Human Humble

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Deborah

Here’s the link to the relevant article I mentioned a day ago written by Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs. It’s titled: “Anthropocentrism’s Antidote, Reclaiming our Indigenous Orientation to Non-Human Teachers.” I still haven’t found my copy of it because I filed it so quickly and efficiently that I don’t remember where it is!!! That’s my trouble with being on top of things! I could probably have found it if it were in a pile of papers on my desk.

But I am supported in other ways. The day after I wrote about my frustration over losing the article, Four Arrows himself referenced the article and offered the link above to an email group in which we are both involved. A big smile spreads over my face with this effortless wish fulfillment.

Today, I’m still pondering my statement of yesterday: This complexity sustains itself without me.

Why does that seem so important? That truth stops me in my tracks that’s why. Being inconsequential to the big picture defies everything we moderns stand for. The truth of our circumstances bowls me over while standing in my waders in a muddy estuary. We humans think we can manage the forests, manage systems if we can understand them well enough, manage the wild. Isn’t that an oxymoron? We think our ingenuity will solve every problem and that more and more technology will cure all disease and more and more drugs will make us happy. We believe that somehow we humans alone determine our fate. I don’t believe it.

During the spirit bear trip, we spent hours inside the small galley of an elegant sailboat. Many times a day I sat at the table facing the wall opposite where a Canadian Sierra Club poster hung. “Think twice before you remain silent.” Remembering the impact of that sentence, I realize in retrospect this blog is my way of giving voice.

Experiencing the land, sea, creatures and culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast moves me still all these years later. Spending time in a functioning ecosystem moved me to tears then and moves me now. Something about being a non-essential component in the community of life liberates me. I belong to this earth as a member of life’s community. I am not in charge. As human humble I can never know enough to untangle the complexity. Here, standing in this humility, my senses tingle and expand – not just the typical senses like sight and smell but the unseen vibrational ones, too. Being tuned in to mystery, living aliveness, allowing myself to be awed, all that enriches my experience of being here now in a body. And seeing the spirit bear at home in its habitat amplifies my life. You know how they used to say, “Seeing is believing?” I appreciate that statement now. Seeing the white black bear elicits a response so enormous in me that words are limp descriptors. Poetic form helps:

We “bump” into a Brazilian film crew on the estuary.
After videoing an interview with the bear biologist,
they tell us they watched a white bear up Whalen Creek
only last week.

We decide to go for it.

Rainforest but not old growth,
the logging road is clogged with alder
and slippery with moss.
It  still provides the easiest access
to the spawning pool upstream.
Rare sun warms our backs.
Alder leaves paint yellow across the cobalt blue sky.
We shed jackets as we move along, but legs are trapped
sweating under the ubiquitous rubber waders.

Finding perches on the slope above the stream,
we sit waiting,
watching just a few salmon congregate by fallen logs damming a pool.


A black bear flits in/out of view, another, maybe another.
Or it could be the same one thrice.
Unlike Canoona,the bears here are spooked by us.
Wayne whispers,” They’ve always been wary here.
That’s why I stopped coming seven years ago, but
the Brazilian film crew said they watched a white one with her cub
for a long time. . . only last week, so let’s be patient, be still, be quiet.”

For five hours we sit waiting.

No matter because I’m quietly satisfied sitting for five hours.
I feel like a real wild life photographer.
Even though my lens is not long enough to capture bear on film
I experience the patience and trust required to wait for animals
to come to me.

Sitting quietly for five long hours,
I do tire of watching the shrubbery across the stream
and begin to surreptitiously watch my companions.
One fidgets, frisking her pockets for snacks.
Another takes her fly rod and disappears downstream.
Another meanders quietly talking to whomever will listen.
One earns my admiration.
She sits on the steep slope, heels dug in and elbows on her knees.
She sits motionless, holding her camera ready in front of her nose,
finger poised over the shutter button for two, maybe three,
of those five hours.

Her still presence does not bring the white bear.

A chill creeps in as the sun wanes.
We rustle into jackets, pull on hats.
Still no bear.
Standing stiffly we finally decide to head back down the trail
to the Zodiac waiting to motor us home.
The day takes on that end of day golden glow.
I look forward to getting under way to find safe harbor.
Dropping anchor means it’s time to share the daily ritual
of a small glass of wine.
It will be especially sweet after sitting
for five hours waiting.

