objectification

gaze

 My eye for me is a certain power of making contact with things, and not a screen on which they are projected … The other’s gaze transforms me into an object, and mine, him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature [left hemisphere], if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up as understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s. This is what happens, for instance, when I fall under the eyes of a stranger. But even then the objectification of each by the other’s gaze is felt as unbearable only because it takes the place of a possible communication.

~Maurice Merleau-Pontry (cited: Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emmissary, p.166)

dandelion project

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All phenomena of being, since time memorial, are independent of concepts and words. Concepts and words cannot transform them or separate them from their true nature.

~The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana  (cited: Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys, pg. 81)

vulgar songs fill the days…

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Customs become diluted year after year.

Both the noble and the common decline.

The human mind grows fragile with time;

the ancestral way becomes fainter day by day.

Teachers can’t see past the name of their school;

students enable their teachers’ narrow-mindedness.

They are glued to each other,

unwilling to change.
…
Thornbushes grow around high halls,

fragrant flowers wither in the weeds.

Vulgar songs fill the days.

Who will expound the luminous teaching?

Ah, I, a humble one,

have encountered this era.

When a great house is about to crumble,

a stick cannot keep it from falling.

Unable to sleep on a clear night,

I toss in bed, …

~Ryokan, 1796-1816 (K Tanahashi, Sky Above, Great Wind)

wpc: satisfaction

Old Fall River Road, a motor nature trail, is an auto route in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Forest that travels through the park’s wilderness to Fall River Pass, 11,796 feet above sea level.  This road follows a course traveled long ago by Indian hunters in search of game and passes the site of a labor camp which housed state convicts who built a three-mile section of the 11 mile-long road with nothing more than hand tools.

The graveled one-way road which rarely exceeds 14 feet in width was largely built out from the hillside.  In the steepest places, multiple switchbacks are stacked one above the other.  What periodically blinded me to the absolute beauty of montane and subalpine forests, wild flowers, water falls, and alpine landscape along this narrow and curved road was the absence of any guard rails between me and the road-snuggling, never-ending, deep valleys.

wpcsatisfaction

the top of the world

At one point I found myself pulled back into memories of those Sunday drives through Rabbit Ears Pass where my parents, both deaf, would chat away with each other–eyes off the road–about the beauty around them…in sign language.   Fear began to subside as we moved above the timber line to the Alpine Visitors Center.  This Center, the highest facility of its kind in the National Park Services, offers a deep satisfaction and gratitude  to the national park community for offering a road trip to the birthplace of glaciers that once worked they way up and down the mountain valleys and the Never Summer Wilderness where the temperature was 60 degrees…30 degrees less than the summer we escaped from earlier that day.