Ecstasy in the Sierra

Watching the National Parks special by Ken Burns over the last few nights has caused me to think a lot about our connection to nature, not that it is ever very far from my mind. I also had a special interest in watching Dayton Duncan, Burn’s longtime partner, since the editor for my last book is Duncan’s sister-in-law. Would love to meet him as I have some great documentary ideas, but I’m sure that’s true of almost everyone he meets.

John Muir has always been close to my heart, even with his flaws. I understand his ecstatic relationship with the Sierra as I grew up right below Sequoia National Park and am related to the region’s first white explorers and settlers. Every time I return to the banks of the Kaweah River or view it from some high granite dome, I find myself healed of whatever ails me physically, mentally, and spiritually. My 62 year old body gains a spring to its step and a cloud lifts from my mind. In the lifting of that cloud, it seems as if I can see everything with a great clarity and in that clarity the meaning and process of life is laid bare before me in all its nuance. The vision both enlightens me and weighs me down. This vision is of such ecstatic largeness that it strains against the confines of my small life and that strain, that pressure, can be painful. If I give away the vision as best I can through my creativity, especially my writing, the inner and outer balance is maintained, the pressures equalized. The problem lies in finding an audience that allows me to do this and supports me in my ongoing exploration of the backcountry of the mind and the spiritual depths of life.

I can tell you this unequivocally. We are part of something so profound that to call it random acts of chaotic probability, or to alternatively call it God, simplistically reduces this profundity to a shadow of what it really is. The ultimate answer to this environmental question is that we all have to learn how to live in relationship with this profound nature of life. Living in this relationship provides its own guidance and answers. In many ways, we live in greed and materialism in order to hide the emptiness we feel deep inside. What would it feel like to not be empty? How would that alter you? How would that alter our impact on the planet? We live in such a cynical, post-modern world that most people don’t even consider it possible to have this profound relationship with life. No one has ever really taught us how. We’ve only been taught how to conquer and consume as a means to plug the hole that leads to the emptiness and fear. There’s even a certain fashionableness to being empty.

John Muir said, “Go unto the mountains and get their good tidings.” He inspired a lot of people to see the mountains in a different way and inspired them to be willing to put aside their notions of comfort in order to go explore the mountains firsthand. I wish I could inspire you in the same way. “Go unto the mountains and the backcountry of your mind and get the good tidings.” Give up the emptiness, find the profundity. Your journey changes us all.

The Sacred Walk

If you do not walk the way, you do not see

it even as you walk on it.

When you walk the way, it is not near, it is

not far.

If you are deluded, you are mountains

and rivers away from it.

When we stop stop and consider where our foot falls next, the way can become apparent. Without considering our place in the nature of things and walking accordingly, everything is just a random crapshoot or a struggle for control.

Teamwork

Last weekend I went to my 45^th high school reunion. Going back always yields surprises. My wife and I were both in the same class at this high school and reconnected at our 25^th reunion.

A friend of mine told me about going to his 50^th reunion at a fancy hotel in Berkeley. He walked into the banquet room, took one look around and headed back out the door for the hotel bar. After a few stiff drinks he was reasonably fortified to go meet with all the old people. Though my reaction was not nearly so severe, the event was cause for a lot of reflection.

One of the first people I saw when I entered the room was the smiling face of my old basketball coach, who after all these years remembered my name and greeted me warmly. You have to understand I was not the star of the team. Far from it. I was one of the guys sitting on the end of the bench who mostly picked up minutes during garbage time when the game was already decided either way. Our team was incredibly deep that year. The first two strings would substitute in and out and run the other teams down. When coach decided to let up on the other team and put the rest of us in, we played with so much vigor that we continued to run up the score.

I always knew that being on that team had been important to me, but as I talked with Coach, I was overcome with how much that year of ball had altered my life. I had decided in eighth grade that I was going to learn to be a basketball player, long after everyone else had made their decisions and started practicing their moves over and over. I was a skinny, awkward nerd of a kid, the math/science whiz who was always picked last in team sports and suffering from a bad home life. I didn’t even know what a lay-up was, let alone be able to shoot one. My freshman year of high school I grew six inches to become six feet tall. What little coordination I had was further shot to hell, complicated by the fact I was a year younger than my classmates due to skipping a grade.

