You Are Here

Drop a pin – You Are Here

We all feel lost at times.

I have written here about “getting lost” literally and about “feeling lost” in a figurative sense. I have also written about things being lost – ships, cities and lost worlds, lost days, and even a lost generation,

These posts have been quite popular and that makes me think that the general topic is of interest. I also think people find the articles because they believe, as I do, that getting lost is sometimes the path to getting found literally and in other senses.

Is “finding your way” or getting “back on the path” a literal or figurative process? Both.

I think everyone should learn how to navigate on a hike and avoid getting lost. I don’t mean using GPS. I mean using a map, compass, and landmarks. I have gone into the woods and semi-seriously tried to get lost so that I would have to find my way out. I have read books and even taken a class about finding your way in the woods. I have also gone into the woods in those times when I felt lost in the psychological sense.

My 2009 post called “Getting Lost” is about actually getting lost – in my case it was in the woods – and it is also about a friend getting lost in life.  I said that it was sometimes good to get lost.

I followed up on that post the next summer and I had not been literally lost in those nine months. Part of that was because when I had a GPS, so if I am lost, I don’t feel lost because the GPS voice calmly tells me the next turn and knows ultimately that we will get there.

I went back to the book You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall which partially inspired the original post. The first half of that book is about how our brains experience physical space. It looks at human and animal research into how we get a sense of where we are.

I had mentioned homing pigeons in the post. I didn’t mention that someone did some research where they strapped magnets on them to deliberately throw off their inner compass. It worked by messing up the young homing pigeons – but not the older ones. What should we conclude?

The simple advice always given to remember when you are lost is STOP. We tend to panic, head off in the wrong direction, forget where we came from and many other basic mistakes.

But what I want to come back to today is that other sense of being lost. The feeling lost in your life type of lost.

That 2009 post was about my friend Bill who was forced into retiring and was very lost. He did what too many lost people do. He panicked big time. Headed off in all directions and then ended up sitting on a tree stump crying. He lost his job and with it the direction that his life had comfortably followed for 38 years. He started to reconsider a lot of his life choices – college, job (versus “career”), and maybe some other things he didn’t want to talk about in a diner booth with his wife and my wife sitting there.

Ironically, that night we had gone to the movies together to see Up in the Air. Bill’s wife likes George Clooney. I was reading the book that the film is based on, but somehow it didn’t register with me that the book, film and Bill’s story were all connected. The book/film is about a guy whose job is to fire people. He’s hired by bosses who don’t have the nerve to do their layoffs themselves. Of course, the story hit home with Bill.

My advice to Bill had been that basic lost-in-the woods advice – stop. He thought that after a few weeks, he should have figured out “the right direction” to go, but he was still lost.

I thought he needed to be lost for a while. Sit on that tree stump, look around the place, take stock of his supplies, and even cry a little. When he had an idea of the right direction, he could start walking slowly that way and take careful note of where he had been sitting.

Bill’s story has a nice ending. Or maybe it’s a next chapter. He told me that next summer that he “has never been happier.” He went through all his finances with an advisor, got everything in order and realized he was in pretty good financial shape. A handyman who never had time for projects, he got busy building, repairing, and renovating. He lost 20 pounds was shooting to get back to his college weight. His wife is retired that year. They were planning trips. They were taking care of their two grandchildren a few days a week.

I like how my GPS can tell me “You are here.” It is very comforting. Finding some kind of GPS inside ourselves is not as easy. Maybe someone is strapping magnets on us to mess up the readings. But I identify with those older homing pigeons. I think if we sit down a bit and actually give some time to trying to figure out where we are, we are going to find the direction.

Finding True North

There’s a bit of a curse on those of us who studied literature in college. You tend to see symbols, metaphors, and analogies all around you. Maybe you see the games of Chess and Go as defining Western and Eastern societies.  Maybe the seasons take on symbolic significance. For me, using a compass has always felt like more than just literally finding your way and not getting lost.

Let me set aside symbolism for now and write about my own experiences with maps and compasses. As a kid, I was always playing with compasses. At first, cheap ones of the Cracker Jack prize variety probably, and then later a real compass by way of Cub Scouts. I knew very little about how to use it. Like most people, I knew it pointed North, which was useful if you wanted to go North. I had no idea how it would help you if you were in the middle of the forest lost and pulled it out. Which way is home?

