Trails To Life Go Up

Walking Among The Beach Combers of Chicago

2011-07-28T16:59:00.000-07:00

What makes a person wander along a beach fingering along through the flotsam in search of treasures that have washed in with the waves? Are these people born this way? Has something happened to them to make them seek the solitude of the morning surf?
Though the beaches along the southern shores of Lake Michigan do not have the majesty of sea coasts, they nevertheless draw out the beachcomber in the Midwesterner. On my walks along the beaches from Chicago to the Indiana Dunes, I often come across this peculiar breed. They are of all colors and sizes, of every class and physical condition. Once, I saw a woman dragging her tank of oxygen through the rocks, as she sifted through the sands looking for glass. They are often older, but among children you can see the same instinct to marvel and collect, finding in a spent balloon or odd bit of driftwood or colorful stone something to decorate a sand sculpture.

The beach comber apparently has its origins among British sailers, who, exhausted, banished, or simply intrigued, stayed in ports and islands in the South Seas and in other distant shores far from home. There, they learned to live off what they could find on the beach, fishing, collecting, making a hut, co-mingling among the native people, and returning on the next crew or deciding that this life and the ways of these people were far superior than the harsh life of a sailor. I suspect that the beachcomber is part of a world wide tribe of people. And I’m not so sure that a beach comber even needs a beach to do his wandering and sifting through the debris of man and nature. The found art folk, the alley wanderers, dumpster divers, etc. My mother, who suffers from Alzheimers, walks around her yard and garden every day and picks up sticks that have fallen. Is that not a form of beachcombing? We come from a long line of hunters and gatherers, and some of the earliest archeological sites are along the shores of lakes in Africa.

But as I walk, I’m always looking for the beachcombers, to see what they’re doing, what they’re collecting, what they’ve got in that special bag by their side. Often they are simply picking up trash, the good Samaritans of the beach. (There are many of these in Chicago, men mostly, for some reason.) I met a man who'd been picking up trash for over 25 years on Hollywood Beach. He told me: "My daughter cut her foot out here once on a piece of glass, so I just think maybe I can do some good." On the Chicago lake front there are no real shells but there is glass, shards polished by the surf, and this occupies many of us beach combers.

“I’ve got pounds and pounds of them,” a woman told me last week, as I was about to go for a swim. She was dragging a stick through piles of tiny tumbled lake stones by Pratt Pier on Chicago’s northern most beach. “I pray while I do it,” she said. “It keeps me sane,” she smiled, showing me her finds. “I make things with them. Prayer glasses, you know, for candles.” She showed me her legs, scared with little dots up and down her ankles. “I got titanium bones, got rear-ended three times. Blessing in disguise, though. I pray for these rage road people, cause I was like them once.” She leans on her stick, then bends back down and picks up a thumbnail shard of green glass.

“You’ll think this is crazy,” I confessed to her, “but I collect brick and concrete stones.” I picked up a piece of concrete that had been tumbled into a polished stone of conglomerate pebbles. “Water is a powerful thing,” she said. “I’ll look for some for you. I’m collecting Warsaw granite, see,” she showed me a garnet colored stone, wet and gleaming in her black fingers. “I know this guy who picks up the trash here. His mother’s gravestone is made of the same granite. I give him all I got.”

I walked on down the beach, thinking of her, ambling there in the surf, picking through the rocks, as the waves came and retreated.

MARCHING THROUGH 30 YEARS OF AIDS

2011-06-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

“The more we lack the courage and the will to act, the more we condemn to death our brothers and sisters, our children and our grandchildren. When the history of our times is written, will we be remembered as the generation that turned our backs in a moment of a global crisis or will it be recorded that we did the right thing?”— Nelson Mandela, Tromso, Norway (11 June 2004)

Zackie Achmat and AIDS activists at AIDS Conference in South Africa, 2000

Thirty years ago, I heard the news on a gerry-rigged short wave radio with its antennae attached the top of my thatched roof. The BBC announcer described a mysterious disease that affected the immune system, which apparently only infected gay men and some Haitian immigrants. The disease was called AIDS. It was 1981. I was in the Peace Corps in West Africa working with women on vegetable gardening. I heard the report again and again that day, a news junky even then. Each time I became more and more alarmed and scared.

Fifteen years later, in a public health clinic in Chicago, I sat across from a social worker. She passed me a slip of paper with three words on it: my first name, my last name and underneath in a dot matrix blur: POSITIVE. I stared at it for what seemed like a long time, thinking first that it meant, good news, positive, as opposed to negative, bad. Then, as my mind struggled to accept the diagnosis, I actually had the thought that I was not, Michael McColly. After all these years, this was not my name. Who was this man? Not me.

But it was.

On Northwestern Campus, Evanston

In 2000, I was back in Africa, marching along with tens of thousands of South Africans, people like me living with HIV, as well as activists and health workers from around the world who were attending the International AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa. I wore this t-shirt, walking through the streets of Durban, proudly raising my voice with the others, chanting slogans to wake the people of the world to the injustice of drug companies and governments blocking access to the millions in need for treatment. What I remember that day were the throngs of young people, bussed in from around South Africa, from Soweto, from Cape Town, from rural areas where rates of infection were in some places nearly 30 percent. They were so boisterous, chanting, laughing, arm-in-arm, finally able to be out in the open, unafraid, their heads held high, marching at the front of the protest.

Then as now, millions still have little access to the necessary drugs and care that have kept me and thousands of others free from the ravages of this insidious retrovirus, which infiltrates and copies itself onto healthy T-cells.

Last week, I pulled this t-shirt out of my drawer. (I’d worn it only once since that day at talk I’d given on AIDS activism, which was the subject of my last book, The After-Death Room.) I decided to wear it for a few days in honor of all of those who have been affected by HIV as well as all of those unsung healers, care-givers, health workers, activists, scientists, and artists who’ve given so much to keep the world aware of this disease. I wore it to readings, while teaching, while walking through campus, while walking through the streets of Chicago, and through my own neighborhood. It was my mini march of memory and protest. Everyone wears t-shirts to support causes or proclaim affiliations or make jokes or call attention to something. But when I put on this shirt with HIV POSITIVE in bold purple, I felt that old anxiety of fifteen years before, an anxiety that I’m reminded millions feel every day, terrified for not only their health but of others finding out. People are still jailed, beaten, and murdered for living with HIV. Two men boldly asked me why I was wearing it. A few smiled. But most still rushed by, one young man on Michigan Ave, blurted, as if I might not have ears, “Eeww, look: HIV!”

HIV and AIDS still threatens the lives of some 30 plus million people. Most of those who live with HIV don't know they have the disease, as they are too afraid to find out or have little access to health care. Most of the people with HIV are poor, young, female, and vulnerable to other diseases and the world's injustices. The losses attributed to this disease are incalculable. The fears are still palpable and destructive. Yet, this disease has also awakened the world that we share this planet, and the health of each individual affects us all. Whether it is HIV, TB, war, toxic chemicals, greed, racism, hatred or hypocrisy, we all suffer. But we all triumph when even one of us turns toward the fight and marches on. I am alive because of many before me, from all over the world, who did not back down.

EARTH DAY REVISITED

2011-04-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.” Rachel Carson

I’d just wanted to get outside, walk, and feel the promise of spring. For those urban apartment dwellers, spring comes in other people’s yards and in little corners of wilderness like the miracle of Montrose Beach. And that’s where I headed that April day last year. Pulling into the park, I could see teams of adults in green t-shirts in the wooded bird sanctuary, and further out on the beach, kids were dragging trash bags through the sand. And then it dawned as on me, I’d stumbled into Earth Day.

It was an awkward moment. If anyplace in Chicago deserved a hand, it was the marvel of Montrose Beach’s bird sanctuary and its reemerging dunes and rare wetlands habitat. Where else in the city could you spot piping plovers and red fox while listening to the rustle of the dune grasses, then in this monument to the will of nature and the passion of people to preserve it? I considered sifting through the junk in my car for a plastic bag and joining in, but I let it go.

I walked around, trying to spot some of the spring migrating birds, but invariably I’d see these school kids, gleaning what they could after the fastidious Sierra Club folks. They reminded me of my friends and I picking up bottles and trash on that first Earth Day forty years ago in 1970. Within an hour or so, our sacks were filled. We had no idea how much trash there was embedded in the grass and soil along the highway outside of our central Indiana factory town. They were too heavy to drag home, the bags, so we just left them there. And that’s where they stayed, for months.

I got back in my car, a bit guilty but inspired by those kids and the idea of Earth Day as embodied there at Montrose. And instead of going about my usual Saturday routines, I decided I’d make a pilgrimage of sorts a bit further down the shore of Lake Michigan, to another miracle of urban wilderness, another emblem of the spirit of Earth Day, the Indiana Dunes.

For a long time, if I had a desire to get away or enjoy the natural world, I’d get on a plane or drive far from the smokestacks and concrete of Chicago’s Lakefront. But economic times have been tough, so I have been exploring by foot places I’d driven by for years in and around Chicago.

I drove through South Chicago and the industrial cities of Indiana where I could stop and walk along beaches or abandoned railroad beds to see birds and the budding of spring, but it seemed fitting to revisit Cowles Bog in the National Lakeshore on the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. This section of the park is named after the pioneering work of botanist Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago, who spent years studying the dynamics of the dunes and how the climatic forces affected the plants and animals which inhabited them. From Cowles’ work and others we can’t ignore the fact that all life forms—including us—are dependent on the health of the web of life around us. A field of science emerged from the sand dunes of Indiana: it’s called ecology.

Cowles Bog with Steel Mill and NIPSCO in backgound

But the places where Dr. Cowles and his students made their discoveries are now gone, bulldozed, and turned to industrial use. A loss, for sure, but in the battle for the dunes and in other places around the globe a voice emerged, a voice from local people who understood in their own way how their health and that of their children’s depended upon the health of their environment. And it’s for them, on Earth Day, that you want to thank for laws that give us cleaner air and water and parks like the Indiana Dunes.

The trail to the beach at Cowles Bog took me along railroad tracks with a long line of coal cars ready to be burned into digital joy or used to form ore and stone into steel. Underneath crackling electrical lines, I marched on, noticing the mallards in the marshes oblivious to me and the steam billowing from the stacks. I climbed up the old dunes now covered in an oak forest and then made it down into the foredunes, where I walked to the shore through the same grasses now emerging on the beach at Montrose.

WALKING ON SOLID GROUND

2011-04-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." Talmudic saying

I have a reoccurring dream. It involves a car and often some member of my family. In this dream, I'm usually driving but last night it was my older sister. We were driving a truck-like utility vehicle. As usual the car or truck is going out of control or going too fast or heading down a very steep decline or climbing a very steep incline or veering off the road or some such irregular movement. Nobody seems to ever mind that this is occurring but me. In this case, we were speeding down a very slippery road into what I can only describe as a cavern or cave that was icy and gloomily lit. Strangely some guy was there, and his house was in the distance, he was looking at a computer (of course computers and screens are popping in to my dreams all the time now—are they yours too?) The guy didn’t even look up. But I didn’t care. I was just glad to be out of that careening car. Then, looking around I noticed a man coming from some house in the distance. His face looked somewhat threatening and a bit crazy, and strangely and rather comically he held a small saw in his hand, a very rusted saw. At this point, of course, my family has disappeared. I should’ve been concerned but my mind fixed on that saw. I recognized it from somewhere. And then, I remembered: that was my saw or my father’s, I can’t remember, but it was the one I used all the time to make things as a boy and I’d left it out in the rain once and ruined it. Hence the rust.

South Downs in Southern England (Their new Natl Park)

I’m sure there are a number of revealing symbols of my unconscious life in this dream, but what it revealed to me came afterward in that curious state of clarity between dreaming and waking. And it wasn’t the saw or the careening car but the feeling of being on solid ground. That sense of security we get when we feel the ground underneath our feet. I lay there and savored it for that timeless moment before fully awakening. How simple but how basic to our survival this feeling can be. It occurred to me, too, that we don’t notice this feeling or recognize how crucial it is to our well-being unless we’ve experienced uncertainty or instability or imbalance. Being on solid ground is of course a metaphor for stability and safety, but it’s a feeling, a real feeling that we know through our feet and body. Perhaps, too, the events in Japan and the horror of watching the videos of the water and the shaking of buildings and most of all the faces and voices and terror in the actions of the Japanese people influenced this dream. Earthquakes shatter this basic understanding: the earth will always be solid and hold us up.

I thought, too, of how walking can reestablish this sense of literally feeling the ground underneath you, giving you a sense of security and being held. And the thought was quite comforting to me. In childhood standing up is such a monumental threshold. The child now can walk and roam and move more quickly with his hands free. But also, the child feels the sense of the body balanced on two feet. What a miraculous feeling the sense of balance truly is, the feet distributing the weight of the body, the core aligned, the earth below allowing our body to stand up right. Walking is a reminder of this early feeling of security and agency. Every footstep is a signal of the earth being there even if other elements of our lives aren’t so certain. It may seem trivial to state such an obvious fact, but in hours of doubt and despair at what was once fixed and sure, a walk can offer something physically regenerative as the body from the feet up counters the fears in the mind with the sensation of being up right, sturdy, present, held up by the earth. The body doesn’t concern itself much with the weather or the time of day. It simply wants to feel the balance and movement. It just is there and feels the ground and says “this way” and you follow.

BASHO'S JAPAN: A WORLD A WASH IN TSUNAMIS

2011-03-22T23:49:00.000-07:00

“There you stand, but a mountain may be there.

Instead: it is not unlikely that the earth

May be yourself.

Matsuo Basho

Perhaps it is nostalgia, a feeling I was sure I’d never know or have, but I’ve become aware of my body’s love for land as I age. I must admit that for a long time I never much cared for artists or writers who waxed on and on about nature or painters who would stand before an easel and paint scenes. Learning that Cezanne painted the same mountain over a hundred times (Mount St. Victoire in Provence) or Thoreau making a big to do about walking about the outskirts of Concord, Mass., I could never quite get it. How quaint and anachronistic, I thought.

It might be due to the environment in which I was seeded—the flat, farmlands of central Indiana, where I could climb up in a tree and see nothing but manipulated land for miles, every acre cleared, tilled, drained and put to good use. Like everything else—plants, animals, people, machines— the value of land depended on how much you could squeeze out of it.

Walking began to shift my perspective on landscape, slowly though. As I have tried to understand and write about what happens to the body and the mind when we spend long days wandering through landscapes, I have noticed that it’s the land itself that gives us our sense of wonder.

Even in Chicago and along the southern shore of Lake Michigan where I walked last summer, walking over asphalt and concrete and through industrial lands of Northern Indiana with its tank farms and brown fields, I began to feel something I’d not felt before—the land as a force that is shaping us even as we pretend that it is us that is shaping it.

Nostalgia actually comes from the Greek root “nostos” (a return home), and “algia” (the suffix meaning pain), hence the word often has a connotation that implies a bittersweet feeling for something lost from the past. Another clue to its origins might be from the Old English or Norse, which gives us the word “nest” from a related root “nes.” These derivations made me wonder: do we feel nostalgia when we sense we’ve lost our nest, our sense of home?

Watching the earthquake and the tsunami that has shaken Japan and the world, I feel the loss and fear generated by the images and horrific sounds of raw footage. The children and older people, the lost family members, the loss of homes and life and cities all sickened me. But it was the nuclear disaster that triggered some other form of loss that I’ve been feeling since walking through the industrial landscape of Northern Indiana this past summer. It reminded me, too, of the losses suffered in Katrina and Haiti as well as the man-made disasters of BP’s oil spill and the sludge spills of coal wastewater and destruction of mountains I’ve seen in West Virginia. The loss is everywhere if you look. For those who live in Illinois, don’t forget over 7,000 tons of nuclear waste sits in similar cooling pools. (No state has more.) The world is awash with tsunamis slowly rolling in all around us, particularly for people who live in vulnerable places. My friend, the environmental writer, Rob Nixon calls these slow forming environmental disasters aptly “slow violence.”

