Night Howls

Tags

human consciousness, Nature, Pago Pago, poetry, sailing, Tree of Life, universe, wild

Silver Moonlight, by Steven Richardson

Last month around this time when the moon was full, our nights were filled with howling. Almost every night we could hear the mournful cries of coyotes in the fields behind our house, along with ecstatic barking, yipping, chortling–as if they were celebrating a kill, or worshipping the moon, or engaged in some wild orgy.  Or perhaps they were merely giving voice to the irresistible life force pumping through their blood and brains and hearts, a force of nature too wild and fierce to hold back.  

The sound, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, echoed long in my mind afterwards, like ripples of water moving away to the edge of consciousness and reverberating back again. Like something heard long ago deep in my bones, from an evolutionary or primal past.

They say we humans carry in our genes the imprint of life-forms going back to when the first cells emerged on earth.  Deep in our blood, our bones, our very atoms, lays some faint memory of our ancient beginnings. Phylogenists call it our “vast evolutionary tree.”

If we go back even further, traces of that time when the morning stars first sang together may still be felt when we look out on the night sky. We are the stuff of stars, after all, so say astrophysicists. 

Carl Jung envisioned our Collective Unconscious as a reservoir lying deep within our psyches containing our evolutionary memories.  While they lay below consciousness, they break through in dreams and myths and fairy tales, in primitive urges, the call of the wild, in our more-than-human yearnings.

Beautiful Rage by Steve Richardson

Sometimes we feel this wildness rising within when witnessing powerful displays of nature: thunderstorms booming across the land, waterfalls careening over cliffs, huge waves crashing against rocks, hurricanes lashing at trees, lightening forking across a dark sky,  earthquakes heaving beneath our feet.   It frightens and excites—creating both the desire to escape and to embrace that primordial power.  One wild howl elicits another—the urge to howl back, to voice our own wild yearnings—to sing or dance, or paint or play, or grab words from the air and fling them onto paper.I heard that howl and answered back one night on anchor watch in Pago Pago.  A hurricane was blowing a few miles off Samoa and we were set to ride it out if it blew into the bay. 

I stood at the bow of La Gitana, hanging onto the staysail as the deck lurched beneath my feet like a wild stallion while the surging waves rose and fell and the chain from the anchor rooted deep in the mud below grew slack or tight.

Storm Clouds and Moonlight by Steve Richardson

Overhead a torrent of clouds crashed against a full moon, sometimes swallowing it whole, then washing away streaming moonlight. All around me the night raged while the anchor held tight, and I held tight, the terror and exhilaration pumping through my blood and brain.  The wild urge to let go and be carried away by the night was fierce. Later I tried to capture what it felt like.   Here’s what I wrote:

Night Howl

(Anchor watch in Pago Pago, Samoa)

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I watch,

                            moonlight and clouds wind-tangled across the sky.

Suddenly I am loosened, lifted, flung far–

fingers raking stars, mouth howling moon, mind mooning time

my heart-beat

riddles the universe.

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I stand, astonished,

gaping into the maw of some vast mirror.

It’s close to capturing what I felt, but the last two lines trouble me. “Gaping” and “maw” keeps the visceral effect I’m looking for, capturing the sense of trance-like awe and terror.  But mirror moves it away into something more philosophical or intellectual. 

I’m tempted to stop with the line “my heartbeat riddles the universe.” That captures the physicality of my wildly beating heart breaking out of my body to become the heart-beat of the universe.  And it also hints at the mystery of human heartbeat itself being a riddle, the riddle of the universe, that the evolution of the universe over eons led to the creation of a human being, whose heart—its essential being—is the ability to reflect back upon the universe, to take it all in. 

Human consciousness is the mirror through which the universe sees and knows itself, and through which we see and know ourselves—the fullness of being, our primal past and present standing face to face.

That’s a lot to howl about.

[Many thanks to Steve Richardson for permission to use photos of his oil paintings to illustrate this post.  You can find more of his work at his website.]

