The New Archaic

Martin Niemoller was one of the lucky ones, liberated by American forces from Dachau
at the end of WWII.  He’d spent 8 years in Nazi prison camps. Far away in time and place, we often hear two direct quotes from him, coming from very different directions!  I was stunned to learn the words came from the same man.

First there is the famous quotation mentioned in my last post, the one in which the list of those taken by the Nazis dwindles down to the realization that, having judiciously minded his own business, there was no one left to help when they came for Martin Niemoller. But come for him they did, even though he was a decorated German U Boat Captain and a conservative minister.  He was a criminally thoughtful and courageous social conservative who was cautious not to equate God’s will with Hitler’s plans.  I think he’d have felt a similar unease with the slippery way some American politicians refer to themselves as a “Jesus candidates,” or  use some other words to indicate that God is on their side (and, if you want to be safe, you will be, too.)

This question about a Jesus candidate obviously relates to the dangers of confounding church and state, God’s will with human political agenda. But it especially interests me because Martin Niemoller is the author of another famous quote, this time a quote picked up by the American religious right: “What would Jesus do?”  Would he espouse the  mantras of individualism and freedom and meritocracy, wherein those who work hard and are clever get fed and healed and the devil apparently already takes the others?

When asked how he gradually changed from a nationalistic and militaristic Christian minister to a political prisoner and then gradually again to a pacifist educator, he said that he tried to pay attention, and asked himself at every juncture, “What would Jesus do?”

I wonder what Martin Niemoller would say about our contemporary uses of his famous words. I wonder what Martin Niemoller would do in America in 2012.  Would he just be working somewhere, going along for the ride, fearing notice and living under the radar? My bet is that, having learned so much and at such a price, he’d be truly occupying his allotted space. But Martin Niemoller is dead and we’ re alive. Why not occupy our space? Perhaps drawing conviction from both quotes and refusing to be pacified with simplistic interpretations that require nothing of us.

Even the Sun stops in its tracks, twice a year. This is a seasonal event, and before you can say “well, duh,” let me explain that I mean it is in the spirit of the seasonal as contrasted with what is in the calendar. Some years ago, I wrote an essay suggesting a chrono-biological approach to the fact that the flu season is also the season of lesser light when creatures of the day are naturally less active and perhaps less immune responsive. In the process of writing that essay, I learned that the word “season” comes to us by way of Old French and refers to the quality of time when it is good to sow seeds, not March 20, but when the ground and the sky are ready to receive and support those seeds. And I learned that “calendar” comes to us from the Latin, and refers to the first day of the month, when Roman bills came due. These two words, in their contrasting senses of time, point to a lovely distinction between what is natural and what humans culturally impose upon nature. But it seems to me we get into trouble with two time references, one in our bones, and another on our books!

Let me say exactly what I mean for today, for the Winter Solstice: even the sun rests, the dogs rest, and we need to rest, too. I may be a special case of mania, but I don’t’ really think so. Almost everyone I know, even the very young and the very old need to rest more than they do, and I wish we could rest guilt free, I wish we could celebrate rest. (Remember John and Yoko’s “Sleep-In?”)

In honor of the Winter Solstice, the doorway of the Quiet Season, I invite you not to take my advice, but to listen to your own body, to observe the Sun in its moment of stillness, to lie down and let some beautiful music wash over you. To let the world carry you…(But only if you find that you want to)

And there’s a magical twist to this indulgence…while you do this, you will not use any “resources” or “energy.” So you can feel less guilt about ecological collapse and economic scarcity if you give yourself that longed-for rest.  Just think, what an economy it would be if we valued rest. Rest doesn’t cost anything; it restores, conserves and delights. We collectively might find our natural selves in our natural world with a bit more ease and certainty. We might even know what to do…. and what to do less of.  I know that this happens to me when I do mindfulness practice, and when I rest.

For the past few months, I have been engaging the spiritual practice of mindfulness meditation for at least twenty minutes a day. Sometimes I think it is literally turning my life inside out. I have begun to read and use Ron Alexander’s very practical and helpful guide, Wise Mind Open Mind. Today, this cold day of the Winter Solstice, I was focused on uncomfortable body sensations and on releasing them. What I noticed was a nuanced and profound desire to rest, to be still. I noticed the subtle pushing forward of my jaw, the effortful bracing in my back and neck, a gnawing in my stomach, all deep habits of body and mind. All of these and more sensations called for the same one thing, to rest, to stop, to be relaxed, to let something else carry me; the something else of the universe itself, grace, nature, something that might be implied in the word “God.”

