The Practice of Place & The Practice of Presence

New Years Day

January 1, 2008

Happy New Year!

It has been ten days now since the solstice, and I have been realizing an unanticipated benefit of having begun my Circling Home year on the solstice rather than the calendar New Year. For this brief span between the two, I have been far from alone in pulling back on the throttle. Even in our harried culture of never ending work, the week between Christmas and New Years is a time when people do slow down, if they are ever going to. This has made for a more companionable beginning to my journey than if I had begun on the 1st of January, just as everyone else is diving back into work and school. The contemplative tone of this pause between works in progress is still widely shared within the culture, even if we have to dig for it underneath the relentless consumer frenzy of the season.

 

I am lucky to live in close proximity to much of my immediate family, and among friends who remember how to use this time for its intended purpose. Walking or biking between gatherings of family and friends has only deepened my enjoyment of this pause in the turning rhythms of our lives.

One of the many extraordinary people with whom I share local community is the poet David Whyte. In his recent newsletter he spoke to many of the sentiments that have inspired my current experiment in local living:

"We are creatures of desire. Even those deeply desired, desire-less states we seek in times of contemplation seem to require enormous amounts of wanting, discipline and energy to achieve. We are built to want and to follow our wants to their end, sometimes to our satisfaction but also many times, to our destruction. Little wonder then, that our effect on this planet through the accumulated wants of over six billion individual lives are providing a reflection not only of humanity as a whole but on the very nature of human wants and necessities. Innocent individual desires such as a meal or a Trans-Atlantic journey need now to be seen in their magnified multiplied effects; this, at a time when many feel besieged by post modern life and want simply to be left alone to get on with it, whatever it might be.

Almost all of us have an intuition that we live at a break point in history; that those understandings we may have nurtured about the human condition will not survive the coming years; and that we are on the edge of some kind of proving ground. We intuit a threshold, a line beyond which we will reveal ourselves to ourselves, and there is an unspoken fear that we might not like what we find, but there is also a sense that we may be forced to unearth inner resources previously neglected." 

I share both the wariness and anticipation that David speaks to here. It will take real courage to enter this new and perilous "proving ground" in which the very nature of what it is to be human must be reexamined? Yet we can also expect help from "inner resources previously neglected". We should not underestimate our native resilience and audacity in the face of such challenges. What are these inner resources, and how can we bring them to light and put them into practice? This question is key to my own inquiry during the coming year, and key also to the whole question of how we might forcefully respond to this "break point" in our history.

As one who was born and raised along the shores of Puget Sound, it has always been my deep intuition that the relationship we have with the places we inhabit is far more important than our current popular culture recognizes. American culture doesn't care where we live, as long as we always want more than we have, and look forever beyond our own shores to fulfill those wants. We have been rendered a homeless people who are continually urged to bypass what we truly need in the quest for what we merely want. Already drowning in excess material possessions, the latest commodity to be exploited has become our attention itself. The commodification of attention, amplified by our exploding Information Technologies, overwhelms our capacity to focus on one thing at a time, or enjoy what we already have, even as we are driven to chase the latest crop of manufactured desires that advertisers so skillfully plant in every nook and cranny of our shared perceptual commons.

The Practice of Place

The practice of place is a crucial antidote to both this culture of consumption and this attack on attention. By "practice of place", I simply mean the act of returning our attention continually to where we are in the physical and sensual landscape. Constantly renewing contact over time with the specific places we inhabit is an act of sustaining wholeness. Plumbing the depths of immediate geography, weather, seasonal progression, native ecologies and local culture brings us back to our senses, and connects us to the profusion of life that shares this place on earth with us. There is a deep companionship in the act of returning our attention to where we are as the strongest base from which to navigate our world. 

"There are a thousand ways", the poet Rumi has written, "to kneel and kiss the ground". None of them should be attempted at sixty miles per hour, let alone six hundred miles per hour. A world that is whizzing by is not a world we can accurately see or attend to. We first have to slow to a human pace that will allow our senses to meet the world on its own terms. Walking is the oldest and most universal way to access the hidden riches of both our physical and psychological terrain. The poet Gary Snyder has said, "Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices ecology on the level where it counts." 

My first walking excursion of the year will be a 100 mile loop in mid-Janurary through the Skagit River delta from Mukilteo to LaConner, then back down the fifty mile spine of Whidbey Island from Deception Pass. Along the way I will pass through the Tulalip and Swinomish Indian Reservations. These are the traditional peoples who inhabited Whidbey Island prior to European contact. I will seek out the huge flocks of snow geese and trumpeter swans that winter over in the Skagit River delta on my way through. This route will follow the east and west flanks of Saratoga Passage and Skagit Bay. It will cover the ecological backbone of Island and Skagit Counties, dissected by the Snohomish, Stillaquamish and Skagit Rivers, yet almost invisible to the ordinary traveler along the I-5 corridor to the east. It will take me through terrain I have barely touched upon in all the years of living here, terrain which is nevertheless basic to an ecological and cultural understanding of this place I call home.

The Practice of Presence

The practice of presence is the internal dimension of this encounter with place. How we pay attention, how we come toward the territory we inhabit, is as important as the qualities and character of the territory itself. Presence emerges out of the intersection between the two. It grows out of a continuous interpenetration of human nature and wild nature. The cultivation of presence is a conscious journey of the heart and mind in continuous conversation with elements of wild nature that enfold us, if we are paying attention, everywhere we go. 

There are many pathways into the cultivation of presence. No one way is right for everyone, but my experience is that some form of spiritual discipline is most helpful here. The practice of listening, of withholding judgement, and of paying attention to what we are doing while we are doing it, is basic to all these forms of practice. My own primary path has been Zen Buddhist meditation. I have studied Zen for twenty five years, working with a number of teachers. For the past dozen years I have studied with Shodo Harada Roshi, a Japanese Rinzai Zen teacher who has established a Zen monastery here on Whidbey Island. It is an extraordinary opportunity for me to work with one of the best living Zen Masters right here in my own neighborhood, and one of my goals for the coming year is to avail myself more fully of this opportunity by participating regularly in the life of this practicing community. 

I also have a small outdoor meditation hut I built in the woods behind my house where I begin my days with sitting meditation. I do this at about the same time every morning, and it is the best way I have found not only to anchor my daily practice, but to stay in close touch with the changing seasons and changing phases of light. During the winter I bundle up with a blanket and sit by candle light in the dark, with the only sounds being an occasional owl or coyote from the surrounding woods. In spring and fall I sit through the change of light, and follow the changing composition of migratory birdsong that the seasons faithfully dish up. Summers I also sleep in my zendo, and enjoy the whole symphony of sounds that accompany summer nights and early dawns on the island. The simple act of sitting in silence for a few minutes each day out in the midst of these elemental presences is tremendously grounding for me, and deepens my sense of belonging to this particular place.