Tree Consciousness: Last Nail in the Human Coffin or Resurrection for our Species?

One century on—John Muir’s Redwood darlings—stripped for cash, hemmed in by hiking trails

“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and luggage and chatter.” –John Muir, letter to his wife Louie from Yosemite, July 1888

Arbor Day weekend—sadly for the trees—falls on Easter this year: exactly one century after their truest lover, arboreal-sequoia-spirit, John Muir, born April 21, 1838 Dunbar, Scotland, died (December 24, 1914) of a broken heart in a Los Angeles hospital—a terminal scenario he most feared.

Earth Week for Arborists

NoCal 2014: free, enticing, available, but very managed & very non-Redwood-friendly

Arborophiles will gather this week for an unusual tree-planting ceremony. One of many initiatives in the U.S. capital during Earth Week to give credence to the memory of Sierra Club Founder John Muir, the tree-planting ceremony April 25th by Archangel Ancient Trees’ David Milarch at the National Institute for Health, Bethesda, MD will embed in the earth two clones of the ‘Hippocrates sycamore’, a gift from Greece to the U.S. in 1960. At that time, a cutting was taken from the original plane tree on Cos, as an intercultural exchange from the Father of Western Medicine who taught his acolytes there, 330B.C., to D.C.’s Institute of Health—whose whole-medical ethos is based on the Hippocratic Oath. Milarch’s work to clone the rootstock has succeeded. The Institute celebrates Earth Week with an annual tree planting in the capital.

Teetering off the continental tectonic plate: coastline driving along Humboldt’s Scenic Drive is a constant surprise

Two hundred forty miles north of Dunbar, Trees for Life, a charitable group on a mission to restore Caledonian pine forest in sheep-torn northern Scotland, celebrates its twenty-fifth year of planting this summer. The Scots Government (RCAHMS & Forestry Commission) have been supporting individuals to plant small landholdings of remnant forest-cum-ancient monuments with indigenous trees, since 1988. They also celebrate twenty-five this year.

Blue Findhorn caravan where Dorothy Maclean, Eileen and Peter Caddy meditated, lived and grew cabbages

Dorothy Maclean, 94—surviving co-founder of the Findhorn Garden of miracle growth in Moray, Scotland—continues to speak daily to her Muses, her sweet pea Deva, and the Great Spirit. “If we hadn’t tuned into the Nature Devas and listened to their coaxing, we would just have been another meditation group,” she says of the fifty-two-year old Foundation, Center for Intentional Living and Eco-Village, which grew out of the caravan park where she planted her sweet peas. Her quiet stillness continues to inspire her friends and neighbors. The Findhorn Garden thrives.

Findhorn was fertile ground for many Earth-spiritual ideas. David Spangler, Co-Director 1970-1973, founded the Lorian Association, Issaquah, WA where he is Director of Education-Research. His Center for Incarnational Spirituality
focuses on exploring, understanding, and teaching Lorian’s understanding of the emerging spiritual impulse.

Long-time Findhorn trustee and believer in the angelic realms, author William Bloom regularly speaks on self-realization, and encourages living within nature and within one’s own spirit.

Fup, Jim Dodge’s exceptional mallard, has wisdom of the still life

Our radiant energy pervades and gives rise to all life. While it may speak to us through plants, Nature spirits or the human beings with whom we share life on this planet, all are reflections of the deeper reality behind and within them. Myth has become reality in the Findhorn Garden, not to present us with a new form of spiritualism, but to offer us a new vision of life, a vision of unity.
Essentially, the Devas and Nature Spirits are aspects of our own selves, guiding us toward our true identity, the Divine Reality within.
The Findhorn Garden: Pioneering a New vision of Man and nature in Cooperation, by the Findhorn Community; introduction by Sir George Trevelyan, Bt. Turnstone/Wildwood, ©1975

Jim Dodge has been director of creative writing in the English department at Humboldt State University Arcata since 1995. Author of Fup, above, and Stone Junction, he believes like Maclean, Spangler and Bloom, that by surrounding oneself in nature, making it our friend, Nature has ways of teaching us to flow more intuitively, more naturally, as the waves of energy themselves. It is what is taught in all Native American wisdom.

