Category Archives: Dharma Reflections

GRIZZLY LESSONS FROM PEACOCK

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Last year a man was killed and partially eaten by a grizzly in Yellowstone. That same year an American dentist, a member of the trophy hunting organization Safari Club International with at least 43 trophy kills including caribou, moose, deer, buffalo, polar bear and mountain lion on his resume, illegally killed a celebrity lion, Cecil, in Zimbabwe

Which inspires more hope for the future of earth, a predator that kills for food or a predator that kills for a trophy on the wall?

When I think of hope, Doug Peacock, author, grizzly bear and bison expert, wild lands activist and character model for Hayduke in Ed Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” comes to mind. He went to Southeast Asia in the 1960s a warrior/patriot/true believer ready to fight and kill and die for his country. He accomplished the first two but returned from Viet Nam with no more hope than the tattered remains of a road map to Montana, “to remind him of both beloved country and mythical place,” in the words of Jack Turner. Peacock went into the wilderness alone because he loved the place and was guided by its myth. He found hope (and healing) by living for long periods in close proximity to grizzly bears. Peacock lived his hope. In his book “Grizzly Years” he describes it in terms of power and mystery when he encounters a grizzly in the woods and chooses not to shoot the bear:

“I peered down the gun barrel into the dull red eyes of the huge grizzly. He gnashed his jaws and lowered his ears. The hair on his hump stood up. We stared at each other for what might have been seconds but felt like hours. I knew once again that I was not going to pull the trigger. My shooting days were over. I lowered the pistol. The giant bear flicked his ears and looked off to the side. I took a step backwards and turned my head toward the trees. I felt something pass between us. The grizzly slowly turned away from me with grace and dignity and swung into the timber at the end of the meadow…I felt my life had been touched by enormous power and mystery.”

Those are breathtaking words. There is more raw beauty and hope for planet earth in the relationship and moment they describe than, say, in photographs of the birth of galaxies and the death of stars and suns the size of our solar system or, needless to say, in the raving braggadocio of many of the sneering, self-admiring, bunker living cowboys riding the current campaign trail.

Peacock found hope in the courage it took to lower his pistol in the face of a creature above him in the food chain, choosing life over another round of killing. Something passed between the bear and Peacock, and the bear turned away with a noted grace and dignity as powerful and mysterious as Peacock’s courage of hope. The bear was an active participant. It is neither unreasonable nor difficult to imagine the bear conscious of and changed by the passing. What was exchanged between the man and the bear is encompassed by the living meaning of the word “hope.”

 

 

THOREAU THOUGHTS

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Like most Americans of the last 150 years whose interests include writing, literature, nature, the environment, philosophy and the plethora of customs, laws, ideologies, hopes and fears loosely holding together American society, Henry David Thoreau has been a constant presence in my life. That does not imply detailed knowledge, extensive study or emulation, but, rather, a trustworthy influence in the lifelong process of exploring “…the capabilities of this world.”

At his funeral in 1862 (he died at 44 from tuberculosis) his friend, mentor, patron, employer and admirer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said of Thoreau, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.… His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

And so he has. Still, Thoreau has always inspired critics both vile and legitimate, picking apart the man and his work’s human contradictions and imperfections until organic knowledge, virtue and beauty are reduced to a sterilized, manageable order fitting the critic’s preconceptions of tidiness, hierarchy and decree. He was in his time and continues to be a thorn in the ass of proper, conformist, mainstream, capitalist society and a mirror to the intolerance and narrowness of convention smothering creativity. Emerson, a well-known and beloved American man of letters and philosopher, allowed Thoreau to build a small cabin on some land he owned on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He had two purposes in moving to Walden: write his first book “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” and experiment with reversing the Puritan ethic and Yankee habit of working six days a week and resting one. Instead of following the Puritan model, Thoreau worked one day a week at various jobs and spent the others six searching for answers to the questions he asked, “Who are we? Where are we?”

