Big walls & Pubs

Two climbers rope up at the base of a cliff.  Each tends to his own gear, making sure that he has what he needs, or what he thinks he will need, in the adventure to follow.  Each carries his own share of the food water, emergency gear that they might need, plus the one or two items that always stay with him.  For each climber this item is different.  For some it is practical, say a knife or piece of line, or sweater.  For others it is symbolic as in a picture of somebody, or a trinket or token.  For some it is both symbolic and potentially functional, say an energy bar that tastes so bad it will always be at the bottom of the backpack and thus will stave off starvation, or a carabiner that is so old and worn as to be of questionable integrity so it is never used but is always there just in case.

Each is familiar with the route and each has his own concerns over certain sections, though not necessarily the same sections.  They will "rope up", or be tied together on the climb but each will do the work needed to get himself and his share of the load up the wall.  It isn't expected that one could or would carry the weight of the other to the top.  In that case neither would reach their goal.

The climb is it's own subject and we each experience it in our own way.  That is not our concern.  It is the bivys, or rests along the way when the climbers stop for a time, or the night.  It is during these times when the true relationship of the two climbers can be fortifying or destructive to the rest of challenge lying ahead.  While sharing a cup of tea or preparing a meal, and maybe taking stock of gear and position, the conversation that is had between the two can either be about the climb itself, or some other interesting topic that takes them far away from their tenuous station and situation for the moment.

If the conversation is about the climb it can usually be classified in two ways.  First, it can be reflective and a statement or explanation of the experience.  This is usually a sharing of the extreme points and can be an affirmation of the uniqueness of the place and time.  This can sound like a step by step and mechanical re-accounting of the event or it can be more experiential or impressionistic.

The second type of conversation that can occur is often accusatory and critical.  This comes in the form of one climber blaming the other for any number of things like holding up the speed, loosing the route, placing to much gear on the route or not doing the route the way he thinks it could be done best.  It can even be about the route itself, the climb, the mountain, country or the state of climbing in general.

After the climb the same options of conversation are available once on the peak, back at the pub, or when relating the event to others.  The highlights can either be about dangerous and frightening situations, or about the good fortune, good weather, and fine route that was had.

It is sometimes challenging not to focus on the negative.  When relating events to those who have no real experience of something to draw from, it often seems easier to "relate" to them by focusing on the negative or frightening or unpleasant, rather than the extreme exalted state of bliss that can only be had by the actual experience of it.  We all have experiences pleasant and unpleasant so it seems odd to think one easier to relate to than another.

I have found the best company to be in is the company of those who can speak of the joys of life rather than the epic near misses or the true tragedies.  The very best company to be in is the company of those who feel the need to say very little, because little need be said,  understanding is in common.  A word or a reference can be enough to get all looking in the same direction, thinking of the same thing.  When this is not possible I prefer no company at all over hearing of the horrors of experience.  Living them once is often more than enough, no need to relive them in the retelling.

I find myself not always being the best company, by this definition.  I am not sure if it is my outlook or that I have so few around me that seem to have the shared view of what is truly great about life.

Life is lived alone.  We may be in the company of others but our life is ours alone.  At those sustaining moments, when we get to have community with others I feel much more inspired to live a good and full life if those moments of sharing are happy and celebratory.  Those moments with others, sharing a meal, a cup of coffee, listening to music or dancing, preparing food, or what ever, they make me glad to be a part of the human family.  They take on a totally different feeling and have a totally different affect on me if they are filled with complaints and frustrations and anger.

The idea of venting on others seems destructive and selfish.  It seems down right dumb when you consider that after a venting session I might feel less likely to explode, but not near happy, so the fortune of having another person to listen and share with came no where near it's real potential to being communion.

So I guess I can be the blokes sitting at the bar, drunk, unhappy and alone in a crowd, griping about the world, or, I can be the one of the guys sitting in with the band in the corner trying to connect musically and create something celebratory, working hard and with a smile on my face, thirstily quaffing down a pint between songs, but not having so many as to limit my ability to contribute to the chosen tune.

It all happens in the same pub at the same time.

