An Uplifting Story—Eternal Dreamtime of the Furrowed Mind

I’ve looked at this stretch of mountains a million times, and their beauty is never diminished by their familiarity.  Yet, as I stand here looking at the range rumpled out before me, I am struck by how I typically perceive them merely as mountains, rather than what they also are—flat, compressed, sandstone sea-floor thrown up and tilted, the edge of the earth in the sky.

These are the famous Colorado Lyon’s Formations, already compressed into thick sandstone beneath the ancient inland sea-floor sixty-five million years ago.  Eroded sediment from the Ancestral Rockies—another range come and gone—joined and conglomerated with this stone.  Hematite, iron ore, the mountain’s crimson glow.  Tossed back up to be a new range.  Eternity in our vision, one more dream in the Earth’s long remembering.

I am stunned by their stillness, disoriented by their motion, their unified temporal heave.

I’ve written before on the importance of keeping one’s senses fresh and tuned.  Our brains seem designed to process perceived repetitions and routines more quickly the more often we see or do something.  Don’t get me wrong—this is exceedingly useful.  If I’ve cooked a meal many times, I am saved the mental effort of thinking out each ingredient, what to chop first, the timing of each element to get it all done at the same time.  I go into auto-pilot.  The same thing happens when we look at something many times.  We find a way of thinking about said object which is comfortable, familiar, and soon we fall into that pattern habitually, without conscious intent.

It is the same thing which makes the summer feel eternal to a child, fleeting to an adult.  Our brains have become ingrained with the patterns of seasons.

Rather than fear the habitual tendencies of our perceptions, however, I believe this innate mechanism has the potential to reshape our consciousness and integrate our selves with the world around us more deeply.  If we bring conscious intention to not only what we perceive, but how we perceive it.  It is how our ancestors learned to weave willows and plant fibers, to build the elegantly simple tools which remain, despite our apparent advances, the foundational patterns of our species (agrarian civilization being only about ten thousand years old, the loss of handcrafting in first-world countries only fifty to seventy years old).  I believe this is the ancient fount from which that deep sense of peace and nostalgia emerges when I am engaged in a natural materials craft project— weaving a basket, pounding yucca fibers into cordage, testing the edge on a stone flake.  The patterns run deep.

But I also have an addictive personality.  I am vulnerable to my own patterns, and I greatly fear the dulling effects of mindless repetitive behaviors, those which take us out of the ancient patterns.  A primary concern for us post-post-post moderns (or whatever the current nomenclature) is the sheer amount of time we spend online, immersed in sound and image and video, wandering around in virtual worlds instead of this one.  So many spend the bulk of their lives immersed in these addictive shadow-and-light games that they eventually come to believe that these are the real world.  They biologically adapt to an a-biological system.  The physical world becomes dimmed.  Even devastating events—slaughters, oil spills, economic hardships—become one more blip on the screen, one more blog post.

This is why I take issue with philosophies of subjectivity.  “Its all in your mind,” “everything is a projection of your subconscious,” etc.  Movies and fiction such as The Matrix explore these ideas elegantly, but an unfortunate response is that increasing numbers of people seem to be plugging in to virtual worlds (exactly like the one our characters are attempting to liberate themselves from) while perceiving baseline reality as increasingly foreign, strange, and threatening.

I once took a friend on a quick sightseeing trip up the mountains.  He had never been in the Rockies before, and spent most of his time on computers.  When we pulled off and got out, he whooped and spun around.  The sun was slicing through clouds, splayed into ribbons that splashed on the granite spires all around us.  He said “its so unreal.”  I said, “no—that’s real.”

None of this is to say that imaginative realms are not also, in their fashion, real.  To the contrary, the imagination is our primary tool of perception, the seventh sense which connects the nexus of our intake of sight, sound, and smell.  Our ancestral memory operates in this realm, also the realm of dreams, also the realm of Earthmind.

Perhaps this is a flight of fancy, then, a projection of mine, but I like to imagine the Earth in its primacy, its first days, well before life, before the atmosphere, before the weathering and pocking of space-debris—an imaginary time when Earth’s surface was smooth and pearled as a newborn’s brain.  Before the ruffled deserts, the coarse ripples of sand, the twisting masses of mountains and furrowed oceans of experience gave her feature and character.