So, today I went from meditation to a hot bath and from a hot bath back to my crisply made bed. I lay down and listened to Concerto Pour Une Voix (Saint-Preux), surrounded by warm little dogs. I have noticed recently that these same little dogs can sleep deeply and happily for most of the day and all of the night, especially in the winter when the days are short and cold. I notice how they approve when I stop to rest, to listen to music; to make a cuddle-dog-music-saturated renewal.

I am spending time this year with a wonderful group of intellectuals (at the Zygon Center in Chicago), scientists and theologians who are struggling with questions about what “natural” means.  Are we humans not natural? Then is not technology, the creation of us natural beings, not natural, too? Etc. Their job, and mine, as scholars and knowledge makers, is to ferret out incorrect and problematic understandings and to offer new possibilities. And our heritage of thought related to the word “natural” is very problematic, so much so that our thought habits have allowed us to destroy our own niche in nature.  I love this work of correction and expansion at the level of idea, and I love these people. But sometimes I want to suggest that they attempt to stop thinking and just sit aware in nature, nature as contrasted with human culture–nature as in forest and field and mountain and river and ocean; nature as in bird, squirrel, fish, deer, opossum- to experience their own roots in the qualities of nature, to feel nature and to feel what it means to be nature.

At the end of our last session a very angry young Native American student responded with hostility to the whole conversation, saying there is a different way entirely to answer these questions, a way that Europeans have nearly but not completely killed. He said we should consider ourselves less than nature. No one liked that idea much. I think they may not have understood him.  Maybe his message was lost to me, too, but I think he was saying that we need to understand that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we have obligations to that something and that we are entirely dependent upon it. Or maybe that is what I am saying.

As I left, I heard the question, again, “But how do we get a handle on what nature is and what we are in relation to it?”  This time I answered, “Wilderness Awareness dot org.” (wildernessawareness.org) And I do heartily suggest this wonderful school for waking up to nature. * Yes, we are natural, us humans, and I think we are cultural too, and it is this culturedness by which we constrain and direct nature, often unwisely.  But our cultural selves are built upon our biology, so we need to feel down to the level of our own bodies and not be entirely distracted by a head full of enculturated thoughts if we are to keep the connections in working order, if we are to remain on the lovely planet we have come to kind of know and certainly need.

It may be as Joan Chittister suggested that we should “go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again.”  If it seems a daunting task, start by just being with your own body, attentively.  If you fall asleep, choose it!  You might feel good.

* I have been nourished by visits with the non-human world, the great “other” of the last several millennia, especially with guidance from wildernessawareness.org.

Our boats on the ocean of life / photo © Anne Benvenuti 2011

How synchronistic is it that, after posting the very post in which I complained about the limitations imposed upon my mind by watching my feet for three solid weeks while I walked the John Muir Trail last summer, I should fail to watch them one recent winter day and have fallen over backwards, breaking ribs in the process? So I have been derailed by broken ribs, and thus sunk deeply into the quiet season of reflection and rest. My body has been somewhat limited and my mind has been free to roam.

I reflected on the year behind me and the year before me, thinking that my intentions have something to do with what happens in a year of life. And of course we have to live as though our intentions have something to do with our lives… because we have intentions by nature in what Jaak Panksepp calls the seeking system of our mammalian brains. We try to guide our little ships, these paper boats on the wide ocean of life, so that they keep going as smoothly and happily as they might before reaching saturation and the inevitable giving up of their momentary forms as they fall back into the salty sea.

Back into the sea? Sure. I read Richard Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth and Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish as we crossed from 2010 into 2011. Though the transition of years was certainly not one of the great life transitions (as when cells formed organized unions of labor, or fish walked onto the land), my psyche was pleased to be dipped into evolutionary thinking. I love, for example, to wonder what those whale brains think about? Go have a look; they are huge brains, very convoluted with lots of surface area, all indicators of a smart creature, thinking. What do whales think? Do they think about us? If so, how do they perceive us? Not in smell dreams, like those of my dog, because they’ve given up smell entirely in order to breathe through the tops of their heads. And they don’t think about making things with their hands because they’ve given up hands, too. So maybe they don’t think about us, even though we have a hard time imagining that. And they don’t think like us because they have different hardware. But they are mammals with hair and teeth and breasts. Maybe they think whaley thoughts of love (oh, I mean “social bonding!”) after thinking about food, of course. What do whales seek? Do they mark time? Do they set their intentions for the next time period?

