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- [00:05]
A
Welcome to Contemplify, where we seek to kindle the examined life for contemplatives in the world. I'm your host, Paul Swanson. Today I welcome Philip Connors, a fire lookout essayist and author of four books. A former journalist at the Wall Street Journal, Connors has now been a fire lookout in the Gila national forest for over 20 years. In our conversation today, we focus on his latest book, the Mountain Knows the A Fire Watch Diary. We also talk about the life of a fire lookout, attention and dialogue with place. And I reignite the question that I asked him at a live reading this past fall that has stirred my interior soup ever since. I heartily recommend all of Philip Connors books. The Mountain Knows the Mountain is my favorite. As always, you can visit contemplify.com for the show notes on this episode and also you can learn more about philip connors@philipconnors.com and that's Philip with one L. So now join me in raising a glass to my guest today, Philip Connors. Connors.
- [01:32]
B
Right.
- [01:33]
A
Well, I'll just begin with this question. Where am I finding you today? What is the context of your body and spirit?
- [01:44]
B
You are finding me in El Paso, Texas, where I'm staying at the home of my mother and father in law. And I'm here because I'm spending a lot of time with a friend who's in the hospital in El Paso trying to lift his spirits and get him through a tough passage. So I've been here for about a week now in El Paso,
- [02:14]
A
and it's always amazing to me how time stops when a loved one is in need like that. And so I appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation in the midst of that.
- [02:29]
B
No, it's actually a welcome diversion from institutional medical facilities.
- [02:39]
A
As we were just talking about, you know, the, the theme of this podcast is kindling the examined life for contemplatives in the world. But when you hear the word contemplative, how, how does that term relate to you or your work, if you think it does at all?
- [02:54]
B
Well, over the years, I've come to believe that secondary to my primary role as a fire lookout, keeping watch over a landscape and calling in wildfires as they happen, monitoring conditions for crews on the ground on those wildfires. My sort of secondary task is to contemplate the landscape and contemplate the life that thrives in and on that landscape. Because I feel I'm in such a privileged position. I'm getting paid to live in the wilderness of New Mexico for nearly half the year, and that's just not something most people have a chance to do. There's a maximum stay of 14 days at any campsite in the forest where I work. So it's actually against the law to hang out in any one place as long as I do on the payroll of the U.S. forest Service. So it's such a privilege that I want to absorb the energies of the place, pay close attention to who else thrives and lives there, and just try to understand the sweep of seasons and the cycle of life and the drama of wildfire in one of the most beautiful landscapes we have in North America.
- [04:42]
A
Amen to that. I'm often jealous of how much time you get to spend in the Gila. My family and I were down there late fall, and it's just stunning. And I, of course, was thinking of you and your post and just trying to imagine what it would be like to spend that much time in such a marvelous place to watch the cycles and seasons and the life abundance and then also the devastating loss and renewal that also takes place.
- [05:23]
B
Yeah, it's not all birdsong and rainbows, that's for sure.
- [05:31]
A
Is there a spiritual or philosophical tradition or maybe a multitude that speaks most deeply to your life that kind of helps harness how you show up with this contemplative gaze in the Gila?
- [05:48]
B
That's a good question. I think one of the things that I mention explicitly in, in my new book is that I've drifted closer toward a kind of untutored, hillbilly Buddhism. My introduction to, you know, the underpinnings of Buddhism comes not through any conscious seeking of. Of it, but through friends. I have a couple of friends, one now passed on, who was a Buddhist priest. And I have a. A good friend recently made who is in the process of becoming a Buddhist priest. And through conversations with them, I've been introduced to some of the concepts and underpinnings of Buddhism. But I've never really sought out in any active way that other than through maybe reading, I, for a multitude of reasons, have a kind of innate allergy to institutional religion. The shortest way to describe it is I grew up Catholic and rejected, upon close examination with a maturing mind, most of what it had tried to impart to me as the truth of life on Earth. That's not to say I didn't find things there that were of interest and of use to my own personal cosmology. But, you know, for instance, I've read a lot of Thomas Merton, who I find very compelling, but that religion wasn't for me. And I didn't, you know, having. Having been sort of forced to be present for it in school, in evening classes, in Sunday services for most of the first 18 years of my life, I sort of vowed I wouldn't let that happen to me again. But I, I would say most recently my interest in, in Zen Buddhism has led me to the writers who approach that philosophy or faith or what, whatever you want to call it, and most recently finding some of the Japanese haiku poets who were Buddhists in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and just finding my experience spoken to more profoundly by them than by any of my contemporaries in the Western world, really, that I can point to. People always ask me, oh, you must be inspired by Edward Abbey. You must have read Annie Dillard. Surely you've absorbed the lessons of Henry David Thoreau. Answer to all those questions being yes, of course I have, but, but I feel a deeper kinship with the Japanese haiku poets than I do with any of them. So really, reading has been my entry point into an understanding of and a deepening of my own contemplative experience.
