field notes:

5.21.2003

A small group of bloggers who often write about and around "place" are talking amongst ourselves, working on ideas that will resolve into some sort of community of "place bloggers". We've taken some of our recent posts about place and nature public in a group way on Carnival of Vanities.

There are eight of us posting over there: Fragments from Floyd, Cassandra Pages, both Numenius and Pica at Feathers of Hope, Bowen Island Journal, Notes from an Eclectic Mind, and Sainteros.

Susanna at Bias Blog gave us a special section all our own and Cassandra Pages provided this heading:

Place bloggers write, on one level, about the place where they live: its ecology, its beauty, the particular quality of nature in that place, and their relation to it. On another level, place bloggers are concerned with larger questions of ecology and land use, the future of the environment, and human beings' relation to (or alienation from) the world we inhabit and share. And on a still deeper level, many place bloggers are exploring the whole notion of "place" itself: where and what is this elusive idea of "place", in its broadest sense, and what does it mean to us as spiritual beings in perpetual search of something called "home"? We invite you to explore with us...

Oh...I should mention that this week's Carnival of Vanities has a total of 56 posts. I haven't read them all yet, but I've found many worth reading...
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:09 AM link | comments []

5.20.2003

This Place

I don’t know a garden snake from a garter snake. Sometimes I walk in poison oak. I’m not a trained naturalist, botanist or biologist. Yet I live inconveniently “in nature”, and nature is often central to my writing. The question is why. Why write about it, why read about it?
Nature is beautiful and awe-inspiring, unpredictable and even dangerous. But that doesn’t explain this focus on place.

Nature comes from the French ‘nature’ for birth, we call her Mother Nature because symbolically she holds our origin both in story and cultural history. In myths and rituals, initiates usually leave the nest of the family and venture out into nature to be tempered by the fires of initiation and to find their own true “nature”. The natural world they encounter isn’t just a beautiful place where they find contemplation and peace, it’s a world where beauty and danger lie next to each other, where relationships are complex, where every act of life includes inevitable death. The family, at its best, has protected the young person from the dangerous truths of the world, and from want. In ritual, nature teaches truths that a young person needs in order to be whole and to take their place in the larger community. Those stories used to be integral to our knowing about the world, to the thread of life that goes back to the beginning.

We’ve known things about our relationship to nature that have been forgotten or left behind in our drive to progess. In the United States we swept west, not only dominating the landscape but wiping out the cultures that came before us--cultures that respected the natural world and sought to live in harmony with it by their practices and in their rituals. We had “progress” in mind, and that has been the driving force in our culture until recently. Now many of us have noticed that something is wanting in our paradigm.

We feel something missing in our spirits as individuals out of balance with the world around us. We’ve found ourselves looking around for a way of life that might be more fulfilling. We’re reassessing our place in the world, asking ourselves where we fit into a larger picture that includes the earth as Mother—container of all life.

Even as a culture we’ve discovered that we’ve been short-sighted in our relationship to the earth. We’ve looked at it as a place with resources that need “managing”. Those resources turn up in short supply over and again, and those who look ahead know that we must discover systems that replenish the planet if we are to survive and thrive.

We are remembering. Remembering that the very ground we walk on gives the spirit a place to stand. The relationship between who we are and where we are is vital. Without a connnection to that ground we are disembodied. Culture and art are the mind and nature is the body.

This weekend I watched as a shodo sensei (calligraphy teacher) wrote the phrase ‘Harmonious and Joyful Heart’. The character for harmony is a mouth next to a bowl of rice.
When the earth provides rice and people have enough to eat, that is harmony, or peace. I’m amazed at the simplicity of this sign. Harmony isn’t some lofty, esoteric ideal, it’s rooted in man’s relationship with earth to provide food for her sustenance. That implies that in turn man cares for the earth so it’s able to grow food not just for this year and next but for his grandchildren’s grandchildren. The sensei told us that he learned this meaning, and the meaning for all of the characters as an adult, through his own study. He was amazed that they had these deep meanings, and that he didn’t know them. He said that he tells his students here, “Go back to Japan. Teach them the meaning.”

We are remembering. Remembering vital connections that root us to our cultural past, and our divine meaning. Remembering the harmony that connects us with the future, and remembering the mystery and passion that bind us to this place.

posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:32 AM link | comments []

5.19.2003

Poem Without a Title
Charles Simic

I say to the lead
Why did you let yourself
Be cast into a bullet?
Have you forgotten the alchemists?
Have you given up hope
In turning into gold?

Nobody answers.
Lead. Bullet. With names
Such as these
The sleep is deep and long.

Warrior's Light
Rumi

Jafar, Muhammad's cousin, was a warrior of concentrated
light. When he rode up
to a walled city, it was no mor to him than a gulp of water
in his dry mouth. This
happened at Mutah. No one went out to fight him. "What's
to be done?" the kind asked
his clairvoyant minister. "If you strap on your sword
with this one," replied
the advisor, "also wrap your shroud around you!" "But
he's only one man!"
"Ignore the singularity. Look with your wisdom. He
gathers multitudes, as stars
dissolve in sunlight." Human beings can embody a collective, a majesty
of spirit, which is not like having a name or a body.
A herd of onagers may display
a thousand antler points; then a lion comes to the edge of
their field: they scatter.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 6:59 AM link | comments []