a dirt path

parting from the road through yonder valley.

And always, the high green mountain wall

stared down from its dizzying heights,

while the spacious valley opened up,

opulent and serene.

But only once was I struck by a mere trifle,

a scattering of small rocks tossed

haphazardly across the path.

There was no significance in this.  No meaning.

Yet the sight so lightened my footfall, 

I might have been a leaf blown yon,

or a pebble tumbling carelessly away.

So amazing were my antics even the high

mountain wall and verdant valley

broke loose, doubled over in laughter.

Now I cannot pass this way without us sharing,

like old friends, a light skip and quiet chuckle.

I don’t know if this poem will mean anything to anyone other than myself, but I’m hoping those who have had similar experiences will capture a whiff of what I was after.

What’s significant to me is that while I was steeped in the deep beauty and sensual richness of that tropical landscape that could, quite literally, take your breath away, it was something as mundane and homely as a scattering of small rocks that was the catalyst to this singular experience.

The awesome beauty that surrounded me melted away into mere laughter–a shared experience, but not the thing itself, not that which gave rise to the laughter.

Not perfection, not imperfection, not perfection and imperfection together, but the sudden acute realization of the perfect imperfections that permeate life and percolate almost imperceptibly to the surface. Spontaneously, like alliteration, like rhythm, like rhyme. Like verses from the nursery which make no sense at all—until they do.

“With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,

we will make music wherever she goes.”

It’s like that, making music wherever we go.  When suddenly, we slip upon it, there we go too–tumbling carelessly away.  And everything breaks loose in laughter.

The Deer’s Scream, My Mother’s Eyes, and a Ripe Strawberry

Tags

death, dying, human consciousness, Nature, wildlife, Zen

The deer fleeing for its life turns to look at me with my mother’s eyes.  Dark fierce eyes, bitter-bright, locking onto mine.  Not letting me go.  Not looking for help or pity or comfort.  Not looking for escape.  She knows there’s no escape.  That dark gaze locked onto mine wants but one thing.  A witness to its passing, its inevitable and terrifying end.

I never actually saw the deer that night.  It was too dark.  I only heard its pounding hooves passing behind our home, its terrified scream splitting the night.  But I “see” it nonetheless.  For days, weeks, afterwards, even now, I see it. Screaming past me with my mother’s eyes. I’d watched her passing too. Her inevitable and terrifying end.

It came quickly.  Late June she was diagnosed with cancer.  By October she was gone.

I was her caretaker during those last brief months.  I watched her flesh waste away, her energy, her light step, her quick smile, her interest in watching golf and tennis on TV, in reading mysteries, in knitting, in food, in friends, in family.  In me.  In her own life.  It all drained away in a few short months, in the time it takes to flee screaming with pounding hooves from one side of the meadow to the other before crashing down that ravine.

And all that time in her passing, her wide, terrified gaze locked on mine.  Or so it seems now.

In fact, her passing was surprisingly mild.  She refused treatment and entered hospice care.  She was 80 years old.  Her time had come.  She was ready.  Or so she said, and maybe even believed, at the beginning.  The medication kept her free of the worst pain for most of that time.  Until it didn’t.  Until there was no escaping the pain.

She watched herself deteriorate, and I watched with her.  It was like a thing we watched silently together this draining away of her life.  It was a painful thing, but for the most part she was stoic, reserved, resigned.

And then one day as she was struggling across the room with her walker, moving in slow motion like the deer in my dream, she turned toward me and fixed her eyes on mine.

By then her loose skin hung from her bones, her sharp shoulders hunched, her wide mouth drooped, her once silver white hair turned yellow and dull, and her dark eyes shone from sunken sockets. She turned toward me in her slow struggle across the room, fixing her intense bitter-bright eyes on mine and said, “This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

The worst thing. Dying. And I knew she was not looking for a response from me, nor sympathy, nor saving, nor comforting words.  My place was simply to bear witness to this “worst thing”, to the terror of her inevitable passing.  Death at her heels on that slow passage across the room.

She slipped into a coma soon afterwards.  And then she was gone.

