Alexandersmap

    Tag: Alan Watts

    • Getting There In Spirit

      “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking

      Rising up before the dawn has its advantages.  Mostly in solitude, but also in that dance with light that happens whether you join in or not.  I prefer to join in.

      I walked down to the water to watch the crescendo before the light washed out with the sunrise.  I was struck by the number of boats moored in the bay.  More than I recall in other summers, but there are more people holing up near the water this year for all the reasons you’re familiar with.

      I come to Buzzards Bay to watch the dance between water and light.  Sometimes the water rises up to meet the light, and sometimes it quietly pulls back and waits for the light to come to it, but the dance is beautiful just the same.  The reunion of the two offers a performance that can take your breath away.  Like a lingering kiss of fire to water, you expect a hiss when they touch.  The moments when the sun is just below the water is the most beautiful time of all, either rising up from its depths or rejoining at the end of the day.

      “As trees evoke sound from the wind, your eyes evoke light from fire.” – Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

      I haven’t quite immersed myself in the bay yet, but I’m trying to walk that mile.  The restlessness that I’ve felt for days hasn’t subsided, despite time on mountaintops and deep in the woods and now awash in salt water and early morning light.  Perhaps more time swirling about in that salt water would do the trick.  Like the lime in my rum drink at the end of the day.  But I think it comes down to the year we’re living through, where casual escape isn’t as easy as it might have been before.

      I’ve written and deleted more words than I’m keeping in today’s post.  Perhaps letting the picture stand alone as the post would have said more than me jumbling together words.  Surely worth a thousand words?  Its hard to capture light in words when you’re looking inward too much.  The root of restlessness is derived from too much time in one’s own head.  If you look back on this post the last four paragraphs begin with I.  And that “I” needs to be diluted with salt water and sweat and others of consequence.

    • Everything Flows

      Everything Flows

      “Wu-wei is the understanding that energy is gravity, and thus that brush writing, or dancing, or judo, or sailing, or pottery, or even sculpture is following patterns in the flow of liquid.”
      “Panta rhei—everything flows, and therefore the understanding of water is the understanding of life. Fire is water falling upwards.”
      – Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

      I’m a novice when it comes to Chinese philosophy – Taoism – and perhaps I should have spent more time previously in pursuit of a better understanding.  But in a way I was following my own flow in a different direction.  Or better put, I was following a parallel stream with gardening, hiking and time on the water.  Eventually experience leads you to the same conclusions, even if you don’t understand Chinese characters and the rituals that lead you to the stream.  I’m not sure yet how deeply I’ll be swimming into this stream, but find it familiar and natural.  I believe that’s the whole point.

      Google the term “go with the flow” and you’ll see various points of origin, from Marcus Aurelius to William Shakespeare.  I wrote a post a while back about the river as an analogy of timelessness.  So to now tap into the stream of consciousness that is Alan Watts and dipping a toe into the waters of Taoism isn’t unnatural.  Unnatural is commuting to the same place every day, sliding into a cubicle and staring at a screen for hours, working through lunch to prove you’re a team player and willing to pay the price to get ahead.  Intuitively I knew I had to get out of that world as soon as possible and delighted in the exit strategy provided by my employer at the time.  I used a phrase back in my rowing days to describe the lifestyle I’d found myself in with coaching and doing odd jobs to sustain my pursuits: It was an “attractive rut”.  Enjoyable enough to keep doing it indefinitely, but limiting enough to recognize that you needed to do more in life.  Attractive rut also summed up my time working 50 hours per week in an office environment.  Great money, but soul-crushing in the end.

      Career shifts, sabbaticals, graduations, divorce, moving across borders to new places and the like are all forms of state changes. Fire is water falling upwards.  Transformation of our former self into something new, as dried wood transforms to fuel for fire then ash and finally back to the earth to begin again as something entirely different.  But transformation happens in every moment along the way from birth to death.  The question for each of us is how true to our path we remain along the way (I’m reminded of splitting wood, and how some pieces are all knotted and stubbornly resist the swing of the axe.  Difficult and unnatural, but they’re consumed by the flame just the same in the end).  This concept of transformation isn’t exclusive to Taoism:

      “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” — Genesis 3:19

      We’re inherently different people day-by-day as experience molds us and events steer us just as water swirls around rocks in a stream.  We’re watching the world around us swirl around the pandemic and social unrest and transform who we are and will be downstream, and I recognize that I’m also transforming.  And so it is.  Life is a dance, and we’re all finding our way across the page one way or another, following patterns in the flow of liquid and making our small ripple in the endless stream of time.  There’s nothing unnatural about Tao, for it is inherently the natural path of life.  What’s unnatural is resisting the flow and diverting yourself towards pursuits that don’t align with who you are.  One of the beautiful things about life is discovering your own flow and releasing the resistance to following it.

