Reflection 266: Or Is It Just Me?
May 24, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
Everywhere I look, I find loops of engagement whirring in other minds, striving to make sense of the world so that the owners of those minds can act appropriately in it. Or I find disengaged minds angry at the world for not cooperating with their covert desires.
Do loops of engagement exist as the basis of consciousness in individual minds—or is it just me projecting my fantasies onto all of humanity?
My life experience has led me to believe that conscious engagements are sparked in two ways. Either our sensory impressions convince us that our engagements with the world are even more effective in bringing about hoped-for states of affairs than we dared imagine, or those engagements fall far short of our hopes and expectations, leaving us in the lurch.
Whether we win or lose, are happy or sad, we are conscious of the situation we are in. Either way, we are engaged and have a clear grasp of what to work toward in the future. It is the middling, so-so state of neither winning or losing but being an also-ran that dulls consciousness into a “what else did you expect” state, when we resort to habitual performances requiring no special effort or attention. We can achieve that mental state of “business as usual” by coasting along without conscious exertion.
As I see it, good times and bad times both get us moving ahead by igniting consciousness and our loops of engagement. It is the in-between, blah times that dull our senses and actions, putting us to sleep on our feet, or into the coma that passes for everyday life.
Novelty wakes us up, as does calamity, joy, laughter, or sorrow. Therein lies the ignition of consciousness, with the goal of adopting a program of action in the world to sustain or remedy our situation in the world. So do we engage our surrounding situations with deliberate behavior, and invite those situations to engage our senses to apprise us of how we are doing. I see such looping engagements around me every day, and within me as I awaken to every moment of life.
My brain, as I see it, is the master comparator that holds my sensory impressions up against the intentions that led me to act, the resulting agreement or disparity telling me how I’m doing, and suggesting the direction I must take to do better. If my brain can invent depth perception from lateral displacement of images in two eyes, it surely can engender and maintain a dynamic interaction with my world situation. That is the origin of what I call the loop of engagement.
Everywhere I look, I see others engaging their worlds by venturing similar loops. Socratic dialogues are such loops written down in crude language. The exploits of Don Quixote reveal a man driven by a singular passion and sense of identity. As are Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear. As is every statesman and politician, celebrity, author, artist, musician, and dancer. All driven to engage, to review, to engage again.
I see exactly the same comparison in myself, the same drive and passion, the same adjustment, the same propulsion of awareness around and around in engagements with horseshoe crabs, eelgrass, eagles, producing books, writing blogs—being myself again and again, ever the same, but always in new ways. So do I seize my little world and fit myself to it through continuous adjustment. I do not think I’m crazy. Indeed, I am everyman and everywoman, doing my best to survive under difficult conditions.
Lately, I invariably come to the same conclusion. I am not crazy, just doing my thing because it’s the only way I know. My father wrote at his Underwood typewriter behind closed doors seventy-five years ago. Today, I write behind closed doors, as do my elder and younger brothers, turning out pages, thinking, reflecting, tearing up pages, starting anew. Growing weary, but always reviving to play out the game.
What could be simpler? Yet traditional psychology is baroque in comparison, needlessly complicated in conforming to the elaborate understandings of those who invented it. Engagements, yes, without archetypes, egos, ids, superegos and all the parts once thought necessary to consciousness but in the end explained nothing. Consciousness is energetic and kinetic, the result of interacting forces, not eternal qualities or capacities. At every stage, each instant of my life has resolved conflicting desires and inputs in the spur of the moment. I have made up my life as I have gone along, always striving, never finding the anchor I was looking for.
No, I haven’t amounted to much in this world, but I have been myself every inch of the way. My life has been my life because I made it happen as it did. It has always been my engagement and no one else’s. If I have internalized the ways of my father, that is my doing because that’s how I have learned to be myself, the one in charge of my singular engagement. When I die, that engagement will come to a halt. But for now I’m still at it.
How’s your engagement going? I hope you reflect on it daily and don’t think you are crazy. In my case, it’s just me; in yours, just you. Here we are living through these times side-by-side, doing our best to make sense of it all while being true to our innermost selves. What else can we do but occupy ourselves as we do? Y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 265: Rites of Spring
May 21, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
On May 19th, I saw the northernmost population of horseshoe crabs on Earth at it again. Every spring I go looking for them on their breeding shores, and every spring I catch them in the act. Only, now it’s in May, not June, because the water is warmer than it used to be.
Their ritual has become my ritual. Spring wouldn’t come if I didn’t join in their celebration of water temperatures rising to 13 degrees Celsius. When it reaches that point, they come ashore to dig nests in what sand they can find, fertilize the eggs, and bury them safe from predators such as striped killifish, which lie in wait for the protein in those eggs.
I, too, lie in wait, not for protein but to take my annual photographs of this fertility rite that has been continuing unbroken for some 400-million years. I am not that old, but I celebrate their presence in the bay as a reminder of not only their longevity, but of their finding a niche in the universe that has worked for them all that time. My ongoing loop of engagement with horseshoe crabs is a sign of my respect for their evolutionary success. They still look the same as they did before Pangaea split up, well before the great reptiles became extinct. We have much to learn from the horseshoe crab.
Here are three photos from May 19th. The first shows one pair of the 34 crabs I saw on that day. They are swimming along in their breeding position, female in front (toward the top), male grasping the trailing edge of her shell, a position from which he will fertilize the eggs she lays in her succession of perhaps six nests.
The second photo shows a pair emerging from the plume of mud she stirred up in testing the bottom to see if it was suitable for digging a nest.
The third photo shows how protectively camouflaged two pairs swimming along the bottom appear among the cobbles and small boulders of their chosen habitat. The males appears light because of the coat of mud they picked up burrowing into the soft bottom.
This is one of my spring engagements, along with teaching Consciousness: The Seminar; giving a talk on An Anatomy of Consciousness; connecting the dots for 350.org to mark the site of shoreland erosion and sea-level rise in Acadia National Park; promoting an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to counter the impact of the “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision; supporting Occupy Mount Desert Island; and so on.
Horseshoe crabs model the secret of a long and happy life—Stay Engaged!
I hope you are doing the same. As ever, y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 264: Testing, one, two,
May 19, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
For those who do not reflect on their own thoughts, life becomes a projective personality test, often conducted at others’ expense. By claiming our own fears and desires, our judgments of allure and repulsion, we free ourselves to discover the world without prejudgment rather than mold it to fit our personal preferences and prejudices.
The world does not simply flow into our heads as it is. We shape and distort that world according to our basic proclivities in order to view it as clearly as possible from our point of view. If we are unaware of our biased approach to experience, we cannot separate our contribution from what is actually there in front of us. Which is apt to have dangerous consequences for both the world and ourselves, as in the gunning down of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmermann in Florida.
Our biases reflect the attitudes we developed in childhood in reaction to our formative experience. Growing up, we discover ourselves to be Republicans or Democrats, Catholics or Protestants, talkers or listeners, laborers or managers, not because of tendencies built into our genes but because of the subtle atmosphere in our homes and communities that we inhale with each breath. If we grew up in different families, we might well find ourselves on the opposite side of the fence.
A rigorous course of self-administered introspection is the best way I know of getting a handle on who we are and how we came to end up this way. I am not talking about neuroses, pathology, or severe mental trauma. My aim is to get a hold on how we live out our everyday lives. That is, how we think in forming sensory impressions, interpreting those impressions, feeling about those impressions, and then act in response to such factors.
The mistakes we make in acting inappropriately in the world are given us to learn from. By reflecting on incidents when we make mistakes, we come to understand where we went wrong and how we can avoid doing the same thing over and over again. The capacity for self-correction is built into us by means of self-reflection, should we choose to make use of that gift. We can catch ourselves in the act of doing something foolish, review alternative ways of acting, and strike off on a new heading. Such insights burst upon us suddenly—often in revelations lasting mere fractions of a second. If inertia drives us to suppress them, so be it—another lost opportunity for increased self-understanding. But doubt has been raised, and perhaps we will get another chance.
If, however, we live under such extreme or chaotic circumstances that we don’t have time to examine our own mental processes because we are so driven by events in the world, then we have to get help from others so we can call a time-out to get a fresh perspective on how our thinking (or not thinking) leads us to act.
Think about it: as individuals, only we ourselves have access to our personal feelings, our values, our memories, our dreams and nightmares, our sensory impressions, our interpretation of those impressions, our understanding of those interpretations. That is, most of what it feels like to live the lives that we do is known only to us. The reasons we act as we do are strictly our business because out of all people in the world, we are unique. We don’t act as the world would have us act. No, we act as we choose to act because of the internal forces that drive us, forces we alone are aware of.
Introspection is our primary means of self-help for improving any situation. Yes, if we trust a few others, perhaps they can help, too. But the heavy lifting falls to us because we are the only ones who know what it feels like to exist, think, feel, and act as we do. If we don’t help ourselves, who else can we look to? Who can we trust?
Every life is an experiment to see what happens when a person of such-and-such genetic makeup is placed in a difficult situation. At first, with only an instinct to eat and to cry out in pain, we are wholly dependent on those around us. We cannot make it on our own. But over time, we learn to fend for ourselves by making ourselves happen in various ways to discover what sorts of responses we can get. We learn to avoid harsh responses and seek more of the nourishing ones.
But where behaviorist thinking placed emphasis on others being in control of our actions, I now say that we learn in our formative years to be in control of ourselves so to thrive under the conditions in which we grow and learn. It is our life we live—colored by our impressions, fears, desires, dreams, values, understandings, and decisions to act as we do. We, not the world, are in charge. Or if we lack the physical power to follow our own course, we can pursue every chance we get to develop that power.
As I say, every life is a test. Without an instruction manual. We are on our own in doing the best we can with what we’ve got in the time allowed and the help available to us. I have found that self-reflection gives me immeasurable help in figuring my own course as I go. Life is a process that can be improved upon day-by-day. If we’re still the same person today we were yesterday, have we really made use of the time available to us? I just put that thought out there as a reminder that our experience is largely our own doing, and making it better is our responsibility, not the world’s.
Enough said. Hope you have the strength to face into the challenge. As ever, y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 263: Unexamined Life
May 17, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
The dialogues of Plato provide one contiguous illustration of a loop of engagement in action. One theme, one personality at a time, Plato presents detailed arguments in support of the need to doubt and examine one’s own beliefs in order to attempt a worthy life based on truth, not misjudgment or error.
This blog illustrates my own quest to meet the same challenge.
My book on consciousness is another example of the same effort to answer the eternal question, How do I know that I know what I think I know? Living a life of harmony and integrity depends on making a personal commitment to self-doubt and self-reflection in order to achieve a transparent view of oneself.
Socrates was put to death for asking fellow citizens to self-administer the same test to avoid living hollow lives in imitation of false standards of excellence. But self-assurance and self-doubt are hard to maintain in one mind, so Socrates paid the full price for even raising the issue. As did Jesus many years later.
Calling attention to the difference between living an original in contrast to an imitative life is risky in any era. Orthodox or right-answer people have no room for doubt in their minds. Self-doubt is anathema to the image of personified wisdom and authority they strive to present. So they build systems around themselves in which being rich or powerful passes for being wise. With pretenders in charge, is it a surprise to discover we live in the modern world, such as it is?
We live in an age that reveres sham and deceit where appearance is all, accomplishment counts for little, and the solution to every problem is to apply money in great wads.
Do I sound the least bit jaded? If so, my answer to such a situation is to do all I can to know myself as I am, so to avoid falling in with the crowd. I keep on blogging and writing and self-examining to protect myself against the current plague of self-deception.
I can’t have much effect on other minds, but at least I can face into myself through a weekly round of self-reflection as I am here conducting out in the open before your eyes. The more we personally take on that task, the more powerful we become through self-understanding.
The moral of my tale is we are the ones we have been waiting for. Since we’re already here, if we have complaints, we might as well start looking for solutions within, not without, ourselves. Don’t look to authority to draw you out of the mire, but do it yourself step-by-step. A few days ago I was wallowing in the muck of Muddy Cove; today I stand on dry ground. I call that progress because I am a larger man for making the effort. I maintain this blog as a means of keeping my book up-to-date. Keep on, keep on as long as you can. To the future, then.
How are you doing in this big world of ours? Y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 262: Clear as Mud
May 14, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
I have mud on my boots. On my pants. On my jacket. On my hands. Today, I know about mud because yesterday I put in a new mooring for my rowboat in Muddy Cove. The chain on the old mooring was worn, so I had to replace it, along with all the shackles that hold it together, and the buoy I attach my outhaul system to. Now that the job is done, I can stand on the shore and pull on a rope and have my boat out on the water dutifully respond to my will.
Here’s a photo of my boat at high tide.
And here’s Muddy Cove at low tide yesterday, with my bootprints in the mud.
The white buoy is the new one; the muddy one farther out is the old one I couldn’t undo the shackle on.
Trying to undo rusty shackles left in the mud for five years is hard because I couldn’t see what I was trying to do. The pins had been wired so they wouldn’t loosen up on their own. Using the braille method, I tried to cut the wire, and finally twisted it off, but then couldn’t turn the pin which was rusted fast. So I left the old buoy for another day when I have a hacksaw in hand.
It’s not only that I couldn’t see what I was working on, but moving around in the mud was so hard that I really had to exert myself to do the simplest thing. Shifting one foot took both concentration and strength because in lifting my boot, I was really lifting a huge clot of mud stuck to it by the vacuum hermetically binding me to the medium I was walking in. At each step I had to twist my heel sideways to unscrew myself from the gunk underfoot.
Being both functionally blind and barely able to move, I found it a tough job. But it had to be done, so I applied my full awareness to the task and eventually got it done to the best of my abilities under the circumstances. Such is consciousness. When the going gets tough, the tough grow determined and deliberate in paying particular attention to their engagements.
The point I want to make is metaphorical, so I won’t labor over the image any more than I already have. Consciousness is achieved through great personal effort. We have to put ourselves out in order to perform meaningful actions in the world—which often prove muddier than we imagined they could be. Expressing ourselves through appropriate engagements with our surroundings takes our best effort.
Yes, there are two kinds of people, those with open minds willing to do the work, and those with closed minds who know the right answer beforehand and go through the motions of applying rote solutions to complex situations.
We achieve alignment (or syzygy) between our sensory impressions, our understanding of a situation, and the actions through which we apply ourselves in solving life’s problems—we reach that desirable state only through sustained application of our mental capacities to work toward creative solutions using every skill we possess.
The alternative is to lay rote or ideological “solutions” onto novel situations so we can take credit for trying, at least, if not succeeding in settling one issue or another. The various peoples of the book do this all the time like so many missionaries citing chapter and verse as if every problem had been solved once and for all in days long before any of us were born, or the situations we face came to the fore. But memorized answers are often wide of the mark when applied to the modern circumstances of our lives.
“Go forth and multiply” is no solution to problems raised by there being too many of us living too high on the hog for too long a time at too great a rate of consumption. Mouthing the old words leaves us where we were in the old days, when what we need is solutions to the problems of today.
Old ways of doing things tend to muddy the waters when we are faced with novel situations. Only through application of creative consciousness taking modern circumstances into account can we see clearly toward a viable future. Habitual or outdated solutions to problems in business, finance, politics, religion, education, and other fields of endeavor are often no match for problems we fail to anticipate because our attention has been diverted in the meantime.
The Arab Spring and Occupy movement of 2011 were conducted by citizens rising to full consciousness and seeing the world in a new light. Seeing problems where others saw only business as usual, things as they should be.
Supple exercise of full consciousness is the only way to keep abreast of the times as they evolve into a slew of altogether new situations. If unable to walk on water, we must develop skills, attitudes, and strengths for braving the mud when we need to.
Ironically, schools teach only solutions to old problems, those that teachers can understand because they have lived through them. Formal education teaches to the past. It is in the experiential grasp of the students themselves that new learning should be sought.
I advocate for introspection and self-reflection as guides to the future. That’s why I am writing this blog. Which is much like walking through mud, but I see no other way because firmer ground lies on the far side of our current understanding of ourselves. If we don’t face into our own minds and experience, who indeed has the credentials for leading us into the future? Who else will place the buoys we need to moor ourselves to?
