Coda

A tree receives 95% of it's mass from breathing, according to Michael Pollan. The nutrients it receives from the ground acts as a medium through which the air is transformed into tree. Moreover, the breath we exhale, having been converted from O2 to CO2, carrying our mark as carbon-based lifeforms, has in turn been transformed into what the trees inhale. Moreover, the underside of a leaf is covered in lips that open and close; the wind carries the little breaths of millions of lips upon millions of leaves to our lips and nostrils and back again. We use air to oxygenate our blood, which is crucial to our livelihood, like the livelihood of a good wine's bouquet. Pulling a bottle of fermenting ginger beer off of the shelf, I first listen (itself a sensation only made possible through air,) to the sound of bubbles continuously upping from the depths of a yeast paradise. They are eating the sugar and acid I put in the bottle two weeks ago, and are turning it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. Symbiosis. And its all in the air. I then smell, drawing the very carbon dioxide the little critters farted out while living, sexing, birthing, and dying at breakneck pace, (relatively speaking,) I'm filled with memory of meadmaking from high school, of homebrews fine and crude, of bread dough, and dusty earthy crunchy country homes. Memory too is facilitated through the air. I then exhale the memories and they carry off into the breeze, to be considered by the trees. But one modality of breath, the sacred breath that animates and enlivens matter into live being, is expatiated on by David Abram eloquently in a section entitled "The Forgetting and Remembering of the Air". Air is the sacred medium through which we make sound, vocate, communicate. Because of written language, and the subsequent exactitude of language's structure, we have lost some of that sacredness in our contemporary culture. Abram invoked Kabbalism, and the Abrahamic tradition of reading the Torah without vowels, how it was a continuation of oral traditions because reading ancient Hebrew was an interaction with the text. We each add our own vowel sounds just as we add our selves to the text, our meanings, our emphasis. The text reads us too. Abram points to the Native American conception of 'winds within us' as the touchstone metaphor for spirit. It was the same way in our etymological past as well. In fact, the word respiration and spirit have a common root, and it is not that the wind animates, the wind is itself 'animation'. Personally, I have experienced energy like a wind up and down through my central core, through yogic breathing. It is very evident for me. There is air, and then there is air, the prana that I can channel with mind, emotion, body. But most notably, I can suck it in through the top of my head and spout it back out with breathing exercises. But perhaps Abram would want to stress how much air is less a metaphor, less a likeness to something esoteric, and is more of a concrete manifestation of the divine; One that we miss for the esoteric part. Just as the ants were the spirits, the air is the divine. For the Navajo at least, the air is the unmanifest unconscious, which crystallizes into things and thoughts and beings.

On Another Note:

I truly enjoyed our second-to-last class, where we saw Kat's pottery art, then attended the alumni party, and then went to the Wailin Jennys. (the things they do with air are amazing.) I picked up some great pictures not only of our class in the woods, but of the party and jubilation on the porch. It is great to see us all hanging out as a class. It is also great to have an open bar. We milked it for all it was worth. In the next class, too, I was struck by how far we have come as a class. The way we just reminisced for the last hour of class on being a first year was truly touching. I loved that the class just took itself to that place, from a basic question to a big open conversation about changes and memories and reflections. That might have been my favorite conversation from the whole class. And then we cleaned up the woods together. Good coda to the class.

I also believe there was one speaker I have yet to reflect upon, her name I don't remember, so I'll just call her Ms. Foxglove. She was my favorite speaker. She seemed closest to myself in disposition and intention. Her whole point about accepting that you might end up working at a fresh market, and that that's ok, is an important one. I think one danger of being a graduating liberal arts student is that we won't 'settle' for a regular job, and will starve to death first. I certainly feel like she suggested, that I must get some awesome internship making positive change in the world. My concept is probably different from hers, but I certainly am a candidate for starving to death rather than bagging groceries. A housemate of mine just got just that job after just such a problem. But it's fine. Its money in the bank. (As far as money in the bank is concerned, her actual job confounded and flabbergasted me.) I am excited to accept that there is money in this world, that I need to save, and that it is not the demon our culture sometimes portrays it as. It is energy, and it must be churned back into our culture, like kneading. We need to keep it moving for everyone's livelihood, or it stagnates and everything deflates. Anyway, a fermentation metaphor is the best I'm going to be able to do on economics.

