Heartstone 002

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​Continued from Heartstone 001

An on-going conversation with cooperative networks of conscious particles through the focal point of Heartstone.

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​Rod MacKinnon
Good morning/evening Gary

I'm still reading and contemplating your profound thoughts.

Thinking of your conversation with Heartstone, a few days ago I noticed a small, smooth, white stone on the book-cabinet beside my bed.... I don't recall where I first acquired it...after reading your conversation, i've begun keeping it with me and contemplating it during quiet moments...

I've begun with, "I am with you," and waiting with a sense of open-ness.... While I haven't yet experienced a "conversation" (exchanging concepts as you have) I feel a beautiful sense of companionship and acceptance, similar to that i have with Hound and the sea.... 

A couple of days ago, the day I received your HeartSpace breathing draft, I was working on a project set in a pretty valley on The Whangaparaoa and I took some time to sit, breathe and be present to the land, asking it, "What is it to be you?".... 

The sense of sadness which came upon me was very heavy... Barbara is a painter and in her current work she is attempting to express the "weeping land".... areas of natural beauty and sensitivity which are being stripped and scraped for commercial exploitation...... 

The wild land where i grew as a boy and who spoke to me with ancient voices, and awakened my life-spirit is now threatened by the very children she nurtures... I believe that is the sense of grief I feel...

I wanted to share my experiences with you as i believe that to fulfil our way as Whole Humans we need to consciously re-awaken our ability to communicate with our Earth-Mother....

I'd really like to read your thoughts...

Gary R Smith
Good morning/evening to you, Rod.

It seems the human exploitation of the earth is nearly global as we witness the same attitudes and behaviors of those who feel no connection outside their small circles of awareness, and take whatever they want. The greed of some seems insatiable, and that is meant as an observation not a judgment.

In earlier times, my response towards the trashing of America was a mixture of anger, aversion, cyncism, disgust, dismay, grief, outrage, pain, sadness, and helplessness.

Helplessness comes from a personal sense of having no power to change what is happening. In general, though I share some emotions towards exploitation with environmental activists, I am not in agreement with the energies of anger and judgment behind activism. I have turned inward to make changes, as that proves to be my first priority and most effective means towards real and lasting change. My initial experiences with HSB and Heartstone conversations have so far supported this choice.

Before writing further in conversation with Heartstone on your subject, a positive note is that twice I have taken actions which did make a difference for the 'environment.' As a teenager, I often skipped school classes to wander with my dog friend Kiche in an area of gravel pits which filled with creek water from the Colorado Rockies and made a natural habitat for a variety of wildlife. 

I would go there to be with the turtles and muskrats, the snakes and frogs. Canada geese nested in the ponds and we'd see an occasional fox trotting through. I loved to gaze across the plains to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The land was owned by a sugar cane company and leased to farmers who let their sheep graze the prairie grass, and dumped their trash into piles along the banks of the ponds. When I walked among the gravel pit ponds, I was trespassing.

In my senior year of high school, I wrote an article about the gravel pits and the nesting Canada Geese, and the trash piled into the water by the farmers, and submitted it to the local newspaper. Surprisingly, they published it on the front page of a Sunday edition. The next surprise came when I was invited to a meeting at the university, where I responded to questions including, 'What would you like to see done with the land?' I shared my vision of a natural area where the public could walk and bicycle through and the wildlife would be protected.

A week after graduation, Kiche and I left Colorado for Maine. On a return trip a few years later, I was delighted to find on visiting the ponds, that it is now a natural area which protects the wildlife and has a walking/bicycle path running through it. 

Another time, a 600 employee company was putting about one ton of waste paper per month into the landfills and resisted the idea of recycling because it was not a profit center. My writing to express feelings regarding abuses of the environment resulted in the implementation of a recycling program. These experiences showed me the power of the pen.

When I brought Heartstone home, I was a little overboard with my concerns that my motives were pure. I expressed these concerns to the stone, such as not wanting to use it for selfish reasons or offend it with my questions. The idea was to grow a relationship with a stone being, but not for a preconceived outcome. Each time the answer came, 'Gary, we do not have emotions.' 

The 'we' of Heartstone I understand to mean the collective of its conscious atoms/particles. 'They' also indicated that they are aware of emotions and that emotional beings are affected by them, though they do not understand them experientially.

Was the sense of sadness which came upon you in response to your asking the land, 'What is it to be you?' from the land or was the land reflecting your own felt sadness? Or was the collective consciousness of the land responding by letting you know it was aware of your feelings? My intuitive sense is that you made heart connection with the land, and the land responded.

I would like to bring this to Heartstone and see what comes up in conversation. Rod, I trust you understand that I am playing a role in my inter-actions with Heartstone. If I go into them with doubts or cynicism or concerns about deluding myself, there is no need to even begin. I feel the conversations as real without attaching importance to the details at this time. I would like to see where it goes, and if it has to be evaluated, leave that to later. The feeling has been more real than I could have anticipated, with an added bonus of joy. I have in mind to experiment with ways to 'measure' the conversations at some point, to test them more objectively. Thank you so much for sharing.

Rob MacKinnon
Hi Gary... I mentioned that I was reading David Abram's "The Spell of the Sensuous".... this excerpt very accurately articulates my sense of connection.....

"Our most immediate experience of things, according to Merleau­ Ponty, is necessarily an experience of reciprocal encounter-of tension, communication, and commingling. 

From within the depths of this encounter, we know the thing or phenomenon only as our in­terlocutor - as a dynamic presence that confronts us and draws us into relation.

We conceptually immobilize or objectify the phenom­enon if we mentally absent ourselves from this relation, by forgetting or repressing our sensuous involvement. 

To define an­other being as an inert or passive object is to deny its ability to ac­tively engage us and to provoke our senses; we thus block our perceptual reciprocity with that being. By linguistically defining the surrounding world as a determinate set of objects, we cut our con­scious, speaking selves off from the spontaneous life of our sensing bodies."

Gary R Smith
Hi Rod,

Your email with excerpt came 'just in time' as I feel to continue conversations with Heartstone while recognizing a need for weaving my experiences with those of others who explore connection of this type, so my experiential understanding may be expanded.

David Abram's "The Spell of the Sensuous" is intriguing and attractive. Thank you for sharing it with me. The buttons below link to a Wikipedia article about David Abram, and to his web site.

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NEXT - HEARTSTONE 003

DAVID ABRAM (WIKI ARTICLE)

A.W.E. (ABRAM'S SITE)

HEART BREATHING - CONTENTS