It took me a while to learn that the compass really was only useful if you used it when you went into that forest, and it would help if you could use it along with a good (as in topographic) map.

Of course, this was all before GPS could be in your hand. But the GPS you have on your phone or car is not going to help you if you are in the middle of a big forest and get lost. I’m sure that using a map and compass will one day be considered an oddity – like doing calculations with a slide rule.

I enjoyed the compass and map and the drawing lines and angles on the map. It made me feel like a navigator or adventurer from the books and movies I loved in my youth.

Many years later, I got into orienteering for a time. Orienteering is a sport that requires using a map and compass to navigate from point to point in diverse and usually unfamiliar terrain. It can be very competitive.

You get a specially prepared orienteering map which has on it control points marked by flags (like the one shown above). The objective is to get from point to point as fast as possible. In many events, it becomes very much a race through the woods. I found your speed using a map and compass was sometimes only half as important as the speed of your running.

One of the big lessons for me in using a compass was the discovery that if you don’t know how you got somewhere, a compass won’t tell you where to go to get back to where you began.

That’s where the English major in me took over. I would often think in my daily life about where I was – not literally on a map – and wonder “How did I get here?”

Once lost, taking out a compass is nearly worthless. You needed to take a bearing at the beginning. You needed to keep taking bearings throughout the journey. You needed some kinds of reference points for when things around you look unfamiliar.

Why does a post I wrote here years ago called “Getting Lost” continue to be one of the most-read entries on the blog? I’d like to think that it was well written and a good combination of both the literal and figurative aspects of “getting lost.” I think it touched on something that sometimes sends people to counseling, religion, drugs or alcohol, or even thoughts about suicide. How did I get here? How do I get back on the path?

Orienteering courses have boxes (controls) that have been set up for you. and a path is there. You just need to find it. I lost interest in formal orienteering. That was a combination of time constraints (I had two young sons then.), bad knees (trail running is tough), and an inability to do the navigating fast enough to be competitive.

I started creating my own maps and courses. I drew my own maps of local woods. I picked landmarks – huge boulders, the confluence of streams, an unusual tree – and created my own courses. I walked them without concern for speed.

I bought my two sons compasses, gave them lessons, and took them out on treasure hunts. There was one in the Maine woods that we did with friends that led them to a cache of candy treasures that they still talk about 20 years later.

I liked the details in most orienteering maps – the large boulder, isolated tree, big stump, stone wall, fence, swamp, dry river, fields, dense bush – the personalized nature of the landmarking.

I have also had a lifelong fascination with survival techniques. My youthful readings of Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, and adult readings of survival guides like those by Tom Brown, and non-fiction accounts like Into Thin Air and especially Into the Wild by John Krakauer always send me back, not away, from the woods.

Early on, I came across the survival acronym STOP.  Stop,  Think, Observe, and Plan.  You learn that the single most important survival tool is your brain.

Of course, I also liked the accessories of orienteering and survival training. I own too many compasses, too many maps, and plenty of store-bought and handmade items to take into the wild. (Vaseline-soaked cotton balls, packed in a film canister make a reliable, cheap, non-spoiling, non-spilling fire starter.)

This brings me to True North. True North is the direction along the earth’s surface towards the geographic North Pole. If you get into using a map and compass, you quickly learn that True North usually differs from magnetic north. That’s the direction of the magnetic north pole – the one that your compass needle to dawn to. The North on that compass I had as a child pointed at a North, but which one was the true North? (On the technical side, there’s even a “grid North”  – the direction northwards along the grid lines of a map projection.)

I learned to look up from my map and the trail.  The direction of true north is marked in the skies by the north celestial pole.  Basically, it’s the position of the star Polaris – AKA the North Star, the Pole Star, or the Lodestar. But, due to the precession of the Earth’s axis, the true north rotates in an arc. That arc takes about 25,000 years to complete. I found that to be a staggering thought.

In 2102, Polaris will make its closest approach to the celestial north pole.  (In comparison, 5,000 years ago the closest star to the celestial north pole was Thuban.

