stewardship – alive in the sea of information

Mountain Home

Mt. Morrison & Owens River in April 2022 and February 2023, Robin L. Chandler.

Vast and majestic, mountains embrace your shadow;

Broad and deep, rivers harbor your voice.

T’ao Ch’ien

Home Again Among Fields and Gardens

Nothing like all the others, even as a child,

rooted in such love for hills and mountains,

I stumbled into their net of dust, that one

departure a blunder lasting thirteen years.

But a tethered bird longs for its old forest,

and a pond fish its deep waters — so now,

my southern outlines cleared, I nurture

simplicity among these fields and gardens,

home again. I’ve got nearly two acres here,

and four or five rooms in this thatch hut,

elms and willows shading the eaves in back,

and in front, peach and plum spread wide.

Villages lost across mist-and-haze distances,

kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,

dogs bark deep among back roads out here,

and roosters crow from mulberry treetops.

No confusion within these gates, no dust,

my empty home harbors idleness to spare.

Back again: after so long caged in that trap,

I’ve returned to occurrence coming of itself.

*****

T’ao Ch’ien (365 – 427)

The rise of wilderness poetry in the early 5th century C.E. was part of a profound new engagement with wilderness that arose among Chinese artist-intellectuals for several reasons: the recent loss of northern China to “barbarians,” forcing China’s artist-intellectuals to emigrate with the government, settling in the southeast where they were enthralled by a new landscape of serenely beautiful mountains…..born into the educated aristocracy, T’ao was expected to take his proper place in the Confucian order by serving in the government. Accordingly, he took a number of government positions. But he had little patience for the constraints and dangers of official life, and little interest in its superficial rewards, so he finally broke free and returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on the family farm at his ancestral village of Ch’ai-sang (Mulberry-Bramble), just northwest of the famous Thatch-Hut (Lu) Mountain…..this was not a romantic return to the bucolic, but to a life in which the spiritual ecology of tzu-jan was the very texture of everyday experience. This outline of T’ao Ch’ien’s life became a central organizing myth in the Chinese tradition: artist-intellecuals over millennia admired and imitated the way T’ao lived out his life as a recluse, though it meant enduring considerable poverty and hardship…..this commitment, so central to the rivers-and-mountains tradition in poetry, was the one honorable alternative to government service for the artist-intellectual class…..represented a commitment to a more spiritually fulfilling life in which one inhabits the wilderness cosmology in the most immediate day-to-day way…..if Tao’s poems seem bland, a quality much admired in them by the Sung Dynasty poets, it’s because they are never animated by the struggle for understanding. Instead they begin with the deepest wisdom.

Verse, poem, and biography from Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China translated by David Hinton

Profundo

*Five Bridges looking south towards Bishop. Robin L. Chandle*r, 2022.

“It is only after the European invasion and the installation of the colonial regime that the country becomes ‘unknown territory’ whose contours and secrets need to be ‘discovered.’ The viewpoint of the colonizer ignored the profound ancestral perspectives of the [first peoples] who saw and understood this land, in the same way that it ignored the [first peoples] experience and memory.” From Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization by Guillermo Bonfire Batalla

“Difference between what you need and what you want is what you can put on a horse.” Eli Whipp, member of the Pawnee Nation, The English

Panum Crater / obsidian

View of the Sierras from Panum Crater. Robin L. Chandler, 2022.

“…..Obsidian, however, was everywhere: clusters of it every hundred yards or so, and individual chips scattered everywhere we looked. Clearly people had lived here. People just like us, not in some general way, but in the sense of having exactly the same DNA…..I tried to see it as it had been: a little village, with big oval huts standing here and there in knots of trees. People sitting around talking, prepping food, working on tools and clothing, eating meals together. Columns of smoke rising from campfires. Village life. It had been like that. They had not been on summer vacation; they were nomads, living in the right place for that time of year, perfectly at home…..That afternoon was a very different experience from our first discovery on the moraine mound. That first time, my feeling was one of joy: they were here! This time, seeing the meadow that had held a high village for thousands of years, my feeling was more complex, and suffused with sorrow. They were here, yes; but now they aren’t…..I’ll just say that to see those black chips of glass on the land is to feel something deep. We all are descended from people who evolved in Africa, some of whom walked out of Africa around 120,000 years ago, and kept walking. It’s important to remember that. Sometimes I think when you are walking all day, it’s easier to remember that, and to imagine what it must have been like. Possibly that’s one of the greatest values of walking up there [in the High Sierras]. It’s a chance to imagine the deep time of human history, and feel it in one’s body, in the act of walking all day.”

An excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson‘s The High Sierra: A Love Story

a world on fire

“…..on that stretch of the Lewis and Clark Trail, he talked about how the explorers’ mapping of a route to the Pacific forged the way that millions of American settlers followed. Being there, and listening to the lessons of the Missouri River, gave Bernard [DeVoto] an epiphany. The western land the explorers found was filled with species adapted to drought: sagebrush, prickly pear cacti, tens of millions of buffalo. In the 1800s the North and South raced to add western states in a battle for dominance in Congress. The future of slavery hung in the balance. But the land of the West settled the question – it did not have enough rain for a cotton economy, which meant that the slave system was bound by climate and geography and, therefore, politically doomed. Lewis and Clark proved that all waters – meaning all trade routes that the people who occupied the land would follow – pulled together from the tops of the Appalachians to the tips of the Rockies toward the Mississippi River; there was no inland sea or central mountain belt that could divide two nations, one slave, one free. So when Abraham Lincoln, explaining his decision to wage war on secessionists, said “We cannot separate,” he spoke not opinion but literal truth from the land.”

Excerpt from Nate Schweber‘s book This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild

home…home on the range

Where the Deer and the Antelope Play. Robin L. Chandler, 2022.

“…..as is well argued by Bruce Pascoe in his book Dark Emu, the Europeans had a terrible track record for arriving in a new world (Australia in the case of Dark Emu) and, as we all know, devastating the Native tribes by varying methods of genocide, or at least brutal displacement. In order to treat other human souls so viciously, this behavior on “our” part required a certain degree of denial. This was achieved by treating the American Natives, or the Aboriginal tribes in Australia as less than human – vermin, really – that required extermination, so that the proper “civilized” humans could set-up house. Pascoe succinctly points out that when the English made their reports detailing the progress of their settlements Down Under, they therefore had to necessarily ignore the complex civilizations of the local tribes entirely, despite their methods of surviving amicably in concert with nature that had been developed over millennia. Housing, farming, fishing complete economies: eradicated. Wiped off the face of Australia. “Nothing to see here, your highness, except some random savages!” Next, of course, the English heroically shipped in herds of grazing sheep and cows and attempted to plant their wheat and other continental grains, and then looked on stupidly as they all faltered and died in inhospitable soil, within an ecosystem that was entirely alien to the biology of their plants and animals. They exhibited all the common sense of hijacking a plane for its cargo of riches and then killing the pilots without gleaning any of their imperative knowledge. We’re all in so much of a hurry, then and now, to make money, that we never bother learning to land the son-of-a-bitching plane.”

Excerpt from Nick Offerman‘s book Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside.

C = 2 π r

Where we lived, the settlers build their houses. Where

we drew fresh water, the oil companies sucked oil.

Where deer ran in countless numbers, we have a new

mall. Where the healing plants thrived; the river is

burning. Now, a fence cuts the road home. Next the sky

will be tethered, and we will pay for air.

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo

nature and nurture

“Did you know, Dad, that if you write the word ‘red’ in green and ask a small child to tell you the color, the answer will be ‘green?’ But if you show the same word to an adult, the answer will be red. Children see the color, not the word. Adults see the word, and not the color.”

I am an advocate for wild creatures, rare plants, arrays of native vegetation, clean water, fish, stewardship of natural resources, and learning. I believe these things are compatible with ranching, sometimes lost without ranching. Some people call me a cowboy. A lot of good cowboys call me an environmentalist. I suppose there are lots of labels you can attach to me. There was a time when doing so was hurtful, so I threw back labels of my own. We throw a lot of anger at each other with words. It doesn’t do much for the land, really.

The time has come to see colors, not words.

Excerpt from the essay Colors and Words by Bob Budd in Ranching West of the 100th Meridian: Culture, Ecology, and Economics

Jughandle

Hope Bears All Things. Robin L. Chandler, 2021.

humming truck tires on Highway One drowned by the Pacific

lanky Bishop Pines loom

headland prairies rise above the cold rough waters

cliffs glazed in reds and yellow ochre

clockwork of tides, migration of whales, and nesting of birds

comfort reborn

sheltered by a windswept fir

nomadic narcissi bloom

winter tragedies fade

new beginnings found

Calm

*Restoration?* *How precious the life of a peregrine.* Robin L. Chandler, 2021.

calm

yet swamped after the storm

finding our star

gathering our strength

making our plans: moving forward

knowing the Furies regroup

how precious the life of a peregrine