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The Landscape of Forest

Welcome to this place.

I hope that my voice will provide you with a gateway into the forest.

“Writing in landscapes, landscapes write in you.”

– Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness

Some Years ago, while visiting Nepal, I had the good fortune to listen to the words of a Nepalese Archeologist. We were standing in front of an excavation in Lumbini, said to be the birthplace of Buddha. There the mother of Buddha was said to have given birth while holding onto the Sal tree. As he continued to speak, he referenced several other trees in the story of Buddha, and then paused to make an aside:

“It makes you wonder, really, if this is not actually all about the trees.”

He laughed and continued his discourse, but the words stayed with me as softly spoken ideas sometimes do. I remembered the impact of trees in my life and the subtle flavor of places, of landscapes that have moved me. Today, I have given a certain credence to this sensation and have concluded that whether it is a lower brain response to a safe and healthy landscape, or a higher brain desire for beauty, trees do hold a significant place in my relation to earth.

The expression of such things is understandably elusive. All aspects of our interconectedness can seem a challenge, at times, to express. We recognize them in flashes in our consciousness and then turn away to resume what we believe to be the important work of our lives. I have often felt helpless to express such thoughts on the world I have witnessed, in Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Sometimes the human pain I saw, due to economic imbalances, or the compassionate sorrow that twisted my gut, when disrupted landscapes destroyed or displaced plants and animals, became unbearable.

I would try to speak of my experiences with friends and acquaintances, but such topics seem to slide away from peoples interest focus. Their eyes typically glaze and they make a perfunctory remark, returning to the issues they know, relegating your experience to some other world beyond their ken.

This apparent disinterest was a tipping point for me, one day. I identified with a world much larger than the one my associates knew. I also felt compassion, hope, and fear for that world. I began to wake in the night, while living in Africa, and tell myself fictional stories of people who saw and solved the worlds issues. I set aside two decades of filtered ramblings in a journal and opened up into poetry, fantasy, and science fiction. It was personal and it was private. It was also a healing place. This is what I hope to share in these pages.

Fallen Leaves, Fallen Trees

Words fall away from my mind in orange and yellow
They litter the ground, leaving me silent
The flavor of it sits in my mouth
Bitter or sweet
A nameless perfume rife with memory
 
I am at last
Finally, That Tree
Tall, still, I brace the landscape
My leaves fallen about me as past glories to dissolve
Food for saplings
 
I am that tree
Shading the heads of pilgrims
I stand as safe roost for eons of flocks
Soundless, I shrug a shoulder 
Or fan my hands
 
I am post and lintel
Cup, bowl, canoe
I am fire hardened spear and arrow; slit for the stone
Cradle, coffin, crucifix
I take the hangman’s name in silence
 
I am that tree.
Support for Maya in her birth throws
Canopy for her son as he awoke
Gathering place for the elders
The sentinel in silence forgotten
 
Standing within the cycle eternal
Fully aware and in silence
I am falling, falling
My essence dreams
And wakes again

Kiora Tash
 2012

Finding My Guides

North American Desert

I have chosen to practice stillness. I do it for the simple purpose of creating a clear space to make skillful choices, those based on wisdom.

Please do not think this is an easy or simplistic road, and I promise that I do not tell you this because I wish to appear any better than I am.

I tell you because I wish to speak and move from a place of kindness, place that I hope will reflect the basic goodness that I believe, or perhaps only hope, we are all born with.  If I can settle down enough to let heart guide me, rather than fear, the dominoes may fall that way.

Big Island East SIde

No, let me draw another image, take a fractal. It starts small in nature and mathematically repeats making designs of beauty. Tree limbs and snow flakes, broccoli and sea anemones are all examples of fractal design. Let me start small with one beautiful concept and move forward.

Let me be still.

Earlier this week I had a relapse of sorts. I fell into a vat of sorrow, distrust, fear, anger and hopelessness. Buddhists and Hindus call this by the Sanskrit word ‘samsara’. Guerlain, the Parisian Parfumerie, mistakenly named a perfume ‘Samsara’ and charged about $75 an ounce. Very chic. I am certain I have paid much more dearly in this life, and it is even sweet at times. They discontinued the scent, by the way. People were beginning to know the word in common parlance.

My vat of sorrow was the snake I had forgotten to look for.

Big Island West Side

Samsara is a word for the suffering that comes with not understanding my true nature, that is my relationship to ‘what is’. Samsara is simply the way things normally are, the human situation of wanting and not wanting things to be like this, right now. Not allowing for the fact that limitless prior events through time have converged upon this moment in the process of cause and effect.

I am only a tiny piece of this. One little short lived ‘cause’ whose effect is minute and probably ill chosen at that. Even when things go my way, and I am briefly happy, the fact that things will always change leaves me ultimately dissatisfied.

Change. The only thing I can really count on in the world of form, the world I live in.

Stillness is one way to step away from this deeply engrained and quintessentially human function of Want/Not want. It is not the answer, not the antidote, but it is a perspective from which I can possibly see more clearly.

Volcanoes National Park

What shoved me into that vat of slimy darkness was a random rabbit hole on the internet. No. It was less than that, it was a mouse hole. I looked up a definition and found myself reading history.
The history that tried to envelope my soul was a list of 5 steps of Totalitarianism take over and how they were historically used in France, Russia, and Germany to destroy the existing governments. They sounded familiar and I grew ill.

Luckily I told a friend who guided me to look at a balancing note in history:

The Resistance Movement of WWII, The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Suffrage (which my GGG Grandmother was part of), The Singing Revolution in the Baltic States, and work by Gene Sharp on Nonviolent resistance.

