tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70431663358178717072024-02-28T23:39:14.754-08:00Geo-Aesthetics.Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-37644310139107233412024-02-21T15:08:00.000-08:002024-02-23T12:44:01.838-08:00Winter, Leopard Moth Caterpillars, and a Dream<p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfvx88yXv78BLC87WxTTAkwgtvQ29pg8MuhBvjk5msttX64g0Q68TwKbkwrgB5tYui13loNJ-0KLcjy8UBbsp3P6UcBzYYrPLNVgZgnEPZNUotCnEf0kvY0T8A5_Te_nEUKclNAh8gh1SSfBJgpfO10vnhbjrjeaYBODkuppw7xHi1KZcYh4oVfbPXd0k/s2048/IMG_1486.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="922" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfvx88yXv78BLC87WxTTAkwgtvQ29pg8MuhBvjk5msttX64g0Q68TwKbkwrgB5tYui13loNJ-0KLcjy8UBbsp3P6UcBzYYrPLNVgZgnEPZNUotCnEf0kvY0T8A5_Te_nEUKclNAh8gh1SSfBJgpfO10vnhbjrjeaYBODkuppw7xHi1KZcYh4oVfbPXd0k/w288-h640/IMG_1486.jpeg" width="288" /></a></div><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">Afternoon sun reaches through a welter of tree limbs to arrive in bits and pieces on mats of moldering leaves flooring the swamp. The woods here at this time of day are fairly quiet with an occasional distant rat-a-tat-tat of a pileated woodpecker punctuating the silence, as he or she mines some rotting stump for grubs. Otherwise no birdsong is to be heard. Well, perhaps here and there are a few crows somewhere complaining. But crows are always doing that in the woods.</span></h3><div><br /></div><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">The calendar says mid-winter, yet half the days it fails to freeze here, even at night, and a snowfall that sticks has not happened since mid-December. The soil beneath my feet, still humming with decay, smells sweetly of it. The moss in its several varieties remains for the most part green. Here is a place where one can wait out the season, however uncomfortably, in some darkness and damp but with minimal frostbite. </span></h3><div><br /></div><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">I am, it turns out, not the only one marking my time in these circumstances. For the third day I have returned to a copse of Bald Cypresses, situated on a knot of roots and earth rising ever so slightly above the headwaters of Nassawango Creek. And there before me poised on the drab earth, just beyond a fallen trunk ribboned with moss and lichens, is a solitary caterpillar. I am pretty sure she is the same one I saw the last two times I was here. </span></h3><div><br /></div><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">She doesn't seem to be very active and only curls up a bit tighter when I approach to take a closer look. Underneath tufts of black, wiry bristles dotting her plump body, one can discern alternating bands of black and red. I pick her up as gently as I can and place her on the fallen tree trunk to take her photograph with my ever handy iPhone. </span></h3><div><br /></div><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">Here it is:</span></h3><h3><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzAkY2mueSy2O2zh5Eyk9wbKfRmT9V4GoRsr6BuUBw62J3Xazfg6EAASipq-CrIDX0wYF0L8ATZHkABvylaw0doZseKzPZwnuDCpMsjwhfShxw28OY_ny2eD2ZMU8uilRTJ7NMsqXaES0Rlgl3SvQWEFH1ObNC4Qo2tQGrJC2MoVYzuCJl-sFf_xPcj8w/s922/IMG_1487.jpeg" style="font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="882" data-original-width="922" height="153" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzAkY2mueSy2O2zh5Eyk9wbKfRmT9V4GoRsr6BuUBw62J3Xazfg6EAASipq-CrIDX0wYF0L8ATZHkABvylaw0doZseKzPZwnuDCpMsjwhfShxw28OY_ny2eD2ZMU8uilRTJ7NMsqXaES0Rlgl3SvQWEFH1ObNC4Qo2tQGrJC2MoVYzuCJl-sFf_xPcj8w/w160-h153/IMG_1487.jpeg" width="160" /></a></div><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></h3><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">She (or, perhaps, he) is a leopard moth (Hypercombe scribonia) in waiting. She is not in a hurry to move anywhere but seems caught up in a perpetual loop of slow-motion footage. According to those who know these things, this caterpillar is fattening up throughout the winter, finding shelter, particularly when winter gets more unruly, beneath all the leaves littering the ground, and all the while chewing her way to a cocoon and adulthood. Once she emerges, she is finished with the eating and will have only to mate, fly about a bit, and then pass away. For most of her life she is this creature before me and not the winged, sleek moth we humans generally imagine her to be. </span></h3><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></h3><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">Now, a few days have passed and last night I dreamed a small tribe of leopard moth caterpillars, fat and bristly, were gathered on the ground into the configuration of an asterisk, a multi-pointed star forming as each creature's body touched the others at the center and then radiated outward from there in the respective directions of the compass. The image was very striking. But when I stooped down to take a photograph of it, one of the caterpillars rose up and took the iPhone from my hands and cast it aside. </span></h3><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></h3><h3><span style="font-weight: normal;">Does a leopard moth caterpillar still exist in the forest, if no one is there to take a picture of her? Evidently, that caterpillar had strong feelings about how this question should be answered.</span></h3><div><br /></div><br /><br /> <p></p>Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-89341465026476386592022-06-13T13:21:00.016-07:002022-06-13T19:29:51.624-07:00Serviceberry in Spring Gulch: Seven Meditations on Living in an Economy of Gratitude<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYHjx5iB7ecpVxZBsOFYazB3C6SO14Z9u20ifVTFvypVhKNFk8QN-uKjkst6eRVLTP6-oN0-rrwtdAFv8c8bZeNyGIw3bN6KeRzsTzUg_PYwesn014JPZafagkw7JwF7n7nZMIPxz3pb2qM5mg9j-_hxs6yQLX35yqfgAb-9Cef1-JCoa-40YQEUI/s1500/SpringGulchServiceberry.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="997" data-original-width="1500" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzYHjx5iB7ecpVxZBsOFYazB3C6SO14Z9u20ifVTFvypVhKNFk8QN-uKjkst6eRVLTP6-oN0-rrwtdAFv8c8bZeNyGIw3bN6KeRzsTzUg_PYwesn014JPZafagkw7JwF7n7nZMIPxz3pb2qM5mg9j-_hxs6yQLX35yqfgAb-9Cef1-JCoa-40YQEUI/w400-h266/SpringGulchServiceberry.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Serviceberry Blossoms up Spring Gulch</td></tr></tbody></table><h3 style="text-align: left;">First Meditation: The Gift of Gift Giving as Witnessed by Serviceberry, and Chokecherry and Hyacinth too! (Parking Lot)</h3><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMQrbsvlCzxyNbV2wkZpsa-qfHLnhzIP7F0QhbIJ6iPf5FgCMFdmxB_iI04w_Bnnx7LztEPIpuRV_LBtApe4rKeqvpetJ116g4ApkhA9minXR6TN1FHyw8q4poX9sXm7bIipQ70aH60i5nnr4D7D9ppW43b7GtvoFuBkpPkdcWrA74J4vueT-Fpy0r/s6016/IMGP9550.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6016" data-original-width="4000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMQrbsvlCzxyNbV2wkZpsa-qfHLnhzIP7F0QhbIJ6iPf5FgCMFdmxB_iI04w_Bnnx7LztEPIpuRV_LBtApe4rKeqvpetJ116g4ApkhA9minXR6TN1FHyw8q4poX9sXm7bIipQ70aH60i5nnr4D7D9ppW43b7GtvoFuBkpPkdcWrA74J4vueT-Fpy0r/w133-h200/IMGP9550.jpg" width="133" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chokecherry<br /></td></tr></tbody></table>"You can call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts."</div><div><br /></div><div>We are gathered here today to witness the manifold gifts offered by creative energies that emerges from beyond our own all-too-human capacities to have made this occur. In doing so, let us first become mindful of the gift encompassing all others, the gift of receiving and giving gifts. </div><div><br /></div><div>In Potawatomi, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us, the serviceberry is called "Bozakmin," whose most important syllable is "min," the root for berry but also the root word for "gift." At their root and in their leaves, serviceberries offer "bushes spangled with morsels of sweetness in a world that can be bitter." We cannot help, she suggests, but feel gratitude in such circumstances. Indeed gratitude is the very currency of the earthly for Kimmerer, involving "much more than a polite 'thank you.' It [Gratitude] is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods." In doing so, the world not only sustains itself through this gift giving but invites us into its abundance. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Second Meditation: Gratitude for the Gifts of Serviceberry. (First Rise on Rattlesnake Creek Road)</h3><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtaDxm-3FgmWQgl43o7a0AojQ90GvtyG0lFzu36bFIHhB0ODkNtMddlfM84QFh30SCf4xpzlB7iFdfyU5B-Bszv_cXBXdinE6DIvHRwQS2kmr-7EJIdHiyOrx8534DHt6GWRboAOlG4Envdeye6RLa1jHd5Qvm-jxSdFU7y8UQ3uGOtrpAT0xsrNew/s6016/IMGP9551.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6016" data-original-width="4000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtaDxm-3FgmWQgl43o7a0AojQ90GvtyG0lFzu36bFIHhB0ODkNtMddlfM84QFh30SCf4xpzlB7iFdfyU5B-Bszv_cXBXdinE6DIvHRwQS2kmr-7EJIdHiyOrx8534DHt6GWRboAOlG4Envdeye6RLa1jHd5Qvm-jxSdFU7y8UQ3uGOtrpAT0xsrNew/w133-h200/IMGP9551.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>"The tree is beloved for its fruits, for medicinal use, and for the early froth of flowers that whiten the woodland edges at the first hint of spring. Serviceberry is known as a calendar platen, so faithful I it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed and that the shad are running upstream--or at least it was when the rivers were clear and free enough to support their spawning. The derivation of the name 'Service' from tis relative <i>Sorbus </i>(also in the Rose Family) notwithstanding, the plant does provide myriad goods and services. Not only to humans but to many other citizens. It is a preferred browse of Deer and Moose, a vital source of early pollen for newly emerging insect, and host to a suite of butterfly larvae - like Tiger Swallowtails, Viceroys, Admirals, and Hairstreaks - and berry-feasting birds who rely on those calories in breeding season."</div><div><br /></div><div>To these gifts, Craighead adds: The entire plant is palatable to deer, elk, moose, mountain goats, big horn sheep, rabbits and other rodents. For this reason, Serviceberry is often the first plant to be eliminated in overgrazed ranges. Pheasants, grouse, and black bears eat the berries and the buds are a staple winter food of rugged grouse.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, so much to be thankful for. The miracle of Serviceberry opens our eyes to how much the world invites our gratitude.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjra7JW2oDuX68_Sx9Y2MNzFFPEemNokInGBpSfKZgzRlcWyIZRPEvNWSgm6YrwSI_8OnZeyXLt34OGpEfkQAfBQQDRRIa_tInklv1czNc7go7t600cKQr0_8lARlVudRvxQn-0uD0WGQ6AnDh5DyEUPLf9ES-EXOjS3Mu9ACohwsQgsdd-RMujL5fF/s5971/IMGP9559.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3999" data-original-width="5971" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjra7JW2oDuX68_Sx9Y2MNzFFPEemNokInGBpSfKZgzRlcWyIZRPEvNWSgm6YrwSI_8OnZeyXLt34OGpEfkQAfBQQDRRIa_tInklv1czNc7go7t600cKQr0_8lARlVudRvxQn-0uD0WGQ6AnDh5DyEUPLf9ES-EXOjS3Mu9ACohwsQgsdd-RMujL5fF/s320/IMGP9559.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> False Solomon Seal and Arnica Nearby</td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Third Meditation: Living in Reciprocity with Serviceberry and its Kin. (Spring Creek Bridge).</h3><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-VEu3-IpZ7d0d_PKQwYuWdkc_eE8TgBsJ6NhMBw721iMWzSYw7E7LsFN2SmrNZuWj0yY6llee1l1qTVbhwbi8V8cqwGEHXMLazGn5duu1vpgPSNucYDM_LiNlbPwxuseVj56CBc6kf7KvLFCDdlANSQ5tn4BjsWhYL46SRa36BDDO6SLhcznRHQ2O/s6013/IMGP9565.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2702" data-original-width="6013" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-VEu3-IpZ7d0d_PKQwYuWdkc_eE8TgBsJ6NhMBw721iMWzSYw7E7LsFN2SmrNZuWj0yY6llee1l1qTVbhwbi8V8cqwGEHXMLazGn5duu1vpgPSNucYDM_LiNlbPwxuseVj56CBc6kf7KvLFCDdlANSQ5tn4BjsWhYL46SRa36BDDO6SLhcznRHQ2O/w400-h180/IMGP9565.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Waters of Spring Creek</td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>In the thickets running along Spring Creek is found not only Serviceberry but also some of its kin in the rose family, including River Hawthorn, Currants, and Wild Roses. A more distant kin, Red Osier Dogwood, is also found here in abundance.</div><div><br /></div><div>From the Salish Plant Society Website, maintained by ethnobotanist Rose Bear Don't Walk, we read that the Salish People "honor each and every plant as they come to us new in the spring and summer months." Among these, it is noted, is the one named "Staq" in Salish, or Amelancher ainifolia in taxonomists' Latin, or Serviceberry in English. </div><div> </div><div>Let us for this moment then put the emphasis upon honoring all the plants surrounding us here and in particular Serviceberry in this renewing moment of Spring. In doing so, let us also become mindful of Robin Wall Kimmerer's thought that if our first response to serviceberry is to involve gratitude, then our second should involve reciprocity: to give a gift in return. Perhaps the very first gift we might offer in to return serviceberry is to honor it, so as to bring it fully into our hearts so that we might share the story of its gifts with our fellow humans. </div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"> Fourth Meditation: Why do we succumb to economies of commodity? (Serviceberry Alley at turn off to Spring Gulch)</h3><div><br /></div><div>Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: "To name the world as gift is to feel one's membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy - and it makes you accountable." But this observation then leads to a troubling question: "Why," she asks, "have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. I'm wondering how we fix that. And I'm not alone."</div><div><br /></div><div>Have you ever felt alone when confronting the consuming energies of our econonmy, helpless in the rush to take hold of the things of the world so that one can survive? How does this feel? Please feel free to share your thoughts not only with one another but with the serviceberries lining this walkway.</div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Fifth Meditation: Colors are Gifts Too. (Mountainside of Purple Lupine and Yellow Arrowleaf Balsamroot)</h3><div><br /></div><div>The colors of things are also powerful medicines, medicines that in some cases work with one another to form patterns of invitation. Beauty is a medicine! This is what Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests in her chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass regarding how purple and yellow, the colors of asters and goldenrods, interact in reciprocity when the plants are near one another so that "growing together both [might] receive more pollinator visits that they would if there were growing alone." Before us rises a mountainside of Lupine and Arrowleaf Balsamroot, vibrant purple and yellow blossomings, just as in the case of Asters and Goldenrod, each plant being illuminated by the radiance of the other. To take our experience of this beauty seriously, Kimmerer suggests, we must move from the question of "What is a lupine?" to "Who are you, Lupine"?, and "Who are you, Arrowleaf Balsamroot?" Let us pause to reconsider our relationship to these to fellow living kinds and to ask anew how we might better listen for the wisdom these offer us.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGf8hT9cRIn1OZ9qDQAqTSzpE2y78F64R_5tNlzVJ24taDL1Ij0oBiZduruc_cAS81kDAr9GqfcsAd3fLmh10Y3tJR648Q1Bt0MlRC29Rly3YNye5hJoDxQ4rPyl_FqhRKjn7SMMaO1qlF-ViA5tPRkHGf0QTaaJM4288Anb4qUlOIW7MvkxCBAf-Z/s6016/IMGP9445.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6016" data-original-width="4000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGf8hT9cRIn1OZ9qDQAqTSzpE2y78F64R_5tNlzVJ24taDL1Ij0oBiZduruc_cAS81kDAr9GqfcsAd3fLmh10Y3tJR648Q1Bt0MlRC29Rly3YNye5hJoDxQ4rPyl_FqhRKjn7SMMaO1qlF-ViA5tPRkHGf0QTaaJM4288Anb4qUlOIW7MvkxCBAf-Z/s320/IMGP9445.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAPNmfchP_1aYugANigIaQiW7RSlH8Fyu6tQnyyIR6jW7oLpcEfYXJiD75T7Se2VJ7fQp3WBebdUaz-bjObmwu9hiyIw4BZUDbSqxErmwJUVyATJRkPkpkpe1e3lK66xhSqkYzv-DIBAwShLfGBeZ1q03-eqLQeo45dZalKY6-Gt-0ky8lhQgKfs9F/s6016/IMGP9580.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="6016" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAPNmfchP_1aYugANigIaQiW7RSlH8Fyu6tQnyyIR6jW7oLpcEfYXJiD75T7Se2VJ7fQp3WBebdUaz-bjObmwu9hiyIw4BZUDbSqxErmwJUVyATJRkPkpkpe1e3lK66xhSqkYzv-DIBAwShLfGBeZ1q03-eqLQeo45dZalKY6-Gt-0ky8lhQgKfs9F/s320/IMGP9580.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Sixth Meditation: Returning to a Gift Economy (By the Feral Apple Tree)</h3><div><br /></div><div>Several groves of feral apple trees, remnants of former homesteads, inhabit Spring Gulch and the rest of the Rattlesnake watershed. Like them, this single feral apple tree, lost in a thicket of Currant and Serviceberry and Hawthorn, was likely once solely dedicated to the feeding of human hunger but now has been abandoned to the hungers of all comers. And like Serviceberry, Currant and Hawthorn, Apple is a member of the rose family. This single tree before us blossoms and continues to offer itself no longer as commodity for an economy of scarcity but as gift in an economy of abundance. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: ''In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away....The currency in a gift economy is relationship...A gift economy furthers the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is 'we' rather than 'I,' as all flourishing is mutual."</div><div><br /></div><div>Let us reflect upon the transformation of this apple tree, of its reintegration into an ecosystem in which its gifts have become fully open to all comers. This transformation of its generosity inspires us in a manner that keeping the apple merely for our own hungers would not. This leads to a question for our reflection: How might our hungers live in reciprocity with the hungers of others?</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOs9Kuj5LVIoCM0Bt_g4GyjT_TnYweoEfK7omisJFRVoAnWdXrCNIazdv_5WxDff7O4rMP6-mY8SPA6FL1HPNVD-rSvjX3JcU7OnW-y8RNbsdA-6XRrdWjFNWBKT5R4PSX5BAeV_oj9aI5szzRQKiGn9TDwqCwpUx2fZxT0WCRuh8cGV_QuvY0oAm6/s6016/IMGP9504%203.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="6016" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOs9Kuj5LVIoCM0Bt_g4GyjT_TnYweoEfK7omisJFRVoAnWdXrCNIazdv_5WxDff7O4rMP6-mY8SPA6FL1HPNVD-rSvjX3JcU7OnW-y8RNbsdA-6XRrdWjFNWBKT5R4PSX5BAeV_oj9aI5szzRQKiGn9TDwqCwpUx2fZxT0WCRuh8cGV_QuvY0oAm6/s320/IMGP9504%203.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feral Apple Trees further up the Rattlesnake Watershed</td></tr></tbody></table><div> </div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Seventh Meditation: Homecoming and Generosity (Old Homestead)</h3><div><br /></div><div>In his book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein observes: "In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources." Meditating upon this thought, Kimmerer ends her essay with this passage: </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">"Continued fealty to economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil. Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle: genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy. Indigenous story traditions are full of these cautionary teachings. When the gift is dishonored, the outcome is always material as well as spiritual. Disrespect the water and the springs dry up...To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants."</div></blockquote><div></div><div><br /></div><div>And so we end our guided meditations, at the site of an old homestead that has been returned to the land so that both humans and serviceberries, along with the many other living kinds inhabiting the Rattlesnake Watershed, might thrive. We stand here today with this question: "Where is the place in our home places for the home places of others? To answer this questions, Kimmerer invites us into a transformed and transformative relationship with all other living kinds, and all the energies and elements with whom we share the earth. Please use your walk back to the parking lot as the occasion for personal meditation and animated interchange with others on this important question.</div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0frnBPDCztEhVq3fJ5lWNvnilfrcjUZLdchWfUg0DZayMWjrZKb4nReVeKyAogYnazTjSu9knnBWgNrm_TH0ciiZ_lGC7pWz9PwlKj6YO7oFTdRg01VP0dRBG-JaeM4GcbzEcmbphiE2MZeJdKOzvvAsRW6nDkNZDqDWfZjCy3-0Mpj2tf4j8Bxpl/s6016/IMGP9541%203.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6016" data-original-width="4000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0frnBPDCztEhVq3fJ5lWNvnilfrcjUZLdchWfUg0DZayMWjrZKb4nReVeKyAogYnazTjSu9knnBWgNrm_TH0ciiZ_lGC7pWz9PwlKj6YO7oFTdRg01VP0dRBG-JaeM4GcbzEcmbphiE2MZeJdKOzvvAsRW6nDkNZDqDWfZjCy3-0Mpj2tf4j8Bxpl/s320/IMGP9541%203.JPG" width="213" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hyacinth Blossoming at the <br />Parking Lot</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">- Meditations inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer's </span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-size: medium;">"The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance"</span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-15831960232997712242021-08-22T14:48:00.002-07:002021-08-22T15:10:11.604-07:00Heaven<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRFPTtbeW9U45sdf_zgzJpHUuSNivHIfdCYjq4yhHoklUHXyCg0cFkQZK4N8ikk9CS0RojOUSoc3GQd9jw9q25S1oLH7FKjWIBy6S4QpniyNlu6KUL7tvcZ7DP9zeBYegPC1LvKJ5lW7s/s2048/3B8467C7-1A4B-4554-97D5-AFD118DD55CA.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1362" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRFPTtbeW9U45sdf_zgzJpHUuSNivHIfdCYjq4yhHoklUHXyCg0cFkQZK4N8ikk9CS0RojOUSoc3GQd9jw9q25S1oLH7FKjWIBy6S4QpniyNlu6KUL7tvcZ7DP9zeBYegPC1LvKJ5lW7s/s320/3B8467C7-1A4B-4554-97D5-AFD118DD55CA.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>"Ain't goin' there," as one campfire song's refrain playfully puts it. I too am not so confident of a positive outcome, and not just because I haven't been behaving well. After all, we find ourselves increasingly in a world for which the reality of heaven, at least understood as afterlife, is radically in question, if not fully irrelevant. Indeed, religion, which provides a home for all sorts of notions of heaven, is itself in danger, so some say, of going extinct. <p></p><p></p><div>In these circumstances, my son and I recently had a conversation about heaven as we ambled up a wooded gorge surrounded by a surfeit of blooms - blue camas, shooting stars, arnica, the fresh beginnings of lupine, the tattered remnants of glacier lilies dotting the earth. All these spring ephemerals, as they are called - shooting up overnight and disappearing within a week or two - certainly emphasize the transitory nature of things here on earth. And yet precisely in these environs, we humans are struck by the glory of it all. The temporary is caught up in a light that suggests something more, something, dare we say it, perfect. We think at such moments: "Nothing to be added, just <i>this</i>."</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtnECyoN7SvjqBZaCrhIl69Fkxb-RiR7J4uxN3zMdaWev2bLFrHIqvBa5LB4i5uef9qERSrzKv9Ahe3bqBz2nsIoTY6G1VjpyKD4CDFeVqCJu4mvGal42TbJW6C-PtMCjXmrnvL9O-RLc/s2048/34BACF2E-2D7E-44B7-829D-2A2BFB4E4FA0.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1362" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtnECyoN7SvjqBZaCrhIl69Fkxb-RiR7J4uxN3zMdaWev2bLFrHIqvBa5LB4i5uef9qERSrzKv9Ahe3bqBz2nsIoTY6G1VjpyKD4CDFeVqCJu4mvGal42TbJW6C-PtMCjXmrnvL9O-RLc/s320/34BACF2E-2D7E-44B7-829D-2A2BFB4E4FA0.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>The conversation on that day in the main consisted of musings and ruminations. One thought: Heaven could be a very difficult place. We likely would be stuck with a whole host of personas we would prefer not to have had the opportunity ever to have encountered again. What if heaven involves something along the lines of the inverse of Sartre's famous dictum - that hell is other people? Particularly <i>those </i>other people! This point in turn reminded me of something shared by an Oglala thinker who once was invited to the Salisbury University campus: In the spirit world, he shared, there are no secrets. Everyone knows what everyone else did and what they are thinking about it now. Where's the fun in that?</div><div><br /></div><div>But fun is perhaps precisely what heaven does not involve. Christian theologians speak of heaven as a basking in the presence of the Most High, the<i> summum bonum</i>, the highest good, of all creation. But need that involve a perpetually extended, really great day at one's local watering hole with a carefully chosen repertoire of family and friends? Indeed, would the <i>summum bonum</i> even allow one merely to bask in it, as if one were sun-bathing in the Good?</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDr5wFDyTkvVeAB51biPnRcabhjFSabgHtzyJrndn3oLU18ZA1QUy_g1rNhK_aQ7mOGPCRIdFjFnOb62ctvhHyY4hOXwWusu8gpTfwhlqiQr4JkQyI1Y8zENNUPdBKbTbmS7v9cgHhegs/s2048/IMGP3625.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1362" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDr5wFDyTkvVeAB51biPnRcabhjFSabgHtzyJrndn3oLU18ZA1QUy_g1rNhK_aQ7mOGPCRIdFjFnOb62ctvhHyY4hOXwWusu8gpTfwhlqiQr4JkQyI1Y8zENNUPdBKbTbmS7v9cgHhegs/s320/IMGP3625.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div>If heaven is anything at all, it is arguably a place or state where the glory implicit in all things is thoroughly unleashed. as one finds one's voice resounding in an emphatic <i>Yes</i> to creation. What this might imply is only darkly sensed here and now, I think. Certainly, praise is involved, praise beyond any sense of what we might currently imagine, praise that is certainly not fulfilled, as Mark Twain once, in a less than charitable mood, characterized it: as singing interminable hymns in a stuffy Sunday worship service without end. Rather. heaven might be more like walking up a mountain slope on a gaudy spring day asking whether heaven means anything at all. </div><div><br /></div><div>I think we decided, my son and I, that we are better off in our skeptical times with at least the thought of heaven, as long as we remember not to take liberties with it, to render its meaning facile by selling it and ourselves short. Perhaps Dylan Thomas had something like that in mind when he wrote:</div><div><br /></div><div><span> Dark is a way, and light is a place,</span></div><div><span> Heaven that never was</span></div><div><span> Nor will be ever is always true,</span></div><div><span> And, in that brambled void,</span></div><div><span><span> As plenty as the blackberries in the wood</span></span></div><div><span> The dead sing for His joy.</span> </div><div><br /></div><div>Our day was too early in the season for blackberries, but still the thought sticks. The dead surely were there, and we, the currently living, at least for now, as well. And I can only hope that my son and I are and will be in some fashion singing in those woods long beyond the brief moment we took a walk there. How that might be, I cannot know. It lies in heaven itself to say.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdEI61Lxs6RScIIc2SoK0G-eebs5xVnUoEeWsFrqhjHMX4yJwWWKC3ZWfaSyi9l0m2qbieAkDk11uHV1zzfw0b2Uz7trqjUuiLRu9_lgezXhcr-ERsi8xJfaZL4pGfavgHHI7bbmxTzbg/s2048/IMGP3519.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1362" data-original-width="2048" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdEI61Lxs6RScIIc2SoK0G-eebs5xVnUoEeWsFrqhjHMX4yJwWWKC3ZWfaSyi9l0m2qbieAkDk11uHV1zzfw0b2Uz7trqjUuiLRu9_lgezXhcr-ERsi8xJfaZL4pGfavgHHI7bbmxTzbg/s320/IMGP3519.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-60898514947125017392019-11-25T07:01:00.001-08:002019-11-26T07:13:29.344-08:00Incendiary Ghosts on Morrell Creek: The Dark Shimmering of Creation<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEZkf1wh-K-7VRuSR6dLiVjgbWbcmyZRS6lDUPUqn93RrGeZhcPiLhZXmmBU8VTZowOQYyeu2eZK_m-3Gx6B7Vl_MRpnrcnCIz0YQqYbp0DkLpA_wGTb-CbW0zQ8Qce6uSE3FOI0wPmUQ/s1600/C958C203-091C-468A-AB3D-B0A232274ED9.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1068" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEZkf1wh-K-7VRuSR6dLiVjgbWbcmyZRS6lDUPUqn93RrGeZhcPiLhZXmmBU8VTZowOQYyeu2eZK_m-3Gx6B7Vl_MRpnrcnCIz0YQqYbp0DkLpA_wGTb-CbW0zQ8Qce6uSE3FOI0wPmUQ/s400/C958C203-091C-468A-AB3D-B0A232274ED9.jpeg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Larch Snags on Morrell Creek</td></tr>
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A world can burn and burn and yet remain a garden of green. This remarkable truth, know to all who live in ecosystems sculpted by their very flammability, was in full display this summer along the national recreational trail to Morrell Falls in the foothills of the Swan Range of Montana. Spreading along this very route, the Rice Ridge Fire, which commenced with a lightning strike on July 24th of 2017, resisted being quelled for nearly two months. Throughout August it continued to burn, blanketing the surrounding mountains in acrid smoke, until over 46,000 acres had been consumed. Then fire became megafire, growing mightily in early September to scorch an additional 100,000 acres in a mere two weeks.<br />
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Now at every step hikers finds themselves surrounded by the charred snags of lodgepole pines, along with a sprinkling of those of larches and firs, all of which had succumbed two years earlier. Yet everywhere one looks to the earth lying underneath this sobering scene, one finds it festooned with colorful blossoms, as fireweed, lupine, salmon berry, hare bell, hyssop, wild hollyhock, wild licorice and a host of other plants are putting newly-available sunlight to good use. This is especially true of the fireweed which has shown up in droves to reclaim blackened soil still peppered with carbonized bits of wood. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fireweed among the Snags</td></tr>
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The luminosity of fireweed, its neon blooms shimmering with psychedelic intensity, is compelling as it overtakes a forest seemingly in ruins. "Neon," at least to this writer's eyes, is the particular shade of hot pink, as it has been named by those who worry about such things on the internet, that more or less matches the distinctive and showy color of a fireweed's distinctive and showy raceme of flowers. In this particular case the descriptive term turns out to be an apt one. The fireweed's inflorescence literally glows from within, even when fully-exposed to sunlight from without. And when the angle of one's gaze is such that a conical clump of flowers is silhouetted against the background of a charred stump, the effect is doubly electric.<br />