Back on terra firma, is there anything we can take into our oceanic formlessness with us when our little paper boats sink? If so, wouldn’t that be a good thing to seek? Huston Smith suggested that we should identify with our consciousness as a way to deal with the fact that we are ultimately required to loosen our grip on material form until we’ve given it up entirely. I’m not so sure about this. I hear people say on an almost daily basis, we’re not “this,” referring to their bodies. But something deep inside me says, “Yes, we are!” To deny the experience of life in a body is to deny the only experience of life we have access to. I think the denial is just that, denial; the plain old psychological defense mechanism called denial. To be spiritual is, I think, to be here now, as deeply responsive as we can be, to be courageously here… because it takes courage. And to be here now is to be in a body. Even allowing for the occasional out-of-body experience, here in the body is essentially the only way we can know anything at all. Sure it’s painful at times, but it’s real and even the greatest pain doesn’t last forever. No reason not to be here while we are here, no reason that convinces me anyway (’ceptin cowardliness).

In a certain way, 2010 was not a big year for me. Not like 2008 when I sailed around the world. Not like 2009, when I was ordained an Episcopal priest, a mere 40 years after having set off in that general direction; and when the essay on neuroscience and spirituality was accepted by the University of Chicago Press, and when we presented this work at the Parliament for the World’s Religions in Australia. In 2010, these big tasks so many years in the doing had come to completion and I kind of grew into them, like learning to walk in a bigger self. I integrated this sense of priesthood; it so quickly felt like something I’ve been all my life. And in 2010, I walked the John Muir Trail, which was also, in some way I can only dimly articulate, an act of integration.

I think of one of my favorite quotes from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, “Se hace camino al andar” (you make the road by walking). I feel tired; not depressed, not exhausted; but as though it’s time to exhale and release after a long and intense inhale. It’s hard in our culture to respect the times of exhalation, of sleeping, of picking our teeth and pondering. But if we don’t do these things, if we never “loaf and invite our souls” (to invoke now Walt Whitman), we become miserable exhausted pawns in someone else’s game. So. I’ve been exhaling….

For 2011 the thing I found myself most deeply wanting, amongst all my wants, is that old wanting to just be there for daily life, loving it as it comes up and goes down, caring for my body, caring for my spouse and family and friends and dogs and cats, seeing the birds at the feeder, and noticing their dawn and evening songs. I want to be up for more sunrises. I’m tired of thinking about the economy. Sure a Nobel Prize would be nice, but it’s just not in my seeking system this year.

© Anne Benvenuti 2011

OK, the experience of backpacking the John Muir Trail was not what I imagined at all; it was much less glorious, much less mystical, much less aware and attuned to nature. I’d say “no grapenuts” but there was an abundance of them! Generally, I was not in harmony with the world around me, but focused on many necessities of “through walking.” We had to make a certain number of miles per day because our food supplies were calculated to last so long and no longer. We had to eat more breakfast than I like, and I learned I had to eat less lunch than we’d calculated because my body didn’t like walking and digesting at the same time of a Sierra afternoon. I was very hungry by dinner, and even hungrier as the number of days out lengthened. I had to be careful to keep the steri pen away from the raw water. I had to keep from tearing my pants because I had two pairs for 21 days.

My pack was consistently about 45 pounds, except for a couple of days when it might have gone up to 48. I don’t know what Diane’s pack weighed on the low end and I don’t want to know what it weighed on the high end. The reason for the variance is that I carried the tent and the water equipment and stove and she carried the bear barrel and food. My load was always the same, hers varied by how much food was in the barrel. We had one crabby afternoon, just plain crabby. We picked up our last food cache at Muir Trail Ranch. The people were not very nice, especially to me. I arrived aggravated because I’d walked miles with a small stick in my underwear, and they sent me back out into the woods I’d just come through to deal with my necessities. (Yeah, I know about TMI, but these things are real on the trail.) And this was the day I thought my sock was wrinkly when it was the skin of my foot that eventually became so painful I had to look and learn the problem was skin, not sock. I could do precious little, I knew, to carry more weight, taking on only about 2-3 pounds, of the 10 extra pounds we were about to pick up. Diane, for her part, acquired a load so heavy that she teetered. She assumed an expression of grim determination, refused to talk much because talk was a waste of needed energy; she saddled herself up and wobbled on, becoming grayish-yellow of complexion. I made the decision that we would go fewer miles and began to look for a campsite: I’d had it and I knew it. We found a perfect site next to the San Joaquin; a fire pit, logs to sit on, a flat place for a tent, and even some obsidian chips on the ground, left behind when some previous human had made a tool. We had more than one reason to eat a big dinner that night. And Diane made us a great camp fire. I think we may have actually smiled briefly before falling asleep.

