summer_jackel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summer_jackel) wrote2007-05-25 01:42 pm
summer_jackel) wrote2007-05-25 01:42 pm
Entry tags:
Running Dog/Grounding
Sometimes I still write about stuff. This bit is mostly musings on travel, home and ground.
It is in travel, in being away from the piece of earth upon which I habitually dwell, that I remember what it is to understand place, to be grounded.
It is in travel, in being away from the piece of earth upon which I habitually dwell, that I remember what it is to understand place, to be grounded.
I consider travel by means of anything but foot to be a grave spiritual matter, though of course in modern everyday life it is difficult to keep such things in mind. Still, when I travel by car, or even locally by plane, I remain keenly aware, at least in the back of my mind, of where I am.
I am no longer young and have travelled my native biome extensively by now. I know, at least in sketches, the plants and beasts and rock of California: how ocean speaks to shore, the upwelling of the coastal mountains and their rain shadows, the endless valleys, the great granitic Sierras and the thoughtful, complicated, thirsting deserts beyond them. These are words in a language I understand, mostly, so when I find myself in an unfamiliar part of it, it is easy for me to check in, to say hello, to orient myself. If you're familiar with the terminology, to ground.
Ohio was different. I'd never been there or even near there, and, because I was busy in the weeks before the journey or just not paying enough attention, I didn't bother to study it much save to note where it was on a map. Perhaps it was repressed frustration, because I knew that I was there only for a convention and wasn't going to get the chance to hike around. However I choose to understand the underpinnings of my thought, I became keenly aware of the oversight the moment I became present in my temporary new home.
A journey by plane is a cutting, a severing. Walk the steps with me now: enter a car, drive fast and far enough to remove yourself from the land you viscerally know. Find yourself in a city, which with its shell of concrete and humanity layered upon the raw and native ground creates a problem, a kind of double-vision, a vertigo. Then, place yourself in an airport, those bubbles, tiny cities-within-cities, whole and miniature worlds of chaos, order and above all else motion. Ultimately, submit yourself to a delicate winged metal tube and let it take you ever further, above all these things, to a place outside of perspective, outside of touch, up and up and down again.
Touching ground in Ohio I realized that I had no idea where I was. I had come from temperate Oakland to the furnace of Phoenix, and now to this cold, humid place. There was the feel of rain in the air, and the disorientation of being in an unfamiliar place. And the excitement, of course. Don't let this all suggest that I don't like to travel; I love it. It's just that I feel it as a subtle trauma.
Descending, I had watched fascinated as a place of green and gray came into view. Wide swaths, thick trees, still pools and meandering rivers: above all flat and above all green as California is rarely completely green. Driving through it, I searched for a taste of it, the growing essence of this place. A sketch, then: this land speaks moisture, cruel cold half the year and seething life the other, a green almost tropical. Weather that breathes humidity and rain, variable. A leafy deciduous forest full of vine and channel and riot. I did not know the names of any of the trees.
And I was able to touch precious few of them. But I recognised this place. This is the tatters of what Lewis and Clark saw, the famous forest so thick that a squirrel could travel, if she so desired, from New York until that forest finally gave way on the opposite coast. This is the verdure in which the Puritans saw, not awe or deep beauty or mystery, but devils in the night.
I can understand why. We're primates that evolved with leopards hunting us: other things as well, but leopards specifically, that beautiful cat who leaps softly upon her hominid prey with a jaw angled just perfectly to meet the curve of our skull, a cat who loves thick trees. Were you ever a child carrying a deep and unexplainable fear, in the woods at night? Where would you rather camp even now, a place beneath clear and open sky, or under thick, dark trees?
Camped at night amongst thick woods and perfectly safe, I have experienced that fear. Is this vertigo also an echo of something long-ago evolved, an as yet unexamined relict in my heart?
The forest where I dwell is a different place, and I take it as a great gift to better understand that. It is a cliche to compare old redwoods to a cathedral, but we do it for a reason: in old growth, there is that deep quiet that muffles sound, the wide, still spaces between the trees. Even in new second growth, you can see in a redwood forest, you can run. There is something that does not trigger that fear, or at least triggers a different kind, when you are alone.
And also the two places bring a different taste, a different kind of ecstasy. I longed to immerse myself in that green. I welcomed the non-existant leopards.
It is with fascination and joy that I touched this new place, tried to make sense of it, feel a little of what it is. I was not able to rub my face in the soil of it, to lean against the trees or taste the grasses or feel the coldness of its waters running over and chilling my bare skin. I was here for other things, to extend myself against a more human wilderness.
Still, leaving, watching cool-warm rivulets of rain lay down softly from the peculiar gray of a humid sky, I found myself at peace. As the patterns of water slid over window glass at the airport on my way out, there was rest in me, deeply tired as I was, my heart hurting as much as it had been when I left. Eyes searching into broad-leaved deciduous trees, thick grass I did not know, I found comfort and remembered who I was.
