So I decided to sum up the rest of my class reflections in one entry.  I can’t believe that this semester and this class is practically over!  These past few weeks there have been some readings that I admit I didn’t get to but look forward to reading this summer.  I especially can’t wait to finish reading the last chapter of The Spell of the Sensuous.  Though I don’t have much in the way of reading responses for this last entry, I’d like to reflect on some guest speakers and the Wednesday classes in general.  The class after the one loaded with science themes, we went on a field trip, first to Whitted Bowers Farm and then to Maia’s house in Efland.

Whitted Bowers Farm is one of the few bio-dynamic farms in the south east U.S. and it is run by the sweetest couple, Rob and Cheri Bowers.  Cheri had actually gone to high school with Maia and they had reconnected at a high school reunion.  It was fascinating hearing about this type of farming and each of their vocational journeys.  Rob talked about how he used to work in legal positions for nonprofits, but how even though he was great at it, and it sounded good in theory, he really didn’t fill fulfilled, he didn’t like his job.  Finally after he had met Cheri and they had a child they both decided that they really wanted to own and work on a self-sustainable bio-dynamic farm.  So they went for it.  Rob emphasized that living densely is what is rewarding.  Cheri also told her story.  Her’s was a little different in that she had pretty much always followed her heart in her vocational journey.  It was interesting hearing about the diversity of jobs and experiences she had encountered.  After we got a tour of the farm, we got to go to Maia’s house and eat a spaghetti dinner.  It was really fun.  I love her small wooden house in the middle of the woods.  I want a house like that some day.

The next week was my last class out in the woods (I sadly missed the final class as I was busy painting for my senior art thesis show).  I became rather nostalgic sitting around with my classmates realizing how much I had come to like and appreciate each one of them, and how I was going to miss meeting them in the woods every Wednesday.  Our guest speaker was really cool, but for the life of me I can’t remember her name…. She was a Guilford graduate, around 27, bright and full of life.  She talked to us about her first experiences after graduation where she was a manager at the Whole Foods grocery store across the street from Guilford.  She told us that she felt bad about herself that she wasn’t working for a nonprofit or doing something in the spirit of Guilford.  Even though eventually she got a new job and has since then started up her own non-profit called Face-to-Face, she told us that there is nothing wrong with working as a manager at Whole Foods for a few years or forever, that you don’t have to define yourself solely by your work.  Now working at an insurance company, she gave us some good advice about personal finances after we graduate.  She encouraged us to start saving for retirement and to set financial goals.

Reflecting on this class in general, I think it has made me much more ready to face the adventure that will come after college.  Whereas before I would just fear it, now I’m curious about it.  What will I make it?  How do I want to live my life?  I don’t have to figure that out the day after I graduate but I think I have gained some important tools which I can use to analyze my life as I live it.  In the words of Socrates: “The unexamined life is a life not worth living.”  I agree and I look into the future with bright eyes and an open mind.

In the spirit of spontaneity I would like to end my reflection with some pictures my roommate Megan and I took the other night.  We were both working on school work and Megan looks over to the window and exclaims: “Look at those clouds!”  I did and the sunset was beautiful.  We both hurried to get our shoes on, grabbed my camera, and ran outside.  In the wind under the falling sun we took pictures.  It was joy.  We were being idle and blessed as poet Mary Oliver would say.  If she were to ask me, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  I would reply, to try everyday to see it and experience it as such.

Above are some pictures I took by the lake.  I was so excited to get some good pictures of the turtles that live in the Guilford lake.  Sometimes they are hard to get pictures of because as soon as they hear you walking they jump in the water and swim away (pretty fast for a creature notorious for being slow).  Also for our visual journal, in class today we made Fundred Dollar Bills.  If you want to know what those are, check out this link: (http://blog.art21.org/2008/03/03/mel-chin-the-fundred-dollar-bill-project/)

For class today we had to read two articles and one chapter from another book by Howard Gardner.  The articles are “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/kuhn.htm), ”Breaking the Galilean Spell” by Stuart A. Kauffman (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman08/kauffman08_index.html), and “Albert Einstein: The Perennial Child” from Gardner’s book Creating Minds.  Also for today’s class we had a guest speaker, Gilbert Bailey, another Guilford alumni who came to speak about his vocational journey.  And in addition to class we were required to go to a physics lecture on Friday afternoon by the Guilford alumni Viktoria Jane Greanya  called “Faith in the Future: Intellectual Curiosity and Exciting Mysteries”.