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To be among these and the other colorful colonizers who are embroidering a heavenly scene on the drab remnants of forest burned to the quick is to experience what Deborah Bird Rose has characterized as the shimmer of creation. The nature of life is to be lively. In the environs of Morrell Falls and the two small lakes lying directly below it, this liveliness now shows up as what one writer for a local newspaper characterizes as a "landscape under revision." But as witty and catchy as this phrase might be, I would advocate as well for a "landscape re-envisioned." One is eager to walk in these environs not simply to satisfy one's curiosity about how forest succession occurs, as the fabric of an ecosystem is woven anew in the wake of its recent immolation. One also is called upon to behold how what is now emerging offers itself in a wholly other light, indeed, in one that shimmers. <br />
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Deborah Bird Rose speaks of this shimmering as a translation of sorts of what the Yolngu People of Australia characterize as <i>bir'yun</i>, a "brilliance" that is also "a kind of motion," indeed one that "grabs you" and "allows you, or brings you, into the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world." Yet another translation of shimmer might be that of the Hebraic "<i>chavod</i>," the glory of creation, in which the heavenly shows through the things of this world and leaves them resounding beyond their own means to account for themselves. In shimmer, Rose argues, it is made clear that a forest is not simply a contraption of "gears and cogs," an elaborate mechanism that somehow keeps itself, in spite of firestorms and infestations, well-oiled and running. That would certainly gain our admiration, but only as a well-crafted tool might. Such admiration in turn would be forgetful of how the forest is iridescent with the creative dynamism of the diverse agencies of diverse living things, with for instance "the ancestral power," as Rose would put it, of lodgepole pines and fireweed as they renew old ties, the pulsing of life in one living kind communicating its energy to another. Gifts are piling up all about us.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> A Landscape under Revision</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ancestors I</td></tr>
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But it is not only life that shimmers. Death in its own fashion does too. And it is this latter possibility that fully claimed me on two successive July evenings as I walked among the forests of charred snags left in the wake of the Rice Ridge Fire. As night descended and the visible world moved back into the shadows, the outlines of a multitude of carbonized trunks and their leafless branches, only dimly registering in the eye, nevertheless came alive with intimations of their former lives that would not let me be. One might say that I had been visited by ghosts. Indeed, more accurately, I was the visitor, as the ghosts were arrayed all around me. The power of what these trees had been, their decades and centuries of rambunctious life before succumbing to fire was for that moment undeniably palpable. The ancestors were speaking. One had the sense that one was being addressed, that a forest that once had been green and living was now revisiting its haunts on its own behalf, reminding those who tread here now of what had been offered up to the flames for the sake of the coming generations.<br />
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Everywhere one turns in a more-than-human living world, the invitation to liturgy abounds. This is to say, one is invited to offer one's prayers, one's thanksgiving and veneration on behalf of all those other living kinds who contribute to the very possibility that one is offered for at least the brief moment of one's all-too-human life one's own place under the sun. The fires of one summer might leave the earth smoking and blighted, its waters smudged with soot, but this in turn only insures the emergence of a garden green and shimmering in the next.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ancestors II</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ancestors III</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ancestors IV</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ponderosa Pine Unfazed by the Fire</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Morrell Falls</td></tr>
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-3798347726676207322019-04-25T12:26:00.000-07:002019-04-27T11:33:39.052-07:00Mantis Birth<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ready for the Wider World</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Once you know where and when to look, finding a nest of hatching mantises is not so difficult as one might think. Mid morning seems to be the best time. The mantises wriggle out rear-first from the oocenta, their egg case, one by one, wet and folded in on themselves. Just like moths or butterflies emerging from a cocoon, they need to stretch out and dry. Then, if they don't simply drop away from the writhing mass of their fellow hatchlings hanging in mid air, they clamber back up by the thread by which that whole cluster is hanging and find immediately nearby the highest perch available. And then, when their oocenta-mates begin to dispute that perch, they climb down a stem and scatter into the garden. Such an event! </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Oocenta over a Cluster of Newly-Emerged Mantises</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Moments like this one stop me cold. One cannot simply note them and then move on. They demand meditation, or at the very least, rumination, the turning over in the mind of the various ways in which, for instance, the birth of a clutch of mantises is no small thing. Or perhaps, better, how the small thing that is that birth is all the same remarkable, fully endowed with the capacity to invite one's awe. The everyday world of earthly things, it turns out, is wild, dense with meaning. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Not a single mantis crawls about the face of the earth that did not emerge from an oocenta such as those dotting my garden. All too often, one takes for granted that the living kinds are simply going to show up, that the earthly, after a long winter's nap, is automatically set to repopulate itself. But this expectation ignores the long waiting in the cold, the sudden registering of warmth, the developing of an egg until its occupant is ready to squirm tail first into the light of a spring morning. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I have been working through with my students this semester a series of readings raising the prospect for a contemplative ecology. Sensei John Dado Loori in a small set of essays titled "<i>Teachings of the Earth</i>" speaks of how the river verifies the river, of how the earthly communicates itself precisely as itself. We need to get out of the way, Loori recommends, so that the suchness of earthly things is rendered palpable in our thinking, so that we might become intimate with them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The wild is not to be found in the bizarre or the exotic, the untamed or untrammeled. Rather the wild is precisely that which in its very ordinariness verifies itself as such. </span><span style="font-size: large;">If there were ever a moment that begged for a contemplative response in an ecological vein, certainly the birthing of mantises would suffice. As ordinary as the unfolding of a leaf or the rising of the sun, the birthing of a mantis reassures us of our own place upon the earth. If, that is, we were simply to attend to it with an open mind... </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emerging one by one from the Oocenta</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Competing for Perches</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAxgTL9bQd5b-25wXlov7Wfek6MbP2XtZJjrBQ-dNechPdWXRiH-LtSRD-IotIF5PR6hIzlCyQMUJJrW8BHo3oGI1BRPeEbWc3WJHNWis-_PXQTQ-QJIWeb8T4WhoaupuY2x4mqJfX8E/s1600/_IMG5445.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="269" data-original-width="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAxgTL9bQd5b-25wXlov7Wfek6MbP2XtZJjrBQ-dNechPdWXRiH-LtSRD-IotIF5PR6hIzlCyQMUJJrW8BHo3oGI1BRPeEbWc3WJHNWis-_PXQTQ-QJIWeb8T4WhoaupuY2x4mqJfX8E/s1600/_IMG5445.jpg" /></a></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">On the Way Down</td></tr>
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<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-82552300887192806272018-07-23T11:05:00.000-07:002018-07-23T11:29:04.915-07:00Buffalo and Trains: Deeling Gregory's Gigantomachia on the High Plains.<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Deeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 1*</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On the high plains of Eastern Montana, images of buffalo emerge whichever way one turns. Car dealerships and bars, stock brokerages and coffee roasters, sports teams and local banks, art galleries and t-shirt shops: the buffalo, or at least the image of the buffalo, is in evidence in all of these places and more. Charles Russell, the great Montana painter, famously employed a buffalo skull as part of his signature on his artworks. In doing so, he can be understood as insisting that all who remain here and now remember that buffalo had been here too. In any event, the many ways of depicting buffalo - whether sketched out in a full-bodied side-view or frontal approach wth horns lowered, whether rendered as bleached skull or as tanned hide, or simply reduced to a silouhette - is explored obsessively by a broad range of artists in these parts. An infinite appetite for the image is seemingly at work</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The hunger for the presence of the buffalo that these images communicate is all too often nostalgic. The buffalo are welcomed as long as they remain safely in the past, a memory of other times, of a world that was destined to be superseded even if once remarkable in its own manner. In this way, the iconifying of the Buffalo becomes nothing more than a re-inscription of what Australian anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has termed "the Year Zero," a reordering of time by settlement peoples such that what has taken place before the arrival of European culture (and particularly in this case, European <i>agriculture</i>) is relegated to a legendary past that ceases to impinge too strongly on the moment in which one is currently living. To remember the buffalo is fine, as long as they are not too near or too meaningful.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Railroad Poster**</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the imagery of Deeling Gregory's contribution to the public mural painted on the concrete walls of the First Avenue Railroad Underpass at Great Falls, Montana is another manner entirely. To understand exactly how this is the case, it might be helpful to consider an image - supplied by an advertisement poster for a railroad - from the time when Buffalo were being wiped off the face of the earth with gleeful abandon by settlement culture. In this picturing of that event, a steam engine plows through a herd of Buffalo running in panic before the onslaught of riflemen shooting at whatever moves on the prairie.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinzlWdSkRP1qeUT2HQ6x_znSHJmz7MtqFtwu_GMgb33rlhyNj_pj1ZLaAhGcP1j3trmoMWte-KlXHkkJF4Wp1HpD0umFgZhkKjc1F-VAKBeyqaXSP18EILZ6JMoxYRF4mX1lcThHbnIyo/s1600/948318C7-F363-4A6B-B081-70E6CBCBD34A%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinzlWdSkRP1qeUT2HQ6x_znSHJmz7MtqFtwu_GMgb33rlhyNj_pj1ZLaAhGcP1j3trmoMWte-KlXHkkJF4Wp1HpD0umFgZhkKjc1F-VAKBeyqaXSP18EILZ6JMoxYRF4mX1lcThHbnIyo/s320/948318C7-F363-4A6B-B081-70E6CBCBD34A%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deeling Gregory's Gigantomachia*</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Gregory reinterprets this image as a Gigantomachia, in which two great forces are in battle with one another. In her version, rather than simply fleeing the onslaught of settlement, the Buffalo, along with a white dove, oppose the steam engine as it ferociously invades the prairie. In doing so members of the herd offer their very bodies in resistance, as they are crushed under the weight of the locomotive and ultimately paved over by railroad tracks. Still they resist in spite of their defeat. They do not assent to the imposition of the Year Zero, regardless of what riflemen and plows in the meantime might have accomplished.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What comes across in Gregory's portrait is entirely absent in the railroad poster: Buffalo, Gregory would remind us, were not dumb animals to be eagerly chased down and heedlessly slaughtered but august fellow creatures whose capacity to inspire and instruct us humans is not to be underestimated, let alone dismissed. Particularly striking in this regard is how Gregory treats the individuality of each Buffalo in the herd she pictures. Each visage is alive with sentiment as it submitted to ecocide. Consider these images taken from the mural</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi38RAnJM7adYWULhkvW-SeDlqjv6K5awQpLxOdL94_5xjbYSUwc4ymRuTCaywhniOYsKP3oNwSfWHmN3MsxPod4Mx_YoQVnzfWS1hw0g_0Ze8wf8UwALsxoDrAHtaVN6d2idOq_I4Dc7A/s1600/B68150EB-0247-4760-981D-DA9A35FDE5BD%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi38RAnJM7adYWULhkvW-SeDlqjv6K5awQpLxOdL94_5xjbYSUwc4ymRuTCaywhniOYsKP3oNwSfWHmN3MsxPod4Mx_YoQVnzfWS1hw0g_0Ze8wf8UwALsxoDrAHtaVN6d2idOq_I4Dc7A/s320/B68150EB-0247-4760-981D-DA9A35FDE5BD%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 2*</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XlTJvtfJwYoJhijWFwJ9D-nvxneJ4J_5j1UGQFeYWc8DNLofLz6Gn4TdxOrGifxFUTl6NqaK625Nk2GZdYTAp7cl1cYpUxHPDVsh9_-9POEeDAfLwT-nTnecCc-yjXsnFkg4oK0bfpE/s1600/49CC374E-37C2-4C8F-8432-5DB6CCDED91E%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1XlTJvtfJwYoJhijWFwJ9D-nvxneJ4J_5j1UGQFeYWc8DNLofLz6Gn4TdxOrGifxFUTl6NqaK625Nk2GZdYTAp7cl1cYpUxHPDVsh9_-9POEeDAfLwT-nTnecCc-yjXsnFkg4oK0bfpE/s320/49CC374E-37C2-4C8F-8432-5DB6CCDED91E%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 3*</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB_7rpLQmcTsw80JBPBne9dOdKybisLx4zpM1kaMkkkreyYAp1HFSGkaqQuITkcINdvm7fsG7iv3wljXyk-eUXK-8M7iVnOQOSPzdHCet1LRf1P9v9wlrZhZE6Qe618v7CVxVh08ycOZw/s1600/24C07BEE-1263-44BF-ABF4-692F2AA79E4A%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB_7rpLQmcTsw80JBPBne9dOdKybisLx4zpM1kaMkkkreyYAp1HFSGkaqQuITkcINdvm7fsG7iv3wljXyk-eUXK-8M7iVnOQOSPzdHCet1LRf1P9v9wlrZhZE6Qe618v7CVxVh08ycOZw/s320/24C07BEE-1263-44BF-ABF4-692F2AA79E4A%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Feeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 4*</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLAa8HAOztgOalVw2CEFsRYQqT81IDM3Gv5ADI7cJUqb6cb4-iJY7xgZNGN_sLOPQaGVzugSRJgW9Z5IIfbP0znhhCHsv1aY-sWsguT9w-R3YKWd6S5kcctfMVVUtZ9bIp3nwnvYp5B2I/s1600/5966FDFB-4884-4E4D-B1DA-8A0309E03B63%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLAa8HAOztgOalVw2CEFsRYQqT81IDM3Gv5ADI7cJUqb6cb4-iJY7xgZNGN_sLOPQaGVzugSRJgW9Z5IIfbP0znhhCHsv1aY-sWsguT9w-R3YKWd6S5kcctfMVVUtZ9bIp3nwnvYp5B2I/s320/5966FDFB-4884-4E4D-B1DA-8A0309E03B63%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Feeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 5*</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMZhBO_xI66Z7PifsxHXfBJaVCDdAuPcPz_Ig_nrtudQagyizfmZ7muAw7oBU8cHga_5ZAUG0li70dlqYQHeIjc4lzXyo67qKU2_ptUK2ly7pLDx1e4UEWh8-K98Fm436JMUasMv54Adc/s1600/A7FBFD4A-AD83-4DDB-BA1C-9681174A794B%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMZhBO_xI66Z7PifsxHXfBJaVCDdAuPcPz_Ig_nrtudQagyizfmZ7muAw7oBU8cHga_5ZAUG0li70dlqYQHeIjc4lzXyo67qKU2_ptUK2ly7pLDx1e4UEWh8-K98Fm436JMUasMv54Adc/s320/A7FBFD4A-AD83-4DDB-BA1C-9681174A794B%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 6</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi38RAnJM7adYWULhkvW-SeDlqjv6K5awQpLxOdL94_5xjbYSUwc4ymRuTCaywhniOYsKP3oNwSfWHmN3MsxPod4Mx_YoQVnzfWS1hw0g_0Ze8wf8UwALsxoDrAHtaVN6d2idOq_I4Dc7A/s1600/B68150EB-0247-4760-981D-DA9A35FDE5BD%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi38RAnJM7adYWULhkvW-SeDlqjv6K5awQpLxOdL94_5xjbYSUwc4ymRuTCaywhniOYsKP3oNwSfWHmN3MsxPod4Mx_YoQVnzfWS1hw0g_0Ze8wf8UwALsxoDrAHtaVN6d2idOq_I4Dc7A/s320/B68150EB-0247-4760-981D-DA9A35FDE5BD%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 7*</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5U0I4y_OhwUiFQNfIYQCMKDda8cF9fl7gj8xMCSHSBQnTZ-W4J3QvLl1QzeDRJXKvpm4QHCY5vvZ0biZjYOcf7_gCGJFbJhdFJrfR_aFTyxdCY62LSSVH3LBS3RoiMCw6qMNvezY-vIQ/s1600/3450447F-524A-40FD-ABF4-9BF3D69CC3CB%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5U0I4y_OhwUiFQNfIYQCMKDda8cF9fl7gj8xMCSHSBQnTZ-W4J3QvLl1QzeDRJXKvpm4QHCY5vvZ0biZjYOcf7_gCGJFbJhdFJrfR_aFTyxdCY62LSSVH3LBS3RoiMCw6qMNvezY-vIQ/s320/3450447F-524A-40FD-ABF4-9BF3D69CC3CB%2524L0%2524001%257Ephoto-full.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Deeling Gregory: Buffalo Visages 8*</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Those who might pause to meditate on these figures and their connection to the very location in which they are pictured will find provocative instruction on how settlement culture might reconsider its place in time. The imposition of the Year Zero is not a fiat accompli. Not only, it turns out, might the Buffalo one day return, but also in truth, they have never left.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">* Images from the First Avenue North Underpass Mural are used with the permission of the Business Improvement District of Great Falls Montana.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">** Railroad poster image taken from the interpretive materials provided at The First People's Buffalo Jump State Park near Great Falls, Montana.</span><br />
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-3654718284311572482018-05-11T13:11:00.001-07:002018-05-14T07:08:51.006-07:00Dreaming the Waters: Regenerative Ecology on the Banks of the Choptank<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Waters of Rosemary's Spring on the Choptank</td></tr>
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Nick and Margaret Carter have dreamt of many things under the sun in the fifty years since they settled along the upper reaches of the Choptank River. But arguably at the bottom of those dreams, if there is ever a bottom to a dream, are the very waters of the river itself. They are, it turns out, worthy of the devotion of entire lives. Nick and Margaret have offered theirs in an ambitious project of regenerating a forest dominated by native species on farmland that had been plowed under early on in colonial settlement and planted in corn and other monocultural crops for centuries. Regenerating a forest inevitably requires regenerating the waters by which it grows, although Nick Carter might see this in its inverse relationship as well. For him, the project is as much about restoring good water to the Choptank as it is about restoring ecosystem diversity to the watershed.<br />
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Nick would be quick to note that one's notion of a river's waters needs to be expansive. The very land on which the couple lives, for example, is underlain by an aquifer, the Columbia, whose slow-moving lateral drift, inching along underneath one's feet, is as much a part of the Choptank's flow as the waters explicitly meandering between its banks. The rain then that falls on the Carters' land, percolating in the soil and infiltrating into that aquifer is also part of the river's flow, indeed so are the weather fronts that have brought precipitation here in the first place. To make things particularly complicated in this version of the hydrological cycle, if one dawdles a few hours along the edge of the river, one discovers that it has the disconcerting habit of flowing both down and upstream, as it interacts with the incoming and outgoing tides of the Chesapeake Bay, of which it is a tributary. The river's source then is at times downstream as much as upstream, briny as much as fresh, the fate of all estuaries.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nut Sedge found in a Swale</td></tr>
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A river turns out not to be a piece of plumbing, a conduit for efficient delivery of a liquid, but rather a great and multifarious metabolism. Complexity is its life, and a rough circularity is its function. This is not to say that things don't get moved around, but they do so, at least when the river is working properly, in a manner that fits with the intricate and interwoven gestures of a master practicing Daijijuan. Paradoxically, in a healthy ecosystem, the more abundantly its waters flow, the more complex their movement becomes: the very meandering of the river, in which it rhythmically undulates from right to left and then left to right, even as it moves downstream, is perhaps the best illustration of this point. The Choptank, then, is not a jet train powering ahead to its oceanic paradise, but rather a contemplative act focused on remaining precisely where it is, keeping itself in tune with how its manifold waters pause, even as they pass, eddy even as they stream. Indeed the very notion that a river is not a singular but rather plural element, a gathering of <i>the waters</i>, hints at this. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr1t0drliYkAV1Dh6hbpimNY4klmiTiJfUidgdjeX7EtDYi9ywwim8mC-mI78ISdbBRI0W1VjlOBXLfbysqfTs6rLgzBBfA7qumDnwbx_thmnT5Ff08fg0pl-uq2OppZeUpqFp7dc54xE/s1600/32186468_10155281818622414_657847084027740160_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="918" data-original-width="959" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr1t0drliYkAV1Dh6hbpimNY4klmiTiJfUidgdjeX7EtDYi9ywwim8mC-mI78ISdbBRI0W1VjlOBXLfbysqfTs6rLgzBBfA7qumDnwbx_thmnT5Ff08fg0pl-uq2OppZeUpqFp7dc54xE/s320/32186468_10155281818622414_657847084027740160_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ground Cedar (Lycopodium complantum) showing up in a former Cornfield</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
A failure to attend to that complexity and its related aptitude for circularity has shaped all too much of the landscape surrounding where Nick and Margaret live. For instance, if one were to look for the proverbial source of the Choptank, its starting point, one is likely to find it these days in a series of ditches draining fields of corn and soybeans. This at least is the result that occurred when local writer Curtis Badger, in his <i>A Natural History of Quiet Waters, </i>attempted to trace the headwaters of the nearby Pokomoke. From the 1700s onward, he notes, the ditch, as much as the plow and the ax, were the tools by which European settlement transformed the extensive swamps formerly characterizing this area into what locals like to say is "working" farmland. A lot of work, indeed, does go into dewatering the land in this area. Unlike a river, a ditch <i>is</i> a piece of plumbing, in which not <i>the waters </i>but only <i>the water,</i> as a singular, homogenous and troublesome element, is siphoned off and then unceremoniously disposed of. For the digger of ditches excess water is not a precious element to be conserved but instead unwanted refuse, trash. And "industrial-strength ditches," as Badger puts it, crisscross this landscape. Indeed many of them have names suggesting a certain rural charm: "Bald Cypress Branch," "Coon's Foot," "Cowhouse Branch," "Gum Branch," "Gray's Prong," "Tilgham Race" are just some of these. But Nick would remind any visitor to his property such fetching words are wasted on a form of interaction with the land that only ends up in leveling and ultimately impoverishing it.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEighyFNiQFN-QkrZEyv42xQVTzULryTAvz6-1BfIPgLfJVuC_HNoPmyxwxH6cT0dInZlBQWV2SH2WJDKeXa1y45wj0OlDwzBi7ZgO5iuca2QKDDCILV3sAaWfnq3iKMzS0aTBlI_s9IleQ/s1600/32089289_10155281818467414_8507127437849526272_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="636" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEighyFNiQFN-QkrZEyv42xQVTzULryTAvz6-1BfIPgLfJVuC_HNoPmyxwxH6cT0dInZlBQWV2SH2WJDKeXa1y45wj0OlDwzBi7ZgO5iuca2QKDDCILV3sAaWfnq3iKMzS0aTBlI_s9IleQ/s320/32089289_10155281818467414_8507127437849526272_n.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fern along a Brook flowing into<br />
the Choptank</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And so we return to the dream mentioned above. Nick and Margaret have been busy for over fifty years on a project of regenerative ecology that for the most part has involved doing precisely nothing, of letting an extensive plot of farmland literally go to seed. This has been accomplished with attentiveness and love, rather than indifference and neglect. And along the way, at least some explicit interventions were indeed called for. <br />
<br />
As Nick guides me down a path running along the edge of the property, he points out the remains of a ditch, in shambles but still waterlogged, that was dug early on in the history of European settlement. In those times, he notes, ditches were often excavated after a winter thaw. Farmers would determine where the snowmelt was flowing, charting out the lowest contours on the land, in order to place the ditch's course along these. Ditches constructed in this manner, at least on the Eastern Shore, have a laudable tendency to tap into the aquifer, which often is only a few feet below the surface of even the more elevated areas. Not unsurprisingly ponds and seeps abound on this particular ditch as it caves in and dissipates from Nick's studied inattention and particularly so after he dammed up a few decades ago one section of it. As the land in that area reverted to a bog, interesting things began to grow there of their own accord, including ground cedar, really a clubmoss, sphagnum moss, and even the occasional stand of orchids. When all these appeared, Nick and Margaret knew their project was working as they had hoped it might.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxisLeQtNGVL7cYF4YrGY-3gJpZY7IPmzP2sI_FNZJOnxyKrKvgUB5Jcj6CtsHIKIrommUT8cfP4OZex087xlqe2hmbdMs22RuREj0KCAE1HgEvN5Vy_ZA9gXdTjAmAp_Eyb46pFssmjM/s1600/_IGP0715.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxisLeQtNGVL7cYF4YrGY-3gJpZY7IPmzP2sI_FNZJOnxyKrKvgUB5Jcj6CtsHIKIrommUT8cfP4OZex087xlqe2hmbdMs22RuREj0KCAE1HgEvN5Vy_ZA9gXdTjAmAp_Eyb46pFssmjM/s320/_IGP0715.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sphagnum Moss reappearing on the Land</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HjatDd17iYFTpmIwi_U8H3LTJvkyIrAXzyqE9NTNSe_wuCMuWOHVQiGaKArF1HI2rqa2OmwZ8Dx-jZfeg4E-UNzK37BUCfZWvmdIvU6x2zi4n89M8A7WERouAySaHvtrvAIKNjw04VY/s1600/_IGP0881.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HjatDd17iYFTpmIwi_U8H3LTJvkyIrAXzyqE9NTNSe_wuCMuWOHVQiGaKArF1HI2rqa2OmwZ8Dx-jZfeg4E-UNzK37BUCfZWvmdIvU6x2zi4n89M8A7WERouAySaHvtrvAIKNjw04VY/s320/_IGP0881.jpg" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beech Trees in the<br />
Lowlands<br />
along the Chop-tank</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The earlier part of our walk had angled down from the farmhouse through former cornfields toward the river. On these uplands, where crops once grew poorly on dry, sandy soil, an entire forest has sprung up over the last fifty years with loblolly and Virginia pine, black walnut and pignut hickory, southern red and willow oaks now predominating. Under the loblollies, pink lady slippers, which are dependent on a particular fungus associated with this tree, have appeared as if by magic. The magic unfortunately has not kept deer with discriminating taste buds from eagerly chowing down upon the blossoms. To Margaret's consternation, the number of lady slippers in that area is in decline. But still, all in all, things are going reasonably well. Amazingly, not very much management for feral trees and exotics, including Norwegian maple, crape myrtle and all the rest of their ilk, has been necessary. Nick attributes this to the fact that land along the river, too wet for crops, was planted in trees in 1927 and then managed as a woodlot. Today, a healthy, mature beech forest sustaining a wide variety of native plants and shrubs now flourishes there. This older, mature forest in turn has served as a dependable source of seeds and spores taking root in the former cornfields upland from it.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrgBuV4jJX8j8AH5j8dFPzpk5shTMgJi9DfS-5igyNd-RmRe7-UgomhMOG0wlOc0dZSvuqU78t5WODT7LdHiIbMQHJCo1-octhrwpGTWq03sgGb12u5qA2u9tyQs78_qSUJH9MxuDzyYk/s1600/_IGP2081.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1060" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrgBuV4jJX8j8AH5j8dFPzpk5shTMgJi9DfS-5igyNd-RmRe7-UgomhMOG0wlOc0dZSvuqU78t5WODT7LdHiIbMQHJCo1-octhrwpGTWq03sgGb12u5qA2u9tyQs78_qSUJH9MxuDzyYk/s320/_IGP2081.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lady Slipper under a Loblolly Pine</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs5Lc2Fv94PCkA-dWYaILEib7dRSI4UQOpZZuKzb5ri5V82PaNwZjHJLT6rfLzKTXfHP-uEAHHIA5rdFFPcm5CZ8tyoQvERPajOCUHE1sWebhsyO6bpXySW5VEiY5lN4gznfXM4Ueymqk/s1600/32161734_10155281818522414_8108050243620175872_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="636" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs5Lc2Fv94PCkA-dWYaILEib7dRSI4UQOpZZuKzb5ri5V82PaNwZjHJLT6rfLzKTXfHP-uEAHHIA5rdFFPcm5CZ8tyoQvERPajOCUHE1sWebhsyO6bpXySW5VEiY5lN4gznfXM4Ueymqk/s320/32161734_10155281818522414_8108050243620175872_n.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jack in the Pulpit: A Green Bloom<br />
in A Green Shade</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
There is no end to Nick's meditations on the intertwining of this land and its waters. As our walk nears its goal on the banks of the Choptank, Nick points out three consecutive swales marking the course of the river in times past. The first one we reach, he fancies, is the river a thousand years back. These depressions, meandering across the forest floor, make for difficult crossing. Their boggy muck, glistening in the sunlight, threatens to swallow one's foot with every step. Surrounding us are literally thousands of jack in the pulpits, a species of skunk cabbage with a fetching bloom, not to mention a scattering of spring beauties, Indian cucumber, May apples and other spring ephemerals that love moist feet. Here and there a wood frog or bull toad hops out of the way of our passage. Reaching the dryer area lying between two swales, Nick comments on how berms of sand built up here, as well as in tandem with the current banks of the Choptank, are the residue of yearly flooding, as the waters overrunning the river's banks are interrupted by the trees and shrubs of the forest. This allows time for sediment captured upstream to drop out of the water and be deposited anew.<br />
<br />
