Pyle & whole season of leaves...

I fell in love with compost precisely because of its' disintegration existing as an outline for bringing it back -the alive, the vibrant, as Ackerman concludes, "the things of this earth that perish". I guess going somewhere is important to me. Maybe I'm attached in some way to this closed feedback cycle because I want living & dying to mean something outside of self.

Moments of health gone awry, bodily distress and illness can easily serve as camouflage, as with the beloved leaves, for the first time a newness about what being o.k. means is revealed, what we're really made of gets noticed. My 1st time in the ever-so-wet Amazonia, I had a few days to register the images of neon-colored frogs, vistas of the innumerable clouds of canopy above and dig up some yuca before my brain went to sleep and my body turned into an oven. My fever awakened this other part of me that was aware, patient, slow, that kept me alive in quite a different way than my regular self perceives being alive. Even being upset about being sick was too exhausting -I quickly made peace and not war. In some ways, I'd like to hear Pyle coming out of such a situation, a scenario that beckons for more than "nature bats last".
Perhaps he's already experienced a spiritual fast or something and being cynical is just his true self -just his truth (in this lifetime, of course). I just don't see it on the scale to which he bring things to: is it really a battle on earth? the winning/losing game, "the ravaged land" and qualms about postponing departure...maybe we'll just have to find rapture here on earth. After all, it is where spirit embodies an earthly form. I guess undoubtedly, I see -us- as an extension of existence made of earth. Because its' sooo fleeting, giving a damn is part of the justice question.

Maybe an intrinsic part of a healing in flux Earth, is the possibility for humans to engage/receive/work through/ offer healing ourselves, as a species. While reading Pyle, my brain recalled Paul Shepard's How Animals Made Us Humans, and the idea that we -as humanity- are stuck in a stagnant kind of way- within these Jungian archetypes of adolescent boy/male behavior in which we have become somewhat helpless. There's a whole more to that, but I pictured it for some reason while reading him. A rebirth/coming of age sounds more like what we're heading for, hopefully other Pyles will be willing to be awake for the ride.

It's not that I can't identify with such feelings of hopelessness and despair -I come from a place in which such disparities are in your face. And its' somewhat a privilege to give up hands down, perhaps not having stakes against you offers up that luxury.
Rather than operating from a place of struggle, perhaps if we understood the role of compliance in affirming the "ways things are"/ "business as usual" we could deal with the turmoil on a different note. If I really think about it, my biggest umph with Pyles' writing is that its' ultra -"acting right toward the earth" is an expression of relationship (on a spectrum of good & bad, sure -what ever makes most sense for you) not a means of "cheating death" or mortality. Since he brought up his "catholic tastes", perhaps there's some revisiting of fear that could offer up more to his coyote lifting a leg.

Dillard...

She had me hooked from, "ensconed in the lap of lichen" to feeling her feeling the locked embrace with the weasel. I'm thankful her skull didn't rupture because I really enjoyed her writing. It's almost as if her writing is flowing from instinct. I had an eye-to-eye moment with a coyote back home on the lakefront a few years ago. I had just returned from Peru and went to the frozen ice to settle back into the cold and the city, when in my stillness, I realized this was no dog, this was coyote walking across the solidness of the lake seemingly straight to me, when it stopped and I could feel that I
was being watched. In all our looking, it was I that broke the stare simply by changing my feeling. Coyote just scanned and noticed my feeling had changed to fear and it decided to switch direction away from me. I often wondered how close would it have approached.
So true -the remarkable waking up of each day comes and goes. Some days it may feel as if we aren't doing anything out of the ordinary and yet as she says, "...we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge.
I appreciated her unapologetic truth in describing the great effort of detecting while being human, our minds do have the tendency of carrying off, wanting "to live forever".

Pyle

“Nature doesn’t care. Only we care.” Pg 976.
Thank you Pyle. I have done the kids activity thats like the concept map and stringing living things together, I think it is a great activity and can get the point across that nature is connected. But one thing that has bothered me in the last 3 months is that humans don’t need to be apart of that interconnectedness. Pyle is also saying something similar, if the race of humans end it only effects us, not the way nature wants to run. I think it is something that makes humans unique, (apart from our thumbs), we don’t matter to the earth. We really don’t. Yet we also make everything about us. PLT seemed to be all about resources and how we use trees. How did we get there? How should we change our actions to reflect that? I don’t know.
At one point Pyle comments that humans cannot think about the future. I think that we can think about the future. Not to put Native American’s in a perfect box, and I don’t know so much about now, but think that their actions effect 7 seven generations both in the past and future. The stories and tales are lessons and information being passed on to present and future generations. I think that our Western world has lost something a long time ago that makes us think about us, maybe about our grandchildren but not too much farther then that.

Pyle and Ackerman

I echo Rachel on this one. Whoa boy. Several of us recently had this same conversation during the Earth as Ally conference. Yes, there is hope, but who are we really saving the planet for? Hands down, most would say us. Do we really care about polar bears? If you had the chance to shoot a polar bear in the head or a person chosen at random, you'd probably pick the polar bear. Right? Does that mean we shouldn't save the polar bear, or all the endangered mussels in Indiana? Of course our human nature doesn't allow us to think about life in 2070 when all the oil will be gone. Heck, I'll be gone, and who knows if I'll even have grandchildren to worry about. Let's live it up now. Ha. I do agree that in the end the earth will take care of itself. It would just be nice if we could slow it down a little. Ackerman gives me hope. She reminds me that this is a cycle. Maybe we've already been there before. What is deja vu anyway? This is Earth 2.o, or 3.0, or 6.0. The downward cycle to the end has already begun. I can't wait for the next round.

Pyle and Ackerman

Wow, these two are sooo different, yet they do have their similarities.

I enjoyed Pyle, and now I am wondering what this says about me. Reading this tonight made me giggle because I sat on my porch last night with a friend discussing this exact same topic. He said to me at one point in our conversation, "The Earth will be just fine, Sami, we are the ones who are going to be extinct". And most likely he and Pyle are correct. Which makes me think...."what the hell and I fighting for?" I guess I still believe that even though we have gotten as far as we have, they maybe we have a chance to help nature begin healing it's wounds. Although, according to Pyle, I think he would say that I was straight up full of it. It really makes you think that as humans we are truly not part of nature, or maybe because we are humans we are not a part of nature. Although, I guess our coming and going is in the natural cycle of species and creatures of the Earth.

As for Ackerman, I enjoyed her reading as well, but it was very different. After reading Pyle, I was a little turned off by what she was saying as she talked on about the reasons why leaves change their color and how they do this. I thought to myself, "Oh scientific terms, blah, blah, blah" But there were many parts of her writing that I really enjoyed. I like when she say, "Colored like living things, they signal death and disinigration....They are as we hope our own fate will be when we die: not to vanish, just to sublime from one beautiful state into another." I liked her comparisons about how humans view the natural world and choose to see what they want. They do not acknowledge that they changing of the leaves is its preparation death and winter, but flock to see the beautiful colors changing along the coast, not really knowing the reasoning behind it.

Pyle and Ackerman

Robert Michael Pyle: "And the Coyotes Will Lift a Leg"

ooowee well talk about major philosophy reading! I thought that Pyle raised a lot of questions that I often think about. Without humans would the nature world be better off? Well there's no real way of actually answering this because there has been human life on Earth for quite a while AND we if humans were taken off the planet then there would be no way of knowing if the nature world was doing better without us. sooo I guess that is one of those questions that can't be answered. duh. But it's something fun to think about. And I often wonder that when we as people try to help "save" the nature world by better managing it if we are just doing even more harm than help. The nature world will more or less figure it's issues out. That's one aspect that people can't do, we can't figure our issues out.

I liked the way Pyle finish his article by stating all the neat aspects that the nature world and it's creatures possess. "In a sense, all life in the ravaged land is a bunch of weeds-- survivors, coping and adapting under adversity." Pyle presented a lot of points that create for active thinking and I defiantly need to go back and break down his ideas.

Diane Ackerman: "Why Leaves Turn Color in the Fall"

This article made me really excited for when all the leaves fully change their color. I can't wait for the red leaves, they are the best, especially the strawberry blonde leaves. Before living in Indiana, fall wasn't my favorite season just because there aren't really trees that change color in New Mexico and it just kinda gets dusty and dry. But not that I live in Indiana I think that fall is the best season! I love the colors, food, cool weather, hats, light jackets, sweat shirts, pumpkins, crunching leaves!

Both of the articles help me deal more with the fact that death is a natural thing that must be done. I think in our culture in this day of age that death is thought of something that can be postponed with the help of technology and medicine. But since when should death ever be something that is postponed, it needs to happen. Ackerman says, "Colored like living things, they signal death and disintegration. In time, they will become fragile and, like the body, return to dust. They are as we hope our own fate will be when we die: Not to vanish, just to sublime from one beautiful state into another." Transferring from one beautiful state to another is nature's destiny for all of us.

Annie Dillard

I love Annie Dillard and her loveliness and style of writing just continued to show itself in these readings. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek after my mentor recommended it to me while listening to me complain about literature I was reading at the time. He said I needed to learn from her, not only in her writing, but in her ways of observing the natural world.

