ASP Podcast #17: Dan Kowalski, Winter Solstice
Listen to Dan with your favorite podcast player, or via Apple Podcasts
Reflecting on “coming into the peace of wild things”, Wendell Berry
Alaska Story Project host, Dan Kowalski, reflects on the Winter Solstice.
A thought and theme from Wendell Berry, “coming into the peace of wild things.”
A story from the Alaskan cabin with an astonishing encounter with a large, magnificent buck.
Reading liner notes from a collaborative DVD project with Kurt Hoelting, ASP podcast #5.
“Wildness is a process and not a place. Nothing stands alone. The environment is inside as well as outside. The human mind is wild habitat. Poetry is the wild edge of language.”
An excerpt from ASP #4 with writer, editor, fisher-poet, Holly J. Hughes.
Holly reflects on our times and reads her poem, “Credo.”
A shout-out to contributing musician, Christian Arthur
Gratitude for connection, health care workers, and a full embrace of this time of year.
Liner notes from a collaborative DVD project— writing by Kurt Hoelting:
What is Deep Presence about?
Deep Presence is about exploring our human relationship with the natural world. Through our work, we've come to believe:
Wildness is a Process, not a Place
The wild is not some far off place. It is always near at hand, at the heart of the living world. We are never at a distance from the wild, because it encompasses our whole life. As Paul Shepard declared, We can't go back to nature because we never left it.”
Nothing Stands Alone
We are in relationship with everything that sustains us. There is no separation. As John Muir said, "Everything is hitched to everything else.” How we treat the living world is ultimately how we treat ourselves.
The Environment Is Inside as Well as Outside
The wild processes we observe in the world around us also anchor our human genetic legacy. This includes the inner habitat of body, mind and spirit. In the words of Scott Russell Sanders, we are “living repositories of wildness."
The Human Mind Is Wild Habitat
The activity of mind wells up out of what Gary Snyder has called our "inner wilderness areas". This is the place of the muse, the place of awe, terror and sensual delight. This inner habitat of heart and mind can never be domesticated or exhausted. It will always remain essentially wild.
Poetry Is the Wild Edge of Language
Our use of poetry in Deep Presence conveys our respect for the power of language as a wild system. Like any ecosystem, language has its edges, its boundary zones where energy is exchanged, where continuity is broken, and contrasts are most vivid. Poetry operates at this wild edge of language, evoking possibilities of direct experience that lie always beyond the limit of words. [© 2006 depthmedia.org]
When Kurt and I worked on Deep Presence, it was our understanding that we coined the term. What we didn’t do was a comprehensive back-end registering and filing. We’ve moved on since then.
Now a Google search turns up many iterations. It feels quite like pausing on a ridge and seeing many on the trail. We’re inclined to think, all good. DK