Three years ago I gave a talk in Yosemite, and the area around the visitor center was as crowded as anywhere I’ve ever been other than Calcutta
CONNECTION: This is how I feel in the Columbia River Gorge or in Mt. Hood National Forest sometimes. It's like a single file line up the trail. I never see any animals--It feels like a pristinely beautiful movie set.
“We believe we make contact with the wild, but this is an illusion. In both the national parks and wilderness areas, we accept a reduced category of experience, a semblance of wild nature, a fake, and no one complains.
QUESTION: If Turner is against national parks, how does he propose that we protect areas?
“Maybe / a small part of it will die if I’m not around / feeding it anymore.”
QUESTION: What part of himself was he no longer feeding? What part of our selves does society discourage us from feeding these days?
CONNECTION: Lew Welch Poem (It's quite haunting) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55776/chicago-poem
"I lived here nearly 5 years before I could meet the middle western day with anything approaching Dignity. It’s a place that lets you understand why the Bible is the way it is: Proud people cannot live here.
The land’s too flat. Ugly sullen and big it pounds men down past humbleness. They Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and terrible sky. "
You can see wildness in the movement of glaciers, or you can track it in star-forming regions in the Orion Nebula. Wildness is everywhere.
REFLECT: Wilderness = anything we can't control. Humans don't play nice with things we can't control.
Emerson and Thoreau hint at the effect wildness has on us--the healing effect. I wonder how much of this effect comes down to resigning our ability to control the world around us. That desire to control is probably tiring and burdensome. Satisfaction may come from relinquishing it. It's certainly an Eastern philosophy kind of idea.
CONNECTION: This makes me think of meditation and how it's gotten really popular with Apps like Calm and Headspace; it's big in the tech world. However, the ironic part is that it's used as a means to be MORE productive to have MORE control, to MASTER your world. If happiness boils down to relinquishing control and simply "being," then mediation has kind of been co-opted.
I quickly learned that Western ways of classifying people according to education and career are meaningless. There are brilliant people who can’t read. There are ways of living that don’t have anything to do with our way of living.
REFLECT: This is striking. I never thought about the way we categorize people according to education and age as a "Western" thing. In fact, it totally goes against our American mythos of individual mobility.
I wonder if there is a psychological reasoning for this classification on the individual level OR if it's encouraged to feed our competitive, capitalistic system?
Since then, I’ve worked inside — a forty-hour-a-week, punch-the-time-clock type of job — for only two and a half years total. The rest of the time I’ve been working outside or writing in my cabin
EVALUATE: This is an ideal life, but one that isn't possible on a societal level. We can't all just go live in the woods, right? If we did that, then there really wouldn't be any wilderness left. There's also a degree of "privilege" here. He has an Ivy League education. This doesn't discount his message, but it tempers it slightly.
At Exum Mountain Guides Climbing School we forbid our students to bring music into the Tetons. They hate not having music. They don’t want to be alone.
CONNECTION: I think society has ingrained in us this sense that our iphones with Apple Music and Spotify, etc actually "enhance" an experience. Music is one of the greatest things ever--but, when I go on a walk with music vs. without it, my experiences are profoundly different. I see the world more without music. The world seeps into me a bit more.