Cairns

Some simple cairns on a recent vacation

On a recent vacation to the U.S. Virgin Islands, my friend Hugh built a few simple cairns to mark our space on the beach. I’m sure they were disassembled after a day or two. That is how it should be.

A cairn is a human-made pile of stones. It is impermanent. Sometimes a cairn is made to guide hikers by marking the trail or a turn in the trail or a mountain top. Many native peoples used stacks of rocks to mark water, food sources, land boundaries, hunting locations, or places of some importance. Stone mounds were sometimes made as monuments to mark a burial site or as memorials.

Looking at my vacation photos, I wondered about the word “cairn.” It comes from a Gaelic term meaning “heap of stones.” I have read that cairns date back to ancient times and are mentioned in the Bible. (Example Genesis 31:45-52)

Image by Jean-Louis SERVAIS

Cairns can be built by one person but sometimes they grow by the contributions of people who add a rock as they pass the site.

Some people do cairns or more elaborate piles of stones as art. Michael Grab’s “balances” work because he uses what he calls “gravity glue” since the stones stay together without glue but use gravity. His rock piles are a meditative art.

That is not hard to understand since Buddhist writers describe the construction of a cairn as a form of worship. It can be seen as an effort to physically balance energies.

The ancients used them for pointing toward the setting sun for solstice celebrations. Cairns can also be a place and object of prayer and peace. I have made them when I walk a trail to mark a place I would stop or to mark a turn to a special place.

There is a simple beauty in a cairn. It connects us with people from the past. If you are looking for symbolic meaning in cairns, you can see it as representing balance, simplicity, spirituality, peace, prayer, patience, direction, priority, and sometimes just play.

A Neolithic burial cairn at Camster, Caithness, Scotland.

Hozro and Hiraeth

“Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, the way the light reflects into the eye of man beholding his reality. All is part of totality, and in this totality man finds his hozro, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”
― Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway

Image by daschorsch

I came upon two new words recently that come from very different places and cultures, but both resonated with my state of mind this past week.

Hozro is the Navajo word meaning to be in harmony with one’s environment, at peace with one’s circumstances, and free from anger or anxieties. If that isn’t enough, it means you are walking in harmony, content with the beauty all around him.”

It is about balance; about personal and communal beauty that adds its voice to the whole blended ensemble of creation.

Hozho is about real-world harmony and balance in the trenches of life, not the weekend retreat, ”don’t-worry-be-happy varieties.” In the novel Sacred Clowns, Jim Chee, a Navajo detective, is the way author Tony Hillerman explores what it is like to be born among the Dine’ and live on the reservation through novels of mystery. Chee explains hozho in this way:

“This business of hozho… I’ll use an example. Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried out. No water. The Hopi, or the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean? The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, and then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.”

In hozho, harmony and balance are real and it is a realistic goal in life. You don’t find this harmony outside or in things. You find in your own heart and mind.

Not everyone I know could accept this philosophy. Some people I know want to change the world. That is not the wrong thing to do. There are things that need changing and some of them you yourself can change or at least help change. You could view hozho as acceptance. “I can’t change the climate so I just accept it.”

Adjusting ourselves to reality is an easier and certainly less stressful way to live. It seems to me that this philosophy is more about the things we can’t change. Unhappy about how the weather has “ruined your plans” this weekend? You can’t change it, so adjust yourself.

There is also a belief in certain inevitabilities in hozho. Certain things are going to happen – aging and death amongst the big ones – and fighting to change these things is harmful. I don’t think it means to ignore your health and habits and “come what may” but to battle aging every day makes what life you have left less enjoyable.

Image by Michal Jarmoluk

On the other side of the world, I found hiraeth, a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. I found it defined as a combination of homesickness, grief, and sadness over the lost or departed. The closest synonyms in English seem to be “longing, yearning, nostalgia, or wistfulness.” For the Welsh, it seems to be those feelings about the Wales of the past, but the concept is not uniquely Welsh.

The etymology is that it is derived from hir and aeth and literally means “long gone.” The word appears in the earliest Welsh records, including early Welsh poetry. This is not a new feeling.

The word came into the English language in the 19th century. Historically, from 1870 to 1914, approximately 40% of Welsh emigrants returned to Wales. Was it hiraeth?