No escape.  The unalterable, unutterable fact underwriting our existence.  We avert our eyes every which way as long as we can. Until we can’t.  Until the time comes to bear witness, to refuse to look away, to let the fact of another’s inevitable passing, or our own, stare us down, and lock our gaze.  No escape.  And all we can do is be there, fully present, in that moment, bearing witness.

There’s a story about a Zen monk fleeing for his life, a tiger at his heels, chasing him over the edge of a cliff where he grabs hold of a branch.  He dangles there just out of reach of the tiger’s jaws snapping at his head, while below him he sees another tiger half-climbing the cliff to snap at his feet.  No escape.  Just then he notices a fat juicy strawberry dangling from a nearby vine. He lets go with one hand to swing toward the strawberry where he plucks it loose and pops it into his mouth.  “Oh, so delicious!”  He sighs savoring its sweetness.

Here’s another story.  True story.  Caught on video by a group of tourists on safari in Africa. You can watch it here on youtube. Here’s how it goes:

A herd of water buffalo approach a river where a pride of lions are resting.  The lions chase the buffalos, separating a calf from the herd, and dragging it away.  Only the struggling calf slips into the river.  The lions climb down the bank and begin pulling the calf ashore when a crocodile grabs hold of its leg and tries to drag it under.  The lions and crocodile play tug-of-war with the calf, until the lions win and pull it ashore. No escape.

Then something unimaginable happens. The fleeing buffalos suddenly stop running, reverse course, and head back, charging at the lions and chasing them away. The little calf, who moments before hand been in the clutches of the lions’ jaws—no escape, gets to her feet, shakes her rump and walks away with the herd, apparently unharmed.

What does it all mean?

These two stories roll around and around in my mind, the same way the screaming deer’s flight and my mother’s slow struggle across the room are rolled together in my memory.

What do they have in common, the monk and the baby buffalo?  One savoring life while death snaps at his heels, another’s life being saved from the grip of death.  The saving and savoring of life.  It’s a theme I turn to again and again in my writing.

Perhaps our escape from life’s inevitable and terrifying end, like the monk’s, is by embracing life’s sweetness, savoring all it has to offer, living life in the oh-so-delicious present moment.

Perhaps our escape is like the calf being plucked from the jaws of death by something too miraculous to even imagine.

Perhaps at the very end, when there finally is no escape from death, like that deer, like my mother, and that awful inevitable conclusion chasing us down grabs hold, something unimaginable happens.  Some unseen hand plucks us like a ripe strawberry from the jaws of death and swallows us whole, savoring all the sweetness of our brief lives, and reaffirming with a sigh, “Oh, so delicious!”

[This post is a sequel to my last, which you can read here. The photos were taken from an Amtrak train window on a trip to San Diego where I wrote most of this post]

Related articles

• Mountain Lion Kills Deer in Springs Family’s Front Yard (kktv.com)
• Deer Forest (charleymckelvy.wordpress.com)

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

Tags

deep ecology, human consciousness, Nature, poetry, writing

“I watch them every summer, the hot hills crouched like a lion beside the road. I see the strength—tawny skin pulled taut across long, lean ribs. I would take my hand and trace round ripples of male muscle, feel the hot rise and cool dip of his body. . . .” 

So begins a poem I wrote years ago as a young woman driving along the Central Coast of California on my way to class at Cal Poly University in San Luis Obispo.  I loved the commute along highway 101, especially that stretch between Pismo and Avila with the golden rolling hills studded with oak groves towering up beside me on one side, while on the other side lay the Pacific Ocean, cool and shimmering,  far below.

My commute was a kind of communion with silent companions that lay still and passive while I moved past them, watching them fervently. I traveled with my hands stretched out, tracing the changing contours of the passing landscape with my fingers. I felt the silky coolness of the sea, the soft brush of the hot hills– physically, intimately, intensely. And I felt as if I was leaving part of myself behind as I streamed past them

It was an overwhelming feeling, permeated by a sense of longing and loss, because that sense of connection, of “oneness,” I felt so keenly, was so fleeting.  A waft of perfume, a balmy breeze, that slowly dissipates and disappeared.