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“Redwood Speech, Watershed Prayers”

Tags

deep ecology, human consciousness, Nature, wild, writing

The following essay by Francis Weller captures so much of what I feel about nature, the natural habitat in which we live, how it shapes and grounds us, nourishes and inspires, and moves us beyond ourselves while at the same time giving us a deeper sense of who we really are.  

You can read the whole essay at his website Wisdom Bridge – Modern Pathways to our Indigenous Soul.

REDWOOD SPEECH, WATERSHED PRAYERS

The Poetics of Place

by Francis Weller

“Getting intimate with nature and knowing our own wild natures is a matter of going face to face many times.” ~Gary Snyder

Place, to indigenous cultures and the indigenous soul, is a living presence. Familiar watering holes, majestic mountains, sacred groves of trees, painted rocks and caves where initiations were held, added another dimension to life that is quite foreign to modern consciousness. To live within a sentient geography is to find oneself embedded in a rich and engaging terrain; a land that speaks. To our ancestors, and many indigenous cultures today, the landscape was another voice, a territory imbued with mystery and power. What this offered was another way to encounter the sacred and to enliven the imagination. This fertile exchange between place and psyche established a bond with the land, which, in turn, created an ethos of respect for the land. When the ground holds value, when it is the dwelling place of the spirits and the ancestors, when magic swirls through the canyons and across the plains, the relationship between the people and the land becomes sacramental.

Place is sensual, particular, felt as a presence offering itself to us for connection and spiritual sustenance. In traditional cultures, specific and revered places were saturated with stories, the ground filled with mythological rumblings, for example, the well-known storylines found in the landscape in the Dreamtime myths of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Likewise, the Western Apache in Arizona can name hundreds of sites where events took place “in the before time.” To their ancestors, these pathways marked the ways of survival. They led to water and food sources, but even more, they also provided a palpable way of encountering the sacred through geography. To know the world this way, as a living icon, is to know in your body that you are walking upon holy ground. The Aboriginal peoples knew this quality as djang. James Cowen explains what this word meant:

For them djang embodies a special power that can be felt only by those susceptible to its presence. In this way my nomad friends are able to journey from one place to another without ever feeling that they are leaving their homeland. What they feel in the earth, what they hear in the trees are the primordial whispers emanating from an ancient source. And it is this source, linked as it is to the Dreaming, that they acknowledge each time they feel the presence of the djang in the earth under their feet.

Read the rest HERE

The “wildness” I sense in our natural habitat and about which I write is that “living presence” and “mystery and power” he speaks of, even in rocks and streams, wind and fire, in things which do not grow or breathe.  It speaks to us, and shapes our language, how we communicate with each other, and articulate ourselves.

Weller continues:

The wild undoubtedly shaped our original words: imitations of animal sounds, wind, thunder, the music of ocean and river. This lustrous blend of sounds quickened the imagination of our ancestors . . . . Jay Griffiths writes, “Metaphor is where language is most wild, spirited and free, leaping boundaries, and it may be no surprise that Amazonian languages can be as matted and dense with metaphor as the forest is tangly with vegetation. The Amazon seems a place of boundless allusion, this unfenced wild, where meaning is twined within meaning; words couple and double, knotted together.”

In a very real way language and place are synonymous. Words reflect what we inhabit, where we dwell. Thomas Berry said that our imagination is only as rich as the diversity of the life around us. If we inhabit a terrain of microchips, cell phones and video monitors, we speak two-dimensionally, abstractly because there is nothing sensual about these realities.

If, on the other hand, our daily round includes sunlight, fragrances from the green earth, songbirds, tastes of berries picked from the bush, then our sensual minds stir and the words become as richly textured as the terrain. Our language has an ecology and it is as varied as the experiences it is given. Jay Griffiths speaks to this in her book, Wild: An Elemental Journey, “All languages have long aspired to echo the wild world that gave them growth and many indigenous peoples say that their words for creatures are imitations of their calls. According to phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, language ‘is the very voice of the trees, the waves, the forest.’” (pg 25. Wild) . . . .

