Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Best of the 60's to 20teens:Asleep At The Wheel



The Best and Worst of Times
 60's to 20teens Asleep At The Wheel


by Paul Manski

Introduction:

20 years ago(now 30), Cora Wyoming 82925.


This was written in 1989 while living near the Cora Y, I found it in the form of a typed document, typed on a manual typewriter. I was going through some boxes recently (2009) that i was allowed to keep after being dumped in St George then Phoenix, and decided to elaborate on the themes it discussed.

I lived on Herman Genetti's property just south of the “Y”, at the broad flat plains below the Wind River mountains, in the upper Colorado basin watershed, east of the Green river, one of the major tributaries of the Colorado.

Mr Genetti was an amazing man, 7th day Adventist and followed the old ways doing the real work. He worked because that was what he did, with or without pay as an expression of his nature. He was also a writer and deep thinker he could go on for hours about nearly anything to do with the Wind Rivers, Pinedale history and ranch life. He wrote and published a book, “Herman'sHowlings”, which incidentally was not based on the book Howl by Allen Ginsburg.


He cut cedar and lodgepole pine up in the mountains in and around Pinedale and brought them back in a pickup truck and trailer. He also had some draft horses and used them to skid the timber. He then peeled the poles and sold them to ranchers for fence posts. He also cut firewood and sold it. I lived at the Y in an trailer house with a lady who I'll call Marlene who was pregnant with my son. Marlene is not her real name but approximates the feel and sound of her name. Previous to that we were both seasonal Forest Service employees.

The gist of the piece I found had to do with a sense that the world is a living, thinking, feeling being. What appears as rocks, mountains, monoclines, forests, deserts, lakes and watersheds are in fact parts of the living thinking, sensing being that we participate with and can not separate ourselves from. We too engage with our human friends, relatives, lovers, enemies, strangers as part of this process. The drama that unfolds is unfolding us according to some plan or pattern. Our highest duty is to engage in the drama with relish and passion and uphold our uniqueness at the same time developing a knowledge and familiarity with our ecosphere, bioregion to develop an authentic sense of place.

Further ruminations on this theme have showed me intimations that this maybe a unique part of the American experience. Americans are for the most part unlike many rooted cultures longstanding and persevering in a specific place. We come from other places then in in intricate seduction become enthralled with our surroundings. The seduction is ongoing and goes in fits and stops, sometimes generational other times as individuals. This piece talks or attempts to talk about the 60's and the generational acceptance and seduction by place that occurred for many young people who went back to the land and attempted to re-connect with place, rediscover place and in the process found meaning and purpose for their journey. All this lovey dovey seduction going on in the atmosphere of a decade long bizarre failed war, Vietnam: Conducted by other forces in American society just as deeply rooted and authentic in their expression. Authentic but potently separated from the ultimate destiny of America. America will become American in spite of its actions and ambitions because a more powerful force is at work here, and that's the force and spirit, personality of the living breathing earth herself pressing claims and making amorous ultimately undeniable overtures throughout its psychic web. Just as a man may be preoccupied with his life he can only resist temporarily the lures and charms of a potent female. Eventually he is charmed seduced and engages with the would be lover, a child of some kind is born and he may resume his neurotic preoccupation with self but the process of birth has occurred he may deny it or not even be aware of it but the process will unfold with or without his consent, knowledge or approval.

So a blast from the past.....


The Best of the 60's:Asleep at the Wheel

An authentic “history of the 60's” would have to include 4-billion people's statements in hundreds of languages. However to even call that authentic is stretching the meaning of authenticity. What about statements from birds? Reptiles, rivers, oceans, seas, lakes? Mammals, mountains, and insects? There is no fixed truth of things. History is rewritten on a daily basis moment to moment. History is continual distortion.

The rewriting of history is not a random act. It is clever conspiracy. Its perpetrators are ruthless scoundrels. Their hideous nature derives not from evil intent but from fragmented consciousness...They meet the world warped, jaundiced, split, labeled neurotic point of view and destroy the possibility of healing through the misrepresentations of historical events.

One writer who meant a great deal to me, a writer who flourished throughout the 60's and is still creating and influencing people today is Gary Snyder.

In the thought of social scientists, behavioral psychologists, Marxist revolutionaries in Afghanistan, Cuba and Nicaragua-there is common admission that the present generation is 'lost' to the revolution---but if we can get the children then the revolution will grow. If this is a universal truth then the thought of Snyder is dead. The current education system of children eliminates contact with a Gary Snyder. The television monopolies never mention Snyder or a whole generation of people for which Snyder was role model and spokesman.

I spent most of the 60's as an infant, child and son of my father and mother. I met Snyder's writings through an investigation of the 'beat' writers. Snyder was a character in Dharma Bums, a novel by Jack Kerouac. He was Japhy Rider. I did most of this reading when I was 17-18 and a full time student of Swami Vishnu Devananda. That was ten years ago.(now 30 years)


The time spent at the ashram in Val Morin, Quebec allowed me to meet and engage a type of person I had never met before. These people must have been like the first Christians. They saw the end of the world. They were waiting for this new world to come. These people at the ashram prepared themselves through immense personal suffering for a new consciousness and a world in which this new consciousness was welcome, normal and would thrive.

