Category Archives: Beyond the Boundaries

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase

The Biological Arc

Leave a comment

Spring                                              Mountain Spring Moon

Wild. Wilderness. These ideas have established themselves as a filter in my mind, a sort of osmotic membrane that pulls notions out of books, magazines, my own thoughts.

Last night, as I went to sleep, wild and civilized kept pushing through various permutations. I recall best the idea that life itself is a wild adventure, a biological arc, for us mammals it extends from conception through birth to death. This idea sets to the side the notion of civilization as counterpoint to the wild and focuses on inanimate material animated. And not only animated in the human instance, but aware. And not only aware, but self-aware, knowing the biological arc, knowing our location in that arc at any one point in our life.

This is a radical, wild variation on the cold vast wilderness that seems to be our solar system, perhaps our whole universe. If we conceive, we humans on earth, of wilderness as a spot where nature can proceed according to its rhythms, ruled and influenced only by its own law-as it does in the vasty reaches of space, then we might consider the role within it, of an individual tree or wolf or rabbit or stream or mountain.

In a wilderness that really represents an unbroken continuity with the deep biological and geological past a particular tree is still, just like each living instance of the human, the inanimate animated. The tree reaches down with its root system-let’s imagine this tree is a bristlecone pine-into the soil beneath its trunk and develops an intimate relation with the minerals, the biome beneath the surface and available water.  It transforms the riches found there into more bristlecone pine. This individual tree, this bristlecone pine, in this pristine wilderness is an agent of literal metamorphosis, taking the inanimate and making it animate.

No less would an individual human in a pristine wilderness or one in the heart of its polar opposite, a contemporary megacity, accomplish the same magic. With one crucial exception, of course. Photosynthesis. The bristlecone pine not only reaches into the soil beneath, but into the air above and pulls out gases, incorporating them through its leaves into its whole body, mixing those gases with material drawn up from the soil. And one more. It takes the furious wild energy spawned in the nuclear fusion reactions of our sun and uses it to drive this process of animation.

In this sense then the individual bristlecone pine in the wilderness and the human on the streets of Shanghai are both radicals. That is, they both animate the inanimate, take up the elemental shards of the primeval universe and reshape them into patterns not native to their physics.

Within the biosphere, the realm of the living, most of its constituents live, then die. The magic drains out of the individual fish, the domestic cat, the high flying condor, the deep swimming whale. They release the elements they have animated back to cycles linked directly to the act of cosmic creation.

In humans this biological arc goes from conception through live birth to death. Both ends of this continuum, this biological dialectic, are, relative to human civilization, moments deeply wild. They participate only lightly and then inconsequentially in the world of ideas, technology, skill, labor, culture. They both represent key inflections of our wild nature: coming to individual life and leaving it. These moments are not mediated by culture, rather they rip into its fabric and insert or remove individuals from its complex ministrations.

So each of us is wild and free at the moment of our birth and our death. The question then is how much civilization constrains our inherently wild nature. I’ll consider this in another post.

Art and Culture, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The West

Born To Be Wild

Leave a comment

Spring                                 Mountain Spring Moon

In late April, early May I will attend my 27th retreat with the Woolly Mammoths, this year in Ely at the YMCA’s Camp du Nord. Often we have a theme and I suggested the following:

Been thinking about topic and theme. Seems like Ely area cries out for considering the wilderness, the wild within and without. What does it mean to be wild? In your life? In your heart? In and with your passions? Does wildness have anything to say to the third phase? How does wilderness feed us, heal us? Why? Another aspect of the same idea. What is to be human and wild? How do humans fit into the wild? Do we? Can we? It seems to me this is much of what Will Steger has dealt with.

As I’ve begun to consider these questions, take them into my heart, my civilized and my wild heart, they’ve begun to pull information out of the surrounding atmosphere. As often happens once we focus on something.