Find whatever symbolism you want in that looking up to find True North that I discovered. I did learn that looking only at the trail ahead was not going to get me where I wanted to go.

On maps issued by the United States Geological Survey, true north is marked with a line terminating in a five-pointed star. If only it was so clear in our own lives where True North was located. Not knowing our own destination before we start out, not taking note of the landmarks and milestones along the way, and not knowing that there are unseen forces affecting where True North is located make the journey far more frightening.

More Reading
Be Expert with Map and Compass, the Orienteering Handbook
Orienteering
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Orienteering: Skills and Strategies
Wilderness Navigation: Finding Your Way Using Map, Compass, Altimeter & GPS
Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass
Land Navigation Handbook: The Sierra Club Guide to Map, Compass and GPS
Walking and Orienteering

Lost Skills: Reading Nature

After doing lots of reading and observation of nature in my life, I have determined that some of the signs we think we see in nature are deceptive, false, or what I categorize on this site as “lore.”

Prime example: Thinking that some groundhog held in captivity and pulled out on a day in February means anything about the weather to come. Even the voluntary arrival of robins in your backyard doesn’t mean a lot. I’ve seen them sitting on my fence in a March snowstorm. They are more likely to be using nature signs in the place they were wintering. Though the American robin has always been a harbinger of spring here when it arrives in March and starts nesting activities, I’ve read that many are here year-round. They have gotten the message about climate change.

Japanese cherry blossoms, known as “Sakura,” reached a peak bloom in Kyoto, Japan this year on March 26. That is the earliest date in 1,209 years, based on data collected by Osaka University. This is the first time they’ve been this early since 812 AD.

Still, I keep reading and observing, particularly in my own Paradelle area and in my own backyard microclimate.

New Jersey has more cherry trees than Washington D.C.  Branch Brook Park in Belleville and Newark has more than 2,700 Japanese cherry blossom trees. The Essex County Cherry Blossom Festival this year is from April 3 – 18. They are in bloom this weekend and set to peak in the next week or so. But that doesn’t mean we still won’t have a frost night in the next two weeks.

A few years ago, I read The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs. The book’s cover subtitle tells you the breadth of the subject of reading nature signs: “Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals―and Other Forgotten Skills.”

I have tried to use all those skills. Okay, I haven’t had the need to find water. I can use tree roots to know the sun’s direction which tells me which way is east/west and therefore north/south. Of course, you also need to know where you are and where you want to go for that to be useful. I used to teach classes in using a map and compass and one exercise was to take people into the woods and then say “Take out your compass. Okay, which way do we go to get back?” Most students couldn’t answer. At night, some people can navigate by the stars.

You can tell something about the current and near-future weather by observing insects since many of them can sense atmospheric pressure differences. Honey bees stay in the hive when they sense a storm.  coming. Insects use tiny hair-like receptors on their cuticle to sense pressure changes.

I have read that flies bite before it rains because the barometric pressure drop makes them get food before the storm. An old weather lore rhyme is “When hungry bites the thirsty flea, rain and clouds you sure shall see.” Ladybugs seem to swarm in warm, nice weather. Red and black ants sometimes build up their mounds for extra protection or to cover the mounds’ holes when bad weather is coming. I have written earlier about crickets telling us the temperature. 

Similar to insects, birds fly high in clear weather and come closer to the ground with a storm coming, possibly because the pressure is causing them pain at higher altitudes. Old adages include: “Hawks flying high means a clear sky. When they fly low, prepare for a blow.” and “Geese fly higher in fair weather than in foul.” I have also heard that when seagulls fly inland, you should expect a storm, but I have seen them inland on nice, sunny days, so…

Finding Your Way

How much do you rely on GPS, and maps on your phone to navigate? Once upon a time, we didn’t even use paper maps very much. We relied on environmental clues and simple instruments.

I read an excerpt from a book by John Huth called The Lost Art of Finding Our Way and it got me thinking about this topic again.

Huth was kayaking in Nantucket Sound in 2003 when a fogbank rolled in and disoriented him. He didn’t panic because he knew some basic navigation skills and returned safely to shore. But he found out that only half a mile away, two college students in that fog mistakenly turned their kayaks out to sea and died. That day got him into exploring the principles of navigation, from ancient times to modern.

