12 posts tagged “wilderness”

What she wanted was to return

to the original rainforest

hear water pushing

through the sapwood

and leaves eating light

as she wanted to eat light.

She knew her nature

was to be water, not wood.

She knew there was a grove

of vertical rivers

of roaring waterfall-trees,

and a grove of whirlpool-trees

with vortices she could dive through,

past the hollow years of her life

right back to the roots.

 - Pascale Petit 

via WhiskeyRiver:  http://whiskeyriver.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-she-wanted-what-she-wanted-was-to.html

'To practice bare attention is not complicated, but it is difficult. All you have to do is carry out your current activity with full attention. Do not comment on it in your mind. Do not think of something else while you are doing it. Just do it. A specific exercise for this is to sit outside and look around you. Don't comment on what you sense, don't try to interpret what you see, don't judge anything. Just sit and watch the world around you with full attention and concentration.'
 - Shards of Consciousness:  http://www.shardsofconsciousness.com/bare-attention-reawakening-creativity

'You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.'
 - Walt Whitman

Lately we've been invited to wander into some dark forests and down some dark hallways.  In our effort to remain fearless, we meditate, we read and we create.  It helps, it really does.  And so does learning about things like this:

"Bat - Rebirth
Steeped in the mystery of Mesoamerican tribal ritual is the legend of Bat.  Akin to the ancient Buddhist belief in reincarnation, in Central America, Bat is the symbol of rebirth.  The Bat has for centuries been a treasured medicine of the Aztec, Toltec, Tolucan, and Mayan peoples.
Bat embraces the idea of shamanistic death.  The ritual death of the healer is steeped in secrets and highly involved initiation rites.  Shaman death is the symbolic death of the initiate to the old ways of life and personal identity.  The initiation that brings the right to heal and to be called shaman is necessarily preceded by ritual death.  Most of these rituals are brutally hard on the body, mind and spirit.  In light of today's standards, it can be very difficult to find a person who can take the abuse and come through it with their balance intact.
The basic idea of ancient initiations was to break down all the former notions of 'self' that were held by the shaman-to-be.  This could entail brutal tests of physical strength and psychic ability, and having every emotional 'button' pushed hard.  Taunting and spitting on the initiate was common, and taught him or her to endure the duress with humility and fortitude.  The final initiation step was to be buried in the earth for one day and to be reborn without the former ego in the morning."

From Medicine Cards by Jamie Sams and David Carson. 

'If wild animals could talk, would they talk like cartoons?  Would the dismal swamp resound with shrill, befuddled, childlike voices; a cute choir of cuddly Kermits delivering gentle froggy inanities?
Or would wild beasts converse in the style of Hemingway, in sentences short, brave, and clear; each word a smooth pebble damp with blood; aboriginal speech, he-man speech, an economy of language borrowed by Gary Cooper from frontiersmen who borrowed it from Apache and Ute?' -- this fragrant prose from Jitterbug Perfume courtesy of the shamanistically fantastic Tom Robbins.

'Muir spent months at a time wandering the Sierra alone, carrying little more than a blanket, bread and tea as he developed his philosophy of the restorative power of nature on the human spirit.
"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home," Muir wrote. On another occasion he observed: "Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures.  All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts."'
 - From yesterday's (6-25-08) LA Times article on Billy Goat, the man who walks ten months a year in the western wilderness.

Having just passed the full moon last Sunday night, we are still feeling a bit wild.  You know how we get.  In honor of those primal rumblings in our psyche and soul here's some pro-wilderness tidbits...

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”
 Terry Tempest Williams

“In Wildness is the preservation of the world”
 Henry David Thoreau

Living in California like we do, one can't help noticing Mother Nature is the most amazing artist of us all.  Her shapes, her colors, her abundance flood the senses.  Yes, from time to time some unimaginative type manages to hold her down in one location or another - but when you see her by air you realize just how perfectly wild she remains.

"I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.” - Andy Warhol

Devout Citrine-ites are familiar with our 'go-ahead' rationale.  Basically, it means if you have an idea you like, you should go-ahead and do it.  We believe generally the why-nots are insignificant compared to the what-if-it-works.

This time you have is yours - you are a liberated person - so why not capitalize on that freedom?  If it helps, before you begin, you can always say to yourself, "I have a crazy idea..."  This statement should have the effect of making you feel a bit more confident about indulging in some possibly whimsical, recklessly fun ideas.

Three quotes to inspire your experiments:

"The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of the Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life."  ~Robert MacIver

"Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter...  This is it...  If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere.  The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.  Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here's the place to have the experience."  - Joseph Campbell

"When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else."  - Joseph Campbell

"Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze,
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in...

...I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in."

 - Don't Fence Me In, Bing Crosby