When I told my dad that I was reading the book, he said to me, "well yeah its a great book! I took you to Tinker Creek when you were a kid." I have no recollection of this trip, but he had to stop and see what she had been talking about. He described it as being a place that was not all that awesome, but if you spent enough time there and looked closely enough, it could be as great as she described in the book.

I feel as though this is what I and all of us have to learn from Annie Dillard. She is amazing at finding the balance between society and wilderness. At connecting things together. At taking these small things and making them as amazing as the Alps or Grand Canyon. This is what is important. We all may not get a chance to live somewhere that is truly amazing of awesome according to most, but it is making your place amazing and awesome by looking closely and interpreting it in this way. This is why I love her so much.

Dillard pulls out these amazing details in her writing. She pays attention and makes connections between worlds. She describes everything that is happening, describes her surroundings, what she did, what others did, why they did it, and what caught her interest. She then dives in and explores these things the way that she did with the Weasel. It is just fascinating and amazing. I have so much to learn!

Annie Dillard

I really enjoyed the style of writing Annie Dillard wrote in the two articles we were supposed to read. It was defiantly more of an action packed style of writing that kept me intrigued for what was coming next. I particularly liked the "total eclipse" reading because it was one method of trying to explain the weird ways of human nature through a natural event. I liked how the reading was broken up into 4 parts. Annie Dillard began the 4th part by describing how we are taught as children to wake up from a deep sleep and then after we get the hang of it we never think about it again, we just do it. There are a lot of things like this that we just do in life and don't even think about it. This action also goes along with what we notice about nature and the environment. Most things that are happening in nature we take for granted, like the changing of seasons. But when a total eclipse happens we totally change our perspective and give our full attention to what is happening because it only comes so often.

I really enjoyed Dillard's story about the eclipse. She made it into an action story that I couldn't stop reading and she help related it to so many things about life. I defiantly learned to just enjoy life and all it's wonder, just sit back and enjoy the show. For the most part I already live my life like that but I tend to get caught up in the little things that don't matter as time moves on. So that is my new goal, just to enjoy life for all it's craziness.

Annie

Weasels,
I do not think that I have ever seen a weazel in my life, I believe that there is one in the Gods must be Crazy II movie, it is a highly amusing part of the movie because they never let go. I am also sure if I would like to see one in the wild. I am a little spaze if you haven't noticed and think I would freak out making the weazel also freak out, grap my neck and i am now dead. But I admire those who can be completely comfortable with nature and embrass the moments when they come because they are spastic.

Eclipeses:
I remember going outside while in grade school with special glasses. I can't remember seeing anything but I am fairly sure it was a particle eclipse. The was Dillard explained the event was facinating. It was a little freaky but also so intergreing at the same time. MOst of us love to see these spectatular events, yet others are in their cars missing all of the action. I would definately skip work for something like that.

I was surprised that they left before it was over. I was imagining her and her husband sitting there until mid afternoon and being the last to leave. I think that we miss alot because events aren't over yet. It is too bad.

Dillard

Oh, Annie Dillard! How I do love you so.

On the first day of school I read a passage from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In this passage Dillard explains how she “used to hide a precious penny” in hope someone would find it and “receive, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe.” She goes on to compare this free gift with watching “a muskrat kit paddling from her den.” Dillard wonders if this sight is only worth a “chip of copper.” She concludes, “It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny, but if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then since the world is in fact panted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.” I then tell a story about seeing a Great Blue Heron dive off a pier to catch a fish. That event happened after a long disappointing day. The heron turned my day around. Even before I read about "seeing" I knew I was experiencing it that day.

This reading for Natural History was timely for me. After spending two months learning, we are now thrown into teaching. I must admit I wasn't ready to let the book work go. After reading Dillard's words about the weasel, I had a change of heart (I hope it lasts). "I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot part. Seize it and let it seize you..." Let the seizing begin.

Le Guin/ Wilson

I really loved reading "A Very Warn Mountain" by Le Guin. This whole article made me realize how important it is to journal. I'm not talking about the middle school journaling about describing which boy/girl is the new hottie. I'm talking about the journaling that describes the details of the events that happen each day. And the events don't even have to be about major things that are happening in the world at that time. My Grandma Funk is a huge journal-er. Right before she goes to bed she describes each day and she is 92 years old so I think it would be fun to go back and look at her life through her journals but that would be invading her privacy just a bit. When Le Guin shared some of her entries in her article I found those to be very intriguing because they were her personal thoughts and emotions. Thats what journals possess is a person's own personal thoughts and feelings.