I turned to Basho, the 16th century Japanese poet and nature writer, the morning I read of the Japanese quake. And I thought of him, the older man walking with his paper rain coat and satchel of ink pad and paper to write his gifts of 17 syllable haiku as he wandered through the same areas that were affected in the Far North of Japan.

Here he is describing the bay of Matsushima along the same coast where the tsunami hit:
                          "Tall islands point to the sky and lvel ones
                           prostrate themselves before the surges of water.
                           Islands are piled above islands, and islands are
                           joined to islands, so that they look exactly like
                           parents caressing their children or walking with
                           them arm in arm." from The Narrow Road to The Deep North

And reading him, I was reminded of the humility he taught as he walked so lightly on the earth, observing and marveling at all forms of nature before him along his path through his beloved island home of Japan.

This sense of nostalgia is not despair or sentimentality. In fact, it’s a sign of life in us, a vibration that is there if we listen.

Spider, are you

crying—

or the Autumn wind?

MAD ABOUT WALKING AND WORKER'S RIGHTS IN MADISON

2011-02-25T21:06:00.000-08:00

“. . . Today as I stand before you and think back over that great march, I can say, as Sister Pollard said—a seventy-year-old Negro woman who lived in this community during the bus boycott—and one day, she was asked while walking if she didn’t want to ride. And when she answered, "No," the person said, "Well, aren’t you tired?" And with her ungrammatical profundity, she said, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."
From Martin Luther King’s Speech to marchers after the Walk to Selma, Alabama

For the past several years I’ve been exploring the wonderful trails and walks of Wisconsin, specifically those in and around Madison. I’ve been led on my walks by my good friends, Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon (writers of extraordinary heart and intellectual integrity who teach at UW). They’ve introduced me to the network of trails around Madison and its lakes, greenway, and UW’s campus as well as hiking in Devil’s Lake State Park and the 1200 mile Ice Age Trail that meanders through the state and other parks and preserves nearby. After the big snow of the week before, I was eager to get out and “blow the stink off” as my father would say.

Of course, all week I’d been following the pro-union rallies and protests against Wisconsin’s state budget bill and getting first hand reports by Anne and Rob. (See Anne's photos below.) And the next morning, our first walk was the one through campus, down famed State Street where we met the throngs of folks who’d been circling the State Capital for days.

What a scene.

I knew it would be big and loud but I’d not expected such joyous solidarity: school children in support of their teachers with banners marching, nurses and the doctors to support them, snow removers and sanitation workers, police, students (of course), school teachers, and fire fighters and emergency workers. A parade of red and flags and outrageously funny and inventive home-made signs.

Organized marches and taking to the streets are powerful forms of democratic action and speech. We’ve seen many in the past month in the Middle East and it has reminded us of what can happen when people stand together against governments or powers that assume a weak and indifferent public. And this certainly was the case in Madison. And yet here, what struck me was how civil people were. On Saturday when 70 plus thousand attended, including a few thousand to support the proposed budget, I watched two men debating on the capital steps their opposing views. Rare in our polarized times. How proud people were to be there and to support people who work for them. How proud workers felt to be recognized. When some men came into the rotunda directly from their jobs as fireman and city truck drivers, roars went up. The budgets are complex and deficits are real in America, but what impressed me was the sense of solidarity of people walking in circles with friends and children wanting to express their concerns together and not just grumbling alone in front of a TV or in front of a computer.

Gandhi marched to the sea to protest British tyranny. Martin Luther King led marches throughout the South and North for civil rights. And leaderless movements and demonstrations have been sprouting and roaring around the world in the past few years for peace and environmental sanity and now for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. They all demand that people get up, drop their fears and cynicism, and walk together to show their strength and cohesion.

After the cheering and clamor of the protest, we headed to UW’s Arboretum to take a stroll in the late afternoon chilly sun. Out walk took us a good four miles as we circled around the lake and through a subdued wooded residential section of the city and then along the new and old trees of this great center of ecology began by Aldo Leopold. We talked some of the protest but as we often do we recalled episodes of youth in different parts of the world where we grew up and how those lands shaped who we became, for Rob South Africa and for me similar territory back in Indiana. At the end of our walk, we watched a marsh hawk gliding through an opened field and disappear behind the old black oaks with their wiggly squiggly branches against an evening sky.

WISDOM FROM MY MOTHER AND MOROCCO

2011-01-31T15:41:00.000-08:00

While most of America was under snow last week, I snuck down to Florida to spend some time with my parents. On my way to the airport, I nearly got into a traffic accident as a trunk squeezed my taxi nearly into a parked car. The cab driver, a young Moroccan man in a hooded sweatshirt, shrugged his shoulders, sighed some prayer to Allah and we went on. “I don’t get upset any more at these things,” he told me as if explaining to himself. We’d bonded and he went on to give me his philosophy of driving he’d picked up from an old Indian man he knew from his cab company: “Doesn’t pay to rush. You do your job and thank God, for what comes to you. In the long run, you are happier, you don’t get so much of the stress, and you are thinking more of God. And this is the better way.” He was happy to tell me this. We talked on about politics in America and in North Africa. He was excited about events there. (Though he reminded me that, like so many immigrants from North Africa, he’d come here to find work as there was little chance for him there.) Yet he was proud of his country. He told me that Morocco was the first country to recognize America after its independence.

When I told him, I was going to visit my parents in Florida. He turned around for the first time, smiling under his hood. “You are a good son.”

I sighed. My parents are aging and it’s hard sometimes to watch this. My mother is struggling with dementia (or Alzheimer, no one knows). My Moroccan cab driver heard the sigh. “Tell me, when you come back from visiting your parents, how do you feel?”

“I feel . . . I feel always better. You’re right.”

“I know I’m right. They took care of us. Now we take care of them.” (He’d told me that he sends money home as often as he can, and he’d helped pay for their new house along with his brothers.)

In northern Florida, I spent every day walking with my mother on the beach and into the inter-coastal dunes and oak and manzanita groves on the barrier islands where they spend part of the winter. Each morning, we walked an hour or so. And at night after my parents went to bed, I’d walk back on to the beach, where it always gives me the sense that you are walking in space, as the sound of the surf and soft sand seems to lift you out of your small thoughts and up into the stars.

But it’s with my mother where I always seem to learn something new about walking, which is to say, something I’d ignored about what happens to our body when we reconnect to the land around us. When my parents came to this part of Florida twenty years ago I found the area of quaint beaches and the endless inter-coastal wetlands boring. Over the years, in my visits I’ve hiked about and kayaked and fished and found more fascinating each year. This is the area, I’ve learned, where the Spanish first landed in the continental US. It’s also the same area (roughly) where Charles Bartram, the 18^th century Philadelphia naturalist, made his drawings and observations about natural history as part of his walks through the Southeast. Bartram’s Travels, chronicled with a lyrical but lucid prose, is often credited with being a major influence on the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as a hundred years later, inspiring a young John Muir, who trekked from Indiana to these same wetlands to follow in Bartram’s footsteps.

With my mother, we walked as naturalists, too, picking up seashells, pointing at the pelicans and skittering sandpipers, marveling at the osprey with the snake dangling over the telephone wires where he perched. We always make a pilgrimage, a long walk around the beach to Fort Matanza National Coastal Park. A wonderful park with interpretative board walks along the shore and coastal waterway. Here we invariably meet my parent’s neighbors out for their morning walks. There, we find our prize, nesting in the great Spanish oaks, the great horned owl, warming her egg. My mother has a hard time spotting it but feels the excitement and presence of the wondrous owl just the same.

Over past few years with onset of memory loss and the cognitive impairment of Alzheimer’s, my mother’s pace has slowed. She can’t always discern the level of the ground from shadows and changes of light. The beach is easier for her somehow. Perhaps, she trusts it from all the years she’s walked on it, relying more on the feel of her feet than on what her mind might misinterpret. She’s more relaxed and thus more lucid. But, then again, so am I.

Walking gives her a sense of agency and adventure and certainly a sense of joy and freedom. And this, in fact, is extremely important to all of us, but especially those suffering from memory loss and cognitive impairment. Recent studies have shown that walking three or more times a week for at least a mile has a marked improvement on brain plasticity and cognitive health.

Why? Circulation and heart rate are improved, of course, but perhaps more importantly the intricate relationships in the brain circuitry are maintained via the variety of actions being carried out by the body as we walk. Think about it. Orbetter feel it next time you walk. We think, we move, we see, we feel, we haveemotions, all in fractions of seconds as we simply take one step. Link.

As much as I can, I try to slow to her pace, noticing the ferns growing on the mossy limbs, the raccoon tracks in the sand, listening to the cardinals overhead. But I’m still too fast. And then my mother asks, from behind. “You don’t like to walk slow, do you?” I turn. She’s looking out at something in the wooded undergrowth of the oak groves, and if talking to it and not me, declares to all who might walk too fast in the world: “I liked to walk slow. It’s better that way. More interesting.” And then finding me again, “There’s so much here to see, isn’t there?”

From my Moroccan cab driver to my mother, I’m trying to get the message.

Open Lands and Ragdale

2011-01-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

“The health of the eye demands a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we see far enough.” R. W. Emerson

Something happens to perception and thus to our very well being when we are afforded access to natural spaces and open lands where we can walk, gaze, wonder at the elemental world that somehow we lose sight of in our urban life of work, possessions, and technology. I don’t believe we have evolved quite so far as to ignore our essential affinity with our nomadic roots and for our need to roam and wander.

A couple of weeks ago I spent several days at an artist’s retreat, known as Ragdale, that is located on a ridge near the shore of Lake Michigan in Northern Illinois. For those who may not have heard of a place like Ragdale or of someplace like an artist’s colony, imagine a place where you are invited, honored no less, because of the value of your work as a writer, or composer, or artist and given two or four weeks to work without interruption. Where you are given a quiet space to think and doodle and sleep and stare and hopefully create. And you are fed by a gourmet cook who treats you like a prince or a child or a tired soul or whomever you are when you show up to imbibe with your other colonists at supper. And, in this case, at Ragdale, a place that is adjacent to acres and acres of prairie, marsh, and a wooded creek, all preserved by a band of good folk who recognized the value of these spaces and preserved it as well as those today who maintain it, such as the citizens of Lake Forest and the Open Lands.

I’d not even finished unpacking my bags before I marched right out even though the sun had just set. Darkness and the cold made it just that more enticing, and I found myself losing myself in the woods, my eyes not used to the darkness and I nearly walked into the creek bed. But I just wanted to be in the middle of it, just to hear the place, and sink into it a little, be for a while in the land and feeling it there, feeling its darkness and winter brittleness.

That first night it snowed about four inches, beautiful soft wet flakes that fell lighting up the darkness, and by morning the trees and prairie grass were covered, creating that purificatory ritual we all know that comes with the first snow. The patterns made you wince when you had to make the first foot tracks in the snow, reminding me of what it feels like sometimes when I walk at the Indiana Dunes and you don’t want to mar the magical windscapes of sand. But I did, and ran about like a boy, stopping to see if the snow would mold easily into . . . something, I mean I’m no Andy Goldsworthy but I began imagining a snow fort on the edge of the prairie under a few trees. At dinner that night, almost every one of the artists had made a similar excursion into the snow and prairie, and I whispered to the paper-maker and artist next to me, Melissa Craig, if she wanted to make something with me. “Sure! I’ve been going out and finding all kinds of interesting things in the woods.” Of course, that is what she does in her work, find ways to use the actual natural world as the very medium of her work. (Here you can see what she’s doing with her paper making and sculpting and organic use of color in creating a fungus like bar code that reads: “DO NO DAMAGE."

I walked around every day of my 12 day stay, watching and walking about in the snow through this precious oasis that is painstakingly and lovingly restored to its original and evolving ecological niche. But each day, I’d see something I’d not noticed or appreciated before, either because of the light, or the weather, or my own mood. One day, I decided to walk on the ice of the creek, seeing or hoping that it was as hard as it appeared. From inside a ditch, looking up in to the brambles and branches of the cottonwoods and other hardwoods that create the canopy over the creek, I realized from this perspective, from below ground, that this is not only another view but another world, even in winter.

Other artists made other discoveries, British poet, Cheryl Moskowitz, wrote this about one outing of hers where she came upon a deer:

Out there in the cold you don’t expect to see anyone.
Glad if you don’t, actually.
Time to be alone, find a stump,
brush the mound of snow off
sit for a while by the creek that’s all froze up
and listen, like the deer do.

You are a stranger here
the birds know that -
calling out to one another in their strange tongue
retreat, retreat, retreat.

And all at once she’s there,
one side of the Dharma wheel.
Chestnut markings like a dark target
framed against the vast white
and so are you.

I don’t think I’ve ever gone to Ragdale and not heard of some reference to the prairie or to some insight that it evoked. Here’s another image from poet Beth Brandt who very much works with natural imagery in her work:

Earth

How it

is dust

rut mound

mountain

bone-dry

bone-chilling

black.

What it

hides what it

keeps. How it holds

you up weighs

you down draws

you in. The gravity

of it turn of

it pull of

it when

it’s midnight

in November

and you can’t

sleep.

But, oddly, as the days wore on, I found myself transfixed in my walks by not just the natural landscape but the the electrical towers rising out of the ground, at the fixity of the rusted steel of a train trestle and the trains that went by that I could hear at night in my studio. And I wasn’t the only one, Cheryl told me on the last day she made a video with her I-phone of a train moving through the landscape as she stood in the woods listening, and listening to her video myself, I was struck by the disappearance of sound as the train faded from view, leaving the woods and making me hear it anew. Here it is, listen to the end of the video. We think sometimes that these environments are sullied by the ways of humans. But all spaces have something of the wild still echoing through. We just have to give over to the place as it is and spend some time there, watching and listening and absorbing what it has to offer.

Walking and the Brain

2010-09-19T13:34:00.001-07:00

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it . . . if one keeps on walking, everything will be all right." Soren Kierkegaard

Despite the many anxieties and crises of our time, we are also living in era of revolutionary developments in the fields of science, particularly in the study of the human brain. Every month we are learning more about how the brain functions, and consequently, beliefs about learning, memory, the imagination, emotion, and a whole host of other brain functions now must be re-evaluated. We now know, for example, that the brain evolves and changes as we age, countering long held beliefs that past a certain age in childhood the largely remained unchanged. We do in fact lose brain cells or neurons as we age but the brain’s ability to make new pathways or synaptic connections between neurons is virtually limitless. No, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Environment, experience, exercise, attitude, social engagement, and intellectual challenges are profoundly important for the on-going development of the bran and it’s health.

Recently, several studies have caught my attention that relate to walking and spending time in nature. Last week, in fact, a major study done at the University of Illinois by Kramer and Moss who study the role of how exercise affects the brain, they found that regular walking (forty minutes 3 days a week) dramatically affected brain connectivity and thus enhancing cognition. This was true as well with older adults, a helpful sign for people suffering from memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer's.

Another study at the University of Michigan looked at how where we walk affects brain function and concentration. In the study, one group of graduate students walked in urban an area—along busy commercial streets with traffic and little natural buffering, and another group walked along paths in more natural environments of parks with trees, grass, lakes, etc. Afterward the two groups were given basic cognitive tests, recalling lists, etc. And the difference in cognitive function was clear: those who walked in natural environments were much better in their scores. A similar study at Michigan also tested three groups for the role of nature on brain function. In this study, one group was wired as they watched a video screen of a natural environment, another group simply looked at a wall, and a third actually sat in the same natural area viewed on the screen of the first group. The result? The levels of brain activity i.e. the stimulation of various parts of the brain was most pronounced in the group sitting outside viewing the natural environment. But most interesting to me was that the levels of those looking at a wall and at the video image of nature was virtually the same.

Walking in nature seems so benign. But walking is actually much more of a complex physiological activity than we think; it involves multiple areas of the brain, which is why it is so beneficial. In nature, we must also negotiate pathways and environments that are unpredictable and highly stimulating. Motor function and perception are profoundly linked and being aware of this relationship enhances not only the pleasure but also the long-term health of our brain. Our brain is pattern maker and a pattern decoder. Every day we create new patterns by what we do, think, feel, and experience. And one pattern to weave into our lives is very simple: walking.

