(photo from the Colorado Trail project, 2020)
I’m sitting here as Spring is finally letting herself bloom free here in western Colorado, a month late, or perhaps right on time, inside and prepping for the large amount of responsibilities I took on this season. I don’t really have time to write, but I’m gonna for a second. I’m getting ready for an online class I’m hosting tonight through Terratalks and we’re getting into wilderness, wildness, and it’s a big heavy conversation that needs to happen. I’m also getting ready for an in person ecology class in a week that I’m hosting focusing on riparian ecology and the magic of waterside spaces, and I ALSO am doing a wilderness first responder course in less than a month and have 30 hours of studying and tests to past before attending.
I have an epic article in process here on substack that I haven’t finished or published that I was working on in early February the last time I was doing all the wilderness reading in prep for the last round of Terratalks on the globalization of conservation, something we talk about in the online class.
How does the wilderness myth affect conservation in South America, Africa, India and beyond?
Do we recognize the harm that is inadvertently caused when we don’t see that wilderness is a part of western culture, and our understanding of how land should be? Without seeing the lands as including indigenous peoples — the meme of conserved land taken out to other cultures where more intact indigenous cultures are still tending land means they often get removed in the name of this idea of the national park or preserve. The cartel moves in. The trees get cut. It’s almost worse than what it was before. More on that when the article comes out. Hopefully I will get it out sometime this summer.
I got off the phone earlier with a news reporter in the area that wanted to talk to me about the ecology programs I’m offering this summer, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. But as soon as we got on the phone, I got right to the point.
‘Re-creating’ on land as is so popular in outdoorsy Colorado without honoring the bigger story of peopled landscapes and the large scale resource extraction that has happened on these landscapes and what mindset must have been necessary to treat the land this way— was at the forefront of my conversation with this reporter. We can’t ‘re-create’ without facing the reality that we are still approaching the land as a product to be consumed, and we consume one another as products, and the intricate web of life that I’m trying to point people towards isn’t about memorizing everything living, it’s about pulling the veil. With the veil pulled, it is incredibly difficult for people to justify objectifying the land or seeing place as a sacrifice zone for progress, or straight up greed. The point of educating about ecology for me is to give people a tool to peek out if they want, so they don’t feel like existing in the world as we have been told we must, is the only way.
In talk about wilderness, its veil pulling. All of it. We’ve got cultural glasses on, even when well intentioned, that encourage us to ignore the animisms, and inherently, as humans a part of ecology, we DO do this to one another too. The veil metaphor is one I liked to visualize a lot when I was studying Sufism and Zen Buddhist texts in college, as the veil is the bit that separates us from truly seeing what is right in front of us. Which is, the interconnection between all things despite the illusion of separateness. It doesn’t have to take much effort.
Do you see an old woman or young woman? Hint, her necklace is the old woman’s mouth.
An optical illusion is the exact same image, it is only our minds that tell us that one thing is there or another. Everything in our lives is this way, being willing to see, shift focus, lift the veil, is necessary, but it can be painful, or euphoric because it reveals to us the lie we have been told our whole life. That we aren’t a part of something greater. That we aren’t connected to others. That we will die and not have our spirits carry on in the embodiment of other beings with a level of consciousness we cannot comprehend but is there and will be there. And right here, the beautiful puzzle of love in front of us, is the dance of beings woven in a tapestry of gems. I’m always inspired too by the esoteric Islamic philosopher I studied in my early 20’s Ibn Al-Arabi. Here’s a few quotes to get you thinking about ‘seeing’ and ecological awareness.
Such knowledge can only be had by actual experience, nor can the reason of man define it, or arrive at any cognizance of it by deduction, just as one cannot, without experience, know the taste of honey, the bitterness of patience, the bliss of sexual union, love, passion, or desire.Quote n°3780 | Ibn 'Arabi
Meccan Revelations, I
What you plant here, you will reap there.
Quote n°3541 | Ibn 'Arabi
O dear one, listen! I am the reality of the world, the center of the circle. I am the parts and the whole. I am the will holding Heaven and Earth in place. I have given you sight only so you may see me.