Earth First or Earth Whenever

Naturalist John Muir took US President Teddy Roosevelt camping overnight in Yosemite, 1906

He thought on it, mulling it with that slow, voluptuous thoroughness that comes with the still life. He paused. ‘Have you not found that hunger becomes most intense near the moment of satisfaction?’
Johnny Seven Moons to Granddaddy Jake in Jim Dodge’s Fup

John Muir would have been happy to see his trees—albeit several foreign imports—receive all this attention. But his first love—wilderness—and our 21st-Century attitude to it, would have him totally confused.

Because this weekend also heralds Spring Break—Brit, Easter Hols—and a sudden switch of fortune for spaceweather-worry-warts from Arctic deepfreeze to Caribbean breathless balmy (courtesy current incoming M-class solar flare, below sidebar right); American teenage tin-soldiers are on the march.

Spring Break: mass exodus of youth, determined to tame Nature in the Wild

Parents in tow, willingly or otherwise, the great Easter adventure is to pit one’s child against Nature, and hope the family comes back in one piece, if not in one tent. Media classes in kayaking and backpacking abound, boyscout-girl-guide firemaking is ‘awesome possum’; endless catalogs touting latest designer all-weather gear, space-age freeze-dried GMO-mush in non-recyclable plastic bombs serve to make vacation roughing it more smooth… or maybe it’s to give Mom relief and a catalog to read, when wet wood spits out the camp fire.

Highway-299, No.Humboldt County’s E-W artery, daily connects Redding, Central Valley via Redwoods to the Coast

School vacations occur, regardless of solar maxima, X-class and M-class flares incoming, internet interruptions, and Chaos Theory.

What currently cool school kids may fail to grasp, in their quest for astral Tesla solar panels, ear-to-ear-sound, and instant palm-top X-box hacking, is that there is no internet on a mountain top; arborophiles and tree sitters hug trees, not cut them down. What their parents may fail to notice is increasing wear and tear on the planet brought on by human indifference.

Homeguard, Humboldt style

According to Forbes Magazine, ‘Gallup poll reports more than sixty percent Americans believe effect of global warming is happening during their lifetimes, yet only 25% worry about it.’

Local tolerance during full moon madness, combined with Easter, the new growing season and runup to Beltane and Cinco de Mayo, is just too much for some local redwoods residents. They close their gates, get out the shotgun, ask stray campers, their single-parent wildchild wannabes—and their litter—to leave.

Big Tree, like her sister Corkscrew Tree, both 350-ft+ sequoia sempervirens, hold Prairie Creek State Park microsystem in balance

Meanwhile, Milarch and his research team have been scouring Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park along infamous Tsunami Alley in Northern Humboldt, in search for the last undiscovered sequoia sempervirens.

It will not have helped matters in the ‘real world’ that Wilderness has not been cared for at Muir’s level for several decades, much less in the one hundred twenty years since he and President Roosevelt founded the Sierra Club in 1892—to take care of Mother N where John M left off. Teddy Roosevelt, at Muir’s insistence, brought 430 million acres of land under federal protection during his presidency.

At the end of his life, Muir and Sierra Club fought a bitter battle on construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam over Hetch Hetchy Valley in his beloved Yosemite National Park.

1890s Chute harvested redwood logs, wooden trains, flumes called Miracles of the Age hauled lumber to sawmill yards

Muir used his solitary voice in the wilderness; Sierra Club used lawyers.

Seen as the first major battle of the environmental movement, it pales by comparison with present treesit, earth-aware group initiatives, and corporate legal wrangling. But for Muir, who had seen his work put an end to ruthless tree-felling, an exploitative timber trade, this betrayal bruised his spirit. On Christmas Eve, 1914—just over a year after Congress authorized the dam’s construction against his wishes—Muir died of pneumonia in southern California.

Redwood moorings from Trinidad, CA whaling days were replaced 2012 by smart steel dock

His work was seminal. He inspired generations of naturalists, and brought pioneer spirit, raw enthusiasm and innocence to an American system which has only calcified since his time.

