Leavings · 10 November 2008

I’ve been not writing here, letting the hourly blog-sized thoughts walk on by. They are like deer. I like them, with their immature spots and testing-the-waters uncertainty, but when they whisper off again they deposit a steaming little turd to remind me they were here.

I miss the Beartooth mountains. Because I did not make it home this summer, I’m that much more aware of how little time I spend in forests, distinguishing elk turd from deer in the trails up to the tundra. I shrug off the REI fleece geeks who think of backpacking as “fun,” in part because of the one-with-nature elitism the “outdoor adventure lifestyle” entails. And in part because in my experience backpacking is what you do when walking is the only mode of vacation transport you can afford. My dad was a wilderness guide before he started preaching, and doesn’t see much difference between the two vocations: he feels God is more accessible in the mountains than anywhere. It’s finally dawned on my how much my practice, in the beginning, was about finding wildernessy oneness in the city. About packing that aporia of powder days and starry campfire nights wherever I went—to the point where I now see as trite the peak experiences that cannot happen without external promts from actual mountain peaks.

But I don’t know. When I remember the delight and peace that rednecks get from nature, the part of my research that’s about environmentalism becomes metaphysically interesting. Yoga is metaphysically interesting on its face. No contest. But as this dimension surfaces in my research, taking analytical writing from turd-size to book-size makes more sense. Even if books feel so 20^th century and my idea of long-form now is a 60-minute podcast.

So yeah, it’s been a week of devotional music—Hildegaard and Arvo Part—and lying on the earth. I stayed until the end of practice yesterday, rather than slipping out early like the rabbit late for a very important date. Sundays form 8:30 until class ends at 8:45, to teacher issues the only spoken “do as I say” instruction of the week. The command: relax. Savasana is deeper when there’s an outer ego to conclude it and you can let go of the anticipation of bringing yourself out. At the very end we chant the closing prayer together, just minutes before my father gives his the closing benediction to his freaky congregation a time zone to the east and more than a thousand miles to the north.

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord turn his face upon you and be gracious to you. May the light of the Lord shine upon you and grant you peace. Have a good week.

For now, in this new time, my intention on Sundays is to let myself hear that blessing filtered through the Sanskrit. And to receive it for what it’s worth.

A lot of people have experienced SOME kind of resolution of opposition the past week (predictably, I see this least among the academics: they want to experience this only on a rational level, only as an epochal improvement in the strategic tableaux). Take a duality any duality—whatever is the one that has hurt you most in days of Bush. For many, it’s a sense that Americans are exceptional oppressors: now it’s ok to embrace the scoundrels. For most, it’s the black-white hypocrisy that generations of fear and segregation have kept alive: now, the “all men are created equal” line rings more true. For others, it’s simply an end to internecine warfare in the Congress: now is a time to reason together. For me, I’ve had to look the sexist ignorant Frontier in the rimless-lensed eyes and recognize there is a place in this country—albeit a vanishingly small one—for that way of being. Palin-hate makes some sense because she’s trying to tell us how to be women (though the hate is paradoxical coming from those women who choose against history to re-institute patriarchy “by choice” under a man's name), but only if we actually need to defend ourselves against that. Suddenly the threat she poses to our selfhood is revealed as a vulnerable backwater joke—so why not let the backwater be? It works well for some, and those in transition, who still weirdly wish for a little patriarchy in their lives, should especially understand that.

Recognizing that Frontier ways of being will never again overpower me, and that those folks are still vital on their own terms, I’m suddenly a little more comfortable with the old forms of devotion that the Frontierspeople take for granted. Nature, music, and old prayers that never, ever felt real to me before now. I’ve had to block that out my whole life, and fight it in order to have a self. That has given me energy and self-willed critical intelligence. The urgent need to evolve away from that, the drive to transform, carried me many miles from the wilderess.