On board the boat we wrestle with gear.
Stowing unused rain jackets,
struggling out of our unbendable hip waders
and tight long johns.
Never an easy task where space under tarp is limited.
There, even my short legs loom long.
But tonight, we can stretch a bit out on deck
under a radiant sunset sky.
The skipper raises anchor, the boat turns,
steaming for open water,
making haste for anchorage before dark.
Half in and half out of my boot,
I hear him yell from the bridge:
“White bear, white bear white bear on beach.”
I think this is a cruel joke after waiting five hours . . .
But no – he’s cut the engine.
Someone else begins to yell.
“Oh my god, oh my god.”
And there it is.
A big one – a really big one
ambling along the beach
right near where we ourselves had emerged
from the forest not long before.

Its bearness clarifies my bones..

Without binoculars
I see its head swing side to side
in rhythm with its lumbering gait.
With binoculars I can see its peach colored mantle,
orangey nose.
I’m awkward jumping up and down,
half in and half out of my boots,
but jump I must.
I can’t stop myself.
I yell with joy
and then everyone is hugging
and everyone starts crying and laughing
and we’re all jumping up and down
and crying and yelling.
So beside ourselves in our need to clasp each other tight
we forget the bear for moments still ambling on the beach
oblivious to our jubilation on the boat.
Even the bear biologist from Montana,
a veteran of seeing bears, has glistening cheeks.
We can’t seem to stop.
A white bear,
a white black bear.

I’m seeing with my own eyes Creator’s anomoly.
A white bear in a dark green world.

I am glad that my first sighting
of the enigmatic miraculous spirit bear
is
just as it has been.

Any closer
and
our exultation
would have sent it scrambling.

I’m sure the wine must have tasted extra sweet that night,
but I don’t  really remember.

The forest as home calls me back. My soul needs that forest, too, to remember the beauty of a fully functioning world which reminds me of my own true nature.

 

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Of Wolf and Salmon

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Deborah

Going straight to the past, I share with you, today, more from my journal written during the Spirit Bear Pilgrimage in 2002. Today, that past, seems completely present, as it probably is, still occurring there as it always has in that non-humanized neck of the wood.

On the fourth day, it clears up and five of us kayak in the estuary.  A thrill to sit down near the water with the potential of seeing wildlife closeup on the bank.  And we nearly do have an encounter.  Soon after starting to paddle, I feel a tremendous pull to go up a tidal channel. Logs have fallen across it, the water is about to drain back to sea, there is a bend ahead with brooding forest beyond, but I start paddling in that direction anyway. This IS the adventure of my lifetime, isn’t it? But I would feel much safer if someone else were following me, so I turn to look. Susan’s right behind me. She’s feeling the pull too.

So there I am eagerly paddling into the unknown around the bend when suddenly, inexplicably a salmon comes swimming fast down stream. Being so close to the water my “fear factor” bolts for my throat. The salmon is big, coming straight for me. It could slam into my kayak, hurl itself over the side, all slimy and wriggly, get trapped in my lap. Before I can even scream, I look again at the oncoming fish and do a double take. The salmon has no head! Like a recently slaughtered chicken running around the barnyard, the salmon is still swimming and passes just before my bow.  My belly knows we have just missed seeing a wolf snatch it.

How do I know we’ve missed a wolf? Wolves love the heads and brains of salmon.  Most of the time that’s all they eat.  Bears prefer eating the bulk of the body often leaving the head behind. Other scavengers, like coyotes and birds, clean up the bones.  All of this activity spreads the nitrogen rich nutrients from the salmon all over the place so that the insects, fungi, and microbes decompose what remains.  This fertilizes the soil with minerals and compounds from the planet’s other hemisphere. Imagine that richness! All of this supports the growth of the crabapple trees, grasses, berry bushes, and sedges, keeping the soil intact, shading the streams to maintain life-friendly temperatures, regulating the flow so the salmon can spawn and return, thus  keeping the whole planetary life cycle going. Nothing is out of place or unnecessary. Everything interacts with everything else.  This perfection – this intricate interdependency – hits me bone deep.  I can’t stop grinning with awe at the same time humility shakes my core.

