The Piñon Self

The truth is, this has been a relational journey. I set out to know something, to know it in a way I hadn't known it before. And with knowing came feeling. And with feeling understanding. And with understanding, relating. And with relating a sense of an embodied knowledge.

Piñon has been a neighbor for my whole life. It has been the green backdrop to life's unfolding, given shade to the desert soil of my home. Fed the birds that filled my childhood walks with song and color. Fed the fires and drifting smoke to warm our little adobe house -- an etching of a wondrous olfactory memory of winter in New Mexico.

This relational journey began with a vow to give my attention to piñon. To approach the world of piñon with greater curiosity and less distraction. I sought out other hearts and minds who possessed a more extensive lived and researched knowing. And this is where I landed:

Through conversations with scientists like Jeanne Faire, I came to understand the perilous predicament of living as piñon in a time of climate crisis: 90% die-off in some parts of New Mexico. Through reading published work by Ronald Lanner, John M. Marzluff and Russell P. Balda, and Lisa Floyd-Hanna, I realized the delicate mutualism necessary for piñon's flourishing -- that the ecosystem of the piñon-juniper woodland was complex and full of mutualistic exchanges. Considering piñon in isolation was no longer an option. To know piñon was also to know its life partners: juniper, piñon jay, and the entire underland rhizomatic universe of fungi that weave it all together.

The scientific data was simultaneously awe-inspiring and deeply disheartening. The materialist poet and philosopher Dario Robleto speaks about the moral obligation of memory. As creatures with the cognitive capacity to remember, in an age of such great loss, we must exercise this faculty with great consideration and intention. Faced with the looming disappearance of much of my familiar p-j woodland, I began to feel charged with a moral obligation to remember. Every smell, every intricate pattern of needles and cones carpeting the forest floor, it all seemed shot through with incredible beauty and an ever-present grieving nostalgia.

But the question I couldn't help asking myself in the midst of all this researching was: what does all this knowledge do in the world? What is it for? The real meaning of the knowing seemed to have no place to ground until the knowing became a thing in and of the world. So I gathered my incipient knowledge and carried it to the p-j woodlands of the foothills of my home.

Here the knowing became felt experience. The knowing became noticing the pitch tubes produced by piñon under the duress of beetle infestation. The knowing became discerning between the rich dark brown of a ripened piñon nut shell and the reddish rust of an unripened one. The knowing became a listening for the unmistakable shuddering caws of the piñon jay. And the relationship between this feathered member of the corvid family and its namesake tree became a marvelous research project into the inextricable ties between mutualistic species. The tree could not survive without the bird. And vice versa.

This project was inspired by loss. It was meant to be a creative response to loss. Fatigued by the constant tragedy porn documenting percentages of species extirpation, of critical habitat destroyed, I longed to be a body in the world not overcome with grief and sorrow, but pledged to tending to and noticing. The phenomenologists tell us that the central structure of an experience is its intentionality. Every experience is directed towards some object, is about some thing. When we bring our consciousness to the world, fully awake and in our body, we offer the world the gift of our intention and attention.

In addition to rigorous scientific research and documentation, it is our moral imperative to remember the world. To respond to this extraordinary loss with extraordinary attention and appreciation. The English novelist John Fowles said, "The deepest thing we can learn about Nature is not how it works, but that it is the poetry of survival." We must become fluent in the rhythm of these poems. We must sing them to the world, to each other, and praise all that is resilient and beautiful and strong.