Nessmuk hated pothunters. Pothunters are guys who hunt for trophies, killing animals indiscriminately to satisfy their need for power over other living things - essentially using hunting to build their ego. As an artist, how do I stay honest about my own tendency in this direction?

While I no longer hunt with a gun, I still hunt. Hunting is deep in my genetic codes, as is violence, greed, and a strong survival instinct.  When I chant along with Zaadsters , "love, joy, peace and beads" I have this sensation like cold water running down my spine. How do I transcend and include the dark hunting meme?

I hunt now with a camera and a pen and an audio recorder. I capture beauty and bring it home to show people. Pothunter? Maybe, in a way. At least the danger is there.

I have started a new writing project in which I will be visiting 100 lakes on Vancouver Island and writing about my experiences. I hope that I can accomplish this without damaging my soul, without becoming a pothunter.

You can view my progress here: http://www.stillinthestream.com/files/100lakes.html

Let me know if you see my ego swelling. Feel free to apply a cold compress.

Thanks,

Richard

 

There is an RCMP truck in my rear view mirror. I'm in the middle of a logging road, deep in the inner forrest of Vancouver Island, cruising along with my canoe on top, looking for Kissinger Lake, and this cop is suddenly on my tail and I pull over and he goes past. I guess the forests really aren't safe.

The road has changed since the last time I was here. Frost covers the dormant broad leaf maple trunks and the wintery sun ricochets light through a mist hanging in the grey boughs. I turn around and head back toward Cowichan Lake, then decide to check out the Kissinger Lake Recreation Site, what used to be called a forestry campground. The campground road leads to the lake. What a surprise. I see why I missed it now, they switched roads, started using an old one. It's marked as a dotted line on the map, usually a deactivated road or trail. But they must have ressurected it. The shifting roads disoriented me. That seems to be how I feel whenever I drive through an area of "active logging." No map maker can keep up. 

The lake is beautiful; a slight mist rises off it. I  hear a grader grading a road in the distance. 4 young men, load ATV's into the back of 3 large trucks. They had fun today. Slightly drunk, one of them sings along to a country song playing on one of the truck's radios. I talk to him. "Were just leaving" he says, throwing some garbage on their fire. They climb into their rigs and drive off, leaving me to unload my boat in the dwindling light, the smoke from their fire acrid in my nose.

I paddle onto the lake, the silence closes in behind me. Out on the misty water I rest, the canoe drifts to a stop. Somewhere in the dark I hear a fish break the surface.

 

Rounding the bushy bend, a brace of ducks beat air into sound into ears and my eyes track them, wing singing across the marsh. Where in all this stillness will I find a home for that name, that label, for that feeling; where can I paste a note for others?

 "warning, this point may cause disorientation, loss of comprehension, and feelings of unusual awe."

 

Do you have time to feel good about human thoughtfulness? The following video is long, almost 20 minutes, and I know that most people are not willing to watch a person speak about design for 20 minutes, but if you do, if you watch to the end, you may find yourself wanting more designs like these. I did. It gave me hope and insight.

I hope you will watch. If you do, what will you do with your own hope and insight?

I tried to post the video directly into this blog, but I guess it is too long, so here is the link instead,



William McDonough: The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/104

Thanks,

Richard

Like shards of classic blue on white china these sand etched shells fly past in the long back wash of each wave down the smooth slope of the beach. The boys swing whole kelp at each other, sand spattering their faces, and on this immense beach, all these thousand miles of water rush over whales and sea grass  to cool my toes, the call of a killdeer abbreviated by the wind. The teenage girl who waited on us at lunch rarely visits the beach, her life defined by thoughts of getting away from this small town. And we, giddy tourists wading in her wake, notice all the people gawking at the absence of land. We travel to lose sight of home, to glimpse the unfamiliar so that returning; we can remember what others overlook.  And at the end of her shift, the smell of food on her clothes, the waitress rushes to a movie, the raw explosion of sky containing only the broken vase of clouds pouring out a stain of sun against the darkening sound.

Fiona Robyn's new book "A Year of Questions: how to slow down and fall in love with life", promises to be a great read for those who appreciate a sympathetic companion on the road to intentional awareness.