As he wrote in Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

He was never entirely forgiven by some for living deliberately and for his true account of what he learned and experienced of the essential facts of life. One of them is among my favorite Thoreau quotes: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

 

THE INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF DEEP ECOLOGY

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“Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.”
Robert M. Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

“An intellectual is a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike.”
Spiro T. Agnew, 39th Vice President of the United States

A fine film concerning the environment of Planet Earth, “COWSPIRACY: The Sustainability Secret” is recommended to anyone who cares about……well, anything. One gentleman interviewed in the film, Howard F. Lyman, a lifetime Montana cattle rancher and author of “The Mad Cowboy” commented that “75% of Americans consider themselves environmentalists,” a surprising assertion. It seems to me that if that statement were true the air, water, soil, flora and fauna, of America would certainly be healthier than they in fact are, but some research reveals that Lyman is correct. Most Americans consider themselves environmentalists, though a Gallop Poll puts the percentage at 61%.
Whether Lyman or Gallup are closer to the truth, most people reading this consider themselves environmentalists and will be interested in one of the best environmental activist organizations in America—The Foundation For Deep Ecology, based in San Francisco and found on line at www.deepecology.org. It also suggests a disconnect between those environmentalists and their direct experience of the environment. That is, the perceptions of intellect and the consequential realities of action are not in accord. The Foundation For Deep Ecology addresses this disconnect in several ways, including its efforts “…to helping build the intellectual infrastructure of the conservation movement… Since its inception the foundation has invested in a wide variety of such efforts, supporting numerous journals (Wild Earth, Resurgence, Plain, and AdBusters to name a few), books (The Case Against the Global Economy, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, Turning Away from Technology), conferences and symposia, and advertising campaigns. FDE-sponsored gatherings of leading thinkers led to the formation of several independent organizations including the International Forum on Globalization, the Jacque Ellul Society, and the Wildlands Project. The foundation has also operated an innovative book publishing program that has produced numerous award-winning titles on conservation issues.”

Deep Ecology is a term coined in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess whose environmental thinking had been greatly influenced by Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” He viewed much of the environmental thinking of the time as ‘shallow’ because it did not address the deeper root causes of environmental problems. Thus, Deep Ecology, which has an eight point platform. The first is “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” The eighth is “Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.”
That is, between 61% and 75% of Americans have an obligation to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes, and the necessary intellectual infrastructure to do so is already in place. Check it out.

THE PURPOSE OF A GUN

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In August 1965 the Watts riots exploded in the Los Angeles neighborhood of that name. Though I was out of the country and long-distance telephone calls in those days were expensive, I called a friend living in an adjacent neighborhood to see how he was faring. He reported that the violence of Watts had not spread to his neighborhood, but he was in his front room with a loaded rifle and plenty of ammunition “just in case.” I asked if he thought he would have to use the rifle.

“I hope so,” he replied.

Those three words were as unexpected and disturbing to me as what Watts represented (and revealed) about our country, and they helped me take a tiny step in a counter direction. I was not comfortable with hope that would kill another human, no matter their perceived infraction. I grew up with guns, hunted as a boy and young man and killed, dressed and cleaned enough game animals and birds to know the reality of dinner. Once, while still a boy, I was involved in the rescue of a hapless hunter who had been shot in the thigh by his careless partner. It was not pretty.

I learned early on that the only purpose of a gun is to kill. It is a superb tool for that purpose.

The last time I carried a weapon with the intent to use it was an unsuccessful day of hunting Chukkar in northern Nevada when we shot no birds and the car broke down on an infrequently traveled back road miles from any paved highway. It was not a good position, but within an hour a car appeared heading in the right direction and stopped. We were grateful for the ride but quickly alarmed by the driver’s story and very mien. He informed us that earlier that day he had shot another man during an argument, didn’t know if the victim was alive or not, and was heading south on the least traveled roads he could find. We had stashed our own guns in the broken car with the thought that hitchhikers with weapons have a lesser chance of being picked up, but though the driver’s demeanor made it questionable whether he was telling the truth or spinning a tale we asked to be let out at the first available telephone.