I had my first encounter with a woman there. It was a platonic love affair. She too was something new to me. She was 19 had her own car, a tiny Honda with a stick shift. She was educated at a private school outside of DC, Georgetown University. I can remember Mary Gaffney reading and rereading Emerson and Thoreau. She carried Walden and Emerson his essays on Freedom, Self-sufficiency, Truth...like born again Christians carry the Bible. We would do asanas and pranayama then take long walks in the woods, wash dishes and chop vegetable. Sit at Swami Vishnu's feet and chant, play guitar, fast on lemon juice and lay in the sun of a magic summer in Quebec.


We took a couple of trips and visited a commune on Otter Lake in the bush and I heard a wolf howl at the full moon rising over a cranberry bog for the first time. She was also blonde and fit with a body like a ballet dancer, her skin was creamy and the white and when we swam naked in the ice cold water I saw her small erect breasts and just the slightest of pubic hair in a perfect triangle, reddish blonde. I was going to devote my life to her. But another less platonic girl eight years older than me and willing to spread her legs enraptured me and I had to forget Mary. She died a few months later in a bicycle accident and the news was brought to me by my first real lover, though I never totally believed it I found out recently it was true. I thought it was a story Carolyn made up so I would forget about Mary.

Now looking back Carolyn was a Bodhisattva of compassion and a nymphomaniac. I was continually making love to her every waking hour of the day.....

{back to Asleep at the Wheel}....Snyder himself was part of this milieu, with a difference, that being his practice of zazen and his childhood and youth spent in Oregon and Washington, in the forests and natural places there. I had the chance to spend 100 days in a Zen Buddhist temple. During this time I began to not see the bronze Buddha, the scrolls and gilded images of Bodhisattvas, but instead the mountains, lakes and forest took an equal status as “teaching”.


This idea that natural places are teachers comes to Zen from Shinto which is the natural religion of Japan. It is also the teaching of Dogen the founder of Soto-zen who lived in the 12th century. Dogen wrote the Mountain and Waters Sutra. In this classic which is translated in Moon In A Dew Drop, Dogen writes, “When Sakyamuni Buddha left his father's palace and entered the mountains, his father the king did not resent the mountains...”Dogen goes on to say that Sakyamuni attained realization in the mountains, and the idea is that the mountain itself is a being, alive and flowing. “The green mountains are always walking.”, Dogen says the Zen student must understand this walking of mountains. To further understand this one must know that Dogen located his teaching center in isolated mountains far away from the urban centers of Kyoto and Kamakura. Dogen's teacher told him, “Do not stay in the center of cities and towns. Do not become friendly with rulers and state ministers. Dwell in the deep mountains and valleys to realize the true nature of humanity.”

Dogen further states in Mountain and Rivers Sutra, “From the countless beginning have mountains been the habitat of great sages. Wise ones and holy ones have all made mountains their secret chambers and their bodies and minds; by them mountains are fulfilled.” In fact unknown to pop-Zen writers (everything from motorcycle maintenance to skiiing and interstate driving) Buddhism in Japan has a tradition known as “Shugendo”. A Shugendo practicioner is known as a 'yamabushi'=”one who sleeps in the mountains”. Dogen's first disciples were involved with shugendo as a way of introducing Zazen to common Japanese farmers, hillbillies, and mountain folk. This form of 'mountain-Buddhism' is connected with the concept of “kami no michi”=the way of Shinto , the way of 'kami'

“kami” can not be defined. It is felt, touched, seen by the heart. It can be felt at a glacial lake above the tree line, and in the limpid perspicacity of the blue sky in mid May in the alpine meadows near Down's Mountain, just as bears awaken 'kami' is returning to the Green river watershed.

Gary Snyder raised in Oregon and Washington of the 1930's had a feeling from his childhood for 'kami'. The moment when lightning and thunder arrive in spring and the first winter storm rolling over the cascades again with thunder taking the 'kami' back to its home deep within the sky, deep within the earth, putting bears to sleep then awakening them again. Snyder gravitated toward summer work as a fire look out, Kerouac also influenced by Snyder tried his hand at it but didn't make the grade. He missed the city lights and Cassidy's non-stop driving. He couldn't handle solitude and it chased him down till he succumbed to port wine and vodka in Massachusetts. Like another American writer Edward Abbey, alcohol chased him to Phoenix where he died of liver failure.

Snyder's experience in the American west, the wild west coupled with his Zen aesthetic education caused to write his 1974 Pulitzer prize book of poems and views, Turtle Island. “On Hopi and Navaho land, at Black Mesa, the whole issue is revolving at this moment. The cancer is eating away at the breast of Mother Earth in the form of strip mining.” To have a vague idea of 'cleaning up the environment' and to experience the sacred power emanating from the land in a specific place are two very different things. One person feels and knows the coming and goings of kami, the first flower of spring, Orion high overhead in winter. Snyder's thinking is radical and subverts environmentalism.

