OPM 134, June 27th Meditation, Being and Learning, ch 6, pp. 139-140

OPM 134 Day 7 on Mt. Desert Island, Pine Cone Cabin, Hodgon Pond

I’ve just finished reading the meditation from today, and there are at least three things that call for some reflection.

But first I want to write down some reflections after my final full day here on Mt. Desert Island.  Two prompts from today.  The first is the non-productive estrangement I experienced at the anthill of tourists that is the Jordan pond parking area, which is not only the nexus for the vast network of trails and carriage roads, but also the site of Acadia’s only full service dining area.  There are hundreds of non hiking nor biking visitors, who come for the restaurant, the inspiring view of Jordan pond and the mountains surrounding it, and, perhaps, and leisurely walk around part of the pond trail.   On our two visits through the area when we were making a combined bike and hike trip I was overwhelmed by the ‘whiteness’ of the crowd.  Although Maine is a largely ‘white’ population, they are many of the funky, crunchy, and hipster variation that are posses the kind of openness and  mindfulness that I write about in these meditations.  Portland also has a good number of African immigrants, and this adds to the feeling of diversity and cultural dynamic.  All that to say that one feels life is happening in Portland.  Here on Mt. Desert Island, one can certainly feel that energy in Bar Harbor, where there are a good number of coffee houses, some cool restaurants, and even the Hemporium gift store.  Combine that will all the Acadia park focused business and energy, not to mention Acadia itself, and I feel very much ‘at home’ here.  Until I encounter the crowds of gringoes that somehow make me feel not  ‘at home’ I my home state.   How is that?  I don’t want to spend lots of energy speculating, but I do feel the need to document the very unusual contrasting feeling of coming down from one of the mountain trails only to be met with hostile and inhospitable eyes, as if we were replaying some tragic  drama from the 1600’s between the Wabanaki and the English ‘settlers’ who managed to decimate 95% of the population of Indigenous people from this island and the surrounding area.   Perhaps these ‘white’ people are reminded of this genocide and how ‘they’ are thrown onto the side of the villain’s history, and perhaps, at some deep unconscious level, they feel a complex set of modalities that only registers at the top as hostility and resentment. Whatever the case, it sets up anything but the kind of relationality I have been writing about in these meditations, the kind of relationality that creates the condition for peace and freedom, the kind of relationality that arises from a dialogic learning community that dwells together in the clearing of meditative thinking. 

The second prompt for reflection happened when we were canoeing on Hodgon pond where our cabin is located.  On the eastside of the pond the forest rises quickly, and it was from somewhere in those trees that we heard the loud call of a moose earlier this week.  Today the pond was without humans, aside from us.  We were twice visited by an osprey hunting in the pond, heard the songs of many birds, the croaking of frogs in the lily pads, some blossoming with lotus flowers, and also shared the pond with a small turtle who was swimming around near the entrance of the mountain brook that drains into and floods the pond.   When we weren’t paddling the only sounds to be heard were those of Nature.   As I listened I wondered why any philosophy was necessary at all when all was already given.  Art yes, to imitate the songs, rhythms, colors, shapes, given by Nature.  But philosophy?  A speculative system?  It seemed to me a paltry work at that moment.  I felt that somewhat awkward sense of emptiness when I was walking back up the dirt road to the cabin.  And during that walk, which I took alone because I lingered behind to tie up the canoe and drain the small kayak we towed with Jaime on board, I fell into some kind of meditative state listening to the song of a bird I’ve been hearing during this week, but can’t recall hearing before.  The song is a dissonant phrase, and sound almost like a question or a commentary or even a judgment.  I’m hearing it now, as dusk ends its slow finale on these longest days of the year.    As I listened to the song this afternoon, I wondered about this drive or urge to think, to make sense of the life we are given, and, what’s more, to do something with that offering.  Isn’t that all just a set of cultural expectations?  I wondered what I’d think and feel if I’d lived my whole life on this island, and never attended a college, and new some of the literary and philosophical world through the little I gained at school, but was focused and quite excellent at some trade, say, wood working, or even fishing, or boat repair.  I’m not sure I actually got that far in my stream of consciousness, but I certainly did wonder about the arbitrariness of the work I had taken up, and, what’s more, the almost paradoxical and self-contradictory nature of that work, which, on the one hand, is so self-assured about the question it raises and the manner it takes up those questions, yet, on the other hand, couldn’t be less impactful, and as all who do it seem to agree, it is the most urgent yet useless endeavor undertaken by human beings.  Yet, somehow, it feels so natural to be writing philosophical reflections at the end of a long active day, in the quiet of the early evening, when everyone has fallen asleep!

As for OPM 134, I wanted only to note the continuity regarding the receptive modality of the meditative thinker.   There is a notable rewriting of an earlier cited quotation from Aristotle, where the figure of the teacher is redefined as one who obeys the other because she heeds the directive of the Word, recalling Heraclitus’ fragment: “for wisdom listen not to me, but to the Word (logos).”  

This reminds me that my Sage is my earliest attempt to describe that particular kind of education that happens when we study and practice philosophy.  Call the learning we experience ‘wisdom’.  Whatever the case, the claim, which is at the center of my philosophy of education course – or what I call my ‘education of philosophy’ course – is the one that insists that philosophy has a particular way of educating because what we learn from it is a form of thinking – meditative – that gathers us into who we are by way of showing us where we are.  I would cite the two examples I describe above – my experience with the crowds at Jordan pond, and my experience on Hodgon pond – as two examples of the way philosophy ‘educated’ me by disclosing quite clearly who I was in relation to where I was.  Of course, the question that is begged is:  how is it that you claim it is ‘philosophy’ that is educating you in this way?  Why call these experiences ‘philosophy’ or ‘philosophical’, and if you do, isn’t this simply your way of describing your own predisposition to have an acute awareness of your surroundings and the atmosphere you are in?  So isn’t it rather that, as Hegel put it so poignantly, philosophy only spreads its wings at dusk, like the Owl of Minerva, and is only then a medium through which you then come to think about those experiences you have had during the day, the significant ones that have remained with you and that demand to be taken up?  Isn’t philosophy then the documentation of reflection?  And isn’t this precisely what a daily meditation is all about?  And if this is the case, then why were the meditations you wrote so speculative, and metaphysical, and detached from experience?

The last question is quite devastating, actually, because it strikes to the heart of the experiment, and where, perhaps, I got it wrong?  Especially if I was claiming to be doing phenomenology.  But here, again, is where  I am indicating a way for that writing to come!