James Scott Smith

A Practice of Wonder and Gratitude, Thanksgiving Day, 2021

My practice of wonder includes a weekly (that's the goal) pilgrimage to the river. It doesn't always happen because I get busy, preoccupied, convinced that another day of work and worry will be more liberating in the long run. It never is. So, it is a balance with other priorities that guides my decision to go. Only by going will I reach the moment I step into the water and throw that line out onto the surface of the South Platte. Then I watch, I wait, then orchestrate another cast. I absolve myself from everything else. Everything beneath me, in front of me, behind me, and above me is enough. This is my intention, what I tell myself I'm there for. Then another kind of work that is not work begins. 

You see, one of my false beliefs, a very tricky one, is "I have a lot on my mind." And so, standing in the river, absent from my world of favorite distractions, that cognitive distortion often spontaneously switches on and becomes its own truth. Here comes the inner chatter; here comes the monkey mind. You name it, anything that has been pressing in on me throughout my daily life will ask for attention. This is the moment discipline that is not discipline begins to lead to a deeper meditative awareness. I can see, objectify my anxious reactivity because of where I am standing. And when it rises, I have learned to let it come, then let it go. As Ram Dass once said, "I pick it up and put it down, I pick it up and put it down." Connecting to my breath and the movement of my body, I relinquish it. I reel it in, I cast it off. There will be no contention with these matters. On one level, I'm simply fishing, angling as they call it, a procedure of old tasks attuned to the ways of bugs and fish and water. On another level, I'm engaged in my spiritual practice. It is when these levels of consciousness merge and meld that the voices begin to quiet.  

On a recent mid-November morning, I waded until almost noon and had not seen a fish. The canyon air stirred cold, and the sun could not break through the overcast. My feet felt clubbed like I was dragging around clumsy blocks of ice. My fingers were burning brittle sticks. I returned to the truck and stripped off my gear. I put on a warm pair of socks and dry boots. I ate half a turkey wrap I bought at Trader Joes the day before. I drank some water. There would be no more fishing. As I began feeling more comfortable, I grabbed my camera and started walking the canyon road. 

There is nothing magnificent about the physical profile of the American Dipper, a river-bound roundish grayish-brown bird with pale fleshy legs and about the size of a small robin. They're ubiquitous on the South Platte. Dippers are clean water foragers and eat insects, worms, larvae, and small fish, as I saw on this day. They hang around throughout the year and do not travel far except to find nearby pockets of open water in the winter. Their magnificence is found in their particular form of tasking about. I've watched them build beautiful wreath-like nests in clefs on cliff-sides while defending their territory fiercely. But the absolute marvel the Dipper provides is in its plunging into a fast-moving stream, submerged for several seconds only to reappear upon the same rock from which it first launched. They often return with a small clump of vegetation. They quickly preen for tiny aquatic bugs that live on the river-bottom. The same cold clear water that froze my feet to a tingling numbness is their home, their habitat, of which I'm assuming they do not give a second thought. Their world is whole, complete, and unfettered of distractions, clamor, or disturbance except for the occasional fisherman. He might step into their venue for a while. In that, they are gracious and accommodating. I was able to once again capture some images of a Dipper and, this time, emerging with a fingerling trout. The two creatures were engaged in the cycle of subsistence living and sacrificial dying. All in a day's work for the Dipper.

As one trying to be conscious, I continue to learn that I can occupy a heart-mind space where my normal activities are the medium of a spiritual practice. Immersion is the only way through. I am not separate. There is nothing I am not connected to. The illusion of being exceptional and distinct is just that, an illusion. And, I'm not alone. Even in the human realm of electric everything, fast-paced, prescribed, contrived, the small things of the primal domain emerge to bless the moment. Noticing, seeing, abiding. Noticing, seeing, abiding. Preconceptions give way to discovery. Discovery brings a new awareness of the more ancient realities to which I remain akin, cold water, a small bird we call the Dipper. I take my rightful place in the universe, and I am certainly not anywhere near the center, nor are we as a species. For that, I am thankful.

JSS / November 25, 2021

Out Of The Way to Places Set Aside

I bumped along on a washboard earthen road, over sand, rock, and ruts, twenty miles up from the South in northwest New Mexico. I had a feeling someone wanted to keep even the most determined visitors to Chaco to a minimum. The sweeping Colorado Plateau landscape was marked with distant buttes and ravines while my little safari continued into an out-of-the-way place, set aside for those willing to find it.

