not a pretty picture. not a good. not a bad. picture. but an argument.

Monday, December 24, 2018

flow; water as boundary and bridge with the wild


"Letting the facts form a poem in your mind is an exercise in a certain kind of thinking: letting something happen instead of forcing it to happen, and simultaneously letting yourself be enlarged. Letting the facts form a poem in your mind is a way to practise thinking like an ecosystem, thinking like a planet, thinking like the world. But in order to let the facts form a poem in your mind, you have to have some facts to start with. You might get a few by attending a public lecture. But you can get far more of them, any time you wish, just by spending a day in the wild — alone with reality, keeping quiet and letting things unfold.

In order to let the facts form a poem in your mind, you also need a mind, and you need that mind to be in working order. The wild is the only place to go to calibrate your mind. There is really no other place. That's why undiscovering America is one of the great koans. Only the wild can calibrate your mind, because it's what your mind was born from. If you're trapped in the city, you find a little smidgen or reminder of the wild — a mouse in the cupboard, a sparrow in a maple tree, or a bumblebee in the lilac — and then your mind remembers what it is."

from "The Mind of the Wild," by Robert Bringhurst, from Learning to Die; Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis.