Mother Bear wears many hats. She is protector, resource, and teacher. Although Bears are born with a genetic library of inborn knowledge, there is a lot that a mother’s children must learn and experience if they are to thrive in the wild. Living in the wilderness takes more than inheritance. It demands careful observation, vast social and ecological knowledge, and experience. Skill levels vary across individuals and families, and using them well takes practice. Not all Brown Bears, for example, are born expert fishermen. Interspersed between play and forays of exploration, young Bears watch what their mother does and how she does it, be it fishing, snuffling for roots, artfully collecting Pine nuts, or, critically, exercising the ethics of Brown Bear society.
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While female Bears may parent on their own, they are partnered at every step with mother Nature. Every aspect of a Bear is shaped in relationship with Nature’s grain. This refined union of self with surroundings has been passed through innumerable generations over millions of years. To optimize their children’s security and wellness, mothers-to-be must be aware of external states as well as their own internal states. In parallel to Salmon who use osmoregulation to retain inner balance amid changing environments, Bears maintain coherence between their bodies and the environment by using accurate knowledge of self and Nature reality.
Nature reality is the unspoken web of ethics and principles by which all Animals and Plants live. It is a sense of self born from and in relationship, resonant with what was referred to by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh as “interbeing” and by German philosopher Martin Buber as the nexus of “I-Thou” encounters. This interdependence and vibrant betweenness of wild existence is part of Nature’s coherence and beauty. Nature reality is reflected in Justo Oxa Díaz’s description of Quechuan relational living:
The community, the ayllu, is not only a territory where a group of people live; it is more than that. It is a dynamic space where the whole community of beings that exist in the world lives; this includes humans, plants, animals, the mountains, the rivers, the rain, etc. All are related like a family. It is important to remember that this place [the community] is not where we are from, it is who we are. For example, I am not from Huantura, I am Huantura.
Wholeness is the essence of our ancestral evolved nest and those of other Animals. We are placed in, and our ethics emerge from, that space. This exquisite sensitivity to perceiving oneself as fully part of Nature is woven into every aspect of life, including the time leading up to pregnancy and birth.
Male and female Brown Bears begin courting in early summer, after enough food and warmth have revived their bodies and minds. Generally, they do not mate until they are around five years old. By this time, Brown Bears are grown and sufficiently seasoned in the wisdom of the wild to take on the responsibility of a family.
Photo by Sneha Chandrashekar on Unsplash
Unless a female is without children or her cubs are ready to wean, she will not mate. If she is solo, without children in tow, a female Brown Bear tends to wait to find a suitable male. If the pair “clicks,” they partner, and encased in the safety and warmth of the winter den crafted by their mother, a handful of hairless, blind baby Bears are born—but not always. While they may be fertilized, Bear eggs do not implant with conception. In fact, in humans, up to half of all embryos never implant after conception.
Animals have evolved innumerable ways to adapt to changing and challenging environmental conditions. Birds like Canada Geese migrate when cool weather begins and food becomes scarce. Others stay put. Some, such as Black-Tailed Deer, can eke out a living despite the cold. Others yet, like Brown Bears, enter a period of dormancy, a sleepy state of lowered metabolism, heart, and breath rates.
… While denning, mother Bears stop eating, drinking, urinating, and defecating. They rely on stored fat to provide the necessary energy to survive and, if pregnant, nourish their cubs. This is another example illustrating why the relationship between a mother’s condition and her circumstances and environment is so important. It determines whether she gives birth and if her children will live through hibernation and beyond. Bears in peak condition, for example, seem to den early on, when winter begins to descend. They can afford to leave off finding food and start the process of making a family because they have enough inner resources to sustain their cubs through hibernation and in the first days after emerging in spring. This gives their children an edge because, relative to cubs born to less fit and less fat mothers, they have had more food and time to develop faster and more fully. Young Bear growth and fat storage characteristics are cross-generational, influenced both by their mother’s body condition before birth as well as their own postnatal nutrition.
Processes such as delayed implantation are usually regarded as automatic, not involving active participation. Deeper reflection, however, suggests that while implantation mechanisms may be hardwired, the decision to implant is mindful of present and future conditions. Evolution created the pause between fertilization and implantation for a reason. All Animals express mindfulness and psychobiological self-regulation, the awareness of and ability to respond appropriately to environmental cues. Mindfulness—awareness of self and environment—is vital and integral to being one with Nature. Consciously or unconsciously, at the cusp of implantation, female Bears seem to hold the mirror of self-scrutiny close and ask: Am I ready to care for my babies?
Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash
This is not a strange concept for human cultures that, similar to Bears and other Animals, live as part of Nature’s skin. The now is connected to the following seven generations…Deciding whether to have a child is a time for naked self-honesty and a stark assessment of reality. The correct answer to the question Am I ready to care for my babies? may not be what a potential mother or other parent/carer anticipates or desires. The biological momentum to pull ancestral heritage into the future is potent, and the yearning for the love, joy, and intimacy of family is strong. Yet her babies’ very lives depend on the mother’s ability to care well for them and maneuver outer social and ecological worlds successfully. If the results of the mother’s evaluations of self and environment do not align, she risks her life and that of her offspring, and hence her lineage. If she has misjudged her capacity or that of the environment, the babies will fail to thrive. As witnessed today writ large, society spirals into poor mental and physical health if care and concern for one another are not reciprocated and ecological well-being is disregarded.
Further Reflections from the Authors
Kosmos | We grieve what we love. So, how can we transform our grief about species loss and the grave trauma endured by Earth’s children into the kind of compost that will allow new life to flourish?
Darcia Narvaez | In every moment, we are co-constructing life together with all other creatures. We can relationally attune to and respect the life around us—whether spiders, dandelions, bees, trees. We can enhance their wellbeing as fellow members of the Earth’s community of beings. Wherever we are, we have the opportunity to make the world more beautiful with mindful lovingkindness toward all.
We may need to grieve our sadness routinely with ceremony. The San People of central Africa have regular, sometimes daily, ceremonies to grieve, heal, and rebalance, individually and relationally. Taking time each day to reconnect to a sense of oneness is vital for maintaining heartminded actions. We can honor Earth’s energies in six directions and bring those energies into our (seventh) place of being. We are a co-creator of the next moment. What choice will we make—to brace against life and protect what we have and know, or be open to possibility for creative collaboration with those around us?
Each life will pass and transform into new life, even our own. Life will go on. Each generation of creatures is the compost for the next generation on this beautiful planet. Will you contribute bitterness or sweetness?
G.A. Bradshaw | All nonhumans live in synchrony with the rest of Life. Being in synchrony means fitting in and following Nature’s ethics and principles. This is why humans feel peace and wellbeing in Nature. Bears, Penguins, Octopuses and other Animals know when and how to raise their children because they follow Nature’s patterns and are respectful of each other. Animals understand that we are all one and that no one thrives unless everyone thrives. Animals and Plants are suffering and going extinct because humans do not follow Nature’s ethics and principles.
Kosmos | Tell us more about the Kerulos Center.
G.A. Bradshaw | The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence is a teaching center and sanctuary for mindful living and nonviolence. We bring together mindfulness, science, and Nature’s ethics to galvanize profound, lasting cultural change to Animal and Earth liberation. Our teachings and practices focus on addressing the foundational source of global alienation and violence – human minds.
For ten thousand years, the planet has been dominated by the belief that humans are superior and separate from Nature. Mindfulness dissolves barriers of resistance which lie at the root of Animal exploitation. Mindfulness returns human minds to the natural empathy and kindness embodied by Plant and Animal kin, what we refer to as Nature Consciousness. This is the ground from which humanity builds a new culture – one shaped by the ethics and principles of nonviolence which have guided all of Nature for millions of years. By changing how we think, we change what we do. By changing to oneness and connection, we change to compassion and liberation. Kerulos’ work catalyzes this transformation through education, sanctuary, and contemplative activism (www.kerulos.org)
Unnested care—the absence of an evolved nest—often leaves a baby fearful, uncertain, and vulnerable in a threatening world. Baby learns to feel that she is bad and may never feel truly secure. She does not see her environment, others, and Nature as welcoming and joyful, but rather as potential agents of harm and hurt, undeserving of her care and concern. Charlie Russell saw these consequences play out in Bears. Orphaned baby Bears, abused and traumatized, their nests shattered by their mother’s death with the blast of a hunter’s gun, similarly suffer. Bear and human brains, minds, and psyches did not evolve in anticipation of the violence and trauma intrinsic to the dominant human culture.
All organisms have evolved to align with the environments in which they are born and live. Animals and our Nature-based ancestors enjoyed the bounty of a nested world for millions of years because the nested world is a relational world of reciprocity, fullness, and respect. It takes years of intimate, caring companionship in community and Nature to build well-functioning physical and emotional support that nourishes a baby’s body and spirit. It is only recently in human history that our species has created environments that are antithetical to those in which our species evolved. Instead of the ancestral nest, the majority of humans today follow a specific human-constructed world that is out of step with Nature. The difference between living in our natural ancestral environments and the largely human-constructed world of the present has generated widespread physical and psychological ill health affecting our species and the planet as a whole. Without the resources that our ancestral continuum and evolved nest provide, a child’s ability to thrive is challenged. Self, inner and outer circumstances, and other unanticipated factors affect how babies will grow and whether they will be able to flourish in the world into which they are born. Taken together, these factors underscore the weighty responsibility that starting a family entails. In the words of Rae Maté:
We all need to realize that entering a pregnancy should be like entering a shrine, a sacred place and time: a baby is being built. . . . Society needs to protect pregnant women because everybody is creating this child. It takes a world to make a baby.
