Category: Ecopoesie

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Ecopoesie Journal Nature Spiritual Connection

Walking in the Plum Rain

Jinbasan Rain Walk
Stalking beneath the rain clouds along a level ridge traverse between Mt. Jinba and Mt. Takao, June, 2004.
Jinbasan Rain Walk
Stalking beneath the rain clouds along a level ridge traverse between Mt. Jinba and Mt. Takao, June, 2004.

I’ve been finding it difficult to charge myself up to write in the blog lately. Even viewing other blogs has been difficult. More and more I’ve been getting the feeling that the unreality of the computer screen and the ethereal voices of people I almost never see, let alone share more than fleeting words with, seems uncannily like what happens to you when you end up pacing your living room, mumbling to yourself. I keep staring out of the window and watching the wind stir the trees, each touching the other, a completion of purpose and presence. The blog world and the whole internet phenomenon comes across more as intention than as act. And lately I’ve been feeling more of a powerful need to interact.

Reading David James Duncan’s My Story As Told By Water shook awake a lot of slumbering convictions that living in the city, away from the opera of live things that make up natural biomes, has of necessity switched off. There is so much to take in and ponder in Duncan’s words that it is difficult to summarize the story that is speaking itself into my daily thoughts lately.

In my last post I spoke of rediscovering the rhapsody that wrapped my world when I was younger. I wondered how to go about doing so without losing sight of what the outcome was meant to grow into. Just stepping outside and expecting the elements of the outdoors to immediately imbibe meaning into my soul ignored all the causes of my initial retreat, like the over prevalence of human settlements and people, the destruction of live things and habitats that I love, the apathy, even despite, of people toward the very world that keeps them alive. Looking out my window I recognized that I could view everything I see out there as simply items in a scene, items to be bought and sold, cut without regard for the gifts of life they might carry, and thus lose the very essence of human imagination and the explanation for our own existence in this world.

Or I could relearn to imbue meaning in all that I see.

Duncan discusses ways in which we can find effectiveness in our desire to protect the natural world. He points out that our modern world has neutered the ages old inclination to view the world through spiritual vocabulary, instead giving complete legitimacy to the concept of commodity and ownership. By seeing the whole world in such a narrow and selfish light we effectively starve the kernel of consciousness and dialogue that watches from within each of our shells, a consciousness that speaks in constant dialogue with the surrounding world we live in, and, by use of our imaginations, allows us to create an identity that either expands or limits our understanding and sense of meaning within the physical world.

I would go on to say that much of the western world’s loss of spiritual connection to the natural world, often spoken of as the western world’s “duality”, stems in great part from the Judeo-Christian-Moslem insistence upon a separate, disembodied entity that rules the world. I wonder if it is this displacement of our imaginations and intimate identifying with our surrounding world, by shunting the whole personality of the natural world onto some abstract construct called “God”, thus disembodying the spiritual richness of the world around us, that allows us to view other living creatures, including ourselves, as mere shells without inner resources or value.

I believe what this has done is relieved us of responsibility for the world, that destroying everything can now be regarded as simply a rearrangement of blocks. With “God” up in the heavens now, out of reach and thus free from our sense of guilt, wanton destruction and irresponsibility could be engaged in without remorse or culpability. It may also explain why so much of the world’s worst wars so often take place in monotheist cultures, and why so many cultures that seemed more or less stable with their earlier polytheist outlook now face complete meltdown with the introduction of western values. So much of Japan’s destruction of its natural beauty occurred as the Japanese reverence for its anima (kami), with its belief in or respect for the deities that populate every single aspect of the Japanese world, gradually eroded in favor of a culture dominated by materialistic acquisition. The evidence is physically visible. The few places where the deities are still influential enough to command respect, such as in shrines or locations recognized as holy to bodhisattvas, old trees and biologically diverse habitats often remain intact, often right in the middle of densely populated, biologically dead locales.

So I’ve been taking my experiment a step further: learning how to bring home the gods. People talk of seeking something to believe in, and yet the answers are all there, all around us. The Earth is right at our fingertips. It is important to return again and again to our ur-cosmology, being able to fundamentally comprehend the Earth as HOLY, to remember where religion first stemmed from and why we carry a need to instill the holy in our lives. The Earth is holy. Sacred. All of it. Every single thing we see and cannot see. All the live things. All of the less living things. All of our brothers and sisters. Gods, in all of us, in all things.

To rediscover this sense of connection with the world is easier than one might imagine. You can do it anywhere, any time. Just open your eyes, look around you, and try to feel what is around you. If you open up your heart and allow what you might normally think of as “inanimate” (notice the insistence of not having spirit that our language has instilled in us… a vocabulary that does not exist in most Asian languages) to generate a kind of presence, strangely it immediately comes alive and occupies a undeniable place in your sense of the whole. If you take a step further and inject the idea of a deity into that object, suddenly it is more than just an item; it is alive, and has a name. The more “items” you inject with spirit the richer the world around you grows, and the more imbued with meaning it all grows into. The world suddenly blossoms with presences, with a great richness of meaning in which you no longer feel alone… as Duncan calls “the sphere of eyes”.

