Keeping Still, Mountain

Sometimes when I am writing an essay (or a talk), I realize the logical argument which exists in my head and heart is actually not logical at all in the ways in which one is taught to write. I like to write in circles, often with repetition, quite frequently borrowing (stealing) ideas out of context or mixing metaphors from seemingly unrelated sources in order to create a new universe of logic to describe whatever feeling, observation, interconnection that I am writing about. I often use the format of chapters, even in the shortest pieces, because it allows me to abruptly jump from one topic to an unrelated other without a logical path of connection.  By the end, I hope the reader (or listener) can take in the sum of all of the chapters as a kind of cosmological event—where past, present, future happen in simultaneity, rather than the causal plodding of one event to another, one day to the next, one thought which precedes its next logical step.

I tend to blame our cultural desire for rationality or concreteness within an argument—the tightness of a thesis, where a statement is made and all subsequent points are made in support of that thesis—on the influence of capitalism, where things are rendered simple and tied neatly in a bow for ease of description (or production) or proof of concept. The speed of the read. A kind of efficiency prized by economics (in all of its forms). This kind of justification thinking has always felt dangerous to me; if an idea or let’s say a person or a practice or a life falls outside of a straight path of “objective” efficiency or a cleanliness it can be understood as a deviation, an outlier, a “subjective” breach. Think of who and what that has meant historically, and unfortunately, think about who and what that means today in 2025. 

I’ve been trying to remember when I first became truly aware of nature—like a real memory where it is not just a setting or backdrop. I have some very clear mental pictures from when I was child in Baltimore: pulling the style from honeysuckle to taste the nectar; a 1980s brood awakening of cicadas and running with my arms over my head to protect myself from them dropping on me (and of course, the sound, I remember the sound at night); and driving on the back roads to my cousin’s house through the forest which my mom called “spook woods” because of the bodies that had been dumped there (the same woods where the Blair Witch Project would be filmed some 20 years later). 

I never thought of either of my parents as particularly interested in nature, though my father grew up on a farm in Ethiopia. They both just seemed to be indoor people—city people.  It is not surprising that my mother’s association with nature was one of darkness or fear. But by the time I got to high school, I was a teenage activist. My parents, who taught me about the political, let me hang out with these older environmentalists (maybe my parents’ age?) who founded a group called Grassroots Coalition for Environmental and Economic Justice and who would pick me up and take me to all kinds of actions. We protested, we testified, we made documentaries about the watershed. I learned a lot, but I haven’t thought about John and Iona in a long time—despite the clear effect they had on whatever future I would eventually construct for myself. To look at me, I doubt you would know how I understand my place and relationship with, in, and to the natural world. 

Eventually my relationship with nature, undoubtedly informed by hanging out in forests with Iona and John, started to change; it became a place to escape to or hide within—more so than about leisure, enjoyment, protection. I thought a lot about the final scene in Truffaut’s film version of Fahrenheit 451, when Montag and the other exiles are walking in the forest reciting the lines of books they had to memorize to preserve. Rebels. I thought about social movement theory, which I studied in grad school and the idea that distance from the state apparatus or eye could give one the space to imagine a system not made in the image of the state. I thought about all of the ways in which my own body and history made me an outlier inside a dominant culture, and I wanted to find or make space that could exist outside of those definitions.

I experimented. Sometimes those spaces were communal, sometimes they were imaginary, sometimes they were situated right in the center of it all. Most times those spaces existed on a margin which I was stuck in, but eventually interpreted not as lack, but as relief. All of the spaces were future-oriented—where even if all that I knew about the world, including ideas about futureness, had already emerged from some kind of fucked up past—I just needed enough of a wedge, or a suspension from reality, or a propositional space where the past was something we could acknowledge as existing but didn’t necessarily govern what we might imagine as a future. 

And so I went to the woods where you could escape these images of the past and where time exists on its own clock. 

