From Up On Frederick's Stone

There is a profound double negativity to life, to complexity. I struggle what to call it, because life implies something positive, in contrast to death, but we often also mean by “life” the cycle of life and death, nature, existence, reality. English is lacking, in this regard.

Where was I? Oh yes, I was mentioning how last year in June I had come up against the lack of a word for the quality of resilience that does not abate during the destabilization process. It was like something out of a catechism, a Westminster Confession for the 21st century. What is that which outlives mortal strife? It is unde-______. I felt strongly that an English word existed, but I could not put my finger on it. I searched the dictionary for a few days, fervently. My effort for the word exhibited the word itself. Then, all of a sudden, an image, almost clear as day—definitely clear as moonlight—came to mind. It was an image of the high Sierra, with a lake in the foreground, a pointed peak in the background, rolling glacial terrain all around. Islands in the lake, dotted round with pine trees. I drew what it looked like and showed my friend who knew the Sierra decently well from growing up in the Boy Scouts and backpacking with his dad. Immediately, he said, “That’s Thousand Island Lake.” The resemblance was striking. The moon was in the distance, it was a gibbous moon. My search for a word for a concept had become a search for a place.

My affection for the Sierras began in the summer between the fourth and fifth grade, when my papa took us to Yosemite. We stayed in Oakhurst, and purchased a giant sub sandwich from Vons for lunch. As most family vacations go, it took us until past noon to get into Yosemite, the Mariposa sequoia grove. I remember being in awe of seeing a deer amble casually past the row of cars, and how casually my dad commented that they are used to people. The giant trees really caught my imagination, and I later wrote a little piece about them for fifth grade, in which I used the word gargantuan for the first time and perhaps the most fittingly in my life, and drew a picture that got an award with the library of some kind. I remember feeling the effects of altitude at 7000 ft, of marvelling at the water bottle becoming tense with the relative air pressure difference inside and outside. I remember the shorts and shirt I was wearing that day at Glacier point, and how much I wanted to run around the rocks and see all the vistas, but time was ebbing. The winding forest road, the tunnel view, the valley meadows, looking down on the clear and broad Merced river—I had never seen a real river before. I begged to drive up the Tioga Road, and we went as far as overlooking the Tenaya Canyon. The slanting, glinting light, the amber glow on almost purple granitic gray, the clear wind, the sparsity of trees up there. I remember my papa frantically trying to use an old camp stove to make a pot of soup to satiate my mother and me. But the high country had sunk its lovely venom into me. Yosemite transported me. I begged to go back for a few years.

Fast forwarding, I had visited the Sierras a few more times through middle/high school, Yosemite once again with my parents and family dog, the east Sierra twice with my aunt and uncle, but it had not yet become an independent love. Neither was hiking. I would go on long rambling walks once I became a Christian. Once I walked nine miles from my house to the summit of a local mountain (Stanley Peak) barefoot and without water, only donning my flip flops to get across broken glass. I would meander the hills of San Luis Obispo like a 19th century romantic poet of the Lake Country, melancholically searching for the dreamy ideal. People portrayed me as a mountain man, a hobbit. Perhaps the sheer whimsy for the hillsides and woods made me out to be a John Muir category. It was an aesthetic pursuit, one brimming with glory in the beginning and then rotting with disappointment and disillusionment in the pursuit for the lost Edenic aesthetic purity, the fresh eyes of the heart. I am still searching for those fresh eyes, yet I keep approaching. The fog is thin, I can see the coastline rocks and shrubs and trees from this vast ocean of longing.

One of my biggest regrets is not taking up backpacking in college. I was consumed with inward matters of faith. I had all this time and all this opportunity to meet people, and it didn’t even cross my mind. All I could do was envy the Front Porch church/coffee house community and their annual trips to Limekiln—which is now essentially my backyard. My love of nature was existentialized, internalized, scholastified. The touch of nature, the immanence of the body was something marketed to me in books about spirituality and phenomenology. Being outside was not a lifestyle. Hiking as a hobby was thrust upon me as a label. I never thought of myself as a hiker. I was simply going for long walks in the countryside, searching for self, for pleasure, for divinity, for truth. Albeit, nature existed for me almost as a representational tool, a symbolic medium.

Again, off to work I must go.


July 21, 2023
Gorda

A year or so ago, I became wrapped up in a lexophilic pursuit. I was looking for a word that surpasses “resilience.” When I was in grad school, the concept of resilience meant a lot to me. Emerging from a doctrinarian Christian background, both in the church and within myself, I felt that there were purer forms of morality than explicitated coda, abstract principles that were real yet not given over to stricture. It is also part of growing up to step back from the directions of one’s parents, one’s upbringing, one’s culture, to enter into the nebulous zone of individuation, to listen for the deeper movements. When we are young, we are given a simplified picture of the world, even if these simplifications introduce falsehoods that we must later outgrow and may even come to resent. Granted, it is difficult to guide children with a mature vision of truth, with all its complexities that may confuse, but I believe that children are better equipped to deal with complexities than most people give them credit. The decision to oversimplify reality seems quite often to be rooted in parental exhaustion at addressing a tireless chain of questions of why things are the way they are. So parents give metaphors and false representations so as to direct the child’s behavior into something better for them, even if the child does not understand at the time. If the child were expected to understand what a hot stove means, then maybe they would get burned trying to learn, and instead of explaining, the parent uses emotional force to simulate the effect of a burn and mitigate a burn from happening.