But now I wonder if I might be secure enough to be strengthened by the wilderness/Frontier in a different way. With a subversive inclusion into my cultural repertoire of the nature-worship, the old time gospel songs (god I think I might love that shit!), even the scriptures. The last are etched into my memory—I thought for years I’d succeeded in forgetting them but the yoga belies the accomplishment: the scriptures are buried there in rhythmic, otherworldly KJV verbatim, surfacing one by one as I push back the veil. I almost have no choice but to re-own it all, so thank god I feel like I live in a world where there’s much space for mutts and where contradiction is not really contradiction. It’s just fuel for movement, and paradox for stillness.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: evolution , integration , sound

Comment

1. Yes, my issue too.
   Everyone has a part to play. How still to determine who is playing well, and who is not. Who is the antagonist, or better, where is there antagonism rooted.
   The thing about change I am feeling, is about choice. The choice come before the change. The responsibility is again ours, if we can bear it, we can eventually be it.
   Someone said inquiry is better than advocacy, and yet we all know that eventually it becomes advocacy, action, doing, being a living inquiry.
   And basking in that.

   Posted by: Gregor · Nov 10, 03:29 PM · #

2. There seem to be phases to that kind of stuff — whatever label goes on the stuff. I don’t know them all but dismissal/escape must be one of them. After the rejection phase comes some sort of freedom for peaceful reexamination, wherein some truths can be discerned despite all the previous dogma-struggle dysphoria and dishevelment. The wandering through the wilderness is cliche but it’s real — it’s the only means to isolate the internal variables from the chatter that’s part of existing within society. But wilderness can be gotten into anywhere.

   Posted by: Carl · Nov 10, 03:35 PM · #

3. Was it here that I once read the leaves changing likened to the color of fruitloops? It knocked me out, because I’d always made the same comparison. There’s so much you write about your childhood that resonates with my experiences, too… the dirt road, cornfield, nothing-for-miles intimacy with the earth, no where to go…my rural Michigan faith-healing, prayer-circle pentacostal father’s side of the family who really loved the lord, and Grandpa leader of the Masons, Sunday school with my cousins on that side after sleep-overs, may the light of the lord shine upon you and grant you peace. Who here hasn’t been saved? My Swedish mother’s side of the family had branched out to Detroit, my older cousins had intermarried and my family is bi-racial but I grew up in the cornfields and went through 12 years of school with the same small group classmates who had never even shaken hands with a black person and many of whom were fiercly racist. I had to go home from school early one day in the 7th grade because my hillbilly buck-toothed American history teacher turned out to be an unapologetic bigot and laughed at me for crying in class when he disparaged Lincoln and the abolitionists. Ah, memories!

   I’ve let most of that float away and hardly ever speak to my dad’s relatives, and I never identified much with the companions of my country childhood and the scary religion. I always clung tight to my mom’s family and felt safe enough to reject most of what’s passed down through religion and spirituality, to be a pretty outspoken atheist— but who’s practicing yoga here? And who used to climb up on the roof to sit and do a kind of meditation ritual that belonged only to me? It’s funny. I always believed a little that my Aunt Linda and my Grandmother really could heal the burns or scare away the cancer with their prayers and the enegry they moved in a room. (Of course nothing ever happened.)

   Don’t not write here, Owl.

   Posted by: joy · Nov 11, 04:49 AM · #

4. Ironically, I just spent 2 hours hiking in the woods with my son yesterday.

   Did you see this entry from Andrew Sullivan?

   http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/11/nature-is-good.html

   (I can’t html here!)

   Posted by: cody · Nov 12, 12:06 PM · #

5. Joy… I have blogged of fruitloops, but the mottled leaf imagery is new to me. Very nice. Our childhoods are parallel in so many ways. I also attended country school with the same 15 farm kids as classmates all the way through. They fired the science teacher when he gave the eighth graders a short course on the theory of evolution. Sent him packing mid-semester.

   CP, this is a great study! (Re-linking it.) Reminds me that someone highly recommended bloggers read this column of his, though I didn’t get to it.

   If bucolic settings make intellectual endeavors that much fresher, maybe New Haven and Ann Arbor shouldn’t sound quite so awful to me, especially if scholarship is the goal? Is there some way in which LA is not the perfection of perfection? Naaaahhh….

