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I am listening in on this conversation from New Brunswick, where I am (also)  vacationing, where today I visited the very striking natural sandstone formations known as the "Hopewell Flowerpots"--and learned something, Arlo! about the geological processes that continue to shape them: how the ocean floor once rose up, to create mountains, how the water and wind then sculpted those formations...continually overturning the divisions between land, water, air, as each element works to remake the other.

 

Looking out, it's actually sometimes hard for me to tell whether I am seeing land or water or air, a confusion that seems to me, today, to be less optical illusion than evocative representation of nature's ongoing erasure of distinction, an erasure that was very much on my mind and retinas when I came across  Mark's posting. So now I want to lay alongside his striking observation that we neglect "different differences" my current strongly-felt sense of nature's indifference...

to such differences. The natural forces @ work here, in the maritime provinces, are very powerful ones, and they seem in opposition to all the constructions that humans continually build, and as continually try to maintain. But of course they are not really "opposed" to us and not working "against" us...we are the ones who create those oppositions.



Betwixt and between trying to make sense of such sights, I am also reading local authors, and am deep now into Helen Nearing's Loving and Leaving the Good Life. She writes after the death of her husband, the radical economist and activist Scott Nearing, and makes it seem a very small stretch when she quotes Gandhi: "sorrow over separation is perhaps the greatest delusion. To realize that it is a delusion is to become free. We love friends for the substance we recognize in them and yet deplore the destruction of the insubstantial that covers the substance for the time being. There is no death, no separation for the substance."

Death as a human construction....put that one in your pipe and smoke it along w/ me, along with Nearing's sense of a universe "too magnificent" to "concern itself overmuch with personalities," her invitation to "live in the entirety rather than in our own puny selves."

More later, perhaps, on her attempts, and "mine"? to live life without the "I," with the ego muted...