This complexity sustains itself without me.

How’s that for something to ponder today? And another reason I care about salmon’s continued life on this earth.


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Of Bear and Salmon

Posted on October 20, 2010 by Deborah

Where do the days go? Really, where??? Are they scrolled up at the edge of the world waiting for history to assess them? Have they dropped into the molten cauldron at the center of the earth or flung themselves past satellites into deep space? How is the edge of day defined anyway when your day ends before my day does? This is the kind of question I wish we asked more often because it juices my imagination, which is a useful faculty to “rev up” in these times of conundrums.

So today, earlier, before day evaporated into evening, I babysat for my 23 month old grandson.

I know I’m feeling a bit better, because I am drawn to dance a bit to the Wiggles on PBS Sprout. I begin thinking about salmon because the Wiggles are pretending to be monkeys, tigers and elephants. As we try to imitate their gestures, Don Trent Jacobs, also known as Four Arrows, floats through my mind. I met him about a month ago and I am impressed by his spirited style and inspired by his provocative ideas about education. He says it’s “high time” for us humans to remember who our real teachers are. Author of many books, Four Arrows, his daughter, also a teacher, and his not-yet-teen grandson recently wrote an article together for the journal called “Critical Education.”

I’m ashamed to say I can’t find the article itself at this moment, either hard copy or online. Drat. But I will give you the title here – maybe even offer up a quote – as soon as the article surfaces because their message is a paradigm buster. Get off our anthropocentric pedestal folks!

They call for us to remember that we learn much from our non-human companions. Our own human ancestors left us a legacy of information about our dependency on other forms of life, including the animals. Myths and rituals, stories, proverbs, artwork and songs keep this knowledge alive. Modern science could keep it alive, too, if we choose to look at the facts from the perspective of reverence, of humility.

This is not new thinking for me, but in 2002, I experienced this truth with more than my brain.  As I listened to the bear biologist while standing in an estuary, I suddenly knew myself to be a human of yesteryear – many long yesteryears ago.

Here’s what I wrote in my journal:Wayne tells us all sorts of fascinating things about bears. Their diet is just like ours: they eat the potato group ( roots), fruits and berries, leafy greens and meat, primarily salmon. He shows us a trail where for as long as one hundred years bears have placed their feet in the same spots so that their pawprints are now inches deep. As the bears walk in these footprints, they sway in an exaggerated rhythmic fashion. Sometimes the scientists know these trails lead to rubbing trees. Wayne has discovered that even slender trunks will be used for rubbing posts, especially if they have stubby little branches. He shows us a trunk of a large tree sprinkled with bear hairs of all colors and types. Here grizzly, black bear, and Kermode bear, the scientific name for the white spirit bear, co-exist.

We find a wallow too – a hollow rich in mud and water where bears roll. After the mud dries and cakes on their fur, they rub it off on their special rubbing trees which take burrs, debris and varmints along with the flaking mud. Brilliant yes?

Bears also use plants for medicine. They know which plants to eat for bellyache, worms, gout, arthritis and diarrhea. Every plant the bear eats—licorice fern, chocolate lily, angelica, cow parsnip, devil’s club, salmon berries, salal—every one was eaten for nourishment or medicinal purposes by our own ancestors. Since the bears thrived here long before we two-leggeds showed up, I can feel me long ago, hiding in the shadows to watch and learn from the bears. A great A-HA ripples through me.

No wonder cultures all over the northern hemisphere still revere the bear as powerful medicine.

Oh, one last fact I picked up from the library onboard the sailboat during that pilgrimage in 2002. Again from my journal at the time: Most of you know we portray the grizzly as a vicious human killer.  But look at these statistics I found in yet another reference book on the boat: “Between 1978 and 1994,…DOMESTIC DOGS killed more people than black AND grizzly bears combined.” ( capitalization mine.) This staggers me.

Extinct now in so many lands where once, long ago, before bears were demonized, bears inspired.

Please take that notion deep into your human animal mind and let it sift, settle and soften you.

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Of Salmon and Spider

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Deborah

“…Why bother worrying? It shortens living. I really do wonder why we all make such a big thing out of so many little things when all we’re doing is preparing to die anyway.”