Many of the logical outcomes of environmentalism and Snyder's thought are the same. There is a fundamental difference between the two. A difference that has recently been appreciated by traditional members of the environmental camp.

A book published in 1985 Deep Ecology by Bill Devall and George Sessions is dedicated to Snyder. Snyder is quoted quite often in Deep Ecology yet there is something concerning Snyder at best merely hinted at in Deep Ecology.


Ecological thinking while discussing the natural world is rooted in an urban culture. Its expression goes back to the French Impressionists, the paintings of Monet show the urban upper class elite at play on a spring day having a picnic near the Seine. We are told that use of public lands includes this type of activity, indeed in some ways limited to this type of activity. The environmentalist wants us to visit nature but never stay. It's a vacation mentality, a picnic on a grander scale with the back drop of the Tetons instead of the Seine.

Inherent to this 'preservation' consciousness is a fragmented split, daily life and “off” work, leisure, vacation, family activity apart from the daily grind. The mainstream ecologist accepts the staus quo, that our culture is hazardous to the existence of the natural world. Therefor let's ban human existence from certain areas so that these area may remain pure, pristine. Mainstream ecologist believes with heart and soul that the only definition of man is urban existence, man=destruction, therefore let's set certain areas aside and make human habitation in those areas illegal so that at least a 'part' of the earth is left unmolested from our cancerous, industrial culture.

The mainstream ecologist has inherited the notion of 'original sin' and adapted it to the landscape. For this type of ecologist the liberation of the land entails the banning of greedy, sinful, destructive human hands, “hands off”.

Enter Gary Snyder, for Snyder human existence does not require rape of the land. Just as rape is not so much a crime of sex but of violence towards the powerless, weak and available. For the rapist the female is vulnerable, smaller, weaker and available so he dominates with violence- not from a perspective of sexuality but from fear and self-hatred. We must not ban sex but violence, and remedy fear and self-hatred with love and understanding, compassion. . So our human existence does not require rape of the environment, our living is our sex and just as we are from this very same environment, fundamentally wild ourselves, we can interact in ways that are balanced. Our nature is not sin, we are not from Adam. We are not from God at all. We are tool using social animals as much a part of 'here' as the cougar and the bear. At our core we are wild and free and most significantly intelligent loving and honest. We are capable so so much more and so much less. To say we are social and animals using tools, is not to say we have no spiritual values. Authentic spiritual values come from this thinking breathing earth of which we are a part. The earth informs our spiritual nature. If you need a Christ on a cross look no further than around you.

In The Real Work, Snyder goes into the implications of the poetic numinous experience. Snyder talks of “reinhabiting the land” as the essence of the real work. In the tradition of ancient Greek thinkers like Plato, who spoke of virtue. Our highest virtue and greatest happiness is in this real work.

In his more recent work, Axe Handles Snyder writes:

“I pledge allegiance

to the soil

of Turtle Island,

and to the beings who thereon dwell

one ecosystem

in diversity

under the sun

With joyful interpenetration for all”

Dolores LaChapelle in her 1988 publication, Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, goes into the radical implications of reinhabiting the land, of a life in harmony with flow of the land. Not a transcontinental

New York/LA, bi-coastal environmentalism, but a dedication to place, a specific place. To begin in the present moment toengage oneself fully into this 'real work'. For LaChapelle the 'way' must include community festivals of the two solstices and equinoxes, the cycles of the moon and an adoption of children into this 'way'.

Snyder and LaChapelle call us to live aware and awke in a new way. Not merely to maintain status quo and set aside wilderness/hands-off zones. LaChapelle who lives in Silverton, Colorado teaches Tai Chi. She tells humorously of her admonitions to perspective tai chi students, “It will destroy your life.” She tells how tai chi causes divorces and job loss. When the person opens up to the real work of living his of her 'old' self goes through convulsions. The point is well taken. The “total transformation” advised by Snyder in “Four Seasons” in the last section of Turtle Island is a total commitment to change. More than anything else, this total transformation, is the Best of the 60's Asleep At the Wheel.













Friday, October 23, 2009

evening song

Canyon wren,


mesquite pods



rattle in the wind,

our life is a song on red slick rock,

blue sky Venus in the east rising.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Climbing San Ysidro peak

    Robert Levi Cahuilla elder and bird song teacher died September 2007. I dedicate this poem and piece to him. I asked Robert Levi when I met him in Borrego Springs, CA in 1990 if it was OK to talk about Mukat and Temayawet, he said it was and so I do. I heard him shake the rattle several times and sang the songs he taught them so they wouldn't die. I think about them today like wise so I won't die. I want to live and living is a song.


     Mukat and Temayawet were brothers, twin brothers, so I a Gemini also found affinity for them. They like my brother and I fought and struggled to gain dominance. Coyote of course was involved and stole Mukat's heart, the red sand, the red rocks all these places we know and love are his doing. The Cahuilla believed in dreams and song and stories as I do. I likewise beleive and have found to be true that power, which they called ,""?iva?a" is vital to health prosperity and balance. How I can find it of course is a struggle and challenge, one that often eludes me.

