Further unfurling

 

What a difference six days make!

High Peaks

Higher altitude offers different vistas

Hope in a tree

Rippled

In "Religion and Ecology" we read an essay by John Daido Loori about Dogen's "Mountins and Waters Sutra," but what really got to students was a scratchy old film he'd shot, called "Water speaking water." (There are longer versions.) It was made among the streams flowing into Raquette Lake, near one of whose shores we are staying. Here's the lake sharing late in the day enlightenment. There are mountains hidden in water!

Overstory

But the really good news is that Rümeysa Öztürk has been released! Now for all the others unjustly detained by a wannabe gangster state.

All hands on deck!

Alright folks, it's showtime!

 

Can we get some applause here?

Back in the Dacks

All three of my classes wrapped up this week - rather sweetly, too, if you ask me. Papers need to be read and grades tabulated before graduation next week, but all that can be done anywhere. So we hopped in the car and are back in our beloved Adirondacks. 

I could devise a meaningful-seeming segue if you wish: the Friday class was the one on William James' Varieties, and a nearly mystical experience in the Adirondacks seems to have been decisive in that work's composition. Call it research! And of course, it's the perfect segue back to my own religion of trees work, too. 

We decamped to the 'Dacks around this time last year, too, but this is a week and a half earlier - even deeper back in the spring which, in New York City, is already passign the baton to summer. We've been here in early May before, but didn't notice these gaggles of ferns popping up along the rain-flush Hudson before!

Tree tale

It's a gorgeous sunny day, and the Lang courtyard maples' leaves are already almost full size and deepening green in taking best advantage of it. 

But perhaps you've been wondering what's become of that red maple branch which came so close to my office window this spring, and allowed me rapturous witness to the magical procession from bud to flower to growing samara to leaf. It's a little complicated. The short version is that the branch is broken.

Not completely, but it dangles down now rather than reaching up. Here's how it looked last week; below is the way it's looking now. 

I can't remember a branch so close before. I even encouraged students to reach out the window and touch it! But the very thing that made it available for my devotion put it at risk. When the wind eddies in the courtyard, branches brush against the windows. No surprise that some will have snapped from the collision.

And so we dangle, small leaves green but wilting. My witness continues.

Greening of the self

 

As students were sharing their final projects for "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives," the wall of the courtyard out our classroom window, recovering from a night of rain, made its own offering.

 

Joanna Macy: The self is the metaphoric construct of identity and agency, the hypothetical piece of turf on which we construct our strategies for survival, the notion around which we focus our instincts for self-preservation, our needs for self-approval, and the boundaries of our self- interest. Something is shifting here. The conventional notion of the self with which we have been raised and to which we have been conditioned by mainstream culture is being undermined. What Alan Watts called “the skin-encapsulated ego” and Gregory Bateson referred to as “the epistemological error of Occidental civilization” is being peeled off. It is being replaced by wider constructs of identity and self-interest—by what philosopher Arne Naess termed the ecological self, co-extensive with other beings and the life of our planet. It is what I like to call “the greening of the self.”

Moist

DEI? No: DIE

 

How do you say "we don't care if you live or die"? There are so many ways. Here as elsewhere there are so many undercurrents in this administration that are homicidal .

Democracy is supposed to be about sharing a society with others, maybe even delighting in the privilege of the shared journey. Not these guys.