OLLI Class November 8 2003

Download

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/FieldGuide/cal_poly_field_guide.pdf

Introductions—what got you interested in this class and what you want from it? How much do you want to walk, uphill? Trails? Dirt roads, off trail?

Provide notebooks—OLLI—their expertise—meteorologists, geologists, botanists, wildlife, agriculturists? Planners? Writers and photographers?

Plan for the day

Hour in lab—hike from 10-11; break; 11-12 lunch break; back at 1 pm in lab

Poly canyon, horse canyon, arboretum

Or just barns

Quarry, arch area, write and read what we’ve written

Come back to lab or seminar room—pictures or text? –make anthology

Lab presentation—cal poly land project—my brainchild—started 1999 when I finished book on Sh. And Bible

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/Shakespeare/ShBible/Shbib.html

and found end of literary scholarship

What did I want to do—faced question

Cal Poly 10K acres intrigued me

Hiking enjoyment, learning about land, Environmental stewardship, —asset not properly managed

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/topics/stewardship/SaveOaks/index.HTML

Place study—conference here—american studies association—diablo: mapping americal culture—interedisciplinarity—its appeal: anthropology, local history, technology, politics

http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress/framapame.htm

Collect information on Website—presentations senior projects, etc

Make course on land—get faculty to agree

Funding and support from Zingg—Centennial sem. Proposal

Help with website from Library

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/overview/maps/main.html

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/overview/airViews/large/index.htm

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/topics/Geology/Geotour/index.htm

Explore it like land—spatial and topics coordinates

Course—technology requirement—turf and land; difficulty of interdisciplinarity—need for GE certification because not a major class

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/overview/Archives/CPLcourse/CPLdescrip.html

Technology area—learn technological skill; deal with technological issues

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/overview/Whatsnew/index.html

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/topics/agriculture/studentsites/2003a/index.htm

Book—last stage and longest and hardest—sky and mary; design; money—foundation support

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/FieldGuide/cal_poly_field_guide.pdf

about the book

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/FieldGuide/index.htm

look at maps—and tours

recreation chapter

Take 15 minutes to explore website

Go to The Arts:

http://polyland.lib.calpoly.edu/topics/arts/index.html

Go to Arts in Field Guide

Go to English 380

Journal pages

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/380/Journal/2003journpages/April%2022.html

From “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard

I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clude where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why. (12)

Unfortunately nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water befor my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillnmess and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand non-chalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now you do. For a week last September, migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket. I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparantly weightless as well as invisible…These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.

The fawn

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/380/hikes/rockslideridge/index.htm

pennington canyon and back

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/380/hikes/penning6-01/index.htm

sunset and rainbow

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/380/rockslidemay1/rockslidemay1.html

Its all a matter of keeping my eyes open…recently an author advised me to set my mind at east about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that when the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade wont topple at a single cut through the stem; instead the cut stem keeps dropping an inch at a time and finally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds. Meanwhile the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems. (17-18)

http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/380/hikes/mortars/index.htm

From “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Three poems by Wendel Berry

Water

I was born in a drouth year.  That summer

my mother waited in the house, enclosed

in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind,

for the men to come back in the evenings,

bringing water from a distant spring.

veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank.

And all my life I have dreaded the return

of that year, sure that it still is

somewhere, like a dead enemy’s soul.  Fear

of dust in my mouth is always with me,

and I am the faithful husband of the rain,

I love the water of wells and springs

and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns.

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise

of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup.

My sweetness is to wake in the night

after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

In this World

The hill pasture, an open place among the trees,

tilts into the valley.  The clovers and tall grasses

are in bloom.  Along the foot of the hill

dark floodwater moves down the river.

The sun sets.  Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.

I have climbed up to water the horses

and now sit and rest, high on the hillside,

letting the day gather and pass.  Below me

cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands,

slow and preoccupied as stars.  In this world

men are making plans, wearing themselves out,

spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

The Wish to be Generous

ALL that I serve will die, all my delights,

the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,

the silent lilies standing in the woods,

the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all

will burn in man's evil, or dwindle

in its own age. Let the world bring on me

the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know

my little light taken from me into the seed

of the beginning and the end, so I may bow

to mystery, and take my stand on the earth

like a tree in a field, passing without haste

or regret toward what will be, my life

a patient willing descent into the grass.

Two poems by Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert,  repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - - -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Vultures

Like large dark

lazy

butterflies they sweep over

the glades looking

for death,

to eat it,

to make it vanish,

to make of it the miracle:

resurrection.  No one

knows how many

they are who daily

minister so to the grassy

miles, no one

counts how many bodies

they discover

and descend to, demonstrating

each time the earth’s

appetite, the unending

waterfalls of change.