- [09:54]
A
That's beautiful. Is there a poem or haiku that you have read or written recently that, that exhibits that kind of enhancement of contemplative life that speaks to you?
- [10:09]
B
I've been writing a lot of haiku and I don't know how much of it deals directly head on with the contemplative experience that I have. But part of how I think about the contemplative life for myself is just being observant of things that are not me. And so I've inspired by Kobayashi Issa, one of the greats of Japanese haiku poetry. I've written a lot of haiku that, you know, take note of spiders and mice and birds and flies and bees. He really made a practice of paying attention to every little thing around him. And so occasionally, of course, as well, you, you have to mock yourself when you're getting paid to live alone in the woods for months on end. I think left to one's own devices, you could trend toward taking yourself either really seriously or less seriously all the time. And I probably toggle back and forth between those two, but I wrote a poem this summer that goes, or a haiku that goes, no mice in the traps, day one in my life as a born again Buddhist and that sort of thing. I think just gentle self mockery and awareness of our own limitations and our own impact on the creatures around us. I think that's, that's part of the contemplative experience too. Yeah,
- [12:18]
A
if I'm recalling correctly, there's also. You have a haiku as well about farts. I'm not asking you to recite it, but am I remembering correctly that there's
- [12:28]
B
one
- [12:30]
A
that deals with the dalliance of our bodily functions?
- [12:35]
B
Yes, that is correct. In the new book I have one and then I have actually written others. Because another thing the Japanese haiku poets taught me was that nothing is off limits for the poetic imagination. Masaoka Shiki, one of the greats, once said that the haiku poet tries to capture every inch of the world. And so, yeah, you're by yourself all day. The body is going about its processing of food and liquids and effusions are emerging. And the Japanese haiku poets wrote about all this. They wrote about the immense pleasure of creating a crisp, neat, yellow hole in the snow, your urine, you know, they. Yeah, they wrote many poems about outhouses, which were a fundamental fact of life in 17th, 18th, 19th century Japan. And that happens to be a fundamental fact of my life too. I live on a mountain and I do my business in an outhouse. So this summer I wrote another haiku on the subject that goes. Sitting with my farts, wondering how anyone ever loved me, which is just an accurate snapshot of a moment in my life. There I am, I'm in a 7 by 7 foot lookout tower. There's no escaping myself. And sometimes you wonder, how did anyone ever love me? But yeah, that too is part of trying to capture every inch of the experience of life on earth.
- [14:44]
A
Yes, the body speaks and charting it can go a long way in the poetic form.
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B
Absolutely.
- [14:57]
A
A question for folks to get a sense of how you became the Phil Connors you are today. And this is just for today. So if someone were going to teach a class on the formation of Philip Connors, what would be the three mandatory readings or works that formed you that would definitely be on that syllabus?
- [15:25]
B
Well, I would say probably in the number one position would be A River Runs through it and other stories by Norman McLean. McLean wrote about growing up in Montana early in the 20th century. He himself was a fire lookout as a young man in the Bitterroot Mountains south of Missoula, Montana, in, I think it was, 1919. And so he wrote about a life in the woods of life with spent with mule packers and loggers and others who made a life in the wild mountains of Montana. And his most famous work, the novella the River Runs Through It. It's a beautiful story about two brothers growing up in Montana and the. The elder brothers attempt to help his younger brother, who's kind of gotten himself into some trouble in life. And ultimately the older brother loses his younger brother to that trouble and to a violent death. And I myself had a similar experience. I lost a younger brother to his own hand almost 30 years ago now. And all of these experiences that McLean writes about, he does so so beautifully, so thoughtfully, with such good humor, and also deep recognition of life's pathos. And so his work has probably meant more to me than any other writer, I would say. And it's. It's partly because it speaks so. So closely to and so thoughtfully about my own experience, but it's also because he's just a master literary craftsman. He couldn't find anybody in New York to publish A River Runs through it and Other Stories, which tells you something about New York, right? Because he later published the book with the University of Chicago Press, they had to make an exception to publish what turned out to be the first work of fiction that the press ever published in its history. And it went on to be shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than a million copies because, yeah, people recognize it for the literary masterpiece it is, but. But he couldn't find a publisher for it in the beginning, I'd say. Maclean, I think, more recently, because it's. It's altered the trajectory of my writing life and sent me down a new path in a different direction. Probably Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, which is a work of. It's a diary interspersed with haiku, a form the Japanese poets called haibun, where you toggle back and forth between prose and poem, with each diary entry punctuated by a haiku that either expands upon or is in dialogue with the passage of prose that came before it. It's a recognized masterpiece of world literature. It shows one of the interesting facets of Japanese, of this particular form, anyway, that you can achieve unity in from disparate elements. Unity and variety. He tells jokes, he