The Path Ahead

As most California places go, Sagehen Station is remote.  As the hawk flies, it is 20 miles to the nearest town, 20 miles to the nearest residence, 20 miles to the closest people.  20 miles is a long way to walk through country like this.  It is the distance that separates me from the next dreaming human each night when I lie in bed.  20 miles if the truck breaks down.  20 miles if I hurt myself or become ill.  It gives me pause once in awhile.

I put a lot of thought into why I am here, and what I hope to get out of life here.  Why choose such isolation, why a landscape with such serious consequences?  Why a place so devoid of other people?

The simple answer is that I come by it honestly.  Admiration for the lone journey has been my companion throughout life...all of my life.  It is a fundamental part of who I am.  I was always fascinated by the stories of adventure in the lore of mountains and oceans...the strong, solitary adventurer deep in the wild, alone, his survival dependent on his skills pressed by the constant test of the environment.  While at school, I admired the pantheistic individualism expressed by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman and all the other wordsmiths of the Romantic Era.  So too, solitary spiritual writers like Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani.  I suffered a persistent gnawing for solitude through a couple of long partnerships, despite their deep pleasures.  Yet I likely would have never had a chance to experience a solitary life were it not for the death of my second wife.  But die she did, and with a few scars left in her passing, she gave me an opportunity I would not have chosen, but now relish.

With that opportunity, I am powerless to resist exploring the dream of Sagehen Station.  How could I not embrace it, this chance to really and truly follow one of my heart's strongest curiosities?  The surprise, to me and perhaps others, is that despite knowing the desire plenty well, I don't have a solid vision of where it will lead.  What will a life lived very alone feel like after a year?  After ten?  I don't know.  How might it change who I am?

I believe our lives are shaped by all the events and experiences each of us live.  Emergent from these events and experiences is the unique path each of us finds ourself on.  When I came of age, I fled Southern California and the human decline it represents to me...people living behind double-locked doors, drapes drawn, pretending the ugliness outside their walls doesn't really exist...people spending hours on the freeways (boy, what a euphemism), heart rates elevated, multitasking between their cell phones and iPods.  They don't even know about the qualities in life they have lost.  Perhaps that is the saddest thing.  I see these paths, rushed people busy in their urban entanglements, as sheer hell.  There is hardly a space to look long and hard at a natural vista.  Hardly a space to contemplate who you are and how you fit.  No room for humbleness there.

So far, my path has been fortunate with many years in quiet and beautiful places, some shared with good partners and friends, some alone.  The journey has eased me into a slower pace of moving and thinking, a pace with a focused attentiveness to the world around me.  The longer I am here, the more focused I become on the goings-on outside these walls.  My attention is being pulled in directions more wild.  It is in this sense that I believe landscapes sculpt us over time, and that the landscapes we choose, each one of us, get expressed in who we become.  And in this knowledge lies the power of control, if we are only brave enough to grasp hold.

My path is here, and now, in this place of breathless beauty and vast expanse.  I feel small and insignificant, and it makes me smile.  Now, for me, is Sagehen Station, and forward is a journey into a solitary existence with the natural world, a non-denominational hermitage of sorts.  It fulfills a dream carried through many years.  Perhaps some of my questions will find answers.  Others may disappear.  The spirit around me manifests in the sage and pine, in the canyon and the mountain.  It pulls me in, constantly, an invitation received in every glance.  It is my cathedral for worship, and it is my home.

And over time, I will be shaped further, I hope gently, by this wild place.

                                                                                                                      -gmm

The Hawk And I

March 9, 2012

60 degrees on this amazingly-sweet spring day.  The dishes are done and drying, the bed made, and I have no particular plans other than to enjoy myself.  Outside, the sun is intense on what little snow remains, and the breeze brushes warm in passing.  That springtime sense of clean is everywhere, no dust to be seen.  The greens and browns of the sage and bitterbrush appear saturated with color, the entire landscape an astounding canvas of delight and welcome.  It is a perfect morning to walk...no, to stroll out and about, to see what goings-on are going on.  The open, dry sand of the road heading out through the forest looks more inviting than the hardened snow still on the road up through Sagehen Saddle, so out I walk, the sun on my back, toward a special spot of mine whose shared company is long overdue.

This is one of my magic perches.  It is a place I visit infrequently, despite being a place that brings me calm and pleasant, mindful introspection.  I don't want to wear it out.  Its views are unsurpassed by anything my imagination can conjure.  It is stunning to sit here, the warm spring wind coming off the tops of the Jeffrey Pines to my south and west.  I feel like an eagle in flight, soaring over this grand landscape.

Whenever I sit at this spot, this tree-top-height extrusion of rock, and look out over this big country, I feel pulled by the expanse, like I could fall into it as I might a pool of water.  It gives me a surprising sense of belonging.  It is a Spirit Spot for me, a place ripe with powerful suggestions.  But how so or why, I haven't a clue.  Yet I know its regenerative power from experience.  Repeatable experience.  It seems real enough, this renewal I feel when visiting my Spirit Spot, but to give it a name would be to lose the mystery, and thus the reality, of its existence.  So I think of it as spirit and leave it at that.

