The Sacred Middle —
Somewhere Betwixt Devils & the Deep, Part 2
“The only way out is to relearn or just remember the techniques that made us human in the first place.” — Dolores LaChapelle, from Mountains Constantly Walking, an interview with Jonathan White (Talking on the Water, Conversations About Nature and Creativity [Sierra Club Books; 1993])
I paused the last post at the wicked problem of non-combatant life surviving societies dedicated to wealth accumulation. Climber, skier, Tai Chi artist, writer, philosopher, and deep ecology worker Dolores LaChapelle described these dominant goals of current human endeavor, as observed from her chosen home in the heart of my local mountain range about 30 years ago, as “modern industrial growth” — and her advice to “relearn” and “remember” seems a fitting, alternative path to explore just now.
The question of what the “techniques that made us human” might be have engaged the minds of many throughout the history of recorded thought, resulting in a range of answers, theories, hypotheses, and speculations—each one shaped by the culture and era of the individual storyteller. Here are a couple of quotes from writers who lived in the era directly preceding my own, whose lives were marked by two worldwide wars that employed technologies promoted as making such future wars ‘unthinkable.’ Notably, the utter failure of each war to accomplish its stated ambitions did not extinguish, in either writer, an enthusiastic passion for the possibilities of earth and its inhabitants—possibly a good lesson for humans surviving this current era’s warmongers, doomsayers, and despots. Each writer sought the sacred in human activities of many cultures and belief systems, and was a student—and practitioner—of ritual.
In his essay Spirit of Earth, Teilhard de Chardin wrote:
“Stimulated by discoveries which in the space of a hundred years have revealed to our generation several important things—first the profundities and significance of time, then the limitless spiritual resources of Matter, and lastly the power of living beings acting in association—it seems that our psyche is in the process of changing." — excerpt from Building the Earth* [Dimension Books, Inc.; 1965] (*first published as Construire la terre [Editions du Seuil; 1958])
Joseph Campbell’s essay, Secularization of the Sacred reaches this conclusion:
“‘Man is condemned,’ as Sartre says, ‘to be free.’ However, not all, even today, are of that supine sort that must have their life values given them, cried at them from the pulpits and other mass media of the day. For there is, in fact, in quiet places, a great deal of spiritual quest and finding now in progress in this world, outside the sanctified social centers, beyond their purview and control: in small groups, here and there, and more often, more typically (as anyone who looks about may learn), by ones and twos, there entering the forest at those points which they themselves have chosen, where they see it to be most dark, and there is no beaten way or path.” — excerpt from The Flight of the Wild Gander [Viking Press; 1969]
Some few of us are lucky enough to sample the power and grandeur of our home planet at an early enough age to fully experience awe, before our perceptions are dulled by loss, knowledge and opinion. Let’s turn again to Dolores LaChapelle’s interview with Jonathan White, as recorded in Talking on the Water, Conversations About Nature and Creativity:
“Long before I heard of any of the concepts we’re talking about, I was experiencing them while skiing and mountain climbing. For years I had skied deep powder and had come to know the bliss of interacting with snow, gravity, and humans in a group.”