0 dear one! I call again and again but you do not hear me, I appear again and again but you do not see me, I fill myself with fragrance, again and again, but you do not smell me. I become savory food yet you do not taste me. Why can't you reach me through your touch Or breathe me in through your sweet perfumes?
Love me, Love yourself in me. No one is deeper within you than I. Others may love you for their own sake, But I love you for yourself.
Dear one! This bargain is not fair. If you take one step toward me, It is only because I have taken a hundred toward you. I am closer to you than yourself. Closer than your soul, than your own breath. Why do you not see me? Why do you not hear me? I am so jealous. I want you to see me-and no one else. To hear me-and no one else, not even yourself
Dear one! Come with me. Let us go to Paradise together. And if we find any road that leads to separation, We will destroy that road. Let us go hand in hand In the presence of Love. Let it be our witness, Let it forever seal this wondrous union of ours.Quote n°3058 | Ibn 'Arabi
The reporter asked:
What would you tell someone who was just getting into learning ecology?
I answered with: go outside and be curious. Realize first that we aren’t separate from nature and life outside of us in the begin with. You don’t need to know the names of things. What do you see happening? What stories are playing out? What assumptions are you making about what’s happening and why? See the land with glorious eyes of wonder, as our wonder is the greatest gift we can give to the tapestry of life. And as Al-Arabi says, there is only Love, as Love is the unity behind all things.
Back to prepping for classes, and a walk later to see the wild onions starting to bloom. I’ll probably cry. I cry everyday from beauty I see and the sadness I feel. I too see myself woven in it all, and also the deepest loneliness in a world that encourages separation from land and one another, and the grief that is present in existing within it. When I want to be held by other humans and I am not, I try to remember the company of the plants, the land, and how they/it/Love itself has always held me. And will be there to welcome me in death into their arms.
So be it another spring unfolding, new green leaves, flowers of Rose, Lomatiums dotting the hillsides. Mallow and Desert Verbena.
I think about a podcast episode I listened to the other day where they talked about what a true apology really means, I think it was an interview with Báyò Akómoláfé, a philosopher I really appreciate in the realm of imagining new futurisms in connection to the earth. I feature the episode just below. Apologies in our current culture are overrated— encouraged to be quick and surface level so we go on with business. Is merely symbolic and not authentic. But in reality, as V and Bayo mention in this episode, it requires one to fully dive into the body of the other person, or other being, and fully feel the effects of the harm done on the other, to somatically journey into the harm, into the discomfort. All kinds of people have issued apologies for past harms done, like the Pope apologizing to indigenous peoples, and yet without action, without true embodied empathy, the apology means nothing. What does it mean for us to practice this in our lives? How does this connect to the somatic experience of veil lifting, of ecological awareness, of re-honoring land that we have been violently pulled from? How can right relations in all the realms of our life be a practice for seeing and prayer? Can we dive into the bodies of others, and feel the immensity of grief, instead of skirting to the side in order to avoid that experience? What beauty we miss when we avoid grieving, for one another and for the land itself. What magic is revealed when we truly allow ourselves to feel the depth of the woven tapestry, and embody the pain of it’s destruction through the dirt and vessels of our own bodies, our own universes of feeling.
I listen to this album on repeat a lot, and it’s what’s in my ears today as I miss Spring in Appalachia and remember somatically in my body what it felt like the last time I was there for Spring, both the joy and sorrow. The Resonant Rogues live in the area where I used to live in Appalachia.
More soon, but for now this snippet. Take care and honor curiosity and wonder today, and lean into love.
"But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words “I” and “myself ” must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many “growing communities” are as disastrous as cancer"
-Alan Watts
-Does it Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality
A truly felt apology- working in the corporate world in India, itself an imitation of the workplace in western cultures really sheds light on how we harm each other through inattentive jibberjabber and how apologies are purely abstractions, purely symbolic not showing any essence of any action being undertaken.