Striving, always striving ahead—that’s what it takes. Nothing less than our full, conscious attention. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. I say, let’s do it. As ever, y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 261: 2 Kinds of People
May 10, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
Slowly, I have come to realize what I learned by writing Consciousness: The Book. There are two kinds of people walking around in the world, and I have been each of them at different times in my life. I call them knowers and searchers, or members of the right-answer tribe and those of the problem-solving tribe.
Right-answer people know the answer to every question before it is asked because they have studiously memorized all they need to know for the rest of their lives. They carry their book of answers around in their heads, and when they meet an obstacle, they consult the index and go straight to the section that prescribes what to do about it.
This is made possible by studious application of their minds during childhood to whatever book is taken to be the ultimate authority on all issues of importance. They don’t usually have to seek out such a book; it is handed to their innocent selves and they dutifully memorize the great teachings within, calibrating themselves according to the ways and beliefs of the familial culture they are born to.
As adults, they become respected as authorities within their clans, communities, and professions because they can be relied upon to provide a spontaneous solution to every conflict or predicament. As masters of received wisdom, they thrive on the praise and gratitude they receive from those who look up to them.
As a teenager, I was such a person. I knew all there was to know about mathematics, art, science, history, politics, religion, war, to mention but a few of my many conceits. That is, what I knew—no matter how little it might seem—defined all that was true and worth knowing. Ask me any question and I could give a ready answer straight from my heart, for I earnestly believed every word that I said. I was my own greatest fan and admirer for I was convinced I knew everything worth knowing. If I didn’t have a ready answer, the question was trivial and not worth bothering about.
Ah, I fondly recall those heady days when I doubted the world was ready to receive me in the full glory of my understanding.
It has taken me sixty years to descend from what I then thought of as the pinnacle of my career.
Only gradually did I discern that I myself was the problem, my task becoming reframed as having to unlearn everything I was so sure that I knew, and start learning what I could through personal experience. Now in old age I think I have made some progress in those sixty years, and can hold my own for a limited time on a small selection of topics I have grappled with through intimate application of my caring and attention.
If I dare classify myself as a problem solver, it is only in those areas of experience I have grappled with most earnestly for the longest time. In most areas I remain a bumbling novice. I can usually bring back a photographic image of what moves me, and arrange my photos into a PowerPoint that gets my theme across to a small and select audience. What I have become is a seeker of what I call adventures, one who throws himself into the world to feel alive, and usually stumbles upon experiences he has never had or imagined before. My innocence and ignorance are boundless, so no matter what happens, I judge myself fortunate to be alive.
Today, for instance, I finished a presentation on erosion and sea-level rise in Acadia National Park. Not the whole park, just the shoreline of a small picnic area on Thompson Island near the park entrance. I have been following the fate of seven fire rings—barbecue grills for cooking hamburgers over wood-burning fires in the great outdoor. Tracking those rings through the seasons for six years, I have followed them through storms of rain, snow, and ice, through summer heat and winter chill, as the landscape around them is overtaken by waves, overcome, and claimed by the sea, leaving them as much as five feet closer to the shoreline at high tide, now only three of the rings capable of containing a fire if the tide isn’t too high.
That’s the level I operate on now. I know whereof I speak because I have lived my personal adventure every inch of the way. I have felt it with my fingers, smelled it, tasted it on my tongue, heard the roaring of the waves, and seen the lashing of waves against the shore where the fire rings were once though to be snug.
The big adventure, of course, flows from my fascination with the workings of my own mind, which I have largely devoted myself to for the past thirty years. Before I died, I wanted to acquaint one human mind on intimate terms, so I pursued the one mind within reach, which happened to be my own. My goal was to learn how to separate out my own contribution to situations I found myself in so I could see beyond my own shadow to the great world beyond. In my youth, back in the days when I knew everything, I thought my shadow was the world itself, so I was often balked and confused by my my own unique brand of ignorance.
Now I know better, and feel grateful for whatever sunlight illuminates the scene before my eyes so I can reach out to it as myself and not some mythical and pretentious being. Humility is the lesson of living a life, which leads on to familiarity with little things, not the grand dreams of my youth.