Imagine what the world must have seemed like to those first people who have always lived within a country of spirits great and small. No matter where the eye alighted all was holy and sacred. And humans could move within this sphere confident of their own value within the cosmos. What a wonderful LIVING world it must have been! And yet there is no reason we cannot see the world the same way.

And this is what the early monotheistic leaders must have feared and why they insisted on destroying the “idols”. You cannot take control if your spiritual construct has no authority over people’s imaginations.

Last Sunday I stepped out into the monsoon rain and walked the slopes of Mt. Jinba in the pouring rain. Not another human soul in sight, the trails sluicing with mud, and the rain clouds obscuring any views of the surrounding forests. But I didn’t feel alone. As long as I kept myself warm and well-fed, I walked the solitary paths with a sense of walking with other beings. It was the beginning of reawakening to the real world.

Categories
America: Society Ecopoesie Iraq War Journal Nature

The New Tide

Seaweed Gatherers
Fisherfolk gathering seaweed, southern coast of Boso Peninsula, Chiba, Japan, 1977.
Seaweed Gatherers
Fisherfolk gathering seaweed, southern coast of Boso Peninsula, Chiba, Japan, 1977.

So many roiling emotions and thoughts lately about identity and the direction we need to take in the world today. The thoughts are rough and fleeting, like a cloud of bees, clarity alighting here and there, then flitting away into obfuscation, so that writing comes heavily and plodding. Several days ago I read the poem post by Madame Butterfly at Nehanda Dreams about the world’s tribes declaring pride and love in who they are, and then later her comment on my “Thunder” post, questioning the idea of race. It was a question that every non-white in the world, when subjected to the white world or other homogenous group, daily thinks about, in constant comparison to some amorphous image of perfection hovering over the psychic world.

Yesterday, as if on cue, I just happened to come across Barbara Kingsolver’s selection of essays “Small Wonder: Essays”, a last copy hidden in the corner of the bottom shelf of the tiny nature section of the Kinokuniya bookstore in downtown Tokyo. I thought the book was mainly about nature, since that is Kingsolver’s domain, but upon starting it, it became clear that this was her response to the New York tragedy, and, over time, an effort to comprehend what is happening in the world today. In the opening lines, her wounds are very fresh from the New York attack and still raw with grief and anger. I have to remind myself that her book appeared before much of what the United States is doing now took place, and that through the examples of her earlier work, I must remember that her mind is open to the minds of people in other places.

Then, today, I was watching yet another Discovery Channel documentary of one of our world’s smaller tribes, this time the Tauduram hunter gatherers of Palawan, the Philippines. In the last scene the narrator Phil Borges compares a shaman’s inability to heal a tribe member’s liver disease he had never encountered before, with the surrounding destruction of the forest. Borges wonders about the spiritual effect on these people, who until recently lived in intimate relationship with the mountain forests, of having suddenly to switch to a slash and burn economy and destroy the very forests that constituted the spirits of their ancestors.

It got me thinking about why it is that so many Native Americans lost the desire to live after the Indian Wars, and so many of them gave up after Wounded Knee, with alcoholism and domestic violence reaching epidemic proportions. I understood the sense of despair, but I couldn’t personally compare it to anything that I could empathize with. Until I thought of the New York tragedy and how Americans, and people all over the world, reacted to it. How the sense of the world coming to an end engulfed us all and wrought shock and despair. That must be how it felt, and still feels, to the Native Americans, their world toppled by an abrupt (if seen from their 10,000 or more years of history) and violent attack.

In addition the values that the Europeans brought with them, the very de-personification of the Land, of killing the spirits and gods as if the Land could be anything without them, must have shattered the foundations of what constituted their understanding of the world. What the Europeans brought forced them to adopt a world view in direct opposition to all that was true and right, in comparison almost as if a Christian were coerced into accepting the Antichrist as their god.

Madame Butterfly’s exclamation of “amandhla!” perhaps provides a glimmer of hope, a tiny first step for people around the world reclaiming their heritage and standing up to put the Christian god back in its place, as one among many in the pantheon. With her question of how we might understand race, I claim that we are now delving into something new. The old adages and proclamations need to be redefined, and a new understanding of what the human race is and how it needs to name itself demands discussion. People are mixing among themselves all around the world… the distances are foreshortened. It no longer means everything to claim you are American or I am German or she is Japanese or he is Nigerian. The borders are blurred.

So we are something new. The inability to clearly enunciate what this is illustrates just how new the changes are. Many people deny it and those who do recognize that all aspects of our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet are evolving, often react with anger and violence, out of fear.

But we are changing. And we must adapt. We must clear our minds of cobwebs and address the mounting problems that are overtaking the world. And we must learn to redefine what we are, once and for all ridding ourselves of the ignorance and intolerance that have plagued our history since we first formed societies. This is the new and fearsome frontier, blessed with peace and prosperity if we can truly learn from our mistakes.

Otherwise…