#SOL17: Canyon

From my art journal (2017)

I.

There are moments during the last few weeks when I experience Rob's death as if I was standing inside a too-deep box canyon with no apparent way out.  At such times, it is not the beauty of the canyon walls I sense, but rather the impossibility of scaling or descending such steepness in order to arrive elsewhere. Arriving elsewhere is a destination I have trouble seeing, naming. What rests beyond the life I have known? Where is elsewhere?

And thinking once again about the canyon and its walls has me recalling Barry Lopez's opening description of a box canyon in his essay, "Gone Back into the Earth. "  It is an essay I first read on a May afternoon, one year after my mother died, when Rob handed me the book, Crossing Open Ground, with the opening page of the essay (p. 41) marked and simply said, "You'll want to make time to read this."

And I did.

II.

In this essay, Lopez chronicles a ten-day river trip he made with 41 others--many of whom were musicians, most notably--Paul Winter. He begins the essay with a description of himself and the canyon:

“I am up to my waist in a basin of cool, acid-clear water, at the head of a box canyon some 600 feet above the Colorado River. I place my outstretched hands flat against a terminal wall of dark limestone which rises more than a hundred feet above me, and down which a sheet of water falls—the thin creek whose pooled waters I now stand. The water splits at my fingertips into wild threads; higher up a warm canyon wind lifts water off the limestone in a fine spray; these droplets intercept and shatter sunlight. Down, down another four waterfalls and fern shrouded pools below, the water splits into an eddy of the Colorado River, in the shadow of a huge boulder. Our boat is tied there.”

And it is the closing line that most catches my eye, most hitches my heart. "Our boat is tied there."

Since Rob's death, I've been bereft of both man and boat.
Moored, some days, by grief, and unmoored other days by possibility.


III.

I wonder where there might be a boat for me. I recall that lovely advice Antoine de Saint-Exupéry gave: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

And isn't this a truth that grief reveals? It is not so much the vessel as it is the yearning that moves us, propels us.

Tonight I am wondering, how I might travel beyond the confines of the known canyon?

Responding to Barry Lopez: Art Improvisations

Art Conversation. 4.29.13

In an earlier post, What Makes Your Heart Beat?, I shard plans of work I intended to do with staff developers in manhattan.

Below is one publication that was generated from the work. Found poems and paintings generated via art conversations comprise the book.

Throw Them Out: They Are The Wrong Sort of Map

Watching (2009, M.A. Reilly)

I. Watching

In "The Naturalist" Barry Lopez talks about his habit of visiting the McKenzie River in western Oregon on a daily basis.  Lopez writes:

Almost every day I go down to the river with no intention but to sit and watch. I have been watching the river for thirty years, just the three or four hundred yards of it I can see from the forested bank, a run of clear, quick water about 350 feet wide. If I have learned anything here, it’s that each time I come down, something I don’t know yet will reveal itself.

If it’s a man’s intent to spend thirty years staring at a river’s environs in order to arrive at an explanation of the river, he should find some other way to spend his time. To assert this, that a river can’t be known, does not to my way of thinking denigrate science, any more than saying a brown bear can’t be completely known. The reason this is true is because the river is not a thing, in the way a Saturn V rocket engine is a thing. It is an expression of biological life, in dynamic relation to everything around it—the salmon within, the violet-green swallow swooping its surface, alder twigs floating its current, a mountain lion sipping its bank water, the configurations of basalt that break its flow and give it timbre and tone.

Rereading Lopez always gives me pause: much like the river he references.  There is so much to not know and watching opens us to these possibilities. How different might formal education be if emphasizing not knowing was seen as keenly necessary as knowing. 

II. No Standardized Codification

Complex matters refuse to be understood fully, codified neatly, presented completely. And so the last few months I have tried in earnest to see a positive light in relationship to the new national standards, the tests that accompany them, the curriculum and professional products that are streaming into classrooms and teachers' hands daily, the packaged curriculum and I keep coming back to Lopez who offers us this insight about ways of knowing and although he was not writing about the Common Core and other such documents, the insights nonetheless can be applied:

I would like to tell you how to get there so that you may see all this for yourself. But first a warning: you may already have come across a set of detailed instructions, a map with every bush and stone clearly marked, the meandering courses of dry rivers and other geographical features noted, with dotted lines put down to represent the very faintest of trails. Perhaps there were also warnings printed in tiny red letters along the margin, about the lack of water, the strength of the wind and the swiftness of the rattlesnakes. Your confidence in these finely etched maps is understandable, for at first glance they seem excellent, the best a man is capable of; but your confidence is misplaced. Throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map. They are too thin. They are not the sort of map that can be followed by a man who knows what he is doing. The coyote, even the crow, would regard them with suspicion. (from Desert Notes) 

III. Thinking

It is tempting to hold in one's hand the ready made map and think I hold all I need.  There are many types of map we are seduced by, fall victim to, yes?

Ready made maps, especially the slickest, are unauthored.

We would be wise to follow Lopez's advice and "throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map."