Nature
A Mind State
Wilderness is a place, a state of being where open spaces opens minds.~Terry Tempest Williams If open spaces opens minds, and I believe this truth will all my open soul, it holds, conversely, that closed spaces closes minds…and by extension…cuts off souls from all that is holy. The further one is removed from open spaces […]
Missing Earth Intimacy
I could hear birdsong, which sharpened an irrational feeling of allegiance, of fierce camaraderie with trees, the wild tortoises I had seen that afternoon, the vermillion flycatchers that had followed me.~Barry Lopez One stilting aspect of inner city life is the paucity of bird song. There are a few chirps and tweets here and there […]
Understanding the Mind-Soul Mystery
If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.~Terry Tempest Williams Most people I know are either attracted to […]
The Way of Ugly
The Navajo belief system is called the Beautiful Way, a way of life where one adjusts to the land and elements, accepts nature and events as they are instead of forcing their adjustment to oneself. ~Jan D. Payne If living in harmony with the land is considered the Way of Beauty, then the Western mindset […]
Sanctity of Life
Those who have forgotten say trees are not sentient beings, but they do not understand poetry. Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by rain and music or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft~Joy Harjo It is beyond my ken that anyone would deny trees […]
The Venus Divine
Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society or cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known.~Camille Paglia The Venus of Willendorf is believed to […]
Screaming Trees
If I listened, I might hear the chaos of those trees being dismembered, their bark peeled, their tendons sliced, and the unbearable noise of nail guns assaulting their limbs.~Gretel Ehrlich There is debate in the scientific community regarding whether or not fish feel pain. The don’t feel side claims fish lack the sufficient density of […]
To Soul or Not to Soul?
If place is stripped of geography, and if geography is stripped of spirit, any destructive scheme for profit will fly.~Barry Lopez The US has been at war for more than 500 years between two factions. One that wholeheartedly believes land is imbued with a soul and the other side believing just as strongly the land […]
Green Sky Dreams
When I look at the Northern Lights, I see our ancestors dancing around a sacred fire, lighting the way for us when it’s time for us to cross over from this physical world and joined them.~Molly Larkin I stand on the boat deck wrapped in layers surrounded by four score and more tourists all with […]
How Many Souls Are There?
The idea of a separate soul that lives outside the individual is a profound consideration and a conclusion.~Linda Hogan One of the greatest evils perpetrated by Christian theology is that the soul is uniquely human and isolated within the individual. The isolated individual leads to a conceptual philosophy viewing other beings as separate and distinct […]
God is Not Male
The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man.~Yaa Gyasi The rationale in nature behind the two primary sexes is the propagation of the species. This is accomplished when the male’s sperm fertilizes the female’s egg. […]
Struggles with Myopia
It was a vast old religion, greater than anything we know: more starkly and nakedly religious. There is no God, no conception of a god. All is god…It is the religion which precedes the god-concept, and is therefore greater and deeper than any god-religion.~D. H. Lawrence It feels to me a very narrow way of […]
Cultivating Sacred Spaces
A sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to […]
Full Circle
In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. ~D. H. Lawrence Does it count as coming full circle to the beginning if one started in the middle? Actually, the travel is more a decaying toroid (Think […]
Pursuit of Happiness
Primitivists believed that man’s happiness and well-being decreased in direct proportion to his degree of civilization.~Roderick Noah Don’t know how the iconic book escaped my attention for so many years, especially when, shortly after graduating from university, I devoured every book on Nature I could find at the local bookstores (back when what books we […]
Sun Transitions
Moonflowers blossom in the sandhills before dawn.~Leslie Marmon Silko My favorite times of the day are the crepuscular hours when day gives way to night or the night succumbs to the rising sun. During those magical times, the nocturnal creatures and their diurnal counterparts coexist for a short span until each either wakes up or […]
Weaned on Flat Earth
We are shaped by environment as much as by our ancestors. The epigenetic memory of our cells is constantly being made. The push and pull, blast and bang of life is making us in ways we haven’t understood until recently.~Gretel Ehrlich If place, if environment influences our DNA, what damage have I inflicted upon my […]
Soul Print
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence~N. Scott Momaday A few years back, we visited the highly overrated Sedona area in central Arizona. It was beautiful in a more abused sense than the lower third of Utah. Because of its proximity to Phoenix, it was overrun with […]
Kindred Crazies
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he […]
When Two Become One
It feels as if my ability to create is fading as the moon wanes…slowly dissolving into a void in which not even 108 Aums can rescue it from oblivion. No, not the moon cycle. Looser. My abilities are as truncated as the daylight in the solar cycle fading to fewer and fewer moments when creativity […]
Musings of a Middle Aged Man 