I guess I will respond to these all kind of mixed up in a paragraph.  My favorite article to read was “Breaking the Galilean Spell” Kauffman talks about the limits of the scientific reductionist world view which is something I have struggled with.  I appreciate his argument about the inherent creativity of the universe and how the future cannot be predicted even using science.  Kauffman says, “Emergence is therefore a major part of the new scientific worldview. Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives.”  His conclusions remind me of phenomenology that Abram discusses.  In Kuhn’s article he talks about scientific paradigms and how there are different ones and how first you have one and you use it to solve scientific problems but then you find holes in it where it doesn’t explain everything, and then you have to switch to a new paradigm.  What I find interesting about this is the idea that we as humans cannot so simply explain natural phenomena.  Many people who are unfamiliar with the complexities of the sciences, a category in which I admit I fall, assume that it i, for one, unified, and that “science,” as if it is one singular thing, is completely objective and outside of humanity and its biases.  Finally from what I got reading part of the Einstein article, is that he was an awesome individual and made a major shift away from the Newtonian paradigm into a new paradigm concerning physics: the Einstein theory of relativity.  I admit I didn’t get to the part where Gardner explains what his theory entails.  Sorry Maia, I promise I’ll read it in the summer!

Anyways, in conclusion, I really liked Kauffman’s article, so much so that I want to reread it this summer to try and more completely digest all of its implications.

Oh! I almost forgot.  On Friday we went to a physics lecture as a part of the Guilford Alumni Physics Lecture thing.  I can’ t remember too much about what she said, but it was really cool to hear her speak and to see her excitement about what she was doing.  It was interesting that with all the differences in what she studied at Guilford and what I did, we seemed to have a lot in common about our relationships with our teachers and our outlook on what’s important in life, which is also how I felt listening to our guest speaker in class that week, Gilbert Bailey.

Above is a sketch of the intertwined roots of two trees along a stream in the Guilford woods.

For today’s class we read the book Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, written by Yvon Chouinard.  We had an interesting class discussion and a really cool guest speaker, Tom Risser.

I enjoyed reading Yvon’s book and learning about his life and his outdoor clothing company, Patagonia.  I especially loved the first part where he talks about his adventurous youth.  He got into climbing at a young age and started making his own climbing gear that he began to sell to other climbers to support his spontaneous outdoors life-style.  One of my favorite parts of the book were the pictures.  They were just really nice, large black and white pictures of people doing outdoor sports, people involved in the company, and landscapes.  They just made the story come to life in a way.  One thing we talked about in class was that he wrote this book for a specific audience, which are other businesses who aren’t doing anything for the environment.  Our class too was wondering about some of the labor issues that the book didn’t touch on.  One guy in class said that he had been to, (I forget the country) but he went to a free-trade market place or something and saw sweatshop conditions and people working on Patagonia clothing there.  So while this book is definitely from the perspective of ownership, and there are still things the company could do better, I still think that Yvon is brave for trying to create a company that is conscientious and progressive in negotiating more environmentally friendly ways of production.  Maia had an interesting comment where she said something like this is what he did, these are the changes he worked to put into place, and now it’s up to you guys to carry the torch and try and solve issues that you think are important.  I think the most compelling part of Yvon’s story is that he never stopped doing what he loved.  He always made time for surfing, climbing: experiencing the outdoors that he loved so much.  He didn’t let his passions die away in the face of having a career and running a business.  I know that in my life I definitely want  to keep pursuing my passions, two of which are appreciating the outdoors and art.

Tom Risser.  I think everyone in my class loves this guy, he was a really cool guest speaker.  He even made a video for us and a large steel sculpture of our college mascot!  It was interesting hearing him speak the same week of the Yvon reading because they both have important things in common.  They both live their passions and they both run businesses.  They both believe in having a community work environment and in encouraging creativity in the work place.  They both also have passions outside of work.  Tom loves skateboarding and sculpting and still does both.  I admire Tom for his energy.  He has a full time job, a family, and still finds time to create.  One interesting thing he said was that he is glad that he doesn’t count the hours that he works on his art because then he would probably enjoy it less.  His art isn’t about quantifying or qualifying, it’s about fun and liberation.

