Five Bridges looking south towards Bishop. Robin L. Chandler, 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 Civilizationby 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
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.”
Obsidian is so sharp that you can use it to cut your lousy life to pieces, and then when you have the original parts, the real ones, you can put them back together and have a clean assembly of things and see the world as it is and always was, and get to work at last, before it’s too goddam late.
The Coyolxauhqui imperative is to heal and achieve integration. When fragmentations occur, you fall apart and feel as though you’ve been expelled from paradise. Coyolxauhqui is my symbol for the necessary process of dismemberment and fragmentation, of seeing that self or the situations you’re embroiled in differently. Coyolxauhqui is also my symbol for reconstruction and reframing, one that allows for putting the pieces together in a new way. The Coyolxauhqui imperative is an ongoing process of making and unmaking. There is never any resolution, just the process of healing.
It is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through “the relocation of the unheard-of toward the background…while the everyday moves into the foreground.” There is, however, an important difference between the weather events that we are now experiencing and those that occur in surrealist and magical realist novels: improbable though they might be, these events are neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real.
Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
After a year confined, while Shiva created and destroyed, the open road beckoned. The horizon open, the land infinite, and my mind seemed lotus-like, unbound. And Earth shared: sky, mountains, trees, deserts, meadows, and rivers. My soul replenished: hope glimmers.
Clockwise: Thunderstorm over Wheeler Peak, Taos, NM; waterfall at Whitney Portal, Lone Pine, CA; sentinel trees at Whitney Portal, Lone Pine, CA; monsoon over Mt. Langley, Lone Pine, CA; and the San Francisco Peaks from Bonita Meadow, Flagstaff, AZ. Watercolors by Robin L. Chandler, 2021.
In mid-January, we drove northward on 395 through the Owens Valley from Los Angeles to Mammoth Lakes. Late afternoon, the sun flirted among the storm clouds and the Eastern Sierra mountain peaks creating a dramatic bright yellow light shining on the valley floor turning the White Mountains a mysterious blue. Ahead, a red cinder cone, a volcanic legacy, grew larger as we made our way closer to the sleeping Long Valley Caldera. The cinder cone, a beautiful rich red, still captivates my imagination.
Rebecca Fish Ewan wrote in A Land Between: The Owens Valley“ the landscape…reveals that stability in the West is both precious and fragile; the relationship between people and the land is deep and passionate, yet the balance of this union can be shaken overnight.” When settlers brought cattle to the Owens Valley in the 19thcentury, the new grazing animal destroyed the grasses and marshland environment that had been vital to the lives of the Pauite-Shoshone. When Los Angeles Water and Power Department diverted and transported snow-fed lakes, creeks and rivers of the Owens Valley to the Los Angeles basin, the ecosystem of the region was changed forever.
The Buddha teaches that we must accept that impermanence characterizes existence. But the Buddha’s noble eightfold path also teaches us to have right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort right mindfulness and right concentration. The recent damage to Joshua Tree National Park caused during the Federal government shutdown may last for centuries. It is difficult for me to grasp the consciousness of people who cause such damage. Are they mindful of their actions consequences? Do they lack a relationship with place and community? Do they believe their “life” exists somewhere else in a different time and space? How can I teach that every moment is precious and our actions reflect our consciousness? We must understand our impact on the land and it’s inhabitants; our choices must be guided by sensitivity to the needs of others and not by our desires alone. Stewardship means never having to say your sorry.
In the 1970s, Gary Snyder heard a Crow elder say at a conference in Bozeman, Montana “you know I think if people stay somewhere long enough the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.”[1]
[1]Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. “The Place, The Region, The Commons.” p.42 San Francisco: North Point Press. 1990.
Aspens, trees of life, sketched at Lundy Canyon. Robin L. Chandler, 2018.
