(Ansel Adams) “Think like a mountain,” instructs the famous ecologist and philosopher Aldo Leopold in his book The Sand County Almanac. The essay documents Leopold’s realization that human scale can never truly apprehend or predict the complex, intertangled animacy of an ecosystem. When we kill off one animal or invasive species, we set off a cascade of unintended consequences. As Leopold notes, “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf”. Only the assemblage of beings – the stones and streams and insects and fluidity of weather – can properly assess what attunements and shifts are necessary. Leopold’s exercise in holistic consciousness became a building block in modern ecological preservation and restoration. We must always admit that our human desires are insufficient in understanding complex systems. Still, it is important to try to imagine at larger scales, and to constantly be formulating ecology as an interrogative practice. What does the ecosystem want? What are the tides of weeds and pests and migrating animals telling us?
Wonderful to read this love for mountains. I’m grown up in the lowlands and don’t know mountains, so it’s beautiful to read your communion with the landscape that is so foreign to me. I’m part of the sea, the never not moving waters, that pull at me and lap my feet, always talking, whispering, roaring and singing. A greeting from the sea to your mountains.
Dec 17, 2023·edited Dec 17, 2023Liked by Sophie Strand
This piece puts me in mind of a place near where I'm living called Rattlesnake Gutter, a scenic boulder filled chasm filled with a primordial stillness which takes me by surprise each time I hike up the old road which runs through it. I long ago noticed that all of its boulders, some the size of locomotives, are in motion, although at such a slow pace on human scale that they appear motionless. Still, it is apparent, although I could not tell you to whom or what. If you were sitting at the base of a waterfall and the water suddenly froze - not with cold but with stillness - so that it appeared to be falling still even though the motion was no longer perceptible, well, that is how Rattlesnake Gutter looks to me: stone moving at its stony pace, time moving on multiple scales simultaneously, which, I suppose, it is. I'd love to pin a photo here of that place but it's not allowed.
i absolutely LOVE that you connected nan & zen. this was the topic of my university thesis. there is so much relationship there - also upon reading her diaries in edinburgh i found all these other amazing influences. rabindranath tagore and lafcadio hearn off the top of my head...
the way this work of yours FEELS though renders my desire to connect names and such almost meaningless. but i thought i’d mention it nonetheless mainly because i am excited by it !
I've been working with Gary Snyder's "Mountains and Rivers Without End" and the companion text, "A Sense of the Whole." This epic poem is Snyder's magnum opus, actively authored over forty years. Its most iconic line is "walking on walking." Like all poetry, the line has many interpretations, but some interpret it as: just as our natural state as humans is in motion in the landscape, the landscape we traverse is also constantly in motion under foot, dynamic and transforming.
I've concurrently been reading John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning geological epic, "From Annals of the Former World." It is an excellent geological companion to Snyders work (often describing the very same landbeings Snyder courts in his poetry), as it points illustrates the livingness of the earth through the lens of the geological sciences.
Delightful. Will come back to this. It would pair well with meditation.
Speaking of, the only place I’ve encountered Dogen before is a “16 Boddhisattva Precepts” reading I found on Insight Timer, which includes commentary from Boddhidharma, Dogen, and Zen Peacemakers. It was the only thing I meditated with for a while. I love the liturgical opening by Boddhidharma followed by the always-high-as-a-kite Dogen and the down-to-earth practicality of Zen Peacemakers. You can find a pdf of it here https://villagezendo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-16-Bodhisattva-Precepts-of-the-Village-Zendo.pdf
Lovely meditation. The shift from thinking like, to feeling with, to (co)existing as, to being lived by... ❤️
Sophie! This is truly gorgeous writing of the ineffable, Mountains! BRAVA! So heartfelt and profound.
Thank you.
Wonderful to read this love for mountains. I’m grown up in the lowlands and don’t know mountains, so it’s beautiful to read your communion with the landscape that is so foreign to me. I’m part of the sea, the never not moving waters, that pull at me and lap my feet, always talking, whispering, roaring and singing. A greeting from the sea to your mountains.
Oh what an expansively immersive love letter Sophie! And I am honored to know those mountains a little from my visits ❤️
This piece puts me in mind of a place near where I'm living called Rattlesnake Gutter, a scenic boulder filled chasm filled with a primordial stillness which takes me by surprise each time I hike up the old road which runs through it. I long ago noticed that all of its boulders, some the size of locomotives, are in motion, although at such a slow pace on human scale that they appear motionless. Still, it is apparent, although I could not tell you to whom or what. If you were sitting at the base of a waterfall and the water suddenly froze - not with cold but with stillness - so that it appeared to be falling still even though the motion was no longer perceptible, well, that is how Rattlesnake Gutter looks to me: stone moving at its stony pace, time moving on multiple scales simultaneously, which, I suppose, it is. I'd love to pin a photo here of that place but it's not allowed.
i absolutely LOVE that you connected nan & zen. this was the topic of my university thesis. there is so much relationship there - also upon reading her diaries in edinburgh i found all these other amazing influences. rabindranath tagore and lafcadio hearn off the top of my head...
the way this work of yours FEELS though renders my desire to connect names and such almost meaningless. but i thought i’d mention it nonetheless mainly because i am excited by it !
I've been working with Gary Snyder's "Mountains and Rivers Without End" and the companion text, "A Sense of the Whole." This epic poem is Snyder's magnum opus, actively authored over forty years. Its most iconic line is "walking on walking." Like all poetry, the line has many interpretations, but some interpret it as: just as our natural state as humans is in motion in the landscape, the landscape we traverse is also constantly in motion under foot, dynamic and transforming.
I've concurrently been reading John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning geological epic, "From Annals of the Former World." It is an excellent geological companion to Snyders work (often describing the very same landbeings Snyder courts in his poetry), as it points illustrates the livingness of the earth through the lens of the geological sciences.
Delightful. Will come back to this. It would pair well with meditation.
Speaking of, the only place I’ve encountered Dogen before is a “16 Boddhisattva Precepts” reading I found on Insight Timer, which includes commentary from Boddhidharma, Dogen, and Zen Peacemakers. It was the only thing I meditated with for a while. I love the liturgical opening by Boddhidharma followed by the always-high-as-a-kite Dogen and the down-to-earth practicality of Zen Peacemakers. You can find a pdf of it here https://villagezendo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-16-Bodhisattva-Precepts-of-the-Village-Zendo.pdf