All in all, this was the mose epic IDS ever. It completely embodied what I had dreamed Guilford could produce for me when I was looking at colleges. It incorporates everything in a fast-paced way that allows us to glean the good bits and make connections across disciplines. But the overall focus on the land and passionate engagement helped me feel liberated from any perceived machine that could eat me up after college. I'm excited to expand and grow out of this little think tank. Thank you.

Hydroelectric Prayer Wheel

Leading bio-heirophant Alex Caliva has co-conspired with me to resurrect Nicola Tesla's experiments with direct energy transfer from da 'ert. However the wires here are consciousnesss of observers, human and daemon. The creek's divinity has signed off on construction of a small-scale waterwheel to generate spirituoelectric power for those willing to take the time to harvest it. Using birch sticks, Caliva tested the geometrically succinct pine cone cell, and observed a strong wood shock! Success!

The main spinning structure is comprised of the dead organic energy shell of poke berry plant. This provides a light-weight material. Thin sections were poked through the poke, and the whole beam was nestled into leaf-lubricated Y sticks. The pleasant and constant speed of the generator was perfect to cause double-takes on the part of passers by.

Ok, so therer is a space-time boundary that is approached by acceleration. As one asymptotically approaches lightspeed, space is flattened outin front and behind you. Think tunnel vision, except where the tunnel thins into a line. This is what Star wars was representing when the ships jump into hyperspeed and all the points of light stretch out into lines. Time stretches too. Basically, the faster you move, the more time you experience. People in orbit, moving faster than humans on earth, are actually experiencing slightly more time than we are! Time is speed. The universe is as big as it is old.

This is also true of life for humans. Einstein famously portrays it in negative corelation with enjoyment. Time flys when you're having fun. But I also see it disappear from homogeneity. All those routine highschool days bleed into one spatiotemporal place comprised of halls and lockers and thoughts all at once. I feel like the past and future are contained within the present, within our minds. Things make sense going forward as much as they do going backward. Tnink about it, if we lived backward, constantly fulfilling our memory, only knowing what will happen, the past being a total mystery...

It's also amazing to see what people can do with their time. Today we get people like Gilbert Bailey, who have worked and developed multiple businesses, worked internationally, and lived a variety of experiences, all within relatively few years. He seemed very time-conscious. The metaphor about buckets was like saying "go get while the gettin's good!" But I did find his description of a job interview interesting. It was revealing to see just how in-depth they can become. As somebody thoroughly interested in working with nature (plants in particular,) it just seemed way too means-end oriented for me. I hope to close the gap between work and benefit. Making sauerkraut is a good example. I just see these things in such stark contrast, the speed, the social institutions of government, money, reputation, consumer base; the necessity-to-stay-afloat paradigm; Buzzing and buzzing away, while the sauerkraut changes slowly, living and dying at the same time, transmogrifying into biotic gold for the human body. And it keeps for years... The ease of mind engendered by sauerkraut is my minds answer to the busyness I sensed from Gilbert.

What was so nice was seeing that contrast embodied in the biodynamic farmers in Efland. At least, their hearts were in it. There was still means-end stuff going on, but my perspective is skewed, after living with a maniac genius homesteader zen farmer in Black Mountain. The Biodynamic farmers were great. I love the cycle-oriented approach. The image of that little bud steadily expanding and contracting with the moon just reminded me how much we are like the plants ourselves. Another thing I love about Anthrposophy is how effective it is, while being pretty much spiritually inspired. Realizing the proper rythm in this pulsating earth being is possible. I remember a moment in Floyd, Virginia, weeding little parsely sprigs, and philosophizing with every breath, every motion of my body, looking down at each little being, keeping them safe, wondering if they have any idea that I'm here doing it for them, when suddenly out of a clear blue sky, a single fat raindrop landed from above me, right at the little rootbase of the parsely sprig in front of me. And I looked up, knowing.

I think when we really slow down and experience the complexity and necessated design in nature -- that expression of copasetic perfection in each part--we can realize that our own minds are of the same nature. Conditions make us up. I am a conglomeration of all my friends and family and culture and childhood and early fears and loves, and at the same time always freely expressing a self. I think the realization that I am a manifestation of universal copasetic energy can synthesize the duals of determinism and freedom, divinity and mechanics, morals and blind force. I mean, they all exist anyway, don't they?

