Hut Words

After over a week here, just sometimes, I notice what I wasn’t noticing before. The background. The texture of winter. And what I couldn’t have noticed before. Repetitions. Rhythms.

I am aware of how my endless filters, thinking, expectation, agendas, intentions, previous experiences, cut me off from simply sensing everything around me. Yet my hope is always to escape those things and be tutored by the land alone.

How hard it is proving to “let the winter be”. To be fully aware of the wetness and wet-darkness of everything. Gloomy, dank winter ponds lying everywhere. Rain darkened trees standing in those cold, black pools. Water lying puddled on the paths. And mosses and lichens, fat with rain on the tree trunks, vivid in green and grey. And, everywhere, mud, yellow mud, brown mud, grey mud. Mixed slurry of soil and rock and water. And the water lying beneath the sward that every footstep squelches into. And the deep, brown stream that moves like a huge smooth snake through the woodland beyond the fence behind the hut. And the rushing streams, running clear over stony beds, by the ancient woodland paths.

And the cold. The crisp, clear, singing chill of the winter air. The coldness is the air. And the air lays the coldness on everything. The cold is so clean, so sharp. My skin can see it, glinting like diamonds to the touch.

And it’s in the crunch of the grass. The frost on the branches. The lattice slabs on the frozen lake. The frozen water pump. The air lays her icy breath where she goes.

And the air is the dampness too. And the air lays the dampness on everything.

And the air is the colours. Shrouding everything in grey. Then lightening everything in diamond light, with whitened blue, with strong cobalt and every shade between. And with the darkness of night.

And this is the place of our dwelling. If indeed we dwell. The land is the rocks and the soil giving shape to every living thing. And the air brings life and colour and warmth and cool and movement to every moment of the life of every living thing. And everything has presence, has being, and mirrors everything else in itself, in a dance that is the whole. And this presencing we once called the gods, long before they grew to become abstract beings of the imagination, and maybe now, it is best just to note their coming to us out of the whole.

And we are in this dance too. In no special way. Just animals drawing life from the land and the air, moving and being in the wide place of the land. But also (not more than, just other than) our awareness has taken a path that is different from the others (but with great loss of other powers). And this gifts us in the unique way that everything arises in our experience.

So, maybe, the twist in the web of nature that is called humanness beckons us to do no more than live humbly, in common neighbourliness with the wild community of beings we live amongst. Yet more than this, to bring, as an offering to the whole, the uncommon gift that our quirk of consciousness has bestowed on us.

Not to master but to serve.

Photo by Fabrice Villard on Unsplash

We readily ask, “Who am I?”, hoping with this question to make sense of our own identity. But is this actually a misleading question? One that creates for us as many problems as it attempts to solve and creates much pain on the way.

The questions we choose to ask define the path our thinking will take and the sort of things that we are likely to discover.

Maybe there are more useful questions to ask of ourselves than “Who am I?”.

What happens when we ask instead, “What am I?”. What do we discover about ourselves then? What flight of inquiry do we launch out on?

Or maybe, “How am I?”. Not in the sense of, how am I feeling? But rather in “How do I happen?” What processes and patterns are at work to cause me to show up in the world as I do? “How does the event that is me create itself?”.

These two questions, “What” and “How”, take us on a very different path towards getting some useful insights into how we experience our life.

Asking “Who am I?” just takes us down a rabbit hole. “What” and “How” have the potential to take us out into some wild and interesting places.

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The air carries her immense and varied feeling. Vast, slow-moving dark clouds move eastwards across the thin blue dusk sky, heavy with rain,  but more than that, heavy with the weight of strong emotion bearing down from the sky and through my senses. So different from the rapid moving, almost skittish, game of tag that sometimes air will play in the high tree tops of the beech wood or the cold, clammy, darkness when she roots amongst the rushes, and the alders, black with dampness, at the head of the fishing lake. All are air. What clothes she wears, what variety of moods she carries, in her ever-present, shifting invisibility.

My school of education from the land is forming itself, over the past couple of days. The crows, the ancient trackways, Markstakes Common and its ancient trees, and of course, the air, always the air, have presented themselves most noticeable as my teachers. My responsibility is to apprentice myself to them as completely as I am able.

If I watched the sky for a day, it would always be continually changing, but always slower than my ability to notice. It is always in endless change and is never the same twice. Likewise, the river, likewise the sea, likewise the wind. Life is always in movement, but in a way that is unnameable, that submits ultimately to no laws but its own. Keep in step with the spirit (the ruach, the pneuma, the breath) it goes where it wills. And yet there is order.

There are patterns that form. Waves in the sea, the river, the sand. Gulleys and ravines in mountains, in tree bark, in farm pathways. There is a fingerprint to the Tao.

The left hemisphere is vital to notice the patterns, to learn them. But it really does have two modes to its working. One helpful, when you notice the number of lobes on a leaf, and the markings on a bud. One unhelpful, when it gets lost in story-telling about things – making models and maps and believing them.

To notice you need to move between the right and left attention constantly, but always using the right hemisphere mode as the foundation and point of return.

And slowness. Slowness in attention is everything. And it is my Achilles’ heel.

Image mine

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.

 

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What would it be to weave seamlessly into the fabric of the beast? To bodily wriggle, hunker or mold into soft landscape of her being?

In the woods, I slip into the silence at the heart of things, moving, in hope, to create the smallest possible ripples in the fabric of the here-now.

And then I am trying to write, to try to capture something in phrases. To say the something which is buzzing in my body. Wordless vibrations set off by the nearness of the land; the way she has, to the smallest degree, set off her dance beneath my skin.

I am making such small progress and am so lacking in the apparatus to notice and name the ripples and sensations that fleetingly arising in me each day.

But I work on.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

You need to feel the beast. You need to sit with her long enough. Walk through her often enough. Pause in her carefully enough. Till her rich and subtle being rises in you. As she rises in the old oak tree and the twisted birch and the dark winter pools and the flight of the crow.

You will not be able to name her or explain her, but she will rise in you nonetheless. There is the universal Tao, the Tao of the mind. And then there is the moist, dark, green Tao of this land, the inscape of this wooded, stream-carved place.

And the beast is not a fearful thing. She is not the beast of horror films and books. She is the animate presence of this nearby, more-than-human world, the living, visceral stirring of this dark soil.

 

 

Image mine.

Saturday evening. She has gone and I am alone again. The ice is leaving too.

I stand at the door of the hut feeling the sharp chill of the frozen air. I know this is the last night. The warmth of the rest of the year will sweep through in the coming wind.

Walking over Chailey Common that morning. Trees still frosted, muddy paths still crisp, pools and streams trapped in brown ice. A sharp magic everywhere. In my breath. On my skin. Under my feet. But soon this magic will be gone.

And now. A day later. This evening. Air from the west. Warmer now. Big sky over darkening meadow. Blue-grey cumulus quickly on the move. Thin crescent moon. Evening birdsong. Joyance.

The ice has gone and something new is here. My thoughts, resisting the abstraction of time, dwell on the movement of sun, moon and earth. No, to say that again. There comes a moment when the relations of the elements open a pathway to a new season. When the earth is at certain place with the sun and the moon hangs as it does just now and the jet stream snakes as it does and the dance of high and low shifts to a certain juxtaposition. Then, and only then, the air changes and the birds sing the spring and the buds break open and the grass is wet not iced.

Or did the Blackbird sing this into being or did the Ash sway this into life or did the lake soften everything into moistness again?

Everything is relations. Everything is movement. Everything dances with everything. It is not the things that make the moment; it is their movement, their relations and their dance.

I stop my thinking and swing with the sway.

 

Image mine.