makes fun of himself. He talks about life's difficulties and sadnesses. He nods to his literary forebears, he ropes in poems from his traveling companions and drinking friends and quotes their. Drops their work right into his. And somehow, despite kind of moving in all these different directions, there's this underlying unity to what he's doing. And I thought that was an interesting thing to try in my own work because I've been keeping journals for a long time. And so I made the attempt to create a hybund of my own that toggled between a diary of a season in a fire tower and haiku punctuating the diary entries. And I just love his sensibility. He's a great noticer. He's a great seeker. He walked thousands of miles across Japan on these journeys in search of. Well, he tells us in his books he's in search of enlightenment and adventure and a way into the mysteries of life on earth. So that would probably be a second one, a third book. Boy, that's. It's so tough to narrow this down, but I would say I'll just give you a book. I love Marilyn Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping. It's a beautiful book about two sisters growing up in Idaho in the 20th century. It's a book in which the landscape kind of pulses with the same vigor that the human characters do. And as someone who responds to places as intensely or sometimes even more so than I do to people, I really respond to works that have a deep sense of place as part of the narrative. I think in companion to that, I'll also mention because, partly because it's out in a movie form now and it's getting some attention, Dennis Johnson's novella Train Dream, it's set in the same part of the world it said in Idaho in, well, 100 years ago or so, about a man confronting the changing frontier in America and experiencing the coming of trains, massive forest fires, encounters with wild animals. And it, too, has a kind of. Yeah, there's a kind of undergirding of place. That is something I really respond to in works of art.
- [23:09]
A
That's a beautiful list. You're adding Train Dreams to my book list here, as I had heard about the film coming out.
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B
But
- [23:22]
A
that little snippet is sparking my curiosity, and it's wonderful because I can see the influences of these writers and works in your writing. I want to ask you a question that I actually, I asked you at Bookworks in Albuquerque when you were doing a reading in October, and you probably don't recall it, but I wanted to ask it to you again because it has. Your response has had a disturbing solace effect on me. And I've thought about it a lot and not expecting the same answer anyway, but it's something I think you've thought a lot about. So what I asked then I'm asking again, is, you know, I've thought about your work a lot. I think I said more than I should admit in public. And I imagine you looking through a fire lookout window to the mountain, and I think of the masses of people who Stare into the window of the Internet countless hours a day. What word would you have for those of us who are being digitally overserved every day?
- [24:34]
B
I distinctly remember that question. It's not every day that a writer hears from a reader who admits they've spent a lot of time thinking about your work. Maybe too much time thinking about your work. I don't know too many writers who are so without ego that they wouldn't respond to that by saying, well, it's not possible to think too much about my work. So, yeah, I do remember that question, and I also remember my answer. And it would be the same now as it was then, which is go outside. Yes, living when and where we do, we have managed to swaddle ourselves in comfort and reduce the difficulties of life that humans have spent millennia dealing with on Earth, which is that it gets cold, it rains, it snows, the wind blows, the sun bores down. We have managed to protect ourselves from the discomforts of all of that. But I think it behooves us to go out into the world, outside, out of doors, out from under rooftops and four walls and windows, and be in what our species long understood as its true home, which is the face of the earth. But I think there's a second meaning to the phrase of going outside, which is go outside the confines of the screen. Go outside the curated unreality that our tech overlords have designed to keep us coming back like addicted rats on the wheel, pressing the lever for another hit of cocaine. You know, I think the lab experiments that have been done on animals to addict them to some behavior and then see how that changes them, see how it rewires their brains. And all of those experiments could have predicted what's happening to us now as our tech overlords tweak their algorithms to keep us coming back. Back for another hit of dopamine, another hit of outrage, another hit of whatever goofy 6 second TikTok video is forcing us to stare at it and demand more of that and the next hit and the next hit. Because I think that way lies ruined for our species. It's disconnecting us, the timeless things. It's disconnecting us from our neighbors here on Earth, those that have wings, those that have four legs instead of two. And it's also disconnecting us from each other. Now, the promise was, this was a new way of connection. The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world promised that endlessly, relentlessly, optimistically, cheerfully, with great smiles on their faces. And I don't know anyone who is sentient and paying attention, who would say yes. The promise of screens has connected us all more and deepened our connections with each other. No, it's just the opposite. It's been an acid bath for social connection and human intimacy, dissolving our bonds. And the more we can spend time with other humans face to face or time outdoors in the presence of, of other living organisms, I think the better and the more we're able to restore our true intimacy with things that actually endure.