I didn't have much time and decided to quickly gather information, a book on the Chaco People, along with a couple of nicely produced guidebooks for self-guided tours at various sites in the park. I chose Pueblo Bonito because it seemed to be the main attraction, highlighted by a three-dimensional rendering of the excavated footprint of the pueblo centrally displayed among other exhibits. How it might have looked (and felt) in the ninth and tenth centuries can be imagined but not fully realized, not really. What this place once contained had wandered off or was extracted and taken to museums and storage archives in places like New York, Boston, and Albuquerque. Nonetheless, the remnant stood up to the expectation of an encounter, a brief but significant mind-shift, metanoia, a revelation. Yeah, I know that's all a personal thing, but that's how I do it.

When I parked at the trailhead, I was approached by a man who seemed to be leaving. He was awkward in his demeanor and manner of speaking. He told me the battery in his camera died but then went ahead with a sudden general impression of the pueblo.

"It all feels so evil to me."

"Evil," I said, neither a question nor comment. I was struck by the word.

"Yeah, I have a feeling these people came here to escape something, but then, you know they probably couldn't help it when certain practices found their way here. Up from the South, you know. You know what I mean."

I shook it off. I had no idea what the guy meant and wondered if he'd had a long day in the sun. I watched as he abruptly wandered off toward his car, continuing to talk, mostly to himself.

There were a few others, but we only nodded and exchanged pleasant, quiet greetings as we passed. One man had an old German camera on a heavy tripod with wooden legs, the kind that looked vintage, something Ansel Adams might have been familiar with. I told him I would love to see his pictures.

"Just black and white." He smiled as he said it.

The time quickly passed as I followed the enumerated trail through rooms and out into the vast "courtyards" holding great kivas with various features of both a utilitarian and ceremonial nature. I was in the pueblo for about 2 hours, stopping, looking, imagining, capturing images, conceding on my minimal understanding of everything I was taking in. I was back in the 4Runner and moving along before I really wanted to.

When I got home the next day, I found Craig Childs's book, House of Rain, on my shelf. I realized then I'd already read his chapters on Chaco. What I had seen the day before, I learned about in previous years, appreciating his work over decades and his more profound take on what places like these can mean to us today. He is one of my heroes of "cultural competency" based on his extensive experience in the field. It was good to reread those passages.

Metaphorically, the day was one of many I've enjoyed in various places. These moments always turn me inward enough to ask fundamental questions that I can no longer answer. Everything crumbles. Beliefs turn from certainties into suspended assumptions. Mystery inspires faith, the organic kind. It makes me wonder what attributions will be made when they excavate our culture.

Chaco, the place, was the center. What's left of it is a sacred shadow. Ain't no getting around that for all that stands viable and valuable today. The question is, what of it will be worth setting aside when all of it is out-of-the-way?

JSS / November, 2021

When I Get Lost

When I get lost and can't remember why I'm here, I've learned to dwell on two things: 1. Deep Time, and 2. The evolution of human consciousness. I take some breaths and remember any attempt to "believe" my way to a unifying philosophy of life on earth will fail me. There will be no explaining, arranging things within frameworks of mental models, methods, strategies, doctrines, or sorting into dualistic "isms." No more straw men, no more fighting windmills. In this age of profound incoherence, unraveling is more fitting than "constructing."

On Sunday morning, I found myself on the road near the Glorieta Mesa, New Mexico. In my novel, Wild God of the World, my character, Crawford Mattawa, had spent some years there, apprenticing, falling in love with a Navajo woman named Olathe before returning to a modern homestead in Colorado. I wanted to hang out with Crawford and pulled off, looking for a place to get out and walk. I found the Pecos National Historic Site. I parked and walked into the visitor center, masked as requested, briefly spoke with a welcoming staff member who handed me a map and pointed me in the direction of the trailhead. I took off my mask and carried my camera into the quiet morning.