Nick takes me to the final berm near the Choptank and asks me to consider how its sands engage in ionic capture of nutrients and pollutants, leaving the waters of the river to pass downstream cleansed of excess phosphorous, as well as a host of unseemly chemicals. Listening to him, I finally begin to get a hint of the complexity and breadth of his vision. He is asking that those who visit here join him in the contemplation of the journey and fate of each and every drop of the waters finding themselves, however temporarily, at home here. When Tom Horton wrote that the unexamined place is not worth living in, he surely had Nick and Margaret in mind. There is no walking this landscape in their company without every step becoming an interrogation in how the waters are making their way through it. <br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB4Z-HziYdix484NLzDkHeR6i1huJg3ND9dL3PjxBveooe_sDxcvGqaNg4A3ApaN2yqEDAuczYdBm_xwzYU5JLrc7XkcLF_KQvYUH_e99mQPJV_QXZju1h5U-IOSNGwIzioa4jzUj3V6w/s1600/32104851_10155281825732414_8160992089274843136_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="960" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB4Z-HziYdix484NLzDkHeR6i1huJg3ND9dL3PjxBveooe_sDxcvGqaNg4A3ApaN2yqEDAuczYdBm_xwzYU5JLrc7XkcLF_KQvYUH_e99mQPJV_QXZju1h5U-IOSNGwIzioa4jzUj3V6w/s320/32104851_10155281825732414_8160992089274843136_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Crane Fly on a Sedge Leaf</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFsA5wEcYOQmzbkFiBCRtk3DyVl9p65-ebPZUshgKGgy7Ip_YZfxEOOCCn5T-9y11MA4izmQ1KSNOygbquUbihzYCfoI_mp9J539O7_gM6hPhf5ScZ3sVlq6Fnur2MfpJ5r44fO_9n1X4/s1600/32105034_10155281818327414_5386005760754843648_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="891" data-original-width="958" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFsA5wEcYOQmzbkFiBCRtk3DyVl9p65-ebPZUshgKGgy7Ip_YZfxEOOCCn5T-9y11MA4izmQ1KSNOygbquUbihzYCfoI_mp9J539O7_gM6hPhf5ScZ3sVlq6Fnur2MfpJ5r44fO_9n1X4/s320/32105034_10155281818327414_5386005760754843648_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wood Frog</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBB3NljfeU7dNxSKyosxH07XJTGlaBh09UCyehvkB3bP-2aJZSAU9PPgH795nJWzNo4Sqsio4pX0bIAM90qVPz5J35nLcHdgm8xYWEUEhHwclhFZu4i7_LQbIBD9PBczvhsasXpQTNWdk/s1600/_IGP0882.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBB3NljfeU7dNxSKyosxH07XJTGlaBh09UCyehvkB3bP-2aJZSAU9PPgH795nJWzNo4Sqsio4pX0bIAM90qVPz5J35nLcHdgm8xYWEUEhHwclhFZu4i7_LQbIBD9PBczvhsasXpQTNWdk/s320/_IGP0882.jpg" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Complicating the<br />
Topography</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I ask Nick if he ever dreams of the land in his sleep, and his answer is disconcerting. In his dream, it turns out, a phalanx of bulldozers are poised at the edge of his and Margaret's property. The foreman of the crew shows Nick a legal document ordering the uprooting of the newly-regenerated forest to make way for a suburban development. This nightmare lies literally in plain site during Nick's waking hours in every direction from where we stand. "The leveling of the land," as Nick puts it, involved in suburbanization and farming, continues unabated. Imagine, Nick asks me, to think of what a single branch fallen from a tree does to the waters encountering it on the forest floor. The branch interrupts the waters' progress, complicates their flow. The irregular topography of land is what makes it amenable to the diversity of life. Farms and suburbs tend to smooth out the land and channel its waters quickly away into ditches and storm drains. Nick's goal, on the contrary, is to keep the waters around and active as long as possible. This is accomplished by intensifying the roughness of the terrain, by letting duff accumulate and fallen branches, not to mention entire trees uprooted, lie. Nick intones, "When you walk down the land in spring and puddles are all around, the land is doing what it ought to do." <br />
<br />
At least for the time being, Nick and Margaret's land is indeed doing exactly what it ought to do.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGeBlSF3QkfRgr6sMzvd2r3-2O5If2Y7c6HAtUer1EQKtOcTamiS9woRQfwd71sSIPBrm8HO3IReFJ2Q-INvDPvMOeIG_qWg5vbikabYu5gJd5MPnD1pTqJKC-NIyinM_GpYSK-qYAVDI/s1600/32116886_10155281818877414_1679599226557825024_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="636" data-original-width="960" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGeBlSF3QkfRgr6sMzvd2r3-2O5If2Y7c6HAtUer1EQKtOcTamiS9woRQfwd71sSIPBrm8HO3IReFJ2Q-INvDPvMOeIG_qWg5vbikabYu5gJd5MPnD1pTqJKC-NIyinM_GpYSK-qYAVDI/s320/32116886_10155281818877414_1679599226557825024_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nick and Margaret Carter</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-18479776844878728702018-04-13T20:23:00.002-07:002018-04-13T20:43:23.644-07:00The Last Good Water<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrc2omfYx-_bWBl1ngpxlM6MePo9ISswR5UREaB2mDGkCXbZ1vIHOnfHtrXSmtRqhxS2HNLeK_C8Dja0OafnJdSXQStEMjpvSRZWbdcG4s840OxOByBszyyIPOGqIc5CI358oq221qkCA/s1600/FaceBookRosemarysSpring3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrc2omfYx-_bWBl1ngpxlM6MePo9ISswR5UREaB2mDGkCXbZ1vIHOnfHtrXSmtRqhxS2HNLeK_C8Dja0OafnJdSXQStEMjpvSRZWbdcG4s840OxOByBszyyIPOGqIc5CI358oq221qkCA/s400/FaceBookRosemarysSpring3.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rosemary's Spring in April</td></tr>
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Springs are magic, and we humans can't keep away from them. If one is nearby, we go and look, and, if we are just a bit foolhardy, we even go and drink. For several years I have been dreaming of a spring on the headwaters of the Choptank that is likely without a name on any map but is called Rosemary's Spring by those who know it up close and personal. Recently I had the chance to visit it again, to spend time in its company, and to take photographs of it in the early light of the day.<br />
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Names, of course, matter. The Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan reminds her readers that determining the appropriate name for a living kind or earthly element is a crucial part of our human vocation. We need, she argues, to be very careful about how we name things and how we use those names once they have been found. In English, for instance, we have come to name our home the Earth. That's a pretty important name and, as names go, this one has its charms. But it also gives the impression that our planet's surface is mainly composed of soil and stone. It's all about the land. But between puddles and bogs and springs and streams and ponds and lakes and seas and oceans, not to mention the innumerable aquifers underlying even deserts, we could just as well have named our planet the Waters. Indeed our bodies are more water than anything else, a feature we share with most earthly living kinds. We humans then are precisely the proverbial fish out of water, except that we've also learned the trick of bringing the waters along with us in our only semi-solid flesh. <br />
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Rosemary's Spring and the marshy bottom land it feeds into is a fiesta of salamanders and frogs and toads, of sphagnum moss and skunk cabbage, of spring beauties and unpleasant nettles. The poet Catherine Carter, who grew up with the spring, has written a poem about it that I cannot get off my mind.<br />
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The Last Good Water.<br />
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By this spring you cannot stand<br />
to drink like a man. If you would drink,<br />
crouch on your muddy knees,<br />
four-legged, or lie<br />
flat on the ground braced on wet hands<br />
in the swale. Set your lips to clear<br />
water, but shallow, not even<br />
an inch. Move your dry<br />
tongue to swallow, and taste oak leaves<br />
and darkness. The spring<br />
is a puddle that seeps<br />
from the ground; dip it up<br />
and you get mud. You must<br />
be an animal here,<br />
prostrate yourself. This spring will bear<br />
no hand, no cup.<br />
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I love this poem because it insists that one should not just stand there and take in what one sees. Instead one is to get off one's own hind limbs and ether crouch or prostrate one's body upon the earth. The activity involves a lowering of one's regard, a bending down of one's skeletal frame, a nearing of one's lips to the face, literally the <i>surface</i> of an earthly element. In this act, one is cautioned against becoming so consumed with the swollen tongue, its perpetual obsession for quenching its thirst, that the waters become muddied, and one's drinking is spoiled.<br />
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Simply put, Carter's poem is liturgical. It asks its reader to engage in an action that is solemnly heedful of another. In doing so one is reminded that drinking water from a spring is a form of prayer. <br />
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The specificity of Carter's liturgy is also instructive. Other waters call for other rubrics. For instance, in Linda Hogan's essay, "What Holds the Water, What Holds the Light," the dappling of desert sandstone with ephemeral pools of water after a heavy rain is celebrated. "Along the way," she writes, "my friend and I stopped at a cluster of large boulders to drink fresh rain collected in a hollow bowl that had been worn into stone over slow centuries. Bending over the stone, smelling earth up close, we drank sky off the surface of water." Here the genius of the waters of a particular country, of a certain place under the sun, to shape one's all-too-human doings is as filled with light as the seep of water in Carter's poem is troubled by darkness. The heteroglossia of water, tis many registers of instruction, call for liturgical improvisation and renewed interventions.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Birch, Holly and Oak Leaves in the Waters</td></tr>
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Intimations of the biblical story of creation suffuse Carter's poem, although with a difference: one is called upon here to hover over the shallows, instead of the depths, as in the case of the Most High, in order to confront an elemental darkness. A muddied one, to be precise. The depths, <i>tehom </i>in Hebrew, of the account in Genesis, are offered a surprising counterpoint here. The shallows, it turns out, are demanding in their own way. Another surprise is that the poem brings the upright human down to the level of the crouching animal in order that the former might be instructed in humility in regard to its creatureliness. One is called then to the poverty of a drinking that bears neither human hand nor any cup fashioned by a human hand. Human preeminence is questioned, as the drinker is deprived of her or his usual props. But a grace remains. Darkness is permeated with the taste of oak leaves. That is a darkness one might be able to bear. That is the gift of Rosemary's Spring.<br />
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<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-10915829125792234872018-02-09T15:50:00.001-08:002018-02-11T22:10:23.005-08:00Marsh Grasses and Corn Cobs: Tundra Swans Wintering on the Chesapeake <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tundra Swans Arriving at Nightfall</td></tr>
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Winter evenings set in early, so Tom Horton, spokesperson for all things Chesapeake, makes sure we reach the headwaters of the Chicamacomico River before the buglers begin to arrive. After leaving the vans parked a discrete distance from our final destination, Tom and his students walk down a gravel road to the edge of a network of marshes interlaced with open water, an old mill pond now mostly filled in and located to one side of Highway 50. In the distance, a steady stream of cars obliviously pass by, their headlamps flickering through the trees surrounding our site. In the chilling air, we quickly settle down on blankets, or lean against tree trunks, staring out into the deepening evening with notebook and pen in hand, ready to write down our thoughts, should any arrive, at a moment's notice. But the real wait is for the Tundra Swans themselves.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Waiting for the Swans to Arrive</td></tr>
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Our vigilance is soon rewarded. Each flight arrives, a few birds at a time, fast-moving, ghostly blurs nearly swallowed up in the growing darkness. Even in the dim light, the grace and strength of their movement is undeniable. As each successive flight plows into the Chicamacomico's waters, it is enthusiastically greeted by a growing cacophony of fellow travelers. "A four foot windpipe can make a lot of noise," Horton notes later. At the time, I wonder at how it might be to be a swan in the midst of swans, to be settling into cold waters for a night's sleep while bugling out my lungs, my feathered skull filled with the din of voices from kith and kin. I ask Tom if the commotion goes on for very long. "Off and on all night," is his reply. "They might quiet down a bit before dawn but mostly you're in for a noisy sleep if your tent is pitched nearby."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Ruckus of Feeding Swans</td></tr>
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Tom's love for these great birds is infectious. For the previous two hours he has been leading us literally on a wild swan chase, as the vans sped down backroads in the fading afternoon light to locate where the birds have been feeding for the day. At first we have no luck. The site Tom scouted the day before, fields that were planted with watermelon during the long, humid summers typical of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, are now deserted. Finally we turn down Ravenswood off of Middletown Branch Road to find a good number of swans out in an expanse of stubble. The birds are strung out along an elevated irrigation pipeline, clustering into familial pods of mating adults accompanied by their maturing offspring. "If you listen," Tom points out, "you can hear the young ones making a sound that's not yet a bugle. More like a 'chirrup.' They're still learning to sound like a swan." The students, following Tom's lead, half walk and half wade across a wet field to the edge of a wide drainage ditch. On the other side a few hundred feet away the swans perk up, a sea of heads pivoting in unison to gaze in our direction and suss out what's afoot. A good number take to the air and then settle down again a bit farther out. The rest remain on the ground, not yet convinced we are a force to be reckoned with.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taking Notes in the Company of Tom and Tundra Swans</td></tr>
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As the students watch and listen, Tom shares Tundra Swan lore. These birds, he explains, have been arriving from the arctic reaches of Alaska and Canada to winter in the Chesapeake for nigh on 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. Before that it's anyone's guess exactly where summer and winter ranges were located. But now the birds before us have flown across a continent, their newest generation in tow, to be here. Before the last hundred years or so, the swan's winter range was focused on the bay itself, where an abundance of grasses - redhead, widgeon, and sage pondweed, among others - provided rich opportunities for feeding. But increasingly these sources are disappearing from the waters of the Chesapeake, as the bay succumbs to depredation by humans and, ironically. also by the Mute Swan, a European import and cousin of the Tundra Swan. Nevertheless, Tundra Swans are resourceful omnivores, so they have switched to handy food sources nearby in the plowed fields bordering on the bay and its network of marshes. Walking out into the stubble of this particular field, one sees everywhere discarded cobs, stripped of corn and left by the combines to rot back into the soil. The harvest, it turns out, misses enough kernels to feed a host of swans. One has to admire an agricultural process that keeps a fellow living kind well fed, even as it nourishes us humans and our livestock too.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tom Horton in Thoughtful Mode</td></tr>
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But Tom cautions against being too satisfied with this state of affairs. In an era of mass species extinction, when the populations of a wide range of living kinds are plummeting across the face of the earth, the survival of the Tundra Swan is not at all assured. Tom notes that the fate of this swan is tied up even more with the fate of the arctic tundra than it is with its feeding grounds in the Chesapeake. As the former undergoes climate change, the permafrost is melting and with this the marshy pools of water stretching across the reaches of the arctic north, crucial to the swans' thriving, will diminish, if not out and out disappear. By 2080 the Audubon Society estimates 61% of the northern range of the Tundra Swan, which is the place where they mate, bear their young and regain body mass lost during the hard travel and less fruitful feeding of the winter months, is going to be gone. The tundra will have ceased to be tundra, at least as we have heretofore understood this term to mean something. <br />
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Perhaps the most crucial bit of information Tom offers about the swans is that there are, in the entire world, only 140,000 of them. That number is not at all a lot of one kind of a living kind. Just in the United States there are around 180 towns and cities with more human beings, big boisterous primates, than there are Tundra Swans, feathered and aloft, on the entire planet. Joliet, Illinois or Mesquite Texas alone has as many people as there are Tundra Swans altogether. Even if we see these great and graceful birds in noisy congregations of hundreds and even thousands, it's important to keep in mind that each mating pair needs a minimum of two square miles of fruitful tundra if they are going to successfully produce offspring and then raise them. The adults put in a lot of work doing so, and if their efforts over the long haul prove unsuccessful, their kind disappears. We humans need to keep in mind that the fauna of a more-than-human living world are not merely mindless automatons effortlessly reproducing themselves down through the ages. Mom and dad, at least in the case of swans and cranes, of robins and nuthatches, of eagles and osprey, as well as many other similar living kinds, have to show up and put in significant time. And this effort on the part of individual birds and other fauna to sustain their own living kind calls for our respect.<br />
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Thom Van Dooren, in his brilliant study of endangered birds titled <i>Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction</i>, reminds his reader that the disappearance of a living kind from the face of the earth does not occur in a single moment with the cutting of a single thread, but rather is the outcome of a massive unraveling over generations of a particular species' entanglement with its habitat and a host of other living kinds In the last century or so, a lot of unraveling has been occurring in the Chesapeake region, but the swans have been busy re-entangling themselves in the land and waterscapes of their winter home. If bay grasses disappear, the swans possess the genius to reengineer their residency, to seek out kernels of corn and fallen soy beans amidst the stubble. And they are not so shy that they can't spend the long winter nights on open waters in the vicinity of highways busy with traffic. The question Tom and his students, as well as the writer of this blog, are left with, is whether the swans possess enough genius to resist our massive altering of both their summer and winter habitats, or whether we humans might even find a way to temper our activities and make more room on the planet for a lot more of more-than-human living kinds. A world without tundra swans would be a poorer world indeed.<br />
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-37483975835700902122017-04-28T06:43:00.001-07:002017-04-28T06:51:52.376-07:00"Most Unfortunately, We Have a Plan."<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amitav Ghosh at the Wilson Center</td></tr>
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60,000,000 human beings, notes Amitav Ghosh, are currently migrating across the face of the earth, vast arrays of the homeless in search of a home, any home at all, under the sun. This ongoing dislocation of humankind fleeing intractable wars and regimes of terror, sustained famine and abject poverty, accompanied, as they are, by innumerable drownings on the high seas and mass incarceration on the lands of newly-found shores, constitute the largest movement of human populations that has ever been witnessed in human history. And this phenomenon, Ghosh reminds us, is in no small part due to the economic and ecological contortions that both have wrought and have been wrought by the catastrophe that is named Global Climate Change, a situation that is only going to become worse in the coming decades.<br />
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Ghosh's talk on "The Great Derangement: Global Warming and the Unthinkable" took place on April 26th at the Wilson Center in D.C. at a meeting of the Washington History Seminar, just a few days before the Global Climate March planned for April 29th. Situated in a building across a narrow public walkway from the doors of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, an institution now intently oblivious to all talk about human-caused GCC, the Wilson Center provided a telling venue for Ghosh's theme. He began his talk by sharing the history of his own family, displaced by a massive flood in Bangladesh a few generations back, an event that killed the majority of the persons living in a village that now no longer exists. The theme of forced migration then is personal for him.<br />
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Perhaps most probing philosophically was Ghosh's discussion near the opening of his talk on the plight of a global culture framed by the European Enlightenment and, as a result, no longer capable of even recognizing catastrophic changes of the environmental variety, let alone amending one's practices to allow for them. The modern novel is symptomatic of this situation, Ghosh argues, in which the natural world is repeatedly rendered as a mass of static details against which the singular actions of individual humans then emerge, heroically or otherwise, to be recognized as such. This manner of proceeding is a new phenomenon, one that ends up locating the uncanny, if it is to be found at all, in the solely-human rather than in the world surrounding us. But the tiger's gaze and the course of a flood are uncanny in ways that call for a different manner of conceiving the issue of how one is to be aware and to act. We are, Ghosh argues, surrounded by animate others, more-than-human forces and realities that are capable of intervening in human thought and life, and have been doing so all along, regardless of our own obliviousness to them. Earth is, it turns out, not so different from the planet of Solaris, as it is pictured in Stanislaw Lem's novel by the same name, over-brimming with protean energy and intent on its own ways.<br />
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That the manner in which one writes of the world becomes determinative of how one understands oneself capable of acting in it is an important insight. During the emergence of an era of Global Climate Change, the political state has repeatedly assumed the non-exceptionality of the earthly, that mass of inert and uniform details against which the magnificence of human activity, its technological capacity to effect change and regulate its surroundings, purportedly shows its stuff. This is what gives us atomic power plants and middle class housing developments located on the very lip of oceans. exposed willy nilly to voracious forces that eventually come calling. Earlier peoples would not have been so presumptuous, Ghosh argues. Or at the very least they would have recognized more quickly the folly of building a civilization as if the planet were its plaything.<br />
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At the core of Ghosh's lecture then was a plea for a discursive retooling of our modes of recognition, for our adopting manners of speaking and writing that stand ready to attend to that which exceeds our own all-too-human capacity to have anticipated it. "The tiger's gaze is invisible - and then it is not!," Ghosh reflects. So too is global warming. In this wise, Ghosh is grateful for the gravity and straightforwardness found in the lucid prose of Pope Francis's <i>Laudato Si</i>, as opposed to the intricate indirection and celebratory claptrap of the recent Paris Climate Accords. The pope speaks of a "catastrophe," but the nations insist on rendering the situation as a set of "adverse impacts." Further, the hunger for miracles, whether they be supernatural ones fashioned by the Most High or technological ones fashioned by humans, must be kept in check, if we are to attend soberly to the plight in which we are entangled. If the Pope already knows this, Gosh wonders, why is this insight so difficult to attain for the secular authorities to whom the fate of an entire planet has been entrusted? <br />
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In the time after Ghosh's talk reserved for questions, a member of the audience observed in regard to the overwhelming forces unleashed by Global Climate Change, "people are paralyzed by what they have created," and wondered whether Ghosh might offer some small shred of hope, or at least a word of advice, that might move us beyond our intransigency. Ghosh's response was characteristically sober: "This thing we think of as paralysis is not really paralysis. Rather we know, and we have a plan - to do nothing and let others die." These are not soothing sentiments. A bit later in response to yet another questioner asking in a similar vein "What words would you leave us with that are not simply succumbing to despair?." Ghosh again resisted any easy reply. He spoke instead against a teleological view of history in which human actions inevitably lead to universal contentment and liberation. "The arc of history has moved again toward strife," he observed and reflected on Carl Schmidt's notion of history as a "labyrinth," in which "we do not see where the exits and entrances lie." He continued: "For Buddha human life is sorrowful. Why do we insist on an inevitable movement to a happy ending?"<br />
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Precisely the sobriety of Ghosh's response, of his refusal to participate in magical thinking in the throe of radical emergency, is the example called for in a time all too often characterized by its inattentiveness, misdirection and even delusion. Ghosh reminds us in the words of Jean-Pierre Dupuy: "We attack and harm nature, not because we hate it, but because we hate each other." The Great Derangement is finally a product of our own selfishness and hardened hearts, indeed, of our knowing complicity, even as it remains astutely unacknowledged, in a world in which others are eaten as if they are merely our daily dole of bread. Generosity begins at home, but so too violence. These are likely more helpful sentiments to carry us into a difficult future than those provided currently by the technocratic imperium, obsessed as it is with interpreting catastrophe as a set of adverse impacts, wth promoting the virtue of overcoming the intractable rather than learning to live uneasily with it.<br />
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<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-19053111642938857142017-02-17T11:12:00.000-08:002017-02-17T14:01:24.301-08:00Larapinta: Extinction, Temporal Discernment and the Reaches of Creation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Water Hole on Finke River/ <i> </i>in Evening Light</td></tr>
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I was out of touch. After a night of uneasy sleep, still topsy turvy with half-remembered dreams, I wobbled out into the early morning light of Glen Helen Homestead and sat down on a bench overlooking the waters of the Finke River. It was time to take stock. Of what exactly was unclear - of the last week, month, or year, or perhaps even of an entire lifetime, at least as much as the latter had progressed so far. In my 67th year to heaven, as Dylan Thomas might have put it, should he have lived so long, I found myself again in the Red Center, looking yet again to make some sort of contact with what matters. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stone Marking <i>Tjilpa </i>Country</td></tr>
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A few years ago, I had spent a week in these environs with anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose engaged in preliminary ethnographic research regarding Dasyurus geoffroii, the Western Quoll, also known as <i>Tjilpa</i> to the Arrernte families here traditionally responsible for its well-being (See Rose and Hatley, 2011). Like many of its marsupial kin in the area, Dasyurus geoffroii is a threatened species, yet one more living kind being summarily consigned to non-existence in an era of mass species extinction. In fact, this marsupial cat, as it is has sometimes been called by Europeans, has long since disappeared, at least in the flesh, from these surroundings and is now only found in the wild in the southwestern corner of the continent. Nevertheless, <i>Tjilpa</i> remains in this country a ceremonial presence, its dreaming still a powerful element of Arrernte cultural life. I witnessed during that visit how even in the shadow of its absence, <i>Tjilpa </i>still<i> </i>reaches out to touch those who would remain faithful to it. And now I had returned to express my own commitment, however fraught it might be with the destructive legacies of European settlement, to this living kind's continued life upon the face of the earth.<br />
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Thinking about mass species extinction as one's day to day activity leads to a disquieting way of life. When Deborah Bird Rose, along with Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew, instituted the Extinction Studies Working Group in 2013, we were well aware that the challenges presented by our subject were as much spiritual as conceptual. One's love for the diverse creatures wth whom we humans from our very beginnings have shared a home on the face of the earth, leaves one, here and now, the target of terrible knowledge and uncanny grief. At the bottom of it, one is called upon to witness a degree of disloyalty on the part of humanity to its more than human kin that is not easy to bear. The temptation is either to succumb to anger, becoming consumed with rage, or to yield to despair by simply growing numb. Even worse, one can just let the madness of it all settle in, giving free rein to the mania and incoherency feeding the catastrophe. One acts as if all is well, regardless of what might actually be the case. One denies climate change and habitat loss, as if reality can be dismissed with a quip. When worlds are ending, it turns out, for those who remain the shopping can be fantastic. At least temporarily.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dragon Perched on Stone in Ormiston Gorge</td></tr>