It is this realization that may give a female Bear pause. Without the foundations to provide resources of an evolved nest and a social and ecological world that can support the health of mind and body, a child’s future is precarious.
G.A. Bradshaw is the founder and director of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence (Kerulos.org). She holds doctoral degrees in ecology and psychology, and she was the first scientist to recognize and diagnose PTSD in Elephants, Chimpanzees, Orcas, and other Animals. Her books include the Pulitzer-nominated Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity; Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Animals Really Are; Talking with Bears: Conversations with Charlie Russell; and The Elephant Letters: The Story of Billy and Kani. In addition to teaching Nature mindfulness and nonviolence training, the is the director and primary carer for rescued domesticated Animals and Indigenous Wildlife at Grace Village in the mountains of southern Oregon, located on the traditional lands of the Grizzly Bear, Takelma, Gray Wolf, Golden Eagle, and Coho Salmon.
Darcia Narvaez is Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, and Fellow of the American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association, Association for Psychological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to studying evolved morality, child development and human flourishing with over 20 books. Her most recent books include Restoring the Kinship Worldview, and The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities. Her recent films are Breaking the Cycle and Reimagining Humanity. She serves as president of KindredWorld.org and hosts the webpage EvolvedNest.org.
Editor’s note: Andrew Lipke is an accomplished composer, producer, arranger, conductor, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and educator active in many styles across multiple genres. He is also my neighbor.
Kosmos | You were a kid in South Africa just before apartheid ended, right? if the trajectory of your life from childhood to now could be characterized by a musical composition, what kind of composition would it be?
Andrew | Well, that’s interesting. I guess it would definitely be varied. There would clearly be a first part and a next part. It was challenging to live in a system that was antithetical to the ways in which you believe humans should interact with each other. Every white family in South Africa had a maid and gardener and so forth. It’s not so dissimilar to this country when it comes to undocumented non-English speaking people doing a lot of the work in all the yards and everything.
But the thing that was very different was that there were all these rules in place where after a certain hour people had to go to the townships or bus out of the city. And that definitely felt – even as a child who didn’t have any other reference, partly because of being brought up in the Methodist church – it didn’t feel right,
I turned nine when we moved in ’87, so in my mind, everything previous to that is a little bit hazy and everything since then is crystal clear. We most often use the word trauma in a negative connotation. And maybe I’m incorrect in thinking that there are other ways that it can be applied. But as far as something traumatic in my life, it was that move from South Africa to America. There was this sort of epic, shattering experience landing in New York City. It was very much like the scene in the Wizard of Oz where she walks out of the house.
So, if it was a composition, there would definitely be a ‘before’ sound and an ‘after’ sound in it – you would know right away which was which.
LiveConnections commission of "My Love" by Andrew Lipke with the Aizuri Quartet
Kosmos|Whether you’re composing, conducting, arranging, singing or playing different instruments, how do you make your approach to the inherent order, that underlying ‘intelligence’ that is somehow common to all music?
Andrew | I think it’s a combination of two things. The energy part of it, the part that you’re calling the ‘intelligence’ is the fuel that propels the emotional significance that we find in music. That ‘thing’ is ineffable. It’s like God or it’s the same thing to me. It’s that same core magic energy, consciousness, whatever you want to call it… awareness.
That’s really what all music is if it’s honest music. And the less you try to know about it, the better you are. The less you try to understand it in the way that we think about understanding something, the better you are. You want to feel it. You want to practice getting close to it.
There’s a great Philip Glass documentary where he talks about it being like this underground river that you want to be able to access as much as possible. The more you access it, the more natural it will feel. It’s a lot like praying, or meditating. But the more boundaries and guidelines and personality traits and specifics that you give it, the further away from it you get.
All the other aspects that come along with how to use it in order to communicate something, to me, is really just problem-solving as you deal with different genres or different modes of musical expression. The problems start to differ a little bit, but they all start with the same problem and then they start splintering off from that.
The core problem is that you want to convey this thing that’s unconconveyable, right? It’s a feeling, or maybe conveying is not even a thing. You want to capture it. I feel a certain way when this sound hits and I want to capture this and find a way to put it in a little package and say, ‘okay, here’s this feeling that I was able to capture and put in this thing’. And then other people, when they interact with it, sometimes they feel that same thing, and there’s magic and mystery to how that is possible. I don’t know how music works at all. I have some theories about why it can have the effect that it does, but I don’t know how it does. It doesn’t really make any sense.
Throughout my development as a musician, I’ve been interested in so many things, partly because of how they solve problems differently. You have the question of form. If I’m doing something for an orchestra, I have all the practical problems of the individual instruments. Every instrument has a range, every instrument has a tessitura, a place where they shine the best, but then again, they may be really effective in their upper register or lower register, or when they’re really stretched they sound a certain way. I guess through various points of my life I’ve been fascinated by, and curious about what some solutions are to all these various sets of problems.
