John Muir: Ecology of the Heart

"Fountain Lake Farm in central Wisconsin, the boyhood home of Sierra Club founder John Muir, was recently purchased for protection by a Wisconsin land trust. The newly protected area will adjoin the John Muir Memorial County Park and be part of a larger 1,400-acre natural preserve..." -Sierra Club Blog Notes

When I was in elementary school, K-6th grade, I attended John Muir Elementary in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.  At the time, being a wee one, I did not know what a profoundly lucky thing that was and only recently have I started to put together all the factors that made that experience the perfect one for me.  I learned about the man, John Muir, when I was young and have continued to be in awe of his foresightedness and what he did to make our wilderness areas protected sacred spaces.  When I learned today about the farm in Wisconsin where he grew up when his family immigrated from Scotland, I thought again about how fortunate I was to know something of his life's work when I was a child. The father of ecological activism taught us about preservation. His life was built on the belief  that our wilderness areas were to be valued, that the Redwood forests and the mountain tops were temples.  

I just read a powerful couple of paragraphs by David Orr from his book Earth in Mind: 

"It is worth noting that [environmental devastation] is not the work of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the results of work by people with [college degrees]. Elie Wiesel once made the same point, noting that the designers and perpetrators of... the Holocaust were heirs of Kant and Goethe, widely thought to be the best educated people on earth.  But their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity.  What was wrong with their education?  In Weisel's words, 'It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers rather than questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.'

     I believe that the same could be said of our education.  Toward the natural world it too emphasizes theories, not values; abstraction rather than consciousness; neat answers instead of questions; and technical efficiency over conscience."

Yet, we are all in this together. We all have had purchase in the Redwoods of California. We have all sat down for a meal at a picnic table, driven in automobiles, turned on lights in our homes and therefore contributed to the clear -cut Redwood story in one way or another through burning coal, cutting down the forests or petroleum use. I think John Muir would be saddened to know we learned so little from his words: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” We know by now the need to recognize the situation we find ourselves in today has been a story of unconscious consumption. The result of unbridled growth, overpopulation and greed--mainly, the fear that there is not enough to go around. 

    Even now in the midst of great awareness about global warming, renowned colleges and universities are unwilling to divest their portfolios of fossil fuel companies. What kind of education does that provide for the ones being educated in these centers for higher learning? What does it show by example? How can we transform when we are hanging on to a way of life which is unsustainable?  What would John Muir think if he knew that within the one hundred years since his death, we have covered the entire planet with concrete and asphalt and poisoned our water tables with chemicals, fracking, plastic and heavy metals?

    These are questions of ethics as well as matters of the heart. How can we connect on a level of solidarity with our global community and reinvent ourselves with greater conscience? How can we awaken as a higher collective together?   I am reminded of my teacher Jose Stevens's words about the false personality. We cannot rise in consciousness unless we let go of egoic desires.  If we live out of our false personality we are living in fear. Then we are afraid to divest our portfolios of the interests which bring environmental devastation and we are therefore educating our students to do the same. Learning of John Muir was my first schooling about a human being living from an awakened place with ecology.  I am grateful for his legacy and I hope we will have the inner vision to begin to live his wisdom teachings.

Finding Humility, Part II

On the train to Santa Fe two days ago, I met a wonderful woman from Oakland, California.  We talked about the book she was reading by Stephen Harrod Buhner,   Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. This, his latest of nineteen books, is a further exploration of what he is so gifted in conveying about our environment and especially the plant kingdom, with profound insight and perception.  What I am pondering today is directly connected to his words in the first pages of this new book.  He recalls an experience from his childhood, when he felt an unusual charged vitality in the presence of his beloved Grandfather.  He shares how the whole room and everything in it came alive for a brief few moments beyond the ordinary: "something inside of me flowed into him and something from inside of him flowed into me. And our bodies and our eyes acknowledged the reality of it in...[a] simple glance even though our minds had no words to describe it."