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Yet what is really required is the courage to remain faithful to all involved, both the human and more-than-human living kinds who make their homes here. Half a continent away to the east in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, both eastern and western quolls can be found at the Secret Creek Nature Sanctuary, thriving not in the wild but in pens designed to protect their inhabitants from the marauding cats and foxes permeating the countryside. The quolls are cared for by former coal miner Trevor Evans. A prodigious soul bustling with energy, Trevor once looked me straight in the eyes and said wth blunt frankness: "If you write about a creature, about a living kind, then you owe it. You shouldn't just write something, and then walk away."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Blooming on the Finke River</td></tr>
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Those words have stuck with me. And so these several years later, contemplating retirement and the looming question of what to do next, I had repaired to the Red Center to revivify my faith in things in general and Western Quolls in particular. Arrernte artist and author Margaret <i>Kamarre</i> Turner puts succinctly the devastation wrought by European settlement here when she writes: "The land's...been turned upside down" (<i>Kemarre </i>Turner, 192). Yet she also observes: "We see our country, even though it might be destroyed by another species, we see how the beautiness is still in the country. It doesn't matter that horses and bullocks have caused such destruction, we still the spirit of that Land glistening" (<i>Kemarre </i>Turner, 141). If nothing else, I had hoped, perhaps in my just witnessing a place in which so much is still flourishing, in which the very land still speaks of quolls, even if they are not so easily found, healing and insight might be offered. Yet after a week of motoring about the desert, stopping here and there to be still and listen, or at times even to kneel down on the earth and observe as closely as possible the goings on (lots and lots of ants!), I was still more than a bit lost.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cliffs overlooking Larapinta</td></tr>
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And this brings me back to that moment recounted above on the banks of a river. Known on contemporary Australian maps as the Finke. <i>Larapinta</i> rises in the McDonnel range of the Red Center and then meanders several hundred miles before disappearing into the arid reaches of the Simpson Desert. Named in 1872 after a benefactor in Adelaide bankrolling an expedition into these parts, the earliest European account of the river's Arendan name mistakenly understood it as a word denoting the rainbow serpent; only later did it become clear that <i>Larapinta</i> refers to the briny waterholes dotting the riverscape (Koch and Hercus, 292). Still, the river's serpentine course bordered by white sands and green marshes twisting left and right across the desert floor - as if the the milky way had looked down to find its reflection on the face of the earth - makes the mistaken translation a bit more forgivable and perhaps even inspiring.<br />
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Reading one of the earliest accounts of contact between European outsiders and the Arrernte people on the banks of this river is instructive. In his journal, Ernest Giles writes: "We made an attempt at a long conversation, but signally failed, for
neither of us knew many of the words the other was saying. The only
bit of information I obtained from them was their name for the river – as
they kept continually pointing to it and repeating the word Larapinta" (Koch and Hercus, 291). The river itself then serves as the hinge of encounter, the auspicious occasion for the first word shared between one people and another. Personally, I am saddened when I read Giles's characterization of the medium of this precious exchange as "a bit of information." So much went wrong so quickly when whitefella met blackfella, but in this first interchange might be found a hint as to another way in which the settlement culture now housed at Glen Helen Homestead might find its way into the truth of things in this place under the sun. Something much more than "bits of information" will be involved.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Ancient River Gum" by Roland Hemmert</td></tr>
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And so early on November 29, 2016, if I had been keeping a diary at the time, I might have written something like this: "<i>I am not sure what is happening as I face the great glistening cliffs hovering over the river this morning. I do not know its name, but I am being touched by it and heartened, my anxieties eased, my despair assuaged. I have been scurrying to and fro over the floor of the desert looking for a sign these last days when all along the earth was speaking loud and clear right outside my door."</i><br />
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This experience is one that is more often than not dismissed these days as romantic claptrap by many of my scholarly colleagues. And perhaps more often than not, they are right to be suspicious of, if not outright scandalized by, yet another denizen of the non-Indigenous world seeking out sunny climes usurped from other peoples in order to feed her or his appetite for spiritual enlightenment. All the while, all around one, the catastrophic consequences of colonial usurpation continue unabated. Better perhaps to pack up and leave and go home. Of course, the very home one would return to is itself stolen land. The more one thinks about the position of the great-grand-children of colonial settlers upon the face of the earth, the more homeless one realizes she or he might be.<br />
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<i>Larapinta</i> is among a small group of rivers, it turns out, whose courses are older than the mountains surrounding them. When one views the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, one looks down at waters that began carving into the earth some six millions years ago. The story gets more complicated when geologists note that earlier rivers had already begun sculpting these canyons, so that the defiles themselves go back some 70 millions years (Greenfield-Boyce). This is already a long ways. But <i>Larapinta </i>adopted another strategy altogether, continuing to meander over the face of the earth, even as mountain ranges were thrusting up around it, inch by inch (Pickup (1988), Wells (1988), Haines (2001)). The path the river follows is now 300 to 400 million years old, older by far than the diverse species of marsupials, <i>Tjilpa </i>among them, now making their home here. As a whole they have only been in residence upon the earth for the last 90 million years. Yet next to these we humans are rank newcomers. <br />
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When one is called upon to take stock of one's time upon the face of the earth, one would do well to consider the immensity of the past into which one's own life is rooted. European colonists were convinced that the earth was a recent phenomenon, no more than four or five thousands years in age. While other cultures might not have quantified so precisely the time involved, they seemed far more aware and respectful of a temporal depth to earthly existence transcending the human capacity to conceive of it in straightforward terms. They realized we humans are in need of discernment to understand how time itself provides for us. We were not here upon the face of the earth, when <i>Larapinta</i> first arose, nor when <i>Tjilpa </i>first set foot on the desert floor surrounding its banks. <br />
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The birth of a living kind is not an overnight phenomenon. <i>Larapinta </i>instructs us concerning the powers at work on the face of the earth, powers that mold the living kinds, that call the very dust of stones into the restless shapes moving through time that are both ourselves and our biological kin. Before we who are now living can begin to appreciate what is involved in the threatened loss of <i>Tjilpa </i>among many others in a time of mass species extinction, we would do well to listen to what this river has to tell us about the reaches of creation.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7yIYjQ31KwvWfyaK06m9UnJm4-k1P4iiOZw3IU7tlBK4maBcgCKnbFkCkDiVn01OyWdSLjrrM7Qr0CWPwoQRoNnevz53_-DnNrX7V48h71yK5nFUvFfPjz80Svft3SeDwK2H4CeYuAjY/s1600/IMGP1429.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7yIYjQ31KwvWfyaK06m9UnJm4-k1P4iiOZw3IU7tlBK4maBcgCKnbFkCkDiVn01OyWdSLjrrM7Qr0CWPwoQRoNnevz53_-DnNrX7V48h71yK5nFUvFfPjz80Svft3SeDwK2H4CeYuAjY/s400/IMGP1429.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hills Overlooking <i>Larapinta's </i>Waters Transformed into Molten Light/</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Tj-w2NpVLhkGBmeAC_ci5Pm3UGl7YbiyEmPxzpdfhz-UeIe0B_-SF0ZQtNUPAGjoSD1PKpB-Zwn7DHRIty5xgUNjCPLpQn-r8IIFEIjyAKF9WGFLir0yf292upKBg8l8553IBkSKdmM/s1600/FinkeRivef2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Tj-w2NpVLhkGBmeAC_ci5Pm3UGl7YbiyEmPxzpdfhz-UeIe0B_-SF0ZQtNUPAGjoSD1PKpB-Zwn7DHRIty5xgUNjCPLpQn-r8IIFEIjyAKF9WGFLir0yf292upKBg8l8553IBkSKdmM/s320/FinkeRivef2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">River Gum near <i>Larapinta</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Works Cited<br />
<br />
Edinburgh, Unviersity of. "Origin and Evolution of Marsupials." University Natural History Collection Website: http://www.nhc.ed.ac.uk/index.php?page=493.168.256<br />
<br />
Greenfield Boyce, Nell. "The Grand Canyon May be Older (and Younger) than you Think." NPR Website. January 27, 2014: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/27/265437261/grand-canyon-may-be-older-and-younger-than-you-think<br />
<br />
Haines P.W., Hand M., Sanford M. "Palaeozioc synorogenic sedimentation in central and northern Australia: a review of distribution and timing with implications for the evolution of intracontinental orogens." <i>Australia Journal of Earth Sciences</i>. Vol. 48, no. 6 (2001): 911-928.<br />
<br />
Hemmert, Roland. "Ancient River Gum," a pastel composed and completed in <i>pleine aire</i> nearby the <i>Larapinta</i>, is in my collection of artwork. More can be read about Roland's work at: http://www.rolandhemmert.com.au/<br />
<br />
<i>Kemarre</i> Turner, Margaret. <i>Iwenhe Tyerrtye -what it means to be an Aboriginal person </i>(Alice Springs: IAD Press, 2010).<br />
<br />
Koch, Harold and Hercus, Luise. <i>Aboriginal Place Names: Naming and Renaming the Australian Landscape </i>(Canberra: ANU E Press and Aboriginal History, Inc., 2009) Access: http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p17331/pdf/book.pdf?referer=81<br />
<br />
Pickup G., Allan G., Bakerr V.R. "History, palaechannels and palaeofloods of the Finke River, central Australia. <i>Fluvial Geomorphology of Australia</i>. Warner, R.F., ed. (London: Academic Press, 1988), pp. 177-200.<br />
<br />
Rose, Deborah Bird, and Hatley, James. "Tjilpa - Quoll - Native Cat - Dasyurus geoffroii - Dreaming - Vulnerable." Blog originally published on the Extinction Studies Working Group Website in 2011. For an archived copy see:<br />
https://www.academia.edu/2337677/Tjilpa_Quoll_Native_Cat_Dasyurus_geoffroii_Dreaming_Vulnerable_Coming_home<br />
<br />
Wells, A.T., Forman, D.J., Ranford L.C., Cook, P.J. "Geology of the Amadeus Basin, Central Australia. <i>Bureau of Mineral Resources, Australia Bulletin</i> (1988), p. 100.<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12.6px;"> </span><br />
<br />
<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-47258689378849392202017-02-01T10:58:00.000-08:002017-02-08T08:01:51.706-08:00Haunted by Dragonflies<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Green Emerald Patrolling the Rockhole at <i>Rungutjirpa</i></td></tr>
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A deep cleft splitting the mountains asunder, <i style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Rungutjirpa </i><span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">has been known</span> for 40,000 years or so <span style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">to the Arrernte People of central Australia as a site of creation. A Goanna Dreaming is storied here, their tussling long ago putting things today as they are. For the last 200 years or so Whitefellas have know the place as </span></span>Simpson's Gap, in honor of the same geographer, A. A. Simpson, whose name also serves to designate a nearby desert and more distant cape. Whether the life of a Whitefella geographer constitutes a dreaming serious enough to merit being mentioned in these environs is not an unimportant question. Personally, I am not so confident of a positive outcome. And so even if doing so makes me more than a bit uncomfortable, calling on the tongue of the very people whom the people of my tongue have so persistently displaced, I end up referring to this site in its Arrendan rather than English instantiation.<br />
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Following anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose's example, I come first to <i style="color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Rungutjirpa</i> whenever I reenter the country of the red center. Showing up here is not something to be taken lightly. In late afternoon the green waters lapping at the rocky foot of the cleft catch bits of sun and bushels of shadow. After clambering around a boulder or two, I settle down on a spot along a bit of sandy shore overhung by stone and stare up into the airy heights and then down into liquid depths. Their muddy bottom is likely only a few meters below my folded knees, but what the waters suggest are abysses as deep as creation itself. The immensity of the world above is effortlessly gathered onto the pond's surface, an image shuddering with the passing of every breath of air. We are, the waters whisper, agile enough to encompass all that is illumined. And, they could just as well add, all that is not illumined.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wandering Percher Resting<br />
on the Path to <i>Rungutjirpa</i></td></tr>
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The sun flashes on the wings of a green dragonfly, a single Emerald Tau (Hemicordulia tau), capering and gliding in great figure eights over the length of the pool. Below its path more diminutive wandering perchers (Diplacodes bipunctata) hover near the water's surface into which they are regularly dipping their red, red abdomens, as thin as colored pencil leads, as they lay their eggs. Just above these yet others are coupling in flight, male with female. The wandering perchers are less standoffish, coming near from time to time to perch, just as their name promises, abdomen flexed upward on stone within an arm's reach. The Emerald Tau, on the other hand, circuits ceaselessly never alighting anywhere. Scooping up mosquitos and gnats on the go with its opened jaws, the dragonfly replenishes its energy and continues to claim its spot under the sun. Other males will be driven away. At one point he even breaks off from his path and rushes toward me, hovering at eye level four or five feet away for a few moments. I can't help but think he is making clear that I am in his sights.<br />
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The globular eyes of dragonflies are famously immense compound organs, honeycombed with 30,000 or so "ommatidea," each of which in turn is shaped in a hexagon composed of a lens fixed over a small patch of light-sensitive cells. But even if we know precisely the anatomy involved, what the dragonfly actually sees is not so certain. Some theorize its field of vision is a vast mosaic cobbling together individual bits of light, others that the outlines of things are not so distinct even as any movement nearby is magnified thirty-thousandfold, others that the dragonfly's visual field circles a full 360 degrees around its body, effectively immersing it in a globe of illumination. Its tail would be as available to it as its forelimbs. Possessing no fewer than eleven and as many as thirty chromatic opsins (proteins with distinct sensitivities to color in the diverse rods of its many retinas), it is rumored the dragonfly lives in a far more colorful, even ultra-chromatic universe. I wonder then what the Emerald Tau makes of the redness of the red earth here, already intense to my mammalian eyes with only three opsins to call upon, not to mention the overwhelmingly blue sky stretching overhead. What boiling bubbles of color might my own mammalian flesh be for these non-mammalian eyes?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Green Emerald over the Waters</td></tr>
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"When we appeared in their eyes/ we were strangers": In these lines from his poem "After the Dragonflies" (Merwin, 2016), W. S. Merwin wonders not only of how foreign we might seem to this living kind but also of how enigmatic and perplexing we become to ourselves when we muse upon our own all-too-human image making itself at home in a dragonfly's perceptions. At the core of the exchange of light between one species and another, the eyes work magic, bringing the flesh of another living kind, or at the very least its facsimile, into one's most intimate depths. The Bible might have well proclaimed that man has been made in the <i>tselem</i>, the image or imprint, of the Most High but should have added that immediately this image radiates outward into the eyes of arthropods and amphibians, of mammals and birds. And when we turn to the world surrounding us and see ourselves there being seen by all these others, might this not be just as disconcerting and unsettling, as our seeing ourselves in the gaze of the Creator? "Where art thou?", the dragonfly is asking. Easier to imagine oneself in the mind of God than in that of an arthropod. But the latter meditation offers its own peculiar invitation into spiritual insight, into humility before and complicity with others that undoes the assumption that one's loyalties can be confined to one's own hominoid skin.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Golden Winged Skimmer in my Garden in Salisbury, MD</td></tr>
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These days, dragonflies are doing well at <i>Rungutjirpa</i> but not so well in one's own backyard. W. S. Merwin's poem imagines a world in which dragonflies, once "as common as sunlight," have disappeared. And already to a degree they have, given the persistent applications in urban areas across the planet of a diverse array of insecticides targeting mosquitoes. A governmental study recently concludes, "Virtually every pesticide currently used to manage mosquito populations has the potential to adversely impact nontarget species" (USFWS, 14). The adverse effects, for example of mathoprene, has been observed in fourteen aquatic taxa including odonata, the dragonflies and damselflies (Breaud <i>et al.)</i>. I remember, as Merwin does, a time in my childhood when dragonflies aplenty helicoptered about the yard, hooked to one another in dazzles of profligate and promiscuous mating. Not so in my garden today despite its proximity to an entire landscape of marshes and swamps comprising the eastern shore of Maryland. The dragonfly population just outside my door regularly crashes throughout the summer One can only theorize as to why. Even more troubling is a recent German study which hints that the biomass of insects is plummeting across the face of the earth as complex ecosystems are transformed into huge swaths of monoculture regularly seasoned with pesticides. A trap set up in the Orbroicher Bruch Nature Reserve that yielded 3.5 pounds of diverse species of insects in 1989 only yielded 10.6 ounces in 2014 (Schwaegerl, 2016). Something is afoot. <br />
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Images of dragonflies abound on the internet. We humans love to observe this particular creature in all its intimate details, to hold its taxonomical characteristics fixedly and precisely in our imagination. This often results in what might be termed the money shot, one in which every filament and hair, every anatomical detail, is rendered with precision. The results are truly spectacular if not just a bit pornographic. One wonders whether a picture of a human being similarly rendered might be similarly sought out and for what reasons. Imagine a close up focusing on every hair and pore, not to mention the nearly microscopic mites inevitably finding their way into such environs, speckling the face of a fashion model. So much for Descartes' notion of a clear and distinct idea.<br />
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Colonial seizure of lands often involved the renaming and reimagining of things in a manner that was not necessarily intent on who was involved. The land might speak, but we Whitefellas weren't necessarily interested in listening. Goannas might dream, but Geographers were for the most part fixed on describing, delimiting, and classifying topographical features. And of making maps so one could know where to find them again. The colonial project in a nutshell: uncover, designate and store for future use. The images of dragonflies mentioned above made with a view to fixing the precise details of their taxonomy fit well into this attitude. In lieu of these the images offered on this blog hopefully move toward the iconic if not the Icon. The living kinds involved have not been removed from their habitat and held firmly in place between one's fingers or by means of some other implement in order to get the money shot. Instead, the photographs here verge on the oneiric, as the gesture of a dragonfly's flight over the waters of <i>Rungutjirpa </i>actively threads a line between darkness and light. One is hopefully summoned into a world revealed through the powers of a fellow creature. Are we willing to live in the company of dragonflies, to invite them into our most secret recesses? I pray that we are.<br />
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Works Cited</div>
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Breaud, T. P., J. E. Farlow, C. D. Steelman, and P.E. Schilling. 1977, "Effects of the insect growth regulator methoprene on natural populations of aquatic organisms in Louisiana intermediate marsh habitats Mosquitoe News 37: 704-712.</div>
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Merwin, W. S. "After the Dragonflies," Matthew Zapruder, ed. <i>New York Times Magazine</i>. July 22, 2016. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/24/magazine/ws-merwin-after-the-dragonflies.html?_r=0. Accessed, December 15, 2016.</div>
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Schwaegerl, Christian. "What's Causing the Sharp Decline in Insects, and Why it Matters." <i>Yale</i> <i>Environment 360</i>. July 16, 2016. URL: http://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters. Accessed, December 15, 2016.</div>
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USFWS. "Environmental Effects of Mosquito Control: Appendix K." Edwards, 2004. URL: https://www.fws.gov/cno/refuges/DonEdwards/CCP-PDFs/Appendix-K4_EffectsofMosquitoControl.pdf. Accessed, December 15, 2016. No longer accessible on USFWS Website.<br />
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</style>Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-11224979518521161592016-10-25T16:55:00.005-07:002018-02-01T15:08:21.274-08:00Salmon Creation: A Midrash<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The following entry was written after spending time on Sitka Island observing the Salmon run on Indian River. In Tlingit these waters are named <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kaasda Heeni,</i> perhaps best translated into English as “Human's River.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>A story is told that the Tlingit once saw a canoe moving upstream, powered by people they did not recognize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When they investigated, they found a log with frogs perched on it, drifting in the current.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Salmon over a Redd</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 11pt;">I. Salmon Run Reverie</span><br />
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In August the chum, dog salmon,
arrive, at first insubstantial, green shadows flickering over green stones,
green shadows slipping noiselessly between fingers of light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But soon the fish thicken in the river, settle
in, their great bodies churning the waters, flashes of silver, backbones
clothed in gray-green bands bending to the current, yellow dorsal fins,
translucent and extended, cutting into the surface of waves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From time to time a thick ribbon of flesh smothered
in scales flashes up from the depths as a salmon turns on its flank and arches
sideways toward the heavens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Females
pick out spots in the channels and burrow into the riverbed, beating on the
gravel with tails and bellies to hollow out a redd, while two or three males
cluster around them, jostling one another, one male sometimes swimming upstream
then curving </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Males Fighting for Position</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">back and descending with the force of the current on the others,
teeth sinking into meat, tails thrashing the waters, suitors' jockeying for
position.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The fish, both male and
female, no longer eat, </span>oils stored in their muscles leaching out to feed the growing genitalia.<span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Spawning females pump
out roe, a thousand or more reddish translucent spheres the size of peas, to be
bathed in clouds of milt by the males before burial in the gravel.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Eagles descend on the river, bears too and
ravens, all intent on tearing away their daily dole of salmon.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Brown bears biting off with expert precision
a chunk of the skull, intent on the protein and fat in the brain, another chunk
of the belly in the case of the female, where her ovaries are charged with
unfertilized eggs, the eagles dancing around one another on the banks stripping
meat off the bones of a landed fish, the ravens crowding in afterward for the
scraps.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">All of this over and over and
over again, for days without end, and then the emaciated bodies of salmon,
their flesh growing leprous in ivory splotches, muscles and organs shriveling
until all that is left is skin and skeleton, the eyes caved in and glazed over
in death, that is, unless they have been picked out already by the beak of a
raven.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">In the end, for days the entire
river stinks of rotting meat.</span></div>
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By the next spring, buried in the gravel the roe hatches, the fry
emerge and a new generation begins.<o:p></o:p></div>
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II. <i>Tohu v'Bohu:</i> Dare we Name it?</div>
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How is one to understand this moment as a moment in and also of
creation?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How exactly has one been
called as a creature to make sense of the salmon consumed with their final run
and its inevitable culmination in morbidity? What is one to make of this way of
life in which life is dispossessed of itself and how this in turn instructs those humans
who come eagerly to be witnesses of it, crowding against one another on the
bridges overlooking the waters?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik4R8qTUhC1z8NuBpN7ovty9bJP69zGhAu0h4FPel3ZD3gnFgxedUpStZZUMeULEDQatbcby26QM1WejCuQgvHC4D3BkkLhBr179ZkFNomjPydKqLh383KWV0QgBpsUnOVWhcapFxWEPQ/s1600/SalmonOffering.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik4R8qTUhC1z8NuBpN7ovty9bJP69zGhAu0h4FPel3ZD3gnFgxedUpStZZUMeULEDQatbcby26QM1WejCuQgvHC4D3BkkLhBr179ZkFNomjPydKqLh383KWV0QgBpsUnOVWhcapFxWEPQ/s320/SalmonOffering.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Final Offering</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="Body">
To learn from salmon is to encounter a questioning, a way of
thinking that is relevant not only to theodicy, the justification of the ways
of the Most High, but also to biodicy, the justification of the ways of life
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In carrying out this latter
project, as in the former, the temptation is to emphasize the illumination
offered by the salmon run, to focus intently upon the very light life sheds
upon itself in its renewal from generation to generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those fry emerging from the redd, no matter
that most suffocate or are eaten within a few days of their hatching, no matter
that their ultimate destination is to return to the very riverbed from which
they emerged to culminate their life in exhaustion and death, these fry, indeed
the very idea of them, indicate a beneficence, a well-doing, that calls forth
life anew even as life dissipates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
in doing so, doing well is said to transcend incapacity, the failure
to do whatsoever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather than on
moments of darkness, of form dissipating into the formless, of meaning losing
its own hold upon itself, one focuses one’s thinking on the magnificence of the
sacrifice of one generation for the sake of the next, on the transcending of
one's particular existence for the goodness of those lives who follow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In doing so, the world comes to be
articulated by principles ordering and affirming its persistence in being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Creation itself in this wise is understood <i>ex
nihilo</i>, as arising in an emergence whose very illumination as emergence
sustains itself ever after by the power of the inauguration of its very
illumination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This might be one
translation of the Hebrew <i>tov</i>, in which the Most High, in the opening
accounts of Genesis, recommends creation as being good in its emergence of
ordering and purpose, in its rendering of distinction within lawful
constraints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once the seven days have
passed, the reverberations of lawful emergence sustain creation into
eternity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once the Word has been spoken,
there is no taking it back. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
But for the Rabbis the significance of Creation is not exhausted