There were other things that were not up to snuff. My memories and images of many hours in the Sierra Nevada mountains are of hopping along boulders in creek beds, planting my face in the forest loam to smell the rich of it, courting animals until they play with me, and they often have, delighting my memory many years later. But I couldn’t hop anywhere; I was weighed down mightily and had blisters to boot. If I’d planted my face in the forest floor, I’d have been unable to get up again. I didn’t see the animals because it takes a kind of awareness that is different from the task focus of through walking and because the bears aren’t hanging around trails, now that bear barrels lock them out from human food. This lack of playing with animals was perhaps my deepest disappointment because it is one of my greatest joys.

What I did see way too much of, if I’m to be honest, was the rim of my hat and the top of my boots and the points of my walking sticks. Mmmm, yeah, and mosquitoes. Every scene was framed by these elements, and the frame dominated the picture. What mindfulness I had was generally consumed by focusing on my feet and walking poles, and when I’d look up, there was the damned hat rim. To see with intention, I had to plant my feet and poles, tip back my hat. Soon the infernal mosquitoes were buzzing and I had to get the hat in place and move.

How then was I so nourished, how so renewed?

What I think I learned again is how much of our experience is absorbed as a gestalt, a complete energetic osmosis with the totality of our environment. Though my tasks were challenging and my mind was wandering, my eyes and ears, my skin and proprioception, were taking in rock moving waters, soaring peaks, sudden meadows of wildflower and shimmering aspen, and, of course the constant company of one utterly competent and generous human being.

What I still say of it, in spite of disillusionment, is: “Now THAT is living.”

And I would encourage the fearful to try it. And to carry less!

© Anne Benvenuti 2010

One thing that had the capacity to consistently pierce the veil of rumination was my body, and my body’s constant voice in the production of emotion. The evidence, especially the neuroscientific evidence, is that emotion is primary and body-based (see the research of Jaak Panksepp), and mostly unconscious by nature. Of course as we develop, our emotions, like almost everything else about us, are formed into habits and associated with stories; unfortunately they tend to remain unconscious, wreaking havoc with our intentions for our lives. My body spoke out there in the wilds, and so did my emotions. I suppose it would be fair to say that I became aware of my emotions. There was space for them, and there were also demands upon them, so it felt as though something came into balance. As corny as it may sound to the ears of desk-working commuters, my body, my feelings, and my thinking mind were in some kind of balance out in the wilds, an experience quite distinct from ‘ordinary life,’ such that I never needed my bed, nor my glass of wine, much less a therapy session, or even a religious service. A massage would have been nice, though.

On the first day out I turned my ankle, and was instantly reinforced for having decided to wear leather hiking boots. That ankle tweaked a little over the next few days, but this served as a reminder to be careful. And I was very careful in the placement of my feet. For 21 days, I knew where my feet were. That alone creates some mind-body balance, to actually be aware of what your feet are doing, moment by moment for several days. This was quite different from young Anne’s backpacking, she who went out alone and, for example, walked down a steep pass barefoot, after taking off boots to cross a stream, causing a stress-fractured foot in the process, only really getting the message weeks later. Oh, this behavior is not for older Anne! Watch your step girl, too many broken bones already threaten to send arthritic messages. And then there was the huffing and puffing as the habitual sins of over-consumption became more than theoretical messages or cholesterol readings on that second day up and over Donohue Pass. It was hard to carry excess body weight along with a 45-pound pack, it was very hard. I questioned the wisdom of it, as I wondered about the health trade-offs of working my muscles hard while wearing down my skeleton.