My family moved to a larger town between my 10^th and 11^th grade years and I suddenly felt like I had a clean slate. During my junior year I went out for the JV team, but I wasn’t on anyone’s radar and was immediately cut. I went to play on something they called the reserve team, a group of wannabes from all levels who practiced with the hope of someday making a team. We practiced outdoors on the blacktop through the San Joaquin Valley winters of dense bone-chilling tule fog. We had to hustle just to stay warm. Before the end of the season I was called up to the JV team.

As a senior I was invited to try out for the varsity, though I knew it would be a longshot. By this time I had really come to love the game and would have been happy to be a JV and just be able to play, though as a senior I wasn’t allowed to. It was all or nothing. My biggest attribute was that I could jump higher than about anyone else and could play the boards. Somehow I made the team, a miracle to this day.

Coach was a student of John Wooden and we played like a Wooden team—fast breaks and full-court presses. We were also a team, from the top to the bottom. Coach never belittled or trashed anyone. He taught us through his concern for all the players and by his love and passion for the game. We responded with dedication and all-out hustle. The first team didn’t look down on the last team. We just played hard together. We were a group of distinct individuals who chose to play as a team under the watchful eye and guidance of a good man. It was joy and I never wanted the season to end.

I realized that all through my life I have attempted to recreate the sense of that teamwork in all the situations I found myself, from being the head of a department as a teacher, an outdoor instructor, or a writer—with varying degrees of success. These days, all the emphasis seems to be on the triumphant in-your-face individual, in or out of sports, yet I had found a personal joy and grace in clearing the rebound out to the guard on the wing and then filling a lane. I didn’t have to take the shot. In fact during games, I was mostly on the bench, though I was always in the game.

There were about 6 or 7 of the old players at the reunion and we laughed and reminisced with Coach. We talked about the game we lost that would have taken us to the league championship and our star player lamented the shot he didn’t make, but it didn’t matter. The thing that mattered the most was the fact that we had played as real teammates and had loved the game together.

For many years I had wanted to thank him and I finally did. Thanks, Les Borges.

I’m an old man now and I no longer have the knees and the hops to play basketball, but in the bigger game of life, I’m still looking for someone to take the wing so I can clear the ball and fill the lane.

Non-Doing and Vision

I still haven’t mastered the art of keeping up with this blog in addition to working on a novel and keeping up with my other endeavors. I still have a lot to do for my upcoming gallery showing of photographs, as well as my furniture making. I’m actually trying to get a computer desk finished as a work center for my digital photography. I seem to work my best when I’m surrounded by the products of my creative life as well as those of others. I still have many prints—lithographs and woodcuts—made by other artists that are awaiting matting and framing. But, this is just a long segue…

In the midst of all the doing, it’s sometimes difficult to remember the art of non-doing. We are constantly exhorted to plan and work hard toward a goal, to market and extol ourselves. Yet, I’ve found that the greatest things that have come to me were unplanned and unexpected, welcome gifts that came from life that I could never have created with my willpower and cleverness.

Nearly two years ago I returned to the area where I grew up below Sequoia National Park. It is also the setting for my book The Great Western Divide. Marketing the book has been a problem for me, sometimes overwhelming in complexity, despite many favorable reviews. As I was leaving the area to return home, I sat down to have breakfast at the Wildflower Café in my hometown of Exeter. I had a momentary thought to leave my book at the small bookstore across the street that occupied a building that was once a pharmacy when I was a child, but I decided not to. I was tired and wanted to get home. Besides, what was the point? I could see no personal gain at leaving my book at such a tiny place.

As I got into my truck to leave I knew that I should leave my book at the bookstore without even understanding the reason. The owner of the bookstore put the book into the hands of a lady named Trudy to review it. A week later I received an excited phone call from her. She described her overwhelming appreciation for the book, both for the content of the book and for the literary style. She in turn put the book into the hands of a well-known cowboy poet named John Dofflemyer, with whom I had actually gone to elementary school. He in turn passed it on to a young Chicano artist named Matthew Rangel. Matthew was fresh from a program called “Artists in the Backcountry” that had been put on by the Sequoia Parks Foundation. Matthew had spent the time in the company of Gary Snyder, the poet, and Tom Killion, the woodcut artist, among others. Matthew had wanted to do a project centered on the Kaweah drainage of the Sierra and Snyder had put him in touch with John D., who is a cattle rancher in the foothills below Sequoia.