These two words and their larger meanings don’t seem similar to me. In fact, I see them as opposites in a way. That longing for things long gone in hiraeth is a yearning for things that can never return, such as a lost loved one, or the world, real and imagined, of your childhood. Those kinds of feelings certainly would not enhance any harmony or balance in your life. It means an unacceptance of some inevitabilities.

Everything is connected. The past is settled. You have the present to live in. The future is not completely undetermined but you have the ability to change some of it. If you believe in an afterlife, you are determining what it will be today.

 

Perfect Alignment

Pluto in near-true color, imaged by the New Horizons space probe

Humans like alignment. We like perfection.

Every year, planets orbiting the sun beyond Earth’s orbit reach what astronomers call “opposition.”  That means when they appear in the sky at the position opposite that of the sun. At opposition, the planet (it could also be a satellite or asteroid) and the sun line up with Earth between them.

Pluto and its moons were at opposition on July 8, 2016 and in this case the alignment was perfect. That means something that I don’t quite understand. I read that if you were standing on the surface of Pluto or one of its moons and looked at Earth, you would see Earth transit (or move across) the solar disk.

Oh, it has to do with the Line of Nodes, the intersection of the plane of the Earth’s orbit and a planet’s orbit. I don’t get it, but it’s interesting.

I do like the idea that things eventually align.

Pluto was last near one of these perfect alignments in 1931. But it will be there again in 2018, and then, oddly, because of the eccentricity of Pluto’s orbit, it will be another 161 years until the next perfect alignment.

Yes, we like alignment, perfection and symmetry. It is a mostly human thing. Nature has its own ideas about perfection.

 

Committing to Three Marriages

Think about your relationship to your partner, your work and your inner self. Is that 3 different things, 3 interrelated things or one whole?

According to David Whyte, most of us are in more than the one “marriage.” One is with a significant other (even if we are not legally married), but also ones in which we have made secret vows to our work and to our self.

In his book, The Three Marriages, he explores those three marriages, their commonalities, their mutual relationships and the way they can together contribute to a life.

David Whyte, who is a poet and Associate Fellow at Templeton College and Said Business School at the University of Oxford. I can’t think of any other poets who use poetry and concepts of creativity in organizational development. Apparently, Whyte does in working with companies to foster “courage and engagement.” He views this as part of  individual and organizational change and calls it “Conversational Leadership.”

He subtitles the book “Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship:”

“We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong commitments and … they involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously… To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.”

All three renewed dedication as the years go by. We hear so much about having a “work/life balance” but he believes that to separate these three (split life into two parts) in order to balance is harmful. He doesn’t believe you can sacrifice one marriage for any of the others without causing deep (psychological) damage.

Whyte grew up in England and now lives in the American Pacific Northwest and along with six books of poetry, he has written three books of prose.

He has a degree in Marine Zoology and has worked as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands, lead anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, the Amazon and the Himalaya.

Looking at some of his poems, you might see that they often live in the different marriages too.

Some are in the usual realm of poetry, while some enter more deeply psychological, theological and philosophical areas, and others look at work. I suppose many poets use these areas, but with this book of marriages as the lens in front of me, the separations seem more apparent.

Her is how his poem “Start Close In” begins:

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

One of the articles read this past year, said that “The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest things to master in life, and one of the most important. We, both as a culture and as individuals, often conflate it with the deceptively similar-sounding yet profoundly different notion of “work/life balance” — a concept rather disheartening upon closer inspection. It implies, after all, that we must counter the downside — that which we must endure in order to make a living — with the upside — that which we long to do in order to feel alive. It implies allocating half of our waking hours to something we begrudge while anxiously awaiting the other half to arrive so we can live already.”

I am committed to that first marriage – the traditional one with a partner. The one with work is going through some transitioning.  The third marriage, engaging the soul and senses, feels to me to be the one that supports the other two. There is some things of the traditional marriage that he carries into the others. Living with the Self, and Divorce, Forgiveness, even Remarriage. Any of these marriages can fail.

Can we surrender ego to something larger than it?

This is not a question of balance or balancing amounts of time and resources.

Yes, you can have all three marriages work at the same time and  what we learn about life and ourselves in one marriage, makes us better partners in the other ones.

---

Listen to a brief excerpt from the book

Whyte’s  website