Where Am I?

2010-09-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

Walking To The Indiana Dunes

2010-09-19T13:20:00.001-07:00

People usually consider walking
on water or thin air a miracle,
but I think the real miracle
is not to walk either on water or in thin air,
but to walk on earth.

Thich Nhat Hanh

This week I made a pilgrimage of sorts. One that began at my own door step in Rogers Park, then 19 miles along the Chicago Lakefront, through the industrial cities along the shore of Lake Michigan, Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, Gary and finally to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, some 50 plus miles in total. I did this in two days.

I tried to stay along the lake as much as possible, but when you leave the southern neighborhood of Jackson Park in Chicago, the lake disappears from view. Once in East Chicago by the Majestic Star Casino, I illegally slipped through a fence and touched the water. But I had to wait some 24 miles until I got to West Beach in the National Lakeshore until I could finally feel the cool water on my tired hot body.

Why do such a thing?

I wanted to walk this route to ask the question: why isn’t there a walking route linking Chicago’s magnificent lake front park to the patchwork of wetlands, prairies, woodlands and towering sand dunes that make up one of the few urban National Parks, the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore?

There are plans for a green way called the Marquette Plan to do such a thing, but the momentum, money and will to do it seems more wishful than real. I stayed in a Casino my first night, the Majestic Star, which along with the other casinos in the area are supposedly aimed at redeveloping the region by making an entertainment and recreation zone. Slot machines stretch the idea of entertainment, not to mention recreation or redevelopment. And of course, in a casino the brownfields and industrial wastelands that surround them are conveniently out of sight.

But I also took this walk to prove something I’ve been wondering about for the last few years as I’ve walked in all kinds of more traditional so-called ‘natural’ landscapes—deserts, mountains, forests, sea shores. Would my body and mind respond in similar ways, feeling revitalized and awakened from nature and exercise, if I walked through my own neighborhood and the city lakefront and then into one of the most industrialized and polluted landscapes of America? And further, would walking to the dunes make me appreciate the fragile beauty and ecological miracle of this landscape more than by driving there and taking a little walk through the park?

The body and the legs do more than just hold us up and carry us about back and forth to work. Like the antennae of insects, they read the landscapes and negotiate through them learning where to go and where to find nourishment and safety. The body isn't a machine we turn off on and on. Walking all those steps made me consider my connection to this landscape where I've lived for three decades. And despite the harshness of the highways and disfigurement of the landscape, I sensed it's grandeur, its timeless presence, enduring no matter what we puny humans think we can do with it. From the ground, I felt so many emotions, from rage to awe, from joy to sadness, from humiliation to wonder. We think we know where we live like we think we know our own body, but take a little walk or rather a long walk in the land where you live. And I guarantee you'll discover something about the very ground you drive and walk over and it will be your body, your feet, that will teach you.

2010-09-19T13:09:00.000-07:00

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw 
Or heard or felt came not but from myself; 
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Wallace Stevens from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

A bird, blackish brown in the intense summer afternoon light, is walking on water. Well, not on the actual water but on golden green lily pads, skillfully hop-flying, then step, step, step, moving just fast enough not to sink. Pin oaks, I see, and white birch, young sycamore. Water stretches into a thick woods and appears to curve as if it might be a river but it isn’t, it’s a marsh, a very old one, one that somehow survived over hundred years of American industrialization. Sedge, that ancient plant of prehistoric times, grows out of the rubble I’m walking on, limestone and slag and railroad spikes.

A marsh hawk startles the heavy afternoon heat, its white and brown belly, as it sweeps down over the marsh. A white egret lopes over the water and disappears into the darkness of the tall stand of sycamore shielding the marsh from the highway beyond. Moments later a heron labors to pick up speed to rise over the trees. Two goldfinch, blurs in the sunlight yet identifiable with their undulating speed, trigger the memory of other summers and other places where I have stood stock still and felt that strange sensation deep in the belly of my body wanting to lift and follow what I was seeing.

Where am I?*

Where am I? That’s a good question. But is it a question of place? Or is it a state of mind that I’m in as I walk through this marsh? A reciprocal experience of the land imprinting itself in me as I walk through it.

Like many people, I could tell the story of my life by describing the places where walking somehow figured in my education and experience. I’ve hiked since I was a teenager, along highways, up mountains, through deserts, along borders, through savannahs, along lakes and rivers, down streets of cities, and into and out of my wayward emotions and imagination. Your legs turn out to be allies, and as Nietzsche, a walker himself, would say, they often can offer infinitely more wisdom than our best thinking.

My recent interest in walking began as a way to combat serious bouts of depression that not even years of study and practice of yoga seemed able to help me handle. I hiked as a way to counter spells that sunk me every winter. As I began to hike more and more, in places of profound beauty and in places familiar and local, I began to notice how the simple act of walking offered more than benefits to my physical and mental health. Walking began to make me see or feel so much more of what was going on inside and around me. Walking I’m learning has so much to do with developing the body/mind’s ability to perceive and read the rhythms and relationships that bind us to the elemental world: to rock and water, wind and weather, sky and space. And perhaps most important of all, walking alerts us to how our health depends on the health of the land in which we live and work and walk.

*These observations about walking were inspired by a walk down an abandoned railroad track through the Clark and Pine Nature Preserve in Lake County, Indiana a few miles from Gary. It is a remnant of the vast marsh and interdunal ecology that once covered the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Surprisingly, the marsh flourishes, teeming with life and birds, though it is next to an abandoned steel processing factory, a gypsum plant a mile to the east along Lake Michigan, Gary’s Sanitation Works and acres and acres of wastelands that is a Federal Superfund Site.

Walking To The Indiana Dunes

People usually consider walking
on water or thin air a miracle,
but I think the real miracle
is not to walk either on water or in thin air,
but to walk on earth.

Thich Nhat Hanh

This week I made a pilgrimage of sorts. One that began at my own door step in Rogers Park, then 19 miles along the Chicago Lakefront, through the industrial cities along the shore of Lake Michigan, Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, Gary and finally to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, some 50 plus miles in total. I did this in two days.

I tried to stay along the lake as much as possible, but when you leave the southern neighborhood of Jackson Park in Chicago, the lake disappears from view. Once in East Chicago by the Majestic Star Casino, I illegally slipped through a fence and touched the water. But I had to wait some 24 miles until I got to West Beach in the National Lakeshore until I could finally feel the cool water on my tired hot body.

Why do such a thing?

I wanted to walk this route to ask the question: why isn’t there a walking route linking Chicago’s magnificent lake front park to the patchwork of wetlands, prairies, woodlands and towering sand dunes that make up one of the few urban National Parks, the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore?

There are plans for a green way called the Marquette Plan to do such a thing, but the momentum, money and will to do it seems more wishful than real. I stayed in a Casino my first night, the Majestic Star, which along with the other casinos in the area are supposedly aimed at redeveloping the region by making an entertainment and recreation zone. Slot machines stretch the idea of entertainment, not to mention recreation or redevelopment. And of course, in a casino the brownfields and industrial wastelands that surround them are conveniently out of sight.

But I also took this walk to prove something I’ve been wondering about for the last few years as I’ve walked in all kinds of more traditional so-called ‘natural’ landscapes—deserts, mountains, forests, sea shores. Would my body and mind respond in similar ways, feeling revitalized and awakened from nature and exercise, if I walked through my own neighborhood and the city lakefront and then into one of the most industrialized and polluted landscapes of America? And further, would walking to the dunes make me appreciate the fragile beauty and ecological miracle of this landscape more than by driving there and taking a little walk through the park?

The body and the legs do more than just hold us up and carry us about back and forth to work. Like the antennae of insects, they read the landscapes and negotiate through them learning where to go and where to find nourishment and safety. The body isn't a machine we turn off on and on. Walking all those steps made me consider my connection to this landscape where I've lived for three decades. And despite the harshness of the highways and disfigurement of the landscape, I sensed it's grandeur, its timeless presence, enduring no matter what we puny humans think we can do with it. From the ground, I felt so many emotions, from rage to awe, from joy to sadness, from humiliation to wonder. We think we know where we live like we think we know our own body, but take a little walk or rather a long walk in the land where you live. And I guarantee you'll discover something about the very ground you drive and walk over and it will be your body, your feet, that will teach you.

"The Brain -- is wider than the Sky"

2010-09-19T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Brain -- is wider than the Sky --
For -- put them side by side --
The one the other will contain
With ease -- and You -- beside --
Emily Dickenson

The age of neuroscience has arrived. Go to a bookstore, turn on TV, open a magazine, and you’ll find evidence of America’s new fascination: the human brain. How we think, remember, perceive, feel, and imagine are no longer the subjects of philosophers and poets alone, but under the eyes of an ever-growing number of scientists in a wide array of fields related to the study of the biology and evolution of the central nervous system and the brain. Advances in imaging technology, neurobiology, computer science and host of converging fields have brought us even to the brink of unlocking the very biological basis of consciousness itself.

Though we are only just beginning to understand the complexities of the brain, discoveries in these fields are already throwing out long-held theories in both the physical and social sciences, and what they might mean for the rest of us has yet to be fully understood. But the remarkable discovery of brain plasticity has presented us with evidence that we can no longer ignore the wisdom of those like Patanjali and Aristotle who long ago understood that the human brain was the frontier that would in the end determine the fate of humankind.

Once you begin to understand a bit of what’s going on in neuroscience, it’s clear that practices such as yoga and meditation stand to benefit from an ever-growing body of evidence that suggest that they are perfect tools to develop an alert and healthy brain. Similarly, yoga, too, can use the language of neuroscience to help students better understand what is happening in their brain when they are practicing yoga. Many of our best teachers have been on to brain science for years. Listen to a talk by Richard Freeman and you’ll hear how well he’s incorporated the insights of this exploding field into his teachings.

Here are a few key concepts that I am using in my classes and workshops that might be useful.

Human_brain_major_internal_parts

Agency, Attitude and Information

Attitude is everything. Framing the mind with a positive intention and staying focused on it is not just a cliché you hear in sports and New Age self-help books; it’s how the brain works most effectively. The brain needs direction or it will flit from subject to subject. I always begin my class with breathwork and a short mediation, before I do, I ask students to think of an intention for their practice. This helps them to focus and engage emotionally. The brain follows patterns and grooves supported by memory and emotion. If the pattern is negative or positive, makes no difference, the brain will fall into it.

Researchers at the University of Michigan gave an experimental group of middle school students in Detroit a special tutorial on how their brain worked, reinforcing the basic idea that it was their own work habits and ability to learn not their income or parent’s educational background that determined how their brain worked. Testing showed that the students given the tutorial not only outperformed other students in their school but they also exceeded national averages for their age.

Daniel Siegel, interpersonal neurobiologist and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, is exploring the same basic techniques used on students but on psychotherapists and psychiatrists. And Siegel is trying something else—mindfulness and simple breathing exercises. Siegel advises therapists to use actual models of the brain in therapy sessions to help patients visualize and understand what is happening in their brains when they are depressed or emotionally troubled. This can be of great relief to a patient to see that their frustrations are a brain processing problem rather than a lack of will or emotional strength. After giving this demonstration, the therapist teaches the patient an easy mindfulness exercise to calm them down when these frustrations and emotions emerge. In both cases, giving people a sense of how their brain works and offering them tools to change attitudes makes a difference. Why? Because they are actively involved in changing the actual wiring of neural pathways in their brains.

Awareness and Perception

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, is another scientist interested in how meditation affects brain function. He wired up several Tibetan monks to see what was going on in their brains as they meditated as well as some novice practitioners for comparative purposes. What he discovered was not only could these monks reach unprecedented levels of brain activity, but they could reach these alpha and theta frequencies within minutes of their sitting.

What the monks revealed so beautifully was the limitless potential we have of training the mind to affect states of consciousness and well-being. But their skill came from a long series of learning experiences in which neural maps or interconnecting groups of neurons bonded as they were used over and over again. The first step in learning to meditate is to actually calm the mind down so that it can actually focus on the sensation of what it feels like to affect our brains. When we are focused we enable the brain to do its primary function: process or integrate information into the various centers in the brain necessary to learn. The stronger the signals, the stronger the memory for the next time we practice. Awareness is registered in both the conscious and unconscious mind. As we practice yoga, we begin to cultivate deeper and deeper levels of sense perception. B.K.S. Iyengar speaks of involution as he describes the learning process of yoga; in other words, we develop our practice by working from the outside of the body, learning from our five senses, particularly touch and balance, and progressively move deeper inside the bodies to muscles, organs, energy centers in the core and so on. When we practice we use four layers of perception: the exteroceptors (the five senses and balance), the interoceptors the feeling of the organs as they function, and proprioceptors or some may say the kinesthetic sense, which regulate effort and the feeling of muscles and joints as we move or hold a pose. Perception is a feedback mechanism, as the brain processes experience to create more elaborate sets of maps in the brain.

This same process occurs in meditation. As we sit, we are not only psychologically challenged as we observe countless patterns of repetitive thoughts and emotions, but we are also learning to pay very close attention to sensations coming from the body. In particular, when we are first learning, we are focusing on the feeling of our lungs and the muscles associated with breath. But as we develop the skill and stamina to sit for longer periods, we can begin to notice our awareness dropping from the buzzing in the mind downward to the core and energetic centers. It’s important then in a class to remind people that what they are learning is not just how to perform a pose but how to feel it.

Imagination, Visualization and Metaphor

As a writer and teacher of writing one of the most compelling findings of neuroscience has been in the area of imagination and language. I’ve long suspected that the creative work of an artist—writer, painter, musician—provides pleasure in a profound way, not because it simply inspires us emotionally and intellectually but because the work engages our imaginations deep within the unconscious, as Jung and others have suggested. And this is exactly the case, as many brain researchers are discovering. The modernist painters such as Cezanne and Van Gogh arrested our minds because they mimicked the process the brain goes through as it imagines and perceives. The same is true of poets and writers. Imagery and metaphors trigger a very complex process in the brain as memory, emotion, cognition and the imagination collectively recreate what we read from our own experience. When a reader remarks that they were so involved with a book that it felt as if it were happening to them, then the writer has does her job, because that’s exactly what is happening it is happening to them. Art primes the imagination and expands it.

Imagination has become one of the areas I have begun to explore in my practice and teaching. I used to enjoy listening to a teacher’s use of metaphors as ways to help guide me in a pose. Richard Freeman often used metaphors I enjoyed, such as flowering, rooting, and other metaphors of classic poetry that refer to nature. But as I’ve come to understand, metaphors aren’t just figurative language to please us, but actually they sever as symbols that help focus the mind and engage the imagination as a mandala does so that we can more entrain the mind and cultivate deeper states of awareness. Telling a student to imagine the bottoms of their feet spreading and setting down roots into the earth, we are initiating sensors in the bottom of the feet to feel, connect, and balance.

Empathy and Mirror Neurons

Finally, one of the more fascinating discoveries over the past few years is the neurobiological explanation for how we are affected by the movement and sensations of other bodies around us. The classic example is unconsciously yawning or smiling once we witness someone doing the same. Why do humans do this mimicking behavior? Neuroscientists have found that animals and humans are equipped with an adaptive mechanism in our nervous system called mirror neurons. These highly sensitive neurons are triggered in the body unconsciously as we witness the actions, emotion, or behaviors of another. Think of a flock of birds instantaneously setting off in flight because of one bird’s detection of a predator. It has always been interesting to me what happens in a yoga class as students miraculously attune to one another’s focus and physical awareness of their bodies, and thereby heightening the therapeutic effect for everyone in the class. Of course, this phenomenon occurs in a variety of group interactions where there is a collective focus on a goal or shared purpose. As social animals we have evolved to be highly sensitive to the needs and emotions of others in our group. Researchers are beginning to understand the profound capabilities we have to feel empathy and how important interpersonal skills are to our health and survival. Daniel Siegel in his study of interpersonal neurobiology recognizes that humans often cannot access deep emotional patterns alone but require the presence of another witnessing and actively feeling the emotion along with them. He trains therapists to develop a keen awareness of both the body of their patients as well as their own as they listen and offer feedback. Siegel believes that therapeutic skill is both a verbal and nonverbal art. By teaching therapists to use mindfulness and breathing techniques, Siegel hopes therapists can in turn help patients to trust their own bodily sensations as they relate narratives or speak about difficult emotional issues in their lives.

