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Entries in Pilgrimage (17)

Wednesday
Apr212010

Walking

I walk all the time, but even in this wild place I love so much, most of the walking that I do is along familiar paths that I follow nearly every day. It's true that I walk further afield, too, sometimes much further, where everything is new—new in a different way than these madrone blossoms and douglas irises and lupines are new. And yet I don't walk like this nearly enough—just heading out the door in favor of what comes up next.

Instead, how often we make some list of tasks fixed and determinant—just like that other list we carry with us, the one with all the expectations we imagine that others hold for us.

But when we walk just for the helluvait, we can become as fluid as the world is—as fluid in the world as we are meant to be. 

Below are two quick reading suggestions for helping you walk out the door...

The first, Edward Abbey's "Walking," is full of memorable one-line slogans to slap on your bumper, and typical of Abbey, is sarcastic as hell. 

Abbey on walking:"Whenever possible I avoid the practice myself. If God had meant us to walk, he would have kept us down on all fours, with well-padded paws...He surely would not have made mountains...read more 

The second, by Kurt Vonnegut, is no less funny...or poignant. You'll be reminded that it's as easy (or as hard) to get off your butt and ramble in a city as it is in the wild.

Vonnegut: "I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I'd never have to leave it...read more

The other day I met a guy from Tuscany wearing this t-shirt: "The internet is down...so I've come outside a while." (He's the guy on the far left—with his back to you.) We were all working side by side clearing brush along the Rocky Creek road—the one way a vehicle can get in and out of here. And we did some good work together, too. But tomorrow morning I'm heading out a different way.

Saturday
Apr102010

Pilgrimage and Spring

“Spring fever” is too anemic a description altogether—especially compared with Chaucer who says that it is now, when Aprille with hise shoures soote is engendering such flowers...and the yonge sonne has run half his course through Aries,

…exactly now that longen folk to goon on pilgrimages and palmeres seek out straunge strondes and distant shrines in sondry londes.
 
But read—or better yet, hear—Chaucer’s lines yourself below.

And then if you need to parse a phrase or two, you can go here.  In the left hand column, under “Edition,” select “Enface ME-MO.” Under “Pagination,” check the circle for “30.” Hit “Go.” A side-by-side translation of Chaucer’s middle English into modern English will appear—and you can look at whichever lines or phrases that you'd like.



Wednesday
Mar032010

Cézanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire

Sometimes the world opens and takes you into secrets where it seems only you are meant to go.

But if we really notice—and if we really prepare ourselves, saying no to everything that has become irrelevant, and yes to the path that is ours and ours alone—then we find this opening happening more than we would have realized.

How many excuses we tell ourselves to avoid committing to who we really are—and to where the world would take us if we just had the courage to say yes enough.

A year ago we were in Aix-en-Provence,

…which means that during most of the daylight hours we were outside of it,

 …sur le motif,

  …walking in the footsteps
…where Cézanne had walked and painted.
We didn’t write about this then. And we almost didn’t write about it now.  It means too much to us. And our words will fall short of how we really feel.

Another difficulty is with these images on your screen right now. They aren’t the paintings themselves, of course. So you can’t get the colors right. Or the genius of the touches of his brush upon the canvas.

Or the exact relationships among the colors and touches and empty spaces.
And yet if you click on these images, you begin to get a sense of them. (Click here, for example, and move around awhile. Then backspace to return.)


What a thing it is to enter such a world again.

Now we only have what he had—our vision and our imagining.

And we aren’t meant to live in a surrogate world either.

It is the actuality of where we really are—together with our imagining—that creates anything real at all. And imagining, of course, isn’t the faculty of inventing something out of thin air, as if that were even possible.
It isn’t avoidance or dissipation.
It is the faculty of really seeing—in which our own true self emerges.
But you can’t say much about this, or you will frighten her away.
“Yes, that’s what I like to paint, the absent man, but totally integrated into the landscape,” Cézanne said.
It’s like that. You can’t see the absent man anywhere. And yet there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t been.
Cézanne spent most of his life in Aix. He was born and died there.
 

And so his life moved around the mountain, too.

 And within the conformations of his native land, each small movement, each difference in the rhythm of where he walked and worked, taught him to see differently. And so it can teach us, too.

Later in his life, Cézanne rented this cabanon at Bibémus, where he could store canvases and materials, and sometimes take an afternoon nap, in between working sur le motif there.

Bibémus was an abandoned quarry

…and afforded Cézanne mysterious angular man-made shapes in yellow ochre within the wildness that reclaimed the place.

He also later rented a room at the Chateau Noir along the Petit Rue du Tholonet.

As at Bibémus, Cézanne kept painting materials in the room to save himself the time and effort of transporting them to the places where he worked.

He wanted to buy the Chateau Noir, but his offer was refused. It would’ve brought him closer to the mountain, and he loved the wildness of the forest and grottoes there.

But sometimes the best thing that can happen is for our own plans to fall through.