Six weeks ago, I moved from a semi-rural place where a horse and five goats lived across the street to a busy city part of Albuquerque. On the last day that I was at the old place, after moving out, I came back to settle up a few final things.  The horse, I call him Sunday, was standing at the fence with the goats as he often did and we made direct eye contact. I felt a union with him for a few moments, ordinary time dropped away, I stood still  and felt we were in direct communication.  I felt in my heart space that he understood I was leaving for good and that this was a good-bye. I connected with those animals for six years and I miss them now, the daily presence of their grounding bodies underneath an old cottonwood tree. I miss watching their natural easy way with the seasons and the weather changes.  Sunday's fur would start to grow thicker after the summer and his breath would frost -up in the air on cold winter days. His mane and fur - all white -would seem to glow in the moonlight. I miss feeding him, and his little herd of goats, alfalfa treats.  I miss seeing him grazing in his field but I hold certain that we had genuine connection and that humbles me. I feel that something inexplicable flowed between us.

Stephen Harrod Buhner writes that most of us can recall a childhood experience of oneness.  "...in all of us such memories are tucked away. But as we are schooled, as life has its way with us-and with our hearts-those memories come less and less to the conscious mind."  I am so grateful for the moments when I touch down into that sacred place of oneness with another being and remember that we are all connected to each other beyond words.  I am grateful for the synchronicity of certain happy link-ups like the recent one I had with the stranger on the train, Lucy. Our conversation reminded me -as if by magical guidance- to read again the wise words from another book by Buhner, The Lost Language of Plants. In this book he explains methods to gather information, used by many nonindustrial cultures, beyond our standard verbal means of communication. 

• At the center of all things is spirit.  In other words, there is a central underlying unifying force in the Universe that is sacred.
• All matter is made from this substance. In other words, the sacred manifests itself in physical form.
• Because all matter is made from the sacred, all things possess a soul, a sacred intelligence or logos.
• Because human beings are generated out of this same substance it is possible for human beings to communicate with the soul or intelligence in plants and all other matter and for those intelligences to communicate with human beings.
• Human beings emerged later on Earth and are the offspring of plants. Because we are their offspring, their children, plants will help us whenever we are in need if we ask them. 
• Human beings were ignorant when they arrived here and the powers of Earth and the various intelligences in all things began to the teach them how to be human.  This is still true.  It is not possible for new generations to become human without this communication or teaching from the natural world.
• Parts of Earth can manifest more or less sacredness, just like human beings. A human being can never know when some part of Earth might begin expressing deep levels of sacredness or begin talking to him. Therefore it is important to cultivate attentiveness of mind.
• Human beings are only one of many life-forms of Earth, neither more nor less important than the others.  Failure to remember this can be catastrophic for individuals, nations, and peoples.  The other life in the Universe can and will become vengeful if treated with disrespect by human beings.

All this reminds me to remain humble and keep an open heart. To be in awe each day at the wonder of it all, to remain mindful that each moment is truly once-in-a-lifetime and to consider that wisely. If we want to come into harmony with living on Earth in a sustainable way, perhaps the nonindustrial cultures have something to teach us.

Finding Humility on Route 66, Part I

Recently, a colleague, (thank you Marta) helped me to formulate a question for my best interest now and in the future: "What is the quality I most need for present circumstances and for proceeding into the future?"

After I got off our call, the answer came swiftly: Humility.  I need humility now and into the future.  My life deepens upon it. I woke up the next day with the remains of a delightful dream, perfect guidance to help me integrate the quality of humility.  It came in the form of humor.  In the dream, a great being, an Archangel acted out the body expression of arrogance- head held high, nose in the air, neck snapped back, hips askew-you get the picture.  The image of an angel taking on the posture of arrogance was very funny to me. Then the great being in my dream shape-shifted again taking on the posture of self-deprecation, with head hanging low, near perpendicular to it's slumped body, heart compressed, bent at that waist, knees buckled together.  I got it, not this posture, no that is not the picture of true humility.   In the dictionary, hu-mil-i-ty, a noun, is defined as: a modest or low view of one's own importance, humbleness.  However, my dream showed me different.  Humility is not having a low view of one's importance, but rather a neutral view, neither high or low.  Humility is not arrogant or self-deprecating, it is neither greedy or impatient.  Humility is not stubborn in the face of change or self-destructive.  Humility is love, self-love, not martyrdom.  Humility is not concerned with feigning or exaggerating one's experience to others, nor is it being in fear.  It is a natural state of equanimity - it is disengaged from being driven by ego.

