Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Geodes: The Dilemma

Randall brought me these geodes yesterday.  He has had to confront 'poachers' on his land looking for these monsters. They are each about the size of a human head.

Inside each there will be a treasure cave of crystals. What to do?
1) Allow the imagination free play?
2) Break them open to reveal their hidden beauty?
Nature loves to hide.
Man loves to reveal.
Is it a virtue (reverence, respect?) to leave them be? Would we not be better off if we had not split the atom? Here is an image of an opened geode. They are not all so pretty.

http://www.rikoo.com/ProductImage/2800897/Agate-Amehtyst-Geode-Crystal-Ball-03.jpg


"Geodes are spherical rocks encapsulating a hollow cavity that is lined with crystals. They begin as bubbles in volcanic rock or as animal burrows, tree roots or mud balls in sedimentary rock. Over time the outer shell of the sphere hardens and the interior fills with hot, mineral-rich liquids.
Over centuries the liquid evaporates and crystals form of varying shapes and colors that can only be seen when the geode is cracked open."


What to do? Open one of them? Usually they are (just) quartz. 




Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Lifting Mist

I woke with my life cloaked in mist. Pneumonia in its last stages of cling. I buttoned up and walked up to the lakes, huffing and puffing, hoping to watch the mist rise over the water and my mood with it. I came late - the mist had lifted. The cats asked to be caressed and Socks too. I made a figure of eight around the two ponds, consciously trying to unwind something, while also inscribing infinity. The surface of the water was already bright, and offering inverted images of the trees and sky. It felt like an image out of the same box as the prospect of lifting mist. Things are not what they may seem. This can become clear. Perhaps the truth is staring us in the face - just upside down. Thank you Plato. Thank you Hegel (verkehrte Welt).

Sunday, September 28, 2014

FLOW: the film

Sarah Childress made this film at Yellow Bird last year.
Starring 'Jonathan' as the man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjr_XoaoaCU&feature=youtu.be



Thursday, July 31, 2014

Hannah's Garden

Hannah came two weeks ago and left today for her next wwoofing stop, an apiary in N Carolina. She rescued the garden from my neglect, and finished planting seeds. Among other things. Here she is pressure washing the oak boards I'm cutting up into wedges to make a giant round bench for the lake firepit. On her last day she turned artist and made an installation of tiny bells in the trees in the Arch Garden.

As she was leaving this morning something strange happened. My cat Steely Dan Thoreau (deceased) was wont to get into the car through an open window, and even have lunch there, leaving the wrappers on the floor (feathers). I joked that if a cat smuggled himself in her truck Hannah would have a long way to drive back. This morning a mouse did just that, and hid in her truck lining. So she is taking him/her to N Carolina in the hope, eventually of coaxing him out of hiding. This is a mouse with no name and no special residency rights.
At the bottom, just such a mouse, inspecting the Cabin Outhouse. An outhouse mouse.

Bells in the boughs









Monday, July 14, 2014

Rainbow Dinner

This evening Yellow Bird really delivered. Everything was fresh from the garden, except the olive oil they were fried in.

Green beans
Yellow cherry tomatoes (Coyote)
Red tomatoes (Russian)
Blue potatoes (Peruvian ?)
Basil
Zucchini (half charred)

So many colors - glad I wasn't eating in the dark.
You can almost feel the anti-oxidants (e.g. anthocyanins in the blue pots) doing their good work.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

More Wabi Sabi


Tsukubai  silver-gelatin print  ©Tim Wong
A Crow's Caw  silver-gelatin print  ©Tim Wong
Tim Wong photo "Tsukubai"
Mystic  silver-gelatin print  ©Tim Wong

 