I wrote those sentences in 1986.

Seventeen years later, I stand on the bank of the Khutz River in BC and watch salmon surge upstream, trying to hurtle over car sized boulders and flinging themselves against huge torrents of water, failing again and again, trying again and again to manifest their destiny.

Passion for full-on living surges before my eyes, determined to head for their dying in order to regenerate life. Salmon put flesh on the bones of my nascent wisdom expressed so many years earlier.

Salmon inspire me. That’s one reason I care about them.

Spiders inspire me, too.

This past week, this web spends two days next to my front door. Spider strategically places it so we humans can walk in and out of the house without running into the primary thread responsible for anchoring the web in space. The second afternoon, a squall moves through. When I look next, the web is no more, evaporated into thin air.

No surprise then, really, that as I sort through boxes of memorabilia yesterday this poem surfaces. This was also written in 1986.

Life’s web
tightens its grip.
I am gasping.
My vision blurs.

Yet in this breathless place,
I need do nothing
but
fight restraints.

“It’s all your fault!”
“You wrecked my life.”
“If it weren’t for you and your neediness, I would have. . .”

I am safe,
no response-abilities.
I stand for nothing,
afraid to be

me.

 

Rain, wind, heavy frost
break the threads.
I fall free,
no bonds holding me.

Falling,
I can do naught but trust.
I see, I breathe, I am.

I ask you, reader, what have you learned from the living world about living your dying?

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Bemused

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Deborah

My viscous cold lingers and I swear it’s starting to slow my brain down, to cover my synapses with goop and generally make a muckery of my ability to think clearly. Yesterday it seemed a wonderful idea to continue sharing my birthing experiences in the dark ages of the early ‘60’s, those days when we felt so modern and civilized.

But other thoughts intervene. Those halcyon days of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s are the very same days that widened the rift between our bodies and our brains begun several centuries earlier. We now suffer from a huge rent in the fabric of our human nature, the nature that has been with us for literally millions of years. For that reason alone, I need to run wild with thoughts that are niggling.

Here goes…get ready…persevere, please…

Just this morning, my nine year old granddaughter picks up a National G from my coffee table. “We were alive 4 million years ago?” she asks with astonishment. The cover shows the skull of the latest anthropological find, “Ardi,” the oldest known female hominid skeleton. Four million years old. We human animals slowly slowly evolved over all those eons of time, but the last 100 years, only three or four generations, have totally changed everything about how we two-leggeds think and behave.

Yesterday, I volunteered to assess a stream preparatory to monitoring the return of salmon. We three women, each an elder, gathered on the driveway near our cars to decide on a date for the next streamside visit. Not one of us has a blackberry or an I-phone on which we keep our calendars. I suddenly started laughing. We are a throwback to times gone by. We still keep our calendars on paper, hanging on the fridge or next to the computer. The fish biologist, overhearing us and also probably close to sixty, chimed in: “Hey, my wife and I keep our calendar on a dry erase board. We think that’s modern.” I loved this meeting of comrades AND it reminded me of how rare we are.

I belong to a generation who grew up with black phones, ONLY black, with receivers connected to a wire connected to the body of the phone connected to the wall. AND a real person, almost always a woman, of course, said, “Hello – what number are you calling?” when I picked up the receiver and dialed “O”. A real person was always waiting on the other end of the line. I actually thought it was a step backward to eliminate the operator. We had party lines, too, meaning several families shared the same phone line and sometimes we had to apologize for picking up the phone in the middle of someone else’s conversation. Such a feeling of community!!!

My Mom and Dad witnessed the invention of the airplane and the horseless carriage. REALLLLY. Radio and phones were brand new and primitive. Hand cranked even! My folks wrote letters routinely. Real letters on real paper, sometimes written in long hand with an ink fountain pen and sometimes typed, folded into an envelope and mailed with 1 cent stamps. They made romantic dates and professional appointments, made apologies to friends and professions of friendship by writing letters.

And as early as 1920, my uncle as a lad was observing the pollution of the Hudson River and commenting in his diary that the fish weren’t looking so good anymore. This was due to coal mining up stream way back then.