- [29:14]
A
Thank you for that. That lasting line of intimacy with things that endure. The short sighted nature of so much of dominant culture is killing us. And you are literally a voice in the wilderness who I think is calling us back home. And I don't take that for granted. I think I'm so grateful for your voice and wanting there to be a choir of these voices. And I know they're out there. And how do we, you know, my desire is to keep listening, observing to those voices and not in a passive way, but to steep in the intimacy of this amazing planet that we're a part of. We're just one species, a part of this. And I think your, your books offer a lot of delight and reality of what that looks like. And I know that it's been an unfolding. You spent, am I correct? Is it over two decades as a fire watch in the Gila now?
- [30:33]
B
Yeah, that's correct. I just finished my 23rd year as a fire lookout.
- [30:38]
A
That's amazing. How would you describe your relationship with the Gila wilderness? Would you say it's one of the great loves of your life?
- [30:50]
B
Absolutely. That's a great way to put it. I showed up there with no knowledge of it 23 years ago at the invitation of a friend. And she was a fire lookout that summer and invited me out to spend a few days with her. She was an old friend from the University of Montana, where I'd gone to journalism school as an undergraduate. And so had she. At the time, I was working in the World Financial center, Lower Manhattan, 10th floor carpeted cubicle, and she kind of gently mocked me and said, you know, get out of your cubicle, come breathe some fresh air in the desert southwest. So I, you know, how could I not take up a friend's invitation to come visit her fire tower at 10,000ft above sea level in what I later learned was our first wilderness area so designated in the country and in the world, in fact. And I, so I went out and paid her a visit and something happened to me and my, for lack of a better word, Soul on that journey. I just responded so viscerally to the beauty and, and the harshness of the landscape there. And I thought after three days of being there, I don't want this to end. I, you know, I want more. And I talked myself into her job. With her help, I was. I was able to convince her boss that I should be her replacement. And that, yeah, that changed the course of my life. I had been living in. Living in the borough of Queens just across the river from Manhattan, and commuting every day to the financial district and wearing a shirt and tie, working against daily deadline, putting out a newspaper or at least a portion of a newspaper, and. But my one contact, my first contact with that place changed everything. And ever since, I feel like I've been in this kind of profound dialogue with this landscape that beckoned to me and called out to something wild in me. And ever since, I've been exploring it, hiking in it, backpacking in it, working in it, sitting watch over it, and trying to unravel its mysteries, which are many. There's an overlay of human civilization there that dates back thousands of years. Different overlapping cultures. You can wander around certain parts of that landscape. And fine potsherds and arrowheads, turquoise beads worked by human hands more than a thousand years ago. And so there's that element of the landscape too. It's not just the geophysical form and the biotic life on it. There's evidence of other cultures interacting with it and, you know, the beauty of their pottery and the imagery on it and the clay that they used and the pigments they found to decorate it, the tools they fashioned to be able to eat from the landscape. It's all right there. It's all at the surface, much of it, if you know where to look. And so the place kind of hums with an ancient mystery that I find very intriguing. And it's in the process of changing so rapidly now that I'm also trying to catalog those places where it remains unchanged or places the ancient forest is still intact and hasn't burned because so much of it has burned in recent years. So it's a dynamic landscape. It's very, very wild. And I never for a second of my life have gotten tired of being there.
- [35:35]
A
Yeah, and that's so noticed in your writing, that relationship and that the ways in which you're. You're marking your own experience of it as one person amongst a lineage of folks who have lived and worked and observed this landscape and been in relationship to it within their own communities. I also see this evolution in your writing, in this latest book, the Mountain Knows the Mountain. And as you mentioned earlier, that you've been inspired by. Am I saying, is it high boon? Am I saying that correctly?
- [36:28]
B
Yeah, that's right.
- [36:30]
A
And the haiku traditions. And I can see as a reader how it's. It's, at least from my lens, it's like, sharpened your perspective. How would you say that these traditions have opened up your writing from. From your perspective in relationship to the mountain?
- [36:50]
B
I would say that the tendency in myself, and I would. I would also venture to say in our culture is toward a kind of maximalism, like, tell me everything. Go further, go deeper. In my own work, I've tried to draw in various different strands, different disciplines, different genres, as a way of trying to understand this landscape. I've, you know, I've deployed history, natural history. Sometimes I've delved into court documents, sometimes I've delved into diaries kept by people like Aldo Leopold. I've tried to read all the work that I know of that I can get my hands on, that touches on the history of this place, just in an effort to understand it as deeply as I could. And there's something about haiku that steps away from that hunger to. To say as much as you know, or to describe and explain ad nauseam. Because what it's trying to do is capture snapshots of reality and little moments and kind of bring them to life through the frame of a very confining form, which is the 17 syllable form in three phrases or three lines. Five syllables, seven syllables. Five syllables. That's how it was practiced in Japanese anyway. And there's something about the radical concision of that form and the kind of box it places you inside of that almost forces you to say the essential thing by saying so little. And I kind of loved that I started seeing metaphors in that. Like, when I'm in my tower, I'm looking through 72 panes of glass, each about 10 or 11 inches square, each its own little box, revealing one little piece of the landscape inside of it. And I started thinking about haiku as almost like one little pane of glass, right? Like one little box, one little square through which you see something essential. Yeah. And when you've written so much about a specific place, as I have in the case of this fire tower and the landscape that it's situated in, if you're going to keep saying more, it behooves you to find new ways to say more. And as I say in the forward of the book, you Know, maybe. Maybe for me, the way to say more was to find new ways to say less. And somehow that way of thinking about haiku in relation to the place and the job and what I see there was liberating. It did help me see the place new because I was deploying a different lens to do the seeing. And, yeah, that sort of thing is crucial to my creative life. To keep it fresh and to keep having this same experience year after year in the same place. But enliven it and see deeper into the heart of it, which is what I hope I can still continue to do as long as I'm able to have this job and get to this place miles from the nearest road. I want to find new ways to see it fresh.
