Forest Gardening meets Deep and Personal Ecology

© Gerald G. May 2006
Harper Collins
Hardback. 194pp.
ISBN: 13: 9780060845407, 10: 0060845406
Dunedin Public Library: 615.851 MAY

This remarkable account of a personal journey and connection with nature emphasises the difference between our modern day focus and the all encompassing loose focus of being aware of all that goes on around us.

"Fear is not an enemy but a friend. Fear is something good, something alive, alert, and wild in us. Fear may be a response to danger, but fear itself is not dangerous. On the contrary, it is nothing other than life-spirit standing on its toes right here, right now with clear attention, sharp senses, ready body, flared nostrils, bristled hair, poised muscles, pumping heart, clean breathe.

"The immense gratitude I experienced when I was most afraid was for feeling so incredibly alive. In untamed fear there is a profound sense of something that is me going through the experience." p. 46

"Contemplation is a state of awareness that is, among other things, wide-open and completely present to whatever is going on in the immediate moment. I also know that most of us aren't that wide-open or immediately present most of the time. Instead, our brains have leared to pay attention to specific tasks at hand by actively excluding background noises, distracting thoughts, and anything else that we deem irrelevant. The brain has to work hard to do this, which is why we become tired after long periods of concentration... It has always seemed to me that true natural presence, true wild being, involves no tuning out of anything. If must be absolutely contemplative - openly receptive to all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that exist in each immediate moment. I believe it is civilisation, the taming of our nature, that has taught us to focus on a single task and tune out what we consider to be distractions. I acknowledge that we do hae to do this to function well in our society - but it just isn't natural. p. 61.

"neither dullness nor focused attention is very wise unless you're in an absolutely secure situation. Both would be dangerous in the wild ... stalking [of prey] requires a keen, open, unfocused awareness of landscape, scents, wind shifts, and a host of other perceptions all at once; it simply must be contemplative.

"The focused staling of domestic cats seems crude, almost lazy compared to the open contemplative attentivenss of wild cats. It is essence of the difference between domestic and wild, between tameness and freedom, between safety and danger. For me, it is the difference between going through the motions of life and really living. " p. 63.

"Whereas human teachers tell children to pay attention to one thing at a time, I am convinced mother mountain lions, wolves, and other predators teach their young the opposite: not to become to absorbed in any one thing, to keep their senses open". p. 64

"What we are missing is fullness of life. To put it simply, in concentrating on one thing at a time, we miss everything else." p. 64.

"Through it all, we fail to appreciate our own precious being - the soft flow of breath, the beating of heart, the subtle beauty and wisdom of body, the sheer pristine wonder of being aware." p. 65.

"Like domesticated animals, we are completely unprepared for the wild - the wild outdoors, the wild in our cities, the wild in our own psyches. In any of these places , we panic when we're lost and afraid. We frantically concentrate our attention here and there, folllowing non-existant tracks, unaware of a thousand clues from sky and light and smell and inner Wisdom that could tell us where to go and what to do. Feeling so divorced from the nature withing and around us, we make wildness and adversary that we must tame, rather than join, master rather than learn from. Whenever we find it, we feel we must force Nature into the tunnel of our own concentrated vision. That's what brings us to manage natural resources, engineer social change, strategize our child-reatring and human relationships, control our emotions, and cope with our stresses." p. 65.

"My hunch is that life needs 95 per cent openess and 5 per cent concentration, and we have the proportions reversed. I wish we could encourage our children's natural contemplative awareness as well as their capacity to concentrate. And I wish that we adults who have been trained away from contemplative presence could have a teacher to show us where the present moment is." p. 66.

"' Be here now, Be here now, Be here now'. All it takes is ears to hear. The listening is everything.". p. 66.

"In pure immediacy it is finally impossible to distinguish who is touching whom, who is teaching whom, what is being taught." p. 67.

"Nature, I think, knows nothing of concepts of time, or of the present. Nature - our own and that of the world around us - lives in Presence instead of 'in the present'. Rather than moving through time, it simply exists in cycles and successsions: sound and silence, light and darkness, birth and death, activity and stillness, courting and nesting, eathing and sleeping. Everything in rhythms. Everything in seasons." p. 71.

"It's just a gift to have a moment's experience of the perfection that is there all the time." p. 125.

"For the most part, my mother taught me that I should defend myself against Nature." p. 155.

"And in truth, Wilderness is everywhere." p. 185.

"Regardless of how, where, or when you experience it, Wilderness changes you. You come out of it deeper, wilder (more natural)" p. 185.

Gerald then closes with the concept that we attack our diseases, regard them as our enemies. We do not embrace them as part of ourselves, out of order perhaps, but part of ourselves as he accepts the cancer that takes him to the end of his current cycle just after putting his pres-ence into this book.

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