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!