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. 

Beginnings

December 23, 2007

  To go in the dark with a light is to know the light

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

- Wendell Berry

After all the anticipation and planning, the winter solstice has come and gone, and I am now several days into my Circling Home journey. I'm off to a really satisfying start.

I love the symbolism of this beginning at the moment of least light and greatest darkness here in the Northern Hemisphere in the annual circle of our earth around the sun. I marked the precise solstice moment at 10:08 PM on Friday night, Dec. 21, with a small group of friends in the Whidbey Institute sanctuary, a short walk up the hill on a trail through the woods from my house. We sat in silent meditation as the moment approached, then walked the circular maze of a stone-lined labyrinth on the nearby Institute land under a nearly full moon. 

The next day I invited friends from the community to join me again at the sanctuary to help mark the beginning of my Circling Home year. Thirty friends and neighbors took time from their busy Holiday schedules to attend my little home made ceremony. We again sat in a circle in silence together, then I shared some poems, a few songs, and a period of open solstice reflections. It was a deeply grounding and gratifying expression of community. I felt such gratitude for this support, and for the way my community has embraced the spirit of this endeavor. It really sent me out with wind in my sails.

 

Here are a couple of the poems I shared during the ceremony, and that I share with you now as we begin the long turning back toward the light. 

The Peace of Wild Things

(by Wendell Berry)

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children's lives may be

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty

And the great heron feeds

I come into the peace of wild things

Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief

I come into the presence of still water

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light

For a time I rest in the grace of the world

And am free

Lost

(by David Wagoner)

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

December 25, 2007

For the first time in years, Christmas was a genuinely relaxed time. I rode my bike the six miles into Langley for the Christmas Eve candlelight caroling service at the Methodist church, then on to my mom's house to spend the night. Christmas day was full of the usual convergence of aunts and uncles and neices and nephews, grandchildren and great grandchildren, with four generations of Hoeltings assembled at my mom's for the day. Sally and I took a long walk after brunch, dropping in on friends for a bit of holiday cheer. It actually snowed for a spell in the afternoon, and the Cascade Mountains and foothills were white almost down to tidewater. This was the closest to a white Christmas we've had in a long time.  

I have been surprised how good it has felt to walk and bike everywhere during the hectic build-up to Christmas. The fact that I live in the country at five miles from the nearest store or services is so far proving less daunting than I expected. Even riding these distances at night when it's raining hasn't felt like a burden. It is actually a relief to have eliminated the option of using a car. Because I have given myself no choice but to ride or walk, I'm just doing it, and already I can feel the slower rhythm beginning to take hold. I feel some strength flowing back into my body, and I find the contact with the elements surprisingly welcome. I've spent so much time exposed to the elements during my life as a commercial fisherman, wilderness guide and outdoorsman that it's not that big a stretch to add this contact back into the domain of transportation. I find myself wondering why I've waited so long to embrace this shift.

I'm surprised by the interest my community is taking in what I'm doing. Everywhere I go around the island people seem to know what I am up to, and want to talk about it. Partly I think it is an accident of timing, with the recent devastating floods in Western Washington on the heels of the Bali Climate Summit and Gore's Nobel Peace Prize speech. New data from the IPCC showing that the polar ice cap could be completely gone now in as few as seven years puts an exclamation point on the mounting level of concern. I sense a palpable change in people's awareness of the climate crisis, and I'm gratified that my efforts seem to be challenging many of my friends and neighbors to think harder about their own choices. I would be doing this even if no one was taking notice, but the fact that it is striking a chord really helps fortify my own resolve to dive into this experiment with as much determination as I can muster. I'm really quite excited to be underway, and to see where it goes from here. 

  

    

Circling Home - Welcome to the journey

CIRCLING HOME 2008
An Online Journal
by Kurt Hoelting
Winter Solstice, 2007

Dear friends,

Welcome to my online journal for Circling Home. I officially begin this journey on the Winter Solstice December 21st. These are my opening reflections, which I will update regularly during the year. I am taking this travel sabbatical in 2008 as a personal response to the challenge of climate change. I will go car-free during the year, traveling primarily on foot, by bicycle and kayak on a pilgrimage into the heart of my own home region, staying within a 100-kilometer circle of my home on Whidbey Island until Winter Solstice in 2008. My essay Circling Home, which appeared in the Sept. / Oct. 2007 issue of Resurgence Magazine, tells more about the vision and motivation behind this experiment, so I won’t repeat that story here. To read the article, go to here<.

One friend described Circling Home as an attempt to chart a rite of passage between the world as it has been, and the world as it will be. This is a commission I can accept. In the coming year I will voluntarily embrace changes in life style that may well be on the horizon for most of us anyway. By stepping into these changes now, I hope to reclaim a sense of purpose that is lost when our actions fall out of alignment with our intentions, or when our deepest convictions are cut off from the way we actually live. I am weary of feeling powerless about this crisis. I am weary of feeling that I have no choice but to continue wounding the world by the way I move through it. 

