Ecology and the Eco-self

Environmental activist and Buddhist scholar, Johanna Macy wrote in 1991, "Among those who are shedding ... old constructs of self, like old skin or a confining shell, is john Seed, director of the Rainforest Information Center in Australia. One day we were walking through the rainforest in New South Wales, where he has his office, and I asked him, 'You talk about the struggle against the lumbering interests and politicians to save the remaining rainforest in Australia. How do you deal with the despair?'
He replied, “I try to remember that it's not me, john Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather, I am part of the rainforest protecting itself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking." "


I find these words to be so helpful in my own quest to be part of the solution; a profound example of thinking in alignment with the web of life. If we see ourselves as part of the forest, river, landscape, ocean -protecting ourselves from self-destruction- then of course, we will have a much better chance of making compassionate actions. And to take this one step farther, in the same piece, Macy quotes from a letter by a student she calls Michael:

I think of the tree-huggers hugging my trunk, blocking the chain saws with their bodies. I feel their fingers digging into my bark to stop the steel and let me breathe. I hear the bodhisattvas in their rubber boats as they put themselves between the harpoons and me, so I can escape to the depths of the sea. I give thanks for your life and mine, and for life itself. I give thanks for realizing that I too have the powers of the tree-huggers and the bodhisattvas.

Macy is writing about the emergence of the eco-self, a heart- open shift from an egocentric separatist perspective. When I consider my life as intrinsically loving and connected to all that is, then I realize the idea of other is merely a construct.   If there is ever to be a truly healing consciousness on earth, a recognition of this premise, that we are part of the whole not unrelated from other but one witnessing experience, seems fundamental.  

One of my daily practices is to work with Rune stones every morning to help me feel more
connected to the great web of life. The use of rune stones for divination is old, at least from the 3rd century. Each of the 25 stones -Germanic alphabetic letter forms and their sounds- name elements of nature like water and plants as well as abstract constructs like peace and fulfillment.  By speaking them in succession, repeating these archtypal sounds, I create a container of support for my day.  Over time the experience of working with these sounds, their forms and meanings has helped me to resonate with a deeper sense of connection to myself as part of something greater.

In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram theorizes that over the centuries our alphabets lost their original connection to nature -referential letter shapes and sounds.  We became less connected to nature, less of our experience in life evolved with nature through our written words. Add to that the industrialization of civilization, over-population and a well shaken cocktail of greed, war, fracking and monocultures. Over time we have forgotten that hidden wisdom which is the etymology of the runes. If we practice something to remind us of that union now, perhaps we can like john Seed become a part of a more empathetic world-view protecting itself.  Maybe for all the complexity in the world, all the environmental destruction, war and confusion, healing can be as simple as the insight to reconnect ourselves consciously to the greater web of life.

Numinous Fields

numina |ˈn(y)oōmənə|
plural form of numen .
numen |ˈn(y)oōmən|
noun ( pl. -mina |-mənə|)
the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place.
ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin.



numinous
adjective
the numinous beauty of these ancient relics: spiritual, religious, divine, holy, sacred; mysterious, otherworldly, unearthly, transcendent.

from the Latin, numin=divine power
numinous |ˈn(y)oōmənəs|
adjective
having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity : the strange, numinous beauty of this ancient landmark.
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin numen, numin- ‘divine power’ + -ous .




Crane migration 2015

My crane painting migrated to his new home in October.  We installed him in his chambers at the Federal court house on the sixth floor facing northward. He can look out across the vast expanse of the city as the real birds fly in and out of Albuquerque. Now, as the Sandhill cranes - the Grus canadensises- are moving south, they are landing in small family groups and larger flocks all along the Rio Grande corridor.  It is my favorite time of year.

One day last week, my friend, Elise and I drove in the late afternoon to the Bernardo wildlife refuge where we had seen the cranes last year.  It is a place of wide open corn fields, numinous fields, planted specifically for the cranes near to the Rio Grande river. An open space reserved for the birds to rest for the winter, it is a sacred space.

As the late afternoon sun crawls behind billowing clouds and the moon is still hidden behind the mountain, Sandia, we see "fingers" of God (a hundred shining rays of sunlight) touching earth as we approach the refuge.

A lone Great Blue Heron is in a ditch when we cross over  in my bulky vehicle.  We disturb him when we stop to look at him and he moves away from us on his massive wings.  Elise spots a large garden spider in it’s web further connecting us to this vast web of life. As we come around the loop road a second time, my friend notices a pair of Red-tailed hawks ahead  in a bare-branched tree.  We brake and watch them as one flies out to hunt and then circles around in front of us and out of view.

Many groups of cranes, in flapping- wing formation come in low to roost for the night.  We hear their calling as they fly in overhead.  And later we track them by the sound of their converations down a ditch road, like we are on safari.  

