Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude-Day 14

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Day 14 - Black Beetle Moon Night Gratitude

In the evening I bicycled four miles to a trailhead, parked, walked up a steep slope a mere hundred paces, and sat down between some patches of wild grama grass with a view to the southeast sky. There I waited for the ascent of the full moon.

I was in a liberated mood. All day I had been on the go—painted the porch boards I prepared yesterday and wrote some technical emails to colleagues. A hundred small tasks required me to hurry through each to move on to others. Sometimes hurrying is not so bad, because you get more done. Part of what makes us human is our hustle and bustle.

I felt a huge, chesty, sky full of thanks . . . for the chemists who developed the paint that I used today; for the designers of my boots, a pair of low-cut hikers purchased a month ago, which fit like a glove and immediately a favorite; for the growers of the cherries that I carried along as a snack; for the expert authors of books I have been reading; and especially for many far-away dear friends with whom I have shared so many fruitful experiences. Those last thanks extended to those I knew intimately and even to those unknown in the giant social matrix of the modern world, in which every life is connected to multitudes. My gratitude extended even back to those in ancient history.

There is nothing Egyptian about where I live, but, in a bizarre meander of the mind, I even felt thankful to peoples of ancient Egypt. It’s not their pyramids specifically that I nodded to with gratitude, rather their creative efforts that built those precisely erected stone mountains that are now a part of everyone’s heritage. How unfathomable the complexity of human history! Myths, understandings, intrigues, battles, loves, strivings, artistic accomplishments, and architecture—all that preceded us, all is now folded into how we think and feel. It is all somehow merged into the metabolism of mind: the great mind that goes on between all of us, into which we are born, partake of, and participate in constructing.

I am sitting here alone, waiting for the moon. But my whole life depends upon everybody. Earlier that day, I pondered the hill of big red ants behind my trailer. It has been there, a low mound of gravel, an ant pyramid, virtually unchanged, for my fourteen years of summer stays. The previous owner of the property told me that the hill has been replete with a community of scurrying ants ever since he can remember, more than thirty years ago. Exaggerating a little, this is enough for generations of ants working collectively to add up to the human equivalent in time going back to the raising of the Egyptian pyramids at ancient Gifu.

Though we are somewhat like lowly ants in our servitude that helps constructed human culture, unconsciously to a large degree, we can be grateful for the privilege of existing not just in personal time but also in elevated, collective time. We are all unique bundles of personality. Made. Not made in the way the paint or hiking boots were, but made nonetheless, in a very complicated, sophisticated, evolved, and almost unfathomable manner. And for this making of ourselves we should be thankful for as well. How can the thing that was made in this sophisticated manner be thankful for the thing that was made in the sophisticated manner? Well, that is a strange-loop aspect of thinking about thinking, which is what we’re puzzling about, via thinking.

Let’s have some fun with Descartes. Everyone likes to promulgate their own take on poor ole René. Me too. Here goes: Descartes’ statement—“I think therefore I am”—is actually a thought about thinking. Therefore he should have said, “I think about thinking, therefore I am.” But isn’t that, in turn, a thought about thinking about thinking? If you agree, you can iterate further. You can be thinking about thinking about thinking, and therefore be. You can ascend to whatever level of being that you desire.

Is it ascent, or is the mind just a tangle of pine needles?

I waited for the moon. The sky progressed from deep indigo to grey pitch. I heard a noise new to me. Bezzeah . . . bezzeah . . . (like a frog blowing a froggie saxophone). I eventually found the surprising source: A big beetle black as midnight with long black antennae, barely visible in the growing darkness. What was it doing? Soon I witnessed it trying to fly, with an emphasis on trying. It lifted off on a number of “failed” journeys that each only went about three inches before a crash landing. These disasters appeared out of control, as the beetle lurched sometimes forwards but also backwards and sideways. Then, suddenly, it revealed that its wings could unfurl much wider. These it skillfully extended outwards, in a final split second, and then it sounded forth with one more loud bezzeah as it launched up, up, and away into the night sky. Ah, in its failed attempts the beetle had been just warming up its flight muscles. Soon after the beetle rose, so did the moon over the distant mountains to the southeast.

---

Note: I borrowed the term “strange-loop,” used above, from Douglas Hofstadter’s excellent book, I Am a Strange Loop, Basic Books, 2007.

© 2024 by Tyler Volk