Author: Judy Rintoul

Scientists say we are increasingly biased visually and neuronally against some sensory aspects of our own perceptions and experience. We don’t let awareness linger in fragrances because we head frequently toward sight and thoughts. In other words, we spend a lot of our time in cognitions and visual experiences, but not so much enjoying our other senses and experiences.

So when I had the chance recently to stand so close to a buffalo, I could hear him tearing grass from the ground and sliding it back and forth across his massive teeth and tongue, I lunged at the opportunity to keep my awareness in my ears and resisted the temptation to flit through thoughts about buffalo, danger, my non-working leg or even to appreciate the rich brown of his ear. For a good chunk of time it was just me taking in the tearing and chewing, which, unfortunately, I can’t share in words. The sequence of sounds went something like: tch-glm-sss-ngm-tsh-tsh-zszszszs. It was a non-vowel moment. It was also a bunch of stretchy moments with no markers of time. I have no idea how long I took in the munching of the buffalo sounds. Time slows and stops when I truly switch to a different sense perception. Buffalo time maybe.

Having my awareness seized by new sounds and smells is a reason to leave home and journey to unfamiliar places. The birds sing different songs. The air carries no highway hum only the chorus of crickets or frogs. And when I walk in the sage, the penetrating fragrance prompts an urge to rub myself in a bush and carry its pungent caress on my body always.

My travels in the Northwest are not just for the purpose of seeing new vistas. They are to unhook me from living a biased life. A life lived mostly in my head would be a tragedy. Stale, self-referential, repetitive, boring. The world offers much beyond what the eye can see or the prefrontal cortex throws together in thoughts: the chatter of aspen leaves in the breeze, the click of a crow’s feet walking on rock, or raspy demands from its chicks, the warm mustiness of a wood floor, the juice of a strawberry grown in far away soil.

In the moment I am writing this, I am squarely back in my cortical experience, thinking about what it meant to me to take in new sounds, long sounds, nothing but sounds, or a certain sound as a chosen focus for experience. My decision in this moment is to expand the moments of bliss beside the bison and the sage.

My stored memories are more than just sequential thoughts. They are mini reproductions of the presence I chose in those moments. I didn’t command the buffalo or the crow. The world offered them to me and I brought my awareness to them. And now I feel my thankfulness for all that they stored within me. My knee jerk processes have received a good shake up and reset. “What is that sweet tweet?” asks my ear before my head turns to bring the bird in sight or its species to mind. Let me lounge in the lavender and breathe in smells that have no words.

Images of buffalo and crows by Andrea Blose Dobkin

Okay. I admit I like to play god. That’s why I have a purple clematis flowering in the plum tree. God neglected to give the tree the flowers I like. I had to do it myself. I’m quite happy with the results. They remind me that often I have the power to clean up his design flaws. And if you don’t appreciate my impersonating a deity, I can offer a more neutral take away:

Let your delights tangle together. There is no reason to accept any reality that falls short of what your imagination can do. The sacred new creation awaits your hand and heart.

The clematis episode is not just a jumping off point for vanity or profanity, an excuse to unleash my ego on the flora. (Though I have to mention that on other days of creation there emerged yellow lilies from the midnight ninebark bush and shasta daisies on the variegated iris.)

Sometimes the creations are co-created. The snail that chewed a hole in the leaf allowed a flower to emerge through the opening.

And sometimes the wayward ones plant themselves devilishly in the wrong places. So yes, demons are at work in my palette as well. Why else would a garish pink appear beside a true red? Depends on whether you believe in the design-wrecking devil or the serendipity artist.

I go outside to capture my creations with my phone. I totter to the bottom of the garden with my cane in one hand and my phone in my teeth. When I confront the full on beauty of my handiwork, the marriage of clematis and plum, so does the wind. Apparently I can choose to grow velvety vines in trees, but I can’t prevent the wind from flapping the blossoms and fruit away from the phone-camera. Okay, so I am an imperfect deity. After the wind has buffeted my plums, flowers, wobbly leg and brain, I put the phone back in my teeth and concede my humanity.

I don’t control the weather, my wobbles, the seed spreading birds or my phone. Together they render a blurry picture of my arboreal masterpiece. I go inside and humbly plead for assistance. I will tell the story of creation but the picture will come from my partner, Jeff. The wind has wonderful messages. It says: “Play god as much as you like. Create again and again; just don’t expect your creations to sit still and pose. When I come to bless them, they will dance.”

Creation is collaboration with the unexpected or it is misery.

In driving through the countryside this summer, we found the remnants of people’s dreams. They were houses, barns, shops, gas stations, cars and even a US post office.

Every weathered edifice speaks to vision and decay. Looking on from the outside, I don’t know the story of each dream, but I know well enough how they work in general. There is the spark of invention, creativity, interest. There is the Herculean task of putting it into action; begging, saving or inheriting the money, buying the boards and nailing them together. Maybe even synergy with partners. Seeing the reality of a shared vision come into being.