29 years – I remember this exactly – October 15, 1981 – everything changed. Only 29 years ago, a personal computer cost $10,000 and my husband wanted to buy one.

My own children, who are still young by my standards,  grew up without computers, digital cameras, VCR’s, DVR’s, CD’s, DVD’s, MP3’s, cell phones, I-pads, I-pods, whatever else exists now that didn’t even 15 years ago. They still loved rock music and went crazy for Led Zeppelin, Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – turn tables and tape decks – what a wonder!!! They did grow up with TV and Sunday family dinners in front of Walt Disney. I didn’t see my first TV, black and white of course, until I was around 10 years old. It was in the neighbor’s living room where everyone gathered at least once a week during the few months before every household on the block purchased their own.

The onslaught of computers and electronic media devices have come upon us so quickly that we’ve forgotten we have the right to choose how and when to use them.

We’re so immersed that we don’t realize we have become enmeshed, dependent.

Imagine a childhood without computers. It’s hard isn’t it?

We humans have been on this planet falling in love, sexing, eating, belching, singing, dancing, breathing, writing poetry, making music, dreaming, telling stories, chatting about our lives, making plans, starting wars and envisioning peace, experiencing loss, wonder, fear, success and fulfillment for millions of years. Yet in only 29 years we’ve become addicted to instant communication. Deadlines are NOW. Multitasking is the norm, not just the domain of harried mums. Life has speeded up beyond our capacity to respond, and we’re falling ill from stress and confusion. We’re reeling and don’t even know what’s spun us around.

As I walk the salmon stream, I ponder the myriad, inextricable, conundrums of today and wonder how we will find our way back to a more reverent and balanced way of living. Here on this wealthy island in the Pacific Northwest, where people love nature and are devoted to sustainability, toxic waste from a nearby industrial park and rain sluiced cadmium, zinc and copper coming off brake linings and car tires from the busy highway above contaminate this stream.

Foam is gathering, a sign of too much nitrogen. The fish biologist is a bit discouraged. He expected to see a few young salmon, the first returnees – but there are none.

My granddaughter asks, “Gemma, why do you care about salmon?” And, though I will answer her question, soon, here, I ask YOU now, how has the computer age affected you? Why do you care?

 

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Still Far from Home

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Deborah

Pandemonium erupts. Nurses holding me on either side, I totter to the delivery room but not before one last stop at the toilet. Agony that. It actually seems possible to me that the baby could fall into the toilet.

It’s all happening too fast and the doctor is a long time away due to the ice storm. Heaving and hoisting, they get my quivering, frightened body onto the bed of a table.

“Squeeze your legs together.” I wonder if they’re serious. . .

“Squeeze your legs together tight.” Oh my goodness, they are serious.

“Stop pushing.”

Pushing is mandatory.

“I said, stop pushing.”

“I can’t stop pushing.”

“Sit her up, then. Get that spinal administered.”

Slow it down, slow   it    down,     s l o w    i  t      d  o    w      n.

My wrists are officially strapped to the handles of the bed of a table, my feet are put in the metal stirrups, the doctor is still miles away, the knees are up and the legs are spread, and I can’t feel a thing below my chest. I’m awake and I can’t feel my body. Apparently, the contractions have stopped.

Everyone around me seems tense but at least they’re quieter.

I vaguely wonder about the baby, what’s happening to him or her as he stays stuck in the birth canal.

The doctor arrives and he tells me to push. I have no way of knowing if I’m pushing or not. I decide I must not be when a nurse begins pushing on my belly.

Someone comments, “This is not working.”

The doctor gets forceps and a voice tells me to hang on to the handles. They almost pull me off the table with the strength needed to pull the baby free of my body.

I know then that something is wrong with this way of birthing. Never again, I swear to myself, never again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Coming Back

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Deborah

I begin the slow return to embracing my animal nature with the birthing process of my children. Still living in Philadelphia area, it’s the early 1960’s now. There are no natural childbirth classes yet, but there is talk of breastfeeding. When I ask the husband of my pregnant friend, Shelley, if she is going to nurse their baby, he, an educated, decent man, looks horrified. “Are you kidding? I refuse to have a cow for a wife.”