Knowing this, sometimes my watching was like a spurned lover or jealous mistress. Sometimes like a distant voyeur, or persistent suitor, watching and waiting, watching and waiting.  Waiting for that moment, as my poem concludes, when the lion so still and silent beside me would “rise, stretch his sensuous body against the sky with one low moan” and “pursue me”. 

Pursue and devour, was the unstated implication.  “Swallow me whole” is the metaphor that comes to mind these days—consummation.

All that waiting paid off, it appears.  My relationship with the natural world has matured over the years. How I remember so long ago watching the streaming stars passing overhead on those hot, balmy nights, and being filled with a deep sense of longing and loss.  This too must pass, I thought, and it was almost unbearable.  But no more. 

Now when I say goodnight to the stars before going to bed–the nights hot and balmy or crystal clear and cold–there’s no sense of longing. When I turn away toward the house nothing is lost. It’s all a part of me now.  A sustaining presence.  

And the passing days and nights, that sense of fleetingness that the poets have mourned over the ages, is “a dark stream streaming through me,” as I write in another poem.  It’s all one, the stream and the streaming.  It always was.

For those curious, here’s the complete poem I quoted earlier as written so long ago.

 Hot Hills in Summer Heat

I watch them every summer, the hot hills

Crouched like a lion beside the road.

I see the strength—tawny skin pulled taut

Across long, lean ribs.

I would take my hand and trace

Round ripples of male muscle, feel

The hot rise and cool dip of his body.

I see the arrogance—rocky head held

High against infinity, the patient power

Unmindful of the heat that holds me.

Someday he will rise, stretch his sensuous

Body against the sky with one, low moan.

On silent paws he will pursue me.

And so I wait.

Walking Among Flowers

Tags

aesthetics, art, beauty, flowers, French Polynesia, human consciousness, Nature, poetry, sailing, Tao, writing

Landfall in Nuka Hiva

Out of the dark blue sea rose a lush-green mountain ribboned with cascading waterfalls.This was what we saw after 29 days at sea, our first tropical landfall on our round-the-world journey–the Marquesas Islands

Walking through the village on Nuka Hiva down narrow, winding roads, past pastel-colored houses surrounded by gardens overflowing with flowers and dense tropical foliage, melting in the heat and humidity and the perfumed air . . . . . I felt physically and mentally assaulted, overcome by the intensity of the colors and the abundance of the beauty that surrounded me.

EK Photo & Art Layers of Blue

Perhaps it was because we’d been so long at sea, or because this was our first glimpse of a tropical paradise. Or perhaps it was for me as it has been for so many artists and travelers coming to the South Pacific for the first time.

Colors exploding all around me, shattering the senses—sight, smell, and sound washing together. Undulating waves of color, wrapping around me, streaming through me, carrying me away.

EK Photo & Art Luscious Pink

This sense of being awash in, or assaulted by, color, stayed with me and revisited me often on our travels through the South Pacific. Sometimes it was a soft, sensual immersion. Sometimes a harsh, brutal slaying. It knocked me off my feet and broke me open. I swallowed it whole.

It all came together one day in Moorea in the Tahitian Islands. La Gitana was anchored at the end of a deep cove, with green mountains walls on one side and a valley opening up between them.

Anchored in Moorea

On the other side was a bluff with a small cottage surrounded by a flower garden that trailed down the rocks toward us.

EK Photo & Art Magnolia

Each afternoon magnolia tree blossoms would drift down into the sea and our daughter rowed among them, gathering the sweetly scented flowers.

As beautiful as it was down here on the water, I kept wondering what it would be like up there, in the garden on the bluff, walking among flowers.

At the time I was reading Creativity and Taoism – A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry by Chang Chung-yuan. He writes of the “interpenetration of Nature and Man” by which ”the artist reveals the reality concealed in things [and] sets it free.”

One of my favorite drawings in the book is Flower in Vase by Pa-ta san-Jen(1626-1701). There is nothing beautiful or delicate or uplifting about the drawing, but it affected me deeply, physically, like a punch in the gut.

