Discuss: Mind in the Forest

I cannot imagine a more thought-provoking piece than this. It has come straight from the heart of the author(as we have somehow come to express such things).
I wonder whether words like inanimate matter,living/nonliving, etc., do not inhibit our ability to ‘realise’ ourselves and our role in the cosmic ‘order’ of things.(even chaos is a state of order not understood by us).

Beautifully written, thank you.

In this beautiful piece, you have expressed what has been inexpressible for me, and I plan to share it with my family and friends. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I recognize, deep in my gut, the strong life force that you were enveloped in here, in the forest of the Doug Fir. Thank you for this gift.

The author steps as carefully thru the forest of ideas about nature (our place in it and our possible responses ) as he does over the land itself, bringing us close to the beating of the heart of the matter. This is the degree of care needed to envision sane action.
  Meditation as an experience of tree intelligence, carefully sidestepped anthropomorphism (walking mountains and muscular current are just descriptive, not anthropomorphic), the dangers of the sky god cults, the need to think like the forest, flow, above all how our thoughts and concepts lead to creation or destruction.
  Our experience of mind is a local manifestation of something immense that surely is manifesting differently in other localities. I personally hesitate to give that other immensity the name of mind. Just my own brand of sidestepping.

beautifull thoughts scot,
i am blessed also to live amoung beautifull forests that feed the body and nourish all that i am.
you articulate beautifully much
of what i feel about this treasure,
thank you for your inspiration..
niall.

Thank you so much…

Since I am a citizen of Oregon who can readily take in the lofty majesty of Mount Hood from windows near where I am writing, from our house near the east bank of the Willamette River here in Portland, I commend Mr.Russell for sharing his ripe, lyrical articulation of what we Oregonians and our visitors can access with relatively little effort. Some of the trees long ago set aside in a generously long strip which extends miles along the crest of what we know as “The West Hills” host thick, curly moss, some species of lichen and other native plants—even some species of terrestrial orchids! Headed west for an hour to the almost gothic Pacific coastline—again much of it still intact—anyone can stop to draw in the deep fragrance of “old growth” Douglas fir and other vegetation, e.g. Foxglove flower spikes both lavender and white in bloom for weeks. Your author’s perceptions and reflections merite comparison to Thoreau and other Americans since who found green tranquility and mindful nutrition while others, crazed by gold finds and free land, left only dust and sickened native peoples in their wake. This past week, delighted to greet yet another knock on our door by a young person representing an “eco-friendly” organization called “BARK,” I contributed to their costs in battling some outfit bent on running a pipeline through the Mt. Hood National Forest.Other Portlanders do more than gossip about celebs while scooping up trash or “invasive species” of plants on beaches and trails, etc. I quietly celebrate the flow of natural phenomena that runs in so many directions and at such sweet depths here, and I feel like a tributary as yet another rain front tonight will leave the Yew and the Blue Spruce drenched as I gaze over my fresh coffee after a night of bright dreams and perhaps a fresh metaphor for my current journal. Pax vobiscum!

Scott—
Thank you for this thoughtful and moving essay.  There was much I appreciated.

A recurring word here is “spell,” whose origins converge on incantation, saying and play, and make the word a good one to characterize “Mind of the Forest.”  In places the essay is spell-binding, but in a freeing way.

The essay turns on a weave of thinking and metaphor.  Crowd of pebbles, fungi like balconies, muscular current—-these and other metaphors not only help us cross the bridge of Lookout Creek; they reveal that thinking of this kind has its roots in our experience of the earth as a living, phenomenal being, a correlative of our symbolic understanding, including language.

Surely it’s a narrow form of reason that would claim such analogies are false, the same kind of reason, routine since the scientific revolution, that claims the only valid truth is empirical,the measuring of(mere)matter.

I too, though rarely, have experienced in meditation contact with what I’d call a larger mind, if only by emptying my own smaller mind of clutter.  It’s clear, after such emptying, that something is there, perhaps what the Buddhists call no-mind.  Maybe meditation will oneday make it possible to experience other forms of intelligence than our own.  I’ve worked on lichens at times, though they’re stubborn and crusty and taste like moldy sawdust. Still, they seem to want to tell me something.

I agree that in composing we must honor the matrix.  It is surely the power that is forever composing us, in the very acts of perceiving and thinking. As Campbell says, “we are the consciousness of the earth.”  Whether or not a fir tree can understand us will remain moot as long as a residue of unconscious positivism (Barfield’s phrase)colors our thinking—I know it does mine.

The challenge is huge.  Honoring the matrix—actually re-composing it—on a daily basis,is virtually a requirement if we are to sustain the life of the planet.  It demands a systematic use of imagination of the kind your essay embodies.  Our challenge, and especially the challenge of science,is exactly to think like a tree, and—the leap repels the positivist—be thought by the tree.

If nature is a reflection of Mind, such thinking opens an ancient door.

Thanks for knocking,Scott.
As ever,
Bill