Pollan is an amazing articulator of hard-to grasp realities. One of these is evolution and species-level dynamics. He explicates the coevolution of human crops and humans. We enter into a symbiosis where we provide all the perfect conditions for them to thrive, and we consume them in some fashion. But the consumption only happens on the individual level. On the species level, the plants are benefiting much more. Corn has conquered the midwest. Grass covers the outskirts of human settlements worldwide. These beings have developed ingeniously. And its not that they were designed that way, or intend themselves to become that way, but it is a manifestation of interbeing. The conditions of interaction with the world have given life its structure and function. Those words miss it though, for the structure is filling in the negative space of everything outside of it, and its function is the function of what everything else needs and gives. We are shaped by everything around us-literally. But there is this will that keeps it all moving from the inside. Subjectivities always differentiate themselves and create the level of time-experience we call life. But when you expand time-space in a conceptual space that allows for a species-level observation, what we call life dissipates in lieu of a massive explosion of organic force, tending outward....

Passionately Engaged Gentlemen

Reading Wendell Berry is satisfying to me beacuse of his acute specificity of articulation when it comes to complex issues. Many of the problems he mentions in plain speak take other academics pages and pages to excogitate. Part of it is his brazenness is fearlessness to state his opinion, and to state it as blunt argument. We need to get closer to the land, and localize our farm industry, or things are going to get worse. He doesn't waver on this. His distaste for big business and the overarching 'fall from Eden' feeling invoked by his writing are easy to get behind.

I liked how in class we challenged its applicability to our day and age. Not only is he still right about what is happening, but it has gotten so much worse that we are at a point where we are much more helpless to it, and it is much more ubiquitous. His arguments have bounced around for forty years, and have been fleshed out ad nauseum and even more articulately by a sleu of geniuses, yet the changes have not taken place. Capital greed has won the day, and our (humans' and the land's) health has suffered because of it. We didn't come to a fruitful conclusion on what to do, though giving up certainly wasn't the answer.

This brings me to Thom Riser's presentation. He also suggested we don;'t become discouraged by the state of the world. It is strange, he seemed to blend work and play while keeping them separate at the same time. His work was very different from his play, and it seemed to take president over other things. For instance, he didnt start doing art or have kids until he was stable financially. He also didn't skateboard while in college. It seems like the work ethic point was his strongest. He just worked really hard at Math and Engineering, and put that work ethic into the rest of his life when it was available to him. He definitely kept his free attitude in life, but he also had a stable and specific business handed to him, and focused on security. (going to school again immediately after Guilford, for example.) That part worried me a little. It implied that if we want to do something of that calibur we need a lot more schooling. I guess thats true. There is just an overarching feeling for me that he is a poster child for the status quo. He went to school until he could be a big part of production, and he sequestered his creative side to the household. He felt wierd about his art being public, for example. He reserved enjoyment for the home, and balance of work and play was still balance of separate things. Also, he didn't go very far into how he made his business more positive on the world/more sustainable. Perhaps he didn't. Taking it full circle, he seems to imply that we shouldn't worry about those wider issues to where it keeps us from enjoying life. That is true. He did talk a little about fostering communication in his neighborhood. But it wasn't a promising story. anyway....

Yvon Chouinard was a total badass. That is unquestionable. I loved his life story, his growing up and trying everything he encountered, tending towards the challenging and extreme. But I agree with most of the class that the book left a lot to be desired, and that it became a sort of advertisement. We must, however, place his story in its proper historical context. He was the first to use organic cotton, kind of invented maternity leave, and was good to his workers *(managers, not foreign labor, as we talked about)... But overall I found his outlook very positive. The way he held sessions with all his managers about the philosophy of the company was really good. There was no compromising quality and stweardship for profit. And it bears repeating, he was a total badass.