Snow last night

It's been a pretty snowless year so far.

The Lakes and woods just to the west of where we live are quite lovely.  I haven't spent a lot of time exploring there, but this morning they called to me.

Silver Mine Lake morning mist and rain

After the snow that fell overnight the State park is little populated and a peaceful place to go for a walk.  The fog and mist all help to dampen the sound of what little automobile traffic there is here.  Dripping, melting and running water are the soundtrack, that and the crunch of my boots in the snow.

Silver Mine Lake, snow last night, thick rain today

 I am reminded that I don't have to go far, anywhere at all really, to find beauty and peace and the affirmation of my reasons for gratitude and contentment with my place in life.  Sometimes it's hard to see from the positive side.  Is the lake half frozen or half thawed?  Why want one or the other?  Why not just except that it is both, and neither.

More on RWE and us

".....Wise and virtuous, loving, sincere, honorable, self-reliant, self-disciplined, generous, and nonviolent.  Such a person acts responsibly and reasonably, and does what needs to be done.  He or she is capable of governing himself or herself, not only morally but also politically.
That conclusion was taken for granted by the Founding Father of the United States, and it underlay all of Emerson's philosophy.  Only self-governing (i.e., self-reliant, self-disciplined) people are able to be self- governing in the political sense.  A democracy ignores that absolutely basic and eternal truth at peril to its very existence.  Now, when so much of American culture is based on greed, self-indulgence, ignorance, and viciously destructive passion, we must understand that a nation in which a majority of the people is enslaved and degraded by such a culture will automatically lose its ability to govern itself democratically."


   -from the introduction to "SELF-RELIANCE,  the Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as inspiration for daily living"  by Richard Whelan. published by Bell Tower, 1991.

From "Nature" VIII

An essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published 1836.

"Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world, a heaven.  Know then that the world exists for you........Build therefore your own world.  As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.  A correspondent revolution in all things will attend the influx of the spirit........As when the summer comes from the south, the snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its own ornaments along its path, and  carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, and warm hearts, and wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no more."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

From "Nature" I-IV

"To go into solitude man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.  I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me."


"The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  His intercourse with heaven and earth become part of his daily food."


"Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result."


"Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors seem ridiculous."


"The wind and the waves", said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest navigator"  So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven.


"Nothing Divine dies.  All good is eternally reproductive."
"il piu nel uno."  Nothing is quite beautiful alone:  nothing but is beautiful in the whole.  A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace." 


"The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.....new imagery is created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed when there is no currency in the vaults"


"The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics.  "Thus the whole is greater than it's part"; reaction is equal to action"; "The smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time"


"A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text."


"Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they are to be executed."


"In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us!  She pardons no mistakes.  Her yea is yea and her nay, nay."


"Nothing in nature is exhausted in it's first use.  When a thing has served and end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior motive."


"Words are finite organs of the infinite mind.  They cannot cover the dimensions of what is absolute truth.  They break, chop, impoverish it.  An action is the perfection and publication of a thought"

Where's Waldo (R.W.E.)

Nature in the common sense, refers to the essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.  Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.  But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result. 
-from the introduction to "Nature", Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836.

So then what is the "art of man"?

Have the essences of nature been affected?  Emerson thought this not possible, and in fact many people today stand in this same attitude, even while they are unable to swim in polluted waters or breathe the air of their city or eat the fruit from the trees with out fear of cancers.  Many of those same people who would say that we are meant to use the earth are the support of those who poison it, disfigure it, and mine it to the point that we no longer know what to expect from it, other than catastrophe, cataclysm and disease.

Where is Emerson to stop the oceans rise, and the temperatures increase, and to make the stronger hurricanes and droughts go back to the way they were by speaking aloud his words that man can only make art and not affect the rest of nature?

Maybe the essence if these things is still there, maybe he was right.  Maybe part of the essence of "space, the air, the river, the leaf" was always with potential to destroy us.  Maybe we are just exposing another dimension of Nature by the way we interact with it, make use of it, experience it, define it.

If nature refers to those "essences unchanged by man" and art refers to the mixing of man's will with nature then it seems that art is self destruction, slow and steady, not just for the individual, for that is in the domain of nature, but for the entirety of the race.