   Carl, for years I have said that you could find all the nature you need in the city. But I don’t know. Lately I’ve been remembering the feel of walking out of the wilderness after a week or a month. There is a stillness that shares some things with the first day off a Vipassana retreat. Neither are good times for analytical thought, though. Actually it tends to take me several days to get back up to speed, pace Mr. Sullivan.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 12, 06:14 PM · #

6. People shoot deer for a reason.

   Posted by: Susan · Nov 12, 07:10 PM · #

7. It would be too easy to write about the grandiose “nondual” pretentiousness that is really spiritual bypassing. The all-transcendence-all-the-time model of “I get it and you don’t” spirituality. In fact, I have always refrained out of affection and good humor. The shoot-your-deer-thoughts-and-shut-up internet advaita doesn’t do the tradition justice.

   Cracking wise can bring light and awareness. It can also seep with anger and pre-emptive rejection and fake-joking cruelty. You decide for yourself why you think you’re so much more insightful than everyone else. You think the experiences of oneness are for only for "people who get it"? I don’t want to hear it. I am too receptive to others’ feelings (the emotions of other people pass through me too easily at this point) to subject myself to pre-manufactured anger without good fucking reason. I'm just all out of hate, sorry.

   Or, as RE just put it to me,

   Thereʼs a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. -Dorothy Parker

   Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 12, 07:25 PM · #

8. By the way, it’s all-AirSupply-all-the-time here this week.

   So awesome I sing all night.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 12, 07:47 PM · #

9. Awww hellyes.

   BFF and I just had an all-Journey weekend while we were in London!! (There were little forays into Air Supply and Kansas and other good stuff from the youtube sidebar, of course ;)

   Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHHOBZfHH8o

   Awesome awesome

   Posted by: joy · Nov 13, 12:40 AM · #

10. Perhaps you are the Peter Camenzind of the bend and stretch battalion. After the high country snows of the ‘impassable pass’ have softened to meltwater, you may share a glass or two with your dad.

    Such a raw, polarized place, the ‘States seems. Here the edges are rounded off, sanded down some by the clashing, so that the ruined chapels seem as old as the standing stones.

    Funny about KJV cadences welling up through (out of ?) the sanskrit. Does for me too, though (at least) 3 generations apostate. Maybe it’s the Milton.

    Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Nov 13, 07:05 AM · #

11. Dirty old pervert, that King James, but the version he commissioned is as incantatory hocus pocus as our mantras.

    Romans 8:38-9
    For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God. Huminahuminahumina.

    Joy, I just heard this in the produce section at the market. The video is sweet. It was all about driving around then. Kansas makes me think of doing 90 through backroads in a Dodge pickup. Montana didn’t have speed limits on secondary roads and you could drive at age 14. Uncivilized, really.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 13, 08:41 PM · #

12. We used to pile into my friend Laura’s big Oldsmobile, cut the lights, and go speeding down the backroads while playing “Carry On My Wayward Son”... ahhh. good times. There was nothing else to do! I wasn’t in to cow-tipping. TPing, though, that was always a past-time.

    I had a Ford pickup. ;) American steel-frame, in case my fifteen year old self were to get into any accidents on the ice and snow in Michigan winters, with my little sister in the car on our way to school.

    Faithfullly… yeah! I heard “Oh Sherrie” playing on Cars108 last time I was home, driving a familiar route through my hometown. Sigh, I kind of love Steven Perry. Plus he looks like a conquistador, I like hooked noses like that. ;)

    Posted by: joy · Nov 14, 01:29 PM · #

13. Parallel lives 1,536 miles apart.

    Would we have escaped without classic rock radio? I actually learned to drive on an F150 that was older than me and had a clutch tougher than a tractor. That thing was huge, had two gas tanks, and probably didn’t get 10 miles to the gallon. But gas was $0.89, so we didn’t notice.

    On the topic of the post, this looks beautiful.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 14, 05:58 PM · #

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