The day after the full moon, when my physical training was well underway and my energy reserves good, I felt a strange euphoria, almost light-headed, but not uncomfortable, and it went on and on. Very strange, I couldn’t place it… then remembered “runner’s high.” I had a whole day of runner’s high, combined with amazing views of mountain top panorama to the West, just south of Mammoth Mountain and Reds Meadow, as we hiked away from Deer Creek, where we’d camped and slept several extra hours during an afternoon thunder and hail storm. I can’t get away from the word ‘natural’ in describing the experience of my body. I was tired because I’d worked hard, and there was a storm that allowed for extra sleep, and I slept—so did Diane—while the thunder rolled and the hail pounded, and I got up to eat and I slept again all through the night. Then there was the day when I noticed that I could just stand up from a squat with my pack on.

There were other moments of blissful body awareness, sometimes with no thoughts at all, like focusing on the placement of my walking poles as I crossed stream after stream of water rushing over polished rocks. There was the stunning cold of the water, making feet numb in the time it took to get from one side of a little creek to the other side. On one occasion Diane abraded the bottom of her foot and didn’t know it till later when it hurt again after the numb of cold wore off. Knowing there was no easy treatment option if I sustained an injury helped me to focus my chronically wandering attention. My right shin, especially, cumulatively chronicled the wanderings of my mind. There were other things, like blisters on my feet that required constant attention, and when I misunderstood them, as when I thought my sock was wrinkling but it was my foot that was wrinkling, I paid a price. So I learned to carry my pre-cut mole skin strips where I could get to them. Washing socks that I carried outside the pack to dry became a habit. Imagine this: keeping a supply of clean and dry socks was more urgent than any office politics or evening news. Oh dropping reactivity, oh lazing cortisol levels!

I often ached in the late afternoon or early evening as we made camp. I had one twelve-advil day, but that was early in the training, that arduous long fourth day, up to Agnew Pass and down along the San Joaquin River. On the trail I didn’t have a chair or a bed, but I had Big Agnes, the glorious sleeping pad, and a very good sleeping bag, and my down sweater as my pillow. The comforts of these rivaled anything I have at home. And what I did for my body was to rest and later, as my reserves were being used, I ate carefully too. It rings strange in my ears to say “I” about these things, because they were a natural and effortless “we.” Diane was tired, too, and needed to eat. We naturally divided tasks; she did the cooking and dish washing, I did the water fetching and purification. Together we set up and took down the tent, we unpacked and repacked our packs. To be fair, she did more of the camp work, especially in the early part of the journey, because she had more strength and more energy. She did not complain, being both generous and disciplined, and being uncommonly able to perceive and relate to reality.

Over those 21 days, I came to a real acquaintance with my feet, my knees, my hips, my shoulders, but also, and more unexpectedly with my emotional feelings. Those mornings or evenings of shared camp tasks were times of conversation, making over the weeks an extended conversation in which I learned things I’d not known about Diane, a very close friend for the last 15 years, and I learned things about myself, too.

I would begin to talk about something, my Grandmother Gwendolyn, for example, and burst into tears. Who would have expected Grandma Gwen, the discounted person, the buffoon, the embarrassment, to show up around our little fire, bringing a storm of emotion with her? Grandma Gwen who played overturned trash cans with drum fans and who knew the Charleston and who could barely move her 300+ pound body, Grandma Gwen, who was a victim of her gendered and duplicitous culture, who was a victim of incest multiple after her mother died. She was 12 years old, ripe for the picking. Grandma Gwen who was coerced to have an abortion she did not want, and who grieved the rest of her life for that baby daughter, buried in a shoe box, as she told it in secretive little side conversations with her granddaughters many years later. How the secrets leaked from her, oh so inappropriately! She cracked under the strain of her necessary secrets, and was, at best, a lovable crackpot; at worst she was a terribly embarrassing burden. And how I boil and bristle in my knowledge of the proprieties of her time and place; how I rage for her now; and even worse is the well of grief for her wasted life. Gifted Gwendolyn, eye of the storm, who sent the ripples of her dilemma down through the generations. And there she was, sitting on the rocky outcrops with us, falling from my eyes in a sudden gush of tears. It happened more than once, that someone like Gwen came to me at the camp fire.

Though as adults, we may rarely awaken to this moment, when we do awaken, it is as something that we awaken, and into something that we awaken. The common source of both our “as” and the world’s “is” is nature, human nature and the natural world. Though our daily world in ‘normal’ life is radically reconfigured by technology, it is still earth, air, fire, and water in some configuration; even if that configuration is metal beams made of fire and earth, air conditioning made of fire and air, glass, brick, and stone, made of fire and earth, tap water, toilet water, pool water, bottled water, made of fire and water. As I write, I notice what climate scientists are shouting about, the presence of fire, or energy, in all of our technologically driven life, fire there at a rate that cannot be processed in a balanced way with the other elements. Overuse of fire all the way to global warming. No wonder the gods punished Prometheus! I took a course in global warming, and, if I remember correctly, it would take the energy of six hundred human deep knee bends to keep a single light bulb burning for a minute.