Cello playing really high feels like somebody’s soul is coming out of their body. And the violin playing low feels like all these different things that are very technical but don’t have anything to do with the music. It’s kind of like comparing the parts of an engine in a car to actually going somewhere. You’re not thinking about ‘going somewhere’ when you’re wondering, ‘how do I get this engine to work?’
Andrew Lipke's orchestration of 'Up To Here' from the album 'The Plague'. Performed by The Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, Conducted by Steve Hackman
Kosmos |Do you sit down at a piano to compose the same way you compose on your guitar?
Andrew | It’s very different. Now you’re dealing with electricity, so it’s a whole other set of problems: What’s the tone? What kind of preamps are you using? What kind of guitar are you using?
I still oftentimes will do things on a guitar and not know what I’m doing, for lack better term. I don’t tune into the theoretical aspect of it. It’s harder for me to do that on piano because I was trained earlier in that, and when I play something, I’m automatically sort of thinking about it theoretically.
I love classical musicians. I write for classical musicians, but I’m not a very good classical performer. I tend to change things randomly, and you don’t want that to happen when you’re a classical musician. However, I love the relationship of written music to music at large. Written music is a completely different way of engaging with those things that we were talking about. Written music fundamentally changes how people think about music.
There’s a lot of discussion about what classical music is or isn’t, and the difference between classical music and popular music. I think the difference is very simple. Classical music for the most part, starts on the page.
Recorded music is capturing a performance, or these days synthesizing a performance, whatever you want to do with it. But either way, you are creating the version of a thing in sound. It’s ones and zeros most of the time, but it actualizes in sound.
Written music – you’re creating a thing that will never actually happen. It’s a soundless music that is essentially just a set of instructions that everybody who plays it will to some degree approach but never land on because it’s not possible. That’s why you can play classical music for two hundred, three hundred years and never be done, because there is no definitive version of the piece of paper. The definitive version doesn’t exist in sound. It exists written on the page. Written music is unrealized.
I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure it out, trying to solve all the problems. The thing I like the most is hearing something that doesn’t exist, putting it on paper and then having it come back and be pretty much what I heard in my mind. That’s the best, that’s the best. And these days I’m able to work with people at a fairly high level where that happens.
If you write it correctly, it happens the first time. And that’s just incredible. Or if you got something wrong, you’re like, ‘oh, that didn’t balance the way I thought it was going to balance.’ But you start getting better at being able to predict that.
Holy War>Reunion from the album 'The Plague'
Part 3 of the Siddhartha Trilogy. Artwork | Steve Bradshaw
Steve Hackman's BRAHMS V. RADIOHEAD: An orchestral synthesis of Brahms 1st Symphony and Radiohead's 'OK Computer' - Andrew Lipke, Will Post, and Kerén Tayár, vocalists
Kosmos|You wrote an album called The Plague ten years before we had an actual plague.
Andrew | In The Plague, I found a more unified way of combining all the things I like to do in music. And I really enjoyed that process. Conceptually, it started with two thoughts. There was apocalyptic fever going on. I remember there was a billboard proclaiming the end of the world on May 22nd, 2012 or something. It happened to be my birthday. And the thought that popped into my head was, ‘okay, so the end of the world happens. Well, what do you do then? What’s the next day like?’ What if the apocalypse really happens and we all messed up? Nobody got the religion right? And then the other question was, ‘what would be the practical implications?’ The second song on The Plague, Reunion, is in my mind, this image of two people who feel they should be together but putting it off. And then suddenly it’s the end of the world. They can’t put it off anymore! So, she shows up at his door and she’s like, there’s nothing, this is it. If we’re going to be together, we got to do it now.
Kosmos|You have seven albums and three of them are based on one book, Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, (Siddhartha” – released in 2015, “Kamala & The Child People” – released in 2020, and the final installment, “Murmurs of The River”, released in 2021). How did that happen?
Andrew | I read the book when I think I was 18 and I loved it very much, but also had a strong feeling that there were things that I was too young to really mine and get the full value out of them. Later, as I was doing the first album, I was growing in my understanding of classical music. I was finding connections with people who I really respected, who were starting to enjoy my work, which was validating and gave me confidence to be more bold. So, the first album was me kind of going through those processes and trying to bring some things together with some of the choral work that I put in there.
And then my buddy Steve Bradshaw, who actually did the artwork for the first and third album, (he sings in a Philadelphia choir called The Crossing, and we were becoming very friendly), commissioned me to write a piece for them, Fire and the Harp. I said to them, ‘what if this becomes a big part of the second installment of the Siddhartha story?’ And they were totally into it.
So the second album took that 20 minute piece, which I just called Kamala and kind of blew that up into the full album and created a sound world that to me felt like a combination of some of the elements of the previous album and then the dark, nihilistic, destructive energy of the very human existence in the city when Siddhartha is there. I knew that the second act or whatever, was going to be the main part of him having the crisis of Self.