The sun and fog are dreamstuff.  I can feel palpably, as I stand, that I am awake within the Earth’s dream.  From what ancient sleep or daydream did these uplifted slabs of earthcrust first emerge?  Already this old planet has dreamed giant lizards, dark deepsea behemoths blind and brooding, vast fungal networks, caves and heights, creatures unimaginable, giant short-nosed bears, camels, and ancestor horses right where I am standing.  It has even uplifted some mammals, set them upright where before they were prone and horizoned as the sea floor.  And sometimes our heads are soaked in cloud-dreams.

Look around at the dream you are in right now.  No, it is not a projection.  You are relieved of that burden.  The mind which dreams is creation’s, and it is yours to the extent you are a participant in creation.  Wake up.  You have some agency here.  The dream is conscious, responsive.  It lives on what we feed it.  Are you feeding it good things?  Are you having a good dream?

(Visit my other blog, Animal Verse, for a comic strip on Imagination, starring Old Greybones: http://dustinpickett.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/old-greybones-wordpress-debut/)

Expressions of the Circle Sun

Doudy Draw, Boulder Colorado

Full November Moon

The night said “stillness,” rolled out a blanket of frost, and everything became still.  The morning poured over the land and released the timeless cold, saying “movement.”  Now the fog and sun perform their rising swirl-dance, circling and clouding as milk in coffee.

Rising is the motion today.  The chill subsides, the fog emerges out of the valley, releasing the close-huddled grasses, who stretch and uncurl.  Warmth rises, the fog stains the mountain’s sandstone head.

I am walking up the Doudy Draw, rising with the gentle slope.  This was old homestead country, a swooping U of a valley at the foot of the mountains.  The steep foothills loom to the west, a high pine-topped mesa to the east.  Little rills and seasonal streams provide water for rich grasses and shrub-land—good pasture and shelter for the hooved.  Before that it was good hunting and camping ground.  The forest above and the plentiful chokecherry, sumac, bearberry, and other choice grazing plants draw deer, coyote, black bear, and elk, among many others.

Ancient rings of stone laid by human hands can be found scattered across the mesas by the very observant.  Or the fortuitous lollygagger.  I once had lunch with Willow in the very midst of one such ring without realizing.  I was halfway through a sandwich when I suddenly became aware of human design all around me.  I imagine in antiquity, the rings lie in cleared open areas.  The pines now surround them, and they appear like any other pile of pink rock if you do not see the intentionality of their placement.  Officially, no one knows what they were for.

Atop the hidden and forgotten rings, above the unmilled homestead timber, the sharp lines of power-cables sweep across the valley, strung between regularly-placed scaffolding, slicing swaths in the pines over the mesas, with no regard for topography.  Histories intermingle, are overlaid as palimpsests, and the land holds them all.

I stopped under the power lines, arrested by the dull electric hum.  At first I could not locate the sound.  The sun straining through the fog had lit the tufted heads of the grasses in such a way that they appeared as glowing orbs of energy, the stalks all but invisible.  They seemed to hover above the ground, and I could imagine them emitting such a low electric buzz.

I fancied then that perhaps they did, on some frequency below our audible range.  They were, after all, doing the same thing the power lines represented, in a sense.  The grasses were transforming the raw energy of the sun into inner fire, scrubbing light from the air with their brushy receptor tips, converting it into food energy.  My gaze drifted upward again to the energy coursing and flowing through those cables.  The power of the sun—we have harnessed it, after a fashion.  But its crude.  The straight lines seemed suddenly terribly inefficient to a creature who could convert sun-energy directly, passively, in its own body.  Still, there is something magical about the nature of electricity and energy, something I generally take for granted.  I bid the field of sparks good day, and went on up the trail.

Everything becomes as the roundness of the sun.  I walked past a ring of yuccas on the crest of a hill, their sharp fronds in all directions, expressing the sun.  Each particular plant has its unique form because of the particular relationship it has between sun and soil.  What if we thought of plants, and all things for that matter, not as things, but as relationships.  The sun, after all, came first.  Seeds peppered the earth, loosened their coats in the embrace of soil, and erupted towards the sun.  A magic concentration of potential and being, a seed.