One source that has been prodding me over the last week is a book, The Great Divide: A Biography of the Rocky Mountains, by Gary Ferguson. In the first chapter on Mountain Men comes this observation. Richard Slotkin, an American studies professor at Wesleyan University suggests that a main theme of early America was the shredding of conventional European mythology and getting to a more primary source, the “blood knowledge” of the wilderness. Since was the time of Emerson and Thoreau, too, both of whom were instrumental in the turn away from European influence and toward development of American letters, American thought, American literature and who were, again both, focused on the natural world as a source of inspiration, it seems this tendency to turn our back on “civilization,” whether European then, or decadent American late-stage capitalism now, and look to the wilderness for guidance is an integral aspect of the American character.

It may be less so now than then, but nonetheless, it endures. Look at the heritage of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, the outdoors ethos of Minnesota, Colorado and Alaska (to name state cultures I know), the idea of the West.

In this same chapter Ferguson counterpoises the Easterners romanticization of the mountain men as true individuals living with unfettered freedom with the civilized and European inflected culture of the East Coast. This was true, he says, throughout the 19th century. In fact, many of the mountain men worked in companies of 20-30, with some trapping, some hunting, some cooking, some taking care of supplies and pelts. They also tended to travel with their families and were surprisingly well-educated. About 1/5 of the mountain men left memoirs and many were fluent in both Latin and Greek.

I mention this because when our gaze turns toward the Boundary Waters Wilderness, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada range or the expanses of wilderness in Alaska, to mention only a few of the wild areas in the U.S. alone, we often look toward them as places of healing, zones where civilization can be shed, as mystical bounded lands within which magic of a sort is still possible.

In fact though these are simply places where the hand of civilization has been light-though not absent. Witness acid rain, the extinction or near extinction of apex predators, and now the slow creep of climate change. And the need for a word like wilderness, the notion of wild occurs only when its dialectical opponent, civilization, has become ascendant.

So, to consider the wild in our hearts, in our lives, in our country we need also look at how civilized we are. What being civilized means. What needs civilization meets that wilderness does not and the reverse. We must also consider that the dynamics of these questions are bound up, in a particular way, with the American experience, with our sense of who we are as a people and a nation. It is not enough, in other words, to imagine the wild heart, but we must also attend to its gilded cage. It is not enough to seek the blood knowledge of the wilderness, but we must also attend to the context, our everyday home, where that knowledge has been lost.

Art and Culture, Asia, Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Spring, 2015

Leave a comment

Spring                                   Mountain Spring Moon

The sun hits the celestial equator today at 4:45 pm. It also rises due East and sets due West. This is the day the serpent crawls up Chichen Itza. Though meteorological spring, the three months between the coldest and warmest months, began on March 1st, today is the old holiday, one celebrated in cultures across many lands.

Here, for example, is an interesting paragraph about spring from the perspective of wu xing: “In Chinese thought, spring is associated with the color green, the sound of shouting, the wood element, the climate of wind, things sprouting, your eyes, your liver, your anger, patience and altruism– and a green dragon. Not surprisingly, spring is also associated with the direction east, the sunrise direction as Earth spins us toward the beginning of each new day.”  earth and sky

Spring sees the early evidence of winter’s end, celebrated at Imbolc, when the lambs are in the belly, brought forward. The lambs are born. The grass is plentiful so the ewes can give milk and nourish their babies. The gradual loosening of winter’s cold and snow and ice continues, accelerates until the days have warmth as their usual state.

The warmth and the sun climbing toward the north signal plants and animals both. Hibernation ends so the visible population of critters increases rapidly, coming out for the food the new season promises. Spring ephemerals burst out of the snow: snowdrops, crocus, aconites. Later, the daffodils will come, too. The strategy of the spring ephemerals is an interesting one. They emerge, bloom and die back before whatever is in the surrounding vicinity can leaf out, thus capturing all the available sunlight before shade covers their spot.

If Michaelmas is the springtime of the soul, then the vernal equinox is the springtime of the body, of the material and animate world. No surprise then that it serves as the proximate marker for the Christian easter, focused as it is on the resurrection, the new life of the body. Both Christmas and the Easter, the two key Christian holidays, one marking the incarnation and the other the death and regained life of Jesus, focus on the body and its possibilities. In the first instance the body is seen as a vessel for the divine and in the second the body is seen as no longer bound by the strict laws of the animal world. Death is no longer the end.

