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"no defense against an open heart"

Anne Dalke's picture



Williams writes, “There is no defense against an open heart …in dialogue with wildness…I believe that out of an erotics of place, a politics of place is emerging…rooted in empathy.”

There is NONE of this in my site sits. The keynote is boredom. I moved from the first one because I didn’t like being closed in. After one week in the second one, I was having trouble being there…. My last two postings were both time traveling, avoiding being in the moment, avoiding facing my boredom. Both were clearly deflections. But so was all the earlier stuff: I complained about the noise, the generator, I did research on the weeping hemlock….



And as the semester went on, if anything, I deflected MORE, not less, dug in less deeply to any of what Williams called a “relationship with the land, any evolution of the spirit.”

What’s going on here…?

Why can I not access the range of emotion Williams talks about….?




(What emerged for me later, from class discussion, was that @ least part of what is preventing this is the format of this assignment … and perhaps also, as Joni suggested, the absence of physical interaction in the space…I should be gardening!)

This week, though--as happens, gloriously, once a year--I am sitting @ my desk, in a sea of blossoms...