Monday, June 30, 2014

Fruit Trees


Mulberry by the Airstream
Mulberry fruit
I have tried planting pears, peaches, nectarines, apples, plums, and I have never had a single fruit off any of them. One nectarine survives, bent and crippled, and all its fruit end up as dried black mummified corpses. All the others have been ravaged by deer and especially goats. I used to make individual cages, then enclosed a whole orchard field, but every time the goats etc would find a way in and eat them down. The only solution is to spend the time and money and do the fencing properly.
Meanwhile another story is emerging. Randall has pointed out to me one mulberry tree, and one plum tree. Both are probably wild, and the birds and squirrels think they belong to them, but they are there, established, and bearing fruit. (The real exception is an old German pear tree that I have had plenty of pears from.) I have also seen but never tasted paw-paw fruit - again the squirrels get them first. Here are images of two existing fruit trees that have been here all the time, unbeknownst to me. Only massive nets will preserve their fruit for us two-leggeds.
Plum tree
Plums

Working Meditation

Does one need to sit in order to meditate? No. Even within Zen there is 'walking meditation'. But it raises the question of what specifically is the point of sitting. And whether its goals could be achieved in another way, perhaps even more effectively. What are its goals? Undoubtedly there are many opinions here, but the most obvious thought is that its goal is enlightenment, and that enlightenment is achieved through quiet contemplation. But it would be of little value if it were just a eureka experience, a flash of insight, that then faded. And it would not be much more valuable if it lasted only as long as you kept sitting. That suggests that enlightenment must be adverbial, it must affect how we do things, and not just how we think about what we do. This opens up the question of how important it is to move through contemplation to broader kinds of doing. It might be useful for some, but also a potential distraction if one came to privilege sitting. Those (like Nietzsche) who would champion walking might argue that the rhythm of the body moving is the best way to integrate mind and body. Sitters would claim the same for attentive breathing. Either way the question remains as to how enlightenment translates into more cotedian practices. Two thoughts: if our practices are typically instrumental, it might be practically useful or necessary to step back from such shapes of engagement by disengagement - for example sitting. What phenomenologists would call an epoche. Bracketing out (Husserl) would be like letting go. But equally one could try doing things in a not-wholly-instrumental way more directly. Going for a walk, as opposed to walking to (the store). Or enjoying walking to the store. Or walking mindfully to the store.

I tried something of this today (which also bears on the question of wabi-sabi). Above Shambala is a putative 'zen garden', a circle of rocks bisected by a yin yang line (more rocks). The left side will focus on prickly pear (many plants naturally there), and the RHS planted with local stone crop. The soil needs to be poor and gravelly and I had some gravel dumped in the middle. It needed raking off the yin yang rocks onto both sides, exposing the rock faces again. I set to work with the rake, moving to a stiff corn broom to sweep the surfaces better. I had a goal - to make the yin yang line visible again, and to begin to distribute the pile of gravel evenly. But without trying I came to enjoy the process. Letting each stone emerge from its surrounding gravel was a mild form of midwifery. Brushing off the surface gravel felt like caring. Time did not quite stand still, but almost. I got to the point of not wanting it to stop, or thinking that if someone else wanted to help I would only reluctantly hand over the broom. I need a lot of help at Yellow Bird with things that can take on this tone. 

Compare Tom Sawyer getting help whitewashing a fence by making it seem fun. 

“What do you call work?”,“Why, ain’t that work?” Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly: “Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.” “Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”
The brush continued to move.“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy  get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” That put the thing in a new light. 
Ben [Rogers] stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth – stepped back to note the effect – added a touch here and there – criticised the effect again – Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said: “Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.” [Tom Sawyer]

Tom subsequently enlists Billy Fisher, and then Johnny Miller ...

Obviously Tom is a gifted amateur psychologist. But he did make painting a fence seem less like work, more something one could get absorbed in.

That happened to me with the rake and the brush. I thought I would see if I could extend the experience to sweeping the goat droppings, and rock fragments, from around Shambala (the cob meditation hut). I found myself enjoying the rhythm of my arm movements, the repetition (like windscreen wipers) moving across the pavement to cover the whole surface. I reflected that the nitrogen in the goat droppings would help the weeds at the edge grow even taller. I wondered if the goats would be attracted by the now clean surface to make more deposits than usual. I remembered that it was goat droppings that had re-fertilized the subsoil distributed on the fields surrounding the lake and pond after they were dug. I wondered if Yellow Bird 'novices' could be brought to treat this as a meditative practice. I was then reminded of the monks in Kyoto, tending their moss gardens, picking off at dawn  leaves that that had floated from the trees overnight. 