by its goodness, its capacity to illuminate and be illuminated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surprisingly the attribution of purpose as
the overriding significance of Creation is resisted by at least some of the
rabbis as they focus on the opening lines of B'reshit, the Hebraic name for the biblical text called Genesis by Christians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> These dissenters intimate that s</span>omething darker is afoot,
something devastating, afflicting. By focusing on principles, upon the
emergence from the beginning of a lawful edifice by which creation is to be governed, one fully
evades these troubling thoughts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is not to say the discussion
of the issue proceeds without ambivalence. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">MIdrash B’reshit</i>, the opening line of the creation story, "In
the beginning the Most High created," is interpreted by Rav Oshaya and Rav
Hanina<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in a doubled movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the one hand, Rav Oshaya argues the Most
High is to be understood even before the beginning to have created Torah,
learning or wisdom personified, by which the very manner in which Creation is
then to proceed is already laid out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
this wise, the Most High is even pictured as consulting Torah, as a king might
consult an architect in building a palace, in order to proceed in an orderly
manner with the doing of creation, with the construction of its many
chambers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But on the other hand, right
after this discussion Rav Hanina raises the possibility of understanding
Creation as the work of a monarch who "builds a palace on a site of
sewers, dunghills, and garbage," a translation into parable of what is to
be understood by "<i>tohu v'bohu</i>," the "formless and the
void," over which the Most High hovers, in the picturing of the act of
creation in B’reshit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>R. Huna adds,
"If the matter were not written [that creation begins in an
acknowledgement of <i>tohu v'bohu</i>] it would be impossible to say."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
In fact Rav Huna argues one should not say it at all, this
scandalous blasphemy inflected from within the very work of the Most High, the
ambivalent not-so-well-doing of Creation, even if it has been written into the
Torah itself, that one is better off if one's lips were "bound, made dumb,
and silenced."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Involved here are
matters "withheld from His [Elohim's] creatures."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the story that is not to pass one's lips
is recounted just a few sections later when "a certain philosopher"
approaches and interrogates Rav Gamliel about "the good materials"
the Most High called upon in order to create the earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"<i>Tohu</i>, <i>Bohu</i>, <i>Choshech</i>, <i>Mayim, Ruach,</i><i> v'Tehom" - "</i>the void, the formless,<i> </i>darkness, the waters, wind and the deep" - is Rav Gamliel's reply. In justifying his
remarks concerning <i>Tohu, Bohu,</i> and <i>Choshech</i>, the Rav calls upon Isaiah,
where it is written "I make peace and create evil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I form the light and create
darkness."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To this the philosopher
replies: "Woe to that man," meaning, to Gamliel who has just affirmed
chaos in the midst of principle, who has built a house of law upon a primordial
sewer, or in the case of salmon, a river stinking of rotting meat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjqWYioeqWlGrExQjkDuuyKpj065eBz9DGU-EZUSVQ4vds4U50VJ5WPvbprAzw7WO9OMO1rAINOYF1yAw1riSbajnxzMqnTIEnjrebJB4f2AaPps11nc6SUcK-8UfCx4rk5beOK8ypRXM/s1600/Speckled+Waters.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjqWYioeqWlGrExQjkDuuyKpj065eBz9DGU-EZUSVQ4vds4U50VJ5WPvbprAzw7WO9OMO1rAINOYF1yAw1riSbajnxzMqnTIEnjrebJB4f2AaPps11nc6SUcK-8UfCx4rk5beOK8ypRXM/s320/Speckled+Waters.jpeg" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bog Waters</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
III.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Darkness has its Day,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
Taking seriously the train of thought developed above concerning <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tohu v'bohu</i>, Catherine Challier in her
Talmudic study, <i>Le nuit, le jour au diapason de la creation </i>(“Night, Day
in accord with Creation"), speaks on behalf of Creation characterized as
de novo rather than ex nihilo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further,
she understand the former differently than in Maimonides, for whom Creation de
novo was a manner of scrupulously acknowledging the priority of the Most High
in regard to what is created, Creation de novo indicating that there is
particularity in the creature's beginning, that the mundane cannot be dependent
upon the most high as emerging ex nihilo but nevertheless eternally so. Rather
for Maimonides Creation de novo emerges as a specific event with a specific
beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For Chalier, on the other
hand, Creation de novo indicates a Creation ever in crisis, a Creation that
perhaps has not yet actually begun, at least in its fullness, a Creation whose
instantiation is not in "an act situated in a past of long ago" but
one which "occurs here and now." This view fits, she notes, in a
tradition of prayer inaugurated by the Rabbis, who each morning address a Creator "renewing without ceasing the work of creation."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
In this work she includes the Creator's breaking into speech,
affirming logos, in the proximity of <i>tohu v'bohu</i>, the latter of which is
not simply to be characterized as "nothing" but rather as "a
shadowy power of dislocation and confusion, that is to say, of decreation." This power of decreation does not predate Creation but is itself
inflected from within the very drama of Creation de novo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She notes: "If speech is an illumination
for us, this is precisely because speech gives being to differentiated
creatures and that it does so from out of unformed magma." In
Creation discourse comes to itself not from out of a pure nothing, crystalline
and transparent in its emptiness, but in the face of the deep, a "shadowy
disorder and incessant troubling." <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
In Creation de novo understood in this manner, the emergence of
creatures as beings is not assured ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In a sense the beginning has never occurred sufficiently to be a
beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a result, Creation de novo
as understood by Chalier requires that one receives in humility and poverty the
thought of how all one's theories about Creation, all one's stories of
Creation, are themselves already conditioned in a manner beyond one's own
capacity to reason out or to tell, to specify or to locate. Her approach
cultivates discernment concerning the profound even abysmal inability of the
creaturely to account for itself in its own terms, and cultivates sensitivity
to how unendingly vigilant one must be in regard to respecting, attending to,
this impoverishment in one's reasoning. The first thought of Creation then is
cultivating patience in the proximity of shadows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this wise, the very theorem of causation,
that Creation is the outcome of the Most High's capacity to be a cause, is to
be attended to as yet another mode of idolatry, as yet another manner in which
the creature would presumptuously fix the reality of Creator in creaturely
terms.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
IV. Naming Muddam Naming Salmon Naming The Most High<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
Immediately following upon the account of Creation beginning
B'reshit, a second story is offered, both resonating with and differing from
the first.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most important difference
lies perhaps in how the Most High cries out to the heavenly court "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lo tov!,"</i> "not good!,"
upon witnessing the first human, standing singular and alone on the
face of the earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A crisis is brewing
in spite of all the "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tovs</i>,"
all the proclamations of the good that had ensued heretofore in Creation's
first account.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the second account,
the collapsing of tov into its negation moves the Creator to unusual measures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body" style="tab-stops: 229.5pt;">
To understand these one needs first to
consider how in creating the human consumed in loneliness characteristic of the
second account, the very dust of the ground must be gathered, formed, shaped
into the facsimile of a living entity, before breath can be instilled in it by
the inbreathing of the Most High who hovers above the inert form.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As if to underline this fact, in the human's
very being named as "Adam," better translated as “Muddam” or “Dustam”
or "Eartham,” if you will, the very matter of the human creature's being of
matter, that is of "earth/<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">adamah</i>"
is given expression. This matter in turn is worked upon, animated, by the
breath of the Most High, in the case of Muddam, and by the breath of Muddam in
the case of the remaining living creatures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the latter case, with the Most High standing behind Muddam, Muddam is
brought before the newly-formed creatures to name each of them in its own kind through
the power, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tov</i>, the goodness of
his human breath, namely, his speech.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Only in this gesture can the creation of the animals, which began with
the Most High fashioning them from out of the dust of the earth, be accomplished
in its fullness. The verb here is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">i'caro</i>,
“to call,” which suggests the naming is not pronouncement, objective, named
from afar, but a bringing near, a cultivation of proximity. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Most High started it, but Muddam finishes
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this way, among others, the Most
High provides consolation, provides reassurance, for the perilous state of
Muddam's having been created. In all of this are refractions of the first story
of creation, the one in which the Most High hovers above <i>tohu v'bohu</i>/.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizwrluP5wJJzaCfYe0uT7C8bnE17_ZJT7MD-_sutCApwdyDIUcFYfecCHnd0_GpfWHYxnqNf1UgDP8pg1Uhah3MAKwi6ycNxygwvpWPqtnUx6aRDprwvepG6fjsSQXH4WQQtLemmIXppo/s1600/SalmonSwimming.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizwrluP5wJJzaCfYe0uT7C8bnE17_ZJT7MD-_sutCApwdyDIUcFYfecCHnd0_GpfWHYxnqNf1UgDP8pg1Uhah3MAKwi6ycNxygwvpWPqtnUx6aRDprwvepG6fjsSQXH4WQQtLemmIXppo/s320/SalmonSwimming.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In the Current</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="Body">
Even now the dog salmon of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kaasde
Heeni</i>, witnessed last August in their run on rainy days of diminishing sun
in the northern reaches of the planet, even now these salmon are decaying in
these words, even now eagles are ripping these words apart, rendering them
unruly, a descent into shadows and confusion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> This is to say, t</span>hese words name salmon, even as the salmon insist on the impoverishment of all naming, on rendering these very words here
and now creaturely in their attunement, words in search of company, of
creaturely others to share the burden of creation, its inevitable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lo tov</i>, its affliction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
Here is encountered a naming that perhaps for a moment attends to the
grandiose theorem of evolution as teleological development, of the unfolding of
the manifold niches of creation as if it were a palace plotted out by an
architect, even if the project is continually and currently under renovation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But troubling this teleology from within its
very movement is mutation and inexactitude, morbidity and extinction,
instability and loss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And did I mention
everything creaturely is eating everything else that is creaturely in the
process? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="Body">
The Rabbis speculate: Because Muddam has named the animals, he is
now capable of naming himself as Muddam.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And because he now recognizes the humility of humus involved in his own
naming, the Most HIgh feels free to ask him as well:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"What is MY name."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To which Muddam replies with the
four-lettered-one, the four-spelled, the name not named, the name immediately
translated in the mouth of the text's reader as "Adonai," as
Lord.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rashi adds, in the naming of this
name the quality of mercy is engaged. And in the naming of this name, it might
be added, the salmon too are making their run.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Body">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7xcJDUC1N3GmjR6Onm44dR79SIL8HxR4Tt9WlO3aNy5IH-d28F0Ge92ewGZduaqXBeO99wbeQe-it1TIlH6QOpZov8DG0AivT9shkgbVu4vYHdsFEA94BFpvvZ1ZdYRjW2_pCaauvM8c/s1600/SalmonsSwimming2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7xcJDUC1N3GmjR6Onm44dR79SIL8HxR4Tt9WlO3aNy5IH-d28F0Ge92ewGZduaqXBeO99wbeQe-it1TIlH6QOpZov8DG0AivT9shkgbVu4vYHdsFEA94BFpvvZ1ZdYRjW2_pCaauvM8c/s320/SalmonsSwimming2.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-7142910512102621222016-07-18T10:07:00.001-07:002016-07-18T19:01:55.420-07:00Tending one's Garden: Intimations of Hope in the Anthropocene<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3LMyTP1mnGYpU-8sx5afvz6kKY24fqcm7B7F0Sleki9F2rzB2kyxw-SyfJ12Y3J5OPBTT4sJu5UsY-K7M1O7Tm_6D6N_7Cqr3Ok1QpPWD55X3CPiWsiYrUN0BhDdBqOZSWfwDvklNLDg/s1600/2016+Garden+Panorama.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3LMyTP1mnGYpU-8sx5afvz6kKY24fqcm7B7F0Sleki9F2rzB2kyxw-SyfJ12Y3J5OPBTT4sJu5UsY-K7M1O7Tm_6D6N_7Cqr3Ok1QpPWD55X3CPiWsiYrUN0BhDdBqOZSWfwDvklNLDg/s640/2016+Garden+Panorama.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
"We can see the country...we can see how the beautiness is still in the country...we can still see the spirit of the land glistening." From <i>Iwenhe Terrette - what it means to be an aboriginal person</i>, Margaret Kemarre Turner.<br />
<br />
Dispiriting. Inspiring. Between these two words lies a garden, one that I have attended to for the last decade. Sixty years ago when a lot was developed and the house in which I live was built, a thick layer of dredged sand was trucked in to level out the yard. This left a good-sized area to the side of the garage not suitable for growing much of anything. When I arrived in 2000, this space was desolate, a wasteland thoroughly colonized by wire grass with a generous sprinkling of nut sedge. Walking across the area barefoot, or even just bare ankled, was pure torture. It turns out that the delightful name "nut sedge" hides the thorny nature of the so-called nut, a spike of sharpened needles more shrapnel than fruit that pierces effortlessly and stays painfully embedded in any flesh brushing against it. The sand fill in which these plants were rooted was so compressed that not even scrub trees had a found a way in. And cars speeding down the alley were increasingly encroaching on the land, their tires grinding into the earth what little diversity remained at large.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJAU1YaWqoartkIFeeGVsoSQdLk7JeKOp_BptPzMBMq0y2gqnCw9ZZ_cMNwVO35ukXcaXlDoOZb1GeciflUXFUiyFVY6iMw7KnwbjCSItf1dN21SRagWA69wGsVOUl_BQdiAzYP9MguFs/s1600/FullSizeRender+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJAU1YaWqoartkIFeeGVsoSQdLk7JeKOp_BptPzMBMq0y2gqnCw9ZZ_cMNwVO35ukXcaXlDoOZb1GeciflUXFUiyFVY6iMw7KnwbjCSItf1dN21SRagWA69wGsVOUl_BQdiAzYP9MguFs/s400/FullSizeRender+%25282%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Catalpa Growing on the Berm with Jerusalem Artichokes to the right.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I took measures. Over time nearby remnants of old telephone poles and fallen tree trunks were gathered to craft a low berm along the alley to discourage wayward drivers. And then a surprise: taking advantage of the nooks and crannies found there, several trees, including some black locusts, a black cherry and even a catalpa, took root and are now thriving. They are being pruned to grow laterally in hopes of an improvised hedgerow. And surprise upon surprise: Last year catbirds built a nest in the black cherry, and this year robins. Rhizomes of Jerusalem artichokes, dug up from a garden bed to make way for blueberry bushes, were also discarded on the berm. They took root too, a thick stand staining the air with rambunctious yellow flower heads at the height of summer. A lovely thought - the very wall built to keep automobiles out of the garden is becoming a garden in its own right. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Psychedelic Milkweed</td></tr>
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But the larger garden on the side of the berm away from the alley is where most of my efforts have been focused. Rather than importing top soil to simply throw over what was already land paved over with sand fill, I took to the earth with a shovel and compost. Year by year new sections were dug out out, amended and planted. At first the emphasis was upon natives that could make themselves at home without too much fuss - phlox and columbine, bee balm and beardstongue, Joe pye weed and yarrow, false indigo and echinacea, blanket flower and trumpet vine. Eventually a strip of plots dedicated to fruits - particularly blueberries and raspberries were added, along with an apple tree. Milkweed was given the run of a part of the yard, in hopes that monarch butterflies would show up (which they do only occasionally). An area with marsh loving-plants took shape - including iris and marsh hibiscus, nettle and swamp milkweed, lobelia and cardinal flower. Finally several intensively cultivated beds of vegetables were shoehorned into the space. Currently, tomatoes and chard, tomatillos and peppers, beans and okra with a smattering of onions and leeks are thriving there. So too is a tower of scarlet runner, a bean originally cultivated by the Incas, that is actively adored by hummingbirds. <br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beardstongue</td></tr>
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Once seemingly wasteland, the spirit of this little patch of earth is again, as Margaret Kemarre Turner would put it, "gllistening." People walking by stop to admire and say thank you. Even better, lots of critters, happy at a newfound habitat, are showing up and making themselves at home. While the voles and rabbits, along with Japanese beetles and stinkbugs, are irritating in this regard, so many others, including those hummingbirds, are positively inspiring.<br />
<br />
Over a decade in, persistent efforts have transformed this little patch of earth and, as well, its gardener. Margert Kemarre Turner would likely argue that the transformation was most assuredly not of the land, whose spirit, in its beautiness and glistening, was already waiting for me, but only of my own capacity to see again what had been hidden from untutored eyes. The land already knew what it was capable of. Its gardener on the other hand, needed to figure this out. In the process, he has found new hope to stave off a growing sense of dread that comes from living in a time of immense loss of habitat for an immense array of living kinds, a time that is being named the Anthropocene.<br />
<br />
As a human of the Anthropocene, I take welcomed comfort in these endeavors to restore to the living kinds a small bit of country. Certainly this alone will not be enough. Certainly systemic efforts are called for as well. But loving the earth requires more than acting systemically. It requires the touch of one's hands, close up and personal.<br />
<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Columbine</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fly Sunning herself on a Lily. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wasp Searching for Nectar on Echinacea</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sweat Bee Searching for Nectar on Flea Bane</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-19200733814632440392015-09-06T15:59:00.000-07:002015-12-29T07:16:01.315-08:00Black Eyed Susan: A World of Green for All Comers.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnOf5AM49qpF0wl5Xwm7MIy1-rRGfq_MONgIGia8MlzjN8eG11ig0aUyKc8KZsLAQq-HaZv-f_GIu6w0qSo2C7JqWyZyfRKC0Dq23pxVmROTMlwQewHNLJwjTMQ5CxE75AGZEUra8pc2E/s1600/SunFlower1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnOf5AM49qpF0wl5Xwm7MIy1-rRGfq_MONgIGia8MlzjN8eG11ig0aUyKc8KZsLAQq-HaZv-f_GIu6w0qSo2C7JqWyZyfRKC0Dq23pxVmROTMlwQewHNLJwjTMQ5CxE75AGZEUra8pc2E/s400/SunFlower1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Arid Summer on the High Plains where Black Eyed Susans Thrive</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Under a cloudless sky, the already arid earth of the high plains bakes even drier. <i>G</i>rasses, briefly green in June, now turn to a dusky patchworks of yellow and brown in August. As if the symptoms of widespread desiccation were not emphatic enough, the air fills with smoke from forest fires rampaging up and down the not too distant spines of the Rocky Mountains. But precisely at this moment under an implacable even if hazy sun, congregations of Black Eyed Susans - where there is one there are always many - unfurl their great yellow blossoms and thrive. I spent considerable time in their company recently at the First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park and was reminded yet again of my love for this common plant, ordinary in its demeanor but preternatural in its capacities. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bee Fly (Bombylius major) and Spidfer Wasp (Pompilidae)<br />
Sharing a Blossom</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The black eyed susan is a member of the genus Rudbeckia, named and classified as Rudbeckia hirta by the celebrated Carl Linnaeus only two centuries ago. This occurred in Sweden, a place far, far away from the plant's native environs of North America. For that reason among others I prefer the common name which at least suggests how much at home this living kind and its charismatic cousins - sunflowers and Jerusalem artichokes - are in North American soils. My earliest memories of childhood are teeming with black eyed susans that filled the vacant lots and sprouted in every other crack in the cement sidewalks lining the streets of my neighborhood. Perched on wiry green stems swarming with hairy filaments, their composite flowers, composed of deliriously yellow petals, arranged in lazy circles around brown-domed centers, entranced me. Checking in regularly on each blossom's daily tracking of the sun across the sky punctuated my mornings and afternoons of outdoor play. And picking a few to bring home in the evening was not an uncommon event, although tearing away the sticky, fibrous stems from their mother plants took some effort. In all of this, I was offered an enthusiastic introduction into that sort of flora inhabiting my place under the sun that did not need to be planted in carefully-troweled beds around a house and assiduously watered and weeded from then on. In the wayward places beyond the confines of a well-groomed yard I encountered the joy of things that grow effortlessly, that know how to look out for themselves and then some. <br />
<br />
At the jump, those memories of black eyed susans welled up as I encountered their kind anew. On the other hand, after a bit of reading that evening, I learned that these stands were in truth only what biologists term "naturalized" citizens of this particular area, emigrating here in the last century or two from the midwest, where they were originally at home. Indeed, they arrived just, it appears, as the buffalo who were endemic to the short grass prairies of the high plains were in the process of being wiped out by European settlement. But settlement seems far too kind a word for the practices of mass slaughter and habitat destruction that were involved in that terrible moment of species extirpation. <br />
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Dingy Cutworm Moth (Felita jaculifera) Resting.</div>
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Those who write about black eyed susans universally observe that pollinators are fond of them. This turned out to be exactly the case with the plants lining the road along the boundary of the First People's Buffalo Jump State Park. Taking a break from my assigned task of removing the lowest strand from a barb-wired fence (so antelope could scooch under the barrier safely), I took picture after picture as I discovered species after species making its way about the various contours of the plant. Some were interested in the nectar, particularly the bee flies with an occasional honey bee and orange belted bumble bee showing up to join in the feast. Other species meandered about the stems of the plants - yellow jackets and blue spider wasps for the most part - intent, it seemed to me, on licking up the sticky residue exuded there. A dingy cutworm moth, nocturnally active but diurnally recumbent, lounged for the day on the seed head of one blossom, wrapped in its shade. The moth was not inclined to move. And of course ants, western thatching ants in this case, were tracking all over the plant, looking for whatever meal might show up as they tended aphids, which in turn exuded their own sugary treat of honeydew, as they grazed in clutches under the flower heads and on the bottom sides of leaves. <br />
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Western Thatching Ants (Formica obscuripes) on the way to and from</div>
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The black eyed suzan, it turns out, names not only a living kind but also a world. After an hour or so spent up close to a single plant, the latter truth comes into focus. Providing shade, moisture, food, more or less steady perches in gusting wind, and a multitude of hiding places, the plant's very anatomy carves out a green oasis in the midst of an arid, daunting landscape. Within its ambit, a variety of living kinds gather to find themselves more or less at home. As insect after insect sees it, these stems are great limbs, with a girth equal to or exceeding one's own. Western yellow jackets curl about them, fluently in tune with their contours, while the blue spider wasp paces up and down them, as well as over and under every leaf, continually on the move with only a pause here and there. To the bee fly, a lightweight continually at odds with the prairie winds permeating its surroundings, the composite infloresences' great brown domes, speckled with a multitude of disk flower heads, provide opportunity after opportunity for a drink of nectar without the need to battle again into flight. And for creatures in search of moisture in a dry land in a dry time, the black eyed susan is also hospitable. All plants are chemical factories, armed with a variety of defenses that deter almost every creature under the sun from helping themselves to a bite. Inevitably an arms race ensues with only a few species specialized enough to overcome each respective plant's defenses and make a meal of it. The black eyed susan goes another way. Whatever defenses it has mounted, they are not directed to the swath of living kinds one finds thriving on plant after plant under a late summer sun. <br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Two Bee Flies Working the Nectar</td></tr>
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What is there not to love about the generosity of this remarkable even if fully ordinary living kind? Surely this is a rhetorical question. But leaving off my remarks on this deservedly appreciative note would not be responsible without also observing how unsettling, literally and metaphorically unsettling, the presence of the black eyed suzan in this particular country turns out to be. For its appearance, as noted above, is historically recent and inextricably tied to the disappearance of a rich prairie ecosystem that was sustained by great herds of buffalo once flowing over this land. One should not forget that every step upon the site of the First Peoples Buffalo Jump commemorates those herds and the rich legacy they continue to hold for more than a dozen tribes who remember this animal's presence and mourn its loss. <br />
<br />
Thinking about the past in this way inevitably leads my mind to tread in strange directions. Following out one bearing, I remember how the black eyed susans I encountered lined one side of the road - the side bordered by the state park - but were absent from the other side, which abutted a farmer's field of wheat assiduously cultivated to the road's very edge. Any black eyed susan that dared spring up there had quickly withered and died. Surely herbicides were involved. In a detail, then, is illuminated the history, my history, of European occupation of this place. Our settlement of the west left in its wake a landscape capable of feeding many human mouths but extremely stingy in regard to the desires of other than domestic animals and agricultural crops to find their own patch of earth under the sun. Even a hardy and relatively new arrival like the black eyed susan, generously offering a full range of ecological services to a landscape callously depleted of its capacity to sustain living kinds, is fought with tooth and nail, or plow and sprayer as the case may be.<br />
<br />
But following out another bearing I find myself imagining what it must have been for those tribal peoples to love a creature as magnificent and ecologically significant as the buffalo. I grew up consorting with black eyed susans. What would have it been like, I wonder, to have had the same opportunity to be instructed in the ways of the living world in the shadow of a buffalo? This question remains a significant one and is the inspiration for a variety of ongoing projects in Montana to return buffalo to some approximation of an open range. Perhaps the black eyed susan will find its place under the sun there too.<br />