- [41:11]
A
That lands deeply in me. I think that's another way to talk about any relationship of love. Always finding new ways to see it fresh. And you had this line on haikus where you said, move always toward a deepening obscurity. And a practice that I've tried to engage in since reading your book is, upon nightly reflection, trying to write a haiku about the day. You know, not trying to capture every detail, things that I hope to remember about my life, my work, my kids. But what's a way to move towards this deepening obscurity of just a snapshot that is contained, can only contain so much particularity. But often it's through that pinhole that so much is touched or is seen through. And I think that the image of your window panes. And like each. Each shows a piece of the mountain. It's a lovely collage of the imagination.
- [42:23]
B
That's a great way to put it. Yeah, I like the collage of the imagination.
- [42:29]
A
I also got a kick, you know, you were talking about. It's been noted that Esau wrote 20,000 haiku, most of them bad. I revere his example. I think when it comes to poetry of any kind, there's this desire that of perfection, of productivity, and there's a freedom and liberation in that. Not every haiku, every poem has to be this transcendent piece. What is it about the output of just the practice of doing haiku, of writing haiku, that has been instructive for you?
- [43:15]
B
I think it's reintroduced the concept of play to my writing. When you're writing, as I had prior to this book, 75,000 80,000 word works of narrative nonfiction, that kind of need to hold together as a story, beginning to end, it can feel daunting. It can be a real slog sometimes. And it starts to feel like work, because you've got to revise so much and you write and it leads to a dead end or a cul de sac, and you got to find your way out. Whereas with haiku, sit down in the morning, or maybe I'm in my tower in the afternoon and I touch pen to paper and I see if I can write 17 syllables. And even when I fail, I might still delight myself in the effort. I might get one out of three lines right or two out of three lines right, and it's okay. It's okay if it's not perfect. It's okay if I don't nail it on the first attempt. I can try again. I can also revise those, which I do, but just staying spontaneous and reintroducing the concept of play and fun into the work of stringing together words, that alone has been a huge gift. And yeah, I don't mind the fact that my failures are littered throughout my notebooks. Issa, as, as you mentioned, wrote 20,000 haiku, but, you know, 500 of them are pretty darn good and stand the test of time and are still being read today. So I probably won't write that many. But if I had the same percentage, I'd be happy. Yeah, if one of 40 turns out to be a keeper, I'm down with that. I made sure in my new book to keep some of the clunkers in there just to show the process of get it right and sort of failing or mostly failing, because that's part of the writing process too. If you're gonna make it a journey, a journey of discovery, which is what I want writing to be for me.
- [46:01]
A
One of your haikus made me laugh. And just the through line of truth that I just gonna share it here. All the hip people agree that nature is doomed. Meanwhile, the hawk hunts. And it was one of those kind of cackling truths for me of the state of our planet. Does not mean to bypass participation, does not mean to not observe how life adapts, changes. There's a. What strikes me is just the hipness of lobbing in from the outside and almost like head and hands. And of course, there's plenty of reason for grief, but there's also reason to bear witness to the life that still flows on. I think Barry Lopez has a great line about fearlessly embracing and loving what is left and holding both to be true. I think in this haiku, it just brought to mind the humor of the phraseology. But also all these other quotes were coming to my mind in that. That Little haiku. And I think haikus often unlock something for me. How do you perceive. When do your own haikus unlock
- [47:37]
B
a
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A
multitude of voices into your own experience and your own sense of discovery?