These thoughts could be treated as the kind of distraction that inhabits the unquiet mind. But they seemed to me then (and now), to be criss-crossing a space of engagement, filling out its meaning. They referenced cycles, circuits, analogies, the connections between animal and plant, the pleasure of clean surfaces, the power of ritual. Is this not mindfulness? Was it not a meditative practice? Deepening this practice would consist both in being able to move 'at will' into such an attitude, and allowing oneself to weave the connections and associations that we just began. Interestingly, it might turn out that the seeming opposition between instrumental action and delighted absorbed practice might itself fall away. Meditative cooking is not compromised by eating the resulting food! (How to compare the sitting down of thinking with sitting down for dinner?)

Finally, back to my wabi-sabi worries (last blog). Are the Kyoto monks who pick the stray leaf off their moss betraying the spirit of wabi-sabi in the name of an impossible perfection? Why not enjoy the leaf? Why do I sweep the gravel off the surface of the yin yang stone? Why do I keep sweeping it? Why do I want to mend things that are broken, water plants that are dry? Why not just celebrate the stray leaf, the messy gravel, the broken toy, the struggling plant? Hey - nothing is perfect, things come and go. 

I am reminded of Negative Capability (Keats) - the ability (disposition) to live with uncertainty, unresolved issues. This is not to recommend blindness to contradiction, or lack of interest in any kind of clarity. Rather it says - at the end of the day, there may be issues you cannot resolve, for one reason or another. Learn to live with it. And so with wabi-sabi too - the implication is that not that we should never seek perfection or wholeness, but that there will still be flaws, and that these flaws are marks of singularity that deserve our respect. Perhaps beauty (for example) is not incomplete participation in a form, but the point in such a participation at which the thing itself rises above such dependency and asserts its own singularity. A beautiful woman (or man) is more beautiful for that final swerve away from the clinical ideal.


What is Wabi-Sabi?

One view - Wabi-Sabi is an aesthetic:

"Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional...
It is also two separate words, with related but different meanings. "Wabi" is the kind of perfect beauty that is seemingly-paradoxically caused by just the right kind of imperfection, such as an asymmetry in a ceramic bowl which reflects the handmade craftsmanship, as opposed to another bowl which is perfect, but soul-less and machine-made. "Sabi" is the kind of beauty that can come only with age, such as the patina on a very old bronze statue. Wabi and Sabi are independent word stems in normal speech. They are brought together only to make a point about aesthetics. Sabi is most often applied to physical artistic objects, not writing. A well-known examplar of what one would call a "wabishii" object: black spit polish boots with dust on them from the parade ground. Many Japanese pots, the expensive ones, are dark and mottled -- wabi. "Sabishii" is the normal word for "sad", as in, that was a sad movie. A related term in literature and the arts is "clinamen", the act of deliberately breaking a stylistic rule to enhance the beauty of an otherwise perfect whole. French writer GeorgesPerec , who also wrote the first book in that language on the GameOfGo, was a master of the technique. It's not obvious whether clinamen is exactly the same as Wabi, absolutely antinomic to it, or on the gripping hand something else altogether."(Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers [Web])

Or it may also be a world-view:








"Wabi-sabi (?) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete".[1] It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印 sanbōin?), specifically impermanence (無常 mujō?), the other two being suffering ( ku?) and emptiness or absence of self-nature ( ?).
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity (roughness or irregularity), simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes." (Wikipedia)

Fascinating stuff. But so many questions! Are there perfect forms of wabi-sabi? Can we add patina to make something wabi-sabi? Should we 'accept' impermanence or affirm it? Should we not want to preserve the best examples of wabi-sabi? Does it mean I should not finish my book, my projects? Does it mean acceptance of what we cannot change? It feels like a bundle of overlapping ideas and attitudes. Perhaps we just need to accept that.