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Great Golden Digger Wasp </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Big Wasp Meets Little Wasp in Uncertain Circumstances</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yellow Jacket Patrolling her Particular Spot in the Shade</td></tr>
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-43540799327495694032015-05-20T06:58:00.000-07:002017-02-03T10:17:45.134-08:00The Tree of Living Waters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Tree of Living Waters</td></tr>
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Venerable in its years, though slowly rotting from the inside out, this great American beech (Fagus grandifolia), hidden away in a coastal woodlot, still towers above its neighbors. In the midst of its fellow beeches, along with a scattering of younger pin-oaks and hollies, the tree's outspread canopy shelters a clearing, shaded and quiet, the sort of place one would go to gather one's thoughts on a pleasant day. Or a sad day too, if that is needed. </div>
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Sam, who, along with his granddaughter Jessica, has guided me here, ventures the object of our pilgrimage is likely a century and a half old. If true, this is ridiculously old in a landscape that for the last century or two has been harvested and replanted every thirty years or so, "working land" as it sometimes is referred to. And the preferred tree in this enterprise is not the slow-growing beech but the fast-growing loblolly pine, which has proven the most amenable to a quick turn-around time between one seeding and the next. As if to prove the truth of this, just a hundred feet away from our idyllic setting, the woods stop abruptly and a vast patch of land clearcut last winter begins - a melee of overturned trunks, disturbed earth, mounds of uprooted brush. A quarter-mile back, stacked in neat piles, trunk after trunk of loblolly shorn of their limbs are waiting to be picked up for delivery to a wood shredder or saw. Such is the usual fate of forests here on the eastern shore of Maryland.</div>
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But on the Eastern Shore even a grandfather beech tree in a beech wood providentially saved from the saw is still rooted into working land, although of a different sort than the loblolly plantation next door. Michael Lewis, environmental historian at Salisbury University, notes that beech were not so common in the forests encountered here by European colonists 300 years ago. Up to that time the First Peoples of this area - Wicomico, Assateague and the like - had been busy using fire to keep the land clear of underbrush and amenable to hunting. The upshot of this practice was that the beech, which is vulnerable to fire, was little in evidence. But the newly arrived colonists suppressed rather than encouraged fires, which in turn allowed beeches to find a renewed footing. Today approximately 20% of the forest in Maryland is composed of beech trees. And, although they are no longer harvested commercially for their wood, their nuts offer food for a variety of wildlife including turkey and deer. The land, Sam reports, is regularly rented out to hunters, a fact that is underscored by the many deer blinds we have encountered on our walk here. Living things, at least the ones some humans are fond of eating, are doing well in these woods.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Closer Look</td></tr>
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Sam and Jessica have brought me here today to share their love for the Tree of Living Waters. I call it that, although I must also report that Jody Haggler who owns this woodlot calls it the "Jesus Tree," because sometime in the last half century or so, someone has incised the bark with a series of words and phrases, all of them directed to sharing the good news of creation, or at least, of a solidly Christian version of that news. "God - Fountain of Living Waters." "Emmanuel." "Jesus is Lord." "The Saving Word." These and other phrases of similar import have been carefully arranged on the trunk in beautifully rendered block letters, a work that must have taken considerable dedication and time to accomplish. And, judging from the height above ground of some of the entries, good climbing skills as well.</div>
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This tree, engraved with human words conjuring supernatural powers, in turn readily engraves itself on the memory of those lucky enough to have found themselves in its vicinity. The agency involved in this process is complicated, tricky. Is an unknown scribe, employing knife and bark in place of quill and paper, the one who is now at work in my own thoughts as I remember and admire what his or her handiwork has wrought? Yet surely the one who inscribed these words left them not for her or his own particular fame - no initials or dates are in evidence - but for the sake of the Most High. Is it to God then I must turn to appreciate the power of the tree's evocation? Or is the tree itself, this great living pillar of sugary cellulose and dusky sap, spanning from the darkness of the earth to the airy heavens above, the one who is making its mark upon me? To behold such a tree is surely to remember all the trees one has ever looked upon and loved. I am reminded of Wendell Berry's beautiful lines in praise of the trees, "patient as stars," composing his own woodlot in Kentucky. "They build in air, tier after tier a timbered choir," he writes, "Stout beams upholding weightless grace of song, a blessing on this place."</div>
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The blessing of being human certainly entails receiving gratefully the blessing of such arboreal choirs. Yet with this blessing a troubling thought cannot help but to come to mind. Were not the trees of this place once beloved in other tongues with the names of other gods? European colonists were quick to name the towns of the Eastern Shore after those found in their Bible and their memories of home - Salisbury, Chrisfield, Cambridge, Hebron, Bethel and the like. But the naming of the waters - Wicomico, Pocokmoke, Nantacoke, Nassawango, Choptank, Marshyhope - came from another fount entirely, the languages of peoples dispossessed and pushed aside, even as these small indications of their existence were enshrined on maps to persist even into our time in everyday parlance. Given this history, might not the Tree of Living Waters also be thought of as the Tree of Usurpation? Engraving the names of one's God upon the face of a land once held by others is certainly a statement of ownership that should not go unremarked upon. Throughout history, people have murdered others in the name of their God. We should not forget this, even if that very Name itself remains worthy of praise and commemoration in our deliberations and musings, if not our prayers and rituals. History is besotted with violence, a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. Repairing to a glen in a wood does not diminish this fact.</div>
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A century ago, yet another in a series of blights arrived on our shores that threatened yet another in a series of species of indigenous tree, this time, the one in whose precincts I have been walking, Fagus grandifolia. The Tree of Living Waters has not proved immune to this disease and now is succumbing to it. Beech scales, tiny aphids that attack the tree in turn precipating one of two fungal infections, have been at work. The smooth, gray surface of the bark for which the beech is universally famous is growing black and crusty, particularly where saving words, now disappearing into the decay, were incised. Jody tells me that two pileated woodpeckers have been having their way with the weakening tree, boring holes indiscriminately into its flesh. One of the holes, it turns out is placed precisely in the open part of a "d" spelling out the name of God. The tree, Jody fears, is not long for this world. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jessica Brannock with the Tree of Living Waters</td></tr>
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In light of this outcome, one might argue that carving the name of God or that of any other being on a tree is not only a fool's errand but also a vandal's. Perhaps without these incisions wounding its skin, this august beech would have proven resistant for a while longer to contagion. I can imagine the shuddering of every forest ranger across the land at the thought of an army of believers, knives in hand, keenly intent upon carving the names of the Creator on the trunks of trees wherever they might be found. Certainly this should not be counseled. Yet, I am also glad that the Tree of Living Waters, carvings and all, stands here, at least for the time being, welcoming any passerby willing to spend a moment in its company. Someone came into this forest decades ago to behold a fellow creature whose very glory touched the deepest springs of human and more-than-human longings. And suffering the depths of that inspiration, prayers were left in the very flesh of a living thing. "Emmanuel" is a Hebrew word signifying "God is with us." But also, Jody reminds us, a seven foot black snake that swallows rabbits whole is making its home near the tree, perhaps even in its very hollow. What would that particular creature ask of us, I muse, if we would dare to listen to it carefully? In <i>The Sand County Almanac</i>, Aldo Leopold notes that to buy a woods is to buy "almost as many tree diseases as [one has] trees." But these very maladies, Leopold adds, "made my woodlot a mighty fortress, unequaled in the whole county." Although Leopold, when he wrote these words, had in mind the manner in which decrepit trees offer magnificent habitat for a wide range of living things, including both rabbit and snake, the arc of his thought leads other places as well. These woods indeed are dark and deep. Death as well as life is making its home here. Dare we enter into such environs? Faith is required. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Incision of "Emmanuel" isolated from the surrounding Bark</td></tr>
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<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-38661308812750687722014-11-09T18:20:00.000-08:002014-11-21T19:50:46.371-08:00Totems of Intelligibility (Opening Sections)<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">i. A Tree of Dragonflies</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> On the high prairie, an adult rocky mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum), with scaly </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">leaves</span> green and tender, holds itself erect <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">under the intense </span></span>light <span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">filling </span>a cloudless sky in Au<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">gust</span>. Planted strategically near the doorway to the museum and offices of the First People's Buffalo Jump State Park. this lone tree, along with the sarvis berry, chokecherry and black currant bushes clustered about it, resists the sweltering heat and welcomes the public. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> "Ambassadors for better times," I think. For once a prairie unplowed stretched all about here, a land teeming with a variety of native grasses unusually rich in protein and capable of sustaining great herds of buffalo and more. Today the buffalo are no longer to be found, and the fields are dominated by a single crop - crested wheat grass imported from Asia during the dust bowl to fight soil erosion. Manifest destiny became all too manifest in these environs, and a multitude of living things no longer are finding their place here under the sun. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> But the juniper is proving to be a far more effective ambassador than I had imagined possible. For today, she welcomes not only the Jump's human visitors bent upon finding their way to a museum's door, but also a multitude of white-faced meadow-hawks (Sympetrum
obtrusum), who would rather stay outside and play.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> Exploring green pockets of shade, hovering
and darting and then hovering again, the dragonflies' thin, elongated abdomens shimmer in metallic tones of
green and blue and gold. Transparent wings whirring invisibly suddenly jump into view, shining and poised, as their respective owners alight on an unoccupied branch.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;">My vision narrows in, and
I watch a single dragonfly, bouncing about in the gusty prairie winds, tail
and wings flailing in the air. She clings to a limber twig and rides it like a cowboy riding bronco in an arthropod
rodeo.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> D</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;">elight abides here, the
delight of other living kinds in their modes of existing, delight arresting me from my all too human concerns, leaving me breathless and more than a little envious.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /> And so, starting off this inquiry into the intelligibility of
land and its living kinds, dragonfly gets the first word. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">Juniper too, as her hidden roots dig in deep
to find water secreted in the arid earth, her visible body a hillock of green speckled
with shadows, her limbs oozing sticky sap in the oppressive heat.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">“</span><i style="line-height: 115%;">Come here</i><span style="line-height: 115%;">,” she whispers in my ear, “</span><i style="line-height: 115%;">come
here and stay for a while. I am cool and green, an oasis among endless
fields of strange grasses, dry and spent in the weathers of August."</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">ii. The Etiquette of the First Word </span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /> That dragonfly and juniper are given the opportunity to speak first on behalf of the First
People’s Buffalo Jump State Park is a matter of etiquette and atonement.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"> As to etiquette: We practitioners of academic philosophy have far too long ignored dragonfly and juniper, not to mention porcupine and antelope, rattlesnake
and prairie dog, sarvis berry and black currant, red hawk and magpie. And this is not a trivial point, when I consider that these living kinds are rightfully my kin and among my first teachers. My education, both manifold and subtle, into becoming what Leopold
has termed a biotic citizen, a citizen of the land, began under their tutelage.</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"> Prompted here and now by a host of dragonflies and a juniper tree, I contemplate how walking the contours of this land throughout my childhood proved to be
an inalienable aspect of the calling to embrace a philosophical life.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> In that time as well, d</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;">ragonfly and juniper appeared, offering themselves as totems of intelligibility, living kinds capable, along with a host of others, of announcing through their
peculiar modes of behavior, through the gestures and shape of their respective
lives, how life itself might be articulated in diverse species of wonder and
gratitude, of anxiety and supplication, of circumspection and greeting.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /> To this I now offer a heartfelt "Amen." </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">Yet, in the very next breath I must also confirm how the human midwives of philosophical thinking, into whose hands dragonfly
and juniper delivered me, were most often quizzical if not downright perturbed at the sources of my not-so-human birth into wonder.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">The living kinds were not only in the main regarded as irrelevant but also a danger </span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18.3999996185303px;">to the philosophical vocation</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">, allegedly tempting its practitioners to perverse
forms of malpractice.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">And so a second
education began in which the message was made clear: Philosophy is no Noah’s
ark. If you root in with the trees and hover with the dragonflies, you should
not be trusted with deducing the categorical imperative, let alone posing the
ontological question.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">And so, the ritual
of the exorcism of the demon of the “pathetic fallacy,” its liturgy peppered
with imprecations against naivety and, even worse, nativism, was repeatedly invoked
against the intimations of dragonfly and juniper in my speaking and in my
writing.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">The animals and trees of one’s
place under the sun were to be kept at bay. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /> And so today this provocation:</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> C</span><span style="line-height: 115%;">an one at least for a moment drop one’s philosophical
guard and let dragonfly and juniper have their say? And on their own terms?</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">Or put another way: How might one become open
not only to the question of land's intelligibility but also to the very categories
of intelligibility by which land makes itself known? </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">For the land, when it speaks, speaks as much
in dragonflies and juniper, or in shadows and shape-shifting,</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">as in Blackfoot and English.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">In a Greek
way of saying these things, the time is long overdue for a moment of disruptive
poesis in the court of philosophical judgment. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">It’s time for some introductions to take
place.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Mc9kEdMDTz0At84zvJS-4jqRIZZzDT93_fbHS7KoIvChrKa1M5VuI5vAr1EKQm1XZUnu3fqPQo8AppUAmMcfiFSHNwR0qTePd54sq4YyK-Uh1oonW_Et-i6RgAbwYFQNciVpk8wZiBo/s1600/Sabbath+First+Peoples+Buffalo+Jum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9Mc9kEdMDTz0At84zvJS-4jqRIZZzDT93_fbHS7KoIvChrKa1M5VuI5vAr1EKQm1XZUnu3fqPQo8AppUAmMcfiFSHNwR0qTePd54sq4YyK-Uh1oonW_Et-i6RgAbwYFQNciVpk8wZiBo/s1600/Sabbath+First+Peoples+Buffalo+Jum.jpg" height="420" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Jump</td></tr>
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<h3>
</h3>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"> </span></h3>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">iii. The First People's Buffalo Jump State Park</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> The First
People’s Buffalo Jump State Park is located on terrain surrounding the largest
site of its kind on the North American continent, an elongated, sandstone cliff
in the rough shape of a horseshoe running for several miles along the northern,
southern and eastern edges of a low lying butte.</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">The butte in turn emerges, just barely,
between two broad, flat-bottomed valleys carved out on either side by the
yearly spring flooding of the Missouri and Sun rivers.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">The country here is high plains – big sky and
dry earth – a landscape of undulating prairie rising to meet blue-gray reefs of
limestone constituting the front range of the Rockies some sixty miles distant.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">As one looks west toward that convergence,
the land begins to bunch up, as if a string has been threaded through rough
burlap then pulled increasingly tight, so that wrinkles and kinks begin to
appear and then knot themselves into chunky buttes and columns of foothills.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">At the very edge, always, lurking on the
horizon, are those limestone teeth capped with snow, ridges and peaks jutting
along the very margins of the earth before all falls away into dreams and
unknowing.</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">The Piikani, I am
reminded, locate the very place of creation on that distant ridge.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><br /> The
management plan for the park includes the following sentence: “The site
welcomes Native American use for worship and celebration and for reconnection
with ancestors.”</span><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">It appears, according to
the archaeologists, this has been going on for 6000 years or so. </span></span></div>
<br />
<div>
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<div id="ftn1">
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</div>
Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-8863874273897795472014-09-18T09:58:00.001-07:002014-09-21T05:19:33.489-07:00All in the Family: In Praise of Goldenrod and its Pollinators.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1hPhZmENBAnpjv_h0eWCXf-QvQ53XYc3rsmNvXjeW1zopPM0peJmrvBu0fColPU71ERw5LGXFtdm7eDp8ebwdTiZTB0-m50MV9obvGNv26R-oCcr_qy0FzUW-EXR7LhkqEHumLdx2YHA/s1600/ManyManyManyInsects.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1hPhZmENBAnpjv_h0eWCXf-QvQ53XYc3rsmNvXjeW1zopPM0peJmrvBu0fColPU71ERw5LGXFtdm7eDp8ebwdTiZTB0-m50MV9obvGNv26R-oCcr_qy0FzUW-EXR7LhkqEHumLdx2YHA/s1600/ManyManyManyInsects.JPG" height="236" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Digger Wasps among others feeding on flowering Goldenrod</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">T</span>he season has arrived in which to praise goldenrod and the living kinds who love it. While two species of goldenrod are currently making their home in the garden, by far the one preferred by both human and arthropod is the commonly occurring Solidago canadensis. The progenitors of this particular patch were harvested unceremoniously from a roadside ditch and had their roots folded into the damp soil at the edge of small bog put together from scratch in the back yard. The transplants immediately thrived and now have reseeded themselves across the garden. Goldenrod doesn't take a lot of caring for to flourish and is among the first species to colonize a newly-disturbed area. When in flower, according to the Omaha People, goldenrod presages the ripening of the corn crop. Here in the back yard, rows of erect yellow blossoms announce a free for all for digger and ichneumon wasps, organ pipe mud daubers, soldier bugs and locust tree borers. In the heat of the day, when each plant is busy photosynthesizing sugar, all of the above and more crowd in. Later in the evening, when the pickings are leaner and more nimble fliers have departed, the slower-moving carpenters bees stick around to claim, in a quieter moment, their own full share of the nectar. Some of these stay right through the night, becoming dormant and then reawakening in the morning to resume their feeding in the early dew.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg691PuOpkMWfS6ae8WdNzANU-yXYOeud5FKoSW1ngaAeUXzBWSN6PR6c_Zuw9GWo6QICOECUakSB7C3-CuqxwSkZnkRDaHAlajgR_U6DPWN37JomZJZGRRwz-H2KwSgcXbEwq_jLTS88c/s1600/IMGP2409.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg691PuOpkMWfS6ae8WdNzANU-yXYOeud5FKoSW1ngaAeUXzBWSN6PR6c_Zuw9GWo6QICOECUakSB7C3-CuqxwSkZnkRDaHAlajgR_U6DPWN37JomZJZGRRwz-H2KwSgcXbEwq_jLTS88c/s1600/IMGP2409.JPG" height="263" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Locust Tree Borers Mating</td></tr>
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For several reasons, I have been taking photographs of the various tribes of living beings showing up on the blossoms over the last week. Perhaps the most visceral motivation for doing so involves a desire to take snapshots of one's relatives. The more one spends time hanging out in the garden with these creatures, the more they seem like one's neighbors and then one's family. And why not? We are, after all, all sharing our respective places at the table in the very same garden under the very same sun. And the manner in which each species negotiates its participation in the great feast is worthy of note. With so many airborne diners, one comes to appreciate the many styles of arrival and departure - from acrobatic to bumbling, from beeline to roundabout, from nervous to assured. And while most defer from mating while dining, locust borers find a way to do both, the female clawing her way from flower to flower, drinking in nectar, while the male is perched on her, preoccupied with another matter altogether. If this is family, then it's a crazed one. And snapshots are certainly required, if only to remind one of the family resemblances, in so far as they can be ascertained.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiP3hmdYVSZHLUmkCI6BsStewx7v3_mocY9uUdiX-V6NUR_jECWXSRbTIhIwuNCWr4q8uT7f6nb-HGA46dx09BPAKX7ikpozmH_QYfPxE1qxeQmsyMEgYu_JkItrr04Z_CPSb2M2TXYio/s1600/blue+mud+dauber.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiP3hmdYVSZHLUmkCI6BsStewx7v3_mocY9uUdiX-V6NUR_jECWXSRbTIhIwuNCWr4q8uT7f6nb-HGA46dx09BPAKX7ikpozmH_QYfPxE1qxeQmsyMEgYu_JkItrr04Z_CPSb2M2TXYio/s1600/blue+mud+dauber.jpg" height="211" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Organ Pipe Mud Dauber</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLXuzwNzotMwMYRk60jV3suwJMwxo2ULbx5J35UXLiH0sPnUMdK1Rzlil8v4mw5v0uCXmekjHYVn0aTzy3DFykjs6r5qHdEJ2_D67uHVi1F-7kKNP3ndnK_EhgaIS8JQKePODFAQRDio/s1600/IMGP2415.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLXuzwNzotMwMYRk60jV3suwJMwxo2ULbx5J35UXLiH0sPnUMdK1Rzlil8v4mw5v0uCXmekjHYVn0aTzy3DFykjs6r5qHdEJ2_D67uHVi1F-7kKNP3ndnK_EhgaIS8JQKePODFAQRDio/s1600/IMGP2415.JPG" height="211" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ailanthus Webworm Moth</td></tr>
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But the reason that took me, camera in hand, out into the garden in the first place was simply the prosaic task of identifying its living kinds. Before one can welcome someone into the family, that someone needs a name. The photographs were a mnemonic tool, a way of keeping fresh, if not in mind then at least in image, the shape, color and sundry characteristics of a particular creature, until a guide book could be supplied to correlate its picture of a species with mine of a specimen. Needless to say, this phase of my relationship with my subjects involved getting the proverbial God's- eye view of them, both from above and from the side, with all the relevant parts clearly displayed. In metaphor if not in reality I was intent on pinning down each new species, as if it were already strategically positioned in a specimen box stuffed with yellow flower heads instead of the usual white cotton.. I wanted a picture just like the field guides supply, and getting that exact image held all the excitement of the hunt, as I stalked each photographic prey in turn until they were caught, proverbially frozen in my weapon of choice, the camera's omnivorous eye. Only later did I begin to notice how the camera possessed the uncanny power to open up my senses to an arthropod's engagement in her or his environs by bringing me face to face and so eye to eye with an individual actively working her or his way through endless, yellow strings of goldenrod flower heads. Astonishingly, the gaze of various arthropods I was so busily capturing in image would sometimes follow my movements, fixing on my camera's stare as it moved to the left or right, adjusting their bodies to be out of my line of sight. Of course, at some level I know insects are keenly aware of my all-too-human presence, but how this presence is palpably registered in their gaze as they react to my approach never ceases to amaze me. I am reminded that they, like me, negotiate the world with their senses and their bodies. Like me, they squat down to get underneath a low-hanging object in their path. Like me, they turn their heads to catch a flick of motion nearby. And like me, they wish to be left unimpeded as they pursue their own agendas among the flowers of late summer.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHTTYLXrZ1Xsm-AOGjk0rquCD76JKqxEB9C4ctP_sQdd7bxqhVZEYNcQd_AZF-snmkiXgFNcOjrIE4RZDWyWWgDX7KQV9VHtlxQZX2YPrfgqUWAvIetb6V2FExdudw8yScHBIooaWjeJ8/s1600/tree+locust+borer+looking+at+me.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHTTYLXrZ1Xsm-AOGjk0rquCD76JKqxEB9C4ctP_sQdd7bxqhVZEYNcQd_AZF-snmkiXgFNcOjrIE4RZDWyWWgDX7KQV9VHtlxQZX2YPrfgqUWAvIetb6V2FExdudw8yScHBIooaWjeJ8/s1600/tree+locust+borer+looking+at+me.jpg" height="640" width="420" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Face to Face with a Locust Tree Borer</td></tr>
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As Leopold notes in his 1947 essay "Conservation Aesthetic," Americans, when they have turned to the living world for recreation, for the most part have gone out in search of one sort of trophy or another, whether it be a mounted elk head, a colorful trout for one's table, seeds for one's indigenous garden, a stone for one's pocket or merely a photograph for one's facebook page. Leopold allows that the photographic image is perhaps the least invasive of these practices (at least in the places where they are taken, as opposed to those unhappy sites, most often located in third world environs, which supply the raw materials and industrial production for one's camera and its image-storing paraphernalia). But Leopold also argues that the beauty of a photograph is nothing next to an intimate knowledge of the living kinds and their cycles of life, of the numerous processes and relationships constituting the flow of energy that is land. As a result, in Leopold's words, "to promote perception is the only truly creative part of recreational engineering." I suspect this also holds true of the "engineering" that goes into the planting of one's garden. When goldenrod flowers, one's knowing who shows up and why in all its breadth and complexity is necessary to becoming a worthy audience for the land's beauty, for what Australian Aboriginal peoples name "country" in English. Like music, country is a flow of energy, various chords and motifs finding their moment under the sun before either dissipating or moving on, the plethora of living kinds arising and decaying in diverse tempos and keys. The life cycle bringing the organ pipe mud dauber to these flower heads is not the same as that of an ailanthus webworm moth. One stings and the other has dusty but colorful wings. One winters over in the area and cobbles together ornate nests resembling organ pipes for its young, watched over by both parents. Spiders are supplied in abundance for their larvae to eat. The other is a subtropical insect that has recently taken to migrating north every summer to lay eggs on the leaves of the increasingly widespread Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) introduced to our continent from China. In this case, the larvae fend for themselves, feeding and then spinning their silky cocoons in the folds of ailantus leaves, while their parents are busy with mating and imbibing on the nectar of a host of flowers nearby.<br />