The hill dropped steeply towards the creek-bed, and opened the view of the other side of the valley, dressed in round shrubs at eerily regular intervals.  Whoever said that nature is a chaos waiting idly for man’s ordering has not really seen the stunning and intricate patterns to be found in wild spaces.  The ponderosas, with their curving crowns, the rings of stone placed by our own kind in prehistory, the reaching grasses, the concentric spreads of lichens across the surface of boulders—everything expresses the sun.

Our most recent version of civilization stands or falls on expressions of sun, as well, though you may have to look deeper to find it.  For all the straight edges and lines we attempt to draw across the land, the power lines are still round in their width, the only way energy can travel.  We are constrained by physics, by roundness—by the circle of seasons, cycles of every imagining.  Our species is defined by its fire.  Veins of fire run in the walls of our homes, we do not see them.  Our units of energy, our calories, everything runs on the grace of the sun—an obvious assertion, perhaps, but one we seem prone to forget as we conduct our lives.

I followed a trail down another gulch, which wrapped around a steep hill and turned up a faint trickle of a creek which had nonetheless carved a groove through the high plateaus.  The path led me just below the lip of the mesa.  I gazed up the hill, admiring the sun burning in thick rays through the tall pines and fog.  Ravens and jays were thrashing at the transition.  I spotted what I believed to be a deer-path zig-zagging up the slope.  I followed it to the top, where it led to a twisted old pine, its body now a home to birds who bore and cave-up-in-wood.  Spiraling up to the sun.

I rested here awhile, listening to the birds.  I wandered around the site, found a heap of fresh, round mule-deer pellets.  They emitted a faint warmth.  Suddenly, I thought of the stone circle I had stumbled across on this same mesa.  Suddenly, a presence.

The deer were standing a meadow away, watching me for who knows how long.  I was upwind of them, they had known about my presence for some time.  Two three-point bucks and about five does, that I could see.  The bigger buck stood, then, and weaved between the trees, his antlers broad enough to hold up the sun.  I stayed with them some time, long enough for my hands to lose feeling, and my heart to grow warmer.  I was only hunting with my eyes, but every encounter I have with deer connects me to my hunting ancestors.  I am nourished by deer.

As I padded back to my backpack, I heard a low roll as of thunder.  It was the wrong time, the wrong weather, the wrong direction.  The thunder swelled, turned to a deafening and consuming roar, and I saw three fighter-jets shrieking across the sky.  I vaguely remembered then that there was a college football game going on somewhere.  The jets flew from a nearby base to honor the team.  I vaguely remembered we were a war-like people.  I could still see the deer.  They did not seem as disturbed as I was.  They were used to such thunder.

On the walk back, the fog had lifted, the sun had intensified, but my thoughts had grown dimmer.  Many of my family have served in the military, many of my peers.  I knew a few who had good solid circle-minds, who came back and said that the military had imposed grids across their thoughts.  Forced everything into straight lines.  I know it was coincidence, but as I continued around the mesa, back into the draw, I passed a man in camouflage who looked like someone I knew.  I attempted to see his face, to have mine seen, but he was wearing a Terminator mask.

I looked instead at the un-see-able face of the sun.  It burned away the war circles in my mind.  The fighter jets, too, were aloft by the grace and power of the sun, by burning.  Fire-power.  How long before we come back into a proper relationship with the sun?  How long before we respect fire (as all my elders insisted)?  Fire which our ancestors learned to draw from wood and stem, fire which drives our stories, our bodies, fire which thunder gave us.  Where are the makers of rings— and circles which honor the sun?

As I passed under the pines—I don’t know if it was there before—I found a ring of hope, a circle laid down by some stranger to me, but some kindred under the sun.  A small sign, perhaps, but it was all I needed.

(For more photos, visit my Panoramio account. http://www.panoramio.com/user/5156792)

The Virtue of Slowness -or- “Why Don’t You Do Something Useless for a Change?”