Uwharrie

Day one: My excitement builds as we review the materials we had packed out on Wednesday. Helping people load their packs into the van, I remember. My camping spirit is invoked; it never went anywhere. Catoctin songs start echoing back into the twilight backroom of my consciousness as we make our way into the middle of nowhere/NC/somewhere! The group is an interesting mix of quiet and louder personalities. Everyone is getting excited; everyone is sliding to the more out side of themselves. We’re finally experiencing what we’ve been reading about in Abram for weeks. Its time to go out into the sensuous Other and escape our dusty hunch-backed thought-trapped angsty worried-about-nothing college minds into the vast voice of nature’s fresh flux. Time for time. Time for air. The tenor of the group felt like an orchestra before a play. Tuning up, smiles peek out from the corners of trailmix munching mouthes. Sillyness sprouts from sullenness sleepily spiraling upward and outward; forward.
My first leap of faith was asking the group to play Big Booty with me. (Maia, if you haven’t played it before, ask me and we’ll play next class. It’s great) At first, people were very hesitant to learn. I felt like the whole excursion would hinge upon the success of this first gesture. It worked. I persisted, taught, and we played. Soon lots of people watched and laughed at us and with us. It was a fine beginning.
Once we got underway, got some trail underfoot, I quickly realized that Reed and I would spend a lot of time together. He shared the unbridled earth-sign mammalian fervor that I felt welling up inside myself. We cast along ahead of the group, scouting, bounding, exploring. It was great to have somebody who wanted to go even faster than I, because I was worried that I would be the hurried one on the trip. At one point Carly said that one could only miss the beauty of nature going so fast, but there’s something to it, just like there’s something to wharfing down a well drooled-over meal in seconds. You may not feel the flavor as long, meditate on it as much, but there is something to it, and the only way to see it is to do it. Go full throttle--actually, thats a bad metaphor, because it implies pushing. This was nothing but releasing, allowing, freeing the warrior spirit inside. There was such a biting-at-the-bit at hand. Reed would have sprinted the twenty miles if I had let him. But keeping that in check was almost a better way to honor it than heeding it completely.
The first campsite was a score. I remember deciding if we should camp at the first mediocre spot, and choosing to go just a little further. Jessie was behind me, sunset-bathed trees in front; we sank into a stand of brush on a steep hill, and he said there was no way that this was getting better than the spot before. I said that there was no telling what will come around the next bend or on the crest of the next hill. Looking skyward, I beheld an eagle. Well, It may have been a vulture, or a crow, but for all intensive purposes, it was a giant Himalayan eagle, soaking up the setting sun. I consciously hailed the bird, asking where a good place to sleep was. He answered the obvious and simple question with an ambivalent flap of his wings. It felt like my question had been answered with a “duh” or something. Looking down again, I saw our spot. I had asked, and it was given. Every face creeping into camp accumulated another smirk of accomplishment and decadence. We were lucky. A view, a glow, flat parts, a fire circle, all in the nick of time.
Laying in my hammock looking at the full-enough moon and the more-than-usual-but-not-enough stars, Carly and I squoze each other as we hadn’t in months. Legitimately tired, needing warmth, groping at a highly bundled form. There was an ambiance to the campsite, a palpable energy. More than the glow of the firelight and the moon. It was us, the laughter hovering in the evening air, the realization of our freedom. The evening to us, nowhere to go. Little itinerate satellites lighting towards poops-in-the-dark, marshmallow bags, journals, cameras, most of all, warmth!
Waking up to the sunrise on the other side of the ridge was equally, and totally obversely beautiful. A beginning again, but this time a continuation. Laughing about all our odd dreams, (often elicited by a change of place) we gulped down some fast-cooling java and chocolate, and pushed on. The campers liked having me hike point, so I kept on leading. I would have nothing but path in front of me for the rest of the trip. Path in front, and Earth sign behind. He was earth sign, I was Lupine, named for my wolf-like exploits that I recalled on our journey.
Once upon a time, I liked to bound through the Guilford woods barefoot, hunching low, pulling my feet in close to hop over brambles while ducking under the lowest branches. I was the horizon. Looking down I realized that I was on a deer path, complete with fresh hoof prints, and then looking up I was aghast yet somehow drooling to realize that the deer were right in front of me--and fleeing me! I had somehow called upon my very predatory instincts and was literally on their tails before my mind caught up and reminded me: what would i do if I caught them?...So I was Lupine.
Earth Sign and I bequeathed the Wizened staph of Forgotten Callings to the trail herself, and future passers by. There was a definite middle earth feeling as we kept slipping into roles: “Beware the Uwharrie, who dwell in this place. They know we are here, though it may be days before they make their presence known. If you are unfortunate enough to be grazed by one of their arrows, fear not, for if we can find a rare purple flower within the hour we shall counter their poison and you shall live...”
It always surprises me how quickly the human legs move us along. One moment I’m looking at a mountain and the next im looking down from that point. As I wrote in an earlier journal, hiking alters time and space. I feel larger while hiking. My presence covered ten miles yesterday. My reciprocal being was implanted upon and imbued with every step and every smell and every breath of the trail. I grew by necessity. Eating a hill like the super-steep one we devoured that day made my blood and chi and reality flow. I was really really there! And the peace I felt when finally at the top was unequaled. The only thing I could think to do once that hill was out of me, and in me was to make art. I balanced rocks in impossible ways, took pictures of them, saw divinity in every unique form of warped root. Finally pushing through the last four and a half miles to Eric, who had been more-than-patiently waiting for us, we desperately needed to make camp.
The spot was practically the opposite of the first, being at the bottom of a valley, with cloud cover. But it was great. Lauren and I started to make a fire together, and I joked about how she had beginners luck, since this was still the second fire the had ever made, the first occurring the night before. But I was right. There was something very special about building that fire for her. Perhaps the fire demons felt like she needed to see just how perfectly a teepee fire design could work; maybe my experience only amounted to something when it serves another; maybe I was showing off by being especially careful. Anyway, It worked better than I had ever seen, just as I had talked it up to her, one tiny ember growing within a minute into a roaring blaze. The fire flew up the center of the teepee, forming a rocket engine pointed skywards, hovering above the ground. It needed to be rooted to earth, or it would simply take off! But rooted it was, and marshmallows followed, to ease the return of sweep’s long day.
Later, hearing Jim’s talk, I naturally compared aspects of his experience with my own. Where would I be in the next two years? With Carly while she goes to grad school? somewhere else? Would I be happy not following a career path like her? I had talked to Jim thoroughly at lunch about all kinds of things I had tried in the last few years, from a run in with a cult, to woofing, to roughing it in Peru. We laughed together as we duct taped our sorry feet across the creek from the summer sausage-devouring group. He is a good listener, and a good speaker. Hearing his path made me feel better. Just, in general.
The return day was great. It was kind of anticlimactic, but still great. I pushed myself up the last hill I could, finishing my roll of film, and feeling my mind more empty than I have in a long time. There was just me there. The experience alone. Upon arriving back at Guilco, Carly and I drove away, and rolled the windows down, without even thinking about it. We had changed. It was chilly. But everything is relative. Of course the windows were down. It was sunny; it smelled good. And it was not really cold. Not like we had experienced in the previous days. We felt hardened, rough, like a pomace stone that can only be produced in areas once explosive like Uwahriee.
All in all, I had a great time. just being in a tent, or sweating at the top of a hill, or hearing people talk and joke for the sake of keeping themselves going. These are gems in my experience of life. And to have all that take place in the context of a senior-level college class is right on. I feel reminded of what is important to me. Being in touch with my body, with The Body of the Earth. Being Real.

