Week five- Reflective- Hesse and Trees

In between university exams, assignments, reading and journals, I sneak off to read philosophical novellas by great wordsmiths like Milan Kundera and Hermann Hesse. In one of those private indulgent moments of time, Hermann Hesse described so vividly, so poignantly the stillness and power of nature in such a numinous way I had to share it, even though it's a bit long. Absolute craft in arrangement of words.

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Hermann Hesse

Book
Hesse, H, 1917 Wandering, Picador Publishing, Germany.

Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1382208

Week 3- Reflection on Nature and Spirituality

The sun rising over Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Sitting on the buffalo grass overlooking this slice of nature, amidst the asphalt and concrete jungle, a feeling of insignificance always emerges. This feeling is carved from the gargantuan spiritual and natural cosmos which has sustained human life and disposition. When you grasp those few moments of stillness amidst nature, one can't help but feel spiritual or whimsical as the beauty transcends our industrialized, mundane life, even if only for a moment. As the Sustainable Soul blog pronounces so poignantly:

'The Earth is Sacred. Beyond our differences; beyond religion, politics and culture, Earth remains, the (literal) ground of our being. Disconnected and distracted, we search for meaning. Overworked and overwhelmed, we struggle. Leave the struggle and the search behind. Whether or not you practice an established faith tradition, you are welcome here. By virtue of being a human being, you are connected to this Holy Ground. It is your birthright. Welcome' (Hecking 2010, p.1).

                 

A date with an elephant in Ayuttaya, Thailand

Perhaps as our modern lives have become so preoccupied with careers, goals, families and our metropolitan worlds that nature has evoked spiritual wonderment exponentially. Do not most of us prefer to go on holiday away from our cities? Do we not escape from the hustle and bustle of our lives to just exist, somewhere else even if only for awhile?

References

Hecking, R, 2010. The Sustainable Soul: Nature Spirituality, http://www.thesustainablesoul.blogspot.com.au, 14/03/2012.

Photos

All photos were from taken by myself and from my own international travels.

Week 1 reflection- Jennifer Aniston and Hollywood versus Shamans and Ayahuasca

I was recently reading a news article on Jennifer Aniston's new movie 'Wanderlust', in which she drinks the South American holy plant brew of ayahuasca. The article describes how Jennifer through her movie character portrays the taking of the sacred brew in a stereotypical and reductionist light. For instance, the ayahuasca ceremony is filled with stereotypical hippies representing the 1960s LSD era.

The negative portrayal of ayahuasca ceremonies in the movie has caused outrage, as the spread of ayahuasca has reached as far as anthropologist and psychiatrist academics as well as lay people. Ayahuasca in its purest form is used in traditional healing ceremonies and for these to be portrayed as drug fueled hippie encampments angers ayahuasca drinkers and ceremonial attendees alike.

Ayahuasca in itself is the drinking of a tea brewed by several plants, one which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT). I have learned from my own research that DMT occurs in the human brain but lies dormant until we die or almost die, then it is secreted into our brains. So by drinking DMT, it releases the DMT in our brains which one could argue creates a near death experience (NDE).

Far from hippie encampments with mindless drug taking, ayahuasca ceremonies combine nature spirituality with story telling, healing and guidance. The shaman of such ceremonies is someone 'capable of restoring order and harmony in the group. Someone who, when there is a dysfunction in a group-a tribe- he or she is capable of resynchronizing the elements of the group with nature and cosmos' (Narby, Kounen & Ravalee 2010, p. 9).

In Aniston's movie, 'Wanderlust' once she takes the ayahuasca as emotionlessly as a street drug, she suddenly appears perched on a tree singing a top forty song (Phillips 2012). This experience seems to emulate a street drug or acid trip, not a ceremonial medicinal plant. Ayahuasca drinkers who take the plant in shamanic ceremonies say that by all of us, even Western people taking ayahuasca it forces 'us to suddenly perceive the conditioning of the ideas we think are ours but in fact are artifacts implanted by culture, from childhood with your parents, in the end, all these things' (Narby, Kounen & Ravalee 2010, p31).

Far from being a drug addict, the shaman believes 'the vast majority of illnesses have a spiritual cause' and so when the shaman takes part in an ayahuasca ceremony, the 'trance forms part of the cure...by his ecstasy he finds the exact cause of the illness and learns the best treatment' (Eliade 1964, pp. 327-328).

The question to be posed is how damaging is such portrayals of traditional nature healing? Not only is the shamans nature spirituality threatened by such cavalier representations, his home is by the encroaching bulldozers in the Amazon. How can we preserve and or represent this nature spirituality without ethnocentrism or reductionist bias?



References
Eliade, M 1964, SHamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.

Narby, J, Kounen, J & Ravalee, V 2010, The Psychotropic Mind: The World according to Ayahuasca, Iboga, and Shamanism, Park Street Press, Vermont.

Phillips, JT, 2012, Ayahuasca, What Jennifer Aniston May Not Know About the 'Spirit Vine', Huffington Post, 2/3/2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-talat-phillips/jennifer-aniston-and-ayahuasca-explained_b_1303999.html


Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/904610