There were plenty of ponderosa pines dotted across the mesa, towering at regular intervals above the crispy autumn grasses.  What chance—what feast of insect or call to council—brought all of the remaining late-autumn birds to this one?  It wasn’t a particularly large or unusual pine.  It stood much as the others did— spare in its limbs, fanning out in a half-dome, pink scaly bark striped with dried runs of amber sap.  It smelled much the same, that intoxicating vanilla that smells like nothing but ponderosa pine.

Yet, this tree was special, regardless if my eyes could detect the reason.  Nuthatches, finches, a red-crested woodpecker—and the occasional screeching, territorial Stellar’s Jay—draped its branches with flutter, soaked its atmosphere in trills and whistles.  Had I been walking faster I could have easily missed this late-season bird-fling altogether, so unremarkable and common is the sight of birds in a tree.  Why, it’s a cliché.

Unless all of the birds around have selected one particular tree for their gathering, leaving the rest of the pine mesa quiet and still but for the faint sway of grasses, the slow leap of a few lethargic grasshoppers.  There is some pattern that my harried senses can not detect unless I slow them down deliberately.  While I still may not understand the birds’ behavior, I perceive that there are patterns beyond my sphere of knowing.  Even a tree full of birds is a gateway to mystery.

But only if you slow down.  While I stand there on the path, I am passed by joggers, dog-walkers, two women immersed in boisterous conversation, even a man with iPod earplugs who will never hear anything at all beyond his playlist.  At first it feels awkward, being the only human soul standing in one place.  The longer I stand, though, the less I feel accountable to the noisy, hurried, civilized patterns of my own species, and the more I begin to identify with the ponderous stillness of the pines.

I walked away feeling grateful to the birds for “catching” me.  I thanked them for their gift, and followed the trail over the rim of the mesa.  It led into a hollow with a single sparsely-leaved cottonwood bending out over the trail.  I had passed the tree before, on the way up, but did not linger long enough to notice the white bones of a long-dead tree on the rise behind it.  It was riddled with holes.  A woodpecker hopped around its circumference, spiraling up and down the bark-less trunk, tending its garden and harvesting its breakfast.  I had glanced at it before, but I had not truly seen it.  Our senses comprise an instrument which must be tuned regularly if it is to play in harmony with the land.

Why is this sometimes so difficult?  I believe a lot of people experience a kind of “nature anxiety” when they are in open spaces.  I use the word “nature” here in its widest metaphorical sense—the collective of plants and animals in relatively healthy ecosystems, as well as the inner nature of a human being (unusual critters that we are).  Nature anxiety creates a psychic block, a resistance to that natural effortless merging of awareness with other species and landscapes which is our genetic inheritance.  What do we stand to lose if we slow down, indeed, if we stop altogether?  What do we stand to lose if we simply stand?

Well, as long as we are hiking, jogging, having a conversation, etc., we are doing something.  Nature anxiety could be characterized as the fear of not doing anything.  Or more accurately, that someone else will see us doing nothing.  Our obsessively productive and acquisitive culture puts such an emphasis on doing and attaining that simply being becomes a source of distress.  We fear that we are lazy, or spacey, or wasting our time daydreaming.  Hiking is fine, resting is even fine, but just standing there and looking?  What in the world are you doing?

It is the same mind-set which allows strip-mining, monoculture farming, mountaintop removal, the clearing of land for shopping complexes, and many of the other environmental devastations that we mourn.  The fear of idleness gets projected on wild spaces.  A mountain may be lovely and aesthetic just standing there, but from the productivity perspective, it could be put to better use if it were churned up for its resources.  Generations ago, farmers dug up prairies to plant crops and make the land productive.  Swamps were misunderstood for years, their water-filtering and fertilizing effects unknown, let alone their value as rich habitat.  They were looked upon as waste spaces, much as deserts and mountains were at one time.  Thus, they were drained, filled, and put to “use.”

So I continued up the trail, much more slowly.  I was stopping so often now that passersby must have detected my uselessness.  I didn’t care.  My senses were open again, and my eyes were picking up yet more that I had missed on the walk in.  Suddenly drawn across a dry meadow to a thick stand of young pine, I stepped off the trail.  A few steps in I picked up on a faint deer-path meandering past the naked bushes and fire-red sumac.  I allowed my steps to merge with the path, I let it take me where it wanted.  It climbed a low rise and dropped on the other side, where the curve of land had completely concealed a small marsh!  Black-watered, buzzing with flies, swarming with cattails, and utterly, blissfully useless.