In the spring of 1968 I went to Canada for a month. At the border the customs agent asked if I had any weapons in my van. I replied that I carried a pistol under the seat. He told me I couldn’t take the weapon into Canada but that it would be there for me when I returned to the US. By the end of that month I had determined that the only purpose of a gun is to kill, and I did not want to do that with my life. I left my last gun at Canadian customs and embarked on a path of dealing with life according to the attitude and reality that, whatever its challenges and dangers, killing would not be my response.

Has that decision been beneficial to my life and inner and outer being? Absolutely.

Has it been beneficial to the lives and inner and outer beings of my fellow citizens of planet Earth? I hope so.

THE MOST IMPREGNABLE WALL

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Walls

 

Man is

The great wall builder

The Berlin Wall

The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem

But the wall

most impregnable

Has a moat

Flowing with fright

Around his heart

 

A wall without windows

For the spirit to breeze through

 

A wall

without a door

for love to walk in.

 

Oswald Mtshali

Soweto poet

 

This is a most appropriate poem to read, ponder, and take to heart (sic) at the beginning of each day. What better and well intentioned way could there be to start the day than swimming or building a bridge across the moat of fear, installing windows for the spirit and building a door for love in one’s own heart? Mtshali is a 75 year old South African poet who grew up and survived with spirit and heart on the black side of the Apartheid wall. He knows some things about impregnable walls that most people reading this have the good fortune to never experience. Lucky us.

Still, structures like the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China and other monolithic structures are only the most visible and acknowledged impregnable walls separating the fearful from the feared, the haves from the have nots. There are many kinds of walls built by the innumerable fears of man that keep the spirit of freedom from breezing through and love, and thereby understanding, from walking in. Who in their right mind wants to live with a moat flowing with fright around his or her heart? Who are they who want to build another wall of fear to keep ‘the other’ out, to keep separate ‘us’ and ‘them,’ an impregnable wall lacking spirit, heart and love?

Unfortunately, ‘they’ are many more in number than many others, including me, can comprehend. We all know people who fearfully live behind impregnable walls surrounding the mind, heart and spirit and, sometimes, the physical body in a self-made penitentiary, though they are definitely not penitents. And there is this—every human has some walls built to guard against some real or imaginary fear, not all of them impregnable. Likely the highest profile wall builder in America today is presidential candidate Don ‘The Trumpster’ Trump, who said, “I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me‑‑and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

Yes, mark them, and remember the words of Oswald Mtshali.

Personally, I like the observation of Isaac Newton, who had lots more hair, intelligence and compassion than The Don: “We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”

Let each of us build some bridges and tear down some walls this year.

 

