Granite Canyon (The Hills Are Alive) -- 7/17/17

Here is the sublime in all things small.

A thousand thirty-second notes in a symphony. A thousand blades of grass, a thousand curling leaves, a canvas of green.

Upon closer inspection, all leaves are different. Each flower is unique in the same way that a musician plays a note in a string of song never heard before, never to be heard again. Each note each flower each petal each atom is special and indescribably unreplicable. Even the DNA of a cell cannot predict the perfect slope of a sugarbowl bud, which is not unlike the curve of a lip, a mouth; cannot predict the particular color between blue and purple.

How can the bonds between various nitrogenous bases explain every flower, every stem? How can I capture every rolling hill and every grain of soil that has its own story? Some pebbles come from rock beneath the earth and some from lava and limestone and detritus, some gravel has fallen from mountains, some sand has travelled across all seven seas.

How can every story be told? Even with all the knowledge -- we know the distance from the earth to the sun, and the Fahrenheit Celsius Kelvin temperature of the surrounding air, and the moisture content and pH of the soil -- how do you know which patches of ice will stay? Like sugar across the earth, the layers of sedimentary rock look like lines of musical notation. Water wind birds perhaps there is beauty in that chance that probability -- the unknown. Many times we are afraid of what we don’t know but here it seems ethereal, it seems like a gateway into another world into another understanding a deeper understanding a more gutteral a more raw sense of feeling.

Because for all that we know -- the depth of the B-horizon of soil below the surface, the percent composition of the dirt around us, the entire code for the human genome -- being in the presence of all of this reduces it down to feeling: feeling the soil in our hands, in the creases of our nails, feeling the sun on our skin and the snow on our tongues. There’s something indescribable, a gut feeling of the sublime, a recognition of the world around us that speaks for itself.

Everything is quiet cold fresh clean untouched. This is the world’s favorite time of day, the quiet moment between day and night, the quiet moment where the sun hangs between sky and horizon, lingering, not wanting to leave. I think we all tend to linger.

The wildflower fields come to life with new flowers new colors: yellow pink purple red. I wish to know every flower, I wish to greet every flower like the sun does every morning, I wish I could appreciate all that is around me, and so I linger, even though I know I have to go soon.

Around me, the mountain cliffs grow up and up and up. They seem infinite.

But then the mountain peaks scrape at the impossibly pale sky, which in turn also seems infinite. There is no sense of space here.

If the hills are alive, dotted with flowers and leaves and butterflies, then the sky is this giant, soft, sleepy thing. The entire sky is an indescribable color, something between pale blue and pale pink and pale violet, or maybe a mix of all the above. As day turns to night, it’s like music changing key, from one beautiful thing to the next. I wonder, what perspective I brought here, into the Tetons. What did I bring out?

Mary’s room is a thought experiment, originally proposed by Frank Jackson. Here it is below:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue". [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

What have I learned here in Teton that is indescribable? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Qualia are physical properties of experiences (and experiences are physical processes).” Being here, physically experiencing this -- backpacking up the mountainside, crawling under over through trees, stomping across half-frozen rivers and snow and ice -- has taught me much I do not know.

Sources:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkrQ9QuKprE

Walden, Again (Analysis of Walden by Henry David Thoreau)

The last one, I promise.

I mentioned in the past the I wrote about Walden for a scholarship from the Elementary Institute of Science. In that essay, I mentioned a path that Thoreau wrote about, which I’m going to share in this post.

First, here’s the passage:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them (314).

As Walden draws to a close, Thoreau revisits the reason why he came to stay at Walden in the first place. Before, Thoreau mentioned that he came to Walden to “live deliberately,” to reduce his life down to the bare minimum in order to achieve a higher sense of being and thought (68). However, in one of the closing chapters of Walden, Thoreau adds another level of reasoning as to why he came to Walden, using an analogy -- comparing his life to a path -- to help explain his thoughts.

Thoreau describes a worn path between his humble and the pond for which his novel is named after, a “beaten track” that remains distinguishable even after “five or six years” of disuse (314). This path, which is “soft and impressible by the feet of men” is analogous to the “paths which the mind travels” (314); Thoreau claims that it is easy for individuals to conform to society’s standards, falling into well-known paths and patterns. Mobs of people may follow the same path through life with ease. Thoreau himself claims that it is easy to fall into the deep “ruts of tradition and conformity” (314). And yet, Thoreau forced himself to leave the life he lived before, leaving the comfortable home he had in Concord, Massachusetts, to attempt something new, something novel and nontraditional (Biography.com). Thoreau at Concord believed that he could learn something new by changing his life completely, by trying a whole different approach to life. He left Concord and came to Walden to learn. In that same sense, Thoreau at Walden after a certain amount of time believed that he had enough, and that it was time again to change his life. Although this decision to leave was difficult, Thoreau “had several more lives to live,” several more aspects of life to explore, and so Thoreau left “the woods for as good a reason as [he] went there” (314). Comparing his mindset to the worn path by Walden captures the essence of making decisions and falling into routines: once a pattern has been established -- whether it be walking down the same path every day or living in the same lifestyle -- it becomes difficult to break free from that pattern. Nevertheless, there may be rewards for breaking from the cycle. Thoreau claims that the “surface of the earth is soft and impressible,” easy to mold and to shape into a path (314); in that same sense, it is easy to mold and shape one’s mental path. Butonce a behavior or a path has been settled, it is difficult to break free. Thoreau remarks on how old, how deep, and how powerful the paths of a traditional society must be, well worn and molded by thousands and thousands of people conforming to its standards.

