Catherine Greenfield-- Let the Circle Be Unbroken...

I was reading one of Amanda DeSalme's posts, and started thinking about the sacred life exchange. Are we, speaking of current American society as a whole and removing outliers from the picture, really a part of the great circle? We put our dead in coffins and crypts; we burn their flesh and place their ashes in urns. They never go back to the earth. Most people do not participate in a sacred life exchange when we eat, because they never give back-- when they die, they want their bodies to be placed in certain places, in certain ways. I read once that, in Japan, some grave sites have been relocated to the roofs of buildings that were erected in that space. The dead are cremated and put in those sky-scraping graveyards. According to the article I read, the Japanese culture views the tradition of placing bodies in caskets and burying them disgusting, because they see the decaying
flesh as disgusting. It is better, to them, to cremate the body, because then it will not have to go through the humiliating process of decaying.

Does that make sense? What is so bad about the decaying process? All things decay... or, maybe they don't if we don't let them. If the wood siding on your house starts to mold (which, seeing as how it's wood and outside, would make sense), you power-wash it. Strip it of that new cling-on life form. If you get mildew in your caulking, you get some sort of powerful, acidic cleaner to strip the life right out of it... and the first layer of skin from your hands, while it's at it. Termites, those little speed-decayers, who grind the wood up nice and small so the earth can have bite-sized pieces to munch into soil, are exterminated by the boatload. Leave us be, we scream with our Clorox and our Comit, leave us be, we don't want to be a part of this!

But how much of a choice do we have? We are made to decay. Our cheeks hollow as the firm skin loosens, round and supple arms bag and wrinkle at the elbow; bones grow brittle and lose their ability to hold our forms upright; fingernails won't grow with strength anymore; hair slows its growth as well, becoming dryer, colourless, less of a hassle for the earthworms and trundling beetles. We are supposed to be returned to the earth, like everything else. And so we inject ourselves with our man-made, indestructible plastics. Women pad the insides of their useless, flopping breasts with more man-made material-- THAT won't fail her, the way nature has failed her quest for immortal beauty. A plastic Aphrodite. A Steroid-pumped Apollo. Both in their white Styrofoam crowns survey what they have made, survey their battlements and moats against the inevitable, and see that it is good. But it is not good.

Ha. A funny thought just came into my head.

What will happen when, thousands of years from now, man has died out, to be replaced with a similarly inquisitive race of beings who, during their archaeological digs, find something strange beneath the silt and sands-- breasted bones! Skulls with plastic cheeks and lips! It's like something off of a bad 80's half-shirt, minus the BBQs and the cut-off jeans...

There's something very backwards about our determination to not fit in with the rest of the world, right down to our refusal to decompose. I am going to think about this some more...

Abigail Thomas, 4/23 lecture

04/23’s lecture was confusing and I felt that I didn’t get closure. Ideas and statements were made without practical examples or applications. The area I found most confusing was that the language of science is math and numbers but I don’t think math is the language of science. I also don’t think ‘objective’ is subjective enough when describing science and its process, methods or purpose. The only thing I could imagine was computers as being objective.
When I think of the language of science I think of science journals. Journals are studies, they’ll refer to what’s been studied what they’re studying and what could be studied. It’s like building blocks: the study is the material block and the references to what was and what could be studied are the adhesions and connectors to the pattern or journeys of the studies.
The math part is important but it makes up only one section (one objective section) as the ‘results’ section. The ‘results’ section is where the numbers (and graphs) are kept and the rest is discussing results: ‘discussion’ and ‘conclusion’ and before the results section there’s ‘abstract,’ ‘introduction,’ and ‘methods and materials.’

Amanda DeSalme, Berry: intricacy of beauty to be kept alive

from Wendell Berry's A Continuous Harmony:
"Walking among all these flowers, I cannot see enough. One is aware of the abundance of lovely things-forms, scents, colors-lavished on the earth beyond any human capacity to perceive or number or imitate" (Berry, 46).

