Raft Guide Training Contemplations

Another Moon article, this one is from August 2007. I took a raft guide training course through St. John's Student Activities for my summer job on the Rio Grande so I wrote about it for the Moon:

River Reflections

It wasn’t until Tuesday, or maybe even Wednesday, that I received my first epiphany. We had been camping on the river for several nights and it was the Chama River, this time. I had been walking around camp when I spotted what looked like a cloud of crows in the sky. I thought they must have found something dead or dying on the ground below, and now they were circling and waiting for an early lunch. I mentioned this to Brendan O’Neill.

“Well, no actually,” he answered, squinting skyward, “those are ravens and they’re playing!”

At first I smiled and then I began to wonder: How could these animals, in the cruel face of unforgiving Nature, find the time to play? Aren’t we all supposed to be too busy surviving and competing in a world of scarcity, hunger and predation? Well, I thought, maybe that is only my own personal notion, or a human notion—maybe it is only an “adult” notion—or maybe it is only an American notion.

The more I watched the ravens the more I could see that they actually were playing. They had set aside the all-important task of competing with one another to be the “most successful” raven and were just playing to have fun. Watching them dive and flutter in the vast New Mexico blue above, I began to feel envious.

Somewhere behind the eminence of my own reverie Brendan was still talking.

“Yeah, they’re a group of juveniles, just doing their thing. The playing is actually good for them—it makes them stronger flyers and better hunters.”

I had always suspected it: Playing with your friends is good for you! Of course we are catching on to this now, with studies that show the value of spending time with others as well as the benefit of physical activity on the mind and spirit. Both are essential in developing a healthy mind and body—so we can use that vigor to compete with each other and find out who is the big Kahuna, right? After all, we need winners and losers, don’t we?

As a child of the MTV/Rupert Murdoch era, I remain forever mistrustful of the media and the message it conveys to the individual. Mainstream culture concedes that recreation is an important part of being human, and of being alive; but I fear the Greeks, even when they come bearing gifts: “Mom and Dad, let little Johnny run and play with the other kids so that he will be happy and healthy…and grow up to be a super-duper-richer-than-Bill-Gates-and-Tiger-Woods-put-together-GENIUS. Don’t hesitate, YOU deserve a super-genius child, order your informational play-smart handbook NOW!!!”

Hopefully we will never have to live in a society where there is no such thing as real fun, and hopefully we are not headed there…but maybe we are. With workweeks that exceed 40 hours, we spend more time “surviving” than many species. We tend to turn any friendly game into a question of winners and losers and even team sports, on the professional level, are becoming more about individuals’ egos than about the team, or even the sport. We are told, in a constant barrage from the media and, sadly, often from our own peers that we are no one until we compete and succeed in a game of possessions with mansion “cribs” and “pimped rides” at the finish line.

After a few days on the River it was clearer to me than ever why these things never interested me very much. As I grow older it takes more and more conscious effort not to get pulled into the game of social and material competition. The occasional outdoors trip helps a lot.

I am reminded of one of my favorite poems I read as a young child:

Once I spoke the language of the flowers,
Once I understood each word the caterpillar said,
Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings,
And shared a conversation with the housefly
in my bed
Once I heard and answered all the questions
of the crickets,
And joined the crying of each falling dying
flake of snow,
Once I spoke the language of the flowers…
How did it go?
How did it go?

The poem is “Forgotten Language” by Shel Silverstein. It is more than just a reminder of how easy it is to lose touch with a natural sense of things. It seems to reveal the rift between our modern lives and the rest of the Universe.

Emerson said that “words are symbols of natural facts”, whatever that means. To me it means that words come from nature, from things that already exist. Even words that apply to emotions are derived from those feelings; e.g. the word anger is defined by an emotion, not the emotion by a word.

But then what is Silverstein’s “Forgotten Language”? In his case it seems that even “natural facts” take on symbolism of some kind. Is there a voice or a message underlying nature itself? If so, do we lose touch with it? Do we forget it?

I believe there is and I believe we do.

Walking alone in the throes of a Chama River Valley sunset, everything around me was speaking. Watching the symbiotic ballet of hummingbird moths feeding and propagating the evening primroses as they opened in the shifting light, I had an almost eerie feeling that I was being told something. The language I heard was untranslatable and the message I received is impossible to print, but then any Johnny should understand the shortcoming of our human languages on these matters—the persistent recurrence of untranslatables.

Have we really forgotten Shel Silverstein’s supposed language, or have we learned to effectively block it out for the sake of our own convenience? In our modern arrogance do we pretend not to know the words of our own mother, the earth? It hardly seems possible that one would misunderstand or fail to comprehend the statement of a swaying fir or the silvery murmur of a flowing river. The implications of this language frighten us,they threaten our lifestyle. We pretend not to hear or understand. As we endure our sleepless nights, wondering what it is exactly we lost touch with or what it is we are afraid to think about, somewhere above us, by a distance impossible to measure, the ravens are playing. (Josiah Stephens, St John’s College Moon, August 2007)