Making a fortune by tearing of the top of a mountain to mine coal does not elevate the mine owner, it just lowers the mountain top.
making a fortune by providing energies to people that causes their ill health and death does not elevate the CEO or the board members, or the share holders, it just puts the dead beneath their feet.
Amassing great territories by marching armies into other lands does not elevate the country, it just puts the indigenous on their knees or in the ground.

A good farmer is not measured by the amount of weeds he can kill or cut down, but by the abundance of fruit he can nurture from the earth, not once but over a lifetime.

Industrial agriculture is no great invention.  It's measure can be equalled to that of a bird that eats a seed and leaves it as part of it's eliminations.  From that grows a tree.  But the bird is no farmer.
The amount of time that industrial agriculture has been successful is but a moment and by definition it is not sustainable.  This is not farming.  It will not last, it is not lasting.  The only crop industrial agriculture grows is profit for the corporations.

The same can be said of fossil fuel and our current definitions of energy.  A person could sit on the edge of a volcano and wait for the eruption to catapult him thru space to his destination.  Our use of petroleum and coal and uranium and gas is just as explosive, destructive, self destructive and resultant in corruption of the rest of our environment.

We look for "answers" in technology and innovation.  We need only look back and in the mirror to see a sustainable, harmonious, and sane alternative.  We gave up an amazing gift and relationship with the rest of the earth when we let go the reins of the horse, mule, ox, and dog.  We set ourselves on a course of solitude and degeneration when we traded the calories of energy in our body for that in buried deep in the earth.  We fail to see the sun for all it's brightness and warming and feeding of the plant world.  We fail to see the rest of living creation as an on going story that is ours to be a part of and instead burn it up, blow it up, pile it up and go searching for more as the supplies grow short.

When one lives in the woods it makes sense to burn wood from the fallen trees.  When one lives near the sea or a lake it seems reasonable to be a fisherman.  When one lives in the desert it seems sensible to seek shade in the heat of day.  How have we lost or ability to make sense of our world, or situations?

Man's will being put upon nature seems to be more hubris than art.  Art, as I see it, is man finding his path in, and as part of nature, and the expression of his appreciation of that journey and place.

Sauntering

     Thoreau had Walden and I have my woods and my pond too.  I have cleared a path to get to the edge of the pond.  The storms of the past year have taken down many trees and laid them about like piles of twigs.
 At the waters edge there are stumps of small trees where they were all taken down, about a foot and a half above the ground.  This was not the work of an early freak snow, or the strong winds that took the large trees.  The chips on the ground and the pointy tops of the stumps tell the story, and if that isn't enough a walk to the south end of the pond reveals the lodge of the beaver who fell all those trees and took them there to build his home
.
Some creature jumps in the water just ahead of me, always just before I can see who it is.  The ice that is covering most of the pond pops and booms as the sun and the changing level of the pond have there affect on it.  The ground around the pond is muddy in the middle of the day but frozen in the mornings and I often cross small feeds into the pond as the water works it's way down from the hills around us.
I have seen ducks and geese, hawks and eagles.  Of course there are also the deer and I am told that there are otters and mink in our little world here, though I never seen them.  I haven't seen the beaver yet either, but I know he is there.

For some, long walks, never retracing steps but ever taking new ones are the only worthy walks.  I think that each moment is new and thus we can never really repeat a step, or take the same walk twice.  I also believe that there are some who don't even have the ability to stand or maybe don't even have two feet to stand upon, who take great voyages, new steps, walks to the holy land of the spirit and mind.  They go where most of us fear to tread and turn back from when faced with some mysterious fork in a road.

I understand Stephen Hawking just turned 70 years old.  He has travelled to places most of us will never dare to go, and all from the chair that anchors his body to the ground.  Some very large distances can be travelled in short walks, and even from not walking at all.

As the cold gets deeper and the ice thicker and snow covers the ground I hope to continue on "a la sainte terre".  All around us is holy land and to tread upon it, reverent and joyful both, is an act of gratitude, or at least it can be, and should be.