       

    • Cloud-Hidden, Somewhere on the Mount

      “I asked the boy beneath the pines.
      He said, “The Master’s gone alone
      Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,
      Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.”
      – Chia Tao

      Inevitably I had to arrive at Alan Watts.  I’ve circled around his work for some time, and finally landed on Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, which is as much personal journal as philosophical work.  And so it was that I lingered on these lines from Chia Tao that open Watts’ book.  I thought about my hike yesterday, cloud-hidden myself, with my whereabouts largely unknown on a solo hike.  It seemed appropriate to borrow this translation for my own observations.  For yesterday’s post was all nuts and bolts detail on hiking Mount Garfield, but it didn’t convey much about hiking solo largely in solitude.

      There’s a part of me that wants to knock off the 48 New Hampshire 4000 footers as a solo hiker.  Not because I’m anti-social, but because I feel the mountains differently when I’m alone with them.  Perhaps I’m more attuned to the ripple of water and the breeze in the trees, but mostly I’m more attuned with myself.  Slipping or tripping on a solo hike feels more consequential than it does when you’re with hiking buddies.  Sure there are other hikers on the trails, especially on a 4000 footer, but if you’re injured you’re relying on the goodwill of strangers and blowing up their own moment with the mountain.  Who wants that memory of your last hike?  I’d just as soon take the extra millisecond to be especially sure of footing.  To that end, I find hiking poles to be especially valued on a solo hike for the reassurance they provide on the descent.  It took me years to conclude that there was any value at all in hiking poles.  Now I find them invaluable.  I was reminded of their worth when I slipped on a hidden muddy root on my descent yesterday and my right pole bore the weight of my slide, keeping me from a hard fall and now shows evidence of bearing the brunt of the force in the form of a slightly bent shaft.  Thanks for your sacrifice, friend.

      The summit of Mount Garfield is a knob of granite with an old fire tower foundation set into it.  I arrived at the summit feeling a bit like a character in that Chia Tao poem.  Cloud hidden and whereabouts unknown.  There’s something about being alone in swirling clouds that is otherworldly.  I’ve felt this before, most notably when the fog rolled in as I stood alone on North Head at Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland.  My time on the summit lacked the drama of foghorns waking up to blare warnings to all that would hear, but made up for it with wind gusts that implied a threat of their own.  Normally the summit is a place to linger, but the mountain suggested I should move along.  When you’re on the mountain listen to the mountain.

      “The solitary is as necessary to our common sanity as wilderness, as the forest where no one goes, as the waterfall in a canyon, which no one has ever seen or heard. We do not see our hearts…” – Alan Watts, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

      I’m not sure what I’d do if the rest of the world woke up early.  I suppose I’d go for long walks alone in the woods, or quietly slip a kayak into the bay or a river, or some such pursuit of solitude.  But the world tends to sleep in, or otherwise keep to itself, and so must I in the early hours.  Hiking offers a measure of solitude, even when you’re with others.  For who doesn’t listen to the mountain when they hike?  Sadly I’ve come across such people – loud talkers you hear from a mile away, or worse, people who play a soundtrack through their phone speakers as they tackle the trail like they’re on a treadmill at the gym.  There are people who never hear, because they never really listen.  I choose to listen.

      The morning after such a hike is filled with reminders: muscle kinks and soreness that grumble, memories of moments of lightness and wonder, gear to store away after a night of drying.  This is the afterglow of time on a trail, and some of that glow stays with you for a lifetime.  I still wonder at moments spent hiking from the Colorado River up Havasu Creek to the lower falls, or watching a meteor shower late in the night on Old Speck Mountain in Maine with college friends.  Hiking doesn’t always fill you with wonder, but it generally puts you in the neighborhood.  The rest is up to you.