- [47:45]
B
You know, quite often they're, they're in dialogue with other things I've read or something I've observed. So, yeah, they can be a key that way. A key to dialogue across centuries with oats I revere. I think the one haiku you just mentioned is. It's sort of a good example of that because it's in dialogue with this larger cultural phenomenon that I experience and observe where some people just kind of throw up their hands and say, we've killed this place. It's doomed. We're not gonna save wild nature. And I sometimes think there's like a little note almost of like, sickly triumph in that attitude. Like, we were so powerful that we destroyed the planet. And it's also a letting oneself off the hook of paying attention to what still remains. Like the Barry Lopez note that you just mentioned. Yeah, we, we might take some either deep, deep grief or note of sickly triumph in the fact of our effect on the planet, but we're not all powerful There. There remains much on this earth that is beautiful and vibrant and alive and and thriving and reproducing. Re. So just the, the philosophical intimations of what can seem like a simple haiku can be profound. I, you know, I've read some of Basho, I've read some of Issa that, where they're, they're in conversation with classical Chinese poets from a thousand years before them. To be in what I hope is conversation with Issa and Basho also puts me in conversation with all the sources that flowed through them. And it's a reminder of continuity, which we should also look for in nature as well, not just our own efforts, but how something can plant a seed in the 8th century in the work of a Chinese poet that flowers again 900 years later in the work of a Japanese poet. And that reflowering, when encountered 330 years later by a dude sitting in a fire tower in the American west, flowers yet again. That, to me is a beautiful analog to the natural world and the persistence of life and the persistence of regeneration. So, yeah, haiku is a way for me to feel part of a very, very long effort by the human species to make music from our experience.
- [51:32]
A
I wanted to ask about your work as a fire lookout. Fire Watch is with the US Government, and you're a writer, a poet, and you are not A man of bureaucracy, at least as far as I can see. And you note how bureaucracies create processes that get called work but are not, in fact, real work, as the great Gary Snyder has written spoken about the real work. I'm curious to hear from your perspective. What does real work mean to you?
- [52:11]
B
Real work? I have come more and more to respect work that's done with one's hands, partly because I've had to do some of it myself. I mean, in order for me to get to and from a remote fire tower in the wilderness, I every year have to pull out an axe and a saw and clear the trail, not only for me to get there, but more importantly, for horses and mules to get there with my food and supplies that make life possible that far from a road. And I've also noticed that when I clear trail, the bears seem to like it. They follow those footpaths that I do, and their scat shows that they've passed there. Their paw prints show which way they're moving and where they're coming from there. And there's something deeply satisfying about that. I also cut my own firewood to keep myself warm. And I do a little bit of cooking and heating water with that firewood, which is a way of connecting me to the life of that place. I think. I wrote a haiku recently that goes pine in my wood stove. Energy of centuries becomes warmth of hours. And that's a way of connecting to my place in the world, is recognizing that I'm taking something from that world. It took centuries to build the limb of a tree, and I'm carving it up for my own purposes and repurposing it for my own comfort. And by paying attention to these facts, I can make sacred my consumption of a piece of the world, make it a sacrament, whereas so much of that work is kind of done for us now by others. Coal or natural gas gets burned in some confined power plant atmosphere and then conducted by wires to our home, where we toggle a thermostat that either uses electricity or maybe, who knows, maybe a tank of propane parked outside our house to calibrate the temperature to our liking. And so that kind of fundamental, basic work of keeping oneself warm, clearing trail in the woods, reworking, rebuilding things that fall apart. This remote fire tower that gets battered by extreme weather a lot, that all gets done with the hands. And, yeah, there's just something profoundly satisfying about that. And I try to do most of my writing the same way. I use a manual typewriter that requires a little more Push and a little more effort and fingertips kind of floating across a computer keyboard. I write a lot with one hand, and just the use of the hand in that way seems to unlock pathways in my mind that I don't get when I write on a computer. And I'm not some crazy purist, you know, I'm not having other people type up my work for me on a computer. I do that myself. I own a computer computer, I spend time on it, probably more time than I care to admit, but. But the work for me of writing happens through the hand. And the work that I love best is work that is fundamental to sustaining my life and my comfort cooking, working on my old adobe home in southern New Mexico clearing trail. It all happens with the hand. And somehow that's fundamental to my sense of work now.
- [56:57]
A
And I think this for me plays into why I find your book to be. Again, this is an overused word, but a deeply spiritual book in this very tactile, grounded, textured way through this, the work of the hands, the repetitive work of the hands, the repetition of bearing witness, attention and dialogue, and all these are active and sacramental to what has come before you. And that to me, not self referential. How necessary are these to the health of one's spiritual health within the community of place?
- [57:39]
B
Yeah, I think you're right. There's something about repetition. Those things we repeat over time become what we call rituals. And as I say in my book, you can't spell the word spiritual without ritual.
- [57:57]
A
Yes.