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

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Everyday, everywhere, everyone is affected by “The Law of Unintended Consequences” which the cynical term “Murphy’s Law.” In many cases previously invisible consequences are more aptly termed “ignored” than unintended, and “law” implies a certainty about human understanding of the nature of things that carries its own unintended (ignored) consequences.
In our nation nearly three percent of scientists and approximately half the population discount the findings of the ninety-seven percent of educated, concerned scientists who agree on causes, consequences and crises of human caused global warming (also known as anthropogenic climate disruption) and their unintended (ignored) consequences. The willful ignorance of the discounters, popularly known as ‘deniers,’ gives Murphy a bad name.
Like all human dynamics, unintended consequences are as old as human history, but the term was popularized by Robert Merton, a professor at Columbia University and the founder of the sociology of science. Merton also coined the terms “role model” and “self-fulfilling prophesy.” The term grew out of Merton’s 1936 paper “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Acton” in which he emphasizes that “purposive action…is exclusively concerned with ‘conduct’ as distinct from ‘behavior.’ That is, with action that involves motives and consequently a choice between various alternatives.” He pointed out that action is not always based on reason and that motive affects rationality. The motives driving human caused global warming deniers are clear—the comfort and convenience of the most powerful sectors of modern civilization at the expense, among other components of the web of life, of the less developed nations of the world and the future of all the people of the world, including your and my grandchildren. ‘Irrational’ is a polite term to describe such thinking and the motives that allow it, whether expressed by disgraced ex-politicos like Dick Cheney, those still in the game like Senators James Inofe of Oklahoma and Michael Crapo of Idaho, or the frothy ramblings of media meteorites like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity or asteroids like Sarah Palin. Neither they nor you nor I will miss out on the unintended (ignored) consequences they so blithely deny.
Unintended consequences come in many forms, a few of them beneficial. The two and a half mile wide demilitarized zone between North and South Korea was put in place in 1953 at the end of the Korean War. Despite its name it is the most heavily militarized border on earth. Because humans do not inhabit the zone it has become one of the richest, most diverse natural habitats in the world, home to several endangered and rare animal and plant species and an environmental/ecological haven.
Most unintended consequences are more like the ones from Idaho’s four Lower Snake River Dams built in the 1950s to supply irrigation, hydropower and navigation from Lewiston to the Columbia River. Today they supply little of either, cost taxpayers millions of dollars every year, and have decimated the salmon and steelhead populations of Idaho and turned the once lovely Snake River into a fetid canal.

 

WILD RUMINATIONS

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An old friend who is a long-time falconer recently wrote: “High in the consciousness of falconers that I would choose to keep company with is the knowledge that one does not ‘train’ a raptor. A captive-bred raptor is assisted to become self-realized; a wild-trapped raptor (such as I work with) is exposed to our learned ability to conduct ourselves in such a manner as to encourage them to believe in themselves, yet also believe that it is in their best interest to remain in our company. Either way… they are already perfect… we are the ones who must become worthy of their partnership. With few exceptions, the great falconry works allude to the value of applying the lessons we learn from our exposure to the wild creatures to our entire lives.”
One does not train a raptor, tame wilderness, conquer seas and mountains, or control the forces of nature, but the lessons we can learn from exposure to them are invaluable. We need the wild. We need the wild creatures. We need the lessons they can teach us and, more than at any time in our history, we must become worthy of their partnership. Right now, every week more than 150,000 acres of the earth’s forest are leveled, 70,000 acres are turned to desert and 127 species become extinct. Week after week after week, a litany of abuses of the planet and all that lives upon it continues, driven by a disregard of the value of partnership with the wild.
That is, we need the wild. Those whose thinking and emotions are bound up in the dogmas and delusions of anthropomorphism, who view themselves as masters rather than members of the natural order, are unaware of that need. The wild, however, does not need us (humanity) and at an exponential rate is exhibiting signs that it is growing weary of and responding to our presence. In this regard it is worth noting that earth is about 4.5 billion years old, the first primates showed up about 6 million years ago and the first homo-sapiens evolved from them and were in evidence about 2 million years ago. What we now consider humanity began to survive and thrive about 200,000 years ago. Human civilization is about 6000 years old and industrialization is about 300 years old. 2000 years ago the human population of earth was around 300 million. Since 1950 the human population has grown from 2.5 billion to 7 billion and growing exponentially. Global warming is just one of many signs of the wild’s weariness with its human partners and, as Pope Francis recently wrote with great (and wild) cognition, courage and compassion: “Numerous scientific studies indicate that the greater part of the global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases…given off above all because of human activity…The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions.”
We need the wild. Neither the wild nor humanity needs blind faith, indifference or resignation.

