During my second season in Denali, I finally achieved a great campfire program. I dropped any pre-announced topic and responded improvisationally to the audience. I had a beginning talk that I could give to warm up the audience, if needed, but usually the preliminary give and take with the arriving audience as I started the campfire just grew into the program. In form, it was a series of questions and answers. However, I was developing the craft of not answering a question completely but with enough momentum that could generate an additional question that could lead us on to a deeper level. Therefore, it was not “sit back and listen to the ranger answer the question with an eight-minute authoritative answer.” It was me giving enough of an answer to lead the audience a bit deeper and allowing them to determine where the next step would lead. Each program was different, though they almost always contained grizzly bears and the mountain.
Ever since that heady summer Off the Leash, my direction had been “becoming a seasonal naturalist at Mt. McKinley.” I had finally fulfillled that life goal. I had hiked all the parts of the park that called to me. Returning for a third season would be easy but it felt like it would be marking time, a postponing of my next goal which was … What was my next life goal? What should my direction be now? My first direction had been such a shaping force through my last five years that I couldn’t imagine living without a strong sense of direction. But what was it? Or, rather, what should it be?
I wrestled with that question throughout the summer: “What now?” Part of what kept the question stirred up was a book my mom had given me in college: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In it, Joseph Campbell, the famous comparative mythologist, analyzed hero myths from a variety of cultures around the world and found that certain elements were common to them all. The fact that hero myths from all around the world contain the same patterns suggested to him that myths contain something universal. If I understood Campbell right, he was saying that myths contain and pass on the evolved human wisdom accumulated over thousands of years on how an individual should face the adventure of being alive.
Hero myths start with some unexpected encounter that leads the unsuspecting person off their familiar path. The uncharted journey that ensues involves many tasks, obstacles and dangers. However, along the way, the person also encounters various characters that offer help and wisdom in unexpected ways. With their help, the person eventually reaches a place where s/he receives something of value. The journey comes full-circle when the person brings the gift back to their village for the benefit of all.
According to Campbell, hero myths are not about heroes at all, but are guidebooks for how all of us should live during this time we are given. Being a hero is not like comic book, movie, or fairy tale heroes but refers to the possibility that our lives can be mythic, beyond what we might conventionally assume life is about.
Campbell’s idea resonated with me. The Lord of the Rings had been read to me at a formative age; I grew up wanting to become Faramir, not some Sackville-Bagginses. My experience with the grey-crown rosy finch felt mythic, an initial encounter that, out of the blue, shifted me onto a quest I would never have known. Becoming a seasonal naturalist here in Denali had been the completion of that quest. What was the next stage of my quest?
Whenever I asked myself that question during my second Denali summer, whenever I tried to really open myself to the “mythic” quality of Campbell, the same answer kept coming in. But it was not an answer I wanted, so I kept trying again for something more plausible, more grounded. I knew the answer had to have something to do with nature, since it had become such a strong part of my path ever since meeting that rosy finch. But no matter which way I turned to avoid it, my mind kept coming back to orbit the enveloping black hole of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. How do we live within a universe shaped by the Second Law where up only happens through a greater down, where I can live only by eating other living things? I want to believe that my life can be more than that, but is it possible within this universe?
I think my spirit had been circling this question ever since second grade, when I had learned from someone older that our Sun would eventually die and that would be the end of all life on Earth. I remember sitting at the school lunch table feeling a great chasm created by this huge, dark secret separating me from my friends. I felt very mature to possess such grown-up knowledge but also now exiled from childish wonder and hope. What’s the point of anything if it’s all going to end? There was no way I could even find words to talk to anyone about the cosmic futility that suffocated my spirit.
In high school, I began hearing phrases like “a closed system is doomed to run down” and “entropy”. Later, I began learning about “the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” I read a summary that Garrett Hardin, a prominent ecologist, gave to the three laws of thermodynamics: “You can’t win. You can’t even break even. You have to play the game.” How do we aspire in such a universe? Are we fundamentally like maggots on the deer carcass? He who gets there first and eats fastest will crawl away to pupate and breed the next generation before the rove beetles arrive. Is this how the circle of life rolls on?
Religions created reassuring shelters from these bleak questions. But then the rise of science replaced their explanations of the world with scientific explanations. The religious shelters that were tied to those pre-scientific explanations were cut adrift. With the momentum of the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution exploded with machines churning out products as long as energy and raw materials were fed into them. Machines, an assemblage of simple parts artfully combined into something greater yet reducible to those parts, became a metaphor for our world and ourselves.
My child spirit wanted to believe that my life could be more than living at the expense of others. But my years of studying nature had also convinced me that the replicable observations of science are foundational. Is it possible to somehow heal this split in our modern soul? I began thinking of this quandary as my personal koan.
Koans, part of the Zen Buddhist tradition, are teacher-given questions, almost riddles, whose answers can only be discovered at a level the student has not yet attained. Koans might take years of meditation before the answer is realized. Perhaps the best-known koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Esoteric questions like that caught my attention as a young man, so it was kind of cool to think of the Second Law as “my koan”.
