Dr. Strange

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Pam and I went to see the movie Dr. Strange at the Alamo Draft House on Saturday, and it got me thinking. Always a dangerous thing.... 

I see people like Dr. Strange almost every time I drive on the freeways – arrogant idiots who endanger other people’s lives with their own recklessness. The second-best thing that can happen to someone like that is they go upside-down and on fire all by themselves. The best thing that can happen is what happened to Dr. Strange.

When Western medicine can’t give him what he wants, Dr. Strange risks everything on a desperate attempt to find someone who can fix him. He journeys to the East. He believes he has risked everything, but he can’t even risk his own arrogance. That arrogance is stripped away only when he sees for himself that there is a heretofore unknown dimension of awareness. Only now does he see how lowly his old keyhole existence actually was. Only now is he humble enough to be a student.

His last material possession is useless for its intended purpose, but it’s inscribed with magic words that will bind him to earth as he undertakes the supernatural adventure of a lifetime. He does battle with a powerful enemy, but he also has powerful allies and finds supernatural aids, including a levitation cloak and a double ring of power. His final battle is with the enemy of life itself.

We don’t have to be world-class surgeons to be self-absorbed keyhole mongers. We probably don’t have to be forced into dire straits to begin the Strange adventure. That is, we probably don’t have to go into it kicking and screaming and wanting our mommy.

Then again, maybe we do…. (Cue the evil laughter.) 

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Shooting in the Rain

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The road construction is done, so Fairfax-Bolinas Road reopened on Friday, once again making it possible to drive to the Cataract Creek trailhead at Alpine Lake. It was raining pretty hard when I parked, so I sipped coffee until it let up a little. I still had to put on rain pants and jacket, plus carry an umbrella.

This shot and the one before it were done from beneath the umbrella, which I've finally gotten the hang of. It can be frustrating if you don't work more slowly and methodically than normal.

The rain finally let up, which was great because at 55 degrees it wasn't really cold enough to hike up that steep canyon wearing all that rain gear. 

When I got farther up the trail and realized I was missing a lens cap, I was pretty sure I'd dropped it around here somewhere, and as I was hiking back down the trail to look for it I met up with another hiker who'd already picked it up for me. 

Stone steps on the Cataract Trail.

After I left the waterfall area I hiked a short way along a trail up on Bolinas Ridge to look for this very mushroom. Some years they don't come up, so I was glad to find a few of these purple-stalked specimens right where I've seen them before. They look like a shorter version of the Cortinarius vanduzernsis that I've found up in Sonoma County, but I'm not sure that species grows this far south.

Waterfall Clip

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Holotropism

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I’ve recently been reading some of the work of Ken Wilber and Stan Grof. For a long-time fan of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, it’s been interesting to find these guys—both still alive—who carry the torch in a world that has become darkly materialistic and where rationalism appears to be going off the rails. I became familiar with the work of Grof and Wilber a long time ago and kind of forgot about them during the last 20 or so years, but I recently rekindled my interest in connecting with their decidedly non-materialistic approaches to the ways we perceive the world. In 1967, working with Abraham Maslow and others to create a fuller picture of what it means to be human, Grof coined the term transpersonal psychology.

The need for a new kind of psychology grew in part from Grof’s work with patients under the therapeutic influence of psychedelics such as LSD. When the government outlawed the use of these substances, even by doctors, Grof found another way for patients to access the transpersonal realms for healing. He named this other way, Holotropic Breathwork. With its capital letters and legal trademark, the name kind of rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed a little pretentious and just another of the countless avenues of spiritual entrepreneurialism we see today. Not that there’s anything wrong with protecting your ideas—I’m all for copyright protections—but I did have to overcome an ingrained skepticism to learn more about it.

In trying to find out more about this weirdly named thing I found a local guy on Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork Community named Jimmy Eyerman. Looking into it a bit more, I found a podcast interview where Dr. Eyerman discusses the HB process. Although I’d read Grof’s definition of “holotropic” and had a basic understanding of the word, its meaning really sank in when I heard Dr. Eyerman talk about it. Simply put, the word means “movement toward wholeness.”

I think it sank in because I finally related the word holotropic to similar words I already knew from long-ago botany classes: phototropic (the tendency of plants to reach into the light) and geotropic (the tendency of roots to reach into the earth).

