IMAGE: MUIR LAKE (aka "Crater Lake") Eagle Cap Wilderness VII.22.2018
On “THE WAY OF NONVIOLENCE...”
While out on my annual circumambulation of the great MANDALA WHEEL of the WALLOWAS & Eagle Cap Wilderness, I like to pause in the afternoon for a bit of journal writing in the shade. Yes. Real paper. Real handwriting. Really private. Think of that!
Doing THE WHEEL, as I call the trek, takes me six to eight weeks, and most of that time I’m offgrid, blissfully without cell or internet service. Balm for the soul, I might say. It is also,in the spirit of pilgrimage, a form of meditation. Real meditation. In the sense of watching consciousness like a good nature photographer watches the flowforms of water, not trying to change anything, or wishing for better light or whatever, but simply moving with the “what is” of the subject. One has the wonderful opportunity to observe first hand, and with some intensity, the difference. I mean the difference of real solitude, and surrogate solitude of the 21st century kind which, as long as there is internet around, always seems to be but a moment away from being interrupted.
One of the other opportunities is to meditate on the difference between those parts of the journey made on foot or backpacking, and those parts made by mountain bike, or what I call “bikepacking.” (I rhythmically cache the bike, then pack 3 or 5 or 8 days, then return to the bike and continue along the next “spoke” or river of the wheel.)
Yesterday was one of those big biking days, climbing up what I call YELLOW WOLF PASS, and crossing over to a totally new and spectacular drainage, the Imnaha.
Heading to HELLS CANYON OVERLOOK from the pass, I paused for some of this writing and shade, and had just scribbled down something like “Democracy without Truth is just Tyranny by another name.” So you can tell my NEWS OF THE UNIVERSE while out on the wheel is mostly coming from Plato & Socrates. (One of my ‘ambitions’ is to get rid of Aristotle, whose literal emperical style of materialism I very much dislike...)
I quickly gave up on the writing, and started to finish the rough recording of THE WAY OF NONVIOLENCE. Made right off to the side of the road, so the motorcycles etc heard naturally replace the streamside Hermit and Swainson Thushes I recorded before I broke camp in the morning at wilderness’ edge. So the natural and mechanical sounds are indeed used musically, I would say, but also for me are a kind of “sonic journal” of the day’s many turns and changes.
The hymn sounding as background to the text of THE WAY OF NONVIOLENCE is, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross", composed by Isaac Watts, and first published in Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1707.
I love the music, but hate the text. So doing it without words, and as a sustained qualitative spatial ground, is a way of healing it, at least for me personally.
I first came to know the hymn in studying Dr. King”s watershed GANDHI SERMON of 1959. (They actually pause and sing it together with the whole congregation towards the beginning of his talk. You can find Dr. KING’s talk here https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/palm-sunday-sermon-mohandas-k-gandhi-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church