Two sorts of people, two stages in a life. I doubt there is any way to leapfrog the prideful stage to get straight to the simpler stage of humility. I think we have to earn our humility in order to begin our true education. I feel fortunate in having survived long enough to see the glimmer of true understanding reflected from the damp and rusty curves of a select group of fire rings before they and I succumb to the waves rising higher and higher upon us.
How have you fared since last I blogged? Y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 260: Divided Attention
May 3, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
The morning of March 20th began as I had hoped. The sun rose brilliantly from low clouds out over the ocean. I was with a group of friends conducting our annual vigil on the equinox to mark the divide between the winter and spring of our souls.
But from that high point, I have never gotten my act together as coherently as the signs that day seemed to indicate I would. The American spring of 2012 has turned out to be far busier and more complicated than I imagined. So much to do; so little time. In late March, my son Ken and I built a new ramp for the boathouse so I could get my boat in the water and row to the island where I knew stillness awaited me so I could work on this blog. But April has come and gone without that happening.
Last evening, I and two others spoke briefly before the Bar Harbor Town Council to prepare the way for delivery of a petition asking that body to stand with communities across America in defending democracy from the corrupting influence of corporate wealth on the electoral process. I pointed out that corporate “personhood” and money as “free speech” are metaphors, and in taking them literally, the Supreme Court has based its decisions on wishful thinking or out-and-out deception. I compared the effect of the Citizens United decision to toxic emissions wafted into the air by Midwestern industries, which Maine residents inhale at every breath, poisoning the climate in which we vote.
I find myself torn between taking action against the ills abroad in the land and tending my little blog as I would a plant in my garden. Which makes the best use of my limited energy: healing the world or healing myself?
April went by like a shot. Two hearing tests, four senior college sessions on consciousness, figuring my taxes, four Occupy general assemblies, eight meetings, a watershed conference at which I gave a presentation, PetchaKutcha Night in Waterville (another presentation), several talks, and so it went. Not that it was a lot of work, but it was different kinds of work so I kept shifting gears to keep up with myself. As the month went on, I found it harder and harder to concentrate on yet another new thing. For a week now I haven’t updated my blog. Or gotten used to the refurbished iPad I plan to use on the island to post to my blog—that is, if I can get away. I am new to iPad technology, so have yet to figure out how to use a machine that comes with minimal instructions.
Which is boring because it’s largely a matter of technical details, not substance. These days, our technology changes so radically and readily, it’s hard to keep ahead of the learning curve to maintain productivity, much less increase it. The technology of pencils and paper hasn’t changed since Thoreau took up the pencil-making trade over a century-and-a-half ago. Electronic gadgets morph into new versions every few months. For myself, I think in trying to keep up, I simply sidestep into a maze of diminishing returns.
I am torn, trying to keep up as before, but never reaching the goals I am aiming for. Take a break, I tell myself, get away from the melee so I can rely on skills I already have without having to get stuck on square one yet again, stifling even the possibility of engagement with anything that matters.
So here I sit; how about you? Are you able to keep engaged and feel you’re moving ahead? If so, how do you do it? That’s it for today. As ever, I remain, y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 259: Engagement
April 26, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
Known locally as “fire rings,” the barbecue grills in Thompson Island Picnic Area in Acadia National Park are falling into the tide. At least five of them are. Documenting sea-level rise in Frenchman Bay, I’ve been photographing those rings since 2006.
Along with doing estuary research, writing a book on consciousness, taking pictures, making presentations, keeping up with my blog, learning HTML so I could put up a Website, helping “Occupy” my part of Maine, going to Quaker events, and keeping up with both my partner and the news—along with those activities I’ve been busy monitoring sea-level rise in local waters. Such are the multiple loops of engagement I maintain in keeping with my conscious life so I feel like myself.
Since sea level is hard to determine, I monitor worst-case scenarios during storms near full- or new-moon high tides, including the aftermath of such tides along sandy shores. I photograph bank erosion, undercut turf, uprooted trees, extreme waves, and concrete pads bearing fire rings toward the shore. I’ve been keeping track of seven rings on their pads, now down to three as the National Park Service rescues them at the last minute, leaving the pads to break up on the beach.
Here are a few photos of rings number 2 and 4 taken over the years, and three of a shoreline spruce tree. That’s what sea-level rise looks like in Bar Harbor, Maine.