For today’s class we read 4 articles written by Wendell Berry.  The titles are “In Distrust of Movements,” “The Idea of a Local Economy,” “Why I Am NOT Going to Buy a Computer,” and “Feminism, the Body, and The Machine.” Links to the articles:

http://thegreenhorns.wordpress.com/essays/essay-in-distrust-of-movements-by-wendell-berry/

http://www.relocalize.net/node/4770

http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berrynot.html

http://www.crosscurrents.org/berryspring2003.htm

I really enjoyed reading these articles.  There is so much good stuff in them and compelling ideas.  He brings up a lot of concerns that I too have about the “developed” industrial world.  What I think I’m going to do is write out the quotes that really spoke to me from each article and then respond to them.

“In Distrust of Movements”

“[Movements] virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place.”

“Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say.”

“Every economy is, by definition, a land-using economy.”

“[Industrialism] is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends. . . the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures and local economies has been constant.”

“Educated minds, in the modern era, are unlikely to know anything about food and drink, clothing and shelter.”

“What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?”

“I am suggesting that most people now are living on the far side of a broken connection, and that this is potentially catastrophic.”

“Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations.”

“. . . we need to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy.”

“The proper business of a human economy is to make one whole thing of ourselves and this world.”

The Idea of a Local Economy”

“What has happened is that most people in our country, and apparently most people in the “developed” world, have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food, clothing, and shelter. Moreover, they are rapidly giving proxies to corporations or governments to provide entertainment, education, child care, care of the sick and the elderly. . . .”

“The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.”

“. . . the only future good that it assuredly leads to is that it will destroy itself.”

“. . . the “free market” is freest to those who have the most money, and is not free at all to those with little or no money.”

“The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. . . .  The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.”

“The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”

“To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.”

Why I am NOT Going to Buy a Computer”

“I can only conclude that I have scratched the surface of a technological fundamentalism that, like other fundamentalisms, wishes to monopolize a whole society and, therefore, cannot tolerate the smallest difference of opinion.”

“Feminism, the Body, and the Machine”

“It is equally regrettable that all of the feminist attacks on my essay implicitly deny the validity of two decent and probably necessary possibilities: marriage as a state of mutual help, and the household as an economy.”

“Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.”

“How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to?”

“The problem is not just the exploitation of women by men. A greater problem is that women and men alike are consenting to an economy that exploits women and men and everything else.”

“. . . the orthodox assumption of the industrial economy—that the only help worth giving is not given at all, but sold.”

“After several generations of “technological progress,” in fact, we have become a people who cannot think about anything important.”

“This hatred of the body and of the body’s life in the natural world, always inherent in the technological revolution (and sometimes explicitly and vengefully so), is of concern to an artist because art, like sexual love, is of the body. Like sexual love, art is of the mind and spirit also, but it is made with the body and it appeals to the senses.”

“I don’t want to deny myself the pleasure of bodily involvement in my work, for that pleasure seems to me to be the sign of an indispensable integrity.”

“. . . our language passes in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind. They cannot make sense in the mind until they have made sense in the body.”

“A handwritten or typewritten page therefore is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains parts and relics of its own history—erasures, passages crossed out, interlineations—suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to. The light-text on the computer screen, by contrast, is an artifact typical of what can only be called the industrial present, a present absolute. A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization.”

“All good human work remembers its history.”

“But I do say that in using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of the body from the work of the mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a sterile, untouched, factorymade look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new car. The body does not do work like that.”

“The body characterizes everything it touches.”

“On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.”