There really is a great abundance of beauty on this earth. Every season and every place has its own flourishing flora that continues to astound me. There is always something new to be seen, or smelled, or heard. I am dazzled every spring by tiny purple wild flowers that spread across the ground, like a fresh fragrant carpet. The assortment of bright colors in the spring after a stark silver and white winter bring me to awareness once again of the changing beauty. The constant green and blue of the hot summer is invigorating. There is even beauty in the dying of the green leaves on trees, the fading of colors into rich reds and golds in autumn, finally resting brown on the ground. And then the branches stand bare, reaching towards the sky- in the winter I always notice the vast sky, since the leaves aren't there to block it from sight-and glittering ice or snow delicately remind us of a colder kind of beauty. And then spring puts on another show. Nature is constantly changing and coloring our lives. Annie Dillard, in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, states that "Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world" (Dillard, 128). There is so much intricacy in nature that we don't even comprehend half of it. Maybe that lack of full comprehension is why we destroy so much of it with our economy.

"All these places of unforced loveliness, whose details keep touching in my mind the memory of great paintings, now lie within the sound of the approach of an alien army whos bulldozers fly the flag of the American economy" (Berry, 46-47).

It is saddening to think that the American economy ruins so much of that "unforced loveliness." Since our school has been celebrating earth-day this week, I have been more aware of how essential it is that we conserve this natural beauty. As a whole, human beings should incorporate more of that awareness into their everyday lives. We all go out and enjoy the nice warm spring weather and then retreat back into our shelters, wasting energy and throwing non-biodegradable trash into landfills and harming the planet without even realizing it. I cannot fix the world's problems by myself, but I believe that the more people connect with nature, the more it will flourish. Just as the ancient Ainu believed that the spiritual connection they had with the animals they ate would keep the souls of the animals returning to bodies and flourishing, so do I believe that the more we love and appreciate nature the more it will abound. Mother nature will keep us in check if we get too out of hand. I'm not saying we should completely disregard any kind of action to save nature, but if you feel you are not sure what you personally can do for it--just love it. Any kind of spiritual connection with it will keep it alive.

Noah Ryan, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard's interest in the very small is something I don't see very often. She reminds us of the millions of little worlds that play out their stories all around us at all times. The vast multitudes of smaller life make life like ours possible, they fill out a huge food web, effecting and even inhabiting us. The idea of being the host to thousands of being is one that I try to remind myself of occasionally. The idea of personal separation in Western thought (which is the system of thought that, ironically, discovered that these beings exist) and the obsession with purity in things helps us forget that we are indeed the home of many bacteria and microbial beings. The mind body problem seems like a absurd joke when I think about how much the neurons in my brain benefit from the bacteria in my stomach. They eat us and help us live. This is a sort of connectedness to the world that is easy to forget (microscopic things tend to be). While it brings up a lot of questions about what the "I" is and all that, but what I want to say is that we are intimately connected to the world every minute of every day, even in when we separate ourselves in our houses (inhabited by spiders and ants and beetles and many other things) we are still connected to thousands of lives. We carry the reality of inhabited places everywhere we go, inside of us. I find myself wanting to eat yogurt, just to add some more little beings, to be that much more an inhabited place (A being can be a (sacred) place!).
I'm just glad to be part of it all.

Noah Ryan, Three by Annie Dillard

Work is of great importance in our lives. Our work-obsessed culture has us working 40+ hours a week for our entire lives. Even people who do not "work" in the sense of having a job still has to make a living somehow. This could mean farming, hunting, gathering, or some of each. The relationship of a person to their way of making a living is vitally important in one's life. Writing transforms Dillard into a writer, painting turns one into a painter. If one's work is dull and unsatisfying it is a great dullness and emptiness in one's life. The opposite of this would be something profoundly fulfilling that doesn't occupy one's life, but rather consumes it. It seems that this would be a sort of I-You relationship with making a living. If, for example, working is done in a ritual context, say some sort of sacred hunt, then it is engaging the person the landscape and the animal in a way that can be very meaningful for the person (and the landscape and animal too, if we step outside of the western mindset and allow them to have agency in this affair). The point I'm trying to make here is that while some may find an subject that interests them, and they may spend their lives doing that thing, many people do not have that opportunity. If we are shaped by our jobs, in the sense that the relationship between the I and the You or It is reciprocal and shapes us, then the vast majority of jobs available are not ones that tend to create full and mature people.
I for one am excited to find out what programming makes me (I'll bet its a programmer), but I'm also wary of the structure of our jobs and the void that they may bring.