- [57:59]
B
And so, yes, that sense of. Of repetition and. Well, and nothing. That sense of repetition, it feeds into what becomes over time, our spiritual life. I. When I first went to the mountain, I didn't know I would return 22 more times to repeat experience. But the repetition of it became my ritual. Every springtime, my ritual is I go to the mountain, I pack 600 pounds of food and supplies in boxes and I prepare them for mule packers and I hike to 10,000ft and I assume my post. And that's become one repetition in my life, the repetition of which of which becomes a ritual and the ritualization of which becomes the core of my spiritual life. And I'm. I'll admit, I'm just a lucky guy. I stumble into this. I wasn't looking for this. I didn't see it coming. All I did was have the good sense to grasp the opportunity when it was presented to me, not knowing where it would lead. But here I am, 23 years later in a job which I first thought of as a paid writing retreat. Where I would make sense of all the rest of my life growing up on and living in New York City and working at the Wall Street Journal, some of which I've done, but. But the real thing has become trying to understand the landscape where I found myself. And I'm just lucky I showed up. I grasped and it. It changed the course of my life and gave me sustenance and. And connection with a place that I didn't see coming, but which is now at the very core of what I value.
- [60:17]
A
Yeah, I. I often think when I'm reading your work, how lucky you are and the generosity of you sharing that with others. I think it's. It's because not everyone can be a lookout. But it is one of my favorite, I guess, if I can call it a niche genre that I love to read because as you also quote Jim Harris in the book, some people have to stay outside, as we were talking about earlier. And it's a different cleaning of the lens to see and speak to those who don't have that opportunity. And I just find it to be so vivid to human spirituality with the world that we are within. And your books have that rare gift to me as a reader that they circle back into conscious thought regularly and just knowing that they shape me in ways that I'm sure there's ways I'm not even conscious of, but that they're these little. These maps of discovery, of walking landscape in a ritualistic way, to know place, to know myself within that place and know the community that extends from that place. And I think you exhibit this really well in your book because you also write within community. You include some writings from your partner Monica and Bobby Bird, and they show up in this book. What's for you is the significance of writing and publishing from a place of community?
- [62:18]
B
Well, I think it's an acknowledgment that that's how we live. Right. Our culture in particular, venerates the solitary genius, the auteur, and. But if you scratch the surface of the work of any writer and get down to where it came from, it came out of a community because. So that's the way we live. Yes, it happens alone in a room, but it's fed by all these sources. And the Japanese haiku poets were very explicit about this, which is part of what I love about them. They did not venerate the solitary, secluded, sequestered genius because their whole way of practicing poetry emerged out of a communal practice. Haiku, before it became haiku, was just the first verse of a collection of linked verses that might extend 36, 50, 100 verses. And they would emerge out of these parties that were thrown where it was like, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to get together with our friends, our neighbors, and we're going to write a poem together. We're going to take turns, we're going to follow certain protocols and certain forms, but we're going to do it together. It was almost like a parlor game. And so even though haiku later broke away from that practice, in part because, you know, the first verse of those extended poems was always so important, it set the tone for everything that came after, because each verse had to be linked in some way, in some specific way to the verse before it and the verse after. And the first verse being so important, they became sort of like famous, some of them, or at least renowned. And they started to collect it almost like greatest hits, like the greatest hits of first verses in the practice of communal poetry. And then once people saw them that way, as disconnected from everything that came after, they recognized it as, oh, it, it can be its own thing. It could be just 17 syllables and not the start of something much longer. But even so, the Japanese haiku poets, they would, when they wrote their haibun diaries, they would throw in poems from friends and they would. They would name check their inspirations and they would quote from other works. And even Basho, in his narrow road to the interior, he's got a great passage where he talks about his sake drinking buddy, Etsujin, who was also a poet, and he talks about, you know, why he loves this guy, and he gives a really cool snapshot of his character and. And then he just drops in a few of that guy's poems to give us even more of a flavor. And I really wanted to replicate that in this book and kind of run counter to the idea that I had, that I alone had a relationship worth elucidating with this mountain, because I'm not the only one who does. My wife, she visits in the summers. She spends significant time there. She too keeps a journal, and she also has insightful things to say about what it's like to live there. So I wanted to include her viewpoint. And then my friend Bobby Bird, who had published my previous book, made a visit with his wife, Lee Bird, who was my editor on that previous book. And they had a profound experience visiting the mountain, and so much so that Bobby was inspired to write about it. And he wrote a beautiful essay about it. And I thought, this mountain deserves more than One guy singing its praises. It has all these others. So why not bring them together in an anthology of praise for this place? So. And I think that's just a recognition of how we live. I've spent time with there. I've spent time with Bobby and Lee there, and we've had communal experiences of the place. And I wanted the book to reflect that.
- [67:12]
A
I think it's a. It was a marvelous thing to showcase community in that way. Without it just added. It added texture to the entire arc of the book. I thought to bring in these multiple perspectives of. There's a sharing, there's an interconnectedness that. That enhances it all. And so I appreciated the multivocality of that choice. And this might be an ambitious question to ask you, but I think so much about, in your work, how discerning of the tools you use, how you choose to live, the cost of some of those choices. And in your book, you talk about, imagine a future where we have less but are more. I'm curious, when you dare to imagine that future, what does that look like?