Then there are the years in which society decides to go a different direction; to send the wheat to a different mill, or perhaps to decide not to eat wheat at all, maybe to let out the wheatfields to a wind farm entrepreneur. To find someone who will carve a cheaper widget or mind the cows for less pay. The car that was once the dream set of wheels now rusts in a field and the new one runs on a computer made far away.

Dead dreams are never solely about one person’s failings. The photographs of dereliction, the story of the passage of time and the turns taken by society, remind me not to think of my own dreams as mine alone but as part of archeological activities stirred by the greater world, the climate, the people, the passage of time.

Fire season in the west is almost here. Some people’s dreams will end in conflagration. My own dream for this season, is that no fires will be started in stupidity.

Technically this is more of a fearful emotion than a vision for anything I could craft. I have no control over this hope for preservation beyond my own care out in the environment. It’s sad to see things with a lot of promise die. Yet being out and about with a nose for smoke, I know that where something once flourished, there is likely to be a gorgeous death. There should be signs next to beautiful dead things that say: “Stop to celebrate the story here.” If there are no cues to slow down and feel the beauty of life and death dance together, I’ll take pictures and post them in a blog.

Eastern Oregon is a dry place, but it wasn’t always that way.

As we wind our way through the fossil beds, waving our phones and lifting our feet over the stones, we snap pictures of the striped cliffs that serve as shelves of the archaeological record. Layered in the stones are the clues to a very different world.

Where now there is dust and boulders, there once thrived a tropical paradise. The cataclysmic debris exhibits the trapped-forever luscious vines, fleshy flowers, fruiting trees, nuts, and other big leafy plants, the fossils of a far away time. The mild climate was similar to that in Central America today. Things changed. And now there are thistles, fine grasses, succulents, small annual wild flowers, lizards and buried intrigues.

It’s worth the journey to walk through change and see how it feels.

The Bitterroot mountains huddle around the Clear Creek River in Idaho, hugging the sides of Route 12 and the history, tears, and the betrayals of the Nimipu or Nez Perce. We take in beauty and tragedy of the territory as we drive for winding miles beside that sparkling water.

These Natives have lived here for 11,000 years before white maurauders invaded the forests, streams and mineral rich hills with their entitled “every man for himself” ethic. The Nez Perce offered to act as guides across the vast territory of which they would later be robbed. Initially, they presented Lewis and Clark with food and shelter, information and safe passage. Over time when pressures for land increased, they asked to be left alone. They signed on to treaties in good faith. Then they were slaughtered and herded into a tiny, unsustainable fragment of their former land.

The man in front of the teepee doesn’t chastise us for being on land exclusively once the home of the Nez Perce. In fact, he wears a baseball shirt and speaks American English rather than Nimipu as he tells of the Native ways disappearing from the Bitterroot.

“Check out the camas down the road,” he offers the blue field where once the tubers were harvested for food that surpasses the protein content of a trout, and are now a periwinkle sea of entertainment for tourists. He casts no looks of resentment our way.

Nor is he the only reminder of things passed. Things that have changed. On the fringes of the parking lot we find another marginalized group, a prairie dog village, relegated there by virtue of the great necessity to have asphalt blanketing three sides of the Visitor Center so that people can park their cars and RVs next to information. The quest for entertaining information has taken the place of the quest for live things to kill. It seems harmless enough until you see the prairie dogs sticking their cute little heads out of one or two burrows where once a robust native community of thousands scampered. “Our people were warned,” the tall brown man says looking wistfully at the prairie dog as it disappears down its tunnel. “We were told not to over-hunt them. Or they would be gone.” He sighs: “Then that’s what happened.”

I wish that I could mirror his reflection of complicity. The time in this powerful place is short on my own journey, but meaningful. As I reflect, I brought my whole self to his earnest sharing. I didn’t let an ounce of my presence or awareness trickle away. The feather of the pheasant, I bought that from him too. These were not acts of reparation, just a paltry stab at acknowledgement. I mean to convey that I see and hear. I can’t claim to understand.

What I did not do, was say how sorry I was. I would have liked to look at him in the eye, as a privileged white woman and tell him of the sadness that we inherit as oppressors with no way to make amends. No way to even know what a repair would look like, or the words that would connect.

I did not know how to say what was in my heart, without being either condescending or emotionally invasive, maybe even verbally disrespectful or violent. Nor do I wish to eclipse his intergenerational losses and triumphs with my own sadness. So I smiled and asked if I could take a picture. I wanted to say instead that I feel a heavy teariness for the long flights through the wilderness, for those who died from exhaustion, starvation, mishap and fear, for the betrayal of trust and broken promises, the theft of homes, land, horses and peace, for the camas, and even the prairie dogs. And of course all that I have inherited by way of privilege and influence from those invaders.

“For whatever residual pain has made its way to you,” I want to say, “it has leaked also into me.” All I can say is that I will try to make something beautiful of it from far away and from close up.