It’s not surprising that we are seeing a renewed interest in the benefits of mindfulness, and yoga, and other practices that involve integrating the mind and body. Our times are fraught with anxieties that we feel we have little control over, be they the world economy, war and terrorism, global warming, or the fecklessness of government. The exploration into the mysteries of how the brain function by science comes at a crucial time, as we cannot continue to act as if our brains and bodies can increasingly absorb or process empty bits of information without thinking they have no effect on our health or that of the earth’s. Mind/body practices are real pragmatic applications as they always have been for cultivating the potential’s of all of the body’s many forms of intelligence. The excitement and newfound interest scientific fields have in the mind will mean little if the billions of dollars given to research institutes don’t also go towards educating people about how they can learn for themselves to explore and cultivate the wisdom they already possess.

ACT Or REACT

2010-09-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, as life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes with saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's life, accept these injustices as commonplace, but must fight them with all one's strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart . . . James Baldwin, from Notes Of A Native Son

Like many people, I have watched the so-called health care debate with disappointment and at times despair. I was there in Grant Park nearly a year ago, hoping that now finally we could put politics aside and end the injustice of letting millions of working people live with the cruel choice of health or financial ruin.
Despair is a strong word. It means a lack of hope, which is in itself a harbinger of illness. But it’s a real feeling that comes from what lies beneath it, anger and bitterness.
My story is just another story of how easy it is to fall into the ranks of the uninsured. An illness, a changed job, part-time life between three employers, and a pre-condition. I have taught for ten years at an elite private university, and augment it with other teaching gigs at other schools, even yoga in my neighborhood.
My illness? Well, some might say, it’s my stubborn belief in myself as a writer. But I wish that were all it was: I live with HIV and have for 13 years.
When I tell people that I have no insurance, a panicked look comes over them. They assume the worst. I did too when I left a very bad teaching job to finish writing a book on AIDS activism, and then after two years of looking couldn’t find a full time work with benefits. Cobra ran out and I was I faced with insurance for the first time along with a mounting debt from traveling, researching, and promoting my book. However, I was an effective speaker for students that year, standing before med students at Penn State or Princeton’s elite and representing in flesh and blood the realities and absurdities of America’s health care’s failings.
I remember thinking boldly and stupidly that I’d just have to cash in my meager retirement and was about to do so despite pleas from my friends. But what was one to do? A friend, who also lived with HIV, a yoga teacher, told me that his health insurance cost him something like $1400 a month. My bitterness was so intense the only thing I could do to cool down was swim for miles in Lake Michigan. If I didn’t have the money, then I’d just stop taking medications. I hated taking them anyway. But then another friend of mine, a promising journalist in New York, in anger with living a life of spending days crisscrossing Manhattan cobbling together health care from different special clinics and programs, just quit taking meds and seeing a doctor and months later he died. 30 years old. He died of a broken heart, literally, because it was bitterness that killed him.
Fortunately for me, Illinois with the aid of the Federal government provides funds for people who have no health insurance and can’t afford to pay $2000 dollars a month for medications, so I enrolled. And for the last two years have gotten my meds for free, though my days are numbered because I’m starting to make too much money to qualify. Next year, I can lie on my taxes, quit teaching yoga, try not to publish anything, or face paying twenty some thousand on medications.
With a diminished immune system, I can’t risk the stress of bitterness. I can’t lose sleep over the ways of Washington or the fear-mongering of pundits. I’ve protested and written articles, and that helps some. But I’m slowly learning that no matter how unfair things are I have to maintain my health with what I have: my family, my friends, my teaching, my writing, my yoga practice, and my retreats into nature.

White Mountains, New Hampshire and Maine

When I first became infected with HIV, I began a rigorous, devoted yoga practice and exercise program. When people asked me how yoga helped, I remember struggling with an answer, trying to find some biological basis or some philosophical truth, all I could say was that it made me feel as if I were taking action rather than feeling dependent on an abstraction called “the health care system.” Agency is no New Age theme for a weekend workshop; neurobiology has shown a profound relationship between what we believe and do with how we feel and heal.
I struggle, though, like everyone else with emotions of fear, anger and depression. We can’t escape the way we feel or the world’s injustices. But the truths of the ancients, be they from the west or east are the same: We can’t do much about the circumstances of life; we can however do something about how we respond to them.
I understand all too well how the injustices of the world can wound the heart so deeply that it refuses all hope. I know that no matter how strong my will or body is, I must also depend on others for my health. We are social creatures. This is why teaching is such a healthy activity. Being before a group of people who look to you for guidance demands an expansion of your thinking about yourself and how the world works. You must believe in patience and in the potency of small actions. You must learn to listen and feel your way by holding out your hands to others.
I’d hoped, perhaps naively, that this debate might not separate people over politics and money, but bring us together to discuss how to better take care of our bodies and the world that supports them. I hope we still can. Our country, despite its flaws, was founded on the enduring ideal of reason and justice. But they have no power unless we practice them.

Is Hiking a Yoga Practice?

2010-09-19T12:47:00.000-07:00

“In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me. . . . I was there, listening. . . . I think the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it. . . . I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out.” Paul Klee

In the past few years I’ve begun to rediscover walking. I hiked a lot in high school and college. But then somewhere in my thirties, it just felt too tedious, up-down, down-up, staring at shoes and dirt. It just wasn’t enough for me I thought. Part of that had to do with living in the Midwest, and as an adrenaline junky, I needed more space and challenge to subdue a torturous inner life. I gravitated to running, long-distance swimming, and ashtanga yoga. I even did some triathlons. All I did was exhaust myself a bit more quickly, but my mind was no less calm, if anything it was just that much more wound up.
Then in my forties, friends moved to the southwest and I found myself hiking in the mountains and deserts, returning again and again. Something felt different. Often I went alone and it was as if I could walk for days and not get enough of the feeling of just being surrounded by the openness and endless primal rocks and sand. I felt absorbed and my chronic depressive moods and discursive inner voices seemed to disappear. Of course, it would take two long hard days of hiking, but I was purged and even happy.

Aravaipa Canyon, Arizona

Perhaps my return to hiking is simply age or the beauty of the Arizona deserts and Colorado mountains, but I think more is going on. I’ve begun to think quite a bit about how the mind works, reading what I can about neuroscience and cognitive science, but also paying a lot more attention to my body as I practice yoga, particularly felt sensations and energies arising in it from emotions. I’ve also returned to many of the great nature poets and writers to listen how they describe the relationship between the mind and nature.
Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what we half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In Nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being. William Wordsworth,

My sense is that the deep calm that can come over the mind and body while hiking has a lot to do with the body both absorbing and being absorbed by nature, or as Klee states above, being penetrated by it. For perception to tranquilize and affect the mind and body though, we have to feel what is happening to us as we walk, in other words we have to be consciously aware.

Santa Catalina Mountains, Arizona

Brain waves have a lot to do with it, too. While hiking the brain goes through several states. First, beta waves dominate as you begin to hike and you body heats up and buzzes with all the new stimulation and oxygen. But eventually, the rhythm calms you down and you can enter into alpha or even theta waves.
Your pace, in fact, has a lot to do with why walking can be so therapeutic. Your conscious feeling of your pace, I should say. Feeling the feet, the muscles, and the bones in sync with each breath, you discover that your pace depends not only on your abilities but also on your body’s interaction with an environment. We don’t walk in space, we walk on earth. And often, those with us, they, too, affect our pace and experience. (See my last post about hiking with my mother.)
Hiking has begun to feel a lot like practicing yoga. And why wouldn’t it? In Hatha yoga you learn to observe and adjust your body in response to every action, feeling, movement, thought, memory, and emotion both consciously and unconsciously.
Many yoga practitioners will tell you that after several years of dedicated practice they find themselves moving differently, feeling more inside their body, aware of places and their feel. Once you learn to observe and explore sensations in your body suddenly everything gets a bit brighter and more intense. Now as I hike or even walk in the city, I find myself making adjustments in my posture, pulling in on my core, and lifting my chest. I observe and experiment: checking effort and breathe, focusing on the trail ahead and the feeling of my foot pushing off and my legs following through. Focus is not easy to maintain. But what a difference it makes to use your whole body instead of plodding along making certain muscles do all the work. How much lighter one feels when focused.
Of course, hikers, swimmers, climbers and all those who recreate in nature will say it’s not yoga necessarily that has opened my body, but simply the joy that comes with exercise out of doors. I agree. The language is the same as in yoga: focus, body awareness, breath, rhythm, and gratitude. It doesn’t matter how you find your body, the point is to be in it wherever it takes you. And if it wants to go into the desert or up a mountain, I suggest you follow it.

Appalachian Trail, Cherokee Nat. Forest, Georgia

A Walk in the Mountains with My Mother

2010-09-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I took my parents to the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Tennessee. I have been writing about hiking and the lore and mythology that surrounds America’s great natural past time, walking the Appalachian Trail. I’d wanted to do some research and hike as well as spend some time with my parents at a cabin I’d found on Lake Watauga. And it was my birthday. My parents are aging and have struggled with the onset of my mother’s loss of memory, due to early stage Alzheimer’s.
It didn’t take long to realize that my plans to take a long hike alone weren’t realistic. The second day there my mother wandered down the road while my father and I were collecting firewood near the cabin. We found her after a panicked search up and down country roads, standing next to a bridge, looking at wildflowers by the road.
I got out and handled her some water. “Have you been looking for me? my mother asked innocently. My father, sitting rigid and ready to explode, literally bit down on his false teeth. “Yes, we wondered where you went, Mom,” I told her, reaching for her hand, and helping her into the back seat.
“I just need to walk sometimes. Things pull me in and I get to looking a them and then, sometimes, I lose what time it is and forget where I am.” She explained as we drove back to our cabin. “I’m sorry.”
The next day everything was back to normal, and I suggested we all take a short hike to an overlook on top of Roan MT. When we get there, my father begs out and says he'll hang around the parking lot, complaining of his hip and lungs; though in reality, as an old athlete, it’s just too frustrating for him to have to try to keep up. I don’t push. My father’s pride is something I feel in my own body, and, in a way, it’s up to me, to help him protect it. But my mother is out of the car and ready to go before me. "I'm ready."
Though my mother’s in very good physical health and loves walking when my parents go to Florida, she’s on unfamiliar ground. This isn’t a wide-open beach. It’s a dark over-grown forest of pine, fir, and tangles of rhododendron trees. The trail is flat but full of roots and rocks. I slow down, slow more, and finally stop and wait for her. It’s going to be a long walk, I think, as I watch her, concentrating on each step.
Then she stops. “I think I need a walking stick. They’re good to hike with don’t you think?”
“Sure, good idea, mom.” (I hate hiking sticks, though they are now de rigor for most hikers.) We find this rickety rhododendron branch and she looks like a character from a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, but it helps her, though it doesn’t change our pace much.

My mother hiking the AT

I try to relax and enjoy being with my mother on the trail. I take some photos. It’s just a short walk, I tell myself. But coming up to the first trail marker, I can see we’ve gone barely a tenth of a mile. I take a breath and watch her as she takes her careful steps, each movement an act of concentration. But it’s not just her unsteadiness and unfamiliarity that slows her pace. It’s her fascination with the novelty of the landscape. She stoops and looks at the moss on some rocks. “I've got moss like this in my garden, isn’t it something, so green and thick. It’s everywhere.”

My mother's Garden

As I watch her, I think that it was probably not far from here, down the Appalachian Trail a hundred miles or so, where my parents took me and my sisters on our first nature hike, in the rainy summer of 1962 camping in the Great Smokey Mountains.
It finally occurs to me as we reach a rather rough spot that she needs to hold my hand. I wasn’t sure if she wanted my help. But when I put out my hand, she grabs it and pulls me toward her. We walk a long but now the pace seems somehow no longer to bother me.
Of course, I’ve held my mother’s hand before. The evening before, we went canoeing and I just about had to let her grab a hold of my body to stabilize us as she climbed in the canoe. But walking with her on the trail, something felt different to me. Her hand felt fragile and yet electric, making me feel and see a bit more intensely, as if I were being asked to look for both of us or perhaps it was the other way, she was looking for me, I don't know. I’ve never had children, but I had this thought that this is what it must feel like.
We got to the over look and it was really not much to look at. I’d seen some of the great sites hiking around the world, in Patagonia, Colorado, the Alps, South Africa, Asia. It was foggy, but she was happy and sat down and lit a cigarette. I cringed and then had to laugh. Fortunately nobody showed up.

Roan Mountain, Tennessee

My mother’s life as an independent woman, able to go out and take in the world by car or even by foot is nearing its end. Or is it? What are boundaries of our independence? And who sets them? Who is to say, when and where our freedom to explore the world begins and ends?
A few years ago I spent a week at a meditation retreat in Thailand. All day was devoted to meditation. Up at 5 and back to bed early by 9. We sat and we walked in the classic training for the Thai Buddhists who make their retreats in the mountains to learn the dharma and the ways of their ancestors. It was there I learned walking meditation, that patient art of slowing movement down so as to explore the very essence of each sensation of the body touching the earth.
I’d forgotten that until my mother’s hand had slowed me down and made me feel how easy it is to be tricked into thinking that time and movement are something we can control. Walking that short mile with my mother on the great Appalachian Trail, I was made to feel and see that each mile, each step offers a new landscape, a new sensation, a new possibility to see beyond where we think we are going.

My hiking guide with her stick

Flowers on My Mind

2010-09-19T12:32:00.000-07:00

Flowers in the Mind

It’s July and contrary to popular belief, this is the season of flowers, not spring. They are everywhere, in our neighbor’s gardens, breaking through cracks in the sidewalks, decorating abandoned lots, and hanging from back porches.

Back Porch, Chicago

We speak of hallucinogenic drugs having a transformative affect on our mind but I would say that flowers are the most potent and universal. All one has to do is focus on them, no ingestion, preparation, no elaborate rituals or ceremonies and something physiological blooms in us.

But why do we find ourselves so transfixed and transformed by their presence? Emotionally, what happens when we fix our gaze and senses on them? Is there something in our evolutionary path that has married us to them in such deeply emotional and biological ways? Is it smell? Is it color? Is it the form? Is it that they are often symbols of the fruit to come? Are we really no different than our ancient relatives—insects and animals-- moving pollen and seeds about like drugged drones?

As a boy, I never quite understood the mystical effect flowers had over people (i.e. adults). What made them stand in the midst of a bed and stare? What made grown men kneel before beds of snapdragons as if before some alter? Or women meticulously care for a pot of geraniums as if they were secret children they’d as soon raise rather than you? What drug were they on? Much of what I knew of flowers was from forced labor in the back yard, weeding, transplanting, mowing around unruly rosebushes that out of frustration and adolescent rebellion, I gleefully trimmed, watching the plumes of pink exhaust spray across the lawn.

Both my grandmothers, having grown up on farms in Indiana, gardened as a matter of necessity and understated pleasure. And now my parents in their late 70’s seem to find their deepest joy among their flocks of flowers and rows of beans. Here, their hands and hearts are alive with growth and change unlike much of the world they watch and read about it.

