Category Archives: Wild Thang

Far-Hearted

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Far-hearted is a term once used by the San (known as “Bushmen”) of South Africa.

Think for a moment.

What could it mean?

A far-hearted person is one who lacks generosity, who fails to reciprocate, who hoards wealth for him/herself, who does not see a “whole.” The San existed on a gift economy–giving gifts instead of exchanging through barter or money. Such a nice thing to do, but of course, not without purpose. It led to group survival.

Like everything, this definition of far-hearted is complex. It is completely plucked out of context. It rings of capitalism. It suggests a spread-out world of communities with no ties.

I was raised to cherish my independence. No, it wasn’t a girl power thing; my brothers were too. Coasting into adulthood, I remained determined to never depend on anyone for anything. Twenty-year-old me often preached to friends about how my boyfriend (now husband) and I had a vision of remaining 100% independent from one another even within a dedicated partnership. I was vying for an ideal.  I didn’t want to get lost in someone else’s folds. Neither did he. My plan: We would be together, but I would never depend on him for anything and vise versa.

Whoa.

How arrogant.

Americans especially pride themselves on an independence that is largely bullshit. A human, according the books, is a social creature. We all do depend on each other–for food, for love, for stability, for reassurance, for boundaries, for shelter, for everything.

You depend on your UPS man. You depend on the woman slapping mayonnaise on your sandwich at Subway. You depend on a smile from your child.

The down-side of depending on people? You will be disappointed. You will feel pain.

So what?

I would place a bet that we are shifting, RIGHT NOW, into an era of interdependence. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Have we forgotten that natural ecosystems are built upon interdependence and symbiotic relationships? Yep.

Reminder: That is the way of the world. It is how the world sustains itself. You can’t escape it.

[All this said, I do believe that we are the only ones responsible for our own happiness. In this post, I'm talking about basic survival and the acknowledgement that we depend on one other.]

Trite as it sounds, what about aspiring towards being….The Near-Hearted Clan?

Mkondo

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Do you have an adored short story? I never did. Or I always fell back on the wisdom of good old Flannery O’Connor. Now I do! A month ago, my writing friend Brian pressed Anthony Doerr’s first story collection, The Shell Collector, into my hand, “You have to read this. It’s all about place.” At that point, I’d never heard of Anthony Doerr.

Sad for me.

His excellent ending story “Mkondo” borders on the mysticism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But it is tied to the real hard world by smell, sound and taste. It’s hard to argue with this story. It whispers into the reader’s ear,  ”We are morphed, changed and influenced by our physical environments, so for all you people out there ignoring it, well, ……….

sad for you.”

Doerr’s definition of the Swahili word mkondo, shared as the epigraph, is as follows (my cross-referencing confirmed it):

[mkondo, noun. Current, flow, rush, passage, run, e.g., of water in a river or poured on the ground; of air through a door or window; i.e., a draft; of the wake of a ship, a track, the run of an animal.]

Make what you will of this word. But, here’s a thought. Do some places allow you (that’s right, the one-and-only unique you) to flow more than others? Or do you think that’s a lame excuse, that we should grin and bear and adapt happily to the place we are plopped?

I’m into middle ground these days, but… your thoughts, s’il vous plait.

Rework In Progress

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Hey everyone, I’m reworking the blog’s structure. It’ll be up and changed next week.

Here’s the plan.

Three place-based posts per week.

Philosophy Tuesdays–exploring a word or theory or belief.

Geography Thursdays–rediscovering lost places, whether that’s a closet, a river, or a foot.

Conversation Weekend–sharing story or discussion (I have had, overheard or read).

Unproductive and…

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What does productive mean? I’ve been battling with this term and the legacy of it during my past year–one of catapults and false starts in the world of self-employment, writing all day everyday and maintaining my fairly simple and solitary life in the woods.

We grow up learning that we were born to produce. It goes hand in hand with survival. Someone urged us to be productive, or else __________ (fill in your own doomsday blank). Well, being productive does feel good. It assures us of our identity. I think; I do; therefore I am. It leads to change. It pays the bills. It is motion.

It is also a mask, because somewhere along the line, produce became dependent on quantity, not feeling or depth. It got skewed. We began to define ourselves by what we do, instead of how we exist. What’s the first question you ask a stranger or a stranger asks you: “So, what do you do?” Try replacing that question with “So tell me, who are you?” at a party– guaranteed you’ll shock the hell of that person.

In her new book “Dawn Light,” natural history writer Diane Ackerman slams it down:

Monet simply proclaimed, and adored, what we all experience from moment to moment: the wash of sensations that greet us on waking, and which we try, at our cost, to dismiss as wasteful, self-indulgent, unproductive, or by some other term designed to separate us from our true self. The freedom of unbridling that self and losing it in nature is immeasurable. [my bold]

Her sentence is the antidote for my personal guilt.

I used to slink into my new garden, hoping that my disciplined self didn’t notice. I used to sneak away to crack open the spine of a new book and secretly “indulge” myself in literature, as if it were cocaine. I used to feel anxiety overtake my exploratory hikes through pine forests. The refrain in my brain: I sure as shit shouldn’t be enjoying this delightful thing; I should be producing work. What an awful way to live, especially when I live in a natural place that blows my heart right open.

What if tending to your senses is being productive? That might start a revolution. I can already hear the voices of some of my dear loved ones: “You mean make time for joy, for real play, for seeing how my body responds to my surroundings? But I don’t have time for that?” Well, John Muir made time. He tied himself to the high limb of a tree and lived through a vicious thunderstorm just to see what it felt like to be a tree limb in a storm. Why not?

I might not have written the 3,000 words that I planned for yesterday, but I wrote 1,000 words and, guess what, it was fun. Then I learned something about the world and myself when a Great Horned Owl landed on the porch. I padded outside to sit on my haunches and do nothing but stare at it (for long lazy minutes I didn’t keep track of)– eye to eye.