I find that there is so much in these articles so I am only going to touch on a few points that really challenged me.  One big issue at stake is our consumptive industrial society.  It seems that our society’s way of life is at odds with health, to put it simply and bluntly.  How is this healthy, what we’re doing to ourselves and our planet?  How do individuals who choose not to comply with this destructive direction and mentality live their lives with integrity?  Wendell Berry is right, we don’t know anything about real, practical knowledge.  For example, I don’t really know how to literally provide for my basic needs.  I don’t know how to grow food, how to build shelter, how to make clothing.  I think our version of humanity is in someways a contradiction.  We are animals on this earth yet unlike other species of animals, many of us don’t play an active role in survival skills, skills directly related to negotiating with the wild earth.  We are of this planet, but we are far removed from it at the same time.  It’s hard to even describe our curious position.  I think Wendell gets at something when he claims that people give proxies to corporations to do everything for them.  Are we proxying away our lives?  Are we giving up much of what truly connects us to the earth?  I just know that something doesn’t feel right about the way our society is conducting itself.  I don’t really know the answer, or if there is one, but I don’t want to just ignorantly conform to it at the same time.  Somehow I want to find ways to keep my integrity.  Wendell Berry seems to have negotiated ways in which he can keep engaged with these problems.  He showed me that one can keep struggling with these problems, and come up with small strategies to keep from totally letting oneself be completely overshadowed by overwhelming forces.  For example he recognized that he didn’t want to participate in the new technology of computers.  He went against the grain and did what he wanted to do, despite criticism.  He also speaks out and challenges others to think about things they overlook or take for granted.  One important thing that I’m realizing is that you can’t begin to solve a problem unless you see that one’s there.

The other aspect of the Wendell Berry readings that spoke to me as an artist are the points that he makes concerning art making and its relationship to the body and the senses.  He talks about his writing that is either hand written or typed on a type-writer, about how there are remnants of the process of writing and how the history and evolution of the work is important and an integral part of the work itself.  I feel that way about painting.  When I look at a painting, whether mine or someone else’s, I’m not just looking at the finished image, I’m also looking at the process of how that image came to be.  How they applied paint, what did they paint first and then cover with another layer?  What were they seeing and how were they trying to describe it?  I’m looking at all the decisions that were made.  I get an insight into that artist’s creative process and their physical process of art-making.  I love when Berry says, “The body characterizes everything it touches.”  I agree, and I see my art as being a lot about my body and mind’s interaction with materials and concepts.

For this class we also had two guest speakers.  I feel bad that I can’t remember their names but they were two women who had graduated from Guilford and who are currently their own bosses.  They both went to school after college.  It was interesting to hear them speak.  After I felt kinda overwhelmed.  It was a wake-up call to the fact that I’ll be graduating soon and will have to make decisions about what I want my life to be.

Also below is a link to my reflection paper that I wrote for class.  Feel free to read it and learn more about my experience.

IDS 1st backpacking trip, reflection paper

Wednesday’s class was fun.  We actually got to go to a new location in the woods.  Above is a drawing of a fallen tree a number of us were sitting on.  It was nice to have a change of setting.  It was also nice to hear from a couple of students who brought some stuff to share with the class.  One brought some Romantic poetry that related to themes in the Abram readings and another shared an artist who he found makes large “creatures” that move on wind power through different environments.  Pretty interesting, I can’t remember the name of the artist though.  Next we did an exercise inspired by a love letter that Maia brought and read to class.  It’s called “Sullivan Ballou’s Last Letter Home”  written in July 14th 1861.  It was a beautiful letter that revealed his passionate struggle with his love of country and love of his wife and children.  Maia had the idea that in addition to our visual journals that we should all write a love letter inspired by that letter plus the readings we did for class (“Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke), informally and to anyone or anything.  It was an interesting exercise.  I find myself more and more inspired by poetry and to write poetry, using, twisting, and manipulating language to get at true expression and emotion, so I might continue to experiment with that.

Also before I go into the reading reflection, in class on Wednesday we also watched an awesome movie called “Dogtown and Z-Boys.”  It was a fascinating movie about the transformation of skateboarding from a toy/gimmick like thing, to an artful sport.  The filmography was really captivating and the photos were beautiful.  It inspired me how they took something that people didn’t really take seriously and they transformed it creatively into something meaningful.

For class we read “Letters to a Young Poet”  written by Rainer Maria Rilke. (http://www.sfgoth.com/~immanis/rilke/letter1.html) It was interesting to read his letters without having read Mr. Kappus’, to whom he was corresponding, letters.  Rilke essentially writes giving encouragement and advise to the young poet.  I think I’ll just include here some quotes from the reading that I found intriguing.

“Read as little as possible of literary criticism – such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them” (Letter 3).

“[I]n fact the artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss” (Letter 3).

“Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer”  (Letter 4).

“Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge” (Letter 4).

“The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping” is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals – and our enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions” (Letter 4).

“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation” (Letter 7).

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens” (Letter 8).

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love” (Letter 8).

“So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you” (Letter 8)?