In his book, we learn about how the Vikings used a sunstone to detect the polarization of sunlight. Arab traders learned to sail into the wind. Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and were able to “read” waves to guide their explorations.

All of us – land dwellers and sea-goers – have lost the ability to make close observations of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents and weather and atmospheric effects in order to read the planet and find our way.

Lavishly illustrated, Huth’s account of the cultures of navigation gets you into a narrative that is a scientific treatise, personal travelogue, and also a re-creation of navigational history. His premise is that by seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view.

An article I found online asks, “Do our brains pay a price for GPS?”   There’s no doubt that GPS is a useful technology, but does using it interfere with our ability to do “mental mapping?”

Mental mapping and spatial memory are what allow us to remember where we have put things in our homes. It helps you to lay out a garden, plan a trip, pack a suitcase, arrange furniture, navigate your neighborhood and an office building.

Can you give clear directions to someone to get to a particular place in your hometown? When I was a kid riding my bicycle all summer, I knew almost every street in my hometown by name and location. Now, I don’t even know all the streets within a mile of my house.

John Huth is a professor and a high-energy physicist, and he teaches a course in “Primitive Navigation” about the rudiments of the analog methods of wayfinding using sun, stars, tides, weather and wind. He certainly is not anti-technology. He is an experimental particle physicist and was involved in the discovery of both the top quark and the Higgs boson, but he questions our reliance on smartphones and GPS.

I ordered his book, which sounds quite encyclopedic in its coverage, touching on astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography and telling the ways of early navigators whose lives depended on paying close attention to the environment around them.

Reviewers of the book point out that he is not interested in junking the technology, but relearning the old ways. One reason is that it’s still unclear what losing those old skills has done to our modern brain.

Many of my posts here are about maintaining touch with our natural world, and I would agree that losing our visceral connection to the natural world is a tragic loss with broad repercussions personally and globally.

I doubt that I would find many people of any age who know what “dead reckoning” means or how to use a map with a compass. Would you be able to point out major stars in the night sky and use them to find your way?

I used to teach classes in map and compass and basic land navigation at the Pequest Education Center in New Jersey, but I don’t see any offered anymore. Maybe it’s time to do it again. But are people interested, or are they satisfied with the tech doing the work for them?

Poop and Compass

Dogs: contemplative and seekers of True North

I grew up always having a dog, but it has been years since I had a dog in the house. So, I will have to ask you to confirm or disprove this piece of science I found recently.

We have all observed dogs doing their little circle dance before pooping. They do something similar before they settle down for a nap or sleep. I’m pretty sure I had read once that this was some ancient dog ritual for checking the safety of the spot before proceeding. Now, I read that dogs align themselves with the Earth’s magnetic field before pooping..

We have learned that other animals, particularly birds that migrate long distances, can sense the orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field. This is true of whales and bees. The new study seems to indicate that dogs also have magnetosensitivity.

Research being what it is, these scientists did two years of poop and pee observations. They ruled out other influences (wind, time of day, Sun’s angle, leashes, fire hydrants, fences etc.) and decided it was the Earth’s magnetic field. The dogs aligned themselves with the North-South axis and avoided the East-West axis.

Do they feel some magnetic pull? Well, they also found that when there were periods of instability in the Earth’s magnetic field (like when the sun’s magnetic field or solar winds kick up as they did recently)  the dogs did not prefer for the North-South axis.

Since many of us carry a compass on our smartphones or can at least identify the East-West axis by the morning and afternoon sun, I say we conduct our own research and report the results here as a comment.  I know that I am going to pay closer attention to the dogs I see on my rambles in the park. Hopefully, owners won’t call the police.

http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/10/1/80/abstract

Centering

Do you sometimes feel the need to center yourself? If so, what does that mean?

It is a term I have encountered in a number of situations including meditation, including both in a religious and spiritual sense.

A plain old dictionary definition of “to center” would tell you it means to have something as a major concern or theme, as in “the book centers around how people interact with nature.” Synonyms include to focus, concentrate, pivot, hinge, or revolve.