National Parks hit by recent budget cuts made wilderness vacations less fun than fatiguing, more stressful than stretching. So, some public opinion has made inroads, in California, Colorado and Washington at least.

David Milarch admits his search for the ultimate sequoia is a hunt for a trigger to activate his own DNA. He believes the trees have more to teach us than we presently have capacity to learn, but thinks, like Dodge’s immortal Granddaddy, that time is on our side.

There is No Planet B
US Congress antics and current Mercurial media circus make chameleons of all politicians, and so 21stC legislation cannot be depended on for preservation of our Pale Blue Dot, as Carl Sagan affectionately calls home.

Full Lunar Eclipse chalice chart 4/15/14 inside a Cardinal Grand Cross: cornucopia of Earth Week abundance: we can lose it all

In 1982, a shy genius marine bacteriological USC professor Milo Appleman, Ph.D., published his Epitaph for Planet Earth: How to Survive the approaching End of the Human Species, (Frederick Fell, New York). His predictions of the North Pacific Garbage Gyre and (projected) effect of human pollution on world oceans fell on deaf ears. Now, trillions of dollars worldwide are spent annually on so-called cleanup operations.

Media moguls, bored with political stalemate, seem to have brightened viewers’ choices by reaching for the heavens: coverage of April 15th’s first blood moon total lunar eclipse of 2014, along with juxtaposition of Mars, Jupiter and Mercury in the northern night sky, broke Nielsen ratings for a decade. This means more people may be—unconsciously—influenced by the stars!

Cardinal Grand Cross:
Uranus Jupiter Pluto Mars at 13º square
change~change~change

When beggars die,
There are no comets seen,
The heavens themselves
Blaze forth the death of princes
Calphurnia to Julius Caesar
Act II Scene 2 William Shakespeare

What they didn’t say—management order not to frighten viewers—is that, energetically, planet earth is still laboring under the aegis of Saturn and Uranus, planets of change, lined up in a Cardinal Grand Cross, which began March 2010 and will not leave us alone until June 2016. This means massive change for society, but also inner change for the individual. Spaceweather and glory of the stars? this is only the beginning.

So-called primitive Man has always looked to the heavens for guidance. He derived comfort in infinite Divine balance of number. Gematria, Judaic name-number of God, reflects supreme balance in Fibonacci Phi spiral that permeates the Universe. In known civilizations of antiquity—China, Babylon, Egypt—arithmetic-number was sacred, as source of all knowledge, a guide to rightful conduct in art, music, affairs of state.

Minimum ‘safe’ height: 146feet;
most of Tsunami Alley: sea-level 😦

Ancient Science was based like today on number, but whereas it is now used quantitatively in a secular sense, the Ancients saw numbers as symbols of the Universe. They inhabited a living creature of divine fabrication, designed in accordance with reason, and thus, to some extent, comprehensible by the human mind.
John Michell, Dimensions of Paradise, 1988

Comet ISON whet public appetite, current planetary alignments, plus total lunar and annular solar (visible only in Antarctica 4/29) eclipses and Lyrid meteor shower all in one week are a heady mix. Within the vise of a six-year Grand Cross, daily change is beginning to look scary. The streetwise kid knows at gut level what the Ancients knew by precise calculation: Fireworks in the sky means group change—maybe even all change.

Petrolia Shear Zone, Humboldt County, where 3 volcanic faults meet, courtesy HSU Geology

When solar storms and volcanic activity start to make EarthMama shake, even the masses look to the skies. There are three more total lunar eclipses to complete a tetrad over the next year—encouraging ingénue stargazing—10/8/14; 4/4/15, 9/28/15. Even New Age television seems to be getting stardust in its teeth.

Humans—through Nature—have always thrilled to the presence of the Divine—Muse—in dance, music, water, sound and light. Losing our way in the 21st Century, like those tree people of the past, may not be an option. So, please, would all ’Sixties’ Back-to-the-Land BabyBoomer survivors—or any who sold out to the system and regret—please stand. Along with treesitters in the mold of Julia Butterly Hill, and activists of the ’Noughties, now our flower-power really counts.