There is a little theme in The Harp that comes back at the end of Kamala and the Child People, that I wrote for my daughter. It’s this one-handed piano thing, because I wrote it while I was holding her and I just kind of played it for her. It’s just a sweet little thing. And it felt like a representation of the wisdom of the child. It’s like those moments when all the things that you’ve accumulated through your life experience…if you’re quiet then this little voice of the child comes up and it’s just a simple thing that still has this profound emotional weight to it somehow.
The third album was definitely written during Covid. There’s one song, And Then There’s Me, that just gets worse and worse and worse and becomes very, very dissonant. I wanted it to have this sort of meta nature to it – the music just can’t keep it together anymore. The whole thing just falls apart at the end. And then the last track, I started playing that song No Other Love, which is actually a Chopin piece that Joe Stafford made famous in the fifties. It’s so beautiful. So, I wrote this violin part for it. It’s like there’s this… kind of just…you don’t need to do anything…
I get into discussions with my father-in-law. He’s very much into Zen. And I think the ego in Eastern influenced spiritual conversations gets a very bad rap. It’s always, ‘lose your ego, rise above your ego, get rid of the ego.’ And it’s not that I don’t disagree with that conceptually, but I think that the ego is wonderful. It’s so important. It’s the thing that makes you want to rise above it to begin with!
You have this piece of God in you and you feel the magnitude of it and at the same time, you also are confronted by the insignificance of your actual existence. You are the One, but you’re also nothing. That’s why I love the word individual – I feel like it has the whole human condition in it. Because you’re an ‘indivisible duality’. You can’t divide the dual nature of the existence you’ve been thrust into, which is you are the whole thing, and at the same time you’re nothing at all.
Andrew Lipke is a Philadelphia-based, South African born composer, producer, arranger, conductor, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and educator active in many styles across multiple genres.
As composer Lipke has written works for ensembles such as The Aizuri String Quartet, Carpe Diem String Quartet, Choral Arts Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Bach Collegium, The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, virtuosic vocal sextet Variant Six, and many others. He has released seven self-produced albums of original music encompassing a wide variety of musical styles from early madrigal vocal music to aggressive hard rock. In addition to his own material Lipke has produced dozens of recordings for artists in the Philadelphia region many of them engineered by Lipke in his studio The Record Lounge.
As arranger and conductor Andrew has worked extensively with American singer-songwriter Amos Lee, initially providing orchestrations for Lee’s 2015 album “Live at Red Rocks with The Colorado Symphony” and continuing to orchestrate additional material for Lee’s performances with prominent American orchestras including the Philadelphia, Nashville, Los Angeles, Oregon, St. Louis, Utah, and Seattle symphony orchestras. Past conducting engagements also include The National Symphony Orchestra at Kennedy Center, The Atlanta Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Grand Rapids Symphony, and Southwest Florida Symphony Orchestras.
He is currently at work on multiple projects including his first opera, “The Foundling Wheel” about the famed Ospedale della Pieta of Venice.
Note: For ten years, Carolyn spent many hours in deep discussions with Thomas Berry about his transformational thinking for healing the human-earth relationship through recovery of a sense of the sacred. Her memoir is based on her personal notes, practices and reflections from these conversations.
It was a languid fall afternoon as I drove to Thomas’ modest dwelling on the outskirts of Greensboro; I had been there before but had never paid close attention to the surroundings until that day. One of his nieces had remodeled an old stable on her land when Thomas decided to return to North Carolina after his years at the Riverdale Center in New York. He moved in contentedly and named his new abode “The Hermitage.”
To reach his place one had to drive over a slightly unstable bridge, turn right off Four Farms Road onto a gravel drive, which twisted and turned past a lake, and then park opposite an open field under an old oak tree reminiscent of his favorite red oak at the Riverdale Center.
As I parked my car and walked up the thirteen carpeted steps that led to Thomas’ apartment, I remember my quiet anticipation, thinking that the day held a kind of grace.
He greeted me with a cheerful, “Come in, come in, how’s everything out your way?” and told me to look around while he made us each a cup of tea. His place was simply furnished with a couch, a large chair, a coffee table, and a dining table stacked with papers and books above which hung an assortment of framed awards along with an array of dried leaves Thomas had collected on his walks.
Around the doorframe to his study I noticed a large number of Post-it notes with numbers and messages on them, and I called out to ask him what they were for. He responded with a chuckle, “Oh, they are reminders of things I have to do!”
I said, “How do you know which one to tackle first?”
He grinned and said, “I just close my eyes and pick one!”
He brought the tea into the living room and placed it on the coffee table and we sat down together on the couch. “Now,” he said, “how’s yourself?”
I explained that I had several journal entries on soul that I wanted to read to him. He settled back to listen, and when I was done, he provided a thoughtful and measured response: “We have the capacity to awaken to the inner life of things. It is about another way of knowing, an ‘origin-al’ way of knowing, you might say. It is a knowing that is connected as a tendril of the heart to the heart of the universe. It is a numinous awareness, an intuitive consciousness, a second voice, that resides beneath the rational faculties and is actually the approach to transformation.”