Moreover, Thoreau highlights the rewards associated with breaking free from society’s standards: without breaking free from his established path, Thoreau would have never come to Walden to reap the benefits of living in nature. Thoreau breaks free from all expectation and becomes a captain of his own life. Describing this change in his life as a chance to “go before the mast and on the deck of the world” evokes the notion of Thoreau as a captain of a ship (314), sailing away from all societal expectations and to his own destiny. This change for him, described as a path to “best see the moonlight amid the mountains,” emphasizes how fortunate Thoreau is to break free (314). Thoreau then recommends individuals to “advance confidently in the direction of [their] dreams,” to achieve success by their own ways and means (314). Comparing Thoreau’s decision in life to the earthen path near his pond clarifies the reasoning behind Thoreau’s decision to break free from society’s expectations and describes the benefits of choosing not to conform to any standards.

Thoreau connects the last few chapters of Walden to many themes and ideas he addresses in the beginning of his book. Firstly, Thoreau shows how society makes it difficult for individuals to break free and walk on their own path; describing the physical path near Walden Pond and then speculating about the deep ruts of tradition in society show how such patterns can be stronger than gravity, holding individuals back from their full potential. Then, Thoreau stresses how living deliberately and how living in the woods benefitted him tremendously: Thoreau took charge of his own life, Thoreau was not a slave to his work nor to society, and Thoreau reaped the benefits. Additionally, this passage serves as a reminder that living deliberately and pushing towards success will allow individuals to also live with the “license of a higher order of beings” (314). In his description of new and liberal boundaries, Thoreau claims that moving deliberately towards self-improvement and success lends itself to spiritual development; as individuals push themselves -- both away from society’s standards and towards success -- they will also push through “invisible boundaries,” and laws will expand and become liberal to help this individual (314). This changing of laws makes complicated things less complex: Thoreau claims that “solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness” (314), which is reinforced by his anecdotes and musings in previous chapters. In the woods, Thoreau realizes that he does not feel lonely and does not feel any need for company. In the woods, although Thoreau may be poor compared to the life he lived before, in Concord, he has gained much in intellectual wealth and knowledge. In the woods and in living deliberately, Thoreau discovers much about himself and the world around him, without interference from any material desires or the strains of society’s standards.

Rose Creek Pen -- 7/6/17 (Reflection on Wolf Reintroduction in Yellowstone)

Though the history of America doesn’t boast fantastic kingdoms or glorious castles, it does offer the wild, wild story of what is now known as Westward Expansion.

In the mid 1800s, herds of Americans were flocking to the west, settling land out in the fields and panning for gold -- all the things you see in the movies. The recent TV show Westworld depicts the American west as this rural, lawless place, as it was.

Many settlers hunted bison and wildlife, but not for food. They hunted bison because bison for hide and horn, because bison were the primary source of food for Indians. The death of all these animals -- and the surplus of meat uneaten by westward settlers -- led to a rise in apex predators, namely, the wolf. In the seventies, this led to an unmonitored spree of wolf hunts: there was no legislation to protect wildlife in Yellowstone, much less anywhere else in the West, and wolves were seen as undesirable predators.

Eventually even the government condoned and encouraged the slaughter of wolves. For the wolves it was not for meat or hide or horn; for the wolves it was because they were predators and the prevailing biological theories at the time believed that humans could replace wolves as the top of the food chain, killing sheep and bison and other cattle-like animals, without repercussion.

In addition to this, many historians have speculated on the nature of the great wolf slaughter. There is a fear of the uncontrolled, in all people. This is why there are zoos and this is why people visit zoos instead of the wild to view animals. There was, at the time, an assumption of rights that placed us higher on the food chain than wolves.

Only recently have those beliefs been challenged. Research in the mid 1900s by Adolph Murie and others emphasized the importance of wolves in the food chain of Yellowstone.

And so in 1995, wolves from Canada were captured and brought to Yellowstone, put into acclimatizing pens in preparation for their release.