Over the course of our JMT experience, more of the fire came from our bodies themselves, transforming fat reserves and food into fire for walking, carrying a heavy load, and camp tasking. This was arduous but—oh, how can I possibly describe this for those of us who sit a desk to earn our living, then try to work the tension out of our necks and shoulders? The tensions were much more evenly distributed, which is to say that my feet hurt, and my legs ached, and my hips hurt, and my back wanted to be stretched out after carrying that pack all day. I needed my sleep, and, even when my sleep was interrupted I rested deeply during the night. But my head? No headaches, no brain fatigues, no eye strain. No racing thoughts, no psychosomatic symptoms. And no energy indebtedness to future generations, should there be future generations.

Unlike most women (according to published research and journalistic reports), I don’t hate my body. Of course, I have a running critique—contrary to reports, I am not from another planet. But I have a sense of joy in her capacities; there was the day when I dove headlong into Evolution Lake at 12,000 feet, wanting the fresh of it, the cold of it, the stroke and kick of me. I cannot recall a time of life without this embodied joy, except perhaps a few months of the years when my neck was broken and pain dominated. Even with pain, there has always been the superb pleasure of moving through the world because I can. I thank you God for most this amazing body, even cringing while I imagine others picturing me and laughing. That body hatred does not go with the turf of being female; it’s market driven. It’s delightful to be in here.

© Anne Benvenuti 2010

Post 3: Young Anne’s Dream

The very first day, that ‘easy’ stretch of the gorgeous (and easily accessed via Yosemite Park) Lyle Canyon, I felt the presence of someone I’d not seen in about thirty years, young Anne. Those boots going up and down on the trail beneath me were familiar, and this was her dream. I said to her, “We’re here! I got you here.” It was one of those karmic-feeling moments of awakening into an intention formed ages ago, by someone else, forgotten, but not forgotten, too deep to be lost in one of life’s dismantling storms. I’d had a similar experience when I stood in Agra, across the reflecting pools from the Taj Majal, and said joyfully and spontaneously to my eight-year-old self, “I got you here!” because she had planted a seed of intention on those many afternoons of gazing at the beautiful Taj in that old issue of National Geographic.

I started to think that this walk would be some reconnection with the self of my twenties, but that impression faded. I am no longer a romantic twenty-something person, walking around in an utterly resilient body, though I’ve been formed by her intentions and deep commitments, as well as by her too, too many compromises along the way. I felt a shared pleasure with her when, after a couple of days of walking, the few dollars in my pocket caused me to laugh, to take them out of my pocket and flash them for Diane, who laughed too. Money, you see, is ludicrous, and it just takes the right context to understand that well enough to laugh at the mere sight of it.

At last I was out there with no phone access, no camera, no television, no computer, no car, no motor noises. Young Anne’s dream come true, but gone now is her ability to be present, simply and deeply, for any length of time. Given how very in the here and now my actual experience of walking was, I was surprised by how much my mind could wander in the typical ways that minds do wander—what I shoulda said, what I might say, why my perceptions are the correct ones, what I regret, what I hope for. But even my wandering mind could not, under these circumstances, overcome persistent bodily information, or the vastness of the starry sky at night, or the multiple vocal qualities of the waters, or the delightful intrusion of wild flowers, over and over, bright in the gray of rumination.

© Anne Benvenuti 2010

Post 2: The Moon

As you might imagine, two fifty-something-year-old women of reasonable intelligence had each worked out to prepare for this arduous walk. I was swimming a mile and a half in forty-five minutes, then running three eight-minute miles on the treadmill (though at sea level, a real drawback), and I was the fittest I’d ever been. But we knew that neither of us was really sufficiently trained to backpack the John Muir Trail. Diane was much closer to the requirements than was I, but what the heck. Train as you go, right?