In places, the bank has receded two-and-a-half feet in the few years I’ve been monitoring shoreline erosion—some five-and-a-half years. Storm winds, waves, ice, high tides, and now sea-level rise are taking their toll. Why else am I conscious but to keep watch of such events. I thought you might want to know.
Ever vigilant, I remain y’r friend, –Steve
Reflection 258: Being There III
April 24, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
Some time ago (December 21, 2009), Fen Montaigne wrote a piece in the New Yorker about Bill Fraser’s research on the Antarctic Peninsula. He quoted Fraser saying:
It was completely remote and absolutely wild. The rawness and beauty of this place just cannot be described. It was a place where you could still feel inconsequential. You were part of a working system that paid you no mind.
I perked up when I read that because it struck me that Fraser was really present to the place where his body was, unlike so many of us walking around with ear buds or cellphones directing our attention far away from where our bodies are.
Montaigne goes on to quote Fraser further:
It always seemed intuitive to me that the only way to really understand something is to live in it, to spend a tremendous amount of time in the field, collecting the same data year after year. . . . You develop a sense for what the rhythms should be, the flow of things. And that’s what has allowed me to pick up things that don’t make sense, the anomalies. The anomalous years really cue you in as to how this system is operating.
Those are the kinds of things that happen when you truly engage a place with all of your senses. You open yourself to that place, and slowly, slowly, it reveals its secrets to you. You begin to understand how it works as one event flows into another and another. Total immersion, that’s what it takes to understand a watershed, landscape, island, habitat, or place of special interest to any singular human being.
Being there. I don’t think it is—or even can be—taught in schools. You have to figure out how to do it on your own because you have to do it to become part of the scene and be who you are in that place. That is exactly how I learned everything I know about Taunton Bay, Maine, by being there with eyes and ears open and mouth shut. Not looking for anything in particular but keeping watch on everything that’s going on. In sun, snow, or rain; daytime or nighttime; high tide or low; drought or deluge; at all seasons under any and all conditions.
Total engagement, that’s what it takes to know a place. To answer your own questions because you make yourself into the only person qualified to do so. Passion is the driving force that leads you to keep track of whatever comes. By opening yourself to experience and not just data of one sort or another, you trust your whole being—the most finely tuned instrument you have—to show you the way. If you can truly give of yourself, then your surroundings will eventually provide the understanding you need to be yourself in that place.
That is, you learn biology, say, by being a biologist—someone not only interested in how living systems work, but committed to finding out through employing your muscles and bodily senses toward that end. By engaging whatever systems both fascinate and challenge you where you are.
Yes, you can learn biology from books, videos, classes, and experienced biologists. But to know any subject inside-out, you have to engage it with your own actions and senses so it becomes your personal understanding and not something someone else relayed to you from their experience, not yours. Each of us being unique as she is, we will all find something in a discipline that attracts our attention in particular. It is that special interest that leads us to discoveries others will never make because they lead other lives driven by interests of their own. To contribute to world understanding, we must be fully ourselves by grasping the engagements we are compelled to experience for ourselves, and then share what we find.
Henry Thoreau, for instance, wrote in his journal on November 21, 1850:
I saw Fair Haven Pond with its island, and meadow between the island and the shore, and a strip of perfectly still and smooth water in the lee of the island, and two hawks, fish hawks perhaps, sailing over it. I did not see how it could be improved.
He continues:
Yet I do not see what these things can be. I begin to see such an object when I cease to understand it and see that I did not realize or appreciate it before, but I get no further than this. How adapted these forms and colors to my eye! A meadow and an island! What are these things?
That’s what it’s like to be truly engaged with your surroundings. Boundaries get fuzzy and you can’t tell what’s your contribution and what belongs to your sensory environment. The paragraph ends:
Yet the hawks and the ducks keep so aloof! and Nature is so reserved! I am made to love the pond and the meadow, as the wind is made to ripple the water.
There he stands, reaching out with love for the scene before him, the scene reaching in to him. Not in understanding, but with an undeniably attractive force that hooks him and holds him fast. That’s what being there is all about—engaging your surroundings so you feel their force inside you, and at the same time know they are separate from your own being.