The Great Wheel suggests a similar, but profoundly different way of viewing these two most profound mysteries: birth and death. The Great Wheel focuses on the rhythms of the natural world and on their sequence, their repetitiveness. Taken most literally it adds nothing to these rhythms, nor does it subtract from them. Birth and death occur as the great wheel turns, as the earth revolves around the sun, source of the vital energy that maintains life between these antipodes.

This intricate interdependence between animals and plants in their life cycles, the sun and the earth’s orbit around it, is common, literally mundane. Profane, too, I suppose. Yet the miraculous is here, too and we need no sacred text to see it. Out of the stuff born in the birth of the stars themselves, stuff borne later on the solar wind and in the cataclysmic explosions at the deaths of these same stars, came the material that created our sun and our home, this planet, this earth.

Then, consider what happens next. That same stuff, now reordered and shaped into this planet, somehow reconfigured itself so that it could move, so that develop intention and instinct, so that it could replicate itself rather than having to wait for the violent processes more usual for the distribution of matter. And that that stuff, the same from the heart of the stars, so reconfigured, grew in complexity and capability until human babies began to born. Babies that could, probably for the first time here on earth, perhaps for the first time in the whole of the universe, see that which gave them the potential for life, the universe in its particularity here on earth and its dizzying universality in the cosmos.

The birth of the universe’s own eyes and ears and poets and composers and painters and dancers came and as miracles. And still do. In the same way the death of these same poets and artists does not end the births. No, the births keep coming and the deaths do not end them. In my mind this is the true resurrection, the actual reincarnation, the exact moment of rebirth. Death does not end us. We continue. And Spring is just the season to bless and hold this true miracle close to our hearts.

Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Mountains

A View From Shadow Mountain

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                        Black Mountain Moon

The world has receded. The old battles have become less clear. Keystone seems far away. So even the fracking arguments common here in western Colorado and in Weld County. The civil rights focus at Selma, Ferguson, even in Denver, distant. Not sure whether this is an inevitable part of transitioning to a new place, a loss of focus on what used to be, or an age related pulling back, letting the young warriors have their time. It’s as if a fog, not dense, but real has crept up Shadow Mountain, or, maybe it’s just the Shadow itself, the mountain’s long shadow, but the events occurring far below on the plains are less visible, perhaps even less real.

Minnesota now lies at an impossible remove, once again that cold place holder in the central northern U.S. The house in Andover is an abstraction, an asset, a factor on our balance sheet. Like owning a mutual fund.

Here’s what is visible: Kate. Ruth, Gabe, Jon, Jen, Barb. Vega, Rigel, Gertie, Kepler.  The mountains and their geology, the plants native to Colorado. The West. A new novel, Ovid, Caesar, a thread now, a strong thread of wondering how all the information available could be organized. The house. Continued settling in. The grounds and a small potential garden, the bees next year. Near things, you could say, matters of the heart and matters of the immediate physical environment.

This feeling is new. But, permanent? Hard to know.

Beyond the Boundaries, Myth and Story, Original Relation

From the Slumber of the Everyday

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                             Black Mountain Moon

From the dog to the human. Seeing the dogs yesterday, 100% clicked in to their genetic heritage and feeling great about it, made me wonder what circumstances create the same integration of body, mind and spirit in humans? Two ideas occur to me right away: sex and flow, yet those don’t seem quite right. Sex is instinctive and common among mammals, for the purpose of reproduction. Lions and tigers and bears and humans, dogs, too, all engage in sex, so it’s not distinctive, it’s instinctive. Flow is closer, but in its case it’s too distinctive, too idiosyncratic, too much a marker of an individual’s uniqueness and only rarely achieved.

Perhaps the trigger is hunting. After all, we share with lions, tigers, bears and dogs a predatory nature. We are not rabbits, squirrels, mice, voles. In this case I wouldn’t know since I’ve never hunted. But I can imagine. A true hunt, one where finding food is a necessity, would concentrate the mind, require attention to even the smallest physical movement, both on the part of hunter and hunted.

