"As so often on spring evenings , no birds sing near
me, while all the distant trees and bushes ring with song.
Like all human beings, I seem to walk within
a hoop of red-hot iron, a hundred yards across, that sears away all life.
When I stand still, it cools, and slowly
disappears."
J.A. Baker, "The Peregrine"
To remember the world as an organism. To feel it as a series of interlocking and
interdependent patterns repeated on different levels and scales but moving, in
a certain sense, in harmony. "No more beastlike than manlike"
To understand the shifting climates, the dormant inhalations
and brilliant green exhalations of its seasons as a kind of breathing. To recognize in my own breath a smaller
pattern mirroring a larger pattern and to be reminded that there is some place
in the world for me where I belong.
"Not by your will is the house carried through the night.". To go to nature in this
sense to be made small again. The
comfort that comes from this smallness.
To walk a path or a trail.
To repeat a pattern in whole or in part.
To see in this a small ritual. To
move as best you can in concert with the life of the world around you. To pay attention to your movements in its own
and its movements in yours. To move for
a while as it has moved. To fill one's
head up with a great weaving of life and time, meaning and earth, water cycles
and erosion, the plants and the animals, the death and the rebirth.
To see a hawk gliding turns high above, ravens playing in
the same early winter breeze, Flickers foraging in the ebbing brown of the
meadow grass. To see the chickadees
flitting about the branches and to think of them surviving through winter and
singing in the summer. To remember the
toughness and the joy in such a little bird. To see how a bird lives and to
wonder at your own life as they fly on and away.
To feel the deep life and sustaining power of the world and
to feel it as an outsider. To feel the
world slightly retreat at your movement.
To attempt to enter back into this greater pattern of nature with a
gentleness of ceremony or ritual. To
wish to find that peaceful pattern of movement or stillness by which you would
be fully accepted back. To see your
disappearance in a human sense as a form of acceptance in a natural sense. To feel extended towards oneself not a
forgiveness for a prodigal life but a willingness to let pass as all things do
back into the patterned movements of the world and to find the joy in being so
small.