Chung-yuan explains the drawing this way: “No attempt is made at beauty or refinement of form, merely the primary essentials of the object are given. Here we see innocence or the quality of the uncarved block at its best. What is within is manifested without.”

EK Photo & Art Orange Tulip Painting

The “uncarved block” is elsewhere identified as “original simplicity,” “simple, plain,” “obscure and blunt,” “unattached and depending on nothing.” It has “no artificial efforts” or “ intellectual distinction.” It is “not self-assertive but disappears into all other selves” thereby “moving within the forces of the universe.”

Heady stuff. All I know is that the drawing affected me much the same way I felt when being “assaulted by color”: something in me is shattered and released at the same time.

The poem I wrote that day in Moorea captured something of that.

EK Photo & Art Poppy to the Sky

(Robinson Cove, Moorea, French Polynesia)

Walking among flowers

Drowning in scent

Petals assault me

Cool and bent

Pistils are pounding

Stamens stab

Colors exploding

Stun and grab.

Walking among flowers

I die a keen death

Bloodied and trampled

Bourne by my last breath

I lay like a light

On the garden wall

Then swooping, swallow

Flowers and all.

Beauty is not always gentle and soothing, or sweet and sensuous, or uplifting and reassuring. Sometimes it can be blunt, brutal, shattering. As “red in tooth and claw” as the untamed wilderness Tennyson wrote about.

I doubt beauty is meant to simply sooth or sate or inspire us, but to break us apart and open us up. Much like all great art must do.

Think of Van Gogh’s starry nights, or Picasso’s abstracts, or O’Keefe’s flowers.

EK Photo & Art Fiery Sunflower Painting

Was Monet’s impressionism or Seurat’s pointillism pretty ways to put paint on canvas, or ways to reveal how light and color and shapes and all manner of things break apart and open up and take us in. Ways to become immersed in the stream of things.

“Walking Among Flowers” is my way to revisit again and again that shattering into the stream of things.

[Many thanks to EK Photography & Art Gallery for use of the beautiful photographs and paintings. More can be found at http://ekphotoartgallery.wordpress.com/ ]

Nature and Human Consciousness – Seeing Things As They Are

Tags

deep ecology, human consciousness, Nature

© Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every time I write about nature I get deep into human consciousness. You can’t really separate the two. There is no “nature” – no way to identify, quantify, categorize, articulate, or understand it—apart from human consciousness, from how we think and talk about it.

 

We can’t study or explore or write about nature as something separate from ourselves, our own senses and experiences, our own thinking, perceiving, observations, experimentation. In that sense, nature is subjective, no matter how hard we try to objectify it.

This is not new, of course. Better writers and thinkers, from different disciplines, have explored this in more depth and detail that I can here.

This grand book the universe . . . is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it: without these, one wanders around in a dark labyrinth.  –Galileo, Astronomer

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from the experience of the world . . . .  –Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologist

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. –Edward Sapir, Linguist

If the world exists and is not objectively solid and preexisting before I come on the scene, then what is it? The best answer seems to that the world is only a potential and not present without me or you to observe it. . . . All of the world’s many events are potentially present, able to be but not actually seen or felt until one of us sees or feels.  –Fred Allen Wolf, Physicist

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
          -–Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

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. –John Muir, Naturalist

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the processions of the seasons. There is nothing . . . with which I am not linked.  –Carl Jung, Psychologist

See this rock over there? This rock’s me!  –Australian Aborigine

But in the ordinary play of our day, we forget this. We experience everything outside ourselves as “not me,” “alien,” “other.” Even our own bodies are commonly experienced as “not me.” We say “my stomach growled,” or “my foot fell asleep,” or “my sinuses are acting up,” because they seem to act involuntarily, with a mind of their own, without our conscious consent. As does nature, and other people, and the things we create—toasters and cars and computers.

Separating the whole of life and existence into parts is a useful way of talking and thinking about things.

But too often we fail to put everything back together and see how interdependent it all is, how embedded we are in the whole, and the whole in us. When we fail to do so we lose a vital understanding of ourselves and the universe, and we act in ways that may be harmful to the whole.