These divine beings—ancestors, gods, or quarks—place humans and nature on equal footing or perhaps, even though humans are the ones reading the book, it counts us as one of nature not one above nature. And so it is the natural world which grounds and guides all of the readings within the I-Ching:

This friend understood that the path of seeing through the accident wasn’t about jamming myself through a more traditional linear processing of grief—you know it: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (with a healthy dose of alcohol and self-torture in the mix)—but it was to see the person, the relationship,  the accident, the death, the loss, within a cosmology of life, nature, events, perspective, and regrowth. He’d hoped the I-Ching would help me understand that even when things feel random or shocking, that there is some structure that holds what happens—even if that structure is based in chance or chaos, depending on how you interpret it. 

My first reading was Sui 隨, Following: 

In his foreword, Jung writes “an incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance of chance,” and as I processed this death, this drowning, this thunder in the lake, this book of chance grew to become a system I relied on to shape my commitment to a certain kind of openness, a certain kind of unpredictability, a certain kind of riskiness, both as an emotional way of being and a politic. Capitalism, and all of its destructive manifestations, always tries to get you to a prescribed end. The I-Ching offered me a structure for resisting that by detaching myself from control. While my relationship with the I-Ching began with death, like all things within it, over time, death transitions into some other kind of life. 

Sometimes I practice the I-Ching daily for years and sometimes I go years avoiding it. Sometimes I accept that it’s good not to know when anything has the potential to be anything.  But sometimes, even after all of these years, I return to it when I need reminding. 

It is true that our lives are made up of events that we can’t possibly understand—the chance—and it is also true that the world is always moving outside our control—the change. I feel like this line between the two is a slippery one, particularly because in any context other than the I-Ching, they mean very different things. Or if I pretend I am not a human, maybe together they speak to the concatenation of time and nature. 

The trigrams in the I-Ching are representations of seasons, the cardinal directions, of oppositional forces: fire—water, mountain—lake. “Thunder brings about movement; wind brings about dispersion, rain brings about moisture, the sun brings about warmth, Keeping Still brings about standstill, the Joyous brings about pleasure, The Creative brings about rulership, the receptive brings about shelter.” Change is determined by chance or the way in which time inevitably is marked by a constantly moving collision of forces. It’s the chance of that collision which produces change. And maybe that is the logic of nature. 

Maybe I originated from indoor people but over time, my relationship to all of the other beings (plant, insect, animal, geological, microbial, celestial) which I live amongst, has evolved. A long time ago, I flipped the contemporary hierarchy between human and nature and I have spent a lifetime embedded in their universe. When I went to the woods to give myself the space to imagine an alternate future far away from a present that hadn’t been made for everyone, I watched a different kind of freedom that exists in nature. It follows a different scale of time, which is governed not by individualism but instead a kind of interdependence, which transcends any one being or any one class of being. It’s like that watershed that John, Iona, myself and others studied—maybe it’s not always visible but it supports, nourishes, moves, births an enormous diversity of life which is in turn connected through relationship to the watershed. The I-Ching taught me that whether it is read for synchronicity or read as a way to participate in a larger universal system, that wildness might offer opposition to the longstanding structural forces of our own making that have been so destructive to so many of us. That disorder might give way to a new kind of order—that chance can lead to change. 

Once again, the authors of the I-Ching build an image with seemingly oppositional ideas—becoming superior to the limitation of the transitory or the limitation of being not permanent juxtaposed with the idea that time allows for growth. It is a kind of teleological muddle, but the I-Ching is subjective based on how we understand the meanings of words.  I read “becoming superior to the limitation of the transitory” as accepting non-permanence and that those stages of growth don’t ultimately end with non-permanance—instead, time allows the stages to unfold as long as time still exists. Nature tells us stages don’t have to follow a singular linear path—egg, larva, pupa, adult, death. Maybe it shows us that some stages can emerge out of preceding stages that cannot come to their own completion, like a nurse tree, which in its decomposition nourishes and protects seedlings and other plants, or how a parasitic wasp lays its eggs in another living being, eventually sacrificing the host. Before Completion. 

For Beth and all the living flowers

&

For MOLD, Before Completion