And so instead Cézanne built an atelier part way up the hill of Les Lauves, outside of Aix.

It must have been while the studio was still being built that Cézanne walked further up the hill of Les Lauves

  …and came upon this vista of the mountain.
In his last two years, he would paint Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves many times, moving his easel a few feet one way or another.

The mountain always changes.
The mountain is always the same.
But you can see that in these late paintings there isn’t a way to the mountain any more.

You will have to integrate the experience differently now. You will have to compose it, too.
 
Aix has changed a lot since then.
Cézanne had shaken his walking stick in rage when electric street lamps first arrived in Aix.
So what would he think now?
And so in a world of such development, we hadn’t expected to be able to find the mountain any more. Of course, we knew that the geological formation would still be there—but certainly the solitude and presence would have fled.
Cézanne had said, “To see is to conserve—and to conserve is to compose.”
That simple-sounding sentence can ring so many ways.
Perhaps he wouldn’t have intended the sentence in an ecological sense per se.
But he saved the mountain anyway.
He didn’t move from art into political activism the way John Muir did.
Instead, he saved the mountain by seeing it.
Every place must have its poet, Wallace Stegner wrote.
That is, they must find each other. 
And for that to happen, there must be a place—and within us, too—that can still be found
…and in which we can be found, too.

 

Saturday
Oct172009

Visiting home

No one ever said it should be easy,

…coming back home again, that is.

You thought you understood it – that you weren’t just making a trip this time,

…but had become a traveler instead.

But perhaps it’s only now, when your old/new life welcomes you back in,

…that you realize how much the road has crept into your bones

…and that there’s a pilgrim-self within you that desperately wants to stay alive.

So we still haven’t unpacked all the way. And there are packages we mailed home to ourselves that we haven’t opened yet.

And for the longest time, I couldn’t bear to put away my open travel bag.

We’ve heard so many good questions since we’ve been back.

One of them our good friend Greg asked…

“What is it that you think you really miss – the places you visited, or the self you became while you were traveling?”

“They’re bound up with one another, aren’t they?” I said at last.

“Yes, they must be,” he said back.

Our friend Dave Saunders, back home for a little while from Red Rhino Orphanage in Kenya, was at table this night, too.

“All I know,” Dave said, “is that I’m my best self when I travel.”

Not only have we seen Dave since we’ve been back, but our friend Shree Gopal Shrestha from Kathmandu, and his friend Sushil, have visited us, too -- and two good friends from the south of France.

It is like our journey has been visiting us this time.

“If we don’t really practice now,” Debi and I said to one another on our way back home, “ we might lose it all.”

So Debi’s been sitting every morning since we’ve been back,

…“sweeping the garden, any size”

…to keep away the clutter

…so that the real can find its way back in.

But you know how difficult that is – clearing up the clutter within yourself

…as the real goes around knocking on all the doors and windows.

In fact, maybe it’s because the real is everywhere that it’s so difficult.

Maybe we’re terrified of it.

Maybe we’d just prefer to go back to sleep and let that slippery entity, the self, continue to preen and posture as if it’s really some fixed thing after all.

It’s the habituated eye and heart – and not the world -- that closes the door on everything.

And we habituate so easily.

It’s understandable, after all. We need to create a familiar space. We want to wake up in the middle of the night and sense that things are just where we had left them.

You asked us. “Tell us the truth,” you said. “Tell us what it’s really like now that you are back.”

OK, take a good deep breath. Certainly, we can tell the truth to one another after all this time?

But the first thing that wants to jump out of my mouth is this: that suburbia can be a neat comfortable trap.

And that all the things most appealing about it – its orderliness and cleanliness and efficiency – can be ironically what pins you in the most.

But certainly we don’t miss the antithesis -- the poverty and pollution and pell-mell raucous street noise

…of Addis Ababa

…and Nairobi

…and Kulithalai

…and Kathmandu.

 

Or do we?

Because isn’t part of what we miss

…the open air raggedness

…of a daily life

…outside of any walls at all?

The patterns of our old life close back in as easily as some old suit.

But the truth is: I don’t want my old life back. Not all of it anyway.

And certainly not those barbs that the soul can get caught on as by an old ranch fence where she hangs and withers and disappears in the noonday sun.

And I don’t want to confine you either -- within my own presumptions of you it is you’re supposed to be.

On the road, you invent yourself – or the road invents you – new each day.

You’re no longer the CEO of your own life. There’s been some insurrection.

“Throw the damn fools out,” someone has called out.

  

And now you’re not quite sure who you are.

You need to splash water on your face in the morning and ask the day itself to tell you.

Look over in the corner. There’s a travel-bag that’s lived a whole lifetime in just one year. And it’s just as dusty and eager as you are to head out that door again.

On the road, the furniture whispers “hush” and rearranges itself differently each night.

It just wants to surprise you.

And some damn things it just moves all the way out the door

…without even bothering to tell you where the familiar might have hid itself

…because it understands

...that you don’t really need to know.