THINKING OF DOUG

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Two months ago my friend of nearly 50 years, Doug Tompkins, died of hypothermia after his kayak capsized in a very cold lake in southern Chile during the last adventure of an audacious existence. His well-reported death ended a life lived large, deep and meaningfully. He experienced and accomplished as much in life as anyone and cared about and gave to this world even more. He will be remembered for his environmental legacy in South America, as is only fitting, an inheritance that will persist beyond the memory of man.
The loss of a cherished friend is a different matter than the loss of a public figure, no matter how justly admired and honored, even when the two are the same person. Anyone curious about Doug and/or the environment of Earth can Google his name, Deep Ecology, Conservacion Patagonica or Tompkins Conservation and find enough information, inspiration and urgency to make the most devout capitalist understand and perhaps embrace the values and integrity that led this self-made (Doug never graduated from high school) multi-millionaire co-founder of The North Face and Esprit to abandon the comforts of bourgeoisie materialism for the challenges of environmental activism.
As a friend, Doug had a huge affect on my life, starting with the first of many long, deep conversations about knowing one’s self and living according to that knowledge rather than by an imposed expectation, cultural norm or material standard. In the winter of 1967, after a full day of skiing on Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain, we had an early dinner and drove through the night of that first conversation to Reno, where I lived. He dropped me off before continuing to San Francisco to his family and fledgling business, The North Face in North Beach down the street from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. North Beach at that time was a central meeting ground for, among other things, those individuals and social forces that would become the 1967 Summer of Love. The morning after that all night conversation I began the process of removing myself from graduate school. By the Summer of Love I was living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco before heading back to the mountains where I belong and have remained, and Doug’s friendship was instrumental in those organic, healthy changes.
There were many other drives, conversations, adventures, challenges, lessons and camaraderie shared with Doug over the years. For the past two months I’ve been revisiting some of them, thinking of Doug. There are books to be written about the life and times and legacy of Doug Tompkins, but part of it comes down to this: Doug was a relentless advocate for Deep Ecology, particularly the first plank of its platform: “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth, intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” He lived by these values and had a grand life and a great time in the process, and all his friends and the Earth itself are better off for his presence. We should all heed those values and have a great time in the process.

THE MOST IMPREGNABLE WALL

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Walls

Man is
The great wall builder
The Berlin Wall
The Wailing Wall of Jerusalem
But the wall
most impregnable
Has a moat
Flowing with fright
Around his heart

A wall without windows
For the spirit to breeze through

A wall
without a door
for love to walk in.

Oswald Mtshali
Soweto poet

This is a most appropriate poem to read, ponder, and take to heart (sic) each day. What better and well-intentioned way could there be to start a day than swimming or building a bridge across the moat of fear, installing windows for the spirit and building a door for love in one’s own heart? Mtshali is a South African poet born in 1940 who grew up and survived with spirit and heart on the black side of the Apartheid wall. He knows some things about impregnable walls that most people reading this have the good fortune to never experience. Lucky us.
Still, structures like the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China and other monolithic structures are only the most visible and acknowledged impregnable walls separating the fearful from the feared, the haves from the have nots. There are many kinds of walls built by the innumerable fears of man that keep the spirit of freedom from breezing through and love, and thereby understanding, from walking in. Who in their right mind wants to live with a moat flowing with fright around his or her heart? Who are they who want to build another wall of fear to keep ‘the other’ out, to keep separate ‘us’ and ‘them,’ an impregnable wall lacking spirit, heart and love?
Unfortunately, ‘they’ are many more in number than many others, including me, can comprehend. We all know people who fearfully live behind impregnable walls surrounding the mind, heart and spirit and, sometimes, the physical body in a self-made penitentiary, though they are definitely not penitents. And there is this: every human has some walls built to guard against some real or imaginary fear, not all of them impregnable. Likely the highest profile wall builder in America today is presidential candidate Don ‘The Trumpster’ Trump, who said, “I will build a great wall and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
Yes, mark them, and remember the words of Oswald Mtshali.
Personally, I like the observation of Isaac Newton, who had lots more hair, intelligence and compassion than The Don: “We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
Let each of us build some bridges and tear down some walls every day.