This is what is at stake in the New Testament. Jesus, the Apostle Paul, the essential gospel is about the juxtaposition between the constraining, simplified way of living, in which social norms and fear dominate, and the open-ended, ever-developing, mature way of living, in which learning and grace is at the heart. In a sense, it is a shift from outward, simplified, shallow forms of stability, and deeper, subtler, inward forms of stability. We stop looking for the God without and start finding the God within. This is the pivot point of Christianity, the trace curve of Jesus. We move from grasping for highly saturated images and allow the deeper resilience to hold us and guide us, through all sorts of mess. The tradeoff is that when you move out of fear-based living, from trying to barely survive to trying to create, from living against to living for, you lose a sense of clarity or definition. There is a sense of mattering, of importance, of need, of urgency when we live reactively. The transition from the two lifestyles is a rift zone where that loss produces all sorts of confusion and wandering and hurt. We may find ourselves disappointed by the apparent absence of God, the apparent absence of protection or creature comfort. It is much the same when we go from the city to the wilderness. We may at first interpret nature’s apparent indifference as hostility, even outright aggression. Nature’s silence may seem like an evil toward us, and in running from the indifferent silence, we throw ourselves into all sorts of calamaties that would not have arisen had we first slowed down and acknowledged that there is no demon chasing us in the solitude but our own fear. Yes, the open-endedness of real living is frightening and more chaotic, in a way. It opens you up to failure, to change, to hurt, you stop trying to cover over your mistakes or coping for other people. You start to accept loss even though it hurts. The whirlwind passes through your life and you hold your palms open. If you were to trade away the wind so you could gain control, you would also trade away the depth and height of living. To stand in the center of the world’s whirlwind, you enter into the vast unfiltered void of outer space. Despite the wild, raw chaos, your life is also purified of the internal constraints that drive our panic. It takes time to develop the new awareness. We must attempt to hold fast as the waves pass through us, bobbing in the surf like the otter wrapped in kelp. The holdfast may be hundreds of feet beneath us, and it may even rip out, but it is holding us in a way that is deeper and more secure than we ever could hold ourselves. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. We should learn to trust the depth, the natural resilience. The world is being balanced in a way that far surpasses our understanding.

Now as time went along, I began to feel that resilience was still a lacking term. Resilience implied that you could push something very far, and it would return. But in the process, there a sense of loss, as if you temporarily kill the stabilizing force in deviating from an average, moderate, normal state. I wanted to acknowledge with a word that which does not go away and yet is also in no way a simplified constant, in no way a metaphysical security blanket. Yes, I’m searching for consolation, but I’m wanting to refine through the false hopes as well as the false pessimisms. The fractal that unifies the cycle through life and death, through good and evil, samsara and nirvana. It was a concept I had loosely imagined years ago while writing a poem. I searched the dictionary for a few days, and I irresolutely pinned down the word “unadulterated.” It was simply the high point I got to at the time. I felt little need to go further. I was at the time content with Jesus being the answer to everything, and so the quest went dormant for a few years. I learned resilience, and that was the new filler word. Then I got to a point in life where I wanted a word for what is beyond that, beyond a mere returnability into a fullness of re-emerging, the very source of life that overcomes all the havoc slated against it, even is the havoc slated against it, the dynamic within the dynamic, the flux of the flux. I scoured and scoured and scoured the dictionary for a few days straight last year. I have to run to work, so I can’t tell the full story right now, but it involves a vision of a specific place in the high Sierra, and an unending search for the word. I felt the word must have the prefix unde-. It was a double negative, and that felt right. I will tell the story more full. Undetracted, undepleted, unphased, undissuaded, undetained.


July 20, 2023
Gorda

(republished with edits)

Samantabhadra becomes Vajrapani by Vairocana and then argues with Vairocana about Mahesvara, leads Mahesvara and his entourage to Mount Meru, all flee or are defeated but Mahesvara, and in a grueling battle, Vajrapani kils Mahesvara.

In this blog post, I’m going to keep tayloring my writing and consolidating research, chart/maintain my progress, use this as a climbing route, so to speak. Maybe it will end up being a series of posts. I’m hoping to publish a short paper through the Geological Society of America’s journal, Geology, which only publishes short papers (max 4 pages).
https://www.geosociety.org/GSA/GSA/Pubs/geology/home.aspx

When I first noticed that the Arctic Ocean is almost exactly opposite to the Antarctic continent, I felt a jolt of delight, perhaps like that of early geographers when they noticed how well Africa and the Americas fit together. An antipodal map of Earth curiously reveals that most continental crust is opposite to ocean.

Just some brief thoughts to jot down before work.

The sea vs storm myth contains narrativized national histories, gender studies, cultural dynamics, religious histories, psychoanalysis, climate studies, the metaphysics and ontology of complexity. It is a multifaceted hermeneutic—a many-sided lens. I want to say a little bit on the gender studies aspect of it and transition that into the challenge of modern civilization left unresolved in it.

Today’s thoughts.

Something I glossed over in my earlier post. The how and the what of difference from the before/after. What is the essence of perfection? Being itself.