Amanda DeSalme, Night

There is something magical about a nice cool summer night. I feel invigorated and my senses are overcome with stimulation- the smell of fresh cut grass, the caress of the moist air, the gentle breeze, the crescendo of an orchestra of cicadas, the mysterious moon or the sparkling stars in the vast void of dark nothingness. It is so energizing to be outside and just enjoying life at night. I remember spending time marvelling at the nighttime with my father and sister when I was a child. It was so quiet with small night music and things to look at and talk about. We would tiptoe barefoot out into the grass timidly, eyes slowly adjusting to the dim moonlight. Sometimes we would walk around the neighborhood and sometimes we would throw a blanket on the ground so we could ly and watch the sky. We would talk in hushed whispers, sensing the sacredness of the mysterious wild nature that comes to life at night. There is so much life around us that we are not aware of. For instance, Cicadas spend 13-17 years underground as nymphs before they dig their way up into the air and start serenading us with their music. Annie Dillard talks about cicadas in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"In the dark of an April night the nymphs emerge, all at once, as many as eighty-four of them digging into the air from every square foot of ground. They inch up trees and bushes, shed their skins, and begin that hollow, shrill grind that lasts all summer. I guess nymphs never see the sun. Adults lay eggs in slits along twig bark; the hatched nymphs drop to the ground and burrow, vanish from the face of the earth, biding their time, for thirteen years. How many are under me now, wishing what? What would I think about for thirteen years? They curl, crawl, clutch at roots and suck, suck blinded, suck trees, rain or shine, heat or frost, year after groping year" (Dillard, 97).

Cicadas and many other creatures are constantly crawling around underneathe our feet every day and we are not aware. When I enjoyed the nighttime with my father and sister, I would often sit there and wonder about all the animals that were in the dark, watching us. I would hear a rustle of a bush and wonder if it was wind or creature or both. There are so many lives out there we can commune with. I guess what I like so much about the nighttime is that it makes me aware. It is harder to see, therefore I am more aware that there is mystery to be aware of. And the more aware I am, the more in the present I am. And being in the present just feels good.

Amanda DeSalme, Snyder and Sacrificial Existence

from Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild:

"When they arrive their 'armor is broken'- they are killed- enabling them to shake off their fur or scale coats and step out as invisible spirit beings. They are then delighted by witnessing the human entertainments- sake and music. (They love music.) The people sing songs to them and eat their flesh" (Snyder, 93-94).

In this passage Snyder talks of how the original inhabits of Japan, the Ainu, would sing to the fish or game and say grace for them. The people showed great respect for the sacrifice of other lives that made it possible for them to live. The world today is so far removed from the process of killing animals for food that many do not appreciate the sacrifice and the spiritual exchange involved in it. Every food we need for existence is readily available in a grocery store. For the natives of Japan and other countries, the food they collected (whether plant or animal) was given much respect, understanding that they were partaking of a life that had a spirit, and that was something to be honored. Today, the meat industry is completely inhumane in their treatment of the animals. We have domesticated them and bred them in masses and placed them in tiny cages with the sole purpose in life to be food for humans. Snyder alludes to this modern flaw as well: "But weeding out the wild from the natures of members...gradually changed animals which are intelligent and alert in the wild to sluggish meat-making machines" (Snyder, 85). This is one reason why I personally have chosen to be a vegetarian. I'm not going to get on a soapbox about it, but I do believe that any living being does not deserve to be processed and exploited like we have done to various animals in the meat industry. I respect others who do choose to eat meat, but they gain my full respect if they truly understand the sacrifice of life in the flesh that they are eating and the spiritual exchange that should happen between wild animal and human. The natives believed that if humans maintained their proper hospitality towards the animals, music and manners, the spirits of the beings would be reborn over and over again. This is an example of one of the many cycles that exist in nature. Plants sacrifice their lives to animals which sacrifice their lives to humans whose bodies decompose in the ground to fertilize new plant growth. It is a constant cycle of sacrificial existence and every natural thing is connected in it.