posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

realignment with reality

The practice of realignment with reality can hardly afford to be utopian. It cannot base itself upon a vision hatched in our heads and then projected into the future. Any approach to current problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future implicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time.

A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more deeply, into the sensorial present. It strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment.

For the other animals and the gathering clouds do not exist in linear time. We meet them only when the thrust of historical time begins to open itself outward, when we walk out of our heads into the cycling life of the land around us.

This wild expanse has its own timing, its rhythms of dawning and dusk, its seasons of gestation and bud and blossom. It is here, and not in linear history, that the ravens reside.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

 
Questions concerning the nature of our reality arrive in mind with regularity. When shopping for food. When sitting in an aisle seat at the rear of a plane, en route. When not answering the phone. When watching disease wreak havoc in bodies and on the surrounding lives.

posted
  • place: en route Great Sand Dunes National Park - Golden - Boulder, Colorado

bajada dreams

Up early. Zero Fahrenheit. Low clouds. Solo in the campground. Spilled water freezes immediately. Ranger passes through, we chat for a bit. Brewing tea while ravens flock back and forth in the pines. A long slow wander through the Douglas fir and fore-dune scrub, up the dunes a bit, and back. silent. low chill breeze. cold, cold, cold.

Have lunch at the bajada in the sun, listening.

Stop at the visitors center on the way out and happen to meet the woman who would have been my boss had I nailed that position as educational liaison a few years back. Very nice instance.

Then to the Center, of course, for a circuit or so.

Then onto the Gunbarrel north-bound. Dinner with Rick and Sally in Golden, then on up to Boulder. Chris and Scharmin and the kids prepping for their Hawaii jaunt. Sage a bit more gray in the muzzle, like some of us.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

opening

College art gallery, opening, student work, yawn. Dana and Marianne were there and then we run over to The Raven, the only reasonable place in town to hang out in the evening. Until some guy dumps a beer over on my lap which was holding my pack with camera and audio recorder in it … shhhite …


(00:05:30, stereo audio, 10.6 mb)