The see the ocean in a drop of water, to see ourselves in everyone we meet, is not, as some think, merely a poetic and rosy way of looking at the world. It’s to see things as they actually are.

Night Howls

Tags

human consciousness, Nature, Pago Pago, poetry, sailing, Tree of Life, universe, wild

Silver Moonlight, by Steven Richardson

Last month around this time when the moon was full, our nights were filled with howling. Almost every night we could hear the mournful cries of coyotes in the fields behind our house, along with ecstatic barking, yipping, chortling–as if they were celebrating a kill, or worshipping the moon, or engaged in some wild orgy.  Or perhaps they were merely giving voice to the irresistible life force pumping through their blood and brains and hearts, a force of nature too wild and fierce to hold back.  

The sound, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, echoed long in my mind afterwards, like ripples of water moving away to the edge of consciousness and reverberating back again. Like something heard long ago deep in my bones, from an evolutionary or primal past.

They say we humans carry in our genes the imprint of life-forms going back to when the first cells emerged on earth.  Deep in our blood, our bones, our very atoms, lays some faint memory of our ancient beginnings. Phylogenists call it our “vast evolutionary tree.”

If we go back even further, traces of that time when the morning stars first sang together may still be felt when we look out on the night sky. We are the stuff of stars, after all, so say astrophysicists. 

Carl Jung envisioned our Collective Unconscious as a reservoir lying deep within our psyches containing our evolutionary memories.  While they lay below consciousness, they break through in dreams and myths and fairy tales, in primitive urges, the call of the wild, in our more-than-human yearnings.

Beautiful Rage by Steve Richardson

Sometimes we feel this wildness rising within when witnessing powerful displays of nature: thunderstorms booming across the land, waterfalls careening over cliffs, huge waves crashing against rocks, hurricanes lashing at trees, lightening forking across a dark sky,  earthquakes heaving beneath our feet.   It frightens and excites—creating both the desire to escape and to embrace that primordial power.  One wild howl elicits another—the urge to howl back, to voice our own wild yearnings—to sing or dance, or paint or play, or grab words from the air and fling them onto paper.I heard that howl and answered back one night on anchor watch in Pago Pago.  A hurricane was blowing a few miles off Samoa and we were set to ride it out if it blew into the bay. 

I stood at the bow of La Gitana, hanging onto the staysail as the deck lurched beneath my feet like a wild stallion while the surging waves rose and fell and the chain from the anchor rooted deep in the mud below grew slack or tight.

Storm Clouds and Moonlight by Steve Richardson

Overhead a torrent of clouds crashed against a full moon, sometimes swallowing it whole, then washing away streaming moonlight. All around me the night raged while the anchor held tight, and I held tight, the terror and exhilaration pumping through my blood and brain.  The wild urge to let go and be carried away by the night was fierce. Later I tried to capture what it felt like.   Here’s what I wrote:

Night Howl

(Anchor watch in Pago Pago, Samoa)

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I watch,

                            moonlight and clouds wind-tangled across the sky.

Suddenly I am loosened, lifted, flung far–

fingers raking stars, mouth howling moon, mind mooning time

my heart-beat

riddles the universe.

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I stand, astonished,

gaping into the maw of some vast mirror.

It’s close to capturing what I felt, but the last two lines trouble me. “Gaping” and “maw” keeps the visceral effect I’m looking for, capturing the sense of trance-like awe and terror.  But mirror moves it away into something more philosophical or intellectual. 

I’m tempted to stop with the line “my heartbeat riddles the universe.” That captures the physicality of my wildly beating heart breaking out of my body to become the heart-beat of the universe.  And it also hints at the mystery of human heartbeat itself being a riddle, the riddle of the universe, that the evolution of the universe over eons led to the creation of a human being, whose heart—its essential being—is the ability to reflect back upon the universe, to take it all in. 

Human consciousness is the mirror through which the universe sees and knows itself, and through which we see and know ourselves—the fullness of being, our primal past and present standing face to face.

That’s a lot to howl about.

[Many thanks to Steve Richardson for permission to use photos of his oil paintings to illustrate this post.  You can find more of his work at his website.]