As usual, I waited while he paused before enlarging upon his topic. When he went on, I again felt the depth and breadth of the Asian influences that he had integrated so deeply into his own thinking.
“The ancient Chinese had a definition of man as the hsin of heaven and earth,” Thomas continued. “The word itself is written as a pictograph of the human heart. It means that ‘man is the understanding heart of heaven and earth’ or ‘man is the psyche or the soul of the universe.’ We are now awakening to the inner life of the heart in the human and the heart in the interior life of the universe.”
By this time, Thomas was standing up and fully into his subject. To my great chagrin, I had run out of paper in my small notebook. Thomas noticed, walked over to his dining table, picked up a notepad and handed it to me while continuing to speak.
“Now, as we said before, the universe has soul in all its living dimensions; every creature has a deep psychic life, an intuitive connection to the Divine that was lost when our perception of the Divine became historical rather than immediate.
“Through the new story of the universe that we now acknowledge to be both physical and spiritual, we are beginning to see through new eyes, through a new, yet very old intuitive awareness that has been lost and is now being recovered. We are recovering an inner way of knowing which is a way of being that is desperately needed at this time when we can no longer bear the loss of the sacred within ourselves and within the earth. It is a distinctive way of knowing, separate from science; the two do not negate each other but they are not the same.
“In science, thought is organized around separateness and differences, parts are dissected, analysis and judgment prevail; with intuition, thought leads to synthesis and vision. We need both kinds of awareness, the inspiration of the intuitive and the critical faculty of the scientific intelligence, but science has been overdone in reference to the intuitive consciousness. Only through intuition can we experience a sense of the sacred.
“You can’t understand the universe simply through science—it is one way of knowing directed toward analysis and use. The intuition is another way of knowing through the heart—the song of the birds, the sky at night, the magnificence of mountains and seas.
“You can see a forest at twilight with its changing light forms and appreciate it without knowing its science; you are experiencing ‘another way of knowing’ as you do. Our gesture toward the universe should be toward one of supplication for greater understanding through this other way of knowing that is really beyond words. In these present moments we actually discover our transformative nature.”
I remembered reading an interview that Thomas had with poet Thomas Rain Crowe in 1990 in which Thomas had said: “I am constantly in an aware, analytical frame of mind, but also simultaneously, in a dream state of mind. We need both kinds of awareness. But the more we can function out of the immediacy of our arational responses, the better off we will be.”
When I quoted this to Thomas, he nodded and replied,“With rationality we are never completely satisfied. Expansion of rationality is different from the expansion of intuition, which can bring a depth of understanding and a sense of the sacred.”
Thomas paused then and sat down briefly to collect his thoughts and determine how to continue. I waited with great anticipation, feeling that with the strength of his comments he had moved again into what was deeply foundational in his thinking. He sipped his tea briefly before going on.
“Intuition is the unique quality of the human that is also the consciousness of the earth and the eventuality of the universe because it can reflect on the reality of the universe, its origin and it’s history. You might say that intuition is the foundation of reason that is laid down first in a child before the rational faculties are added on like grace notes.” He smiled, pleased at how his words had come out in the immediacy of the moment.
“Every child carries this deep intuition but then loses it within a culture that doesn’t understand or honor the intuition. It can remain lost forever. When the Chinese philosopher Mencius spoke of the need for recovering the heart of the child in later life, he was speaking of this inner knowing that we are talking about which is our real authentic nature and the goal of all our searching. Once rediscovered and practiced,” he put great emphasis here on “practiced,” “this ‘indwelling’ can give amazing value to our lives in the midst of all we experience.
“The natural world activates the intuition in the mind—what we see in the rocks and trees and flowers—and from this we very gradually begin to see the whole universe as a manifestation of the Divine. The comprehensive and the particular come together, as I like to say. Everything and everyone can be seen as both whole and part of the whole of the entire universe, and a sense of the sacred—” (here Thomas waited for the right word to come to him, and when it did, it was the same word he used when we first spoke about a sense of the sacred) “affixes—a sense of the sacred affixes itself within us in response to the natural world. We are able to ground ourselves in our own experience and reclaim our inner subjective knowing. As we add to our inner knowledge, we become more conscious of what was there originally. It is a healing both for ourselves and for the earth, for only a sense of the sacred can save us.”
Thomas,” I asked him, “how do we recover our intuitive awareness?”
“It is an emerging process we are talking about,” he said.“There is a great need to understand the sequence of universal emergence—the shaping of the galaxies, the shaping of the earth, and the refined shaping of human consciousness. This story is our personal story. We begin where the universe begins. Our souls, as well as our bodies, began to be shaped at that time.
From the beginning, the universe has been spiritual as well as physical. From the beginning there has been, on a universal scale, a psychic and spiritual as well as a material process unfolding and developing.