Too timid  and confused about what I want, I can’t assert myself with this first pregnancy.  I choose the standard route for delivery -the right obstetrician, the right suburban, spanky clean hospital, doing it the modern, woman-divorced-from-her-body way, though I do insist on a spinal so I can be awake when it happens.  Always wanting to be prepared, I have been reading books about labor and delivery. Intellectually I know about the different stages of the process.

Contractions begin in the late afternoon. By late evening, they’re close and regular so we head out the door. Sleet and icy roads make my husband drive  ever so carefully to the hospital. They say it’s false labor since contractions have stopped by the time we arrive. They put me in a room on the maternity ward, suggest I spend the night, and send my husband home. The staff thinks I am not in labor, so I’m left alone to sleep. But the contractions resume, and early in the wee hours of morning, I buzz the nurse after one particularly intense pushing type contraction. Clearly annoyed at being awakened from her nap, she steams into my room.

“I think I’m about to deliver,” I say.

She says, “You can’t be. You would have been screaming for hours if that were so.”

Screaming? I could have screamed?? Wow, that hadn’t even occurred to me.

“Please, will you look at me down there, please.”

“’Hon,’ there’s gonna be nothing to see. Go back to sleep.”

“Please!”

Something about my delivery of that last PLEASE makes her throw aside the covers with an I’m-not-happy-about-this expression.

She looks. She gasps. She yells. “Oh my God, the baby’s crowning.”

Such sweet vindication!

I’ll continue this story tomorrow. In the meantime, remember some of the times in your own life when your body knew the score before the officials did. I’d love to hear them.

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To be animal . . .or not

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Deborah

The memory of learning that I was an animal, a mammal to be exact, still rivets me. The impact lies in my bones deeply but with a significance that’s hard to articulate. There’s a key somewhere in this memory which relates to our planetary crisis of today. On one hand, I abhorred the idea I was an animal. And yet, I knew deeply that I was animal, at home completely with dirt, sky, wood, creek. If Peanuts the cartoon had existed then, I would have identified with Pig Pen with all those dirty motes swirling around his head keeping him real.

But in my growing up days, I face a huge crack in my worlds. To be me or not to be me. I do not see, as a kid, how my animal self and my human self can live in one body, one mind.

Dependency forces the issue. In my family, cleanliness is actually more important than godliness. Self-control, erudition, correctness, perfection, these rule my days. Cultured and civilized…modern. Starched and ironed dresses, white socks, combed hair and even white gloves and purses on certain occasions – even at the age of 3.

My growing-up era deepens the split as I mature.  Women’s lib is not yet known in the ’40’s and 50’s. Girls in school have only recently been given permission to play sports and we do it with gusto but a high price rides on our heads. Half court basketball is better than no basketball. BUT, I run and block and shoot scared to death. I might die by sweat. We wear blue one-piece rompers for physical education class. Buttoned to the collared neck, sleeves just short of the elbow, a cloth cinch belt and bloomers – that’s right, shorts with elastic shirring the fabric tight to the thigh lest an underpant be seen. They were royal blue. If I perspired ( our word in those days ), the cloth under my arms would turn dark, dark blue. Life, as I knew it, would end.

Girdled and stockinged, brassiered and high heeled, bleached highlights and bobby pins  slicking my mousey hair down, nose matte with powder, cheeks blushing with rouge, I lose the home of my body – a dis-ease wildly prevalent today in different ways with different symptoms depending on where you live.

Even when I am forty-eight, my mother still complains, “Deb, why don’t you do something with your hair? You look like something the cat dragged in. ” I remember arriving at her door for a visit one day and she says, “ Go brush your hair, you look as if you’ve been in a windstorm.” In a way that comment pleased me. I was carefully cultivating that windblown look, thinking it Montana chic.

Living in the East doesn’t help either. Propriety ruled there then. I get a hint of what I might be missing when an Australian woman moves into our suburban block with her German, visiting professor husband. We take our kids to the neighborhood swimming pool and she expresses her surprise that kids have to wear bathing suits in America. In both Europe and Australia, customarily, kids under the age of six swim nude. Her family even routinely goes skinny dipping in German hot springs. Her family. All of them together, young and old. Shocking to me.