Dr. Eyerman has led something like 11,000 people on HB journeys, and in the podcast he talks about some of the experiences they’ve had. Meanwhile I’ve been reading Grof’s Psychology of the Future and getting more insight into the HB experience. As I learned more about HB, something kind of stuck in my craw—it’s temporariness. It seems that an HB experience is similar to a psychedelic experience in the sense that it can often be just that, a wild experience, a visit to a place you come back from and more or less forget about. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it seems like a half-step, like doing something inspiring on the weekend, only to feel stuck in drudgery the rest of the week.

That idea got me back to Wilber’s discussion in his book Integral Psychology of “states” versus “structures.” If I read him right, Wilber held that a goal of psychological evolution is to integrate the “states” into “structures.” Experiencing a state would be like realizing, briefly, that you had two arms. The next time you might realize you have two legs—and hopefully you didn’t forget about your arms during the interim. Eventually you realize you have a whole body, and if you play your cards right, that realization sticks, and now you have a fully realized structure to get around in.

The structure isn’t static like a building because time isn’t static. A structure in time is a process, and adjustments can be made to the structure to improve the process. Now the leap: What if holotropism, the tendency of one’s structure to reach toward wholeness, is as fundamental a process to humans as phototropism and geotropism are to plants? Why fight it?

This idea got me to thinking about the little bit of shamanic journeying I did back in the ‘90s with guys like Michael Harner. In shamanism, your drum is the horse you ride into the shamanic journey. I think writing and photography can be shaman’s drums as well, leading one into new ways of seeing the world. I see photography as being more primal than writing since images are its language, but I think rational writing can complement the primal art of seeing—and one of these days I hope to figure out how to do that.

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Season's Turning

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I usually count it a good year if there are waterfalls and mushrooms at the same time the bigleaf maples are turning yellow. Some years there isn't enough rain before all the leaves have fallen and turned brown.

Looking back at some shots from November 2013, I saw that High Marsh was completely dry. My wife and I hiked past there yesterday and found it full and croaky with Pacific treefrogs.

We hiked from Rock Spring to Barth's Retreat via the Simmons Trail, then made the short connection east to Potrero Meadow to pick up the Kent Trail down to High Marsh. Dodging newts along the High Marsh Trail we eventually reached Bare Knoll where we took in the spectacular view and stopped for a snack before continuing to Cataract Falls (down considerably since my last visit), then looping back up to Rock Spring.

As we hiked past the bigleaf maples above Cataract Falls yesterday I knew I wanted to return to poke around with my camera today. I was lucky to find the West Ridgecrest gate open when I arrived at Rock Spring a little past 7 a.m., so I drove out to the parking area above Laurel Dell to save myself some hiking time.

Little or no rain in the forecast, so I figured I'd better not try to wait a week.

I don't usually go out of the city twice on a weekend, but this was a rough week. Two doses of Mt. Tam seemed like a minimum treatment to prepare me for the coming workweek, to getting back to the so-called real world, where the majority does not rule and where the most surreal politician in my life just got handed the keys to the Oval Office which I'm sure he's eager to take for a joy ride.

It's going to be an interesting cycle in the life of our country.

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Integral Photography, Pt. 2

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The day after I finished reading Ken Wilber’s Intergral Psychology, and despite the fact that it was a Sunday, the mail carrier brought me another book, Integral Ecology, which weighs in at about 800 pages. Obviously, the “integral” idea can be applied to different fields of endeavor, so I got to thinking about its application to photography. (Integral yoga, which started this line of thought, was an early 20th century invention of Sri Aurobindo, whose ultimate spiritual awakening occurred while he was in prison.)

The integral in photography would be the finished photograph, a structured combination of compositional elements (which includes not just things, but tonal and textural values, etc.). In nature photography, the compositional elements can be intricately diverse, and it’s the photographer’s task to unite those diverse elements into an image that works.

One of the key principles of the integral idea seems to be unifying what Wilber calls the “Big Three,” which are Aesthetics, Ethics and Science. So in the process of bringing compositional elements into focus, an integral approach to photography would combine all three. Aesthetically, we decide what to include in our composition. Ethically, we decide against harming our subject or telling a significant lie about it (no image is the thing itself, so small lies or truth-bending for the sake of aesthetics is inevitable). Scientifically, it certainly helps in nature photography to know your subject, but even more simply, it helps to know your equipment.

I'm not suggesting we try to shoehorn the practice of photography into any kind of philosophical or practical framework, but it can be interesting when a seemingly random puzzle piece actually fits the picture.

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