“In past centuries the intuitive and visionary dimensions of the universe have been omitted in favor of the mechanistic and that has been tragic. Today these are emerging again as part of the evolutionary process and we can recover them if we can learn to see and work in the realm of immanence, for our real hope lies in the inner dynamics of our own nature. We must learn to recognize the promptings that emerge from our own depths.”
Kosmos Learning Journey to Timberlake Farm Earth Sanctuary
Boyd and Carolyn Toben purchased Timberlake Farm in Whitsett, NC in 1967 as a way of exposing their children to woods, lakes, pastures, and farm life. Although they had no previous experience in land stewardship, they longed to raise their children in a place where they could retreat from 20th century consumer culture and, as a family, connect and develop a relationship with the earth. Following Boyd’s death in 1999, the family began understanding how fully their relationship to the earth had transformed them. In 2000, Carolyn, inspired by Thomas Berry, her dear friend, created an experiential nature program at Timberlake. A year later, a commitment was made to put the entire 165 acres into an easement with the Conservation Trust of North Carolina to protect it in perpetuity from the ravages of overdevelopment. Now, an event venue and welcoming retreat center, Timberlake remains true to its original vision, bringing more people into a sacred relationship with the earth. Kosmos editor, Rhonda Fabian spent a day this summer with Carolyn and friends, touring Timberlake and exploring future collaboration.
We sat silently for a long time as we both contemplated the enormity of the words that had come to him.
I finally asked, “Thomas, are you saying that in this present time, for our survival and the survival of the planet, that we must be about recovering this intuitive awareness, this interior, inner soul dimension that has been lost?”
When he replied, he repeated the words he had used in our earlier discussion about relationships: “We are being changed. We are being adjusted to see everything in its true proportion. We are being driven down to the heart with its radical interior tendencies.”
Thomas stood up then and said: “Come back next week and we’ll talk more about this in regards to children.”
***
It was several days before I could resume my walks in the woods, so powerful was my last visit with Thomas that I needed time in stillness to absorb his words. When I did go out, I seemed to see all things in a new light: the way one fallen tree was held in the embrace of another, the overhead flight of a red-shouldered hawk, a flotilla of geese making a six-point landing on the dark waters of the pond, everything announcing itself in the “family of things,” as the poet Mary Oliver has written.
“To be in rapport with the uniqueness of things,” as Thomas had said, and yet to see that, “everything is bonded to everything else,” helped me see how the natural world could activate a sense of the sacred. I began to see with my inner intuitive eye that the natural world was teaching what I needed to learn … patience from the enduring qualities of the oak trees, gentleness from the tiniest forest plants, softness from the grove of loblolly pines. Change, transformation, it was all before me and I was part of it all.
I saw that I had always been in search of an outer reflection of what was within and that now in my moments in the woods I was finding it all around me in every living thing. I realized from within that there was indeed a psychic-spiritual inheritance … a love of the earth that came to us through the ages from the universe that was in great danger of being lost in this time. I allowed myself to go deeply into the grief.
As if to bring consolation, the resident blue heron landed in the top of a close-by tree to tell me that the natural world was offering to help … that the “mutual-enhancing relationship” between us was bringing us into a participatory experience with one another.
When one notices in a particular moment—the word “notice” comes from “to know” as in an inner way of knowing— a very special relationship comes into being. In that moment with the heron I felt a direct experience of the sacred and I knew that the natural world was trying to come to our aid, if we could only learn to listen to it and trust it.
And as part of the universe, if we could only learn to listen to our intuition, our soul’s knowing, and really come to trust it, perhaps the human-earth reunion, so long overdue, could finally take place.
Recovering a Sense of the Sacred: Conversations with Thomas Berry is a thoughtful and poignant memoir by Carolyn W. Toben recounting her spiritual journey with renowned scholar, author and cultural historian, Thomas Berry.
Carolyn Toben, M.Ed. is an educator, author and creator of new social forms with a spiritual dimension that foster cultural renewal. Her background includes degrees from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, extensive post-graduate studies in spirituality, world religion, depth psychology, and teaching in both secondary and college settings with an emphasis on interior education. For many years she served as a seminar leader in the field of teacher renewal at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching in Cullowhee and for the Advancement of Renewal for Educators in San Francisco. In 2000 she founded Timberlake Earth Sanctuary which offers programs, retreats, and workshops on a new understanding of the human-earth relationship based on the inspiration of Thomas Berry. Carolyn is the author of Recovering a Sense of the Sacred: Conversations with Thomas Berry, and Cultivating a Sense of the Sacred: Practices Inspired by Thomas Berry. In 2014 Carolyn was the recipient ot the Sacred Universe Award from the Wellspring Spiritual Center in La Grange, Illinois.