     Ruth Murray Underhill wrote books about the desert people, she lived 1883-1984, 101 years, good years with many changes.In her books she communicated the importance of song, power and balance.





Climbing San Ysidro Peak



by Paul Manski



Robert Levi said it was ok

To tell of Mukat and Temayawet fighting

arguing and struggling their own

In that these mountains born

Shaking, trembling they rose up

To meet the blue

Now they block the wind-with-rain

Coming from the ocean



Um'nah'ah, with golden eagle circling around

They circle boundaries, up there Um'nah'ah

You feel it strong, clear meeting sky

Making rain



Dark and cool before first light

Creosote, cheese bush, burro bush, indigo

with croton and buckhorn cholla

You people the desert floor

Making home with mesquite and ironwood in the wash

A swept out depression in the sand

Cleared with soft grey red white fur

This is Jack Rabbit's bed

Seeing with big ears waiting listening for the last moment to run

Coyote's partner and friend



Along the dry wash snaking the canyon

desert willow and lavender follow

Covey of Gambel's quail scatters up the slope

Varnished desert boulders



Up the ridge into ocotillo, agave, barrel cactus

First ray of sun reflecting off Salton Sea

Getting into jojoba, cat claw and juniper

Mule deer and desert Big Horn share a spring

Drips and seaps below the flat

2000 feet below Fan palms green the bottom

with long brown skirts never burned



I lay down on a bed of pinyon needles

For four years I watched the sun disappear behind San Ysidro

Single leaf pinyon nuts crunch between my teeth

Sticky yellow pine sap all over my fingers.


Sunday, October 11, 2009

Last of the night blooming cactus

These are the last of the Night Blooming cactus. The nights are cooler.



This cactus comes from south America. It has large six inch across flowers that open in darkness and close the next day.





Coming into the Country which happens to be the city



"I pulled into Navareth, was a feelin bout half past dead.








Just needed a place where I could lay my head." -J Robbie Robertson/The Band








Well I pulled into Phoenix some back, time in well 2007. Lived in an apartment in Avondale, AZ for a year. Then moved to Phoenix, living near the red rocks of Papago Buttes. Red rocks and me go way back, so I rented this apartment for one reason, red rocks. It reminded me of home and a million other things. A few nice saguaros, ocotillo, iron wood, palo verde, brittle bush and the smell of rain in the larrea tridenta, creosote.






It had been hard and continues to be hard...to live in this urban environment. Continued and finished off the RN at Scottsdale Community college and have been working as a LPN now RN- something I know nothing about. I guess what pulled me through was economic need and an English professor, Dr Carol Harrison. Some how the 7AM english 101 was a turning point in both how I viewed the world and myself in it. As Eido Roshi said, "Know nothing, man without rank.", lots of Dogen-esque insights to draw on.




I work in an area of health where medical is usually not the issue, it's the life journey. I talk to people who are broken in one way or another and all the stuff of listening, non-judgement, being open and real in the present moment- things I learned on a zafu in the meditation hall, things I never thought I'd use are used every day. Things from Dogen, Mountain and Waters Sutra, -this is where I live my life now. And earn my keep, a day of no work is a day of no eating.




So I saved some money and bought a house in downtown Phoenix. That's where I'm living and so far writing.












Saturday, October 10, 2009

she said, a poem for Autumn

She said,

"Heading off to volcano with a red dress."

creative destructing, dangerous,

a burden levelled with blood fire,

humming bird flowers on black lava rocks.

Sipping nectar-dream to dream on the back of humpback whales and airplanes,

firm muscled sweaty warm body.

...why was she walking the frozen Green River below the Cora Y, with a black dog?

So many years ago with promises, our dreams scattered in slick rock.

The Deep Ecology of Every Day Water in Phoenix Arizona

Paul Manski
03/17/2008

The Deep Ecology Of Every Day Water in Phoenix, Arizona






“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”
–King James Version, Isaiah 35:1



The vision of the prophet Isaiah was to imagine an abundant flowing stream of living water in the desert. The culture of the desert was a search for dependable water. The story of water in the desert is the story of life. This vision of bounty in the desert was also the vision of the Hohokam people living more than a thousand years ago in the Gila River valley. Hohokam is a Pima word meaning ‘the one’s who have gone’. They built a system of canals to bring water from the Gila River for their irrigated fields. Any one in Phoenix, Arizona is living upon the world of the Native Americans who have gone before us.

This researcher will explore the deep ecology of every day water in Phoenix, Arizona. Deep ecology is a way of understanding life as relationship and process. Our life is an interconnected web with a spiritual component. According to deep ecology a life fully lived is a spiritual life that includes an understanding of a spiritual matrix that exists in the plants, animals, birds and watersheds and the humans who participate in that life.

According to a story in the New York Times by Sam Roberts, March 20, 2008, “Maricopa County in Arizona, which includes Phoenix, swelled by 102,000 since 2006, making it the biggest gainer numerically.”…by population, in the United States. These 102,000 people are coming to live in an area that averages just 8 inches of rain in a year with daily maximum temperatures over 100 degrees from April through October. These people coming whether Latinos from Mexico and points south or Anglos from the north are coming to a place that is home to non-human life. Water is not only hydrogen and oxygen, it is the blood of mother earth.

