The Brain-Gut-Heart Connection

As I return to school as a McBride Scholar, forty-plus years after breaking off my last bout of formal education, my learning goals and tasks are bound to be somewhat different from those of my freshman classmates. Part of my job in our Ecological Imaginings ESEM was to begin to discover a new identity, in this odd situation where my age is more than three times that of others in the class; and to figure out how to position myself in relation to (1) my own past and future, (2) the expectations of my teacher and of the college, and (3) my peers in the class, so similar to and so different from my own selves of long ago, and of now. I have found this rather a complicated dynamic, to put it mildly.

Self-evaluation is another challenge. My inner critic is well-developed: no classical musician can get far without that faculty. I'm also quite used to honing and improving my own writing. But there are still two things that might make this self-evaluation difficult. Part of my work this semester has been to sort out my attitude to the powers that be, to the perceived and felt authority structures of professor, deans, requirements, college administration, grades: all the hoops to be jumped through. The interaction of these with my own expectations of myself, of being a top student, had to be brought to consciousness in order to stay clear about what I am here for, and to stay sane. So I want to be clear that this self-evaluation is intended to the greatest extent possible to be on my own terms, relating to what I want to learn and how I want to grow, and not to how well I imagine I may have fulfilled, or not, what I imagine to be the expectations others have of me.

The second challenge is that in recent years I have been trying to relax, or subdue, or evade, my inner critic, as I have been moving from performing and interpreting the works of others, to creating my own artistic work in one medium or another. I tend to have rather perfectionistic and idealistically high standards for myself, which make it difficult to begin, to get any kind of creative flow; so I have taken to heart the advice attributed to William Stafford vis-a-vis writer's block: “Lower your standards.” Of course the critic must always return, and play a part in the process. In my paper reflecting on my site-sit posts I thought quite a bit about the spontaneous flow of these less formal pieces, as compared to the papers which I revised and polished. I still have more work to do on this, and I'm grateful for the opportunity given by this course to tackle it. I feel I have made some progress in the direction I'd like to grow with this, and have still much more to do: to work on keeping the aliveness, the energy, the spontaneity and flow of my first drafts, even as I clarify my thesis, tighten up my arguments, and make sure I am communicating cogently and coherently. But I find I still have a gut-level need to stay inside my own process, rather than step outside in order to judge it. I'm thinking my need is somehow to integrate these two things: to learn to evaluate from the inside.

Participation in class discussion has been another challenge. A major part of my whole life process is learning to fully express myself and my own power, without throwing my weight around in an obnoxious way. I've devoted a lot of my life to learning to be a good listener. I have an argumentative bent which has brought me so much grief over the years that I've worked very hard to weed it out completely. So this class has been another arena in which to try to express that which I feel passionately about, without becoming attached to being right and making others wrong. To share whatever wisdom I might have, while allowing those younger than me to find their own voices and their own logic. I think I have probably been a bit obnoxious, but I hope not very often. I hope I have set some kind of example both of speaking out and of staying quiet.

In re-reading my blog posts, I found myself still in love with many of them. Some of them seem to contain evocative observation, but without really making a point or drawing a conclusion. I think that's ok, since that was my aim: just being with nature, not trying to make it into anything. The fault that bothers me more, in a few of my edgier, more incisive outbursts, is the tendency to apologize: unnecessary! Just let it stand. I have nearly, but not quite, gotten a flow going, of writing ideas as I have them, unprompted. I can see where I would like to go with my own blog: to write just because I find my own thoughts interesting enough. I think this may be an arena where I can work with just enough spontaneity, and just enough polish, to make some really strong and fun and beautiful stand-alone pieces of writing.

Reading is an area in which I might benefit from sharpening up quite a bit. It took me nearly the whole semester to even begin to underline a bit. For some time I've been cultivating a belief in reading as a holistic practice, trusting that the material which is useful to me will be received and integrated into what I already know; that what is stimulating and good and true will form my own thinking without my consciously picking it out. I believe this is true to an extent, but for class discussion or for academic argument I'm finding it helpful to zero in on important citations, whether I agree or disagree with them. It is also true that my kind of holistic reading needs to be done rather slowly, in order for the dimensionality of the ideas to have a chance to sink in. So for the purposes of my college career I had better develop some more focused note-taking skills. The readings I enjoy the most are the ones that arise from direct experience, or a kind of primary intersection between words and experience. Winona LaDuke, Alison Bechdel, Terry Tempest Williams, and Gary Snyder spring readily to mind; but oddly enough I also include David Bohm in this category, as I feel he experiences words, and language itself, as visceral phenomena, even though the language he uses is quite abstract. My least favorite were Carolyn Merchant and Timothy Morton, who seemed academic in the sense of dealing with the ideas of others rather than with their own raw material.

The site-sits were a core part of the course for me, and I took them very seriously, as I did the experience of having class outside. The field trips a bit less so, though they were fun and interesting. I very much enjoyed responding and being responded to by others in the class, on line. The “ecological” way the class was taught gave me an ideal chance to begin to find my own way of integrating intellectual, analytical activity with my emotional, experiential, intuitive, and holistic ways of learning and of being in the world.

Works Cited:

Bechdel, Alison (2006). Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy. Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin.

Bohm, David (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London, New York, Routledge.

LaDuke, Winona (2002). Winona LaDuke Reader. Voyageur Press.

Merchant, Carolyn (1992). Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. London, New York, Routedge.

Morton, Timothy (2007). Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press.

Snyder, Gary (1995). A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds. Washington, D.C., Counterpoint.

Stafford, William. Quoted on line at http://grammar.about.com/od/yourwriting/a/wblockquotes.htm

Williams, Terry Tempest (1994). An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field.New York, Vintage Books.