- [68:17]
B
Well, it's certainly a future less cluttered with useless things that we've been taught and told are necessary for our full flourishing, but are really just consumer goods that are meant to enrich the people who make them and sell them and don't actually enrich our lives. It's a hard future to envision because everything is pushing us in the opposite direction. Right. It's like our whole economy is propped up by consumer spending. And our major push for investment right now in this culture is the building of data centers and the deployment of artificial intelligence chips linked to harness this vast computing power. And for what? So that we can have an imaginary friend that we can talk to through a screen? Like.
- [69:33]
A
Right.
- [69:34]
B
I'm not sure that's the answer to our woes. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's only going to deepen our woes. And so the essence of the future I want to envision for ourselves is one where we. Where we re. Embrace almost a kind of principle of anarchism, in the best sense of that word, where we bond together in groups devoted to mutual aid and support. And we do most of the mutual aiding and supporting face to face. And the purpose of the bonding together is to grow food together and share it, when possible, with each other and put it up for the winter together, preserve it for the dark and cold months, and find ways to come together to celebrate places we love and find a way to get back to the basics of our Human experience that aren't so devoted to driving us apart from each other and that aren't making us as human beings, kind of the ground where. Where our tech overlords strip mine human bodies and human minds for their own profit. But the future, yeah, devoted to the hand. What can be made from the hand, the artisanal, the artistic. And less, less connected to supply chains that span continents and that rely on the labor of people who are deeply exploited in places where we don't have to confront that exploitation. And all of it, of course, devoted to just feeding this insatiable hunger. We have to fill the emptiness inside of ourselves with things. If we can find a way to cultivate that space inside of ourselves in a contemplative way, in a deep way, in a way that reforms connection with each other and with the Earth. We won't need so much cheap plastic junk made in factories far distant from us by hands that are virtually enslaved and exploited. We won't need that because we'll have everything we need right in front of us.
- [72:34]
A
Beautifully said. It's an awakening of the old ways and also in the new culture in our times. I think that is the. Especially having children. That is the dream of trying to cultivate that now in ways that we can within the body of the chaos of, as you said, the data centers and the tech overlords and knowing how to do that and teaching the skills of the hand and the heart to one another and to next generations. Phil, you've been so generous with your time and I'm so grateful for all the books that you've written and how they've influenced my life and my family's life. And I'm excited as always, to revisit them. But also, as your work continues to come out, I'll be one of the first people to pick up the latest copy because I find them deeply healing in the cacophony of the day to day rubbles of the empire we're living in. And as a way to close we always, I always like to ask to keep it embodied and in touch with our human bodies and spirit. If you were going to pair our conversation with a drink, what would be your drink of choice?
- [74:04]
B
That is a very good question. I'm such a slow thinker that my mind always struggles with category matching. Where the category. All right, don't, don't immediately suggest to my mind anyway, linkages. But a drink, I think when we started the call and before you started recording, I confess to you that I was late waking up today because I've been spending time helping a friend through a tough situation in a hospital, and I was gonna need my coffee before we started recording. And for me, there's something about coffee that's joyful and pleasing in that as you slip it, sip it slowly, you can feel its effect on your body and your mind, this kind of awakening. And I always find that in conversations like these, where somebody's asking me questions that force me to think about things that might just be second nature to my existence, that the mere fact of being pinned down and asked a direct, good, thoughtful question awakens my mind and helps me be connections I might not have even articulated before. So I think a good cup of half decaf half caffeine, so the end result isn't a wiry, jittery awakening, but a nice, pleasing heightened alertness would be just the thing to pair with this conversation.
- [76:12]
A
That makes perfect sense to me as I've been sipping a cup throughout.
- [76:18]
B
Oh well, we've been doing the same thing, actually. I poured myself two cups. I've got two cups side by side here on the table with me so I wouldn't have to get up and go refill my cup in the middle
- [76:34]
A
of the that's a wise man. Good people, thank you for listening to this episode of of Contemplify. May it aid you in plumbing the earthy depths of this shared cosmos. Pop over to contemplify.com to find the show notes for this episode or sign up for the monthly Contemplify Non Required Reading list. Or sign up for the weekly Contemplative practice Lo Fi and Hushed. If you are enjoying Contemplify, you can rate and review it on your podcast player. It helps fill the cup of contemplative cheer. The theme song of Contemplify is called Langside by Charles Enns and Darian Hoveus. Fellas, thanks as always. I'm looking forward to bringing you more musings here and conversations with contemplatives in the world in the near future. Until then, be well
- [77:37]
B
ra.