Water is the most basic of human needs. The water that sustains life in the Valley of the Sun arrives here not by accident. This water flows by the ingenuity and vision of human design. Though this water flows by human design it still is to be regarded as sacred. This vision of life in the desert is built upon some of the same canals used by the Native Americans living here hundreds of years ago. The purpose of deep ecology is to develop a reverence and respect for this water even though it flows in a concrete man made canal.

The water arrives because it is stored in a series of dams along the Gila River Watershed. These dams built in the early1900’s along the Gila supply 20-25% of the water needs for the valley. This system of ground water pumping and storage facilities supplied the Valley’s growth through the early 1960’s. The majority of water for the valley’s 100,000 annual net growth population comes from a 337 mile system of dams, water pumping stations, tunnels and canals called the Central Arizona Project.

It was late 1980’s when water first arrived from the Colorado River flowing 300 miles to the west along the California/Arizona border.
The Valley of the Sun’s story begins 900 miles away in Wyoming at the foot of Down’s mountain. Snowmelt in the spring gathers in a series of lakes on the west side of the continental divide. The first of these lakes is Green River Lakes. According to deep ecology visualization of the watershed pathway leads to a realization of the spiritual component of water. So when bathing or showering imagine the path the water took to get here. You are without question washing your face with Wyoming snow melt.

These streams and mountain lakes come together to form the Green River which feeds into the Colorado. The Wind River range in back of Pinedale, Wyoming is the home of bear and elk. Their spirit to paraphrase Dogen is in the water. Practice feeling these beings and forces in the water.

The Central Arizona Project takes its water from a lake formed on the California/Arizona border. This lake is formed by a dam built across the Colorado River. This water travels in a man made canal across the state of Arizona to Phoenix and on to Tucson. This water though traveling in a concrete ditch is still earth juice. It is like bathing in the spiritual flow of joyful tears. It is a spiritual embryonic fluid that causes all life to quicken and sing. When one perceives the true nature of water the perception is understanding the true nature of the self.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 landmark study Silent Spring is credited with establishing that our human life is enmeshed with the world around us. Her book is understood to be the catalyst for the ecology movement and for helping bring about an ecological consciousness. However according to deep ecologists 1962 was not in any way significant.

Deep ecological insights are more like the revelations of Lord Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. In the Gita it is said that whenever the forces of darkness are greatest then in that moment will Lord Sri Krishna incarnate himself into the world. This is exactly the same as Christ as the Logos taking flesh and dwelling amongst us. The darkness today is an ecological darkness and the evil is to view the earth as a series of chemical relationships. The risen Christ is the living earth. As Dogen said, “Study the stone Buddha giving birth.”.

According to deep ecology this knowledge is always making itself known because the earth itself is the Christ. The earth is a living being. As the Dine people say, Nahasdan Nadle, the Changing woman, the white turquoise shell woman; These are names for your mother. These insights later were condensed by Bill Devall and George Sessions into a way of looking at the world called deep ecology. This researcher will examine the life blood of Phoenix, Arizona –water, from the perspective of deep ecology with respect to the ecological self. This researcher will trace the path of water as it flows from Wyoming and Colorado’s high peaks into the south west and its meaning from a deep ecological perspective. According to Dogen the mountains and waters are constantly walking.

This historical review will describe the insights and techniques of deep ecology. It will apply them to a specific bioregion and ecosystem with regard to water supply. It will focus on Phoenix, Arizona.

Deep Ecology is a term first used in the writings of Arne Naess. It was later brought to the attention of a wider audience by sociologist Bill Devall and philosopher George Sessions in their1985 book Deep Ecology:
Taking its name and approach from Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess' 1972 article on "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement," deep ecology holds that the reform environmentalism of the 1970s and 1980s dealt only with legal and institutional fixes for pollution and resource depletion, rather than fundamental changes in human relations with nonhuman nature. (Merchant)

So for the deep ecologist the notion of analysis of the ecosystem into lifeless component parts is a fundamental error. Ecosystem is a word that means ‘house’. A house is a home. It is a place where one dwells and stays. It is where a person belongs. It is a shelter and a sanctuary. It is a place where one can not help but be. So for a deep ecologist one must bring warmth and light into the medium.
At the same time Deep Ecology was published, Peter Berg was working in San Francisco to communicate the concept of bioregion to a larger audience. Berg began Planet Drum, a grassroots ecological organization in 1972:

There's an interesting set of meanings hidden in the word region. It's connected to the word for king: Latin, rego, and Greek, orego; region, if the king owned it. We know the king lives in a palace but the region is not the palace. Which leads you to the concept of bioregion: a life-place outside of the centralized civilization mechanism which has unique flora, fauna, soils, weather and topology; all these become the basis of boundaries. Watersheds are the organizing principals of bioregions. (Berg)

According to deep ecology, knowing where you are located is an essential activity of being human. The bioregion is the grouping of animals, plants, and song birds that make up a unique place. According to Berg these are the real nations. As Snyder says the real work is learning the sacred geography of these nations. There is a Artemesia tridentata nation –sage brush nation. There is a Larrea tridentata nation –creosote bush nation. There is the Douglas fir nation and the Pinyon pine nation.