In this example, Thoreau learned more about himself than about the hawks and the ducks. But in sensing that he and they were coequals, he came to see them in a new light, and himself in a new light. That is true learning because the change is in the seer who accommodates to his personal experience, his grasp of his world now larger than before.
May Sarton’s poem “Now I Become Myself” presents somewhat the same message.
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—”
She considers Time’s possible warnings, then continues:
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
/ . . . /
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun.
It’s that ability to stand still amid the onrush of worldly events that is a sure sign of being there with the ability to take it all in from the center of your being. That is precisely when questions arise about the true nature of things, and answer are felt as soon as the issue is raised. Those answers turn into a series of further questions, and true learning begins.
Being there gives us purchase on the immensity of our ignorance, which is how each of us makes his or her way into the future.
I will leave it at that for now. Y’rs truly, –Steve
Reflection 257: Being There II
April 21, 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Perrin
Once upon a time there was a little dot in space. It appears on an image NASA made of our very own Earth using a camera on board Voyager 1 in 1990 when it was four billion miles away from its planet of origin. That dot is us. All of us. Our entire planet as seen from far space.
Humbling to say the least. We are a universal nonentity. A nebbish, no-account planet. One dust speck just floating in emptiness, reducing all human civilization to one pixel among gazillions. Nothing we have ever done makes a difference to any eye that might catch a glimpse of us as a mote drifting across its gaze. We love to talk ourselves up and write books about our deeds, but in the great catalog of the universe, we aren’t even a dot at the end of one sentence. What’s to know, to admire, to engage with?
Yet that dot is all we know. We call it home. The habitat of seven billion human minds, and countless other kinds of animal minds. Seen from space, our great wars, revolutions, and discoveries amount to nothing—a kind of Brownian motion for Dummies, human frictions generating a modicum of heat but certainly no light, all to no purpose whatsoever.
Ah, that’s much better. At least it’s recognizable. Oceans—both Atlantic and Pacific. Clouds. An ice cap. There’s Florida. Mexico. Thank you, NASA, for getting a bit closer. But the image still doesn’t show any signs of us, we the people of earth. Hey, we’re down here on the surface, doing our thing. How do you turn up the resolution of these things so we stand out the way we see ourselves as A-Number One? I guess you just gotta be here to see what’s going on.
Better. Much better. NASA, you’re starting to get it. All those lights—that’s us, brightening the world so we can do our thing at night as well as during the day. We’re the night eliminators going 24/365. See, there’s Philly, New York, Long Island, Cape Cod, Boston. Lake what . . . Ontario? Ottawa, Montreal. Not much of Maine. Maine goes to bed when it gets dark. Maybe that blue is the northern lights. Well, without us, you’d still see that, and the stars of course, but nothing else. No cities, no roads, no boats out on the water.
Finally! I think you got it. Yes, definitely. That’s what being in Bar Harbor is like in August. Bright sun, crowded sidewalks, construction, cruise ships, people heading every which way. You gotta be there to take in the hustle, the ice cream cones, the lobster dinners, the beer, the music, the spirit. America on vacation. That’s the scene. Doing it. Being there in Bar Harbor, Maine. Where nothing is important but everything you do is the most important thing in the world. Where to go, what to do, what to take, what to see, what to wear.
Being there is living your life wholly as yourself, open to anything and everything, taking it all in, growing larger, focusing your senses, seeing and doing things you never did before because you didn’t know they were possible. Until you realized they were at that time in that place.
Being there is the opposite of going to school. Of sitting silently in your seat in a row of seats in a room full of seats, with a teacher up front, and a white board, and a digital projector showing you the world—but not really the world because it leaves the exciting parts out. That’s being there in body but not in spirit. Going through the motions to train you to be a dutiful worker and do what you’re told to do. Or sitting in a cubicle playing computer games when no one is looking, feeling guilty and glad to be getting away with it just the same.
No, being there requires full engagement with your sharpest attention, really taking part in what’s going on around you. Being there comes down to engaging your surroundings where you are, when you are there; being fully yourself in that place.
That’s my thought for today. I’m engaged in writing this blog. What are you up to? Y’r friend, –Steve
