April 2017

Being a Beast
April 21, 2017 In Climbing Night Reading Spring Weather 1 Comment

I climb the tree in the dark in a cold drizzle late in the evening after returning from Bagua.  The branches are covered in a slick organic film and I go carefully, slowly.  I am dressed in black from class, wearing a black jacket, climbing in the dark on a moonless, starless night, and I think how nearly invisible I would be if anyone happened to be walking through the woods in the rain.  And soundless, as drenched bark makes little noise.  

I think of meeting friends for lunch at the Base Camp Cafe in Hanover several months ago, when one of them asked if being in the tree made me feel like an animal.  It was an interesting question, and it came at a time when I was reading the delightfully outrageous Being a Beast by Charles Foster.  In the attempt to understand what it might be like to be a red fox, a badger, a swift, an otter, he does the usual, researching their habits and their habitats, their ways of movement and feeding practices and sensory systems, but also the unusual: he spends months endeavoring to live like each animal.  

As an otter he slithers through the rivers of England trying to catch fish with his teeth; as a badger he lives for a summer with his son in a scrape in the side of a hill in Wales, traversing fields and woods on hands and knees and eating earthworms (and, occasionally, chicken curry).  The book is a bit erratic, as are his efforts to be a beast, but it is viscerally entertaining, full of grit and blood and the smells and sounds of the natural world at its earthiest.  

One of the best paragraphs in the book is a disquisition on the varying tastes of earthworm slime and flesh in different regions of Great Britain, a sommelier-worthy exploration of earthworm terroir, if you will.  This I am delighted to have read but feel no need to experience firsthand.

But the attempt to become something else, and the impetus that drives him to make it, I understand.  The desire to somehow push beyond the bounds of one’s own experience into another experiential world.  This is not foreign to me as I sit in the tree for an hour in a snowstorm, or climb by moonlight and touch on a summer night.  We think with our bodies.  Our flesh is our other mind, our other spirit.  Maybe our best spirit.  (To make use of a distinction that is wholly arbitrary to begin with.)  This is why we sing, dance, hike, do martial arts, hug, make love.  

In a tree we traverse a new landscape, vertically, and our spirit follows.

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Eostre
April 16, 2017 In Climbing Landscape Prayer Flags Spring No Comment

[View with images]  I won’t be climbing the tree until later today, when we have returned from out of town.  But earlier in the week I have climbed in sunshine and luxurious warmth and it has felt like Easter over and over again–it calls to mind for me not so much the eggs and lambs and church service kind of Easter, but perhaps Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the spring, after whom the 8th-century English monk Bede reported that Easter was named.  But Easter or Eostre, I’ll take it either way!

It has felt like the East, like sunrise, like a new dawn, every day.  The snow is gone from lawn and field, remaining only in large piles on the north side of the house.  Mud is the element du jour.  Daffodil spikes rise a full two inches from the straw-colored meadow floor, pushing up between the flattened stems and grasses of last year’s waving vegetation.  Alger Brook in its ravine rushes louder than I have ever heard it, swollen with feet of rapidly melted snow and days of rain.  Everything is drenched, liquid.  Even the air is liquid with bird song in the early morning, after long months of silence.

Easter or Eostre, it feels like the world is risen again.  Everything rising: moisture into the air from the ground, vegetation up toward new sunlight, birdsong from the air up into the sky.  Me, up into the tree and its branches.  The unimaginable benevolence of warmth almost pulling me upwards, after long months of fighting my way up through cold and wind and ice.

I walk the meadow, examining old seed pods, new channels of water, and think about the green shoots pushing up between the dead bodies of their own for sunlight.  Pushing aside plant matter that by next year will be nourishment, though to shoots other than these.  I resurrect old stone statues that have been tumbled by wind and snow and buried, and it feels good to have hands on stone again, working with textures and contact points and palpable centers of gravity.  With things so willful in their mass, yet so unexpectedly gracious in their willingness to stand against gravity.

Up in the tree there is a softness to the light, so different from the violent light of just a few weeks ago.  I begin to examine leaf buds, though we are a long way from budbreak and budburst.  Even the prayer flags look different than they did just days ago: their very fibers–like the world itself–seem to have swollen and softened.  Their texture is appealing to eye, to camera.  Soft fibers in the soft light.  And, serendipitously, loose prayer flag threads have woven themselves around twigs again and again until they have formed a kind of natural cross.  It is hard not to think, and to rejoice in thinking: a Christian cross formed from tree twigs and strands of Buddhist prayer flags, suspended in the light of Eostre.  [View with images]

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Hands on Bark, Face to the Sun
April 2, 2017 In Climbing Miscellanea Rumination Spring No Comment

Thursday, March 30th.  Deep blue skies, sunshine, warmth.  

Never mind that we’ll have a substantial snow storm tomorrow through Saturday—for now it is gorgeously, invitingly mild.  Almost cruelly springlike.  I climb without even a fleece, on my way out to collect the girls from school and continue on through an afternoon’s transport to, eventually, community chorus with Claire in Bridgewater, from which joyous expedition we will return late at night.  The bark is warm under my hands, and it is an invigorating climb.

I have been thinking about the strangeness of using an advanced technology to communicate something as profoundly untechnological—almost anti-technological—as climbing a tree.

Tree climbing is rudimentary.  It requires nothing but a working body (and perhaps an eccentric mind).  The only technology I use in climbing is the clothing I wear.  In summer, perhaps a pair of shorts.  In the cold windswept rains of November, rain pants, good shoes, and a raincoat are useful.  The technology ramps up in winter to include long underwear, a winter coat, snow boots, good gloves.  Ski pants if the tree is full of snow.  Even so, technology of a basic order.

But I think and write and talk about the tree as well.  Language is a technology (arguably) that is built into the experience of climbing for humans, even if the act of climbing could be performed without it (squirrels manage nicely).  And language is essential to conveying the experience to others.  Enter the computer.  And the camera.  These are intricate but—by today’s standards—routine technologies.  Is the Internet simply an extension of these?  A place to put writing and pictures that lots of people can get to?

And yet, I climb partly as an act of defiance against a world that feels increasingly digital.  Hands on bark!  Face to the sun!

There is a dissonance in using the digital medium to communicate this act, this experience.  There is likely no sun on your face as you read this.  However hard I try I cannot put your hand on my tree.  I’m sitting at a computer; you’re looking at a screen.  There’s no chance either of us will fall; neither of us is swaying in the breeze.

Chuang-Tzu asks, am I Chuang-Tzu dreaming I’m a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I’m Chuang-Tzu?  If the Internet is a kind of a dream, a manufactured reality—am I using technology, or is it using me?  What if I’m just the butterfly?  Just one more billionth of the way the Internet finds its way into every part of our lives?  And manufactures us?

Because I could, after all, just climb the tree.

But, since I do climb the tree, Chuang Tzu might say it doesn’t matter who is the butterfly and who is Chuang-Tzu.  Because I am, after all, always back out there among the branches.  Sending down that taproot.  Hands on bark, face to the sun.

(Maybe I should ask instead, am I climbing the tree or is the tree climbing me?  This might invoke more of what is—dare I use the word?—spiritually profound about the experience.)

Climbing a tree is magnificently primitive.

It sends us back in several ways: back to childhood, which is when those of us who have climbed trees mostly did; back on our evolutionary tree, to simians swinging from branches; back to a core of experience that feels more primal, more present, less mediated, than so much else in our technology-ridden lives.

Hands on bark!  Face to the sun!

And an infinite blue sky.

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