How I loved the cold. The ice air freezing. The silence of everything. The absence of visible life. And it was the slow turning of the wheel. But I only really sensed this clearly once it had moved on.
Without first having been with the times of ice, then the filling of the woods with birds and the brightness of the spring air and the growing of the buds, would have been diminished for me. It was the difference that revealed the difference.
As I stood in the presence of the filling Hazel buds last night, the thought arose of the ancient folk conducting their rituals to “cause” the events of nature to occur – to cause the sun to rise, to waken the trees to fruit, and especially, the Mbuti singing to wake up the forest. We are nothing without these events, our lives depend on them. Stock markets, cities, transport systems, internet, will come and go – they are trivial, secondary abstractions – but the movements and change of nature are the very ground of our being. Without them, nothing.
Did the ancient ones really think they were “causing” things to happen “on the outside”? Or was it more that, in enacting their rituals, they entuned their inner landscapes to the events of the land and in that way brought them into being? But, regardless, I sense in me, the echo of the depth of the ancient wonder, the sense of community, and gratitude for the mysterious, yet cyclical, stirrings of the earth. Without them we are nothing, yet we have become completely orphaned from this deep source of our own being. We have become insentient to the place of our own presence here.
Those are just words. As I walked along the field edge last night, I felt the silent stirring of life. And, not to live from this felt awareness of what is happening, in the endless unique moments and places of the land, is to live orphaned and without grounding.
Go back to your land. She will teach you again. But the lesson is not to think ecologically, systemically, conceptually, scientifically; it is to walk in body awareness, earthly resonance and rapport with the land and her more-than-human presences and life-ways.
And only then, peering from that place of presence, to begin cautiously, to think again.
Image mine