Or, perhaps, defending loved ones. This could explain the attraction of the warrior ethos. Though these are both traditionally male roles. What would be the female equivalent? Or, is there one trigger that unites men and women? Women hunt and fight, too.

Of course, there can be more than one trigger, I’m sure. Or, maybe we’ve evolved ourselves past a distinct trigger, become too socialized, too far distant from our veldt past. Still, watching Rigel yesterday afternoon come up to her purpose from the slumber of the everyday, I wonder.

Beyond the Boundaries, Colorado, Mountains, Science, The West

The Rio Grande Rift

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

Into the Colorado School of Mines last night, its Museum of Colorado Geology, for a second lecture to the Friends of the Museum. This one: Whither the Rio Grande Rift?

The significance of the title escaped me until Vince Matthews, former Colorado State Geologist, explained that the rift was a spreading of the earth’s crust, a spreading that thins the mantle and increases volcanism and creates faults. Then it hit me. Oh, a rift. Like the Olduvai Gorge in the horn of Africa.

There are three faults within the Colorado portion of the Rio Grande Rift that made it onto the USGS hazards map, one believed capable of producing a 7.5 magnitude quake and another of producing a 7.0 quake. Logarithmic scale. Those would be powerful and they would come in the middle of Colorado, toward the New Mexico border.

He used two terms in this dense, finely argued lecture that were completely new to me: graben and lineament.

Graben: In geology, a graben is a depressed block of land bordered by parallel faults. Graben is German for ditch or trench.

 

Lineament: A lineament is a linear feature in a landscape which is an expression of an underlying geological structure such as a fault. Typically a lineament will comprise a fault-aligned valley, a series of fault or fold-aligned hills, a straight coastline or indeed a combination of these features.

The focus of his presentation was the true northern extent of the Rio Grande Rift. Here’s a map that shows its extension in the consensus view (more or less). In this map you can see the Rio Grande rising in southwestern Colorado, then flowing through the San Luis basin into New Mexico and then onto its more familiar location as a major boundary feature between the US and Mexico.

Vince said that current thinking took the Rio Grande Rift as far as Leadville.

 

Leadville in this map is the first black lettered city above the C in Colorado. I use this map to show you the San Luis Basin (the light tan opening to the left of Highway 25 and starting at the New Mexico border. The San Luis Basin is a major feature of the Rio Grande Rift as it comes north out of New Mexico.

Matthew’s argument extended the Rio Grande Rift considerably further north and then hypothesized a turn from its primarily north/south axis to an east/west one. This map of the Colorado Plateau can be used to illustrate his argument:

 

Matthews extended the boundary of the Colorado Plateau east to include the Rio Grande Rift, then proposed that the rift extended east/west toward the area here marked as the White River Plateau. He based his argument on indicators of a rift zone (which I won’t go into here) and on an experiment on a clay model of the Colorado Plateau.

In essence he argues that the Colorado Plateau is a tectonic feature that has been rotated clockwise. When asked how that could have happened, he said, “I don’t know.” But, if you imagine the Plateau as a piece of the earth’s crust that has physical integrity, then a motion pushing up on its southwestern edge would turn it clockwise. One of the other geologists in the room proposed the San Andreas Fault as it developed. (I got lost right here, but I followed the argument up to this point.)

Very interesting. These lectures are helping me orient myself to the unusual topography of Colorado and some of forces that shaped it.

BTW: I loved Matthew’s description of two cinder cones as “very young.” They were only 640,000 years old. Puts 68 in a very satisfying context.

Beyond the Boundaries, Health, Latin, MOOCS, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, US History

It’s All Real Stuff

Leave a comment

Imbolc                              Black Mountain Moon

Prep days. Yesterday reorienting my workouts, today moving back into Ovid with the Latin. Prep is important but I find I want to hurry through it, press on, get to the real stuff. But, it’s all real stuff, isn’t it?