Deep Ecologists attempt to understand the question of, “Who am I?", by asking, “Where am I?”. They focus on the watershed as another real place. A watershed is a line that separates streams flowing into different rivers. A watershed is a division. A watershed is not only a geographical place. A watershed is a spiritual entity. Just as when entering a church there is a protocol of conduct and corresponding inner attitude, so when entering a watershed there is a reverence that must be taken. There are songs and stories that are as much the river as the fish that swim and breathe the water.

The water for Phoenix, Arizona begins as snow falling in the Wind River mountains near Square Top Mountain above the Green River Lakes in the state of Wyoming. The lakes are home to cutthroat trout. They have orange firm meat like a salmon. The lakes as they head south form the Green River nourishing moose along the river. The moose graze in the shallow river bottoms eating the aquatic plants along with willows and aspen. Further along the Green meets two large dams one forming the Flaming Gorge Reservoir along the Wyoming/Utah border. The river as it flows south is joined by rivers and streams from Colorado and Utah. The river changes names and becomes the Colorado bringing more snowmelt from the Colorado Rockies to meet with the Green. Dams and man made impoundments are continuous on the river as it heads south.
Below Glen Canyon Dam the river becomes the Grand Canyon and makes a wide turn west forming the border between Arizona and California. Near Parker, Arizona a another dam backs up the flow and from Lake Havasu a pumping station and concrete lined canal 337 miles long takes the water across Arizona to Phoenix and on to Tucson, Arizona.

This constellation of insight drawing from ecology and philosophy was broadcast to the world by American poet Gary Snyder. Snyder read his poem “A Berry Feast” at The Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Besides being the birth place of an American school of writing called the ‘Beats’, this historic poetry reading also gave birth to the patron saint of deep ecology, Gary Snyder. Snyder was the last poet to read that night in San Francisco 1955. He followed Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg read Howl that night for the first time.(Silberman) Snyder finished the reading with these lines:


"See, from the foothills
Shred of river glinting, trailing,
To flatlands, the city:
Glare of haze in the valley horizon
Sun caught on glass gleams and goes.
From cool springs under cedar
On his haunches, white grin,
Long tongue panting, he watches:
Dead city in dry summer;
Where berries grow."
(Snyder 87)

Snyder was describing the perspective that would later be called deep ecology. All the motifs of deep ecology are present and accounted for in this poem. There is watershed. There is the life and doings on of wild nature, apart from human life. There are the native plants, springs and patterns which describe a place without reference to political boundaries. Snyder for more than 50 years has maintained a vision and perspective that is rooted in place.

Snyder spoke from the perspective of coyote. Snyder spoke as coyote, “On his haunches”, “Long tongue panting”. Nick Selby says Snyder is ‘writing the land’. Selby says that the insights of Snyder and the deep ecologists are within a historical context that is uniquely American.

A more useful model for reading Snyder's poetry is Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), a text, moreover, that Snyder read during his time as firewatcher at Sourdough mountain in 1953. Both Snyder and Thoreau trace the working of the land in an attempt to critique American ideology, to reground its work ethic.(Selby)

Selby goes on to name Waldo Emerson writing on the east coast in the 1830’s as an early example of America’s fascination with the wild and the sacred. Selby quotes a Gary Snyder poem,
‘Hunting 13', from Myths and Texts:




"Now I'll also tell what food
we lived on then:
Mescal, yucca fruit, pinyon, acorns,
prickly pear, sumac berry, cactus,
spurge, dropseed, lip fern, corn,
mountain plants, wild potatoes, mesquite,
stems of yucca, tree-yucca flowers, chokecherries,
pitahaya cactus, honey of the ground-bee,
honey, honey of the bumblebee,
mulberries, angle-pod, salt, berries,
berries of the one-seeded juniper,
berries of the alligator-bark juniper,
wild cattle, mule deer, antelopes,
white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, doves, quail,
squirrels, robins, slate-colored juncoes,
song sparrows, wood rats, prairie dogs,
rabbits, peccaries, burros, mules, horses,
buffaloes, mountain sheep, and turtles."(Snyder 53)

Here again there is a description of place in terms of that place. Snyder says where he is without naming nation, state, county or geographical area. He is naming his bioregion by paying attention to the things that are in that place or bioregion. He is using a descriptive mode of being. This is in contrast to a prescriptive mode. The prescriptive mode would say what should be, the descriptive mode describes what is present.

One key to understanding the role of spirituality in deep ecology is to understand that according to Snyder prayer and meditation do come not from a tradition of religion. Spirituality comes from the tradition of hunting. It is perhaps in this light that the death and resurrection of Jesus hint at this insight. Jesus as the sacrifice is the animal hunted. This hearkens back to the Paleolithic hunter tradition where the hunter using simple tools would have to wait for long hours silent. It is not the killing of the hunter that is key to this equation, it is the expectant silence with which the hunter waits. Snyder saw this connection while studying Zen Buddhism in Japan in the 1950’s. The role of the deep ecologist is to cultivate this awareness of the landscape and develop ways that others can perceive the world around them from a perspective of deep ecology.