<br />
And so these two living kinds, among a host of others, find their way to an ordinary patch of goldenrod that happens to be in my garden. And in their comings and goings is overheard a few small phrases of that vast music, those intricate rhythms and motifs, that is county. I am impatient to hear more.<br />
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-35616911810485171722014-07-16T10:09:00.002-07:002014-07-17T09:45:14.144-07:00Putting New Scales on One's Eyes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The mid-summer sun has been pouring down nonstop on the meadow garden, a plot in my yard with a variety of native plants and some not so native ones: false indigo, phlox, Joe-Pye weed (not really a weed), meadow sweet, cone-flower, bee balm, butterfly weed (really a milkweed, which is also not a weed, except for some), hyssop, yarrow, cup rosinweed (also not a weed, except evidently in Connecticut), rudbeckia maxima (a black-eyed Susan on steroids) several varieties of bunch grasses, nettles, meadow rue, trumpet flower and the like. Basically green things that like to congregate in crowds of green things.<br />
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Today the sun is hot, and the honey is coming. Non-stop. The pollinators arrive in droves; a feeding frenzy ensues..<br />
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As the meadow's perennials have rooted in over the last decade and found their respective places among their fellows (with varying degrees of guidance on my part), I've begun educating myself about the many types of pollinators coursing through this patch. Little insights accumulate. For instance, at first one's eye, uneducated, is caught by the obvious: big burly bumble bees dashing here and there to alight on the purple crowns of bee balm and cone-flower; or multicolored swallowtail butterflies clustering on a leafy wall of scarlet runner making its home in the nearby vegetable patch. Polaroid moments ensue.<br />
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But then one looks again. And again. And notices smaller bees and wasps, flies as well, some small and quick enough that the only hint they are there is the glinting of their wings as they dive into the perianths of blossoms no larger than grains of rice. Sometimes even smaller than a grain of rice. It's not for nothing that botanists and entymologists come armed with a loupe when entering creation.<br />
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And so the question of scale arises. Blaise Pascale, both mathematician and philosopher, suggests that humans are poised between two scalar realities--that of the increasingly large and the increasingly small. While Pascale was intent on thinking through how either direction leads to the infinite (a mathematical concept and metaphysical category with which he was especially conversant), for the time being and the garden's sake one could simply think of the scalar magnitudes close to the middle ground characteristic of our all too human gaze upon the face of the earth. Plenty of wonder can already be found in this neighborhood.<br />
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And that thought brings me to the image above, taken with a Pentax DSLR 5000 as I stood in the garden earlier today surrounded by buzzing pollinators. The picture is of a wasp, yet to be identified, in mid flight after having gathered nectar from masses of miniscule pink blossoms clotted on an umbel of Joe-Pye weed. Up this close the intricate structure of the umbel finds renewed definition in the foreground, even as one's eyes are directed slightly beyond to the hind end of that wasp, its legs hanging freely and its wings shimmering with movement. I am particularly fond of the two antennae curved above its body, indicating where the eating and seeing end of the wasp is located. It is as if I have entered another dimension of creaturely existence, as if the gaze of those compound eyes located under the antennae have been delivered to me. Looking about the world from the viewpoint of a wasp, I find, is exhilarating. revelatory, something both very old and very new under the sun.<br />
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Of course, I did not register any of this at the moment the scene occurred. Only the camera through whose viewfinder I was gazing had the quickness of eye and the exactitude of memory to bring this particular world to light. What I saw was a wasp sprawling across an umbel, crawling busily from perianth to perianth, ravishing each blossom for its nectar before moving on to the next. And then in a blur, the wasp disappeared. When this occurred, it was only happenstance, the click of the shutter repeating itself in fast mode, that found an insect in flight. So as natural as this scene might appear, a tool was involved in bringing it to light, a tool that helps extend the scale in which my own limited and all-too-human eyes can operate. For in this case the very quick and the fairly small were at issue, neither visited with ease by the unaided perception of homo-sapiens. <br />
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All of this brings me to two thoughts. The first involves how the image invites its viewer to enter concretely this fetching, even magical scene. Indeed, as I gaze at the photograph, moments from animated films, both recent and old, come to mind, in which a winged insect powers through the intricate and miniaturized world of a meadow, bringing our all-too-humans eyes along for the ride. The scene is, I realize, culturally familiar, even beloved, copyrighted repeatedly by Disney and Pixar. But the scene is also archetypal. For reaching back deep into into our history, variants are found in folk tales, as fairies, elfin creatures the right size for riding on wasps and living on the nectar of roses and lilies, are revealed to us in story if not in fact. <br />
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These old tales offer, I suspect, wisdom in their very genre. For humans cannot move down the chain of magnitudes in order to inhabit other levels of space and time without our existence becoming strange and stranger. A human that effortlessly rides a bee is not one whose perceptions would translate easily into my own. Part of the axis of our humanity, an orientation that keeps us in check and checked in, is revealed to be the very size and speed at and with which we exist bodily. We can visit the scene above briefly in our imaginations and fly with the bees; but remaining there would cost us much.<br />
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The second thought is more prosaic. It has to do with the manner in which scale bedevils all questions ecological. How does one measure the diverse populations of species comprising an ecosystem, for instance? Does one stop with every footstep to take an inventory? But if so, what particular line of inquiry should these footsteps take through the ecosystem to be measured? And how far apart are the multiple pathways to be set? Should they be arranged in a grid? And how small or large should the mesh of that grid be? Or should the lines of inquiry follow other sorts of contours suggested by variations in topography? And again, how small or large should the mesh be? And even as one stops at each place where the ecosystem is to be catalogued and numbered, at what scale of size does one leave off? Do quarks count as much molecules? Do molecules in stones count in the same way as they do in cells? Do cells matter as much as organisms in which they are located? And should the stars overhead be included automatically in the inventory as well? What of all the others creatures just passing through an ecosystem on their own particular lines of inquiry? Not to mention the differences that occur, if one's line of inquiry is performed on any given day in a particular season, as opposed to all the other days and seasons. It turns out the very diversity of scales, whether temporal or spatial, through which an ecosystem can be approached is dizzying. Inevitably, we must decide where to draw a line and keep to it. In doing so, we also admit implicitly that whatever we know of the living world is always necessarily a fragment and so distortion of it. In the intricacy and diversity of its scales and their interactions, a single ecosystem transcends all hope of fully perceiving, let alone fully knowing it.<br />
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This brings me, in conclusion, to a recent email from my colleague Michael Folkoff, a physical geographer who thinks a lot about the soil and topography. His complaint: the criterion by which topographers determine the minimum size that must be reached for a "small water body" (otherwise known as a "pond") to be recognized and counted as one has been set fairly arbitrarily. Since topographical data is stored digitally and mapped out at a scale of 1:24,000, the USGS has decided a small water body must be at least the same size proportionally on the face of the earth as the symbol for a small water body is on a topographical map. However much space the symbol takes up at a 1:24,0000 scale becomes the deciding factor on whether a pond exists or not in the eyes of the USGS.<br />
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To decide which bodies of water are or are not ponds is an unenviable task, fraught with the complexity of competing scales noted above. Who can blame the USGS for cutting the Gordian knot in such an efficient manner? Yet, as Folkoff notes, "hundreds of ponds in Wicomico County alone are excluded from SWB enumeration by this standard." <br />
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How small does a body of water need to be before it ceases to be such? Droplets on leaves, for instance, are hardly ponds and not even puddles. They're droplets. Which leads to yet another question: How many categories of the gatherings of still waters are needed to precisely mirror the reality of an ecosystem? How many ponds can dance on the head of a pin on a topographical map? As a philosopher this gets me thinking: Why not construct a scalar ontology, a theory of being that does not begin by enumerating concrete or even metaphysical entities or the relations between entities but with the diversity of scales by which entities can appear and be approached in the first place? Size does matter. In all sorts of ways.<br />
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<br />Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-22761454817945510312014-07-06T06:32:00.001-07:002014-07-06T16:30:23.358-07:00The Blue Mountains, Lyrebirds and Stories We Tell<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM4eLHGcfyBgRZZ9Nj4nGhtRRmksmP6W22N6CqLGaaw1Pa-VG_zDDNDRP-dq1krI19HVZ911310mfRf6YkecEValR3NiucWJAMCSyCND_PFvOQe53TxC-GwS_BH8n5L12LuKF6MRaUA0U/s1600/LyreBird.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM4eLHGcfyBgRZZ9Nj4nGhtRRmksmP6W22N6CqLGaaw1Pa-VG_zDDNDRP-dq1krI19HVZ911310mfRf6YkecEValR3NiucWJAMCSyCND_PFvOQe53TxC-GwS_BH8n5L12LuKF6MRaUA0U/s1600/LyreBird.jpg" height="320" width="187" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lyrebird Lyrates and Filamentaries</td></tr>
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The Blue Mountains in winter: entire forests of gum trees, their spindly limbs crowned by green mops of leaves, thrash in torrents of air scouring the landscape. One image in particular comes to mind: perched on the heights at an angle against the gusting winds, I look out over a ledge into the depths of the Jamison valley. In massive gulps, the airstream around me is stripping water off the greenery after a rainy night, stripping the water, atomizing it into mist and then scattering it over the lip of an escarpment into the country stretching below. And there in front of me a rainbow, really rain-ribbon, or rain-serpent, materializing and evaporating and materializing again, soaring up the steep slopes from below and anchoring itself in the red sandstone cliffs opposite me. The Blue Mountains are, if anything, a landscape of rainbows, precipices and wind.<br />
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And yet. later, hiking down the escarpments to the wooded bottom lands of the valley, I was amazed to find that terrible wind dissipating with every step, the air becoming nearly still and birdsong audible. As if the valley below were the permanent eye of an unending hurricane raging above it.<br />
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Actually the Blue Mountains are a massive plateau eroded away in great chunks to form a series of forested canyons and valleys framed by towering escarpments. And the lowlands are, it turns out, a great place to encounter a lyrebird. At least in mid-winter during their their mating season. Belying their reputation, the birds were not at all difficult to find: the racket they make, thrashing about in the forest as they dig in the duff for insects and salamanders, unabashedly signals their presence. And they are not concerned about exiting the scene, unless the human visitor is a bit too insistent about approaching near. And even if one cannot see a lyrebird directly, the males, perched on their hidden thrones, mounds built up of dirt and leaves to impress a cohort of mating females, fill up the forest with whistles and throstlings, cooings and tweets, twitters and buzzings and croaks in stereophonic virtuosity. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Blue Mountain Escarpment</td></tr>
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At one point I did approach a male to capture a better image, in fact the one appended above. Eventually, impatient with my insistence, he flew down the slope in a power glide (this particular set of wings being not good for much else), his body configured in a blue ideogram of feathers so perfect, so unearthly, that it surely had escaped from a special effects program for high end video games. The two lyrate tail feathers, as they are termed, are held, at least during flight, curved open in a shape suggesting the musical instrument after which the bird is named. Mating is another business altogether, according to avian ethologists, with the tail feathers directed forward so that they hover over the male's head as he struts his stuff. <br />
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This plumage is hypnotic. To call it beautiful obscures the fact that its most powerful virtue is that of dissemblance, of shape shifting. As the male digs incessantly into the earth in search of goodies he tilts his rear upward--this ungracious posture unleashing a furious dance of feathers in which the two chestnut brown lyrates are transformed into a pair of hyperactive snakes writhing in mid air over the earth. The lacy filamentaries also composing the tail confuse the light around the lyrates and render the ensemble ghostly, a mixture of form and void, uncanny flesh dissipating into shimmers of airy light. Spellbound at this sight, I can sympathize with the fidelity of the mating females to such a display. In some part of me, I'm seduced too and prepared to stay here as this male's consort for eternity. Surely this is Eden and this lyrebird Adam.<br />
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Given the flamboyant feathers and preternatural talent for mimicry, the lyrebird not only fascinates humans but leaves us envious. You Tube is filled with videos showing off the capacity of this species to ape everything under the sun: from kookaburras to car alarms. In one of these, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ" target="_blank">David Attenborough encounters several</a>, obviously not in the wild (of this fact he is not forthcoming: see <a href="http://theconversation.com/lyrebirds-mimicking-chainsaws-fact-or-lie-22529" target="_blank">Hollis Taylor's blog on this issue</a>), that can mimic camera clicks, the buzz of chain saws and men working nearby.. But this fascination with a captive bird's talent for simulation leaves me wondering: Why is the capacity in a living creature to duplicate the sound of a fire alarm so noteworthy?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lyrebird Habitat in the Jamison Valley</td></tr>
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To this question I have a hopeful and not so hopeful answer. I'll start with the hopeful and more subtle point first. In giving voice to click of camera and whirring of electric-motored film advance, the captive lyrebird transforms the inert noises permeating his surroundings into something rich and strange. This power of living things to transcend the merely mechanical and efficacious has recently been christened "biosemiosis." In this term one registers how the very stuff of life, from our genetic coding on up, involves the expression and reception of signs among the living kinds, as well as within the bodies of every living kind. The entirety of creation it turns out is full of messages in search of reception, which is to say, full of storytelling. And so I am thankful for the closeup in Attenborough's video of the captive lyrebird's beak, as an electrical whirring emanates forth from its gifted voicebox: in my very hearing, a mechanical sound, an intricate, human-made contraption of moving metal and plastic gears, finds a renewed and uncanny dwelling place in living flesh of another living kind. In this reverberation of a vibration, it turns out, something more than mere efficacy, the chief virtue of technological existence, emerges. The camera leaves its imprint on the lyrebird's hearing not as machinery but as encounter, not as redundancy but as creative opportunity. <br />
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But that very closeup is also distressing, particularly given Attenborough's condescending take on the moment. It is a matter of the story, after all. And the story Attenborough tells and enacts is one of a huckster: "Look at this," his tone intimates. "Ain't it grand?" But is this the story worthy of a species 15 million years upon the face of the earth, one whose forebears, unlike our own, are part of the very strata of the continents? Rather than questioning the process by which the vocabulary of a lyrebird is overtaken by the sounds of cameras, car alarms and buzz saws, the fact is simply sketched out as an elaborate joke, a trick. This exchange of bird and human here is just one step up from trick dolphins jumping through hoops and elephants balancing on each other's backs. Of course, what is different is that the lyrebird comes to this trick voluntarily via its own practices. But the circumstances of those practices are not voluntary at all: he has been confined to a cage. And this question haunts me: Why is the mimicking of machinery so noteworthy in a living being? And listening again to it, I realize this: This bird no longer is my Adam; his power to seduce these human ears has been reduced to one that amuses. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Three Sisters</td></tr>
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Other stories, it should be noted, are told of the lyrebird, including stories by peoples who were willing to follow for tens of thousands of years the lines of song laid down by a living kind across country. The Gundungurra people, for instance, <a href="https://burgewords.wordpress.com/tag/gundungurra-nation/" target="_blank">who own the stories of what we whitefellows call the Jamison Valley</a>, have something quite different than Attenborough to say about the lyrebird and its mimicry. But their stories are for the most part kept alive and cared for, when they have not been annihilated by colonial violence, in the closed circles of their keepers.<br />
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Still one story might be told, a story that was falsely attributed to the Grundungurra and was actually authored by a whitefellow schoolgirl by the name of Patricia Stone. Her tale involves three sisters who are transformed into stone by their father, a powerful cleverman, to save them from a <i>bunyip</i>, a terrifying creature who lurks in the waters waiting to feast upon anything that comes by, particularly women and children. Angered at the daughters' transformation, the <i>bunyip</i> chases the father, until cornered, he transforms himself into a lyrebird with the same magic bone he had used upon his daughters. And then, to his dismay, he discovers the bone has been lost.<br />
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If a whitefellow is to tell a story about country, this is perhaps not a bad start. And it leaves its audience with important questions to chew upon. Why, for instance, does the clever man turn his daughters to stone, even as he chooses a lyrebird for his own moment of shape shifting? Parents, in protecting their children, can go too far and with tragic results. Yet by throwing rocks heedlessly from the cliff top (which is what initially alerts the <i>bunyip</i> to their presence), the daughters themselves are implicated in their petrification due to their own thoughtlessness. And there is the issue of that magic bone. It is powerful but also limited in its efficacy. And it can simply be misplaced. The contours of the real emerge here in an intricate interplay of themes and forces: the ferocity of love, the carelessness of youth, the outbreak of elemental violence, the limited means of wisdom and and the fragility of human power. In the face of the <i>bunyip</i>'s hungry maw the cleverman chooses song over blood letting. Shakespeare would be pleased. <br />
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But what most intrigues me today is the cleverman's decision to become a lyrebird. The ways in which humans find themselves affirmed in the lyrebird, even as the lyrebird finds its peculiar talents affirmed in human beings is worthy of more than a little thought. As I hear it, the telling of this metamorphosis, of man to lyrebird, gives words to the mystery of language itself. For words clarify the meanings of things, as the act of naming calls forth reality and reality calls forth naming. And like the lyrebird, are not humans in the business of singing their existence in borrowed song? We clothe ourselves, both in body and in thought with the skins and voices of all the other living kinds. When all is said and done, we are made of words. If a human is to become another animal, certainly becoming a lyrebird makes a lot of sense. Thank you Patricia Stone for this thought.Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-75055532235506145642014-01-11T15:40:00.002-08:002014-07-06T16:31:23.630-07:00The Stone Markers of the Choisi-Michi Pilgrimage Route<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgazqfDEYDxZoXeeSTOAv_gvgbXjQHJkYLJhJ2T8fvVaUqAU0YDoxVXCfeePgK6Wn2U0-AofGm7FpZdyZND99vQaCm_7DAy2RFqerObAAEQlUcRySiTiJGwggcs6hRWuetTsakHK9Uzf5o/s1600/Choisi+Michi+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgazqfDEYDxZoXeeSTOAv_gvgbXjQHJkYLJhJ2T8fvVaUqAU0YDoxVXCfeePgK6Wn2U0-AofGm7FpZdyZND99vQaCm_7DAy2RFqerObAAEQlUcRySiTiJGwggcs6hRWuetTsakHK9Uzf5o/s1600/Choisi+Michi+1.jpg" height="200" width="132" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCD1b4NTyMgxIER2gbC7PZIP-jrNrMwb-ew1KhEfLEeArU6a-YD_9oGVAGFDpISk-s3Ef4D1CUFSWGl8uHKyxfnzU_jT91aLwj_dvPDT05AnLEHJm4TDOn3oy9Phfjn5zx7-ctIrgov-s/s1600/Choisi+Michi+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCD1b4NTyMgxIER2gbC7PZIP-jrNrMwb-ew1KhEfLEeArU6a-YD_9oGVAGFDpISk-s3Ef4D1CUFSWGl8uHKyxfnzU_jT91aLwj_dvPDT05AnLEHJm4TDOn3oy9Phfjn5zx7-ctIrgov-s/s1600/Choisi+Michi+3.jpg" height="200" width="132" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjd3AgjRn3JvtEBWYs0eNvZigfrbw_h0f-TA0S8fZMycCAW3pnobFZ0s6riJ0cIN4CK8toKRkyxkxbKjDT8Wh0XqvGEd6buXSXWFWzU3shJ5ZP1IcW-JDQApGLs_N7lbwsIDwKqMcfw4U/s1600/Choisi+Michi+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjd3AgjRn3JvtEBWYs0eNvZigfrbw_h0f-TA0S8fZMycCAW3pnobFZ0s6riJ0cIN4CK8toKRkyxkxbKjDT8Wh0XqvGEd6buXSXWFWzU3shJ5ZP1IcW-JDQApGLs_N7lbwsIDwKqMcfw4U/s1600/Choisi+Michi+2.jpg" height="200" width="132" /> </a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">180</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;"> stone markers, spaced 109 meters apart, line the Choisi Michi trail leading to Koyasan, the seat of Shingon Buddhism and the resting place of Kukai, its founder and most illustrious thinker. Each marker has its own history and stories surrounding it. </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.800000190734863px; line-height: 18px;">Photographing each pillar as I walked up the last 7 km. of the trail in the rain unexpectedly became a meditative practice. The inpouring of sensations as one walks among so many living entities and elements making their home in the environs of the trail can be overwhelming. Cascades of ferns, innumerable branches of hinoki and sugi, the rushing of water among stones, the call of crows in the distance. The markers helped to steady me a bit. I thank them for that.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx6pmK5eXKge0A3idnVeqX-KKKsclJFgaXxvIPgfZxTmSgiUV8A9FEKF34qX1kgsy6a4Ih1naqudw99XSAinl-FBhb0zfMzgsvnZNNMB_nL_BdQxXZNeZZvvlfdVNZoL4HSyfCHZzsroo/s1600/Choisi+Michi+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx6pmK5eXKge0A3idnVeqX-KKKsclJFgaXxvIPgfZxTmSgiUV8A9FEKF34qX1kgsy6a4Ih1naqudw99XSAinl-FBhb0zfMzgsvnZNNMB_nL_BdQxXZNeZZvvlfdVNZoL4HSyfCHZzsroo/s1600/Choisi+Michi+4.jpg" height="200" width="132" /></a><br />
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-45601776642885352092014-01-02T02:38:00.000-08:002014-07-06T16:30:54.614-07:00A Camphor Tree in the Dark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzyE4YH3CaIGcMbinJffqmxUfMYqQCfCroPNwSFqzCRQ8Mlg4Alh_PXxyi6IHjicbyyKAkA723nn7ZLRAnt3Q4SPe7PRZ5TnBgBhwRBHXcUzzLQ54aczc5HJlzOc-lSttiFDIQQnqkHk8/s1600/IMGP1222.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzyE4YH3CaIGcMbinJffqmxUfMYqQCfCroPNwSFqzCRQ8Mlg4Alh_PXxyi6IHjicbyyKAkA723nn7ZLRAnt3Q4SPe7PRZ5TnBgBhwRBHXcUzzLQ54aczc5HJlzOc-lSttiFDIQQnqkHk8/s400/IMGP1222.JPG" height="262" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b>A Camphor Tree in the Dark</b></div>
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Sometimes the image does all the talking. And sometimes the tree in the image is doing the talking in all the talking. This aged camphor tree, a Shinto shrine in the very heart of Wakayama, is a must visit spot each time I return to Japan with a new group of students to hike the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Route. A sporadic stream of people, some homeless, some well-dressed, some young and some old, visit this site throughout the day and into the night. Humans gather with crows and ferns and feral cats and all other manner of living creature to find a moment of solitude, to offer a word of thankfulness, to seek consolation. Or simply to be in the presence of the tree's ministry.<br />
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I have photographed a series of images of this tree, mostly at night. Interestingly, in this particular image the outpouring of light from the city illuminates the sky turning it into a spectral backdrop, even as the many lamps lining the paths of the park in which the tree is found provide foreground and accent lights. The tree, it turns out, is posing in a vast photographic studio constituted by a flood of urban illumination.<br />
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Urban light pollution is often and rightfully mourned as one of a host of factors cutting off us denizens of the contemporary techno-imperium from the living stuff of creation. Or at least cutting us off from how the world is shared with creatures far more accustomed to the dark than we are. In wiping away darkness from the night, have we not lost contact with our own dark natures? Which is to say those aspects of the world that befuddle our senses, or at least our vision. The world is not always ours to grasp at a distance, the darkness teaches. And when distances do appear in the unobstructed darkness of the night, they are the magnificent and harrowing heights of the stars spreading out and dancing in a great circle over the sleeping earth. For us humans to look into the night sky that is full of the night calls for humility and daring. Losing the night diminishes us. <br />
<br />
Yet, this image of a camphor tree, I must confess, is a striking one. And I hunger to return night after night to see what new revelations it might have in store. The urban night lights afford nature a shining forth that is not to be found otherwise for human capacities. What to do then with this blasphemy that is also a blessing? Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0Wakayama Japan34.279914398549934 135.219726562533.442489898549937 133.9288330625 35.117338898549932 136.5106200625tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-90235147392966712812013-09-28T09:59:00.002-07:002013-10-12T12:49:49.780-07:00“This Land” – Exhibition at Salisbury University Galleries, August/September 2013<div style="text-align: justify;">
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In 2004, Gochen Tulku Sang-ngag
Rinpoche, a Tibetan Lama, was traveling through <st1:state>Montana</st1:state> when he looked out a car window and recognized something from his dreams: the massive shapes of mountains floating upon the earth like lotus blossoms on a pond. From this initial moment of encounter and inspiration, when earthly elements in the Jocko Valley and the mountain ranges surrounding it conspired to offer a vision to Rinpoche that he reverently embraced, something quite special under the sun has been emerging: a magnificent garden centering on a gold-leafed statue of Yum Chenmo, the Great Mother, a feminine instantiation of Buddha. Rising two stories above a green meadow with her hands arranged in the mudra expressing the transmission of tradition, the Great Mother’s golden face greets the lotus-shaped mountains with a sublime smile offering limitless compassion and supremely active wisdom. She in turn serves as the hub for a great wheel with eight spokes emanating from her multi-colored, lotus-shaped seat, each spoke inhabited by two ranks of white Buddhas sitting back to back in unbroken contemplation. Beyond the rim of the wheel, whose wide arc is composed of innumerable, waist-high stupas, are arranged in the four directions four Buddhas in dark stone, each garlanded daily with freshly gathered blossoms, each gazing back in turn to the figure of Yum Chenmo at the center. In all, the garden is home to a thousand Buddhas, a river valley and several mountain ranges. To walk the garden pathways is not only to rediscover the manifold insights of an ancient and venerable religious tradition but also to confront the power inherent in the land here and now to inspire and instantiate that tradition, its aspirations and longings.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">‘Land’ is one of those basic words
in the English language, serving as a necessary staple, if you will, in our
speaking of the world and our place in it.
