While we wait for Robert's next response, I thought I'd insert a brief poetic interlude.
For those that know me, and which may be obvious on this web site, I consider myself more of a poet than a prose expositor of ecopsychology. I do my best with that latter mode of expression, but so often for me, a poem gets to the heart of the matter more efficiently. As we all know, rather than talking "about" the human/nature relationship, a poem can aspire to be an actual "expression" from a particular (and preferred) quality of that relationship. Some poems may serve as emissaries or ambassadors from another way of being, and they show us something gently, rather than lecturing us. They often may choose to draw us toward something in the human/nature relationship, rather than tell us where we are lacking or wounded. My house itself is in what most would consider a quite remote location, and yet I am still surprised at how even a short backpack into a wilder location can alter my perceptions and feelings. I'm a proponent of that, though evidence seems to be that fewer and fewer are actually going backpacking these days. Furthermore, I'm a proponent of going alone sometimes. To briefly use Greenway terms, there is something he calls the "psychological wilderness boundary". He says it is very easy to cross the physical boundary, but more difficult and subtle to let go some of our cultural conditioning and enter wilderness in some kind of "healed" way. In any case, a group Greenway trip usually includes some Alone Time, because he notes that it is very easy in company to carry the culture, and some more chance for it to drop away when we are left alone in the more-than-human. So this simple poem gets at these ideas a bit: But Three Miles In Grass and oak trees, river below. Couple days of rain life is fine under tarp. When color fades at dusk stems with sheen of water shapeshift to pure silver. Oaks are silent as their roots and silent the mountain clouds move. Only three miles in there’s a place so big lift one leaf, it’s uncovered.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorDiscussion between Walker Abel and Robert Greenway. Archives
January 2015
Categories |