So the task of this researcher is to examine the element of water as it ebbs and flows through Phoenix, Arizona from a perspective of deep ecology. Where does the water come from in a land of little rain? Phoenix, the city whose water comes in man made canals via the Central Arizona Project: How does the water get into those canals? Where does it start? Whose idea was it to bring it here and why? How can the insight of Snyder and the deep ecologists be applied to water in the Valley of the Sun?

Deep ecology is a way of understanding and points out the work to be done. According to pioneers such as Gary Snyder, Dolores La Chapelle and Peter Berg the bioregion and watershed are the boundaries of our place.(Berg) It is within this watershed that our work is done.(Snyder) Work in this way is realizing the self.(Dogen) The realization of self is working with the energies that flow in a specific place.(Selby)

The energies in a specific place are ocotillo and brittle brush. They are gambel’s quail and coyote. They are palo verde and creosote bush.(Nabum) If you want to find one plant that speaks for the watershed that is Phoenix, Arizona, that plant is the saguaro. The Gila River watershed is defined by the saguaro in its lowest elevation.

The Gila drains the Mogollon rim up to Flagstaff by way of the Verde River. It drains the area from Tucson up to Phoenix by way of the San Pedro. It drains the area of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico and heads east joining the Agua Fria and the Salt river gathering the Valley of the Sun and meeting with the Colorado near Yuma.(Folk-Williams)

This portrait of watershed is made complex with the addition of a 337 mile concrete canal which by way of tunnels and pumping stations brings water west to east up, over, and across from the Colorado River. This concrete lined canal is the Central Arizona Project. It creates a loop, an ox bow dumping water back into the Gila system. This water is also used to recharge the underground aquifer at various points in the valley.(Johnson)

The learning of deep ecology is a listening and observation of natural processes in a specific place. A lot of the real work involves learning the names and listening to the stories. According to deep ecology one listens so that the songs can be heard and understood.

The deep ecology of water in Phoenix, Arizona is made difficult due to the existence of a man made river flowing winter and summer. It is a challenge to feel the belongingness of water coming 337 miles by way of a concrete pipe.(Devall) Along this artificial watershed there are no trees or riparian areas because the Central Arizona Project is designed for efficiency. It delivers water from point A to point B. A river is more like a process. It nourishes the earth along the way. The CAP is not a river. It is a water delivery system.(Johnson) This difficulty in sensing the spirit of an anthropomorphic construct is precisely the importance in developing a deep ecological understanding of water in the Valley of the Sun. It is imperative that residents of Phoenix develop love, respect and gratefulness for the actual life lived here.(Berg)

Peter Berg offers us the idea of bioregion and the challenge of reinhabiting the place where we live. Our nature as humans is urban. Our nature is communal. Our fate is drawn up together. The Hohokam and Pima lived as we do, close. By understanding the nature of the water we use we can develop an intimate relationship with that water. Knowledge is powerful. The mighty Colorado, the snow melt of Green River Lake can not be wasted.(Fradkin) We are called upon as stewards of the land to honor a sacred compact to love and cherish this water. Dolores La Chapelle goes so far as to entitle her book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep:Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life. Deep Ecological Insight is powerful and liberating because it involves all the senses.

Deep ecology is fun. Understanding who and what you are is fun. It is a journey of sitting naked with saguaros overhead in a hidden hot spring following the water course home. It is inching up a vertical slope of gneiss hiking on the last glacial remnants of the Pleistocene in the Wind Rivers searching for a drip that becomes a torrent in spring blood like the rich mucous flow of a female in heat above Moab, UT. It is taking mud baths along the Paria.(Powell) It is rich and frothy and completely beyond control like our inner flow of thought.(Snyder)

According to La Chapelle, Berg and Snyder it is precisely this interface between the sacred and profane that offers us a graceful exit from this quagmire of seeing that blocks our entrance into a sustainable culture. According to these icons from the 1960’s joy is the antidote for the deathsong played and playing at your local movie theatre. Written in the 1940’s, the black hole of neurotic fear that Henry Miller warned of in The Air Conditioned Nightmare is not the birthright and heritage of America. This kind of fate can only be draped on the flag of our destiny because the children don’t know the four directions.(Bear) They are making choices without knowledge. Real knowing must include information.(Merchant) Information must be accurate. Knowing must be informed by where we are. That knowing is the earth and the wilderness.(Abbey) A man can not be considered educated unless he knows the first flower of spring. The prerequisites of guilt and his shakti depression are the deficiency of natural experiences in daily life.(Kidner)

The earth mother like Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita reincarnates herself amongst us to bring us to the light:

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"Whenever the balance of the universe is disturbed by external interference from any of its parts, then I reveal Myself as the Power of eternal balancing. For the protection of those who are in harmony, and the rectification of everything disharmonious, I incarnate Myself at every juncture of time."-Bhagavad Gita(Krisnananda)

She is speaking and calling a generation to see, feel and happen what is right underneath your toes and fingers. Underneath your tongue are the inner fluids of a virgin. She is Nahasdan Nadle called down by Neve Jensen from a bundle of stones wrapped in a badger pelt.(Frisbe) Called the Logos by the early Christian church she is Sophia. It is a truth that takes form and sustains us from the inside out. It is water. It is the deep ecology of everyday water in Phoenix, Arizona.

