Bringing the Salmon Home to sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

It is the time of the year when the sun ripens.

Whether it is smooth sumac…

… sedums storing sunlight during the day to eat it at night … p1230343

… wild gooseberry ripening its leaves with the same energy that only weeks ago ripened its berries… p1230646

… or the Nk’mp salmon coming home to sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ … salmon2sm … and asking and asking to get past the dam there, it is the time of ripening. I give thanks today to the people of the Okanagan Nation Alliance and their families among the Colville Federated Tribes for bringing our ancestors home at the same time we go down to the river to greet them. Today was the annual salmon festival at sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ. I was proud to be among these people. Some day all this land will ripen into the salmon again. Some day all people will ripen to welcome them.

I live for that day.

What Aspens Can Teach Us

Posted on September 15, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

Aspens are powerful, because they are many and one: many trunks from one underground life. These are not individuals. They aren’t even trees.
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They are individual expressions of wholeness. We do well to wander through them and get lost. Because these lakes of life in the grassland have edges, we soon surface, but we surface changed, just as we do anytime we descend into ourselves.

Mind and Body are One

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

Things are just what they seem. Like dreams, the act of looking into water has no words. And it can’t be given any, except the simplest ones: blue, log, deep, water, light, wet, leaf, dragonfly, pond, toad, fish and so on. You can read it, but its language is itself.
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The language is complex.

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And multi-dimensional. p1230634

It profoundly resists usefulness. You can bathe in it. You can drink it. You can be centred by it, but that is not use. That is bathing, drinking and centring, which is a way of saying: in different ways our bodies do the same acts, whether with the eye (seeing), the skin (bathing), the mouth (drinking), or the gut (centring). Beyond that, we can’t go. Our language, English, has this profound layer, that can’t be budged. It can be approached in infinite variety.

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But it can’t be budged. That is honest. It is completely unified, on levels of body, heart and mind, dream and waking, self and world. We can trust it. It can lead us to water, stone, rain, wood, snow, fish, toads, grass and light. Words aren’t there to explain it. How could the complexity shown in the image below be explained? Explaining has nothing to do with the body, and this is about the body.

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And since you can trust this, you can know that if anyone explains what you see here, what they are really doing is dismissing your body, and theirs. They have no right.

Selfless Living

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

Imagine, you put your heart here for a time. p1210913

Then you walk here across the grass and leave your mind. Perhaps it will meet a bear later.
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Then you walk further into the grass, where a glacier left some good soil a while back, and leave your tongue to taste the wind.
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It’s a game that takes a slight suspension of disbelief. I hope you’ll bear with me for a bit. I can’t reveal where we’re going, because if I do we won’t get there, but we’re on our way. Here we go, under the firs, where it hasn’t rained for 500 years and the ant lions have set up shop. Here you can leave your hunger.

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And you walk on without it, across the blue green algae that made the sky blue, and covers the soil like a skin.

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Yes, here you leave your skin, and walk on without it, open now to the wind.It’s like that that you come to the water. Look, your skin is following you. Hello, skin.

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But we have a place to go to and move on. Ah, look, your heart has gone underground and has appeared out of deep time, through our subconscious. Hello, heart.

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Skinless (please remember, these are subjective states not concrete ones, but they’re no less able to impact the world) and knowing your heart has grown and is full of trout, you move on. Ah, there’s a thought.

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Look at it folded in the ancient folds of that brain, soaking up the sun the rock has absorbed and the lichens have been feeding on. Leave your bones here and move on as the wind.

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Here you are fire. Fly to the sun. This is not the stuff of fairytales. This is what you do every day. This is the point of you. This is why you are here. Now, walk on with nothing at all, and to no destination, perhaps to what the soil was like before it was grazed or tilled…

p1220481 … and what you were called before language bound you. Do not judge. If you judge, you will lose the world. Stay in it. See? p1220140

Look at the fire rising from your heart! Look at your body standing up from it and holding it at the same time. Now, find your way back. Start here. p1220425

This is how I live now. This is just one hour in one day.

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Tomorrow we go further yet.

Water Math, Nerves & You

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

Water – Gravity p1200776 Water-Light shadow Water – Gravity – Water + Light V0000012

The doors these mathematics open are not doors into the universe. They are doors into the non-actualized human self. In the way the rye grass is the seed that perches to attract the bird that drops it into the snow, where it dives down to the molten snow base to sprout, long before the spring sun ,,,

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… this self reads this environment well. Why not. It is its nerve system. From zero, all points are alive.

Loons Confusing Eagles

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

I’ve watched loons intimately for 25 years, and I just noticed a couple of splendid bits of camouflage for the first time. The light was right. First, the tail. Not only does it hold a chick on that scooped back but in the absence of a young chick riding up there, it looks like one. Confuses an eagle like all get out, I suspect. Eagles aren’t that bright. P1200861 Thing is, there are two loons, rarely together, and usually one chick, often floating alone in the middle of the lake, on the principle that eagles are punctual (they are) and can be relied on (well, not really; they’re slouches). The chicks are often riding, though. When larger, they’re swimming at a parent’s breast, usually Mom’s, although Dad brings fish, so that’s good. And look at this second bit of camouflage: a ghost chick swimming along at the breast line. It’s all in the feathers. P1200878

Or is the chick in behind and slightly older, with its head peeking up, going in the opposite direction as Mom? An eagle is slouching at speed. It can count, but, sheesh, where to go? This moment’s hesitation is why there are still loons, because by the time the eagle has figured out, it has passed by. Beautiful!

Dawn on Earth

Posted on August 18, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

It is a wave breaking on a shore. P1240161
It is sifted by trees that hold the night within themselves.

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The sun enters the water, and shines from there. (In the image below, it catches a tree that fell here before I was born, and has raised generations of trout in its weave.) P1240181

As the sun is filtered by the living trees over the shoulder of the forest, it lifts the water and the land together.

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During the day that follows, it is a memory, written in light.

wet2 This is when the wind carries the wave forward, through all the dimensions. wet

The water and the light flow with it, right through you.

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Where they become one is where you are. Only there. In all this universe. Earth creature, this is what your thinking looks like.

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Right through dusk. Of the day and of the year.

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Into the night.

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Then it begins again.

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That is your mathematics, earth dweller.

P1230289 That is your music.You who live where the sun and the water meet …

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… and become one. P1230277

If you understand that, or find yourself trying to understand that, or think that these words or this conception is poetry, or that these are images of nature or psychology, please go back …

P1240196 … and try again. P1240219

And again.

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And again.

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Please take your time.

Why Beauty?

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

Beauty is a signature that a human was present, using its bodily senses to measure the precise balances in a landscape and to align its body with them. palepond

Some beautiful early morning light on the Big Bar Wetland, for sure, but also beaver, fish, frog and bird habitat, under precise conditions, and damselflies, which give life meaning. damsels at dawn

Yes, that’s another sign of a human presence, and is the resting place for an apprehension of beauty, recorded in memory. These physical abilities are useful, and powerful. Memory is consciousness. P1200646