She reminded me to hold dear a true community and friendships. It saved me from my own small hell. I am grateful.

The Trees

Wanting things to be my way is not an option, neither is being separate from any of it. I often turn to the words of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj for a sense of wise balance:

“I look within and see that I am nothing, and this is wisdom,

I look without and see that I am everything, and this is love.

Between these two, my world turns.” SNM

Hopefully, it will be this wisdom that ultimately guides me, not the fear.

Pacific Evening

Let me be still.

Information for the heart.

This gift is from a known and moving poet. Worth sharing.

(slices of sorrow beneath the moon)

How to Apologize

By Ellen Bass

Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton
you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying
silver carp that’s invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling
the others into oblivion. If you don’t live
near a lake, you’ll have to travel.
Walking is best and shows you mean it,
but you could take a train and let yourself
be soothed by the rocking
on the rails. It’s permitted
to receive solace for whatever you did
or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful
human. When my mother was in the hospital,
my daughter and I had to clear out the home
she wouldn’t return to. Then she recovered
and asked, incredulous,
How could you have thrown out all my shoes?
So you’ll need a boat. You could rent or buy,
but, for the sake of repairing the world,
build your own. Thin strips
of Western red cedar are perfect,
but don’t cut a tree. There’ll be
a demolished barn or downed trunk
if you venture further.
And someone will have a mill.
And someone will loan you tools.
The perfume of sawdust and the curls
that fall from your plane
will sweeten the hours. Each night
we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night
we could dream back everything lost.
So grill the pale flesh.
Unharness yourself from your weary stories.
Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt.
There is much to fear as a creature
caught in time, but this
is safe. You need no defense. This
is just another way to know
you are alive.

“How to Apologize” originally appeared in The New Yorker (March 15, 2021). 

(defense-less before the wave)

Deep Green

Diversity

Walking in a small protected forest, I constantly plunge into the dizzying effects of a landscape given freedom. There is so much to see on a small scale and so much to see looking up. So much to hear in the silence.

In reality there are probably no truly ‘old growth’ habitats left, between man and the alien creatures who follow, the balance is constantly changing. None the less I am grateful to be here now, breathing the air with them.

Braided Beauty
Native Hawaiian Raspberry (‘akala)
Lovely Leaf Litter
Guava (introduced 200 years ago)
Up
Over

The Words Of White Eagle

Hopi Indian leader White Eagle commented on the situation in 2021.

′′ This moment humanity is experiencing now can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or walk through the door belongs to you. If you consume the information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole.

But if you take this opportunity to look at yourself, to rethink life and death, to take care of yourself and others, then you will go through the portal.

Take care of your home, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual home. When you take care of yourself, you take care of everyone at the same time. Do not underestimate the spiritual dimension of this crisis. Take perspective of an eagle who sees everything from above with a wider view. There is a social demand in this crisis, but also a spiritual demand. Both go hand in hand.

Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. Without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and futility. You are ready to go through this crisis. Grab your toolbox and use all the tools available.

Learn the resistance of the example of Indian and African peoples: we have been and are still being exterminated. But we never stopped singing, dancing, lighting a fire and having joy. ✨🌟

Don’t feel guilty for feeling lucky during these difficult times. Being sad or angry does not help at all. Resistance is resistance through joy! You have every right to be strong and positive. And there’s no other way to do this but to maintain a beautiful, joyful and bright posture. ✨🌟

This has nothing to do with alienation (ignorance of the world). This is a resistance strategy. When we walk through the door, we have a new world view because we faced our fears and hardships. That’s all you can do now:

– Serenity in the storm

– Keep calm, pray daily

– Make the habit of meeting the sacred everyday.

Show resistance through art, joy, trust and love

Apart from Time

Eastern Sierra Nevada

Time moves easily on, but I seem to be slumped in the corner here. I have a desire to move forward and accomplish something; this is the image of me slowly hardening into the amber, caught by the golden sunlight, unaware of my demise. I am sure that a reader might find this image of my personal lithification depressing. Please don’t. I am not so outrageous in most of my life, but a little macabre imagery seems to tickle me right now. Acceptance is a gift of the spirit; it is the movement of life with recognition of its own impermanence. Sometimes it makes me sad, sometimes I look right at it and laugh out loud.

Geology has always been my stabilizing rock, so to speak. It has given me the gift of perspective. In memory, I sit on a summer warmed granite rock, in the California Sierra mountains. This is my favorite type of rock; clean, hard, light colored. It was late in the development of the hot, pressure induced, liquid batholith which it grew from; it had more time to grow those lovely large crystals. Slow cooling of the original melted rock allows larger crystals of grey quartz, and pink or white feldspar, to form in a matrix, these are cut through by dikes (imagine cracks filled with another colored material that forms a discrete and interesting line through the more uniform, larger mass, of rock). Dikes arrive from an even later melt in the batholith with even larger crystals, some with a matrix of small dark, interesting things of a different chemical composition. These huge rocks where I rest, are weathered to the size of cars, buses, and palaces; a world of their own has been smoothed to a polished shine, here and there, by tons of glacier grinding past for thousands of years. I place a hand on its surface and feel my small, and very time limited, nature. Perspective. Lovely.

Autism in the Trenches

Created by a friend.

A very moving piece of art and poetry, donated to Autism Support. Worthy of a read.

AUTISM IN THE TRENCHES BY KIRI L. K. SALAZAR There is a foe, I cannot see Wired with hair-trigger senses. Conflict borne in infancy, Camouflaged in normalcy, My heart is sore, my soul fatigued Fighting Autism in the trenches. My Janus child walks a line between his world and mine I cannot cross his no-man’s […]

Autism in the Trenches