Route 66

It is fall, a natural time of change. I see hot air balloons in the air today as I look out from my new home three floors above historic Route 66- a constant river of movement along which many have traveled east and west for generations. A big shift from a semi-rural earthy casita in one Albuquerque neighborhood on two acres of garden, flowers, trees to a busy city street. I find myself thinking about this idea of humility and how to find it, tune into it each day in this strange new place. A seeming homeless person was sleeping outside the front door to my complex yesterday, another person asks me for money, another asks to use a phone;  I am more aware of the division between the halves and the have-nots here.  There is a food bank for those in need one block from my new building.  On the weekends, motorcycles cruise up and down the stretch in front of my building until all hours of the night- very different than my former quiet- hood.

Change brings up my insecurities, fears about my safety arise; I feel  emotional upheaval.  I prefer to have stability or the illusion of control over my environment. By day number nine of my immigration from one residence to another I hit a wall of overwhelm, too much stress, little sleep.  I have lost my center, my peaceful center, my humility: my garden of grounding.

Humility and home have a root connection, like Christ said, "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Though I do not know exactly what that means, I do know that it is not through separation from the others that we inherit the keys to home but rather through acceptance and heart.  A month passes, I use earplugs, I sleep again. I unpack a bit each day and become more accustomed to the new space and the noises from the street that rise up - an endless playlist of jarring urban beats.  I realize the action of folding into fear- judgement and resistance -is always to create more fear, so I am learning to adapt, embrace the new soundtrack to my life and to continue to cultivate acceptance of what is.  With humility.  After all, I am just one of many dwellers in the city on route somewhere, seeking something. 

The Paradox

I am engrossed in a novel this summer.  I take it with me to the studio and when I am in a moment of pause on a painting commission, I read. The Goldfinch is Donna Tartt's very thick contemporary coming of age story (a 771 page turner) about a fictional character, Theo, growing painfully into manhood and a real life painting from the Frick Collection by Carel Fabritius, painted in 1654. I find the painting, an oil on panel, to be a strange, disturbing, yet masterful portrait of a bird.  To my mind, a heartbreaking image as the bird appears to be chained by one leg to a small box-like container mounted onto a plaster wall.  It has been suggested that the thin chain might not be attached to the bird but to a thimble for dipping water, but I don't view it that way.  Life giving or restricting, the question of the chain remains a mystery.  The red-faced goldfinch looks out at the viewer from just above our eye level so we can never be quite certain of the truth. The story of the painting becomes metaphorical in the novel: Theo, caught in a horrific scene during an explosion in a museum, takes the painting out with him.  Then throughout the unfolding chapters, he, much like the little goldfinch, is chained to it, to addiction, deceit, fantasy.  As Theo says of his looting, "Mine, mine.  Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist."  

In the same year that The Goldfinch was painted- in Delft, mid -17th century- an explosion in an ammunitions factory next to the artist Fabritius's studio took his life and destroyed most of his work. Somehow, the Goldfinch painting survived, traveled from the Hague to New York where it was purchased by the Frick Museum in 1896. Donna Tartt was so inspired by the allegorical piece that she wrote her novel with the painting as the central object, a secondary protagonist, albeit always hidden from view. Just after the explosion, the painting in the novel much like it might have been after the explosion in Delft, is covered in dust. Later, Theo hides it under his bed, wrapped in layers of paper and packing tape, later still after moving it from New York to Las Vegas and back again in a backpack, he puts it into a storage locker, out of sight for years. Always concealed, it becomes a talisman of his journey through the loss of his parents, an unlucky charm that he can't bring himself to let go of in spite of the ever looming dire consequences of the theft.

In an essay on How the Novel Made the Modern World, William Deresiewicz wrote "[t]here is a reason that we call them novels."  From the Italian Novella meaning "new story", Deresiewicz writes that the novel has always had, more than any other artform, "more room" to be real. And so true to form, The Goldfinch, the painting and the story it inspired is based on fact and fiction, there is a sharp realism to both.  Each a masterpiece of trompe l'oeil illusion, each a precise mixture of deception and truth.   On the final pages, at the end of the story, Theo says," ...as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion.  Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic."

It's an interesting thought, I love the idea of the "rainbow edge", but I believe that truth is something else, not one individual's 'reality' or that of another's. Truth is relative. Truth is beyond the dancing molecules that make up our existences. Truth is beyond the mundane, though it is within that too. That's the paradox.  Just as some truth exists in a certain light within the painting by Carel Fabritius and the novel by Donna Tartt, whether we are chained to something or the illusion of it, I believe our short time here is just a part of all that is. To be real is to be grounded in the moment and not in the fantasy. And truthfully, when art comes through us, when beauty abides, it is beyond this human frailty to understand. 