I have enjoyed Fiona's sharp eye for the overlooked and missed treasures of each day regularly recorded on her "a small stone" blog. Fiona has the enviable ability to capture salient  feelings, insights, and humour in a few choice words. Her gentle encouragement to face the complexities of being who you are is a happy antidote to the many voices trying to convince you to be someone you're not. Her  friendly voice and cheerful enthusiasm are infectious.

I also like Fiona's honesty, and she starts her book the way I wish all books started, with a clear outline of what to expect from, and how best to use, the book. She wonders aloud about her reader, and through this wondering I felt included. What a thing to be included right from the start of a book. She gives her credentials, and answers the "why should you listen to me" question.  Have you ever wondered, "Is this author's advice coming from an academic understanding, personal experience, or both?" Fiona tells you right from the start. Like a good writer should, she has ingested whole years of words, ideas, observations, and poetic turns of phrase, from countless books, and synthesised it all into accessible prose, studded with observations from her daily life. The beauty of literature married to the experiential.

Each selection starts with an anecdote or experience from Fiona's life, followed by some questions and a suggestion for the week, and a couple of choice quotes. The questions are not the sorts that have yes or no answers, they are the kind that make you look into space while your inner eye probes the neural web of your heart, coaxing out answers that you want to find. There are themes that run through the book such as simplicity, the importance of reflective thinking, and making friends with the difficult bits of you.

As part of the age-old and newly discovered wisdom of adequacy, Fiona appears to believe that her reader has the answers to the questions she put forth. Think how nice it would be to spend a year with a fellow traveler like that!

Available directly from Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/content/807043), and Fiona tells me the book will also be available on Amazon later in the year.

Topical application of currency, rubbing it in, and the slow bleeding of change from my life. Can we make music from loss? Is there a sob that echoes back as song? For what does it profit a man to gain eternal life but loose his very soul? Rushing for health I miss the normal outgrowth of disease, the thing called character, which seems to have a close approximation to weariness. A clarity, a settling of sediment, the lighter spirits greeting my nose first, when it is I myself which has been opened. Age drags wine to that drinkable band of time beyond which something else happens – an increase in acidity as frailer molecules devolve. Seize the day takes on new meaning. I should drink the wine at the right time, when it is mature, not necessarily when a certain number of months have been clocked. I rub money on my pain in hopes that possessions will block the outflow of time, the ever present ebb of years. There is no going back, there is no firm foundation, even Jesus is changing, showing up in a new car, winking at me from the drug store window, his sure scared hand steadying my fall into the unknown. How is it that we love the dead so much, even the resurrected? Life is moving on, bright trout puzzle in the solution of days.

End of a long day, 10 hours of work behind me, longing for beauty, feeling my health slide, feeling adrenaline still at work in my body, even this late at night. I dreamed of a lying on a beach in some resort while I was working away on important business today. I felt bad that I wanted to be somewhere else. Not mindful, not deliberate, just running away. Flight of fight response, and thinking about our clients, the poor and homeless, no palm strewn beach for them to lie on.

My moral conviction is not as strong as it was when I was thirty; it has tangled into a knotted ball of complexity. Youth has its passion, but middle age has a certain sombre acceptance. I miss dad and I wonder if I am grieving well. Is my ambivalence related to my grief? How soft the rain seemed when I was caught in it the other day without a hat. I was less frustrated by it and wondered: is this a good thing?

I am beginning to think that there is a part of sorrow that is like that feeling you get when you are half way through a jigsaw puzzle and realise that maybe some of the pieces are actually missing. How long do we search for something that isn't there?

I rain across a country, my inner hillsides greening in the downpour. I drive down hard, fragments of myself into grass, washing dust down to the roots, consciousness like a cloud emptying itself, getting thinner until the sun beyond makes beams through my mind. Then all of a sudden there is only clear sky, my whole self condensed out onto the fertile steppes of some less cognitive land, my ego trickling away between all those blades.

Sometimes we grow so heavy from being awake. But then, strangely, consciousness emerges again, molecule by molecule I form again, clouding up the clear blue beyond, until I feel whole again. Losing myself, re-forming, pouring, evaporating. Maybe the mystics finally see that we can never stop being awake until that day we sleep for good. Maybe they do, but so many talk about stilling the mind, loosing self, becoming one with that larger land. My mystical storm is part of a cycle, pouring both down and up, rain and evaporation defining my orbit between forgetting and remembering. Forgetting and remembering I am.