Then one evening, my sister-in-law, whispers confidentially that she and her husband have skinny dipped under a full moon during a recent vacation in the Caribbean. My up-tight, non-animal self blurts, “Why? Why would you want to do that?”

“It feels wonderful,“ is her simple and candid response. Then she adds, “I want to experience everything life has to offer, at least once. Don’t you?” I don’t know if I do!

More stories to come. In the meantime, I would love to hear yours – How does this split in our natures, influence you?

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Being Animal

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Deborah

“Like night cracked open by the shout of day,” epiphanies change me from one state to another. When I was six or seven, I learned I was an animal.

I’ll tell the story after I tell you about the author of that quote above. Striking isn’t it? We experience night cracked open by day everyday of our lives but rarely notice it as dramatic poetry. The author’s name is Carolyn Hillyer, a musician, storyteller and writer who lives in Dartmoor. Learn about her here!

Though I’ve listened to her music countless times, only this morning did that particular line grab my ears. From a song called “the degna’s dream of fire,” ( non capitalization is Hillyer’s ) in a CD called Ice. These are cold songs that “ tell a very old story of lives and lands long hidden, of memories that lay frozen and wrapped within 25,000 years of time. The cold songs speak of…the embodiment of the most ancient relationship between human people and the deep spirits of these northern lands.”

We all have that ancient relationship with the land, an aspect of our global indigenousness, but most of us have currently and thoroughly forgotten this relationship, anesthetized by homogenized urbanity and an uppity sense of being other than everything else. As a young one in the mid 1940’s, rolling around on the recently mowed suburban backyard grass, I know I belong to this green bladed tickly stuff, the cut emerald perfume inhaling me deeply. A few clover still stand with a week’s reprieve from the hand pushed guillotine. Honey bees buzz among them, flitting quickly to my mother’s more blossom abundant, perennial garden. I roll over on my back carefully so as not to smash a stray bee. I face the startling blue of deepsky, not yet dulled by pollution, a word I know not. Cupping my hands to screen out everything but sky, I plunge into it at the same time my shoulder blades dive out the other side of earth arriving in the country of China that I’ve been told lies opposite me.

I lie there wondering at it all, wondering about property lines and my backyard. Where does our property end? Does it go six inches down, six feet up? Sixty feet down, 6 miles up? Where do I really belong? What can I call mine? Why is there a fence bordering my yard with a gate that opens to a trail made by me into the woodland? I love that wood which promises both mystery and discovery. But I know it doesn’t belong to me.

I wonder if kids today even ask these questions, so habituated are we now to domestication.

Despite my immersion in the world around me at this tender age, my mother shocks me one afternoon by telling me I am an animal. Maybe she’s admonished me for being an animal because I am getting grass stains on my shirt. I fight her, she fights back. Maybe the dialogue goes something like this:

“Deb, stop acting like an animal.”

“ I’m NOT acting like an animal.”

“Oh yes, you are, “she might have said. “ You know, Deb, humans actually are animals.”

“We are NOT,” I shout in horror.

“But we are. We’re animals, really.”

“We are not,” I say. My “not” is not quite as vociferous, but I am still clinging tightly to my belief system, so I repeat, “I’m not an animal. I can’t be. I talk.”

“But, honey,” she’s softening a little, too, now, getting into her teacherly mode, “The scientists have figured it out. Biologists know. There are all kinds of animals…birds, reptiles, fish, spiders, bees, horses, elephants, all kinds… The humans are the kind called mammals.”

“But I can’t be an animal,” I remember my panic rising again. “I can’t be. I walk on two legs.” I begin to whimper as I feel my world view inside changing. I’m scared.

“So do birds,” she says.

I begin to wail.

That memory rivets me.

At a time on our planet when we human animals need to remember our total dependency on nature’s largesse, born to this planet, indigenous whether urban or not, why do we fight our nature so intensely?

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Tree Talk

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Deborah

The words below belong to my friend, Jaems, a Druid priest in CA. He replied to my recent post: Words or No  Words. Eloquent, his story, with words of course, which is partly why this is all so funny to me, so paradoxical, but so richly textured and evocative of the indigenous human territory I’m pursuing in this blog.  That’s one reason I’ve used it as my post today…I’m also still wonky from my headslitherygoopiness.