The stone ruins were familiar to me. The excavated archaeological site had many features one would expect to see when exploring places like Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon. On this particular morning, however, I had the whole joint to myself. No tourists. It felt like some kind of ordained arrangement with solitude and a more personal encounter with a story that had unfolded over several thousand years. I wasn't distracted by fanny packs and bucket hats, no overhearing comments or questions, no immediate reminders of my own touristic outsiderness. I felt lucky I was out ahead of the crowd.

In recent centuries (beginning in 1350), the pueblo of the Pecos people was built and became a robust trade and cultural center. As many as two thousand people, including up to 500 warriors, lived and worked at the pueblo. Then came the rest of it (1541) we know now to be so transformative. Spanish colonization was doing its thing. Empire and church worked hand in hand for "cross and crown." There were rebellions, drought, and disease followed by times of relative peace and prosperity. New agricultural practices were adopted. Indian wars, complicity with assimilation, and a burgeoning migration of European immigrants along the Sante Fe trail comprised a complexity of forces until the Pecos people were reduced to a tiny number. Seventeen survivors finally left the area to find refuge in the Tewa-speaking pueblo in Jemez. By 1838, it was over for the Pecos people.

As I walked up to the old mission church seen here in my photograph, I just took it in. I let it roll over my previously confounded rubble of thoughts and feelings about our country, our history, about the current state of religion and empire in our world. As I said, I try to put things in context when I get lost. And "lost" should be part of the narrative. Deep Time is the naturalistic, cosmological context of our planetary existence. We're here, fourteen billion years after something happened, something big. I'm lost in that mystery. I begin to activate in the here and now around the prospect of learning, being empathic, being humble, making the world a better place, being a loving human being, seeking justice, and alleviating suffering. I ask myself if I have any old mission churches within me, old relics of distorted core beliefs that would be a true insult to my brothers and sisters, an extension of long-lived ways of seeing and being what and who I am.

On the other end of the dig site at Pecos sit several kivas, round earthen portals sometimes called pithouses. They were used for ceremony and for rituals of dialogue. They were warmed by fire and ventilated for breathing. They had sipapus dug into the floor, small holes from which ancient ancestors emerged into the present world. Churches are built skyward. Kivas are built earthward. Ascension is a big deal in churches. Descent is just plain inescapable in a kiva. Somewhere in the mix of these metaphors there might be an answer for those of us asking open-ended questions with opening hearts and opening minds. Perhaps a place for us to begin when we are lost.

JSS 11/3/21

Journal Entry / October 4, 2021

Communion

I stood on the ground of being

and looked up at the stars.

Ursa Major was propped up on its handle,

and the moon was cupped in a sliver of itself.

I connect the dots in my own way.

Not knowing

what I'm becoming

is far more in keeping with stars

than words could ever be.

I am absurd

as a teetering constellation.

I am a satellite rock of reflection.

Glory pours out, glory pours out,

and I drink from the slivered cup of light.

JSS / October 2021

Journal Entry / September 20, 2021

A Butterfly in the Barn

A butterfly flew 

into the barn,

at first was free 

until it could not find the open door

and rose up

to the high window

stained with the dried drops

of a dirty rain.

Thinking it was sky,

it fluttered against its own belief.

I could not stand for it

and lifted an old

broken broomstick,

held it still

until the one

once caterpillar,

once chrysalis,

climbed aboard.

Careful to lower it slow

and easy, holding breath,

steady handed,

I walked to the door

and raised my saber,

a swordsman piercing

the blue day

with defiance 

against all the complacency

of this less heartened world.

The wind seemed to know

to throw

a gust, and off

the butterfly flew.

JSS / 2021

 Journal Entry / September 17, 2021

Small Forms

Hops on the cedar fence, rocks in the riverbed,

a house wren, a foxtail, the last star of morning.

Worms on the sidewalk after the rain. My wheelbarrow,

a pinecone, the creak in the door hinge, the word if,

the word only. 

Voices, the din, the madness, the clamor, America

in the context of Deep Time. Thoughts, beliefs, pandemics,

the wrung of the hands of the mind. The woodpile, the 

bird feeder, divorce, videos, smartphones, the routine,

the name God.

Self, death, turning to leave, mental illness, worry, to

carry someone through. Dawn, work, a shift in consciousness,

the coming winter, Cabo San Lucas, recipes, standing in line,

a debit card, caring, early mornings, a yearning, memories,

the word surrender.

JSS / 2021