Spirit, in any of its imagined manifestations from religion to extra sensory perception to ghosts, if it exists at all, is likely an emergent phenomenon, a phenomenon arising out of the interaction of seven billion human thought processors all working at the same time, some in parallel, some in series, and all electrical at their core (our collective consciousness).  As such, it would be as real as your big toe, but existing on a plain so beyond our reality it might as well be in another universe.  Perhaps spirit IS in another universe.

A deep thinker named Stuart Kauffman, at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute during the 80s and 90s, pioneered the study of emergent phenomena, phenomena that arise when a given network of individual entities, all operating under similar laws, achieves a certain critical complexity of design and interaction.  Kauffman's springboard into this world was his study of Boolian Networks, networks comprised of individual nodes in one of two states, A or B, each with a simple set of operating commands and communication pathways connecting them to adjacent nodes (ie. if path=a-a, A, if path=a-b, B).  Activate a communication path here, a communication path there, a few over here, and not much happens.  But continue to activate more and more communication paths, and there comes a point when, all of a sudden, the addition of one activated pathway more and the whole system goes critical with waves of As and Bs marching back and forth over the network display in surprisingly lawful patterns.  Boolian networks are simple mathematical worlds.  But the underlying laws that have predictive power in these simple worlds apparently hold true as you work deeper and deeper into increasing complexity.  Emergent phenomena exist in some future state of all complex systems...once and if the critical limit of complexity is reached by that system.  This is all a bit thick, so bear with me one minute more.

Examples of emergent phenomena are MOLECULES, emerging out of the random yet lawful interaction of particles...once those interactions reach a certain level of complexity; CELLS, emerging out of molecules, again once those molecules reach a certain density and diversity; CONSCIOUSNESS, emerging out of the interactions of somewhere between 80 billion and 120 billion brain cells all interconnected on a massive biotic electrical grid; and SPIRIT, I suggest, perhaps arising out of the interaction of we seven billion thinkers.  Regarding spirit, maybe seven billion processors isn't nearly enough to go critical.  Maybe it will take 700 billion...we'll never know.  All of these emergent phenomena are lawful to some degree, in that they can be predicted to occur, just not when or how or why.  Here's the take-home point for this discussion...an entity on one level of the emergent phenomena ladder, on one level of interactive complexity, cannot, by law, gain information about the emergent phenomena above it arising out of its participation in its own level.  In other words, each rung of the ladder may know things about the phenomena that are occurring below it on the ladder, but CANNOT gain any information about the phenomena arising on a rung above it.  So say the mathematical laws of the Theory Of Complexity.  OK, just a little more...

Another way to say the same thing is that particles cannot know about molecules, molecules cannot know about cells, cells cannot know about consciousness...and we, these conscious things that we are, amazing conglomerations of organic molecules, cannot know, really know, anything about spirit.  We cannot see it, hear it, touch it, smell it or taste it.  It does not manifest in any way on our floor of the building.  It is mystery.  It requires an elevator key to activate its button before the car will go that high.  But as sure as there is mystery that surrounds us, we intuit that spirit exists.  Maybe our concepts of ghost, of soul, of religion, of God, concepts all uniquely individual, are the human efforts to name those things that may, MAY emerge from the churning network of our seven billion actions, thoughts, dialogues and musings.  Maybe we have a real inkling that a ladder rung is up there above us somewhere.  It is a consistent thought at least, one defined by mystery and the laws of Complexity.

A hawk cries out overhead, pulling me back to the land.  The breeze stirs again, long wisps of hair dancing across my cheek.  I let myself soar over the world, a spirit in thought, riding the tail of the hawk over tree tops now far below.  We glide west against the wind, circling up, then again, higher still, always west toward the Mono Craters ahead.  And then a hard right bank off the broad white slopes below and down through the Dry Creek drainage toward Mono Lake's still waters.  The older Jeffreys stand like flags above the green plain, stalwarts from a long-ago war not of our time.  Right again now and up over the shimmering sand flats, heated air spiraling us back up to the sun above.  And then down across Cowtrack Mountain, the wild horses kicking and prancing at Gaspipe Spring below.  I am grounded here, a part of this landscape.  My particles (my!) mix with those of the hawk and the trees and sage and wind and snow-capped peaks, all in the warm spring dance of a single moment.  The hawk and I, these trees, the sage, the wild horses, we are each a manifest phenomenon arising out of the particle soup of our reality.  But on the larger scale of Spirit, we are all particles in the underlying soup of life, a soup out of which what phenomena arise our imaginations can only ponder.   Phenomena, for sure, more distant than our eyes can see, more extraordinary than our minds can create.

                                                                                                                                     -gmm