The Jewish sage Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi says that when human beings saw Earth from outer space for the first time, that blue green ball became for us "the most obligating icon." More obligating, Reb Zalman believes, than a cross or a Star of David or a Torah. Deep Presence: Meditations on a Wild Coast is a contemplative hymn to this most obligating icon, what the liturgy of my own tradition calls "this fragile Earth, our island home."
Filmed on the wild coast of Southeast Alaska, Deep Presence is a collection of digital meditative tone poems that couple Dan Kowalski's striking cinematography with location sound, moving music, and spare poetry, together evoking the coinherence of wilderness and human spirit. What sets Deep Presence apart from conventional nature films and documentaries is its meditative lens. If you liked Into Great Silence and its view inside Carthusian life at the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse in the French Alps, you'll gladly accept the invitation of Deep Presence into the spacious silences and sounds of wild nature in Alaska.
From the stunning beginning meditation, as sea sound slowly opens to a view of none-too-tame waves lit in numinous silver light, the viewer is offered what Kurt Hoelting calls "an unabashed love song for a planet in distress." Kurt Hoelting and Dan Kowalski have a unique vantage point from which to view what is happening on our planet. Both came to Alaska as young men and fell in love with what they found. As commercial fishermen, wilderness guides, and friends for several decades, they have in the marrow of their bones a direct encounter with wild nature as the primary teacher of reverence. Deep Presence is an exquisite offering out of this encounter.
Hoelting and Kowalski have created in Deep Presence something that is neither documentary nor travelogue. Deep Presence does not rely on a narrative line or conventional story to "make a point" or hold the viewer's attention. Instead it trusts the viewer's innate capacity to forge a direct bond with nature through the senses, through the power of contemplative awe. Kowalski manages to convey the enormous visual spaciousness that is Southeast Alaska as well as the intimate detail of ocean spray and Sitka spruce and the grain of geological formations. Three poems, Lynn Ungar's "Hawks," David Wagoner's "Lost," and Kurt Hoelting's "Entering Wild Mind," each read quietly and mindfully, are deftly woven into the visual narrative and give voice to our human hunger for communion with places like this wild coast and what they stir in us.
Because of its contemplative nature, Deep Presence is quite different from passive entertainment. It calls for a focused attention on the part of the viewer to the encounter with wild nature, a reverent attention that is open to the possibility of being, as Hoelting says, "surprised, moved, and instructed." Without this kind of encounter with some particular place on the planet, Hoelting believes it is unlikely we will take the right actions needed to care for creation. As he says, "We will not work to save that which we do not love." Its invitation to unhurried openness and curiosity make Deep Presence a powerful companion in retreat settings, a catalyst for inquiry into the greening of our faith communities, and a grounding for public policy sessions.
The ending of Deep Presence is a visual sequence of what is happening right now on our planet. It shows the slow motion sliding of an enormous section of glacier down into the sea. Kowalski and Hoelting have set the death of the glacier to the elegiac sounds of Tchaikovsky's "Hymn of the Cherubim" from the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the ancient ice bowing down under the forces of human inattention and ignorance. Here Deep Presence offers a "most obligating icon" for us to take the communal action necessary to reverse our destruction of the precious web of life that sustains us all.
Gordon Peerman
DEEP PRESENCE: MEDITATIONS ON A WILD COAST. By Dan Kowalski and Kurt Hoelting. Depth Media, P.O. Box 4690, Rollingbay, WA 98061. 2006. DVD, $30.00. order
