Overnight Field
Trip October 7 and 8
Preparations:
You will be camping and eating with your peer group. Each peer group will be responsible for its own tents, food, cooking/eating/cleaning equipment, stoves, drinking water, sleeping bags, flashlights (one per person). Bring a brown bag lunch for traveling on Monday. The first group meal will be Monday dinner; you will also need to plan and prepare Tuesday’s breakfast and lunch (road food). What you prepare, negotiating specific dietary needs and costs, is up to the group. Remember, this is a silent retreat, so you need to negotiate who is cooking at what time, who is cleaning, and who is buying the food in advance of your departure. If you need a cooler, make sure that it is small and clearly labeled. Please pack lightly, because the vans have very little cargo space. Peer groups 1 through 4 will be in the larger group site, and groups 5 through 12 will need to (silently) locate available campsites. Rules: no more than two tents per site, no more than eight people per site. Our intention is for each peer group to create appropriate sleeping arrangements for its members.
If you plan to take your own car rather than ride in the vans, you must sign a special field trip waiver form that indicates that you’ve chosen to use a private vehicle.
The College has fifteen sleeping bags and even more tents available at no charge on a first-come, first-served basis. You must be on the class list, and you must leave a check deposit for the amount of the equipment that you borrow. They are available through Equipment Check-Out on the first floor of the College Recreation Center (CRC 128). You must be polite to the staff when you request equipment! They are students like you and your courteous attitude is essential in getting what you need from them. The Equipment Check-Out hours are 10-4 on Sunday, and they open at 6 am on Monday.
Bring Journal to the Self, A Language Older Than Words, Intimate Nature, and your journal with writing and drawing equipment. Don’t forget to bring your best sturdy walking shoes, sunscreen/raincoat/hat/umbrella, warm clothes, flashlight with fresh batteries (you think we’re joking?), Swiss army knife or equivalent, bathing suits and towels (or you can rent towels at Sol Duc), delicious and sustaining food, and drinking water. To maintain the mineral balance of the hot springs, the required attire is bathing suits; street clothes are not acceptable. If you have any concerns about this, please talk to us individually.
Itinerary:
Monday
9:00 Gather at the usual place (C lot near the Com building)
9:15 Depart for Sol Duc (brown bag lunch en route, talking is okay)
1:00 Arrive at Sol Duc, silence begins. Set up camp, hike to waterfall and/or soak in the hot springs
5:00 Prepare, eat, clean up. Note: it will get dark by 7 pm, so plan accordingly.
8:00 Hot springs close for the evening
Tuesday
8:00 Breakfast
9:00 Soak or hike to the waterfall
11:00 Break camp and prepare food for the road
12:00 Vans depart for Evergreen
4:00 Projected arrival time at Evergreen
Assignments:
During your time at the Sol Duc campground area, you will be asked to participate in a number of activities: retreating into silence, taking two soaks in the hot springs (one on each day), hiking to the waterfalls (Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning), and developing the three-part dialogue exercise (see below). We want you to remember the tools you began to develop during week one in seeing, listening, touching and feeling. Please use these skills and techniques mindfully when engaging in these activities. We have included the poem we worked with on Monday afternoon for you to consider again the multiple intelligences to which you are opening.
Dialoging exercise: you will be reading and utilizing chapter 11 (“Dialogue”) of Journal to the Self. Follow the directions and create a dialogue with Sol Duc falls. The second part is to create a dialogue with the hot springs. The third part of the exercise is to create a dialogue between the falls and the hot springs. This assignment goes into your journal. You could choose to excerpt this or any other fieldwork material for your weekly journal assignment, which is due at seminar on Thursday the 10th. Future journal excerpts will be due at the normal seminar time on Tuesdays.
For the first peer group meeting Thursday am (and first seminar Thursday pm), select a quotation from Jensen’s A Language Older Than Words that evokes grief. Follow the Springboard (chapter 7, Journal to the Self) directions for working with this selection. Next, work with chapter 20 (“The Five Stages of Grief”), using the material that came up from the Springboard exercise as the forum for exploring these five stages. First, share excerpts of this material and explore the grief work process with your peer group. Then come to seminar prepared to discuss the Jensen book.
Two Kinds of Intelligence (Jalalludin Rumi, 13th century Turkish scholar, teacher, and poet)
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing in its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.