When doing the Latin, for example, I want to work fast, translate easily, get it. But, most often I have to work slowly, translate with difficulty, struggle to understand.

In the MOOC I’m taking from McGill University the current section is on physical literacy. An amazing insight for me. Literacy in the alphabetic, language based world, yes. Numeracy in the numbers based, mathematical world, yes. But physical literacy? That is, learning basic moves and physical actions that can later be strung together to play a sport, keep one fit, teach us how to fall, no. The idea never occurred to me.

It apparently surfaced in the 1930’s in America whereas numeracy only emerged as an idea in the 1960’s. It’s not surprising, I guess, since the move from the farm to the town and city was weighted against the old, physical ways that had existed since hunting and gathering gave way to the neolithic revolution.

Perhaps, come to think of it, becoming native to this place is a component of physical literacy, a tactile spirituality. As we move less and less, we interact with the natural less affectively, less often, less well. Perhaps play is a big component of becoming native to this place, wandering aimlessly in the woods or by a pond, in the mountains, on lakes.

Anyhow, I’m excited about this idea, a human trilogy necessary for a satisfying life: literacy, numeracy and physicality.

Beyond the Boundaries

Beyond the Boundaries

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                                Black Mountain Moon

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Introduction to his essay, Nature

Two new categories appear today on Ancientrails: Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation. They come from this paragraph, the first of Emerson’s introduction to his essay, Nature. When I first read this paragraph, I was just beginning to grasp the radical nature of Emerson’s thought and the liberal religious movement which claimed him. Since that first reading, it has become a steady source of inspiration and more. It has become a sharp knife for my own thinking, my own willingness to walk out to the boundary of what I have learned, what I believe, what I know, to walk out to the boundary then step over it and walk in the meadows beyond.

Now I want to try and give systematic attention to that work, to collect the thoughts I’ve had, the experiences I’ve had out beyond the boundaries. In a way you could call this an attempt to create a personal testament, a summing up, but by the nature of the work those categories are too limiting. Instead this is more in the way of an adventure, following ancientrails out to their terminus, then investigating the terrain beyond them.

What happens after religion, for example? I do not share the current negative assessment of religion, in any of its forms, not even Emerson’s. Religion is the great poetry of our species, the language in which the common person can give voice to wonder, to awe. It is, too, and at the same time, a way to congeal values and create a code of behavior, a way to define who we are and what we do.

Most religions I have studied, or at least become familiar with, have great learnings that all of us can use though we may not be so enamored of the codes of behavior that come along with them. No, I’m not trying to reduce all religions to some universal value like love your neighbor, or love, such work denies the particularity, the native genius in each of them.

I have found in my own searching certain key ideas, even revelations perhaps (if we are careful about what we mean) in various religious traditions that I have incorporated into my own thought. Let me give you an instance: incarnation and how it manifests in the Christian tradition, especially the birth narratives for Jesus. This is a god, in the Christian tradition—the God, becoming human. It’s a mind rattling idea, an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being funneling Itself down into the frailty and limitations of a human body. What are we to make of that? What if we walked up to the notion of a god coming in from the outside, looked around the edges of that idea, and stepped over the fence line? You might get a result like the one below.

Here’s three paragraphs from a Christmas time post:

Three wise men, shepherds, angels and gospel writers of all kinds should take note each time a new human is born. Each of us is the universe looking on and through itself. That is god-like, making the universe a true polytheist.

Each of us has the full potential of a new Self, a Self that may be the next Madam Curie, Ghandi, or Doris Lessing. Or, that Self might be the next loving mother or father, the next hero or heroine, the kind big sister or the thoughtful big brother.

Whatever he or she becomes, each birth could be greeted with: Hallelujah, this day, a new divinity is born.

Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation are part of a trinity of ideas with Reimagining Faith. In posts to these categories I hope over the next year or so to lay down enough material for a book, not a new religion, not at all, not even a new philosophy, hardly, but an idiosyncratic vision, seen from within the life and mind of one man, as he walks up to various boundaries and crosses over them.