I think we live in mythic times. How else can one describe the planetary emergency of climate change that is now unleashing itself on every region of the globe, caused in large part by the excesses of our very success as a species. This is a crisis never before seen or even imagined, in which everything worthy of our love is literally on the line. Our culture, our freedoms, our families, our livelihoods, our posterity, and the very foundations of life on earth are all on the line now. With such immense stakes, even our most ordinary human choices take on a mythic significance. Every action counts. We can no longer rely on “experts” and politicians to solve this crisis for us. Each of us is being called to make fundamental changes, here and now, in the way we think, and more importantly, in the way we live.

It is the urgency of this need to enact personal change that lies at the center of my Circling Home experiment. But I do not embark on this pilgrimage out of guilt, fear, or despair. Quite the contrary. I see huge opportunities now to change and grow in directions that will benefit all of us. I enter this year as a celebration and deepening of my connection to my own home place, and to the local community in which I am privileged to live. I am animated by a hope not only that we are capable of making the necessary changes, but that we will ultimately be better off for having made them, that we will live richer and more satisfying lives as a result.

THE TRAVEL CONUNDRUM

It has been a full year now since I first conceived of Circling Home, in the wake of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It has taken all of this time for me to set the stage for such an ambitious life-style change, as I navigate my own complex web of work, family and personal obligations. Ironically, all three strands of that web are calling for increased travel, even as I’ve come to better understand how much our collective dependence on travel is accelerating the advent of climate change itself. I claim no moral high ground here. I travel a lot in my work, and I also understand the magnetic pull of far-away places that are increasingly available to us in this jet age. I have been a full participant. If we are lucky enough to have the means, it is pretty hard to resist this magic carpet. The call to hit the road is an ancient impulse that jet travel has merely put on steroids.

What is clear now is that there are dragons lurking under this mountain of mobility, and they are generating a lot of heat.

On the eve of my Al Gore-inspired travel fast – (I cannot tell a lie. You might as well know the truth.) - I squeezed in one last trip to visit my daughter Kristin, who is a Fulbright scholar living in Norway this year. I couldn’t quite stand the thought of not seeing her for an entire year.

It was an inspiring trip, even as I felt some ambivalence about this added indulgence. Our visit ended in Oslo just as Al Gore was arriving to receive his Nobel Peace Prize. Sharing the headlines with Gore on the European news channels that day was Australia’s surprise decision to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, leaving the United States as the only industrialized nation left in the world that has refused to take that step. That same newscast from my hotel in Oslo told me of devastating floods back in my home state of Washington, with speculation of links to global warming.

Norway gave unexpected new impetus to my Circling Home aspirations. Throughout my visit, the streets of Bergen and Oslo were remarkably car-free, even during rush hour. Bikes, buses and pedestrians filled the streets, where swarms of automobiles would have greeted me in any comparable city in America. Adding the true costs of gas consumption into its price at the pump has encouraged Norwegians to create a vibrant culture that is remarkably less dependent on cars than our own, even as they are one of the top oil producing countries in the world. Not content with small steps toward oil independence, Norway’s Prime Minister recently committed his country to becoming fully carbon neutral by 2050. The contrast to the United States could hardly be more striking. My Circling Home project began to look less daunting in the company of these robust Norwegians, who think nothing of plunging into the December cold and dark on their bicycles.

Flying home from Oslo the next day, musing about these contrasts, I glanced out my window and was knocked breathless by what I saw. While my fellow passengers sat transfixed by the twitching images on their personalized DVD screens, I was ambushed by one of the most beautiful spectacles I had ever seen. Below me, in real time, lay the deep cut fjords, peaks and glaciers of Greenland’s west coast, locked in December sea ice, and bathed in a soft winter light under a clear blue sky. So unprepared was I for the impact of this heart-rending beauty that my eyes filled with tears. I experienced a wave of grief in knowing that these very glaciers are among the first conspicuous victims of climate change, and that they are melting much faster than expected. The impact of their melting on rising sea levels, and on the ocean currents and salinity that drive the climate of the North Atlantic, is only beginning to be understood, and ranges from the calamitous to the catastrophic. I was left to contemplate the double binds we all face now as we try to comprehend the tide of danger that is rising all around us. Here I had flown half way around the world to visit the daughter I love, whose future is put at further risk by the very act of flying to see her. I was returning home to begin my travel fast amid a perfect storm of contradictions.

Vaclav Havel said, “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” This sentiment seems to me a pretty good place to start my journey back toward home. There is so much to be done, and almost certainly dark days ahead. I have no illusions about that. I also have no idea whether my efforts at carbon-free living in the coming year will do any “good” when measured against the enormity of the challenges we face. I have no idea what I will learn on this “narrow path to the deep interior”, as Basho called his own travels on foot through the mountains of Japan several centuries ago. But I do know that my heart swells at the thought of entering this path. I continue to recognize a persistent voice beckoning me to begin. I know the biggest dragon of all may be my own restlessness of spirit. Taking on this restlessness is itself a mythic act of defiance. How can we hope to slay the dragon of climate change if we aren’t willing to contend with the forces of distraction and restlessness that drive us to look everywhere but in front of us for meaning in our lives.

To all of you who are reading this, and who wish to accompany me on this journey, may the coming year be a time of deep discovery and growth. May we learn from each other, take risks together on behalf of our wounded planet, hold out a hand to each other, and seek inspiration in small acts of restoration and love. May we take comfort, as always, in the return of the light.

Happy Winter Solstice!

Kurt