Our plan was to walk the first four days in the largely hidden company of the waxing Lughnasadh moon, building our strength as the moon built hers. We started out with an ‘easy’ nine-mile day through Lyle Canyon, and the next day we climbed Donohue Pass. I thought I’d die; my breath was short and my ankles swollen. So, with worry, effort, and the good example of Diane, who just doesn’t whine—ever—I bagged my first high pass, complete with falling into the snow field up to my waist, flailing on my walking poles for a few minutes, feeling like a collector’s bug on a pin, really going nowhere. We also did several shockingly cold and high water scary sandal-footed stream crossings, and to my surprise, these exhilarated me. When I finally fell exhausted upon Big Agnes at the end of day two, I’d done all of five or so miles for the whole day! (Mind you, there was a guy running whose goal was to do the whole 219 miles in seven days!)

The third day, we took a wrong turn, testing our map and compass reading and our readjustment skills—oh, not to mention communication!—while wringing from us those last drops of energy over an eight-mile up, down, and dirty that was “hard scrabble” in places. The fourth day, we followed our revised route, climbing up to Agnew Pass, then turning southward along the San Joaquin River to Agnew Meadows, an eleven and a half mile day that brought us out about five miles north of where we had planned to come out.

We’d survived our training period intact, no major injuries, bodies stronger, fears allayed. Mike, Diane’s husband and a champion of the adventure, fetched us down from the mountain and then fetched big burritos and beer for us. Phew. For two days, we rested and reconfigured our gear—my pocket knife blades wouldn’t open and the high tech steri-pen water filter died on the fourth day. And I decided that Diane had to have a Big Agnes of her own because I was feeling guilt over my excessive pleasure in my primaloft luxury next to her merely competent thermarest.

On Sunday, the moon peaked in power, and we did too. Keeping to our moon course, we set out to use up our strength, our energetic reserves, and our food supply between the full moon and the new moon. We walked and carried, made camp, broke camp, walked and carried, and gradually we waned, we wound down and used ourselves up, along with the moon, our constant companion in the blue Sierra skies. There’s a lesson in these moon cycles, but that said is too much said; you’ve got to do it to get it.

On the very day of the New Moon, two renewed women came out of the High Country at North Lake, and having no phone access, we hitchhiked to Bishop without a second thought. Elizabeth, my spouse and another champion of the adventure, was waiting for us at South Lake, as planned, but that’s another story!

© Anne Benvenuti 2010

Post 1: The Informational Skeleton

First and most importantly, the reader must keep in mind the fundamental facts: mountains are essentially, up, down, and dirty, as well as solid and soaring.

On July 19, I set out with my longtime friend, Diane, the only person in whose company I can imagine attempting to carry 45 pounds up and down mountains ranging from 9,000 to 12,000 feet in elevation, for 137 and a half (who’s counting) miles, over 21 days. Essentially, we did what we set out to do, pretty much in the way we intended to do it, rerouting once because we had taken a wrong turn, backtracking another time when we missed a trail sign, and changing course for the last three days to come out at North Lake by way of Piute Pass, instead of South Lake by way of Bishop Pass.

Yes, we did pretty much what we intended, and we did something we could not have imagined… hence, this series of posts.

© Anne Benvenuti 2010

Thanksgiving! Now that’s an elemental innovation. And it can be as elemental as we care to make it… I give thanks for the bacterial cellular life that makes up about 90% of the material of ‘my’ body. I give thanks for the house plants that refresh and recycle my spent breath. And, while I am thanking the green lung of the planet with my red ones, I give thanks to the fish who so long ago gave me lungs, to the Neanderthals whose genes I’ve always felt sure I carried, for the music I am sure they made (read Stephen Mithen’s Singing Neanderthals), and for my new little piano, Magic, who is well named. I give thanks for my own elemental role in the macrocosmic real.

I give thanks for the wood of the desk on which I write, wood that goes on being ‘alive’ for me so many years after it ceased to be a living tree. This is something I noticed in so many real forests, way up in the high country of the Sierra Nevada mountains last summer, real forests that don’t lend themselves to much human tending, being far from roads and at very high elevations. In these forests, the ancestral nature of the trees was so visible, these fallen trees, dead yet teeming with audible insect life, and housing so many other lives, especially squirrels and birds. Dead trees providing for crossings, and fuel, and shelter. I aspire to be that kind of ancestor, someone whose body is still supporting the life of generations that never knew it alive. I would hope to become good elemental stuff for the future; and, since I have no children, it will not be by way of genes.