This time, it will take all the love we can generate together,
to heal and help each other through.

There is no Planet B.
Now is the time to love our little comfort zone.
WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get.
@2014 Siderealview

Dabbling in the Quantum Field

Spiritual novel 'SHASTA: Critical Mass'

 

In quantum physics, the act of Observation changes the object observed.  

 

Writers, especially novelists, beware. 

 

It is a truth worth remembering when knuckling down to the synopsis.  A necessary evil, some say;  but it is really important to remind yourself, when you lift your head up again after you’ve sent the ‘hook’ off to your editor/publisher/reading group that it was an exercise in stepping into the quantum field.  That’s all.  It isn’t really you.  You were acting as a mere observer presenting an object as you saw it to an outside agency.  The real you in still in there, champing at the bit, ready and waiting to get back to REAL writing.

 

I’ve been asked a few times: ‘So, what is your novel about?’  an open-ended – but natural – question from a reader.  The answer varies with the mood of the request.  Which got me thinking about queries in general and query letters in particular: oh, no, not again, sounds the imaginary chorus of rejected authors in the agent/publisher debate.

 

Any excuse will do.

 

There IS a case to be made for the poor, maligned, ever-hopeful, endless optimist writer; she does have to lay down all tools of the scribe and pick up tools of the adman to get her subject noticed.  Her query letter, synopsis and an impeccable first chapter are all she’s got.

 

But not today.   If she’s a trooper, then her Muse will return, the pen or keyboard will beckon and the wild ride will begin once more.

 

So what is my novel about?  The thing is: I didn’t think I was writing a fantasy adventure; I thought it would turn out to be an historical romance with some realtime spiritual insights; a kind of James Redfield-style handbook set in both past and present Scotland with a respectful nod to the New Age, California style.  I spent my childhood in Scotland, some early adult years in California and now swing between the two.  It made sense that I should draw on my own history to create an authentic atmosphere; I spent 20 years writing and giving lectures on the suppressed, unwritten history of my country. It wants to be told.

 

But my spirit soars when I step into the wild country of the Pacific Northwest and I guess my Muse knows that at her core.  So, let’s face it, after setting the romantic framework of ancient Scotland, my Muse was itching to get in there and change it all around.

 

As I began to relax and allow my characters to speak, Muse Girl (MG for short, thanks to S.King for his male version) wasn’t standing for any nonsense.  If it was authenticity I wanted, she would show me what the real message was in the book:  I am the instrument and she directs as the movie unfolds.  Drop the dry historical facts, castle interiors, ancient hunting forests, family lineages;  enter a succession of vivid past lives intermingled with a present day drama of a family caught up in cataclysmic events precipitated by a planet in environmental crisis.   

 

Even my title got changed:  it became SHASTA. You don’t want to know what it was before.  That got relegated to short-story-dom.

 

In some awesome way I could not (didn’t want to) control,  the 14,000-ft mountain colluded with MG to become the dominant presence.   And, gradually the historical corridor of my original vision morphed into a capsule which faded in and out, while a dormant volcano in the present-day Cascades proceeded to take over; create a tectonic miracle, and develop a scenario with potential to disrupt national and international communications. 

 

All right.  It’s true: a lot of writers see their novels as movies in their heads: it’s the way the right hemisphere transmits information.  Yet I was carried along on this visual current like a swollen river of ash and mud within a backdrop that was more than real. Daily reports issued by NOAA and the Global Volcanism Program were mirroring my scenes: Yellowstone, Mauna Loa, Kamchatka, Vesuvius.  There was no way I could put this down.

 

When each morning I went back to edit what I’d written the day before, the left hemisphere often had punctuation and grammar to correct, but the right hemisphere was right there (along with MG), ready to pick up where we left off.

 

Naturally Shasta saw to it that I learned Native American respect for her, researched her early history, became immersed in her volcanic past.  In process I discovered the difficulty humans faced constructing highways and railroads  in trying to tame her; her influence on local tradition, myths and legends surrounding her, filtered through New Age groups and sects that inhabit the valley at her feet. 

