Pauline Oliveros

As Dry Creek Pomo/Wintun/Wappo elder, Clint McKay, stated in his presentation “Learning from our Roots: Traditional Ecological Practices for Fire”, the native people of California listened to the land in order to know when to burn the grasses and clear the young growth for overall prosperity. Fire is an alchemical cleansing tool known to countless worldwide indigenous cultures. Our materialist culture, on the other hand, has demonized fire. What happens when we demonize something? It comes back with a wrathful vengeance from the depths. The indigenous peoples of California knew this and stewarded fire in harmony with nature in order to maintain, what 19th century Conquistadors described in letters back to Europe as, an edenic utopia. The tool that McKay describes natives using--to know when to burn--is the intuition of listening. There is no set day on the calendar when one should burn each year. Simply and complexly, you listen to what the earth tells you. 

An avant-garde Bay Area artist, Pauline Oliveros pioneered the artistic approach of “deep listening”. Deep listening is less of a meditation and more of an indigenous attitude towards phenomenologically being in the world. Deep listening is not a thing rather it is an embodied philosophy towards the unknown. In the major arcana keys, the Hierophant card teaches us that we come to knowing not through knowing but through listening. We go out into the orchards with our refractometers testing sugars but there is another way that has been done by the indigenous since time immemorial, which employs this discipline of listening. We too, have heard the ground, trees, and wildlife tell us unexpected things while out in the orchards and in the barrel rooms; to our egos who demand to know: they can be scary, yet beautiful, dazzling, and inspired things.