Last Saturday morning – October 27, 2018 – I was standing on the rim of Panum Crater at the edge of Mono Lake looking across the long valley at John Muir’s “range of light” beginning to understand great fullness is found in the emptiness.* My dear companions were scrambling joyously across the rock and ash, relishing the beautiful obsidian and pumice fragments, shattered remains of a past volcanic event. Sadly, a text notified me of the tragedy befalling innocents worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh over 3,000 miles distant. I kept the news to myself desiring my friends feel the joy of discovery, just a little longer. Looking West, I saw before me quaking yellow aspens dancing up the hillside along creeks fed by the alpine lakes Parker and Walker. A single perfect moment – shattered suddenly into a thousand fragments by the destruction at the Tree of Life. At the Eastern Side of the Sierras, we grasp our insignificance within the vastness of eternity, and realize the significance of our actions towards other living beings. May we all find healing, redemption, forgiveness and a mindful constructive path rising from the ashes of our volcano.
* “Before the emanations were emanated and the creations created, a most supreme, simple light filled the whole of existence. There was no vacant place, no aspect of empty space or void, but everything was filled by that simple, infinite light…what is called the light of the Infinite (Eyn Sof).” Luria, Issac. The Tree of Life (Etz Chayyim), Vol. 1. with an introduction by Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padah, and ed. (New York: Arizal, 2008), p. 13.
Inyo Mountains from the Alabama Hills. Robin L. Chandler, 2017
Recently, I visited the Owens Valley and gazed upon the vastness of the Sierra Nevada and the Inyo Mountains. Mountains and sky: in that infinite space, their beauty humbled me. In that quiet desert, I opened my soul to their medicine. For two solitary days, I painted Mt. Whitney and the Inyo Mountains from vantage points in the Alabama Hills becoming part of their story. And now, healed by their beauty, now part of their family, I understand how vast humans can be…..when we open our hearts.
Thomas Lowe Fleischner says it best in Nature, Love, Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness, “but each day we start anew and walk out into a world that is full of sorrow and injustice, yes – but that is also heartbreakingly beautiful. Despair must not overrun our appreciation for this world – plant and animal, stone and sky, and human souls – that is immeasurably lovely, more beautiful than it needs to be, in spite of the grief that is embedded within it.”
Mammoth Mountain from Minaret Summit. Robin L. Chandler, 2017.
The Tang Dynasty’s Wang Wei is revered in China as a poet, painter, and practitioner of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism. And for good reason when you read and savor Wang Wei’s work. Wei is considered to be the first Chinese painter to capture the inner spirit of the landscape, originating the mountains-and-rivers tradition beloved by the Buddhist poet Gary Snyder. In his book Mountain Home, David Hinton writes “Wang Wei’s poetry is especially celebrated for the way he could make himself disappear into a landscape, and so dwell as belonging utterly to China’s wilderness cosmology. In Ch’an practice, the self and the constructions of the world dissolve until nothing remains but empty mind or “no-mind.”
A few weeks ago, I travelled with the best companions, reaching the Eastern Sierra and our campground at Convict Lake, after many hours of driving. During our respite, we visited Hot Creek, Long Valley Caldera, Mammoth Mountain, Minaret Summit, and Mono Lake. Walking or sitting amongst the beauty, we were emptied and replenished reaching an awakening, if not the hoped for enlightenment. Wang Wei’s poetry came to mind as I reached for and drank deeply from the cup of friendship and nature. In the Mountains, Sent to Ch’an Brothers and Sisters Wei wrote:
“Anthropocene is the voguish and not yet officially adopted term to describe the first geologic epoch in Earth’s history to be characterized primarily by the impacts of human activity, global warming foremost among them,” writes Glen Martin in the article Hell or High Water: How Will California Adapt to the Anthropocene?
How can I reach others and help them see that for the first time in humankind’s existence – a time now considered the Anthropocene – our actions are raising the temperature of the heavens, the oceans, and the land and thereby changing the fate of all creatures inhabiting these spheres. We must understand the actions we take today impact future generations. And we must understand that human consciousness is formed by our relationship to the sky, the seas and the land: the sky our infinite possibilities, the sea our mystery and the earth our enduring home. What will our consciousness become if the heavens, the oceans and the land are irrevocably changed? What if the air is too dirty to breathe? What if water is a scarce commodity? What if the land is stripped bare and emptied of the creatures with which we currently share this planet? What will it all mean? “We simply need wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to it’s edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves, of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”[1]
alive in the sea of information 