Yoko Ono: ARISING

Yoko Ono invited women from countries around the world to write testaments of harm done to them for simply being a woman. The setting for these testaments are part of her installation Arising, shown in conjunction with the 55th Venice Biennale along Venice’s Grand Canal, just a few steps away from the Rialto Bridge. In an interior room of a Renaissance mansion of the Palazzo Bembo, one finds the source of Ono’s unmistakable voice on the soundtrack to a video playing on a continuous loop. Her haunting aria wails, sings, moans, screams: 

“Listen to your heart 

Respect your intuition... 

Have courage 

Have rage 

We’re all together... 

We’re rising.” 

Arising is a multi-media installation—a single piece comprised of video, sculpture, sound, photos of eyes, and the written testaments from hundreds of anonymous women. On a flat screen mounted between two windows a video plays of a dozen or more human shapes burning like a pyre of corpses in a funerary ceremony. In the center of the gallery space, in front of the video, a mound of life-size female figures—perhaps the remains from the pyre—are piled up on a parquet wood floor. Far more realistic than mannequins, these lifeless bodies are covered with an ashen dust and encrusted with scales of a coppery green patina in an open mass grave. Testaments line two long walls from floor to ceiling and a polite Queen Anne table and chair sit at one end—a place for women to add their own narratives, if they are so inclined. 

At eighty years old, Ono has been creating performance art and installations since the mid-1950s when she moved to Manhattan and married her first husband, pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Ono was on the cusp of change happening in the art world at that time as Asian philosophy met American artists through the lectures of D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University. Ono met John Cage during this critical juncture at one of Suzuki’s lectures on Zen. They became friends and she later helped to bring Cage to Japan, performing with him in a collaborative piece called Music Walk.  

Ono was a founding member of the conceptual artist group Fluxus, in New York City, and created a body of work that is poetic, somewhat ephemeral, and often profound. By comparison to her recent installation in Venice, her 1966 piece Forget It—a steel sewing needle pointed upward and mounted on a Plexiglas pedestal engraved with the title and her initials—is minimal, a found object with Duchampian connections. One thinks about the proverbial needle in a haystack or joining up one thing with another. Ono’s art has consistently been idea oriented and at the same time elegant in material form. Another early conceptual piece, Glass Keys to Open the Skies—four clear glass skeleton keys hanging in a thin Plexiglas case, keys that are too fragile to be used—speaks of the desire to unlock that which is beyond our reach. Arising differs considerably from these pieces, independent of cerebral games. Arising is not about intellectual calculation, but rather an offering up of a collective emotional wound for healing. It is as though in this chapter of Ono’s creative output, she wants to score a piece that is without the sparcity of her previous work and leaves nothing to the imagination.  

The components that make up Arising are literal in subject and content, leaving no space to query what the point is. This is not a needle on a pedestal, or glass keys. Ono’s performance Cut Piece, first presented in Kyoto, in 1964, and later in London and New York City, at Carnegie Recital Hall, does resemble Arising in the expression of content. Ono invited the audience to snip away at her clothing until she was left seated onstage with little but shreds covering her body. In an essay for her 2001-2002 traveling retrospective, Alexandra Munroe wrote, “Cut Piece expresses an anguished interiority while offering a social commentary on the quiet violence that binds individuals and society, the self and gender.” Arising has a similar social commentary with the audible voices of more than two hundred fifty individual testaments. Some women wrote that they had never shared their story with anyone before out of fear or shame. Their words contain the pain of secrets long hidden:

“My silent mantra was, ‘stay small, 

stay quiet, become invisible.’ My name is ‘Anonymous,’ 

because that is how my father made me feel. He touched 

and held me as tight as he could, though not in 

the way a father should.”

These are stories of physical abuse, sexual transgressions, and rape. These are stories of destruction. These are the types of stories flattened by television police dramas. They are not spellchecked or edited for grammar, they are raw. Curator and museum director, Nanjo Fumio, wrote of Ono’s oeuvre, “Some of her messages call for love and peace; others encourage us to see our life from different perspectives. But always at the heart of her messages is a call to us all to be human; and all are informed by Eastern wisdom and poetics transcending national boundaries.” Ono’s installation Arising will continue to travel to various venues during 2014, and all women are invited to continue to add their testaments. Perhaps these stories are a part of that search and the truths of an arising global heart. 

—Deborah Gavel 

THE Magazine, May 2014

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Guy Cross, Editor