My parents, in their own strange way, have separate gardens in a two-acre lot on the edge of Indianapolis. My father has a square plot of course that has grown exponentially since retirement, first, just a few vegetables, practical as always, but then I’ve noticed each year more flowers, four-o’clocks (seeded from his mother’s garden after her death) zinnias, marigolds, hollyhocks, what he calls “farmer’s flowers,” because of their use as borders in farmer’s gardens throughout the Midwest. My mother, however has the most interesting garden, an eclectic rambling of patches that organically blend with ground cover, and the existing trees, rocks and wild plants from when the lot was a woody lot on a farm. For over 35 years, she’s stuck in plants, here and there, creating a winding garden under a canopy of hardwoods. Now suffering from early stages of Alzheimer’s she can’t recall names or how certain plants got there, but she marvels at the blooms and color, bending and weeding wherever she is drawn.

Neuroscientists are beginning to provide some very interesting research on why humans are so hypnotized by the floral universe. Apparently, several things are going on in the brain when we are in the presence of flowers. In fact, even the image or idea of a flower that we call upon from the depth of our unconscious triggers a complex response across several sectors of the brain almost simultaneously. Color, contrast, shape, and movement all figure into to why flowers are such potent sensual subjects for perception. Flowers are ingeniously designed through millions of years of evolution to attract living, moving, eating creatures, like us. Indeed, they mesmerize us, because we’ve evolved with them. Color is a key factor in their success as well as smell and shape. Researchers have discovered that the attraction of flowers in the work of poets and artists is not due to romantic sentiment or nature worship. No, the artist intuitively understands that flowers attract and awaken the imagination and thus simulate in the mind the experience of seeing a real flower. Amazingly, the artist gives pleasure to us because she is inviting our brain to recall, re-see, re-imagine and thus feel the sensation of “flower” or the complex neural patterns of colors we connect with the image or idea of flowers. Poets don’t even use visual color, they substitute words, but still they can have the same effect. Flowers assist the writer depict a landscape or give a feeling of a scene and not by completely describing it but by suggesting it for a reader, who will with pleasure fill in the rest.

Is it a surprise then that the mandala, the complex patterns of color and symbols in the shape of a circle, has been used in sacred rituals and to decorate homes, shrines, and temples across the earth throughout human culture? Is it any wonder that we surround ourselves with flowers as we move through this world, sustaining, inspiring, and making the trip with us even when we depart?

The Science of Mind: Sensation and the Imagination

2010-09-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

“Buddhist teachings are not a religion, they are a science of mind.
-- The Dalai Lama

I’ve been meditating ever since I followed my high school girl friend into a Transcendental Mediation seminar when I was 17. I was a convert in the worst way, meditating rebelliously even before football games in the locker room, determined to prove its value, even while my teammates snickered at the drool that came out of my mouth. I’ve dropped the practice and picked it up at least a dozen times. I’ve dabbled in an embarrassing number of meditation and spiritual practices, studied scores of sacred texts and sat with an opened notebook before religious scholars, charlatans, poets, and gurus. I’ve hiked through empty deserts, up to sacred mountains, and across the globe to holy shrines hoping to stumble upon some formula to concentrate my mind and ground my spirit. I’ve been determined but stubborn in my belief that science could not give me any help on my path to understand this ancient practice. I was wrong.
Meditation or the practice of mindfulness, which to me transcends religious doctrines, cultures, and historical periods, is a practice as old as our ancestors staring at fire. It’s a technique to study the very source of what's going on inside our mind and body. I’ve come to learn mindfulness or meditation is essentially an on-going experiment in observing our mind in action. Like scientists, when we sit and close our eyes, we learn to use the tool of observation on our own mind, feeling and observing sensations, thoughts, ideas, emotions. These responses of our body are real living phenomena and by studying them we cultivate a respect for and appreciation of not only the infinite potential that exists inside us but also in all life itself. Heady stuff, but there it is, going on right inside and all you have to do is sit there and close your eyes and watch and explore.
But, mindfulness is not so simple, either. Or it’s so simple that we have a hard time trusting it. Boredom tricks us into believing that nothing really is going on worth the time it takes and the pain that comes from facing our narrow and juvenile obsessions and fears. (I once tried to meditate at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, hoping I could stay for a month. But I could only last 8 days, as all I wanted to do was break the rules and argue with the monks over why they smoked and didn't recycle!, like some spoiled American not-it-all fifteen year old, which of course I once was.) I’ve experienced emotions of deep sorrow, humiliation and terror, making me long for any form of escape from what I'd felt or witnessed. Only recently have I realized that mindfulness practice is really not a discovery of ideas and values but a way to develop a mature mind by using and exploring how it works, particularly via the imagination.
Sometimes I wonder if what really is at work in science and in any cultivated study is not the actual information or understanding that is achieved, but the very skill or awareness that comes from years of exploring sensation, emotion, curiosity and the imagination. Indeed, this is the guiding principle in the Bhagavad Gita:
“With no desire for success,
no anxiety about failure,
indifferent to results, he burns up
his actions in the fire of wisdom.”

For some time, I have taken this attitude of scientific observation to another step. As a writer and teacher of writing, I’ve experimented with recording what happens in my meditations in a journal. It only takes a few minutes. It’s similar to recording dreams, in that I’ve noticed that by recording my observations, my ability to hold my focus and observe more keenly actually increases.
I’ve asked my writing and yoga students to experiment with this as well. I tell them to simply record as best they can, sensations in their body, the quality and feeling of their breath, the emotions that come, and of course, the thoughts. The point is not to philosophize or explain or use the exercise to ramble about ideas about meditation or feelings, but simply note down as descriptively as possible what they experience. (This becomes the interesting challenge: how to describe a sensation or an emotion or thought as a real living thing?)
One of the things I’ve noticed in my experiments and writing down my observations is that the very act of focusing and the purposeful effort at observing the responses of my body naturally calms and quiets the mind. This is of course nothing new and neurobiologists understood and proved this years ago; it’s called biofeedback. (It’s interesting how much was going on in the 70’s and then dropped and now is being picked up again, isn’t it?)
Another thing I’ve noticed is that focusing on a sensation I begin to sense a feeling of heat in this part of my body. I also sense the feeling widening or deepening, beginning with the surface or some interior place and then moving outward or sinking into the inner body. I feel very subtle sensations where I did not know I could actually consciously feel or reach. It’s similar to the way memory works, one surface memory opens out or connects another more subtle memory, and memory by memory, suddenly a whole new landscape of the past opens up you've completely uncovered from your unconscious. A key to both, I believe, is the imagination.
Neuroscientists call the use of the imagination part of the brain’s organic process of integration as it coordinates various activities and processes related to a given action. Whatever is happening, I’m struck by the way my mind leaps to a symbolic image or idea as I try to stay focused on a sensation or observe my body as an emotion arises or a thought spins out. What is so interesting to me is that as I try to hold on to a feeling sensation of these phenomena (instead analyzing them and placing some meaning for they are), my imagination is energized and engaged with an intensity I seldom experience outside of meditation. Perhaps it’s there working all the time, but I’m just not aware of it. But this is just the point: being aware of how the mind works, including the imagination, enhances our use of it as well as its flexibility and its health.
You may say, so what? Well, consider this. The real revolutionary idea we are just beginning to swallow from the rapid advances in neurobiology is that, unlike what we thought before, we DO have a great deal of influence over the development and health of our brain. And, guess what? like our third grade art teacher told us, using the imagination is not just playing but opening our minds.

Panic Attack!

2010-09-19T12:28:00.000-07:00

Panic—a sudden overpowering terror, often affecting many
people at once. Originating from the Greek God Pan, the god of shepherds of the
mountain wilds of Arkadia, who often amused himself by coming upon a lonely
traveler and causing fear in his half man half goat appearance.
American Heritage College Dictionary

Many people are feeling a sense of real panic and anxiety
these days because of the economy, global terrorism, and the health of our
environment. It doesn’t help either to have a fearmongering media mindlessly
posting updates every half hour with little context.
Stress is part of our life and a very good part of our life,
as it produces challenge and demands us to think, feel, change behavior, act
and evolve. (And, believe me, crises can be a great teacher.) But if we do not
know how stress works or how to regulate our responses to it, it can begin to
overwhelm us. Anxiety and panic are actual signals that tell us that our
body/brain is struggling with the stress levels and demanding some action.
But if stress is not released and we live in a constant
state of low level fear and anxiety, our bodies begin to break down. They can’t
stay in a state of hyper readiness to act 24 hours a day. Our bodies need to
act on perceived or felt fears and then recover.

Panic attacks often develop out of chronic anxiety. These
attacks seemingly come out of nowhere and produce psychological states of
heightened fear, dread, and a sense of feeling out of control. Our body first
gives us signals of dis-ease: nausea, cold sweats, heart palpitations, headaches, andmost of all shortness of breath. It feels we are in a nightmare; only it’s in the middle of the day and we’re not dreaming.
I used to dismiss the despair and terror people said they
experienced when suffering a panic attack. When they expressed their irrational
fears, I’d say to myself: don’t they realize this is only in their
head?
All it takes is one episode and it becomes very clear why
panic can strike us with such dread. Of course, it is in our minds, and that is
precisely why anxiety and panic, left misunderstood or not treated, can affect
our long-term health as well as the health of our families and society as well.
I’ve had mild panic attacks while traveling alone for some
time. But it wasn’t until I nearly drowned nine years ago that I really
understood how deadly a panic attack can be. Most drowning deaths are of course
set off by panic. On land, the shortness of breath may not harm us for long,
but in the water, it can kill us.
For me, a long distance swimmer, the experience was more
than a lesson in how panic shuts down the body/brain’s ability to respond to
stress, it also gave me insight into how not understanding how the emotion and
ego work can ironically prevent our organic survival instincts from working.
Here’s what happened. I’d just returned from a long flight
from South Africa, exhausted, emotionally overwhelmed, and struggling with a
nasal infection. But, eager to enjoy a beautiful lake swim and live up to my
athletic reputation, I joined two friends for a swim across a mile long lake in
New Hampshire on a chilly, dreary summer afternoon. (Mistake one.)
On the leg back across the lake I began to experience
shortness of breath and chills. I let my pals swim on but these conditions
worsened and I couldn’t get enough breath to keep any pace at all. Angry with
myself, my jock ego and trained athlete-self tried to push on. It worsened. I
looked around and my friends were too far away for me to call out for some
help, (actually, ashamed of my weakness, I told myself there was no way I was
going to call out for help). (Mistake two.) I dog-paddled trying to get some
air, but could only feel waves of fatigue beginning to pull the life out of my
arms and legs. Could I be drowning, I thought, incredulously? Me?! A
swimmer? My rational mind was furious
trying to understand the logic and the injustice of what was happening. But
I can swim two miles in Lake Michigan alone in 68 degree water? Was this some
divine joke, some Job-like test? (Mistake
three—ego feeling it as an affront rather than a crisis.)

What saved me?
It certainly wasn’t my rational mind.

In the moment following my outburst of rage, I began to
experience what many who have come close to death describe as the miraculous
sensation of psychological surrender. You’re dying and instead of going down
screaming and kicking, as I was, a profound shift occurs. How it happens or why,
is the subject of mystical poetry and now neuroscience. I have no answer. But to my surprise, I felt a profound relief. My life was over and it was perfectly fine.
And just as I had that feeling of joy and relief, the image came to me of floating in a lake in front of my grandparent’s cottage; it was a warm sunny day, the water soft and , my sister was floating next to me and my mother was standing with her hands under hands under my spine as well as under my sister’s as she whispered, “just
relax, relax, and breath and when you feel yourself sinking, just gently move
your arms and legs.” My mother’s lessons when I was five on how to float.

Where did this memory come from? My muscles? My frontal
cortex? My unconscious? Or was it a combination of them all integrating to find
the best response?

The point of course is that it came just in time to save me.
Immediately, then, I turned over, and began to do what my mother had taught me
44 years before: to focus on my breath.
Breath is of course the key to dealing with panic. It
naturally focuses the mind on the sensations of the body as it takes in oxygen
and nourishes the blood. The longer one can stay focused on the breath, the
quicker the mind will let go of the escalating feelings of fear. Ten seconds
and it can be over. In subsequent attacks I’ve had, on planes and other places,
I simply close my eyes and follow my breath all the way to its completion, fill
up again, and repeat. I keep telling myself, “breathe, just breathe.”
What’s key, is to not only breathe but to feel yourself breathing, that’s what shifts the mind off the fear. The panic subsides because the brain is now focused another
pattern: the sensations of the lungs, the diaphragm dropping, the tingling of energy and oxygen moving through the flesh. The yoga of survival, I call it.

The Real Stimulus Package: Education, Health, Science, and the Arts

2010-09-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

"In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who who have learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." Charles Darwin

* Scroll down for information on my Yoga and Creativity workshop in Chicago (Feb. 22 at Yoga Now) and my retreat in Mexico (March 21-28.)

Despite the fears and worries of our time that dominate the news with war, the economic collapse, and global warming, we are experiencing an unprecedented explosion in the fields of science and in the fields of neurobiology and neuroscience in particular. Also, many fields of science and social sciences are overlapping to bring us amazing insights into how we understand the world both within our bodies and the natural world around us. It’s a heady time. And yet, it seems underreported or plainly misunderstood by the media. Why? Because it is too complicated? Yes, to some degree but that’s because it takes a little connecting of the dots. (The press doesn’t have time or the money, if you haven’t noticed, to do a decent job on anything.) No, the real reason is because what neuroscientists are revealing is how the human brain works and this is threatening the very foundations of our society, from education, to law and government, religion and the arts, business, health care, and the sciences themselves.

I know this sounds dramatic because, frankly, it is. We are learning more and more how the brain works, and that means how we think, feel, behave, process, create, move, learn and evolve are no longer mysteries of a person’s inner life but verifiable brain activities that can be studied, observed, recorded, and most revolutionary of all—changed. You say, so what? We always have had the ability to alter and change how we see and think and act. This is freedom. This is the foundation of education, this is what the enlightenment brought us, this is reason, this is the essence of every major religion. Yes, but now, it’s not a theory or a grand idea or a belief, it’s a fact. Less than a few years ago, scientists and educators did not believe that you could create new brain cells or neurons, and from that, the prevailing idea was that an aging brain, a damaged brain, or (though this was not explicitly discussed) a chronically under-stimulated brain (i.e. a person with little education or opportunity for enrichment) was likely never to regenerate but continue to atrophy. Not so, according to how we understand the brain now. The brain is much more resilient and adaptive than we understood.

And what is most exciting to me as a writer, teacher of creative writer and yoga instructor is that scientists, developmental psychologists, and cognitive scientists are studying everything now: how the imagination and memory work, how the emotions work, and how the brain integrates information, perception, and memory shaping how we think and learn. The very nature of consciousness is under the lamp and on the lab table. What the sage and poet have always known is now come to pass: knowledge is not so much what we know, it is rather how we know it that brings wisdom.

My careers as a yoga teacher, nonfiction writer/journalist and writing professor have challenged me to understand this very shift neuroscience has validated in its study of brain plasticity and the adaptive and creative potential of the mind. For example, Hatha yoga is basically a working theory, a pragmatic discipline to learn how the body and mind work and can evolve as we practice, observe, and develop our awareness of its inherent intelligence. Writing, as I’ve painstakingly learned, is an art form that opens us, again as our scientists are suggesting, to examine the story behind the story of what it means to be alive as a species in an ever-evolving universe. Human nature is as an infinitely fascinating and dramatic story, and the best writers, it seems to me, look at it with a god-like eye, asking us to do the same even while are entranced in the artistry of the story-telling. Teachers, too, the best ones I’ve had, inspired me to question everything, break assumptions and ideas down into their smallest parts, and then begin to find the connections and relationships common to what we discovered.

I hope we are now in a true age of reason, where rationality and, yes, hope, can sustain us and reward those who are doing the work to liberate the creative energy and intelligence locked away in so many people who have been numbed and dumbed down by both their own hopelessness and sadly business, government, and institutions that have benefited on this old way of thinking. The revelation in neurobiology is suggesting that though genetic factors affect our health and potential, our agency and our environment are so much more important and can be altered by a healthy, stimulated, and confident body and mind.