No one

moreover,

wants to ponder it,

how it will be

to feel the blood cool,

shapeliness dissolve.

Locked into

the blaze of our own bodies

we watch them

wheeling and drifting, we

honor them and we

loathe them,

however  wise the doctrine,

however  magnificent the cycles,

however  ultimately sweet

the huddle of death to fuel

those powerful wings.

Entries from Student Journals in English 380:

“Ecolit—Reading and Writing the Landscape”

It rained hard today.  The morning started out great. The rays of light lazered through the passes to the east just over the Grade.  It wsas warm and smelled like fresh grass.  Every time it rains, my nose starts to run.  it's not just a plugged sticky nose, it's more of a watery allergenic type.  That's how I knew it was going to rain tonight.  Sure enough, here it comes.  It started as a slight mist but has now turned into a raging downpour.  The drops of water on the ground and on my truck in the front yard have beat down on everything, flattening the thin stemmed grass.  Puddles forming, water running.  This rain is the key to many good things, especially for the ranchers.  Rain on the hillside means an extra couple of weeks of grazing for the cattle on the hillside.  The cattle love it as they don't have to be confined in drylots and fed by machines.  They can roam and eat as they please, fattening themselves to give the meat I dearly love

Rick Bos

Old tired tree,

you have seen so much

of this world.

You have watched us

as we come and go,

servants to struggle and fortune.

You grasp grasp only

for the sun-

your branches outstretched

arms to hold each dawn.

But we-

we are impermanent,

we cannot root ourselves in

one soil too long.

You seem to know

this failing of man,

you seem to understand

that one day we too will be gone.

"Why struggle for a legacy-

why work for false wealth?"

Could your questions

sound any louder

than the silence you live by?

If I could have such reason,

if I could absorb such patience

from the earth-

I would not be afriad of tomorrows

that may never come,

then I could stretch my fingers to the

dawn and live in your quiet.

Kim Hiroto

The afternoon wind

blows colder but with care,

for it is still settling in

the afternoon air

on this hillside.

Upon this large stone

the hillside welcomes me

as one of its own.

As the wildflowers

and the weeds and the

dirt does as well.

I feel a chill run

down my back

but what does this

mean but that I must

experience that.

As the stones and the

weeds and the wildflowers do,

I must endoure what

the hillside does too.

Ernesto Villegas

On our third hike I found a gigantic oak tree. The rest of my peers continued

exploring, but I was intrigued by my giant friend. I went to him and he

welcomed me by waving his massive branches. I found a low branch that seemed

like a perfect place to sit. I sat and drank a little water from my backpack.

I looked up at my tree and my childhood engulfed me. I tentitively stook on

the branch and climbed onto another limb. One of my classmates joined me and

we both lost years off our lives and climbed our oak tree. I climbed higher,

remembering more and more about how fun it was to hide in the braches of a

tree. I sat in once of the trees' massive limbs and relaxed he slowly rocked

me back and forth in the wind. It felt so wonderful to be held in a being so

much larger than I.

Wendy Traenkner

The wind pushes through the treetops, ravishing each leaf as it

passes, so that a million green bodies flutter in protest at once and then

resettle themselves, waiting for the next current. It sounds like rushing

water, a distant stream. I wish I could see the brook that the wind so

falsely whispers...In the wind lies Nature's test of perseverance. It blows

hard, but the trees endure, and in the process become stronger. "The wind

blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it

comes from or where it is going. (John 3:8)"

Laticia Widman

Some of the class went on to the top of Rockslide Ridge. Others, myself included, went to the top of Caballo Peak. At the top I only momentarily stopped – the western slope was drawing me, drawing me to descend down its face. No one else went with me, which I desired, for I wanted to return alone. I weaved my way down through the brush, enjoying the aromatic oils given-off my their leaves. At times I would break off a piece of foliage or flower, bring it right up to my face and inhale all the strength of its fragrance. I pushed my way through a thicket of native shrubs, silently saying my ‘pardon-me’s’ as I passed. The beautiful community was comprised of Mimulus species, Salvia mellifera, Rhamnus crocea, and Artemisia californica. Nature weaves such nice textural and colorful combinations. Every landscape designer could learn from just walking through nature and taking note of how nature brings her beauty together. The Mimulus and Salvia flowers of this community make a very pleasing combination. The gray foliage of the Artemisia and the dark green foliage of the Rhamnus also combine well together, and make a fine foil for the scene. It makes me want to duplicate this plant combination in my own landscape!

Mark Roberts