Love Poem

New Things

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal”

-William James

Theo Jansen, I believe, should be the idol of our class. Nothing in my day has sparked my sense of novelty and unison. Nothing has leaped forward in time and space, utilized everything coming before to synthesize something completely natal.

Utilizing sacred geometry, which we find everywhere in nature, and seemingly imbued into the basic human aesthetic, (not to mention the proportions of the human body), Jansen utilized perhaps the only known universal constant, Phi. Phi is a simple ratio that can be approximated like this: A is to B, as B is to A+B. (It is the only pattern of numbers that can be expressed with only two numbers. All other patterns require three.) The patterns of sacred geometry (such as Metatrons cube, which actually contains the possible projection of a hypercube, which is a four-dimensional object) were revered by ancients such as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Hebrews. (not to mention some pretty far-out new-agers) Anyway, Jansen draws upon this universal for the purpose of creating life! To not fear being the creator, as Rilke wrote, is the raison d'etre! This also perfectly represents the liminality of truth that I wrote about previously.

In a vastly different space, novelty arises from the utter rejection of history and human endeavor, a rejection of past and future that seeks the present through embodied motion. In the film Dogtown and Z Boys, we find a much less integrated invention. Skateboarding and surfing became cool not because of the multitude of connections, but becasue of the outcast-status and exclusivity engendered by the image. The film captured the culture well by focusing in so specifically on the coolest of the cool, the "originals". It shows another seemingly universal truth: that what is exclucive and specific will be desired by the masses. But there is another level to it, one of motion, of freedom, and of innovation.

Other cool scientific/artistic/begging the question of the basics of life:

Ferrofluid

Walking Cornstarch