During my trip to Yellowstone, I had the opportunity to visit the holding pen in which Canadian wolves were reintroduced to the United States. Here is what I wrote inside the pen:

There once were wild wolves here from Canada, transported to a new world, aliens in this cage. It seems almost cruel to have them so close to nature and yet so far -- people come in with meat for meals to feed but at the same time, the trees and mountains wait beyond the chainlink fence. I am reminded of zoos and cages. How strange that we want to keep such wild things in tame places; we have this innate desire to control what is wild and what we don’t understand. We replicate the wild. It’s almost crueler to give them a taste but not a full meal. We want to keep the wild nature of things but also control them -- see the irony there? How cruel to be here, inside this cage, to be able with the keen senses of the wolves detect the sun and river and mountains but not be able to experience it all (is this how Tantalus must have felt?). I cannot feel the presence of the wolves here. I see a crumbling cage: the trees have fallen and collapsed, the weed and vegetation have overgrown. It’s hard for me to imagine them here.

After the wolves were reintroduced, the elk population in Yellowstone significantly decreased. This however led to the growth of beavers (beavers and elk both rely on willow) and the subsequent storage of water for fish and prevention of erosion. Though the wolves are still hopping on and off the Endangered Species list, their history has taught me much about historical views and emotional views.

Sources:

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/

https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/wolf-restoration.htm

Lamar Valley, Specimen Ridge -- 7/5/17 (Reflection on Yellowstone)

“What is petrified wood? Petrified wood is a fossil of woody vegetation. Most fossils are imprints of plants or animals. Petrified wood is a three-dimensional fossil that is created when trees, or tree parts, are covered by silica-rich sediment. Water seeping through the sediment dissolves the minerals in the soil and penetrates the cells of the tree. As it flows through the plant tissue, it leaves the minerals behind to replace the vegetable matter with stone."

- National Park Service, US Department of the Interior

50 million years ago in what today is known as Yellowstone National Park, a Sequoia forest used to stand not far from the Absaroka Mountain range nearby. When volcanoes in the range erupted, the Sequoias were covered in ash. The wood cells of the Sequoias were soaked through with silica-rich groundwater, replacing vegetation and biotic matter with stone. At the same time, the lack of oxygen meant no bacteria could decompose organic matter, halting decomposition. Essentially, over millions of years, the structure of smothered wood was replaced with minerals, becoming a replica of the wood that was once alive.

What remains today are remnants of a mighty forest from millions of years ago, petrified wood like the bones of the Sequoia’s skeletal remains. Along the hike up Specimen Ridge, I spotted many chunks of petrified wood, along with animal bones and interesting stones.

It is difficult to imagine a Sequoia forest standing in the great expanse of the Lamar Valley. The Valley is now home to bison and wolves and mule deer alike, who roam the sagebrush-covered plains and cross shallow streams crossing the valley. It is difficult to imagine the crack of the Earth’s crust as the Tetons rise from tectonic plates, inch by inch, year after year for what seems like eons.

I’ve been alive for seventeen years, and I have no concept of time, at least on this grand scale. Being in Wyoming has somewhat warped my sense of time: I’ve learned about the birth of mountains and the slow trek of glaciers over hundreds of thousands of years, about super volcanoes that literally change the climate of the earth, about the preservation of Sequoia trees -- cell by cell, mineral by mineral -- over millions of years.

In Yellowstone, I hiked to the top of Specimen Ridge, overlooking Lamar Valley, and I learned about the Absaroka’s volcanic eruption, the consequential formation of petrified wood from Sequoia trees millions of years ago, and I sat there, with a piece of rock, a rock made from mineral to replicate the exact shape of a piece of Sequoia, in my hand. I sat there and I looked out, over the valley, to where the Absaroka’s waited by the horizon, and I found myself struggling with this concept of time: what is a million years? Much less millions and millions of years? How can I even begin to imagine time? The spacetime continuum uses time as this tangible thing, a measurable unit -- I can’t even begin to imagine the stretch of the spacetime continuum. There is a song, and a particular line of lyrics I think of: “These moments are here only yours and mine, tiny dots on an endless timeline,” from La Dispute’s “Woman in Mirror.”

Now there are plains and valleys, wolves and deer and bison, where there once Sequoia forests; this is a dynamic planet and the only thing certain is change. As I learned, even individuals interacting in a group -- that interaction is dynamic. There will never be a day where I interact, where I intersect, with the same group of people the same way.

How insignificant are we? If mountains can rise and fall in this time, if forests can live and die over the course of thousands and thousands and thousands of years?

How significant are we? If we are moving mountains and tearing down cliffs in such a short time? If we are developing cities of metal and kingdoms of steel and concrete and machine, when it takes eons to tear down forests and rivers?