In the report on the deep ecology of everyday water in Phoenix, Arizona Gary Snyder, Dolores La Chapelle and Peter Berg are cited as positing that the boundaries of a place are natural features such as watersheds. The state of Arizona has as its southern boundary the Gadsden purchase and on the north and east arbitrary lines that in no way refer to watersheds or geographic features. The idea that the boundary of a place is somehow determined by things like watershed, rivers or plants is a romantic notion. Only science can inform the modern citizen of a complex democracy like the United States of America.

We must have a global perspective. We are living in a complex political landscape and can’t allow issues like bioregion to “inform” us. Our information comes from the internet and television what could a saguaro cactus teach us?
While it is true that the modern state of Arizona has as its north, south and eastern borders lines drawn by politicians without regard to land forms. It is equally true that the entire western border of Arizona follows the Colorado River. So the watershed does in fact help form the boundary of the state.(Berg) This same watershed via the Central Arizona Project nourishes the agriculture, recreation and drinking water of the 13th largest metropolitan area in the United States.

Furthermore, the city of Phoenix relies on a system of canals many of which were first used by the Hohokam people. Much of the current water delivery system is but an elaboration of the Hohokam/Pima canals. The future is built on the past. To understand the present situation of water in Phoenix, Arizona we must understand that the water has a point of origin and a spiritual component. One only has to look at the automobile license plate of the state of Arizona to see the saguaro. This represents the place, the bioregion and the ecosystem of Phoenix, Arizona. This totem plant better than anything else says who we are and what we are doing here.
Some might say, “Sitting naked with saguaros overhead in a hidden hot spring”, doesn’t seem like a way to gather information about sustainable culture. What is required are data and facts. This resembles some one trying to escape from the real world into a personal fantasy. While it is true that spending time in wild natural places may seem like a waste of time experts disagree. David W. Kidner, senior lecturer in psychology in the humanities and Communication Studies Programmes at Nottingham Trent University, writes in Critical Psychology that lack of time in wild natural places is a major cause of clinical depression. Kim Krisberg writing in the The Nations Health informs us that, “In a September 2004 study published in APHA’s American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that exposure to natural settings helped reduce the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.” Spending time in wild natural places is a prerequisite for anyone wanting to walk in balance.

The 1960’s and the hippie rhetoric of peace, love and going back to the land was already dated when it was new. We have moved so far beyond that paradigm. The idea that joy, love or kinship with nonhuman life can address today’s issues is a waste of time. Information is a mouse click away and that’s something the hippies could not imagine.

Yes that is completely true. The idea of returning to the land was dated in 1969. It was dated then because it was always dated. The idea that love and joy can transform experience is a dated concept. These types of view points remain dated because they are perennial truths. They will always be dated. They will always be rediscovered. Their wisdom informs us of who we are and what we have the potential to be.

In 1969 a republican president was in the white house. In 2008 we also have a republican president. In 1969 thousands of American soldiers were at work liberating Southeast Asia. We were liberating, freeing people who wanted to be free to pursue their own destinies. Fortunes were made by corporations who manufactured the tools of freedom; bombs, planes, helicopters, guns, ammunition, gasoline, herbicides –freedom has quite a cost and quite a profit.(La Chapelle) In 2008 we again have hundreds of thousands laboring to bring freedom to Mesopotamia. Forty years later
again the people want to to be free. Again they want to be free to pursue their own destiny. Fortunes are again being made by corporations who manufacture the tools of freedom; bombs, planes, helicopters, guns, ammunition, gasoline –freedom again has quite a cost and again quite a profit.

History doesn’t move in a line. History is a circle. History is the Ouroboros or Oroboros, a snake in the form of a circle eating its own tail:




"….emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece represented with its tail in its mouth continually devouring itself and being reborn from itself. A Gnostic and alchemical symbol, Ouroboros expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation."
(Encyclopedia)

And so therefore there is a mountain covered with snow in the Wind River Mountains called Square Top Mountain and below you’ll see Green River Lakes. If you see the girl with the wild black dog along the Green River, tell her I said hello.
The solution is to sit with your feet on the ground and see the mountains walking. The water is constantly flowing and the mountains are constantly walking. There is a girl who conceived of a child in those mountains. Her child was made in the land of the grizzly bear. Her child walks along the canals of the Central Arizona canal. When the winds blow hot with fire you can feel gratefulness for water. You can listen to mountains with snow melted and glistening.

From the corner of your eye you can see the spirit of the spring. You can make a spring in the desert and walk near slick rock mountains. You can study to be true to yourself. You can allow the deep ecology of every day water in Phoenix, Arizona to be flowing in one continuous stream. You can begin with a giving spirit and open heart. Some one will hear you dreaming of rain.


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