For this challenge we had to journal about a life lesson we've learned. (apologies in advance for the length!) While attending the University of Utah, I took a liberal arts class entitled "Mind and Nature" that, along with the accompanying book, The Immense Journey by Howard Eisley, changed my outlook on life. They forced me to think about things i never had, to open up and accept ideas that were foreign to me. The class explored the interconnectedness of the mind, the body, and nature. It was a class I will never forget. Reflecting on the class caused me to reflect upon the changes that it wrought in my life; the paradigm change that occurred as a result. I think that this new paradigm has opened my mind to new possibilities, new ideas, and new ways of thinking. It’s funny how the mind works. Half a continent away, and three decades later, I can remember it as if it were yesterday. The irony strikes me anew as I think of the little girl growing up by the ocean, afraid to swim. I was content to sit in the shallow water of the tide pools, waves crashing on the beach, water running over me as the tide came in and out. My father was a Navy man and it drove him crazy that I would find contentment on the shore. The ocean called to him. An irresistible yearning made his soul hunger for the wide expanse of sea. One day, I think he just had enough. He picked me up, hauled me up onto his broad shoulders, and carried me out to sea. There was not much that I could do except cry as he first walked, then swam, farther and farther out until the shoreline was just a strip of white on the horizon. We arrived at the sand bar and there he deposited me. I stood there howling as I watched him make his way back to the safety of the beach. When he arrived on shore, my 13 year old sister was there to greet him, hands on her hips, yelling at him—nose to belly. I saw her turn my way, shield her eyes from the sun, and without hesitation, dive into the surf. Her strokes were beautiful and strong, cutting through the water like knives. To see her swim was like watching a ballet. She moved with an effortless grace and self-confidence. I watched in awe as she danced with the waves. When she reached the sand bar, I ran sobbing to her. She lifted me up, hooked me under her elbow, and swam back to shore. When we reached dry land, she looked at me and said, “If he comes again, just run.” My sister was the swimmer, but I was the runner. After that, every time I saw my father heading to the beach, I would get up from my shallow pool and run. I would run until I found another little pool to splash in. I think back to that primordial fish that Eiseley wrote about. The snout, when needing to leave his ooze, would retreat to land and, with his fin-legs, run until he found another pond more hospitable. I was like the snout. When threatened in my little pool of water, I would retreat to the beach, running until I reached another pool of water, and there, safely reenter. "The first land-walking fish was, by modern standards, an ungainly and inefficient vertebrate. Figuratively, he was a water failure who had managed to climb ashore on a continent where no vertebrates existed. In a time of crisis he had escaped his enemies. As we have seen, it is the wet fish gasping in the harsh air on the shore, the warm blooded mammal roving unchecked through the torpor of the reptilian night, the lizard-bird into a moment of ill-aimed flight that shatter all purely competitive assumptions. These singular events reveal escapes through the living screen, penetrated, one would have to say in retrospect, by the "overspecialized" and the seemingly "inefficient," the creatures driven to the wall. Only after their triumphant planetary radiation is something new observed to have arisen in solitude and silence." Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey I think that is what is happening today. The memes and schemata of the white man hold sway. He holds the world in his iron grip. He is on top of the fitness peak; has been on the top for millennia. But changes are afoot. It is the ungainly, seemingly unfit disappointment, waiting in quiet isolation, who will survive. It is not the successful ones who make that evolutionary leap forward; it is the failures, those who had to develop fin-feet in order to survive, those who lifted their heads out of the sludge and breathed in oxygen. It is those ungainly creatures that we spoke of in class that are poised to leap; the women, minorities, obese, gay—waiting for their chance to rise from obscurity. I dreamed of flying a few nights ago. Standing atop a cliff, I just spread my wings and rose. Over the towering pines and quaking aspens, I lifted higher and higher, soaring across that blue expanse of sky. Nothing could stop me, nothing could hold me back as I lifted and dipped, caught the wind currents and, mounted on eagle’s wings, I soared triumphant. My mind feels like that now. It lifts and climbs every day. It is going through an evolutionary leap, crossing boundaries and barriers, reaching ever upward. My mind has sprouted wings. They are small wings; they are feeble wings, but they are wings. And they are poised to soar.
You can see it here at
Digitals. I used Dana Frantz' beautiful kit
"Butterfly" available at Scrapbook Graphics.