However, my mom had a coffee-table picture book that included a koan along with its “answer”. The koan went something like “You are trapped in an inescapable cell without windows or doors. There are no openings and there is no way out. How do you get out?” The printed answer was “There, I’m out!” What! That was so dumb, just like the punchlines of some fourth grade boys’ jokes. If that really was a koan, and if that really was the answer, then koans lost a bit of their mystical Eastern appeal for me.
As Denali’s summer season drew near an end, I felt myself transitioning into an aimless time. My goal of becoming a seasonal naturalist in Denali that had led me for five years no longer existed. Also, my Denali girlfriend had mentioned how nice a set of matching china would be in a way that communicated domesticity. The moment I heard that, I felt something constrict in my feelings towards her. I had been happy to just continue along the way we were, sharing romance in beautiful places, exulting in the freeness of life, but something had now shifted and when we said good-bye at summer’s end, we both knew it was forever. I wanted to cry when we said good-bye because I knew I was losing somebody precious, but I couldn’t. That’s when I became aware of an inner emotional detachment.
After the summer season ended, I achieved my final Denali hiking goal, hiking to the Wickersham Wall, the north face of Denali, one of the greatest vertical rises in the world. For two days, I gazed at a mountain towering three miles above me. I knew I stood in the middle of a stupendously amazing place watching avalanches drift like clouds down the great mountain before me. I knew it but I barely felt it.
I remained at the park into the early snows of October, volunteering in the office and hiking the increasingly empty, quiet lands of Denali. In late September I sat, all alone, within a vast, beautifully-empty space at the convergence of three glacial valleys. I looked up the valleys at braided streams and north-facing glaciers and I had this sense of it all giving rise to consciousness.
We tend to think of consciousness as arising within a complexity of neuronal interconnections. But in true reductionist spirit, what if the “mechanisms” of consciousness are independent of the materials involved? What if consciousness depends not on neurons but on replicable patterns of signals between things? That is what we accept when we explore the possibility of developing consciousness within a computer program which is, at its heart, a complex coded linear sequence of on’s and off’s, modeled with ones and zeroes. But replicable patterns of signals between things fill the natural world. Heliotropic arctic flowers on the south-facing slopes turn to face the sun, creating parabolic solar collectors that warm the cold-blooded insects struggling to pollinate in the early summer coolness while glaciers grow on the north-facing slopes. I have sat for hours on the edges of braided streams watching them slowly change their channels. Rock grains tumble down to the edge of current deposition and halt, precisely one grain beyond that edge, advancing it one grain further, and the current responds by changing its flow to accommodate that rock grain in its new location so that the next rock grain will tumble to a slightly different location. I’ve sat on glaciers, listening for and sometimes seeing the tumble downslope of a rock melting free of the ice. The surface of a glacier near the bottom looks like a random jumble of rocks on ice but it is not random. Every rock tumble perfectly expresses natural law. Instead of being limited to the two states of being off or being on, this world has so many states in intimate, precise interactions. We humans have emerged possibly within a vast network of consciousness and in response, we have evolved brains that miniaturize enough of the basic patterns of that consciousness so that we have achieved self-consciousness – but then use our complex neuronal network of connections to think that consciousness only began with neurons.
The idea that this vast space of three glacial valleys sustained consciousness seemed magnificent — but it manifested only as thoughts without accompanying emotion. The thoughts were not superficial; they were rich and detailed but they lacked any spirit. The world felt like the too-small world you see when you look through the wrong end of binoculars. [1]
[1] I had this experience again, more deeply and full of spirit, in another vast, solitary space about thirty-five years later.
Two wolves appeared downvalley, approaching at a steady trot of elastic lightness. They passed with hardly a glance and headed up the left-hand valley and away. The next day I followed them over the pass at the head of that valley and came upon the still red bones of a young Dall sheep.
In October, I flew home and there, burdened by this growing sense of emotional detachment, I read a book a friend had recommended: The Primal Scream, by Arthur Janov. Janov was a psychotherapist who believed that certain primal experiences in our early lives can be so painful that we sever our emotional connection with them and slowly cut ourselves off from our world. The goal of his therapy was to help his patients revisit those primal experiences and experience the emotional pain (with the help of a now-adult perspective on the situation) and re-open these hitherto closed paths.
His detailed descriptions of the emotional states of his patients matched me so accurately that I felt pinned like a beetle in an insect collection. There was no doubting his identification. Further evasion was not possible. His accurate descriptions of my mental state, however, then segued into an equally precise description of what life was like once one was freed by his therapy. It was the existentialistic freedom to embrace life, even though it contained no intrinsic meaning, and in that embrace, to honestly and nobly create some dignity where there otherwise is none. Most of us don’t have the strength and courage to accept this gray truth about existence and so we spend our lives fussing with details but if we were freed, we could aspire to at least that nobility.