How humbling to imagine -- I can’t even begin to understand: supervolcanoes big enough to change Earth’s climate, ancient, primordial forests, and even seeing what I have is only a fraction of the history here. How can I even begin to understand? There’s so much detail in flowers and DNA and plants; how can I understand something so huge when there are so many things so small? The more I learn the more there is to learn.

Holding this piece of petrified wood is like holding evidence of what was once here. But even physical evidence is hard to understand, hard to accept.

There is one particular instance I think of when I think of my time in Wyoming: during our backcountry trip, one night after a grueling hike, uphill with heavy backpacks, we decided to stargaze. Wyoming’s sky was so unbelievably clear: there were more stars than I’d ever seen in the city, and in that moment I felt so small, so insignificant. I could see the stars and the constellations, just like in the movies, and I felt humility.

As summer comes to a close, I begin to move towards the world of college applications and college essays. This will be related back to Lamar Valley, in a moment. I remember in one college essay seminar, a speaker mentioned the sublime.

In literature, the sublime describes greatness, vastness. I’ve looked at many articles online regarding the term, but I think it’s best described as this sudden rush of shock, of awe, of awareness and of realization.

In regards to college application essays, this speaker said that, as a prospective college student, the goal for writing all college essays should be capturing the sublime in 650 words or less. I’m not sure if that is a feasible goal, but the idea is there.

Originally, philosophers often used the sublime to describe nature, like the Swiss Alps. Seeing mountains ranges, and being inside of them, and knowing their history and grandeur -- it’s easy recognizing why the sublime was so often used to describe nature: mountains, valleys, space, the stars. I find sublimity in other, small things as well, but I’ll muse on that in another post.

“The sublime, in aesthetics (from the Latin sublimis, [looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted), is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.”

- New World Encyclopedia

"But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again."

- Hermann Hesse

Sources:

https://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/upload/232DHSpecimen2015.pdf

http://petrifiedwoodmuseum.org/specimenridge.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specimen_Ridge

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/the-romantic-sublime-r1109221

http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Contexts/sublime.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sublime_(philosophy)

The Return Home (A Reflection of Wyoming)

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I had won a scholarship to the Kelly Campus of Teton Science Schools. There, I studied in the Jackson Hole Science Expeditions program, which was actually celebrating its 50th anniversary!

I think that I’ve returned from my month-long trip in the mountains a changed person. I think that my life has been completely zoomed out, and then re-zoomed in: I have a new, broader perspective of things, even though I came home to a thousand things to do. Despite the work waiting for me at home, I try to keep in mind the lessons I’ve learned from the Tetons.

There’s so much I’ve learned from Wyoming, both technical and social skills as well as more about myself: at TSS I’ve discovered the history and richness of Jackson Hole and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: the formation of mountain ranges, the paths of glaciers, the SCAR communities, the Rockefellers and the Muries in public land and much more; I’ve met friends from all over the globe -- Singapore, Qatar, New York, Mexico -- and developed communities and relationships that will stay with me for the rest of my life; and finally, I’ve found a sense of peace and gratitude that eluded me throughout the whirlwind that was my junior year of high school.

Despite all this, there are a few lessons that stand out. Here they are: 1) humility -- after looking up into the stars and after seeing these mountains and animals I'm really so small and my problems are so insignificant in the grand scheme of things; all of this will be a faded memory soon and life's this constant rush of memory and feeling and it'll all be over so I really really really want to slow down and enjoy things while they last. 2) strength -- after hiking mountains and crossing rivers and canoeing across lakes, I really think I'll be able to do it (whatever it is) and I will always have the support of friends and family. 3) technology really changes you. 4) reading helps.

The most immediate emotions upon my return home were sadness and gratitude: sadness, because I couldn’t believe the month went by so fast, and that I probably won’t ever get the chance to experience something like this again; sadness, because nothing gold can stay. Gratitude, later, because I have had such a wonderful, fantastic, life-changing experience that I wouldn’t change for anything in the world.

In the days following my return home, I found myself thinking often of the mountains and the friends I made there. I lingered on memories from backpacking trips and pulled out photos from my trip more often than not. While listening to songs that were played during my trip, I think I understood pining, but in a good way, in a reminiscing way.

Now, two weeks from my return, I think I’ve found my peace away from the Tetons. I find myself implementing habits from my life there into my life here. For example, not using my phone during car rides, and instead just musing; eating and only eating, without any distractions; practicing gratitude and appreciating in-person conversations, as opposed to text or email. I feel more at peace with myself, and although I wish for more time for the finer things -- enjoying time with my family, playing more piano and violin, reading more, writing more -- I appreciate my life more than before!

While in Wyoming, I found myself writing whenever inspiration struck. As it were, inspiration struck quite often, and in the most beautiful places! I will post my writings from my trip soon.