Just as neuroscience gives us hope about how we can learn more how to better understand our amazing creative minds, it also starkly points out just what happens to the brain when it does not get stimulated, when it becomes stuck, attached to repetitive cycles of thinking, acting, believing. The brain is a pattern maker and a healthy brain actually seeks stimulation and challenge so that it can maintain its flexibility to integrate, feel, perceive, imagine, think, and act. But if it is not stimulated, it atrophies, and falls victim to patterns that stifle its natural ability to learn, evolve and seek challenge.

This is why, I believe, education, the sciences, the arts, and the cultivation of physical and emotional health are such critical areas to support and FUND for our future both here in the US and abroad. We can make such a difference if we merge these areas and provide opportunities for people to access education, their creative potential and their health. This is not a romantic notion any longer, it’s a factual assessment of how the world works, how biology operates. Limiting knowledge, creativity, and health will be the death of us. Or we can begin to work and act so that as many people as possible can benefit from the liberating knowledge that is within our very own bodies.

My future blogs will discuss these themes:

• Creativity and the imagination and how yoga and other body awareness disciplines can help us understand and use them more consciously in our lives.

• How meditation works and how to use a meditation log to help cultivate more awareness of what’s going on physically, emotionally and mentally as you practice.

• Anxiety, panic, and the breath and how simple breathing techniques can affect our health, decrease stress, and even be a life saver.

• How learning basic physiology and how the mind and brain work affects our physical and emotional health, our ability to learn and take action.

• Hiking, yoga asana and how exercise can affect and alleviate depression.

• The physiology of creative writing: the importance of studying how the body/brain/mind works for the writer and the reader.

Yoga and Writing Workshop
Spring Break in Sayulita, Mexico
March 21 - 28, 2009
The Creative Body: Using Writing and Yoga to Discover the Authentic Voice
Writer Michael McColly will lead morning and afternoon yoga sessions to nurture the mind
and creative spirit along with journaling and writing exercises.
Journalist Teresa Puente will introduce writers to Mexican literature
and culture through afternoon classes. This is a retreat for writers,
students and teachers to work on an individual level with an
opportunity to discuss their goals and challenges with fellow writers
and the instructors.
Sayulita, Mexico is located about 45 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta
on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. It is a colorful beach town with an
array of restaurants and shops. There also are opportunities to go horseback riding, take
surfing lessons and go snorkeling.
The cost of the not-for-credit class does not include these activities, but organizers can
provide you with information. Airfare and transportation not included. It is possible to take
a taxi or a bus from the Puerto Vallarta airport to Sayulita.

Cost: $1,200 for workshop and a shared room and $1,500 for workshop and a single room.
This includes the cost of the workshop, lodging for a week, breakfast and lunch.
Send up to 10 pages of your work and a one page statement on why you want to take the
workshop to tpuente777@hotmail.com
For more information, go to http://toltecatlwritingworkshops.vox.com/

Barack: Our Student President

2010-09-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

"We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth." Emerson

In the throes of our soaring infatuation with our new president, it might be helpful to consider what it is that many of us are attracted to in Barack Obama. Listening and watching him at his inauguration, as a yoga teacher and writer, I noticed first his body, how he stood, how he smiled, how he projected confidence, intelligence and joy, and even fear. He understood his role in the ritual like an actor in a Greek Play. He is comfortable in his body, but not as celebrities are, but with a kind of generosity of spirit, inviting you, too, to feel comfort in your own body. He is someone who loves words and realizes they are bigger than he is. I noticed, too, that his voice sounded much more rooted than in the past, none of that Black preacher voice he has fallen in to before, he’s not a Black preacher, Reverend Lowry is a Black preacher (and what a moving poet he is, too). But that’s okay, because our president, for me, embodies another skill that is perhaps much more important for us, that of how to be a student.

For anyone who has read or heard about his past, you know that this is someone who has learned how to observe, study, and listen. This is not a talent, but a skill learned from his life, from his mother and grandmother and grandfather, from teachers, friends, from his peers, books, colleagues, and from Michele and his daughters. Learning to be a student doesn’t end when we leave formal school, it becomes a philosophy, a way to live, work and act in the world.

In my roles as a writer, teacher, yoga practitioner, and yoga instructor—being a student is perhaps the most important skill I try to practice and teach my students. In Hatha yoga as well as in my work as nonfiction essayist, the foundation of these two arts is the ability to unify as much as humanly possible the observing self with the object being observed.

In Hatha Yoga, one begins by studying one’s physical body: how it works, how it moves, how it breathes, how it releases waste, how energy and chemistry animate it, how it evolves and changes and most of all, how it is a microcosm of nature. A student refines her awareness by focusing on the subtle aspects of our body, specifically our emotions, our organs of perception, our memory, our dreams, our patterns of thinking and feeling, the stories we tell ourselves, and most intriguing of all--our imagination. Step by step, a practitioner becomes a student of their own body and from that knowledge everything follows.

Both yogi and writer are fascinated with not just the subject itself but with the art of how to explore and understand that subject. The yogi like the artist is a pragmatic scientist who wants to learn the best techniques to examine a phenomenon, a process, or a situation. Every perspective, every means of knowing is of value--empirical facts, intuition, perception, and the imagination. The student, like our president, loves the very act of learning, of discovering new ideas and perspectives, and of learning from his errors of perception and judgment. Ironically, for our time of hyping genius, perfection, athletic prowess, wealth, and stardom, a true student relishes failure and difficult challenges, as these become the greatest teachers. We know he has great challenges before him, but I hope we know that we have to let him fail, too, as this will only be to his and our benefit.

Back to the Future: Neuroscience and Kindergarden

2010-09-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

“ . . . habit is a great deadener.” Samuel Beckett

Out of the labs and medical schools across the globe neuroscientists are making some startling discoveries. Startling to the health sciences perhaps but not to those of us in the arts and those who have experienced the benefits of mind/body practices such as Hatha Yoga.

If you’ve been under a rock, it’s been impossible not to notice the explosion in the media stemming from these almost weekly reports from halls of science. Why? Aging baby boomers? Hardly. It has come from a long chain of research as is usually the case in the sciences, but also from the use of new technology like MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) that gives precise pictures of brain activity. Physics and molecular biology in particular has been involved as well. Neurons. Brain Cells. Get used to hearing about them. What is revolutionary about what neuroscience is uncovering is not just interesting facts for scientists to argue about in journals like Nature, but these studies are asking questions and providing valuable insights about the very way in which we think, perceive, feel, remember, and imagine. Consciousness itself is being examined in the laboratory.

One of the discoveries which has received a lot of attention is rather obvious but nevertheless critical for how we understand the way in which neurons work and regenerate. In the past, researchers thought that as people aged or if they suffered severe trauma or injury they lost neural function in parts of the brain for good. Not so. The brain is “plastic,” to use the new term used by neuroscientists. The brain evolves, grows, heals, adapts like other parts of the body. And how? Through what artists, philosophers, and any wise observer of human life could have predicted: through stimulating experience, exercise, enhancing sensual perception, and cultivating self-awareness. The brain needs challenges and that doesn’t mean doing more crossword puzzles, it means moving the body, trying new things, breaking old patterns of thinking and acting.

Knowing is one thing, but changing behavior is quite another. Neuroscience has opened the door and provided the strongest evidence yet that not only the health of our brains but the health of our bodies, families, workplaces, and communities depends on applying this knowledge.

Where to start? Everywhere!

For years people pooh poohed what we did in kindergarden as a gentle and enjoyable way to slowly indoctrinate five year olds into the next phase of their lives: education. And then we learned in touchy/feely 60’s and 70’s that play, meaningful creative expression, singing, and exercise were in fact very important for developing children’s mental and kinetic agility, socialization, etc. Well, what neuroscientists are saying is that, hey, we need to be going to kindergarten our whole lives. As adults, we need to play, meaningfully, several hours a week. And not play so as to sharper and feed our addiction to competing, either. We need to practice being aware of our bodies; yes, practice, moving, tasting, seeing, touching, hearing, and thinking in novel and pleasurable ways. I am going bird watching again and painting, something my first grade teacher introduced us how to do!

I teach creative writing as well as yoga. And even in these disciplines, I have to remind students that their attitudes toward their body is critical. And that every day they need to practice at being alive: by experimenting with perception, seeing the world from different perspectives, exploring how concentration works, exercising their body, exploring the world, feeling pleasure not to escape but to absorb and savor life. Cultivating the mind begins with knowing how the soma or the body works. We can’t know how to use the imagination unless we understand what feeds it and what enhances it. Octavio Paz said, “Every act of perception is an act of creativity.” And this is exactly what neuroscience has underscored.
Perhaps this New Year you can begin to try a few new habits of life . . . and mind. My advice, think small, and make it enjoyable. Surprise yourself as much as you can.

The Art of Concentration

2010-09-19T12:19:00.000-07:00

What goes on when we concentrate? And why is it that sometimes we can easily slip into a state of concentration and at other times we struggle?

As a teacher of writing and of Hatha yoga, I am in the business of trying to help people in this skill crucial to cognition. The cultivation of awareness and perception rests in our ability to sustain focus on some object or sensation. It’s common to hear students complain that they have a hard time focusing. Actually, it’s not focusing that is the problem, it’s sustaining their focus so that they explore and savor the experience before them. They have a hard time, because the brain only stays focused on one thing for about ten seconds.

The derivation of the words focus and concentrate come from the word—heart. The focal point in a home is the what? The hearth. The place of fire, food, story, conversation, and community. To concentrate means to direct or draw towards a common center. In chemistry it means to make a mixture less dilute. And so it is with our mind. We have thousands of competing sensations, ideas, distractions to keep us from maintaining our focus. Neurons are firing all over our complex brain: “Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me!

This is where the arts of meditation are so helpful. People see it as some special esoteric art or prayer like activity imbued with mysterious or religious powers, but meditation is simply a technique to train the mind to maintain focus. And, I like to tell students that there are many ways and experiences where we can train our minds how to focus. The reason meditation is so helpful is that it teaches you how to observe your mind as a way to understand how concentration works. You don’t just watch the object, you watch your mind watching the object. This is the key. You are essentially watch the flux of the mind and not attaching your mind onto whatever new thought it brings. Life is flux. To think we can hold our attention is a mistake. We can’t. Our brain like other organs operates without our conscious effort. What we can train ourselves to do is learn how to concentrate the mind by slowing it down and feeling the sensation of the body under the spell of deep attentiveness.

Meditation is not exact. It’s uneven and imperfect. But in my experience, what the body and mind seem to be doing is not so much as learning how to grip the mind, but rather how to feel a certain sensation or rhythm of feeling. And this is what entrains and quiets the mind; it’s not some physical fete of prowess, it’s learning to feel a vibration or sensation and falling into sync. Actually, it’s our own body’s deep rhythm we are tapping into.

In Hatha yoga, one technique is listening to or feeling the sensation of the breath. It is so simple that it’s difficult because all you are doing is sitting quietly and feeling the body as air (energy or prana) passes in and back out. In a way, it’s an act of intimacy, like sitting next to a child or a friend or a lover or an animal or whatever living thing and completely devoting yourself to seeing and feeling their presence? There are other techniques--chanting, visualizing a sacred image (a mandala) in the mind’s eye, or focusing on an icon or lit candle.

The artist is one who can see relationships and connections in experience, and also see deeply into the heart of an experience, tracing it, layer upon layer, to its source. When we concentrate, we actually frame an experience and make it sacred. And to do this, we naturally turn to our imagination.

Are You Hip?

2010-09-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

“Hip” and the Metaphysical Mysteries of the Origins of Modern Words

Every year the world not only loses words but whole languages. That’s right, entire vocabularies, poetic expressions, mystical ideas, medicinal knowledge, songs, and legends. Modernity keeps marching on, and so, does language. Evolution takes its course.

Writers, however, are wordsmiths. We love words, we love how they sound and feel in the mouth, we love the way they look on the page, we love to discover new ones and use them. Like musicians who love to hear new songs or old songs or learn from other instruments or other cultures, we writers live for poetry of words.

I’ve been reading the back of my dictionary lately, the place that gives the roots of English and it’s Indo-European origins. Their etymology or their stories fascinate me. It’s like archaeology. You look there at the end of the definition, see the root, look it up, and a whole history opens out. Like the word, focus, which means a point where light or radiation converge or where they appear to converge. And you can go down and read that it means many things, in optics, disease, geology, etc, but at the bottom, my eyes “focus” in on the derivation from Latin “hearth.” In other words, this word comes from people seeing light in a fireplace in their homes or huts or wherever it first came from. Your poetic mind can go a lot of places with this.

Here’s another, in our era of terrorism (something we think is new, maybe to us in America, although guess what the Apaches were called or any number of Indian people? Terrorizers, villains, assassins, barbarians, etc.) What were the Apache doing? Protecting their land. But look at the word assassin, for example, this comes from a group of Arabic people who followed a certain mystical Sheik in ancient Persia who promoted the use of hashish to excite and empower warriors to kill enemies (Christian Crusaders or other enemies) in name of their mystical leader. The assassin is the word for hashish user in Arabic. Hmm. Does this help us understand anything of our times?

Finally, my favorite—“Hip” or as it’s been spelled “hep.” We all think we know what this means, right? Where did it come from, though? Hip-pies? Hepcats? Cool dudes? Well, it comes originally from Senegal, West Africa.

I remember seeing it first in a Wolof dictionary while in the Peace Corps, and thinking Is this word the word I think it is? I’d already learned about “dig” (to understand or comprehend) from the Wolof I lived with. “Mangi deg ko.” (I understand it.) But “hip” or “hepkat”? Yes. Here’s what clued me in. In Wolof, a farmer is a “mbaykat” (one who farms), a teacher,”janglekat” (one who teaches). You see the suffix is added to the verb to indicate one who is an expert at something. So . . . a “hepkat” is what? Those wise Wolofs, whose language shares roots with the Ancient Egyptians, released into the world of words an expression that doesn’t have to do with how one acts or appears (the common connotation) but it goes deeper than that, for them, “hep” is “to see clearly,” and thus the “hepkat” is “one who sees the world clearly.”

Projections

2010-09-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Projections

When I lived in Senegal and worked in the Peace Corps, I was always struck by the emphasis people there put on dress. I saw some of the most fantastic displays of style, jewelry, headwear, shoes and scarves (on women and men) that I have ever seen. And color! These people had an amazing sense of color. Vibrant, bold, wild, creative. Designs that would stun you, knock you over and make you smile. Every day in a place like Dakar was like a style show. But, even poor—very poor people—if and when they could, would dress with care and style, especially at a ceremony, marriage or funeral. But for me, being a young guy and a so-called ‘free spirit American, I didn’t think it really mattered what I wore. I wore what I felt like, what other Peace Corps volunteers wore: tie dye or plain white t-shirts, jeans, 50 cent sandals, and baggy pajama like pants. We dressed for comfort and political solidarity, trying to say, hey poor Africans we’re with you. Women dressed a bit better than we guys. But nothing like the Senegalese women.

One day this Senegalese friend of mine who was my French teacher asked me a surprising question. “Why do you Americans dress the way you do? I don’t understand it. You have the money to wear nicer clothes that you have made for you, but you wear the same raggedy things all the time. Why?” I laughed nervously, and try to tell him in my bad French and Wolof that in America young people dress to show how they feel about themselves and not to conform to authority or convention. But he didn’t buy it. “But you live here now. And you’re an authority here. Everybody sees you as a person with money and power. You should dress like that.”

“I don’t care what other people think. I dress for myself.”

“No,” he said. And I’ll never forget the reason he gave. “No, you have to understand we don’t dress for just ourselves, we dress for the people who will see us. We dress to please them.”

I just stood there with a dumb look on my face. It wasn’t the first time, the Senegalese turned my ideas about life completely upside down.

For the Senegalese dressing was not only an act of self-expression, it was also an act of respect and awareness that who we are and what we project affects other people. It also was an act of respect for the family and village people came from.

I tried to dress a bit better but never quite could wear purple and green design ensembles. But when I did dress with more care and color. I always got a lot of compliments as well as jokes about what I used to wear.