THE ALCHEMY OF ACTION

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Foreward
By
Dick Dorworth

The premise of this book and the larger issues it encompasses are common to every human being, not just the climbers, skiers and other high level athletes you will meet in its pages. It is crucial to an appreciation of “The Alchemy of Action” to hold in mind that just as every person is different from every other in obvious ways, they are much more alike and have much more in common in ways both palpable and, at first glance, invisible. This includes similarities and differences in culture, time and place, which are often enough examined and discussed in the popular media, and our common human metabolism, which is not.
I mention this because this book grew out of a particular place in climbing and a specific American time and culture in which that place (Yosemite) was a high-pressure, free-form, colorful laboratory for the experiments of the culture, the rebellions of the time and the expansion of consciousness of its lab rats. The time was the late 1960s and early 1970s and the turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out culture was counter to the mainstream, rebelling against, among other things, Viet Nam and the American mentality and values that allowed it. Consciousness altering drugs—LSD, peyote, marijuana, psilocybin and others were an intrinsic aspect of that culture, and several (not all) of the finest rock climbers of that time were icons and leaders in the process of both expanding consciousness and raising climbing standards.
One of them was Doug Robinson, who was/is prone to pay more attention to the on-going experiments of his own person than most, and whose tenacity and curiosity as a researcher, philosophizer’s breadth of thought and literary skills have delivered to the fortunate reader “The Alchemy of Action.” This book has been a lifetime of the author’s in the making. As a young teen-age distance runner Robinson noted a shift in his perceptions, a different clarity of thought and, of course, a physical heightened awareness during and just after long runs in the hills around Los Gatos, California where he grew up. Later he came to climbing and noticed similar alterations in his being. And then came the 60s and the cultural changes and the drugs and the (sometimes) purposeful exploration of consciousness, which had nothing to do with climbing. Or, at least, so he thought for awhile.
By 1969 he was confident enough that the act of climbing could and did alter consciousness that he wrote the seminal essay “The Climber as Visionary.” It was published in Ascent and caused a stir in the climbing community for suggesting that “There is an interesting relationship between the climber-visionary and his counterpart in the neighboring subculture of psychedelic drug users” and that climbing and its attendant fear “…produces a chemical climate in the body that is conducive to visionary experience.” And the climbing literature from John Muir to Yvon Chouinard to Ueli Steck is filled with beautiful descriptions of that experience.
Doug Robinson knew he was on to something meaningful and little explored. He spent the next 40 years—along with climbing, guiding, writing, raising children, continuing his own laboratory experiments with various drugs and expanding consciousness and the other demands of responsible citizens of planet Earth—investigating that something which he describes as: “…effort plus a degree of fear shifts yours brain in the direction of seeing more sharply, more clearly. And feeling more deeply. It does that by shifting the dynamic balance of hormones in your head. And then, transforming some of them. The upshot is a change in metabolism that becomes literally psychedelic.”
Human metabolism is too complex to be described in a few words or an entire book, and “The Alchemy of Action” is certainly not the final word, but it is an invaluable step, a beautiful and important addition to the literature of human consciousness. As one of the lab rats of Yosemite in the ‘60s and ‘70s and a member in good standing of the counter-culture of the time (as well as being a long-time friend of Doug’s and presented in the book as an example of its premise) I immediately identified with it and am grateful to him for a better understanding of consciousness (they are not the same thing). It has been nearly 30 years since I became aware that I didn’t need psychedelics in order to expand my consciousness and center both mind and being, and I quit using them. I also quit using alcohol which is certainly a mind-altering substance but, so far as I have been able to determine, has never produced clarity of thought or expansion of consciousness among its many users. Au contraire.
Doug Robinson was the right person in he right time to take the experiences and lessons of Yosemite in the ’60s and ‘70s and turn them into a metabolic exploration of a state of being common to all people that has been described as ‘flow,’ ’the zone,’ ‘peak performance,’ ‘self-awareness’ and the like. “The Alchemy of Action” is a metabolic guide to that state, and, as Doug writes, “We’re all metabolic voyagers, every day.”