 

She is a rumbling giant; she never sleeps.   With or without a volcanic murmur, northern California suffers annual forest fires and spring deluge.   It’s what people live with all the time.  What I was being asked to do was to give it a little tweak to up the ante.  It all fit.  I had to move with the story.  It was telling itself.  And by setting the scene over one long weekend I simply brought the elements together to make it believable – in a fantastic sort of way. 

 

Ancient Scotland plays a part.  It has to.  In a quasi-science fiction way it becomes a timeline thread, interjected into the future-present narrative, meshing the background of the principal characters with a deeper element – I like to think.  Past meets present creates future earth where all is possible… of course I’m an idealist.   

 

So what is it about?  We should be grateful for the gentle reader, the well-meaning questioner.  It makes us look at genre (the agent/publisher’s tool) and in observing, perhaps changes us the writer from quantum instrument to quantum fly on the wall.

 

SHASTA made the decision for me: molded my characters, attached me to the project, wouldn’t let me go.  My historical journeys became woven through and around her, creating more substance than I originally planned.  But what story is not improved by a mystery weaving a web to pull one in, to keep up the pace, to NOT give away the ending?   

 

Quantum field? Personal movies or Images of this scale are beyond quantum physics, in my humble opinion.  A project guided from beyond? A spiritual adventure? Particle or wave, it chose me to put it into print, and I am the first to say that I, the observer, was changed by it. Not the other way around.  

The Waiting Room of the Mind: web-longings of a Writer

Blogging should probably  be blonging: web-longing to be writing real stuff while relegated to waiting (in the waiting room of the mind) to hear from publisher/s-agent/s- editor/s to whom our precious words were submitted.  Even the tiniest spark of encouragement,  the smallest interim ‘sorry still reading the in-pile’ is taken as Big Time Hope that our three-year Magnum Opus has received a moment’s notice; that the publishing world is understandably going through a lot of stuff lately and they’ll finally realize what a gem they have ready to roll.  

Writers have to be tough. It goes with the territory: loners at best; communing with our computers; social outcasts at worst – unless or until our talents are recognized and we are inundated with chatter and praise and, worst of all, false friendship.  We have to recognize it all, because the mind devises every scenario (didn’t we just give one of those attributes to a character in chapter 42? its opposite to the antagonist in chapter 6?)  

Inside, if we are true to ourselves, in the interim waiting room of the mind we are above the wrangling, above the pressures that drive an editor to tackle the daily mound of MSS she knows she has to get through. We are guided by an inner equilibrium; sometimes by a need to express something – anything – in print; on a good day, we are in thrall to our Muse.

Ah, that elusive entity, the Muse.

S/he is the keeper of the Stargate: it is s/he who decides what comes out and what stays inside.  If we are really honest with ourselves, it is s/he who not only inspires, but dictates. 

And on days when s/he doesn’t, the poor earthbound writer sits at the computer anyway – never too far from the email inbox or the internet search engine, just in case an idea pops; a thought which needs to be ‘researched’.  

Naturally there are other days when the mind doesn’t even say hello to the Muse: those are days of the rewrite, the ruthless self-editor at work, preening and primping and heartlessly chopping whole chunks of dialogue, along with necessary adverbs and future conditionals.  On those days the writer is just that; no room to be the ‘other’, the author, the celebrated creator, Muse-instrument.  

They say it takes two to tango.  In the case of writing, it takes something in the order of 52 and those personalities are all within.  It’s a miracle some of them ever get out: but that’s what writing is all about.

Successful authors, screenplay-writers, budding novelists, dramatists, wannabe magazine contributors: we are all alike in our self-doubt when we are stuck in the waiting room of the mind.  Maybe that’s why we decorate it with figments and pigments – to cheer the place up till the real stuff comes along.

Are you a frustrated author? a self-disciplined writer of a daily quota? or simply another patient ? (pun intended).  Whichever it is, you are most welcome to join the rest of us here in the waiting room of the mind.