I still don’t dress that well. But last week I, too, changed my appearance to write about the effect on others I met and the effect on myself. I wore a very conservative black suit, tie and black shoes. I rode my bike to a café where I go often and people did a doubletake. Women especially seemed to notice me, much more than normal. One woman leaned over and kissed me as a greeting like we were in Europe or something. I’m older so I guess it seemed normal. But the most interesting thing was how I felt. Yes, uncomfortable and hot. But I did like the whole process of dressing. It changed my walk. It changed how I sat. I think I even worked differently at the café.

In Hatha Yoga, there is a lot of emphasis as there is in all Hindu traditions in karma or your actions and their affects on both your future and on others. “What goes around comes around,” as we say here in the west. “You reap what you sew,” as the Bible says. Being conscious of how you project your ideas, feelings, and thoughts are a big deal in India. Karma matters. In the spiritual practice of yoga, when you live in ignorance of how your actions are affecting your future and other people’s futures, you will eventually feel their effect. There is a symbol of this in Hindu mythology: it’s a snake eating its tail. And that’s precisely what you have to do—eat all of your projections you throw out there in the world, swallow every small-minded act, every hateful statement, every greedy deed, every ugly display, every destructive thought.

In a time where it’s going to get very ugly with the election and the economic disaster ahead of us, it might be worth considering what our projections on the world are. We live in a world where actions, thoughts, deeds, and words matter.

The Body Politic: Physiology and The Election

2010-09-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

Imagine if your body had a vote in this upcoming election. By body, I’m not talking about the pattern of ideas your cerebral cortex says is who you are. I’m speaking about the organs, bones, nerves, muscles, and cellular you. What would it be looking for in a candidate or in a political platform?

It’s not such an odd question. People vote, they say, for emotional reasons, for financial reasons, for philosophical or intellectual reasons, for religious reasons, why can’t they vote for physiological reasons?

So I did a little meditation to quiet down my brain to keep it from butting in while I listened:

“Well, the first thing we do in looking for a candidate is listen to their voice to feel if they are sincere. It’s not difficult. The second thing is to just look at their body. Is it taken care of? Do they feel comfortable in their own skin? We can feel if someone is uptight or unhappy.”

So, who’s body then do you trust?

“Oh, it’s obvious, Obama’s body. His eyes are serene. He smiles sometimes with his legs and arms and looks kind of goofy and childlike. His body is warmer around his children. McCain laughs a lot at himself, and when he does, you can feel his truer body. It’s been through a lot. McCain got tortured. It’s written all over his body. He’s angry. Angry at something he can’t change. Obama sometimes looks up and out and away from his body; I wish he’d look down and in it more. They both trust their heads more than their bodies.”

What else do you look for?

“Look, we don’t ask for much, we just need food, good food, clean water, clean air, you know, the basics. We do best when we have food in our stomach, have warm clothes, a roof over our heads. Environments matter a lot to our well-being. It’s simple.”

The environment, then, matters?

Life or death depends on it. I’m just a body but most plants and animals work this out or adapt or move off to where they can get it. We’re the same. We learned everything from them.”

So, you’re worried about the environment?

“Yes. It’s out of balance. We don’t like to be worried, it’s a waste of our time. Anxiety causes a lot of trouble for us. We lose the feel for what’s best for us. We over react, one problem gets worse because our wonderful brain just obsesses about these things and sends all kinds of signals, day and night, that something is wrong. It’s so chaotic. We like for things to be predictable, secure. Everything functions best when we are happy and not worried. See, we seek balance in every function. It’s our nature.”

So, then you’re more interested in conservative oriented politics and candidates?

“Yes, we want security in all things. We love ritual. We like to eat everyday at about the same time. We like to exercise and sleep regularly. We don’t like to live in fear, it’s taxing, stressful.”

So, you’re not so much for change then.

“Who said that? We love change. We thrive on change.”

Wait. You want things to be predictable but you love change. You can’t have it both ways.

“Why not? Look, life is change, every second we got change going on inside and out. What we’re seeking is balance. We want to make it as easy as possible to breathe, to digest, to perceive, etc. We know we have to change and adapt every minute to survive. We have an innate creative drive, so we are always seeking a better way to respond and adapt, but if it doesn’t work we stay with what we have. We’ve been this way a long time. We just want to survive.”

It sounds like you’re interested primarily in yourself, like you follow the theory of survival of the fittest?

“Theory? We don’t live by theories. The brain likes theories. And we humor it by paying attention to its ideas for a while, but we live by feeling and observing. If we see other bodies adapting better than we are, we mimic them the best we can. We’re animals, we depend on each other. If we didn’t, we would die. Adapting is how we survive. It’s really what you call creativity, and this is where we really depend on our brain to do its job. It’s very good at figuring out how to adapt if we let it practice. The only problem is, we also feel when other bodies are not adapting or are trapped. It’s painful to watch. We haven’t figured out how to deal with this very well. Worry kicks in. Sometimes we must drop what we are doing and help. Sometimes we can’t do anything. Sometimes we have to shut down for a while until all of this suffering and helplessness passes through. There’s nothing else to do.”

This dialogue might sound cute and innocent. But, think about it. Human physiology is not a mystery to us in the 21st century. The human body is miraculously well designed, with levels of intelligence that are only now with neuroscience being discovered. We know what generates and sustains health. We know what causes damage and injury, physically and psychologically. It’s mind-bogglingly simple. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that we can put so much faith and money into science and technology and then ignore the wisdom it reveals to us?

Play: Organic Creativity

2010-09-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

Recently, I’ve been trying out an exercise with my students in my writing classes and workshops. I ask them to make three lists involving memorable experiences of creative play. The first has to do with experiences in childhood with play. The second asks them to list things they do presently they consider creative play. And the third is experiences in which they have observed others in the act of creative play.

“Creative play” is a rather abstract idea and can be taken to mean many different things. But many students get it right away. To help them, I use the adjectives, “organic,” “inventive,” or “homemade.”

I give them examples from my own childhood. I tell them of scouring the alleys of my neighborhood looking for machine parts, junk radios, TV tubes, wire, batteries, junk that I turned into what my friends and I called “contraptions.” (It was my sci-fi period, what can I say.) Or I tell them about this wild storm that split apart a tree in our side yard, out of which my sisters and I built a giant nest in one of its downed branches. Forts were big in my neighborhood: tree houses, foxholes, dens under large bushes, cardboard box towns, abandoned cars.

I like to watch their faces as they set to work, lips curling into smiles, nodding heads, eyes turning up and out as they tune into these memories. I then ask them to write down beside one experience per list, a body part, a place, the situation out of which this occurred, and an emotion they associate with it. This is to help them elaborate a bit and connect the experience to their bodies.

I have been using this exercise as a kind of ice-breaker because it never fails to illicit a story a student can tell about a creative experience that everyone feels at once connected to, often bringing very funny confessions and fascinating insights into the nature of creativity. They can use any story or experience from the three lists. As one might expect, most tell a story from childhood. But a couple chose the present and one invariably chooses an experience of watching someone else.

One student this term told of a man he watched in Chicago, who was known to stake out a street corner in a popular ‘hip’ section of the city, and with boom box, skimpy speedo, running shoes, and his buff Asian body, rocked and danced for hours, as if he were alone in his apartment. A kind of performance piece for sure, but it wasn’t any more elaborate than dancing to his own music with his own beautiful body in a public place.

I ask students to listen carefully and watch the bodies of their classmates as they relate their experiences. I want them to notice characteristics in people’s bodies and in their descriptions of these experiences. For the student who described the dancer, I asked him what did seeing this organic “performance” make him feel as he watched him? And his response was perfect, “freedom” and “rebellion” and “pleasure.”

Again and again the characteristics of pleasure and freedom of expression came up. Pleasure in both the physical actions felt in their bodies and the pleasure of their inventive use of a situation or the things around them. One woman spoke of cooking now for her friends, and how much she enjoyed the whole process of going to a market and picking out vegetables (“I just like to see the colors and go down the aisles and think of all the things I could possibly make.”) What was still most pleasurable for her was not only the physicality of cooking, shopping, chopping, mixing, but the serving of food to her friends.

Several students spoke of games they made up with neighbors, jumping from furniture, taking on the roles of make-believe people, playing out scenarios of TV shows, creating scenes and sets for dolls or in some cases making anti-dolls where Barbee becomes some character of their own invention far from the plastic All-American ideal.

Another trait students point out is the inventiveness in their experiences. Furniture, books, sticks, stones, pots, old clothes, or whatever is at hand take on symbolic meaning. With inventiveness, too, also comes a kind of power or even a kind of confidence.

I was struck by the pragmatic nature of their examples. The context or situation or a given space provide a form that doesn’t’ limit their creativity but actually serves as a foundation or impetus for their imaginative response. Even awkward situations became opportunities as one woman described dealing with guys that annoyed her and her friends by turning them into dupes by making up elaborate fictions about who their lives. One woman told of how she turned dreaded trips shopping with her mother into make-believe games where she hid under clothes racks and scared women who’d pull out dresses from off the rack. “Hey, that’s mine! Put that back! This is my house!”

Bedrooms, playgrounds, backyards, department stores, street corners, bedrooms, and alleys—any place can become a stage or starting point for our creativity.

Some experiences of students reveal not only how pragmatic and organic our creativity can be but also how comforting it can be psychologically or how troubling depending upon how it is used. One student in a workshop described dealing with death by coming back from a funeral and deciding to play “mortician” and asking all her friends to play dead so she could put make up on them and put them in a box. “Everybody in my neighborhood wanted to play dead that summer.” Another African-American woman described the awkward emotional territory of gender and sexuality and perhaps race as well as she described a well-known game where all the girls at recess in her class would go out and capture a boy, pen him down on the ground, and taunt and torture him with the threat of a kiss. “I was the one they decided should be the one who kissed the boy. I don’t know why they chose me. I can’t even remember actually kissing these boys but attempting to do it was enough.”

It was a brave example she chose to give to the class, reminding all of us of how games and creative play can turn destructive. This “kissing game” reminded me, too, of the unconscious energy that often animates our creative responses and action, which is why conscious intention plays a very important role in our creative work and play.

Creativity is often misunderstood as some special talent or in-born or God-given skill, as if we have nothing at all to do with its cultivation. When, in truth, it’s in our very nature to change and create. The mind and the body crave our conscious use of creativity. We seek the pleasure, perhaps even unconsciously, of the challenge the sensual world presents to us, not only for our own survival but for the survival of an evolving planet.

Remnants and Reminders of 1968

2010-09-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

1968

On the pier at Hollywood Beach on the far North Side of Chicago near where I live, there is a remnant of the summer of 1968 when thousands of people—young people and activists—descended on Chicago for the Democratic Convention. I took this picture last year still amazed that after 40 years, the spray painted letters that spelled out an icon of that summer, E U G E N E M C C A R T H Y, had not faded but had become a part of the pier, refusing any of Mayor Daley’s graffiti buster blasts of chemicals. The bitter winds of winters and blaring beach sun had not dimmed the sentiments and message left embedded in that iron railing.

Remnant of 1968 on Hollywood Beach Pier

I’d heard stories and read about that explosive week when the people outside of the institutions of power had as much to say as those inside. And as I watch the tame and at times banal Democratic Convention while the world waits for America to finish it’s two year election, I am “hoping” that “the fierce urgency of now” doesn’t become another cliché.

For whatever you want to say about Chicago and the summer of 1968, you can’t say that people blogged about what was going on in the streets and minds of America, they came together to Chicago and demanded to be heard. Sometimes stupidly and violently, yes. But people felt rage and frustration at what was happening in America and around the world. They didn’t sit quietly watching on 48-inch screen TVs. In Europe they shut down governments and cities that year. Here, Chicago became a circus of poets, activists, hippies, yippies, artists, young, poor, black, white, and brown. And they left their mark.

I came upon this remnant a few years ago sitting on the beach grading some student essays. I stared at the faded lettering, noticing first the M and C and the string of rusted yellow letters before it and after. I knew that the beaches had become campgrounds that week. But it couldn’t be that old. Or could it? I squinted trying to make out the rest of the word. Yes. It read M C C A R T H Y. I got up and walked over. Could it actually be who I thought it was? And there was the letters before that name, spelled out to confirm my hope: E U G E N E.

I remember, my first feeling was to go to tell someone. I looked around at people on the beach that day a Vietnamese couple walked along the pier, some Hispanic children were playing in the water, gay men were lounging down the beach in groups. The lifeguard was in her boat. A few fishermen were casting their lines. Who’d even know, if I said something?

I looked at the beach and in my mind I saw the campers there, turning back the time, the tents and the energy, recalling that the beaches and parks that week had become training centers, gatherings for music and speeches. Ginsburg and Mailer and many poets and activists held court.

But the memory that was strongest was of my mother taking me one afternoon after school to the Court House of Gas City, Indiana where she’d grown up a few miles away from our house in neighboring Marion. She’d wanted me to see a presidential candidate as they were tromping through Indiana that spring of 1968. Robert Kennedy’s motorcade had driven by my school the week before and my 70 year old second grade teacher was one of the only teachers who refused to let her children out of class to see a Kennedy pass our recess yard. My sister, a fifth grader down the hall, came home ecstatic, transformed. (Later when Kennedy had been shot, she wouldn’t come out of her room for a day until she emerged the next day with a poem that she read at dinner and then broke into sobs and ran back into her room.)

So my mother took me to see Eugene McCarthy make a speech on the Court House steps of this forgotten factory town of central Indiana. I can remember only his elegance, the way his pants looked, baggy and grey to match his hair, his white shirt, and hair blowing in the spring afternoon. I don’t remember what he said. Maybe fifty people stood with arms folded and listened. But I remember feeling that my mother wanted me to see him and the people who’d came to hear him. “Listen to what this man says, he’s running for president.”

After that we went to my grandfather’s bar down the street. He came out to our car in his bar apron, a factory worker who’d finally saved enough money to open his own business, and he gave me a Milky Way bar, and we went home.

American elections should never be about candidates, they should always be about what they were intended to be: acts of faith by individuals that their beliefs, their work, their words, their lives matter and affect the future of an evolving, impressionable world.

Neural Mirroring & Watching the Olympics

2010-09-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

Michael Phelps imitating a butterfly

Yesterday, I saw two boys racing down the sidewalk in my neighborhood, one on foot, one on a bicycle. Smiling, laughing, bumping into each other, they raised their arms and crossed an imaginary finish line. As they raised their arms, I, too, felt their joy, my cheeks lightened into a smile and even my shoulders and chest lifted slightly.

Across our little earth, images of Olympic athletes are bouncing through the skies and beaming down onto screens and into the brains and muscles of boys and girls of all ages. Never mind the medal count or the hyped drama, my body isn’t listening, it’s absorbing the dives, the jumps and leaps, the rhythms of legs and arms, the glowing eyes and faces of other bodies half a world away. Like those boys running down the street, the Olympians are dancing around in my mind and body, awakening my muscles, triggering emotions, and engaging my creative mind.

Human Bird or Olympic Athlete?

What’s happening? Why is my body responding in this way?

Neuroscientists call this sympathetic physical response of one body to another, neural mirroring. We absorb the patterns we see and feel as we witness the physical movements and emotions of another. Surprise, surprise scientists are confirming what we all know deep in our body: we are deeply affected physiologically by the world around us, especially those in our own species, and those close to us—our families, friends, and communities.

Neural pathways in the brain are constantly evolving and adapting to stimulation from the body’s experiences, needs, and amazingly from our imagination itself.

We go to a play or watch a dance performance or concert, and we come away enlivened, emotionally charged and challenged. We are not only affected by the performers and the patterns working in their bodies and minds that create their art, but we are also powerfully influenced by the emotions and patterns in the bodies around us.

So can images do this through TV? Of course. It’s not as strong as being next to someone in a yoga class opening their chest in a backbend so much so that your own back and chest ache for the release you’re feeling from them, but it’s happening. The key here is being sensitive and conscious of the feelings and sensations in your own body and, I would argue, how your imagination or mind is responding. Being aware of the imagination and using it to deepen feeling and emotion, actually is an adaptive device of the brain to stimulate the body.