His description of life in terms of how I was feeling was so accurate that I knew he was speaking truth. He answered my koan the way I had always, deep down, known it would be answered. We arose through chance into this temporary consciousness and because of genetic programming, we will seek out matings that will carry life on into its billionth generation of molecules cycling around and around until the end of life on Earth. All we can do is be as dignified and stoic about our passage towards death as possible. I gradually felt the rest of my life slipping into a mask I would put on to play socially-appropriate roles as needed but the core part of me was sitting back behind my left shoulder, watching, sardonically analyzing the futility of it all, sardonically congratulating me on my performance while always reminding me that a performance was all it was, an act of honorably bearing this greater consciousness of the pointlessness of it all.
Given this pointlessness, I decided the most logical thing to do with my life was continue as a seasonal ranger in some other park. I went driving off onto western winter roads, ostensibly to check out new parks to apply to for the next summer but hoping somewhere in the wilderness to wrestle with unknown demons of the past and reconnect with my vitality through some sort of primal scream. It was a dreary, wretched time of growing depression and winter. I got stuck in a blizzard in Wyoming where snow was blowing into my sealed-up car parked on the side of the road. My car broke down in Vernal, Utah. I got sick and threw up somewhere out in the desert. I came home for Christmas emotionally battered, depressed, resigned to futile existence. With grey weariness I sent off applications for a couple of new national parks, knowing that shamming the role of the enthusiastic ranger would be the easiest act I could do. But I couldn’t sham the appropriate holiday mask at home when my true self was so ruthlessly seeing everything as the pretense it truly was. Therefore, I moved out to house-sit an old isolated farmhouse over Christmas vacation.
Every four or five years, an Arctic cold wave reaches down to Walla Walla and it happened that winter. Snow was followed by absolutely clear, blue skies and minus ten degree weather. The old farmhouse was uninsulated. The pipes froze. I lay miserably in my sleeping bag. I would, however, occasionally bundle up and go for a walk into the most beautiful scenery of sensually curving, snow-covered wheatfield hills backed by the silvery Blue Mountains. The blue, blue air was so cold and clear that it sparkled in the sunlight. I recognized the beauty and the capability of the world to create it. But the beauty was something that remained out there. Wherever I went, whatever I did, the commentator behind my left shoulder analyzed it for the little that it reduced down to.
Whitman College presents a January intersession where, instead of regular classes, a diverse smorgasbord of ungraded short classes, seminars, and events are presented to encourage risk-free exploration. Many of these offerings are open to the town’s people. I looked over the courses and a few appealed, especially a three-session dance workshop of “contact improvisation” led by a dance company from Seattle. I had grown up uncomfortably stiff with ballroom dancing but I had discovered the joy of spontaneous dance in college. So the dance workshop appealed and I went.
Three dancers from the American Contemporary Dance Company (ACDC) in Seattle (later renamed the Skinner Releasing Ensemble) led us into a kind of dancing I had never experienced. “Contact improvisation” starts with the point of contact between two dancers. As they begin moving, the point of contact moves. A dance emerges out of this changing point of relationship. It’s a form of dancing somewhat analogous to my cross-country roaming where my path is a constantly changing, walking interaction between my eyes and the land. But the workshop was not just that. It included lots of bodywork to loosen the muscles and work away habitual holdings so the body is freer to respond improvisationally. They would have us do group improvisational dances in which somehow the energy of the group would draw to an ending that left us feeling intimately connected.
The evening between their second and third workshop, they offered a performance to the public. We sat in chairs around the edge of the room while they danced in the center. At some point in the performance, Kris Wheeler rolled across the floor. But she didn’t roll. She had an ineffable Zen quality of “being rolled” and suddenly “It is possible” was chanting over and over in my mind. “It is possible. It is possible. It is possible.” My quest: it is possible. The answer to my koan did exist out there, somewhere beyond Janov’s description. I did not know how it was possible but a voice in my core was chanting that it was.
Afterwards, in a long conversation with the dancers, the world brimmed over with possibilities. The detached watcher on my left shoulder was gone. My depression was gone. And suddenly I remembered that long-ago stupid koan and I understood it!
“How do you escape the inescapable cell?”
“There, I’m out!”
I was out! I had been trapped within an inescapable solitary cell of logic guarded by that watcher behind my left shoulder who was never going to allow an opening. But somehow, now, I was out. And once outside, the power of the logic that seemed irrefutable and inescapable from within collapsed. All I had to do to get out was to see the confining logic from the outside. I could still feel the presence of that little cell over there in some part of my mind with the shoulder watcher and his entrapping logic. That cell felt so little, (5’x5’x8’ it now appeared within my mind) and yet when I had been within it, it had contained the rest of my life and the entire universe! Within that cell, there was nothing I could do to get out.
If I wanted to, I could go back inside that cell and feel once again the trance of swirling logic that had held me inside, but why would I want to do that now that I was out? The keeping power of its logic was broken; it only applied when I was within. I was free of the depression with no need to try figuring out how I had gotten out. Inescapable walls were insignificant from without.
I walked
home afterwards chanting spontaneous verse, celebrating this exultant state of
freedom. To my amazement, line after line, fitting meter and rhyme, rolled
forth lucidly. I often would not know how the line would end but when my chant
got there, there was the last word with proper rhyme, meter, and meaning. The
sidewalks were snowpacked and I spun balanced pirouettes without fear of
slipping, sure that anything I attempted was possible.
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