We even use the scientific term “center of gravity” (or more accurately the center of mass) is that unique point where the weighted relative position of the distributed mass sums to zero. The body is balanced around the center.

If I asked you to be still, close your eyes and “find your center,” what would you do? Possibly you would become more conscious of your body, your breath and the tension in your muscles. Without any training, you would be meditating.

There are books that combine this centering concept with other less spiritual practices, as in Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.

When I first encountered meditation, through investigating Zen Buddhism, I was given the book Zen Flesh Zen Bones. It is a one volume collection of four original sources for Zen: Zen Stories, The Gateless Gate, Bulls, and Centering Together. That last book shows you that this concept of finding your center is a key part of Zen practice.

The book contains many centering practices and you can find many of them on websites too.

Some of these sources will remind you that “Zen is nothing new, neither is it anything old. Long before Buddha was born the search was on in India, as the present work shows. Long after man has forgotten such words as Zen and Buddha, satori and koan, China and Japan and America – still the search will go on, still Zen will be seen even in flower, and grass-blade, before the sun.”

If you have participated in a meditation class (or if you just watch a ten-minute meditation video online), the introductory portion is generally a kind of centering exercise.

If you move from spiritual to religious practice, you will encounter centering prayer. This is a method of silent prayer that is very contemplative. It is often described as prayer that is both a relationship with God and a discipline to foster that relationship.

Father Thomas Keating has been a key figure in the centering prayer movement since the 1970s. It is not a new practice and it has roots in Christian history. I took a life-changing religion and literature course in college that exposed me to the Desert Fathers and Mothers to The Cloud of Unknowing, St John of the Cross, and St Teresa of Avila.

Religious groups are careful not to allow centering prayer to cross over into a version of New-Age spirituality.

Many religions encourage a kind of “centering prayer.” Catholics are advised to meditate in some form daily — such as on the rosary, or on Scripture (lectio divina). This practice makes use of a “sacred word” which might sound similar to using a mantra to others.

Mantra (a Sanskrit word meaning a sacred utterance, word, or phrase) is believed by some to have psychological and spiritual power. A mantra may not even be syntactic nor have any literal meaning. The spiritual value of a mantra comes when it is made audible, visible or present in thought.

Earliest mantras were composed in Vedic times by Hindus in India, and those are at least 3000 years old. Now they are found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism and similar hymns or chants are found in Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Christianity and elsewhere.

Thomas Keating emphasizes that centering prayer is not an exercise in concentrating, or focusing one’s attention on something such as a mantra. Rather, it is concerned with intention and to “consent to God’s presence and action during the time of prayer.”

Centering prayer is not meant to replace other kinds of prayer. It is the opening of your whole being. I the sense of prayer, opening to God, but in other spiritual practices it might be opening to the Ultimate Mystery, a life force, energy or the universe.

Keating is a monk in the Cistercian Order in the Benedictine tradition. He has written many books, including the best-selling Open Mind, Open Heart. He lives at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado where he established a program of 10-Day Centering Prayer retreats, which are now held world-wide.

I’m not sure he would be happy with the definition that Centering Prayer is a form of “Christian” transcendental meditation, but he has presented the Centering Prayer method and its related mystical theology to workshops of non-Christians. He has also used it as a kind of therapy and has written a book on centering prayer and the twelve steps.

I used to teach classes in using a map and compass. One of the first things you teach in the field is orienting a map.  You position it so that North is actually pointing north. When you orient a map and know where you are on the map, you can look in a certain direction and see a real landmark and find it on the map. You find your place in the world. For me, it always felt like a kind of centering.

I also like the idea of using triangulation. That is the process of pinpointing the location of something by taking bearings to it from two remote points and find where the lines intersect on a map. Without knowing where you are, you find your place by looking at your relationship to known things.

Compass

If you knew how to use it,
then starting anywhere,
turning any direction,
you could check,
find your bearings,
tell where you came from,
know where you were going.

If you knew when you entered these woods
where you wanted to be
at the end of this journey,
it would have taken you there.
If you knew how to use it.
If you knew when you entered.
If you knew where you wanted to be.