I followed its rim to the pine stand, ducking beneath the low boughs, and entered a small clearing.  There, in the middle of a circle of pines, were three stools made of stacked stone, little caches of pine-cones, everywhere the glyphs and signs that some unknown children had made this spot holy.  The faint paths belonged to human children, then, not to deer.  Still their presence lingered, as mysterious and numinous as though I had found a secret deer lay.  When I returned to the trail, I felt as though I had been allowed into a secret space, an innocent space, normally concealed from adults.

I thanked the children as I had thanked the bird gathering.  They reminded me that our natures are fully tuned to all other natures.  Our disconnection, our hurriedness, our productivity, is learned.  And it can be unlearned.  If we boldly step out of the noisy, hectic stream of doing, we find that silence and peace were there waiting for us all along.  Stillness like pines.  The gateway to mystery, waiting to be opened by the senses.

So hurry by, if you like.  Me, I’m going to stand there, gawking like a child, like a fool.  I’m going to take it slow.

Give Me a Foot, I’ll Take a Mile

What kind of creature are you and what is your relationship to the world?  Curious upright biped, you have walked unknown fathoms since your ancestors stood and peered above the grasses.  What makes you so persistent, why do your ways confound me?  Why do you confound yourself?  Looking deeply upon your body, you see only mystery.  It would seem that you, like me, are meant to walk through the breathing dreams of the world, to cross the real stony land, waters and air, to pass beyond the reach of your own understanding.  You and I, we’re of a dreaming & walking species.

This does not mean day-dream, row row your boat.  No, we’re too earthflesh for that.  Because it is not our brains or fancies which have first dibs on experience, but our aching common bodies.  I become aware of my roots, my poor cold neglected feet, hardly rubbed or pampered enough, old soldiers.  They connect me to the earth with every thoughtless step while my conceptual mind bops around looking for “connection” to the earth.  Metaphorical and unreal.  The foot touches the earth, stroking her face with every step.  We are blind newborns.  Learning our mother by feel, absorbing her temperatures, taking on her moods and subtleties.

The tallgrass sways, and teaches the wind

the pine stands, and teaches stillness

the creek flows, and teaches unity

the rocks emerge, and teach patience

everything becoming in the land

and I am the walking part

Australian Aboriginals go Walkabout, following the dream-trails of ancestors and creators.  Christians go on Pilgrimage, passing through the history writ in the holy land, sometimes seeking entombed body-parts of saints, the finger-bone divine.  Likewise Mecca, the footsteps of the Prophet, the Tibetan circumambulations of sacred peaks, the North American relay about Mato Tipila, everywhere human beings re-creating creation through the mytho-mnemonic act of travel.  Of walking.

See also: Graceland, Tennessee.  Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home.  Los Alamos.  We have laid a grid across the ancient world, the ancient world we live in right now, that we call modern (or post-modern, or whichever).  This grid is splashed with nodes, energetic points in modern time and history that represent revolutions—some supposed break with the laws of nature or physics, some eruption of music or culture that has never existed before, the new, the unique, the unusual.  The world’s largest thumbtack, the blue highway Museum of Oddities.

How long until the ancient earth absorbs this grid, and we might pass away in wholeness again?  The buddha in the details, god in the wood-grain, that sort of thing.  Faith is a swarming prairie, science is a fire-hydrant.  I’ve wandered enough to know that each accepts the other without distress.  I found this scene not long ago, but I must say the fire-hydrant was corroding, sinking slantwise back into the earth, as the grasses grew and swallowed it up, those who renew themselves each season.

What weird new season is returning from the murk of time?  I feel that I am standing on a precipice, and I know I have to walk into—I don’t know what.  All I know is I have to walk.  The harvest moon has passed, the wind has stripped yet more leaves, everything is shedding.  Old paths and possibilities have dried up.  The herds have moved on, and so must I.  We walk, like our ancestors, following nourishment.  The end of the October moon ushers in a liminal time, where things must die and things are reborn.  The gates are open, and all our ancestors are calling for us to walk with them.