I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a sensual earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity. I want to hear words coming from my mouth and your mouth that are so beautiful that we wince with joy at their departure and arrival. I want to touch words that carry weight and substance, words that have shape and body, curve and tissue. I want to feel what we say as though the words were holy utterances surfacing from a pool where the gods drink. . . . . My language must be redwood speech, watershed prayers, oak savannah, coupled in an erotic way with fog, heat, wind, rain and hills, sweetgrass and jackrabbits, wild iris and ocean current. My land is my language and only then can my longing for eloquence by granted. Until then I will fumble and fume and ache for a style of speaking that tells you who I am.

I too long to sculpt words from rock and stream and trees, from birds and bees and the howl of coyotes, from wind and wave and the scent of earth.

How does your habitat speak to you?  How does it inspire you to speak?

 

Swimming Among the Stars

Tags

adventure, exploring, human consciousness, Milky Way, poetry, sailing, Sea of Cortez, swimming, universe, writing

Milky Way

Last night I swam among the stars. The air and water temperatures were both 78 degrees, so it felt like I was moving from one warm atmosphere into another more dense when I stepped in my pool. There was no moon and the Milky Way was strewn across the sky like scattered bones of light. When I lay on my back to watch them, it felt like I was floating among the stars.

And then I realized–I was! We all are.

We sail across the universe on the back of a tiny planet at the edge of a galaxy that swirls around us. Too often we forget that–how embedded we really are in the universe.

I became acutely aware of this one night when we were crossing the Sea of Cortez from Baja to mainland Mexico. There was no wind, no moon. The sea was perfectly still like the surface of a dark mirror, marred only by our trailing wake.

Above us the bare mast stirred a billion stars, which were reflected in the sea’s surface below. I felt like we were on a starship sailing through the cosmos.

Stars reflected in the water

Later that night I wrote this:

Night Crossing, Sea of Cortez

The sea appears so simple

With a dark, indulgent face

The stars there twice reflected

Like a world spun out of space

Our sloop shoots through the cosmos

Through a mute and moonless night

Our wake a fiery comet

Streaming effervescent light

With all the universe inert

We slip from star to star

Then reach across the Milky Way

Toward galaxies afar

Eons swirl, light-years unfurl

And none can still our flight

Leaping toward the infinite

To apprehend the light.

I’m not alone in seeing the overlap between the ocean and the night sky. Various artists are fond of depicting whales and dolphins and other sea creatures swimming among the stars. The ocean and the universe stand at the edge of the wild, the last two true frontiers we have to explore, except for the human consciousness, of course.  The ocean and the universe have become symbols for consciousness as well as adventure.

We seem to grasp that there is something that connects all three—some deep, dreamy, ever-flowing, ungraspable, powerful yet nurturing element in which we all are steeped. That calls us to move beyond ourselves, beyond the safe and familiar, the already known. That inspires us to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp.

I’m still reaching. Are you? What calls you to move beyond yourself into the unknown?

Other nature posts with poetry

Night Howls

Walking Among Flowers

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

Touching the Wild

“A Scattering of Rocks” – Zen in the Garden of Eden

The Wildness of Water

Tags

diving, Nature, sailing, snorkeling, swimming, water, wild

Now that the weather has warmed and heated our pool, Dale and I go swimming every afternoon. It’s not just the exercise we look forward to, or the relief from the heat, or a pleasant way to wind down the day together. There’s something sensual and delicious about slipping into the cool water, gliding hands over head through folds of flowing silk, becoming weightless and transparent suspended beneath the sky.

I haven’t swum so much since we were living aboard La Gitana and sailing along the coasts of Baja and across the south Pacific. Then it was mostly snorkeling along the reefs, chasing schools of colorful fish, or diving for rock scallops.

Chris and Kelli snorkeling

We’d go early in the morning to forage for food and stay for hours, swimming in pairs. Dale and our son Chris would hunt for fish and lobster with spears. Our daughter Kelli and I would swim away in the opposite direction with abalone knives strapped to our ankles and net bags dangling from our waists, diving for scallops and conch.