Matthew wanted to walk from his home in Dinuba back to the Great Western Divide, the home of the headwaters of the Kaweah in the backcountry of Sequoia, and document the journey with his art. He had had a visionary experience of the mountains and wanted to convey it the best he could. My book had described something very similar, only in words, so we became friends around are shared love of the landscape. His project became his Masters degree project and when it was complete he expressed the desire to bring it back to the Kaweah area and have a presentation along with John D. and myself.

I took the idea to friends at the land trust in Visalia. They liked it and applied for a state grant from the California Council for the Humanities to produce it. The state awarded the land trust (Sequoia Riverlands Trust) $10,000 to do this.

The end result is that in November there will be a three day Kaweah Land and Arts Festival to celebrate the local landscape featuring local writers and artists. The area is one of the poorest regions in the state and beset by a host of environmental issues. I’m hoping with this festival we can connect the community to the spirit, myth, and passion of the place. All the facts, figures, scientific data, and rational arguments have not gotten very far in changing things, and I’ve found you cannot argue things into existence. I hope we can somehow communicate to people what it feels like to look up and really see the mountains and the river for what they are and that the vision lights the fire of their own experience. I’m convinced that all we can really do is extend the beauty and depth of our own experience. That puts an incredible responsibility on me personally to walk my own talk, to be what I express. So much of our experience has been governed by people who want us to listen to their words, but want us to pay no attention to their actions. Yet, we humans learn the most by walking in the footsteps of role models and teachers, till we gain the wisdom and experience to strike out on our own. Whether anyone sees me or not, I have to carry myself in such a way that others can learn from it. That’s my responsibility to vision and to life. Though I rely on words as part of my art form, they can only be an extension of the real life behind them.

All this came from a single unplanned moment whose direction hung in the balance. Without every link in this causal chain, this festival would not be a reality. Some could call it multiple random probabilities, but to artists and poets it smacks of something more, of vibrant connections within a mysterious energy field. Awareness of this is what keeps us alive and creating. I could not have planned this. I don’t know where it will go. All I know is that being part of this mysterious process is what fills me and gives me meaning.

No, my sales haven’t increased dramatically from this whole thing, though my bank account desperately needs it. I have to trust the mysterious process, follow it out and see where it leads, see how it can benefit life. In benefiting life I can only trust that I will in turn be benefited enough to continue to write, create, and walk my walk.

The Launch

It’s taken me awhile to get everything together to launch this particular blog. I intend it as an experiment in pushing the envelope of what’s possible for us as human beings in understanding ourselves in these interesting times. The point of my writings lies at the intersection of art, craft, science, and spirituality.

I’m attempting to use the power of the internet to bring our collective minds to bear on this subject. It’s my observation that the internet is actually a representation of the collective human mind, indeed of all life, and reflects all the good, the bad, and the ugly that is inherent within us. As such, the internet is neither good nor bad, but can be a useful tool, much like my chisels, in an attempt to understand our own minds and actions. With my chisels I can create joinery that brings various pieces of wood together into a useful whole. This creative process takes the naturally occurring phenomena of wood, with its whorls of grain and play of colors, and attempts to bring it into the human world of things in such a fashion that it bridges the worlds.

There is a world of the spirit and there is our world of things. I read in the foreword to George Nakashima’s book, The Soul of a Tree, that we gain wisdom not from words but from things. We tend to reject things as materialistic and bad or to wallow in them. So, the question is, how do we examine our relationship with things in such a way that we gain wisdom or enlightenment? Can we create things that bridge the worlds of spirit and things, and in so doing understand our roles as humans on this planet. Our creations then become signposts and markers for others in their own journeys.

To bring this all back to the internet, my experiment is to use this tool to create something, maybe more ephemeral than a chair or table, yet at least equally as useful. We haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of what is possible via our electronic connections in this vast neural net. We can start here in making those connections. Lest you think I have an interest in telling you what to do, let me put that to rest. If I create a chair, it doesn’t exist as an absolute truth or commandment. It exists only to bridge worlds. Others may create their own chairs or tables. It’s up to you to assess whether the chair I created fits well, is useful, and at the same time still embodies the mysteries of the tree from which it came. This is the world of craft and meaning.

I hope you can keep coming back and bring others to this meeting place. Think of it as both a meditation hall and a place of training for whatever craft or discipline you choose. I welcome you to join my Facebook page as a beginning step till we create still other means of connection.