This feeling, it seems to me, is the reward of questing for the sacred in ritual, ceremony, and daily activities. LaChapelle refers above to this feeling as “bliss,” and also in her books devoted to explaining and promoting the work of practicing a deeper form of ecology. Here are two quotes from her book, Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep [Kivaki Press; 1988]:
“I can remember in the 5th grade, when bored I would try to memorize all the 14,000 foot peaks in the state of Colorado. Yet I had no idea I would ever be allowed to climb—only the wealthy did that long ago in Colorado.” […also…] “I could see the mountains from the trees I climbed in front of my house in north Denver. While still in high school, I saw a little notice in the Denver Post about a Mountain Club with a phone number, I called it and my life was saved and given direction.” —[from the Preface, page 8]
“Then, the bliss takes over, It’s extremely difficult to explain to non-climbers. It’s a state of total relaxation, total joy, and incredible thankfulness that the mountain is allowing you to do this—to proceed so gracefully, beautifully, down the vertical rock, always giving you something to hold onto in passing.”—[from Part II; Our Roots in the Old Ways, page 56]
After some midlife wanderings had landed me back in the Colorado mountain ranges of my own early years, I happened upon the thoughts of Dolores LaChapelle via her 1978 book Earth Wisdom, and found that some of her early life experiences and later musings had paralleled my own, though separated by several decades. Over the succeeding years, I’ve skied, climbed, walked, and lived amongst these mountains, willing myself again and again to be awed despite knowledge, disillusionment, grief, and the relentless dissipation of landscapes and climate at the behest of apologists for greed and avarice masquerading as economic growth. In recent decades, I’ve also observed the resurgence of a media-promoted, human-centered myth that engaging in non-economically driven activities in still-functional landscapes is a privilege of wealth. This, it seems, is effectively diluting the unity—what Teilhard de Chardin called, “…the power of living beings acting in association…”—necessary to defend landscapes from economic exploitation schemes.
Once beyond the narratives of inherited privilege and grievance, a natural effort by humans to re-connect spiritual, rational, and physical aspects of life on our planet—no matter our socioeconomic circumstances—judging from my own experiences, and from Dolores LaChapelle’s writings. For some winter reading and exploration of practices and experiences that just may lead to—if lucky and focused—moments of bliss, I highly recommend a deep dive into her books, and then some well-advised path-finding in your own home landscape. Here are a few more excerpts, drawn from Earth Wisdom [The Guild of Tutors Press; 1978], and Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep [Kivaki Press; 1988] to get you started:
“The earth’s billions of years of experimental wisdom is available to us now if we only learn how to communicate with it. Communication, at its best, is called love; when it breaks down completely, we call it war. And it is a sort of war going on between human beings and the earth.”—from page 4 of Earth Wisdom .
“It is possible to begin to live in a “sacred manner” even within this present Industrial Growth Society, setting up ritual structures in our lives where we can feel nature moving deep within us, in the patterns of all of nature without.” —from page 128 of Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep.
“The human eye, the sun, the cloud droplets must be in a particular relationship for a glory to occur. The glory appears in the opposite direction from the sun, and since the sun is usually higher than the observer, it follows that the glory is seen below. Thus, the mountain is crucial for the manifestation of the glory with its accompanying feelings of unity, power, and awe-feelings usually labelled “religious.”— from page 14 of Earth Wisdom.
“Essentially, you have no choice in this—it is not whether you do ritual or don’t do ritual; because one cannot be here on this earth with other fellow mammals/humans and not do ritual…
“Your choice lies in what kind of ritual. If you want to do rituals designed to keep humans apart, to encourage competition and anger and hatred then there’s that kind of ritual…
“However, the ritual I am dealing with in this chapter concerns putting all parts of the human together deep inside the individual, for putting humans together in society and for facilitating human interactions with nature. I call it “sacred ritual.”— the above quotes are from page 149 of Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep.
I’ve featured all of the, admittedly somewhat out of context, above quotes in hopes of encouraging further exploration of these authors’ thoughts, filtered through each reader’s own lens of experiences and interests. As usual, I’ve linked each book to an online version that can be accessed by all. I do, however, encourage the acquisition (ideally through a local, independent bookstore) of a physical copy of any book that is of lasting interest, and/or the support and patronage of your local library system to add one to their collection. For those of us with early lives defined by limited financial resources, these freely available resources can be more educational than any other institution’s edifices, sports programs, or academic offerings.
Up next, a photographic consideration of erosion as a deep ecological process, in Somewhere Betwixt Devils & the Deep, Part 3. Until then, let’s help each other enjoy—and explore—our beautiful home planet. — B.
To find independent booksellers in your own area, Here’s a search engine from Indiebound.org.
Here’s a link to locate your nearest public library, from the US Department of Labor, and USAGov offers information about US libraries.
WorldCat.org has a search engine for regional academic (and some public) libraries, and published items by various authors.