Elemental innovations. Making new things from old parts. That’s what I mean by the catchy phrase that illustrates my webpage. But before you can make new things, you
have to see the ‘parts’ of the old things. There are so many tired old conflicts that still use up vast amounts of our energy and air space. Oh, let’s name a few! Liberal vs. Conservative, Science vs. Religion, Capitalist vs. Socialist. Protestant vs. Catholic,
Muslim vs. Christian, Pro-life vs. Pro-choice. These words whose tread has worn so thin that they can barely roll down the road. Need I confess to being all of the above? Dare I, since just such a confession may provoke the ire of almost everyone? It seems to me that when a problem has become so intractable that people can only line up across from each other and scream the same phrases over and over, a changed perspective is called for — unless of course, it’s really the emotional release we crave. But to claim that is a changed perspective, and probably a very valuable one!

So I try to go bigger, to see it as if through a telescope, or to go smaller, to see it as if through a microscope, or to turn the dial on the kaleidoscope and see how else the pieces might create a pattern. This is what I mean by elemental innovations.

I’ve been teaching something educators call “critical thinking” for many years now, and one of the things I’ve learned from it is that ‘critical’ is only a fraction of the whole enchilada of good thinking. If we think the same old thoughts over and over, even if we turn them this way and that, critically analyzing their structure, the best we can get is a sense of superiority over whomsoever thunk that half-baked thought for the first time. Really good thinking requires appreciation of the minds that have handed thoughts on to us: not just critical appraisal of their work, but appreciation for the work they did. This is why I don’t let students argue in my classes. Argumentation is largely the art of blowing hot air in some logical progression; but logic is only as good as the assumptions that underlie it, and therein lies a whole host of problems! If we don’t appreciate the work given us by our ancestors, as in really understand and value it, we won’t know how to use it elementally to make of it something new for our new needs, and something alive for future generations. We’ll hand on tired old thoughts with no life in them, a leaden legacy that can only weigh down those who receive it. One example of this that comes to mind is the ready-made critique of Karl Marx, “evil communist,” maker of falsehoods and failed systems. Have you read Marx? Go see what he says about the fisherman’s boat and think about what it means for you on your morning commute!

Better than a resounding critique would be to understand what Marx says that might be useful or inspiring. Then you have the capacity to take bits of genius from this ancestor and that one, and weave them into something new. That is what I hope for, a kind of cultural elemental innovation pattern. Because really valuable thought requires creativity. There may or may not be God, but surely none of us is She, and so our creations can only come from the parts of someone else’s creations. I wish to never hear those tired pro and anti statements and platforms again. I wish to hear some new ideas, some suggestions about how to proceed, some ideas for assessing our efforts, even some wild scramble poetry and art that just serves to break up the nonsense into usable chunks. How about some new arrangements just because they are beautiful?

Most recently I have been tinkering with the “science vs. religion” issues because, to be honest, I was both disdainful of religion, especially defensive irrational religion, and at the same time spiritually very hungry. Life seems to call to and for something spiritual in us. “Man, the rational animal,” is false, boring, and profoundly insufficient for understanding a human, much less a group of humans. Asserting ideas in the form of religious beliefs that may well be irrational does not seem a better alternative. So I have been fooling at the telescope, and the microscope, turning the kaleidoscope to see what else I can get out of these culture remnants. I came to see religion, broadly and globally, as the Land of Peril and Promise, and so I wanted to poke around in it to see if I could distinguish between the peril and the promise.

My current fascination is with the relationship of neural processes in the brain and religious behavior; I think I have found a fresh perspective, neither pro- nor anti-religious, but something that helps me respond to the question, “Why hasn’t religion died out?” as many hope it will, and many fear it will. From the fresh perspective I think I’ve found, I want to strongly suggest that it is self-evident that there is good religion and bad religion and that we can, in fact, tell the difference between the two. Ah… the stuff of a future post!

But before that, I need to revisit the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Mountains…. Looking back on a rich year, I was most blessed there in the stunningly beautiful wilds, wind in my hair, dirt under my fingernails, stars over my head, water music in my ears! All in the spiritual company of the Piute and Mono people whose ancestral summer home I shared for a season. I give thanks for the amazing natural water systems that underlie the everyday life of millions of Californians. You would not believe the vast beauty of the waters, especially last summer. When you turn on your tap, imagine Fish Creek, tons of whitewater pounding down over granite courses, to meet with the San Joaquin River. I thank you God for most this amazing sip of water.

© Anne Benvenuti 2010