Stewardance

Jackie here–

In the book Providence, Daniel Quinn recounts his animist awakening; he was a college-age postulant in a Trappist monastery, when one day, on stepping outside into the garden, he was overwhelmed by the flaming, sparkling, incredible aliveness of the greenery around him.

When I read this, I thought, “I recognize that experience- mountains, oceans, and even my backyard have taken my breath away like that.” But Quinn, in the conclusion to Providence, made some statements that surprised me. Like,

I don’t need to see that fire again [...] I’ve already seen it. An hour’s sight of it is enough for a lifetime (168).

“Wait a second,” I thought. “I hunger for that experience again, and again. I feel lost without it. I feel depressed without it. This concrete city doesn’t have enough greenery to satisfy me. How could he say one hour was enough?”

A few pages on, I found a phrase that I accept as an answer:

We belong to the world (174).

If we belong to the world, New York City belongs to the world. Rain falls on it. The Earth shifts underneath it. The ocean abuts it, the wind rides through it, the birds fly over it, its land connects to land that connects to land that is eventually green. This city looks different than a forest upstate, but they both lie on the surface of the Earth, subject to her laws of physical and chemical matter. The same sky hangs over our skyscrapers as the Catskills, and they’re not even far away from each other. The air may be polluted, but it is air nonetheless, part of the natural environment. Who am I to say NYC is in some realm other than Earth’s?

One hour of flaming beauty is certainly not enough IF I forget my belonging to the world (my debt to the air I breath, the water and food I ingest, the sun I see by) the moment I enter urban space. If I say to myself, “there is nothing animate here,” then certainly, no blade of grass, or shadow, or stone building will feel alive. If I say, “the only things here are people, institutions, buildings, and ungroundedness,” I’ve just killed the connectedness that feeds me.

The more trees, the better. However, changing my understanding of NYC took me further than I thought. It’s pure science (and pure animism) to recognized that I (a body composed of cells, electricity, nourished by sun-plants-animals, water, and air) belong to the world, wherever I am.

Check out the TOOLS section soon for ways we like to walk around NYC and feel connected.

Jackie here–

1) Animism = (according to a radical, anti agro-industrial, ecology-centered preacher in Daniel Quinn’s novel The Story of B) seeing godliness in all things natural.

2) My translation: Look around at trees, birds, dirt, clouds- they are exactly what they are. They have honest, open messages for us about the world- about color, light, time, shadow, gravity, space, structure. They have no mask.

3) Animism — Animate. The natural world is animate. In its messages for us, it is alive.

4) Dancers are trained animists. We are accustomed to thinking of an arm as an animate entity, sensing it’s bone structure or muscle connections or energy flow. We are accustomed to learning about ourselves through ourselves, as if our bodies are animated with secrets that our mind doesn’t immediately comprehend, and can hear only by inviting and listening to the body’s language.

5) The animateness / animism of our own beings is the same as the animateness / animism of everything around us. This is our inherent link to environment. We are the same stuff.

6) We don’t generally realize that by limiting a tree to an object, dismissing it, passing it by day after day, we are limiting ourselves to objects as well. We are saying  of the tree “I know what that is.” Without realizing that “that” is not the only objectified entity in the sentence; “I” is objectified as well.

7) Instead, we should speak from ourselves, not of ourselves. “Tree so green, I feel wind, wow so many leaves, breathe, hand on bark, lean, laugh.” For example.

There is no way to be receptive to the animateness / animism of the environment without being animate oneself. The more you listen, the more you hear. The more you open, the more you feel.

Sources and inspiration: The Story of B (Daniel Quinn), The Spell of the Sensuous (David Abram), Merleau-Ponty

Jackie and I have been reading through David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous , gleaning wisdom about how to move through the urban environment with our senses wide open. One of many quotes I’ve pulled from our reading has helped center me around the idea of place as it relates to the work we’re doing.

A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. it is an active participant in those occurrences (Abram 1996, pp 162).

How do stewards of the urban forest make themselves numb to the enveloping power of the places in which they work? Since reading this passage, I’ve found myself walking down the street, wondering whether I’m just mindlessly following a predetermined path set out for me in street segments and block intersections.

What would it feel like to purposefully move through the same space as if the path were indeterminate? How might I start to look for the ways in which the place is “speaking to me” that go beyond the alphabetic signs that wallpaper the urban environment? Might I be inclined to cross the street (even if it’s out of my way and doing so might add five minutes to my walk home) if a tree or a lamp post calls to me? Might I walk with my back spread flat against the street wall to squirm into the shadiest slice of shadow available? Might I climb up stoops and jump over fences and hang from window grates? Might I walk with heavy feet through a mulchy tree bed?

The practitioners of parkour throw themselves through the urban environment with this sort of minute-by-minute perceptiveness to what’s around them, shunning the predetermined categories that say the sidewalk is the only place suitable for human travel in the public right-of-way. How might such an openness change the way I approach the process of hauling tools around my neighborhood to take care of street trees? Going further, how might it change my relationship with the trees, guiding me to go out there more frequently to care for them?

A lazy wind is blowing through Prospect Heights and a team of local explorers are getting ready to dance through the urban forest. Stay tuned to learn more…