Leaving, I had finally come to ground. I had lived here a little, touched and smelled, loved and hurt here, bled a little on this soil. And so the map inside my heart is a little bigger now.
It is in travel, in being away from the piece of earth upon which I habitually dwell, that I remember what it is to understand place, to be grounded.
It is in travel, in being away from the piece of earth upon which I habitually dwell, that I remember what it is to understand place, to be grounded.
I consider travel by means of anything but foot to be a grave spiritual matter, though of course in modern everyday life it is difficult to keep such things in mind. Still, when I travel by car, or even locally by plane, I remain keenly aware, at least in the back of my mind, of where I am.
I am no longer young and have travelled my native biome extensively by now. I know, at least in sketches, the plants and beasts and rock of California: how ocean speaks to shore, the upwelling of the coastal mountains and their rain shadows, the endless valleys, the great granitic Sierras and the thoughtful, complicated, thirsting deserts beyond them. These are words in a language I understand, mostly, so when I find myself in an unfamiliar part of it, it is easy for me to check in, to say hello, to orient myself. If you're familiar with the terminology, to ground.
Ohio was different. I'd never been there or even near there, and, because I was busy in the weeks before the journey or just not paying enough attention, I didn't bother to study it much save to note where it was on a map. Perhaps it was repressed frustration, because I knew that I was there only for a convention and wasn't going to get the chance to hike around. However I choose to understand the underpinnings of my thought, I became keenly aware of the oversight the moment I became present in my temporary new home.
A journey by plane is a cutting, a severing. Walk the steps with me now: enter a car, drive fast and far enough to remove yourself from the land you viscerally know. Find yourself in a city, which with its shell of concrete and humanity layered upon the raw and native ground creates a problem, a kind of double-vision, a vertigo. Then, place yourself in an airport, those bubbles, tiny cities-within-cities, whole and miniature worlds of chaos, order and above all else motion. Ultimately, submit yourself to a delicate winged metal tube and let it take you ever further, above all these things, to a place outside of perspective, outside of touch, up and up and down again.
Touching ground in Ohio I realized that I had no idea where I was. I had come from temperate Oakland to the furnace of Phoenix, and now to this cold, humid place. There was the feel of rain in the air, and the disorientation of being in an unfamiliar place. And the excitement, of course. Don't let this all suggest that I don't like to travel; I love it. It's just that I feel it as a subtle trauma.
Descending, I had watched fascinated as a place of green and gray came into view. Wide swaths, thick trees, still pools and meandering rivers: above all flat and above all green as California is rarely completely green. Driving through it, I searched for a taste of it, the growing essence of this place. A sketch, then: this land speaks moisture, cruel cold half the year and seething life the other, a green almost tropical. Weather that breathes humidity and rain, variable. A leafy deciduous forest full of vine and channel and riot. I did not know the names of any of the trees.
And I was able to touch precious few of them. But I recognised this place. This is the tatters of what Lewis and Clark saw, the famous forest so thick that a squirrel could travel, if she so desired, from New York until that forest finally gave way on the opposite coast. This is the verdure in which the Puritans saw, not awe or deep beauty or mystery, but devils in the night.
I can understand why. We're primates that evolved with leopards hunting us: other things as well, but leopards specifically, that beautiful cat who leaps softly upon her hominid prey with a jaw angled just perfectly to meet the curve of our skull, a cat who loves thick trees. Were you ever a child carrying a deep and unexplainable fear, in the woods at night? Where would you rather camp even now, a place beneath clear and open sky, or under thick, dark trees?
Camped at night amongst thick woods and perfectly safe, I have experienced that fear. Is this vertigo also an echo of something long-ago evolved, an as yet unexamined relict in my heart?
The forest where I dwell is a different place, and I take it as a great gift to better understand that. It is a cliche to compare old redwoods to a cathedral, but we do it for a reason: in old growth, there is that deep quiet that muffles sound, the wide, still spaces between the trees. Even in new second growth, you can see in a redwood forest, you can run. There is something that does not trigger that fear, or at least triggers a different kind, when you are alone.
And also the two places bring a different taste, a different kind of ecstasy. I longed to immerse myself in that green. I welcomed the non-existant leopards.
It is with fascination and joy that I touched this new place, tried to make sense of it, feel a little of what it is. I was not able to rub my face in the soil of it, to lean against the trees or taste the grasses or feel the coldness of its waters running over and chilling my bare skin. I was here for other things, to extend myself against a more human wilderness.
Still, leaving, watching cool-warm rivulets of rain lay down softly from the peculiar gray of a humid sky, I found myself at peace. As the patterns of water slid over window glass at the airport on my way out, there was rest in me, deeply tired as I was, my heart hurting as much as it had been when I left. Eyes searching into broad-leaved deciduous trees, thick grass I did not know, I found comfort and remembered who I was.
Leaving, I had finally come to ground. I had lived here a little, touched and smelled, loved and hurt here, bled a little on this soil. And so the map inside my heart is a little bigger now.