A male pheasant steps out from a corn row, his ringed neck
a clear sign of something continuous.
The sky is full with glory colors: lavenders, pinks and many blues.
Sunset is another miracle to witness as we look west from a bridge over the Rio Grande.  The yellow- leafed trees reflect into the muddy water.  And then the full moon rises, a pure white glistening disc, massive through the undulating clouds to the east.  I am aware of the many directions of life manifesting above, below and all around us. Numinous fields.

Vincent van Gogh and Nature

50 Paintings and Drawings at the Clark Museum
Williamstown, Massachusetts


In the web of nature, where van Gogh created his masterpieces, he was transfixed by all that is alive: rocks,  water, trees, humanity. He was able to portray life supernaturally with brush and paint. He wrote, "[i]f one draws a pollard willow as if it were a living being, which after all it is, then the surroundings follow almost by themselves, provided only that one has focused all one's attention on that particular tree and not rested until there [is] some life in it." 1

A sweet euphoria slowly swept through me as I walked through the van Gogh exhibit at the Clark Museum. I had never been there before and it is a stunning facility. The museum is on an exceptional site, green rolling hills frame the contemporary architecture of the building. Cows graze in open pasture behind it just beyond an infinity water pool, where visitors can sit and take it all in.  With the natural beauty of this place in the Berkshires in mind, Richard Kendall, Chris Stolwijk and Sjaar van Heugten curated a superb exhibit.  Included are paintings and drawings on loan from many noted collections -the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands; the Museé d’Orsay, Paris; the National Gallery, London; The Metropolitan Museum, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

As we entered the first room of the exhibit I was drawn into several works on paper. I wish I could hold them all in my mind's eye now, it is a fleeting joy. Although a bit dark in the first room and somewhat problematic to see the work because of that, (dimly lit to protect the delicate works on paper), as we moved through the rooms each piece opened my irises further to the light within the work.  Vincent was so present there, hovering around us.  

His work impresses upon me the Artisan- Priest- Minister that he was and how much of that energy he communicated, his shamanistic side, in the artwork he created.  Van Gogh wrote about his "awareness that art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning...art is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man's soul..." 2 It is difficult to separate the paintings from the artist, the tragic circumstances of his struggle to survive mentally, physically and emotionally. Yet there is a revery that he conveyed painting a vase of flowers; a portrait; in the Dutch landscape; in an interior space which holds so much vibration that the work pulses.  Everything is alive and breathing in his later paintings.

In the second room there was a Monet painting that van Gogh had seen in person.  It was beautiful, of course, in a gilded frame as we are accustomed to seeing from that era. At the moment I was observing it, on the top edge of the frame, mid-point, sat a live fly, ever so still as if it had just emerged from the field in the painting.  As I read now the detailed letters that Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, I am reminded of this fly on the frame as well as one of the final paintings he made just before he died of what may or may not have been a self-inflicted wound.  Landscape at Auvers in the Rain, is the concluding painting in the exhibit.  Years before he wrote to Theo about witnessing a rainstorm:

“Did I write to you about the storm I watched not long ago?  The sea was yellowish, especially close to the shore.  On the horizon a streak of light and above it immensely large dark grey clouds, from which one could see the rain coming down in slanting streaks.”3

In the exhibit, just to the right of the painting, a small Japanese print was included that may have inspired the painting or perhaps it was the earlier experience in Ramsgate, England that he wrote about to Theo. I was touched by his courage as a painter to put in the slanted lines indicating rain.  It was a risk, a risk that worked. Streaked with sadness, it moved me to tears. I could sense that the gallery guard standing next to the painting saw my emotional response, as I viewed Landscape at Auvers in the Rain, and I wondered how many other visitors to the show he had witnessed react in a similar way?  If I were a fly on the wall watching, I imagine, there were many.  Van Gogh said, "surely, the true path is to delve deep into nature." 4 Surely, he did.





In Rain–Auvers (1890, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff), - See more at: http://clarkart.edu/About/Press-Room/Press-Releases/2015/Van-Gogh#sthash.XTBJNcR5.dpuf

1,2,3,4  from The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Summer, Struggle, and a Spider's Thread

There is a sweet patio on the first floor of the complex where I live.  It has a small lap pool and a few tables and lounge chairs; flowering trees and rosemary shrubs surround it.  This spring/summer the pool is empty, except for a small pile of dirt and leaf debris collected at the deep end.  I've been hoping it would be up and running soon, but there is an unresolved technical problem.  So today, on a glorious Sunday morning I decided to take a book, a pillow, a glass of water and go down and sit poolside even though the water has gone- missing.

The book in my hand by Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, was published a couple years ago, in 2013 by a non-profit educational organization.  Their mission is to "nurture holistic views of arts and sciences, humanities and healing".  I recommend it to anyone on the path of healing body, mind, spirit.  In the midst of the chapter called Struggle, a thought ran through my mind mirroring the content of the book: "maybe someone else is out doing something more important today to make our environment better or someone else is helping the homeless, maybe that is more evolved than hanging- out reading about changing the world".  With my head more or less in the self-flagellating clouds and exactly at that moment, a hummingbird appeared nearly in front of my face, totally exquisite in form and vitality.  