But much of the time was spent sight-seeing, watching the flow of sea-life below us, diving closer to investigate, hovering like humming birds to take it all in. We lost track of time. Only when our goody bags became too full, or our bodies had lost so much heat we were shivering would we reluctantly agree to head back to the dinghy.

We lived off the sea as much as possible, by choice and necessity. Sometimes we’d be away from civilization for weeks at a time. We had no refrigeration and depended upon our diving for fresh food. We’d preserve in marinades or dry what we couldn’t eat immediately. But mostly we tried to catch only what we could eat that day.

Now it’s a different kind of swimming. I watch the wildlife while floating on my back–a pair of golden eagles circling and calling overhead, yellow breasted finches hiding among the oak leaves swooping down to drink from the waterfall, a red-headed woodpecker chasing them away.

But the pure pleasure that swimming brings is the same. I’m hardly alone in loving the way water looks, feel, sounds. Others have captured the allure of swimming better than I can:

When we swim we shed our higher consciousness, the complex, reasoning human organism, and remember, deep inside ourselves, the first oceanic living cell; we almost become our origins. Whether in lake, ocean, or pool, there comes that moment when the world of our ordinary preoccupations washes away and we sink into a meditative state where the instinctual, intuitive, subconscious mind can tell us what we need to know. . . . In the world of water, we become aware of our skin, of the body’s limits and definitions, while we are simultaneously wrapped in an element so familiar, so delightful, sensual that we feel we have come home.

—From Splash! Great Writing About Swimming by Laurel Blossom

Honduras, Bay Islands

Being immersed in water takes us back to a primordial place–whether it’s through memories of the womb, or the watery origins of life on earth, or the fact that our very bodies are primarily water. Water is not only essential to our well-being, but central to our very being.Whether diving for food, or doing laps in a pool, we feel the pure joy–the wildness–of water.

Do you love to swim?  In what ways does water speak to you?

 

Living on the Edge of the Wild

Tags

adventure, exploring, lifestyle, Nature, sailing, wild, writing

I created this blog to explore what it means to be living on the edge of the wild.

We all are, in some way, living on the edge of the wild, either literally or figuratively, whether we know it or not.  We all are standing at the edge of some great unknown, exploring what it means to be human in a more-than-human universe.

We encounter the “wild” not only in the natural world, but in ourselves and our daily lives, if only in our own strange dreams, our own unruly minds and rebellious bodies, our own inscrutable families and weird and wonderful pets.

We encounter the “wild” at the edges of science, the arts, and human consciousness.

I began my exploration into the wild quite literally, when our family was living aboard La Gitana and traveling around the world for six years. It became starkly apparent when I was sailing across the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by nothing but the sky above and the sea below, that I was living on the edge of something primitive and uninhibited, vulnerable to potentially terrifying forces that could rip us apart or swallow us whole. And yet those very same forces are what filled our sails and moved us forward, and what cradled us below, harboring in those depths the creatures that astounded us with their beauty and power.

I came to appreciate in the most intimate way how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in the natural world that surrounds and supports us.  We are indeed living on the edge of the wild, the largely untamed and unknown world into which we are born, exploring the borderlands that lay between the human and the more-than-human worlds, and the ways they overlap and mirror each other.

Now that I am again living on the edge of the wild in a home bordering a nature preserve, I find myself re-exploring those borderlands:

• Not only through my encounters with the wildlife and natural habitat that now surrounds me, but also through reflecting upon those years living at sea.
• Through my writing, plunging below conscious thought into that unruly wildness that harbors all manner of terrifying and astounding creatures to capture on paper.
• Through the books I read exploring the edges of science and the human condition, pushing the envelope on all manner of frontiers.

What’s really interesting is how often those explorations into the wild begin with seemingly mundane observations, ordinary sights and sounds, that caught in the right light, reveal something extraordinary.

This blog was created to explore those borderlands with others.  I hope you will share your thoughts with me on these and other topics.

• In what ways do you live on the edge of the wild?
• What borderlands are you exploring?
• What envelopes do you think need pushing?