Well,
no, I haven’t done much sitting on a log yet. My mornings are busy with lots of
practises and when it comes to just sitting on this log, which appealed to me,
and closing my eyes and doing nothing, circumstances have sometimes combined
this last week to prevent me from doing it. First it was the timing, as I also wanted
to comply with the 8am finishing schedule for my practises. Then on Saturday
last, I didn’t even get to my tree in the early dawn, as everything had to be
sacrificed for the 2 guard dogs. Coming through the field, they greeted me with
wagging tails, but I saw they had white beards. They had met a porcupine that
night and their muzzles were covered with quills. That took over two and a half
hours of cajoling and tricking them into accepting the pain of pulling them
out, and one even had to go to the vet as he caught on and said no, you’re not
taking them out, and wrestling with him was no good, as he weights 132 lbs and
I had no proper means of restraint in the field.
The other morning I heard church bells,
and dismissed them as a hallucination. Then I heard a high pitched “yoo-hoo”
repeated twice. That I recognised and bellowed back. Something was wrong down
the hill, I thought. But it turned out that it was just the fencing man who had
come early and I was being called down for some specific information, which, by
the way, was not really necessary. The church bell sound came from the horn on
his truck, apparently. But that was the end of my log sitting for the day – not
even 5 minutes!
You see, my WAI/WIG practise has been done
in the sitting position for some time now. I gave up the original supine
position as it was too conducive to sleep. And now that there are so many
practises in the cross-legged posture, I think sitting is the best option for
concentration. The log is just the right height for me. It looks as if it was uprooted
by a major storm, and lies like a huge crocodile west to east, many of its
branches strewn about on the ground.
This was Indian country for millennia before
the modern county was enacted in 1804. Imagine the youth of this area in
comparison to Europe and Asia: a mere 212 years of “modern” civilisation only. Horse-drawn
vehicles for the first 100 years, then incipient automobiles and then the big
boom of modern US gas guzzlers as from 1940. And gradually every town with any
pride has a main street, a McDonald’s, a Burger King, and 6 or 7 more fast-food
joints, and every major town has a 24-hr Walmart with everything under one
roof. Before that thousands of years of non-history, with Nature calling the
shots, and here, with native American Indians of the Five Tribes, as known to the
settlers. Because around 1600, five
tribes – the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas –
banded together to form a confederacy. By this time one can supposed their
cultures had degenerated, as they were now fighting amongst themselves for
hunting and fishing rights and were given guns by the Dutch and fought amongst themselves, and then sided either
with the French, the English, the colonists or whoever was also fighting with
more civilised weapons at that time. What later happened we all know: the natives
were intentionally wiped out and Europeans took all the land in the name of
civilisation. The native came from an entirely different Asian culture, and
they couldn’t imagine anyone really “possessing” land, which is why white and
redskin never understood one another. How can you give or take what belongs to
the Great Spirit? How can land be possessed? They couldn’t fathom how white
people could divide the soil and say this is mine and this is yours. Soil is
soil, indivisible, undividable, beyond all linear conceptions, put htere by the Great Spirit. Like air, where
is your air and where is my air? But when flying machines were invented, “airspace”
was conceived, and maybe “airspace” too can be bought and sold? When everything
becomes a commodity, there isn't much wisdom left. So the retreat to Nature for sitting on a log becomes imperative. Or don't you think so?
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