36 - Canyon Thinking

Transcript

Hey there

So I am walking the backside of this little meadow, forested area where my mom lives

It's on the edges of old farmland and I'm about to hop over a split rail fence, which is a little awkward, it's a little tall

There's some, a lot of native plants around here, and also some volunteers from elsewhere

Oregon ash and cottonwood, willow, aspen

There's a grove of hawthorn in full flower

This is a place where deer hang out

Floods in the winter

It's marshy where I am right now

I could probably set up a tent back here

It's quiet

I've just come back from the far east side of the state

I was off grid, down in a canyon for four days, in some pretty crazy country, working on a project and just existing really

I think it was probably the least I've interacted with screens and media in maybe a decade

I didn't really have cell phone signal for about a week and a half, pretty intentionally

I basically just didn't turn my phone on unless I needed navigation

And then there were three nights and four days when I was down in the bottom of this canyon where I really didn't do anything at all

I just kind of existed down there

Ate food and had a little fire now and then

Watched the light change

And it was beautiful and hard, easy, lonely, quiet, all the things

And I've been thinking a lot about why I do what I do, my work as an artist and person

I don't want to think about it too much, but doing something like that made me really consider a lot about why I make things, share things, live the way I do

There's just a lot there

There's a lot of assumptions, a lot of reasons I've been doing stuff for years

A lot of time passed, a lot of habits, that kind of thing

Now I'm in the Grove of Cottonwoods

It's kind of a flood grove

Some reeds back in here

Maybe there's sedges

So I don't have a lot of answers about why, but I think I discovered a new language of some kind down in that canyon

Definitely a new relationship with myself

There wasn't much to hide down there

Turns out being alone for long periods of time is pretty tough

I mean, I've done it before, but this was different somehow

It's really good to do, but it's not easy sometimes

Parts of it aren't easy

Parts of it are really incredible

It's always funny to be alone in a place like that and run into a person once in a while and realize that pretty much everybody else is out there with other people

It really got me thinking about the reasons why people do things and why I do things

For me, a lot of it is to get away from loneliness, actually

From being alone with my own thoughts

Partially because they can be boring

Partially because it's really not maybe the healthiest long term to always just be alone with one's own thoughts

But I think that there's something really deep there

And I don't consume much media

I mean, maybe a podcast every two or three days

Sometimes I don't listen to one for a week or so

But something I thought was really strange down there is I had songs that I hadn't listened to for many days just repeatedly looping in my head

And it was almost like my mind was just spinning in neutral, trying to find something stimulating to remember or to latch on to

Or maybe it was just digesting everything

My friend Martin said metabolizing, which I really like

Actually metabolizing the experiences that I've had

And I think it takes a really silent, open, empty space without any direction, honestly

No structure

No one else around

No information

Just the sun rising and setting

And sitting in places like that really makes me reconsider kind of my whole life.

Why do I do what I do? Why do I want to share writing and recordings with people? What's really at the base of all that? What need of mine is being met? Am I doing it as a means to an end? Or am I doing it as an end in and of itself? And I've decided pretty conclusively that I want to do things in my life that are an end in and of themselves

I don't want to be chasing different activities for a lot of my life because they're giving me something that's not inside of the activity itself

And I think I do want to share what I make, but it's difficult to know whether that's worthwhile or not for others

And so I decided that I'll do it for my own joy and my own insights

And if others want to come along for the ride and see what's there

I mean, I've been doing it this way all along, but I think that there's always these shadow sides, like hidden unconscious sides of any activity or anything a person does that aren't fully available to them unless they sit and really delve into the why

And an activity I've been doing recently is asking myself why seven or eight times about something really gets down to the root of what's going on

It's hard

I feel like my mind wants to squirm away from those kinds of inquiries

But I think it's pretty necessary and helpful in the long run

I'm leaning on a tree and there's moss on it

It's young

What happened is it fell over

Probably got blown over

That happened a while ago

The original shoot has since been pruned off by the tree itself

It's broken off and healed off

And right above it, the tree is totally horizontal from where it fell

And right above that crook, there's another strong, young stem coming out at a 90 degree angle

And there is one back further, too, before this one was the main apical meristem, I think is what it's called, which I learned about in my pruning work over the last couple of months

And that one's now 20 feet tall and the roots are still somehow connected

And in fact, the trees put down more roots to stabilize and this tree is probably going to be here a long time now

It's nice to see that when things get knocked over, they can get up again

That's kind of how I felt this last year

Lots of knocking over, getting up again

I think I can hear seven different birds singing right now

Thanks for listening.