I really liked when Le Guin started describing how the history and legends show that St. Helen is a woman. Oh man I just ate all that up. It also made me think about how all the people were freaking out about the natural disaster happening. Natural disasters may seem really destructive... at first but man-made disasters are ten times worst to the Earth. Think about the oil spill in the gulf, it is destroying many kingdoms of organisms and taking out ecosystems. Natural disasters seem to be horrible at first but they are supposed to happen, they are natural.

After reading E.O. Wilson made me want to read more about evolution and animal behavior I think that stuff is so fascinating. I listened to E.O Wilson when he came to Goshen and I was glued to every world he spoke. E.O Wilson can be a little depressing when he says the Earth just needs no humans bc really how is that supposed to happen? But I get where he is coming from.

Le Guin/Wilson

When I was in Jr. High (1985-1986, Oh, the 80's) I lived near the 4-H building. Every 1st Saturday and Sunday the 4-H building was home to a flea market. This was long before the days of eBay and Craigslist. The flea market was the only place to find rare baseball cards, and junk you wished you never bought. One of those items was GENUINE ASH FROM MOUNT SAINT HELENS. I begged my mother to let me buy some, but she said no. I was mortified. Just three years ago I took my students to see Edward O. Wilson speak at Goshen College. I was afraid his speech would be boring for my students. I was greatly surprised. Wilson was not only knowledgeable, he was entertaining. Not one of my students fell asleep! They were captivated by his intellect and wit. Both Le Guin and Wilson know the importance of science, but they also understand a connection to nature that is non-scientific. I've never quite understood how some can divorce themselves from that connection. Wendell Berry wrote, "When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free." I don't want to loose this connection. Even when my project plagues me, I want to remember the freedom the still water gives.

Le Guin

If there is one thing that I remember about first year human geography is that we all live in danger zones. Winnipeg is located in a flood zone and we built an alternatirve river around the city to protect it. There is no where on earth that humans can escape from all of earths excitment and sometimes distruction.
I liked reading Le Guin because it was easy, personal, and accepted the erruption for the excitment and adventure that it was, not the trouble it caused for people.

Sometimes associating gender roles to things drive me crazy, in the French language there are things that are gender specific and it is meant to be that way and set up for that. In English we do it not because it should be but because we don't have the right words. I liked the feminist like view Le Guin had of the volcano. It bleched, fart and roared (I am womyn hear me roar, type deal). It was still a lady but let the true side show not just the legs crossed version.

Finally Wilson, I am sure that I will be able to relate to him when I am done this program (and after I spend some time at home, I am going to want to go out and discover and do cool things, but am most likely going to get stuck on one or two wonderful thhings (for him the bird of paradice) and dwell on that. UMM I wonder what it will be? Composting and .... sure there will be something else, maybe snakes.

"A threat: a terror: a fulfillment"-Le Guin

I remember hearing all about the Mount St. Helen's eruption during my Geology class at Texas State. My professor had been one of the lucky geologists who got to go and watch the eruptions and study the mountain. He only talked about how lucky he was to get to see such a great eruption and witness a moment in history such as that one. So, when I began reading this article, I had only positive thoughts about the eruption in my head.

I really loved the way that Le Guin talked about the volcano and the general public's reaction to the eruption. It is so interesting that when a natural disaster occurs in the world, people do take it personally. We begin to question our nations religion and question if the disaster is a act of God's wrath on a people or a nation. The truth is that it is just a natural disaster, they happen, with or without a divine intervention or message that is being sent. Like Le Guin says, "Everybody takes it personally". They try to justify the act and avoid the fact that it is just the way that nature and the earth works. If we knew more about nature and the natural world, maybe we all wouldn't take it so personally.

I also enjoyed the interpretation that Le Guin had about St. Helen's as well as the thoughts of others. She tells us that " In all the Indian legends dug out by newspaper writers for the occasion, the mountain is female." It even shows it in its name that the mountain has been called a woman. It makes the act of eruption so much more interesting when you begin to think of it in the terms that the mountain is a woman. One man, Hamilton, that Le Guin talks about compares the mountain to breasts and the eruption to cancer. Le Guin speaks of the eruption in terms of women's empowerment and the women's movement, which I really like reading about. I think of it as erotic and sexual. I mean, it is called a eruption...but that is just me. I find it interesting that Hamilton would compare the eruption to breast cancer. It shows again just how much we think of it as absolute destruction and an end to life. Really, it is not. Yes the mountain will change visually, but who knows what else will come from the eruption or what will happen next. It is a big mystery, just like anything else in nature.