Eisentein's overview of our current Cartesian dilemma: "[i]n tracing the deep roots of ...programming, ...contained in our basic scientific paradigms.  Not only in Darwinian biology with its struggle to survive, but in physics as well with the doomed and endless struggle against entropy...we reside in a hostile universe in which we must over come natural forces and carve out a realm of security and apply force to impose our design on a purposeless, disorderly jumble."

The hummingbird grabbed my full attention to the perfection of the moment.  I was overcome with a short blissful knowing that maybe the try-harder mentality of self-judgement or competition; conflict, feuding with, straining against, harsh grinding daily responsibilities to produce; jockeying for attention in the work place world; efforted labors, wars, and the ugly rest of it, is unnecessary madness. Eisenstein's point is that we might seek to "look for the unmet need that drives the desire" to do these stressful things to ourselves and put demands on one another with all of the aforementioned campaigns of troubling addictions to our conflicts. His reasonable line of argument being that we claim less struggle in our choice of words and actions when we "address the unmet need directly, it no longer drives the desire that has been so destructive."

As I sat by the empty pool, something I have been resisting for two months- struggling against the gone- missing water and "why don't they fix it"- I noted the heavenliness all around me. A blue sky, all the elements in balance, a slight breeze, a swallowtail butterfly fluttering about, a hummingbird speaking directly to my thoughts and something else overhead. The sunlight hit a single horizontal line so thin at first I did not realize it was a thread of a web, high above me at the second story level, crossing a span between two trees about fifteen feet apart. Remarkable. The thin silvery line moved with the breeze, swinging higher and lower above my head.  I was transfixed with it, as birds flew over and under it like a gossimer jump rope.  It was insubstantial and yet clearly physical enough to be visible, catch the light and strong enough to hold.  Nature never ceases to amaze and inspire me.

How was this possible? What if the effort of the spider to span the distance was no effort at all? What if there was a joyous floating oneness that drew the filament across the space? An invisible "right-effortness" that was neither hard nor a struggle but rather painless.  Is it possible that all of nature is showing us that each day, rather than the "no pain, no gain" mentality that we tend to live by?
Eisenstein says, "[w]e all wrestle the same demon in a myriad of different forms." Be it an empty swimming pool or alcohol, we all struggle and we all desire connection, self-love, easy earthly pleasures, maybe it just takes a leap of faith from one tree to another to find the sweet spot.

Lord of the Feathered Tribe

"Beyond… someone else's land; a terra incognita, holding the suppressed fascination we all have for places just beyond where we know, or are supposed to be."
-Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

Many photographs of CB, the name my friend calls a sandhill crane she has befriended, depict his regal stature. Crossed bill, crooked beak, that is what Elise calls him,  I prefer to call him Lord of the Feathered Tribe, the name cranes were called in China in centuries past.
In my friend's photos he or she-we do not know the gender of this crane- is often standing in the broken straw colored fields planted by the nature center for the cranes each year.  A field of gold-that's what it looks like in one of the photos and that seems like a fitting habitat for this  royal bird.  A bright crimson mask of fine feathers covers the part of his face between his yellow- orange eyes. His body is so many grey hues like incoming storm clouds.  

Elise has photographed him in the nature reserves of Albuquerque each year when he returns in the fall/winter season for six consecutive years.  This past season he did not show up in his usual places; we wonder about him and hope he has made a family.  In 2013 I had the opportunity to "meet" him when I happened upon Elise standing next to a field with her camera where he was near to the fence.  She told me of his unusual beak, an abnormal crossed beak, that is clearly a disability, making it difficult to eat.  Somehow though he persevered and grew into adulthood, grew into a magnificent bird. In fact, he is more than a symbol of overcoming adversity.

I made a portrait painting of him in the last few months for a show with a theme of the middle Rio Grande valley. He seemed to enter my studio space as I painted his form, especially when I worked on his face, I felt he was with me while the brush was in my hand.

Yet, he remains wild, preternatural to us-just beyond where we know, what we can know. While I completed the painting, Elise drove north to Colorado to see the cranes as they move north again in the early spring, mid-March.  She witnessed 20,000 cranes coming together after the long winter rest.  Maybe her CB was there with the others dancing their ancient rituals, plumed tribes mating for life and migrating north again as they have for millions of years. What do we know about these elegant creatures, about their shared wisdom?

I know this one singular crane has touched me in a way that is something individual, non-ordinary, specific in the cycle of life. And yet, I realize he or she is a part of a collective spirit of cranes. Do they know about the changing landscape, the places over which they travel?  Do they know the details of things from flying along the Rocky Mountains for instance? Do they notice how the winds change the rock formations, the fields and streams they may stop by on their journeys north and south?  Do they communicate with one another what to expect ahead?  This one, this uncommon one, Lord of the Feathered Tribe, holds my imagination and keeps me questioning all that is beyond our human understanding, because he comes from an exclusive tribe for initiates of a certain feathered kind.  His kind is ancient and pulls at me to try and grasp just how long this planet of changing patterns has been in place.