What a campfire, a blown transmission, and a century of forest policy reveal about where meaning comes from, and how we stop fighting what's already here.
Thank you for this beautiful piece, and for introducing me to the term ‘eigenzeit’. These lines really struck me:
They read the flame’s tempo the way a musician reads a rest between phrases, attending to fire’s eigenzeit: nature’s own timing, the pace inherent to a process that resists being hurried beyond its own happening.
I have been spending extended periods of time alone on the land where I live, intentionally deepening, slowing to the point of discovering my own eigenzeit. When I do, it often feels like a becoming of your three terms: generosity, resonance and harmony. I wonder if this is down to some kind of reciprocal tuning of inner and outer nature of which I am only dimly aware.
Harrison, thank you for your thoughts. I reread our response a few times. The reciprocal tuning you put your finger on is the note my Nature's Values page closes on, that we tune to the ground and in time it tunes us back. I wrote it as a line on a page. You lived it on the land your tending, in your own eigenzeit. That you met the three as generosity first is the part that stopped me, since that's the order I landed on after a long while unsure. The gift seems to open the room the other two move in.
Then I read your prologue and kept nodding. You quote Cusanus on the sphere whose centre is everywhere, and he turns up in my book as well. Your warning not to mistake the mind's map for the thing itself is, more or less, the whole spine of what I'm writing. The book is even called The Middle Finger is the Middle Finger, which is my daughter's way of revealing/reminding me to stop reaching past the thing in front of me.
I'll be reading The Christ I Know By Heart as the chapters come. Looking forward to it. We seem to share similar roots and pathways to the present. Thanks for reading my essay so closely.
Thank you, Isaiah. I appreciate having wise eyes on my work. I’m fairly new to sharing my writing in public and still leaning into the discomfort that sometimes arises.
Your book sounds great, really like the title and the fact that it comes through your daughter. I have two girls. The eldest asks me to “come back” when she can see I’m not present. It’s one thing to find yourself fully awake and embodied in the forest, quite another to maintain that level of awareness in the rush of daily life.
Thank you for this beautiful piece, and for introducing me to the term ‘eigenzeit’. These lines really struck me:
They read the flame’s tempo the way a musician reads a rest between phrases, attending to fire’s eigenzeit: nature’s own timing, the pace inherent to a process that resists being hurried beyond its own happening.
I have been spending extended periods of time alone on the land where I live, intentionally deepening, slowing to the point of discovering my own eigenzeit. When I do, it often feels like a becoming of your three terms: generosity, resonance and harmony. I wonder if this is down to some kind of reciprocal tuning of inner and outer nature of which I am only dimly aware.
Harrison, thank you for your thoughts. I reread our response a few times. The reciprocal tuning you put your finger on is the note my Nature's Values page closes on, that we tune to the ground and in time it tunes us back. I wrote it as a line on a page. You lived it on the land your tending, in your own eigenzeit. That you met the three as generosity first is the part that stopped me, since that's the order I landed on after a long while unsure. The gift seems to open the room the other two move in.
Then I read your prologue and kept nodding. You quote Cusanus on the sphere whose centre is everywhere, and he turns up in my book as well. Your warning not to mistake the mind's map for the thing itself is, more or less, the whole spine of what I'm writing. The book is even called The Middle Finger is the Middle Finger, which is my daughter's way of revealing/reminding me to stop reaching past the thing in front of me.
I'll be reading The Christ I Know By Heart as the chapters come. Looking forward to it. We seem to share similar roots and pathways to the present. Thanks for reading my essay so closely.
Thank you, Isaiah. I appreciate having wise eyes on my work. I’m fairly new to sharing my writing in public and still leaning into the discomfort that sometimes arises.
Your book sounds great, really like the title and the fact that it comes through your daughter. I have two girls. The eldest asks me to “come back” when she can see I’m not present. It’s one thing to find yourself fully awake and embodied in the forest, quite another to maintain that level of awareness in the rush of daily life.