Indeed, the very notion of finding one’s place in the world only makes
sense if there is some land in that place upon which one can set one’s feet. In
its most abstract sense, land designates a particular area on the planet’s
surface, as long as it is not covered with water. Yet even underneath the waters,
land abides, providing the stay by which the waters are upheld. To simply think of land, then, as a
circumscribed area on the planet’s surface trivializes its role in both human
and planetary existence. For we
regularly go to war over land, or at the very least, end up in court with
unremitting regularity disputing ownership, rights and covenants in regard to
land. And in the American narrative of
westward movement, the dignity and freedom offered by land, recommended by
Jefferson’s notion of the yeoman farmer and later codified into law through the
homestead act, is a decisive and abiding element, for better and worse, of our
culture. Indeed, the very movement
westward proved to be a wholesale usurpation of tribal lands of First Peoples,
an act whose injustice and violence </span><st1:country-region style="text-indent: 0.5in;">America</st1:country-region><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
has yet to fully admit let alone satisfactorily resolve. And this latter point reminds us that in land
we find concretely and uncannily at play the rights and interests and loves of
other humans, indeed of all other humans, not to mention of all other living
kinds, whether they be plentiful raccoons or endangered fox squirrels, unwanted
poison ivy or the lovely though miniscule blossoms of draba celebrated by Aldo
Leopold.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoofAAr5XiADC-N4D_lcb6kvSaz3Hl-W3IXfDqLcYgPC3_nHG_BjtiOCqtChMGZCzQOSJALQhN43oDWSfDtgRfFqoo9sTnfc8KkAFSX4aeJVJhtRCyqec7okvrI-HfpBX-bB5tg3KEm2w/s1600/ThisLand2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoofAAr5XiADC-N4D_lcb6kvSaz3Hl-W3IXfDqLcYgPC3_nHG_BjtiOCqtChMGZCzQOSJALQhN43oDWSfDtgRfFqoo9sTnfc8KkAFSX4aeJVJhtRCyqec7okvrI-HfpBX-bB5tg3KEm2w/s400/ThisLand2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">For
better or worse then, human cultures have been defining themselves through the
land in which they would reside since the beginning of human tenancy upon the
face of the earth As to the worse in our </span>own time, the gallery viewer might
consider Eric LoPresti’s epic yet hellish (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent to the
Latinate ‘dystopian’) landscapes, in which clouds of dust stirred up from
atomic blasts scour the earth and yet reveal in that very alteration something
sublime even if monstrous, something compelling and seductive, even if
destructive and apocalyptic. LoPresti’s
work would remind us that not so far from Rinpoche’s beatific garden in the
Jocko Valley – in fact, just over the continental divide 60 miles to the east –
lies a fleet of minuteman missiles, cocked and ready to fire, ham-fisted
weapons with the capacity to annihilate entire cities and indiscriminately
poison the soil, water and air surrounding them for generations. As a child growing up on the high plains in
Montana I remember the sudden presence of men smartly appointed in Air Force uniforms
explaining the massive construction project that was taking place all around
us. One very personable speaker even attempted to ignite with a blowtorch a
flake of the solid material fueling the missiles to show us locals how inert
and harmless it was, at least until activated with an electronic impulse. Of course, the nuclear warhead to be
installed on top of a tower of that fuel was another matter and remained
unmentioned in his talk. Soon the earth
was peppered with underground silos capped by great concrete lids and fenced
off from any approach. Constructed by
army-green earthmovers and caterpillar tractors, beautifully graded roads for
hauling the bombs and delivery vehicles to their duly appointed resting places
appeared overnight stretching across the landscape. In all of this was an effort not unlike in
effect and exceeding by far in economic means that of Rinpoche’s garden: a
re-envisioning of what it meant to belong to a human culture by a re-envisioning
and reworking of the land upon which that culture makes its home under the
sun. </div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In viewing the exhibition ably put together by Liz
Kaufman and Marisa Sage, the onlooker might keep in mind the manifold ways in
which the very shape and sense of our human existence is constituted by how we
come to define our relationship with land and how land inevitably responds in
its own way to that gesture. It’s not
just up to us after all. The land also
is apt at making itself know even in our most insistent attempts to turn it
into the mere reflection of our own interests and desires.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjboGiiDywwMSOsRh-tKoDBRT8ZISYHLXNlwOhtOPyroIOkpwzrZviiRczVsEndrCGfQjDPNNNb9Sa5qmlIPAiyRDGu-XQkQs70LsxlIgnCS-R5nVIr5YTq6C7AmDDbTyIHv69LlQjKHco/s1600/ThisLand1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjboGiiDywwMSOsRh-tKoDBRT8ZISYHLXNlwOhtOPyroIOkpwzrZviiRczVsEndrCGfQjDPNNNb9Sa5qmlIPAiyRDGu-XQkQs70LsxlIgnCS-R5nVIr5YTq6C7AmDDbTyIHv69LlQjKHco/s320/ThisLand1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Liz Kaufmann’s curatorial approach
asks that the gallery-goer comes to deeper insights not only about the
respective practices of artists in their approach to land but also to entertain
what one learns from the juxtaposition of these different approaches. Land is no more fixed in its meaning and
possibilities, it turns out, than is the human imagination. For instance, the epic gestures of LoPresti’s
paintings, in which the immensity of planetary surfaces and the primordial
forces unleashed in and on them, find an arresting counter-point in the deeply interior landscapes of Kevin Barnes. In the latter’s work, the light by which tree, meadow or forest is illuminated and so land is revealed in its fullness to the human eye comes from within as much as without. In his act of painting the land, Barnes<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> would be </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">true to its facts, to
its given.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The land has its say.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But at the same time a “distillation” of
vision and an intensification of reality takes place in these canvases that
find a second life for the landscape in the hypersensitivity of the human mind
to color and form.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Magical realism is at
work here, although certainly not a magical realism merely introducing
fantastic items or elements into an otherwise mundane world.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">What is magical, Barnes teaches us, is color
and form itself.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">And for Barnes the land
provides a peculiarly powerful initiation into this magic</span>.<br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />Engaging the land in
magical realism of another sort are the photographic performances of Megan
Crump. As with Barnes, the intimacy of
one’s contact with the land is paramount.
But in Crump the magical is worked out not so much in color and form,
although they have their say, as in personal ritual and shamanistic </span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwE2X6w4Md1RDZi-pKpSf0GqRcCNNXy0tSLMDOTohljtyDayi8MJkDdunxwFFhUZ1ufj0lrcqEeKvUl7qbaPogBSajJJtwLSxMTxnhR8Km_Siolvw2C9MBTAuMtnmbM2kVGXF8cJYl8WM/s1600/ThisLand4small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwE2X6w4Md1RDZi-pKpSf0GqRcCNNXy0tSLMDOTohljtyDayi8MJkDdunxwFFhUZ1ufj0lrcqEeKvUl7qbaPogBSajJJtwLSxMTxnhR8Km_Siolvw2C9MBTAuMtnmbM2kVGXF8cJYl8WM/s320/ThisLand4small.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">transformation. David Abram, a philosopher who has written
tellingly about animistic perspectives on a more-than-human living world
identifies the shape-shifting qualities of perception, its metamorphic, protean
capacities, as crucial to indigenous frames of mind. Crump’s photographs work out Abram’s insight
by introducing her own body into the land and so into the photographic image
she produces of the land. But this is
accomplished so that the very appearance of Crump’s human form tricks the eye,
unhinging its assumptions of what might be occurring. For me a powerful moment of recognition took
place when what appeared to be a rather pedestrian fallen tree trunk next to a
creek in “Roots” turned out to be Crump’s naked body, carefully arranged to
emerge from the undergrowth to appear like a pedestrian fallen tree trunk next
to a creek. In that uncanny and
shamanistic transformation, I found myself challenge</span><u style="text-indent: 0.5in;">d</u><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> to see that seeing
is itself unhinged by powers at work when land and body become radically open
to the possibilities they call forth in one another.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH2T20afTYvdlu0QBslXxwkuiaSCDjOsjVCz5uCM3W2bS1HJz0_93s6_dOKaV_jMCG0VM4PVljnqpTq4VUStFURBB1cpReizygpCVk0MNZdl7dVcXOxAMgkeUZqymcGJxq149QtGCPArI/s1600/ThisLand5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiH2T20afTYvdlu0QBslXxwkuiaSCDjOsjVCz5uCM3W2bS1HJz0_93s6_dOKaV_jMCG0VM4PVljnqpTq4VUStFURBB1cpReizygpCVk0MNZdl7dVcXOxAMgkeUZqymcGJxq149QtGCPArI/s320/ThisLand5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet another tack on the role of the land in
defining human culture comes in Dan Mill’s “Quest” series, which is composed of abstract portraits of actual maps derived from colonial history. His paintings invite the </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">gallery-goer to become enchanted yet again with the artifice of map-making, its love of lines and colors as they divvy up the space of a two-dimensional surface. Indeed, humans of all cultures love maps of all sorts. Aboriginal painters from </span><st1:country-region style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Australia</st1:country-region><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,
for instance, often transpose traditional maps tracing storylines through
country into scintillating fields of color and space on a canvas. But
underlying and subverting this enchantment in Mill’s case is the historical
provenance of the particular patchworks of color in which he is
interested. The classification and
parceling out of land in the history of European map-making has all too often
meant the dispossession of others. The
colonial map is a map of discovery that quickly transmutes itself into a map of
usurpation. Indeed, the map in an Air
Force file that locates the minuteman missiles scattered about the high plains
of </span><st1:state style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Montana</st1:state><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> overlays a landscape
inhabited for some 10,000 years by tribal peoples whose place under the sun has
bee</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">n constricted only since
the European arrival to the stingily drawn lines on </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">yet another colonial map
defining a so-called Reservation.</span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Perhaps as well the gallery goer should remember that her or his very footsteps tread the land once part of the Tundotank Reservation of the Wicomico People. What artwork would be sufficient to register that fact, bear witness to this strange doubled vision of land that is at once home and stolen, at once the land of </span></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Tundotank and of Tony Tank (a Colonial name derived from the former Native American one) Creek? Mills leaves that question with us. And Peter Stern's "Nentego," a mural composed of aerial photographs of land once inhabited by the Nanticoke People takes the gallery viewer one step closer to answering that question, although I cannot imagine, in contradistinction to the artist's own view on this matter, that anywhere on the Eastern Shore a forest unaltered by European incursion remains.</span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivUR2vWjEKUky0aTI9aJxmZiqjr-aUmp7hPKwJz_rgQVV6CkIcTTwD-0bOMYumfG-obvbKZR0AI1ukHXcGUmE9mr4KW_IXkUhH5tYeFKaHAgjFpGFL5RfP0zsg6sZ7ITNV8Nd9-YmkPyE/s1600/ThisLand3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivUR2vWjEKUky0aTI9aJxmZiqjr-aUmp7hPKwJz_rgQVV6CkIcTTwD-0bOMYumfG-obvbKZR0AI1ukHXcGUmE9mr4KW_IXkUhH5tYeFKaHAgjFpGFL5RfP0zsg6sZ7ITNV8Nd9-YmkPyE/s400/ThisLand3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In spite of the
historical violence and ecological devastation that is being played out across
the surface of the planet, including our own </span><st1:place style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Eastern Shore</st1:place><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,
the land can still glisten. And its
weathers can still flourish, even if altered in terrible ways by Global Climate
Change. Through the digital arts
informed by computer software, data recording and image projection, Mark
Nystrom’s alchemical transformation of the winds blowing over the roof of
Fulton Hall is not only beautiful in its aesthetic impact but also deeply
informative of the remarkable complexity of the wind’s movement, its mercurial
gestures with their varying intensities and orientations. All too often the living world has become a
vague presence to the denizens of contemporary </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">technocratic culture, who have
all too often reduced the earth to a green blur passing by its car windows, or
an entertaining flickering of colors and shapes on a computer screen. But in “Air Current(s)” </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Nystrom, rather than
abjuring the omnipresent technological processing of the living world
characterizing our time has challenged himself and his audience to embrace it
in a manner that is more rather than less heedful of the land and its many
subtle qualities. Electronically
illuminated screens need not always be a way of veiling or blunting our
interaction with the elements of land.
They can also uncover truths about it that would otherwise go
unnoticed. In offering the winds for
the gallery-goer’s discernment and contemplation, Nystrom’s work is not unlike
Gochen Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche’s garden mentioned above, which is itself
ringed by eight prayer flags perpetually fluttering and falling with the
winds.</span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />I am thankful to the curator of
this show and the artists included in it for having given me the opportunity to
renew my own all too thoughtless relationship with the more-than-human living
world. As these works remind the gallery
goer, the land requires much of us if we are to abide heedfully upon it. While in no way do any of the artists involved
in this exhibition advocate for a simplistic nativism, neither do they counsel
that we ignore the place upon the earth in which our existence is offered its
colors and forms, its depth and meaning.
That enduring and profound struggles emerge in this process, that the
outcome is at time times ambivalent and even disturbing does not excuse us from
the challenge these works pose for us.
The land is waiting for our reply.</span></div>
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-16889398173355008282012-12-20T07:20:00.000-08:002014-08-22T07:36:18.297-07:00First People's Buffalo Jump<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUNYSBrz65eJIaDBvvQdxUkRPYu5TUizy7DK49Qw2CVWtnRpCqH1dkADdEoNvHk1_3-eclNpTVGPZsWHpF3RKCkQMctHKYlAg3x6gwddzvILh65hkij-t7_jphvPJQMlQ60gGN8l5hPvY/s1600/first-peoples-buffalo-jump_chuck-haney_scenic-outcrop_firstPeoplesSP.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGnIOd-t-cMqcHBrEnzY5QDBKgluPZrBbt6JQ7YnurAkIKXJEqWkp0HnaAA01WqR4EqrkM1Lv7Nb8knlrXbaXuANcQ0EJrXWKzcNlV8jlhkb4sPaY0RU2QVDMJoQ4sKHLLQdF49Ib25ww/s1600/IMGP0782.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGnIOd-t-cMqcHBrEnzY5QDBKgluPZrBbt6JQ7YnurAkIKXJEqWkp0HnaAA01WqR4EqrkM1Lv7Nb8knlrXbaXuANcQ0EJrXWKzcNlV8jlhkb4sPaY0RU2QVDMJoQ4sKHLLQdF49Ib25ww/s1600/IMGP0782.JPG" height="263" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Buffalo Jump in foreground with Square Butte in background</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The First People's Buffalo Jump, the largest of its kind on the North American continent, lies to the west of Great Falls, Montana. A low lying butte with sandstone cliffs ranging from 10 to 30 feet and extending along three of its sides, this place is revered by all the tribal peoples - Blackfoot, Crow, Salish, Kootenai, Bannock, Nez Perce, Shoshone, Assiniboine, Gros Ventres - who gathered together and hunted in this area long before the arrival of Europeans. Richard Hopkins, the affable and visionary director of the State Park preserving this site, explained to me how the rich soils deposited on the high prairie surrounding the Jump during the last ice age sustained grasses having an unusually high protein content. The harshness of the weather and the lack of trees may not remind a current day observer of the biblical paradise, but in many senses these rolling hills were one. Immense herds of bison, along with a coterie of their predators, including coyotes, grizzlies and wolves, flourished here. And humans too. <br />
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At the Jump, the stories involving buffalo and humans lie buried 6000 years deep. In ravines carved out by seasons of rain and snowmelt, one can sometimes spy weathered bones returning to the light after a long sojourn in the earth. As I followed the paths lacing the hills below the cliffs on a cold October day, I came to realize the very earth upon which I stood was built up from the once living bodies of buffalo now resting below my footsteps. And not only buffalo died here. Humans too continually risked their lives to hunt buffalo during what are called "the dog years" by tribal elders, the years before the horse entered into the world of tribal peoples. Hunting buffalo before the horse was a dangerous activity that required all the tribal peoples of this area to work closely together. As a result, the Jump is still acknowledged as a place in which a great power resides, the power of peace and survival, a place where the intertwined stories of Buffalo and humans were lived out and now reside. Even if the bison have departed, their stories and so their spiritual presence on the face of the earth remain palpable here.</div>
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But in our time and place, the bison have departed. By the end of the nineteenth century only two thousand remained.on the entirety of the North American continent. Once they had numbered in the tens of millions. As I walked along the path overlooking the cliff face, I felt a peculiar loneliness. For here precisely where the stories of bison reside most powerfully in the Montana landscape, no living animal was to be found. This disjunction is a painful one, a persistent reminder that this place under the sun, even as it remains sacred, has been subjected to immense violence, to a genocidal impulse that flooded over the high prairie during the last two centuries with the the arrival of my European kin, their guns, their booze and their railroads. Even today a minuteman missile silo housing a nuclear payload just a mile or two down the road from the Jump site is a powerful reminder of the modes of life dealing in death that still persist here. Yet today a resurgence in the numbers of bison is also afoot. One walks these hills hoping that in the not too distant future, buffalo will again graze the grasses and keep company with the prairie dogs living on the top of the butte. What a story that would make.<br />
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Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7043166335817871707.post-25048575338993177082012-11-18T07:15:00.001-08:002012-11-26T10:06:43.537-08:00Monoculture on a Pilgrimage Route<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLK2q25ZEfUmsE3FvoWePmyX5RD4WJx1PMY-Sd4c8RcwU7u8MH6UshnKMR1rWCUHM1SOEFf9wP1JhfNJ3JI3XCf2ORvTeS9PlV2mjXeOgIiA9IPw-Y2V5VQmOfgjK0pNiK1burpXEUBPc/s1600/IMGP2830.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLK2q25ZEfUmsE3FvoWePmyX5RD4WJx1PMY-Sd4c8RcwU7u8MH6UshnKMR1rWCUHM1SOEFf9wP1JhfNJ3JI3XCf2ORvTeS9PlV2mjXeOgIiA9IPw-Y2V5VQmOfgjK0pNiK1burpXEUBPc/s320/IMGP2830.JPG" width="212" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: black;">These cedars on the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage route near Chikatsuyui Japan have always struck me as particularly beautiful, precisely because they grow in such preternaturally straight lines. As a result the energy of the mountainside seemingly bursts upwarded unimpeded to the heights. It is as if one is witnesing uninhibited enlightenment. And the landscape bordering the Kumano Kodo is for Shingon Buddhists preeminently an exemplar of Buddha mind. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">Does it matter then that these trees are also textbook examples of monoculture, cedars arranged in straight rows supplanting the rice paddies that once were cultivated on this terraced mountainside? The forest is managed to eliminate scraggly trees and undesirable competitors. Is not then this grace deeply flawed? </span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">And still I am moved. </span></div>
Dr. James Hatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15396929146530958368noreply@blogger.com0