I took a walk in the redwood grove which had been used as the forest for the last of the three Star Wars movies (the Ewok movie)–do you remember the “air bikes” chase scene, the heroes zipping through the trees and enemies crashing into them?–that’s the forest and those are the trees.  The grove lies within a horseshoe bend of the river and is bordered by Hwy 36 that begins near the Northern California coast, winds through the mountains and ends at Red Bluff in the Central Valley.  The grove is cool and quiet.  After walking a bit, even the sound of the passing vehicles is absorbed by the forest and disappears.  In this place, you walk with redwoods.

This is unmistakably their home.  The silence begins to feel–not simply a condition for hearing them, but–as a necessary part of the ordinary conversation between them and me.  Suddenly you get it that they have been talking with each other for much longer than your own life, and you are stepping into their speech and they are reaching out to you and including you.  The silence becomes a substance, a tangible “goop” which, much like an experiment in a chem lab, holds everything in suspension and which facilitates flow of energy.  I walk through “something.”  Soon I realize it’s a visceral communication made up of smells, breath, memories on the forest floor, vines of poison oak leaves turning red, and and something else.  The trees are reaching out, just as I relax and open to them.  No longer am I talking to trees and having ecological consciousness of biodiversity; instead, we are in active dialogue with each other.  I have entered an ancient discussion.  There is a headymixture of delight,  yearning, sorrow, a feeling for being totally right here and stories going back and forth between us.

Truly, the entire experience seems simply normal.  As I come back to the edge of their home, I feel the air change.  The hot air along the river is filtering in.  All of us know this and are changed by it–the trees, the short brush, even the air itself.  It’s all an active dialogue–and I mean “Dialogue” as a comprehensive sense of everything exchanged, felt and known.  As I step out into the sunlight and the sandy bank of the river, suddenly a grasshopper flies away and ratchets its legs in protest.   And just as suddenly I understand that the earth is a living deity, within which we are intimate and integrated, and everything is her expression.  We are in constant Dialogue, because she is always speaking, reflecting upon her being in sound, colors, flight, air temperature, absorption, song, darkness, death and spirits.  Too too much to say in this short space, but she is also the Imagination in the air that continues to reflect upon this in these words.  The flow is visceral, andit is visual.  Sometimes we actually see it with our eyes, a vision of the flow itself, or even the movement along the flow in the flight of a grasshopper.  If we ask, we can see it, because she shows it to herself.  She says a word and it is.

Just as suddenly, I realize that for most of the people I know, this dialogical ability has been diminished to the point of being lost.  Instead of visceral dialogue with her,  the normal and general sensory capacities (for this ordinary kind of communication) have become exceptional and specialized.     The ordinary is not, however, the controlled and heavily manipulated language of Medicare, capitalistic corporations or a culture founded upon fear.  But that discussion goes in another direction.

Dialogue that precedes finding words for it is an ordinary way of life.  Take a walk in the woods.  Step into the goopy suspension within which you will feel the flow moving through all things (very much like electricity moving easily through water), and listen.  And once you know it, you can walk with it always.  Now, then, tomorrow, here, sleeping, over coffee, in the mist.

Hence, when people say that they listen to spirit, when people say they are taught by spirit,  when people sing songs given to them by spirit or when they are moved to say or do something in spirit, it’s just that they step sideways into the visceral dialogue of life.  The spirit(s) are right here.
It’s a beginning to reconnect with knowing this–what you call “reMembering”.  From there, you can travel on the energy.  And there’s more.  But enough for now.  But when you bring back images and paint them, you tell others about the journey.  I mean, you personally, Deborah.  What a gift.

Like the guy who says to you, Yes, that’s where I was.  I have on my living room wall a painting by a friend who has been at edge of the great transformation.  She was, in fact, painting that journey when she suddenly collapsed and was found the next day.  She was brought back in the hospital, but I refuse to put a frame around that painting, because there is one place of white canvas.  It’s when she collapsed.  It’s part of the story.  But she knows, and, this painting still unfinished, she is already working on another.  She is in constant dialogue with the spirit world, and she is showing us.  As you are.  As we could all be more and more.  How more fortunate could we all be?  Most people don’t know yet.

That’s Jaems!

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