Body plasticity is brain plasticity

Those boys, I witnessed in their imaginary world, are not only feeling the sensations and emotions of Olympic athletes, they are recreating them in their mind and replaying them in their bodies. How healthy, for them. and, for anyone who happens to walk by.

I’m always amazed at what happens when I practice yoga outside by the Lake. Invariably people walk by me and out of the corner of my eye, I see a hand rise over a head or a few twists of a torso, a forward bend suddenly in the middle of the beach. People are relaxed. They’ve taken off their shoes. They’re throwing balls for their dogs or watching their children making things in the sand. They’re breathing more deeply and the energy of the lake is lifting their spirits. Their bodies are alive and they see my body bending and diving into a sun salutation and sympathetically their muscles plead for the same. Or, is it the other way around? Perhaps it’s not me who is affecting them, but they who are making me feel more deeply into my own body? Or is the feeling mutual?

Swimming and Yoga: Flying Fish...

2010-09-19T11:33:00.000-07:00

Swimming and Yoga: Flying Fish (Part 1)

Nude swimmer or human fish?

Sometimes when people ask me how was I first introduced to the practice of hatha yoga, instead of technically answering them “in my college acting class,” I want to give a more truthful answer: “swimming at my grandparent’s lake cottage in northern Indiana.”

That would make my mother my first yoga teacher. I remember her there in the water, up to her waist, holding me with her hand under my belly, telling me to kick or stroke, making me practice putting my face into the water and breathe. Then she turned me over and taught me the most important lesson of all: how to float.

I wouldn’t have said this a few years ago, but as you mature in your study and practice of yoga, you begin to discover that the principles of yoga and “gurus” have been around you your whole life.

In fact, swimming now in Lake Michigan, I often consider the Lake itself as a teacher. Certainly that little lake in Indiana was where I learned to confront the fears of deep water. Respect and fearlessness, the classic opposites of yoga, are there for you in every swim.

I never competed, though I was a jock in high school, swimming was not my sport. For me it had a kind of romance, especially lakes. We also had a backyard pool, and it was a place to escape many difficult emotions and the surprises my body seemed full of as a teenager. Ironically, it was yoga and the opening I felt in my body that really reintroduced me to the joys of open water swimming. And now, during the summers especially, I swim as much as I practice asana. Living by Lake Michigan in Rogers Park, I swim every day I can, and often long distances, over a mile at least.

I used to worry that swimming somehow competed with my yoga practice, thinking that it was taking away time and energy away from my practice. A healthy concern but it’s a phase many people go through in their practice, discounting activities and any kind of physical exercise off the mat as somehow profane and maybe even bad for your practice. Hiking, bathing, running, and dance are, as we all know, highly spiritualized practices in many traditions. But you learn that you can observe your body and mind in everything you do. Sometimes I try to blend them: meditating by the lake for a half hour before swimming, and then following a swim with an asana practice. Nothing, nothing is more soothing and energizing than this regimen. The prana is very rich by bodies of water. And I highly recommend it.

Yoga and swimming complement each other in many ways. Both of course rely on careful control and awareness of the breath. Yes, you use your mouth to breathe in swimming, but the rhythmic working of the lungs, expanding and releasing has taught me how to find the right patterns and effort when exerting and feeling stress. Anyone who has ever found themselves in panic situations in water, in currents or suddenly fatigued or cramping, knows that the first thing you do is turn over and float and relax your breath. I have also learned a lot about efficiency and effort in my swimming from yoga. I used to muscle my way in both yoga and swimming, now I feel for the ups and downs of energy, and adjust accordingly. Twisting and tunneling through the water, I find the proper rhythm, the most efficient stroke, and feel for just the right pace and effort to maintain propulsion. Swimming, I’ve come to accept, is an on-going vinyasa. Most important of all, I have learned to find the pleasure in both these parallel practices. And this, ironically, is still a struggle for me.

I practice freestyle or “the crawl” but all the strokes can provide a flowing movement. The crawl gets its name because you literally crawl through the water, just like a baby moving across the carpet. Back and forth, the body rocks through the water, joyously recalling perhaps ancient sensations deep within muscle memory of our childhood body floating there in the warmth of the womb.

When I’m not lost in the dreamy world of my swimming mind, where ideas flash with equal brilliance and absurdity, I often become mesmerized by the watery bottom, imagining the future when the rippled sand below hardens and is heaved and tossed across a yet unknown continent. The ancient bed of a nameless lake, forgotten over millions of years. Or looking to the east in the early mornings, I watch the sun, shattering over the surface up to my nose, lights that I swear are crackles of real fire dancing on the rippling water. And then, I’m awakened by my own body, as a wave of energy passes through me. Perhaps, I’m passing over a spring bubbling up? Or perhaps, it’s a jolt of adrenaline coursing through my blood, feeding the muscles in my arms and legs? Or is it, the lake itself, electrifying my skin with it’s own energetic life, a wave weaving its way through a watery world beyond my comprehension. And yet, I sense some lift, and for several seconds I seem to be swimming on top of the water, so light, it feels almost like I could leap out of the water like a flying fish.

The After Death Room

2010-09-19T11:31:00.000-07:00

Enshrined

2010-09-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

Enshrined

Like most of us who live in Chicago’s real architectural gift to the world—the three flat apartment, I have the requisite wooden back porch.
These extensions of our four-walled world serve various purposes—recycling bin, smokers club, storage closet, barbecue kitchen, and retreat center.

For me, a refugee from small town America who grew up with a real backyard that bordered the open land of farms, rivers and woods, my porch is, especially in summer, my corner of wilderness.

My wooden oasis is no more than 6 feet wide, maybe 13 feet long, and, being the top floor, 12 feet tall. Not much. And though I can hear Lake Michigan roaring in the winter between the digital bells of the doors closing from the Morse El Stop, it has a view of my neighbors (so close I can lean over and steal salmon from their grill) and of course the beauty of a Chicago alley.

When I first moved in a few years ago after traveling for 2 years, I had an idea I’d put some plants out there, but then they spent the better part of a year gutting the apartments all around me, condoizing and driving me literally out of my mind and apartment.

Last year, in a rage and in a spirit of rebellion, I found by the end of the summer I had covered nearly the entire floor save for a little square in the middle to sit and maybe spread out my yoga mat. I had pots, flower boxes found in the alley, milk cartons, bowls, and my special creation, Mexican glass candles emptied of wax, all filled with whatever I could drag back from Jewels or get from my parents yard.

This year, I decided to porchscape a bit. I added more flower boxes, covering the rails, added more pots, and in a another stroke of genius looked up and realized I had a whole space above my head which was empty. Determined to maintain the “organic” nature of my plot, I found wicker baskets of all sizes at the Good Will, filled them with plants, drilled hooks, and suddenly those wave petunias had some space to wave.

I found an ugly big candelabra from a thrift store. Collected beach stones from Lake Michigan. Put down cheap bamboo mats. Mounted my Mexican candles (some sprouting plants, some flickering with flames).

Something happened when I set the candelabra down among my plants and beach stones. It was dark. I’d spent all afternoon and evening out there, planting, hanging, arranging, painting, collecting odd things scattered around my apartment in a kind of playful frenzy. I lit a candle and stuck a stick of incense in a geranium pot.

I’d made a shrine, a little grotto out of a back porch.

We can make anything sacred. All we have to do is name it and use our imagination to see into its source.

Sitting out there surrounded by the green and color and flickering candlelit, it felt strangely as if what was before me was not something I’d created but something I had recovered, something that had always been there.

Yoga, Brain Plasticity and Creativity

2010-09-19T11:09:00.000-07:00

"Every act of perception is an act of creativity." Octavio Paz

By cultivating perception we are cultivating our creativity. Creativity comes from seeing or feeling or recognizing patterns—sometimes very simple patterns, sometimes very complex or abstract patterns—in both the world around us and in our selves. All life is composed of patterns, structures, or forms, as Plato and Greek philosophy understood over two thousand years ago. All the branches and practices of the many schools of yoga are disciplines that understand that the human brain needs to be observed and studied in order for it to be healthy and to work at it's most efficient level. Yoga never disconnected the brain from the rest of the body as Western thought did for so many centuries. Consequently Hatha yoga is a discipline that cultivates the health of the body precisely through both self-study and training of all aspects of human intelligence: physical/kinesthetic, emotional/energetic, mental and cognitive, intellectual/creative, and spiritual. All forms of intelligence work in harmony in the mature yogi. But the life long study or practice begins in the physical body and progresses from the outside in. Breath is a key component in this process of self-education and awareness as the breath helps us literally feel the presence of the quality of energy that comes with focused, concentrated awareness of our mind and our body working together. Our organs of perception are highly evolved parts of our physical body, affecting and regulating our survival in the world. Understanding how they work and using them efficiently and effectively is critical to our survival and our health.

Our creativity comes from our use of our body and understanding how our organs of perception work and feed us—stimulate and orient us. The clearer we see the world, the better we are able to live in harmony with it. Responding to life requires an attuned, sensitive and integrated mind and body. This is obvious but it takes work and discipline. This discipline can come in a variety of practices, skills, activities, and pleasures, as we all know. The key is deepening and exploring these skills over a long period of time.

Every act of perception is essentially an act of creativity as our body/mind records and interprets the patterns around and inside us. How we interpret these patterns—how clearly we see them outside of our prejudices, needs, and selfishness—is our creativity at work. Our lives are in themselves creative responses to the body and the world we live in.

If we study the history of art or literature, one can see that these traditions are rooted in the creative expression of people participating in sacred rituals and devotional acts of every culture in every corner of the earth. It seems that the most profound work of artists in the modern era, be they musicians, painters, dancers, or writers, are all works that not only reveal innovative ways to see or perceive the world, but also are in some way investigations into the very nature of how creativity works. Their art often can be seen as devotional altars to their exploration of how perception and creativity feed one another.

Neuroscience is discovering every day that the more conscious we are of how our body and mind function, the better equipped we are to find ways to maintain body and mind health. Oliver Sacks, a preeminent scientist and writer, describes the fascinating adaptive strategies of four people in his essay "The Mind's Eye." He speaks of "deep perception" or how blinded people use practical applications of their imagination to negotiate their everyday lives without the use of "normal" eyesight. In one case study in his essay, an engineer tells of how he felt completely confident on top of his house in the middle of the night patching his roof to the terror of his sighted neighbors. Scientists are discovering that damaged brains heal themselves in divergent ways, using what neuroscientist call brain plasticity or the brain's inherent ability to adapt and evolve. This ability to adapt and heal is our creativity at work. Brain plasticity, according to neuroscientists, occurs both at the unconscious and conscious levels. But it most certainly comes from our ability to apply our imaginations. Once our creativity begins to atrophy our brain, too, loses its natural ability to make new neurons and rewire itself. In other words, we can shape the way our brains are wired. Or, as so many philosophers have told us from the Chinese to the African to the European: We are what we think. Or let me add: we are what we feel and what we create.

Walking and the Brain

2010-09-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

Despite the many anxieties and crises of our time, we are also living in era of revolutionary developments in the fields of science, particularly in the study of the human brain. Every month we are learning more about how the brain functions, and consequently, beliefs about learning, memory, the imagination, emotion, and a whole host of other brain functions now must be re-evaluated. We now know, for example, that the brain evolves and changes as we age, countering long held beliefs that past a certain age in childhood the largely remained unchanged. We do in fact lose brain cells or neurons as we age but the brain’s ability to make new pathways or synaptic connections between neurons is virtually limitless. No, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Environment, experience, exercise, attitude, social engagement, and intellectual challenges are profoundly important for the on-going development of the bran and it’s health.

Recently, several studies have caught my attention that relate to walking and spending time in nature. Last week, in fact, a major study done at the University of Illinois by Kramer and Moss who study the role of how exercise affects the brain, they found that regular walking (forty minutes 3 days a week) dramatically affected brain connectivity and thus enhancing cognition. This was true as well with older adults, a helpful sign for people suffering from memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer's.

Another study at the University of Michigan looked at how where we walk affects brain function and concentration. In the study, one group of graduate students walked in urban an area—along busy commercial streets with traffic and little natural buffering, and another group walked along paths in more natural environments of parks with trees, grass, lakes, etc. Afterward the two groups were given basic cognitive tests, recalling lists, etc. And the difference in cognitive function was clear: those who walked in natural environments were much better in their scores. A similar study at Michigan also tested three groups for the role of nature on brain function. In this study, one group was wired as they watched a video screen of a natural environment, another group simply looked at a wall, and a third actually sat in the same natural area viewed on the screen of the first group. The result? The levels of brain activity i.e. the stimulation of various parts of the brain was most pronounced in the group sitting outside viewing the natural environment. But most interesting to me was that the levels of those looking at a wall and at the video image of nature was virtually the same.

Walking in nature seems so benign. But walking is actually much more of a complex physiological activity than we think; it involves multiple areas of the brain, which is why it is so beneficial. In nature, we must also negotiate pathways and environments that are unpredictable and highly stimulating. Motor function and perception are profoundly linked and being aware of this relationship enhances not only the pleasure but also the long-term health of our brain. Our brain is pattern maker and a pattern decoder. Every day we create new patterns by what we do, think, feel, and experience. And one pattern to weave into our lives is very simple: walking.

Where Am I?

2010-08-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

Walking To The Indiana Dunes

2010-08-08T10:15:00.001-07:00

People usually consider walking

on water or thin air a miracle,

but I think the real miracle

is not to walk either on water or in thin air,

but to walk on earth.

Thich Nhat Hanh

This week I made a pilgrimage of sorts. One that began at my own door step in Rogers Park, then 19 miles along the Chicago Lakefront, through the industrial cities along the shore of Lake Michigan, Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, Gary and finally to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, some 50 plus miles in total. I did this in two days.

I tried to stay along the lake as much as possible, but when you leave the southern neighborhood of Jackson Park in Chicago, the lake disappears from view. Once in East Chicago by the Majestic Star Casino, I illegally slipped through a fence and touched the water. But I had to wait some 24 miles until I got to West Beach in the National Lakeshore until I could finally feel the cool water on my tired hot body.

Why do such a thing?

I wanted to walk this route to ask the question: why isn’t there a walking route linking Chicago’s magnificent lake front park to the patchwork of wetlands, prairies, woodlands and towering sand dunes that make up one of the few urban National Parks, the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore?

There are plans for a green way called the Marquette Plan to do such a thing, but the momentum, money and will to do it seems more wishful than real. I stayed in a Casino my first night, the Majestic Star, which along with the other casinos in the area are supposedly aimed at redeveloping the region by making an entertainment and recreation zone. Slot machines stretch the idea of entertainment, not to mention recreation or redevelopment. And of course, in a casino the brownfields and industrial wastelands that surround them are conveniently out of sight.

But I also took this walk to prove something I’ve been wondering about for the last few years as I’ve walked in all kinds of more traditional so-called ‘natural’ landscapes—deserts, mountains, forests, sea shores. Would my body and mind respond in similar ways, feeling revitalized and awakened from nature and exercise, if I walked through my own neighborhood and the city lakefront and then into one of the most industrialized and polluted landscapes of America? And further, would walking to the dunes make me appreciate the fragile beauty and ecological miracle of this landscape more than by driving there and taking a little walk through the park?

The body and the legs do more than just hold us up and carry us about back and forth to work. Like the antennae of insects, they read the landscapes and negotiate through them learning where to go and where to find nourishment and safety. The body isn't a machine we turn off on and on. Walking all those steps made me consider my connection to this landscape where I've lived for three decades. And despite the harshness of the highways and disfigurement of the landscape, I sensed it's grandeur, its timeless presence, enduring no matter what we puny humans think we can do with it. From the ground, I felt so many emotions, from rage to awe, from joy to sadness, from humiliation to wonder. We think we know where we live like we think we know our own body, but take a little walk or rather a long walk in the land where you live. And I guarantee you'll discover something about the very ground you drive and walk over and it will be your body, your feet, that will teach you.