What is a watershed?

So, you may remember all this talk about the Awareness project.  The idea was (and is, though evolved now) that we wanted to bring all of our senses to bear IN THE WORLD as people nourished by particular types of practices to really live what the Classics tell us about.  This in turn would be productive of particular kinds of character traits that would, in turn, inform our medical practice and so on.  A kind of evolutionary development watered at the deepest level by taking seriously the Classical literature – particularly that of our spiritual traditions and our medical traditions.

Something like that.

Anyway – you might have thought we forgot.  We didn’t.  It just needed some time to come to maturity.  It’s still doing that… coming to maturity.  It takes time.  You know, you may want to drink that bottle of wine or that puerh tea RIGHT NOW, because it smells good, looks good already.  But, in fullness, better things come.

So there’s lots of talk about, lots to share.  It’s all relevant to Chinese medicine, don’t worry.  But, I’ll ask you to get and stay open – because that’s what’s required of all of us.  Not just in understanding this project, this blog.  But in medicine, in life, in this evolution of humanity in which we find ourselves embedded.  Get and stay open.  Ok?

So, despite my basic discomfort with hearing my own voice – amplified by the fact that this is very much off the cuff, unedited, unscripted and raw – I bring you some insights from today’s walk through Tideman Johnson Natural Area (which I think I mispronounce in the first audio!).  This is one of my favorite places to walk in the world, and I do so daily.

—

Note:  The bird image is not my own, but resembled the scene I witnessed in many details.

The walk I take is about 1.5 miles, through a couple of neighborhoods and ultimately into the Johnson Creek watershed area of the incredible Spring Water Corridor we have nearby.  As soon as I descend into the valley, I am hit by a mélange of odor, of sound, of sensations on my skin.  Water dominates the place, with it all of the things that go along with the Oregon wet – rotting leaves, nutria, a hundred birds of different species hunting bugs in the bark and fallen pine needles, the rushing of nearly flooding Johnson Creek, woodsmoke, stalwart bikers passing me on the trail, a hundred trails going into the brush.  I recorded this (forgive my snippy comment about another blog I’ll not mention in text – it was a moment of weakness).

Crows and Eagles audio

I continued on my walk – in fact at the end of that breathless audio you can hear me descending yet again to arrive at a fork in the creek accompanied by a waterfall.

Johnson Creek Flooding audio

There was this bunch of roots congregating in an eddy just beyond this photo.  I wrote the following:

there is beauty/in the pine bough/sanded/smooth/clean as silk as silk has ever been

the clean lines/suggestions of wanton utility

but give me the roots/gnarled/open/sore/full of soil/insects/worms

waterlogged or exposed

eating the earth/utility no mere suggestion

I sat there a while thinking about a conversation that Brandt and I have been having – for over a year now.  Thinking about how it is coming into its own, and I into mine.  About how my whole family is bound up into this thing, and my whole life, everything about it.  And I thought this is as good a time as any to start talking about Watershed.

It’s a term I’ll use a lot.  It’s a movement, it’s a movement that’s already always been there.  It’s the evolution of the Year of Sagely Living and the Awareness Project.  It’s the culmination of the hard work and dreams of a lot of people.  It will be a clinic.  It will be a fork in the river (as seen from both directions).

Tagged as: birds, Character, classical-chinese-medicine, Cultivation, ecology, erics-habits, Learning, nature, Personal Development, Podcast, symbolism, water, watershed, Year of Sagely Living