For all things sing you
at times we just hear them more clearly. — Rilke
“To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.” — Mark Nepo
I want to share some of my experiences of kinship with Life as I’ve listened for what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls ‘the river beneath the river’ — the pulsing sounds within silence and the whispered secrets longing to surface. I call this “yin-listening,” an ability we are all born with but are rarely encouraged to develop. While our culture values mental accomplishments, material success and power, yin-listening is rooted in the vulnerability of an open-hearted, reciprocal intimacy. Ever since a series of personal disasters unraveled my life in 1990, my intuitive listening has drawn me steadily into this deeper river through many conversations with plants, stones, trees, and animal spirits.
Before energy manifests as form it lives as a frequency, a vibrating song within a womb of silence. We all have an innate capacity to perceive a far wider range of frequencies than we generally engage but most of us have lost our ability to hear the subtle sounds of the Earth and the voices of all her creatures. This collective deafness reinforces the belief that the Earth is mute. It also compromises our ability to gracefully coordinate with Life on this planet. It is my belief that this quality of intimate listening is essential for wisely navigating the tremendous environmental challenges we are now facing.
Rationally, we know stones do not talk; though trees may creak in the wind, we mostly see them as silent sentinels. Meanwhile, Kirlian photography reveals vibrating auras around both living and ‘inanimate’ things and sophisticated devices can detect sound frequencies in plants, stones, and even metals. In other words, science is helping us understand that everything is singing.
I think of listening as taking place within a series of concentric circles, activated from the core — the still small voice of our own heart wisdom. When we listen carefully, the still small voice grows steadily louder and clearer. Gradually, our focused yin-listening develops a palpable field of energy within and around us. We can begin to perceive other voices that resonate with our developing heart wisdom by focusing on an animal we love, a significant tree, or a landscape that really calls us. Listening within this larger circle through an open, engaged heart brings us into a dynamic relationship with the inner life of the ‘other’. Our focused desire to listen, without agenda or expectation, magnetically draws out the other’s voice while enriching our own experience.
As we develop confidence in this type of deeply receptive listening, we can move our attention to other fields of energy, including situations that challenge us or difficult issues in our personal lives and our environments.
Listening to Flowers
Photo by Yoksel 🌿 Zok on Unsplash
Solomon’s Seal Polygonatum multiflorum; Liliaceae
Supporting clear listening, Solomon’s Seal helps us receive aural information fully and accurately. Instead of our mistranslating, over-reacting, or putting our own spin on things, the essence helps us entertain a wide range of possibilities within our listening hearts. As our listening deepens, we can sense the tone of voice required in any situation. With bell-like resonance, Solomon’s Seal expands the range of our vocal expression by modulating harsh abrasiveness and amplifying the sound of our love and joy. – Andrea Mathieson, 1996
As I write this article, the Solomon’s Seal is blooming everywhere in my garden. It is a signature plant, growing into large swaths of beautiful arching bell-flowers. It is a constant reminder of the importance of listening.
I only began to practice yin-listening in my forties. Though I studied many subtle nuances of music as a classical pianist, when I was a child, playing the piano was more about winning at local musical festivals than joyful self-expression.
In 1995, I began making flower essences, a process that involves intuitive listening to each flower’s essential nature. I loved the visceral sensation of intimacy as I carefully observed the plants. Softening my mind and opening my heart to perceive their blossoming expression, I heard distinct phrases conveying the essence of their spirits. Though I was focused on creating healing products, I gradually realized this intuitive process was subtly altering me, drawing me steadily into relationship with the Great Mystery. Flower by flower, I gathered Nature’s stories through the plants in my garden. The experience became an intoxicating love affair.
Out of my conversation with the Solomon Seal essence the following poem arose, with Gaia’s voice as first person.
I hold more pain and grief
than you can ever know,
and I know the ways of change.
When you feel the sting of pain,
let yourself surrender.
Do not bargain for relief.
That will keep us distant.
Walk the pathways of your pain.
Close your eyes and let my humming guide you.
Always, if you yield and trust,
a sweet elixir greets you.
Return again and again
for tenderness begins the change.
From Gaia’s Invitation – 120 Poems from the Sacred Earth by Andrea Mathieson, 2005
My focus has now shifted from producing flower essences to helping others learn to listen.
Recently I gave a private flower essence tutorial to a young woman. After leading Danielle through a guided meditation to ground her energy, I invited her to practice drawing up energy through her root chakra before she went out to the garden to locate the flower that called her. “There are two hosta plants,” she said, “in different locations in the garden.” After she put the petals in a bowl of water to begin making the essence, I asked her to take quiet time to commune separately with each of the plants. Later, she shared her experience.
“This way of listening feels very different,” she said. “I had to engage all of my body and even touch the plants to get clear messages. Before that, the information was very random and scattered…”
Feeling a distinct humming vibration in the earth, she sensed her body was naturally in tune with this frequency. “My song is dancing with the earth’s song.” She also realized she needed to continue consciously tuning into this vibration to feel safe, grounded and fully present in her body.
Though I have taught many people how to make flower essences as a way to commune with the plant kingdom, I did not expect a ‘beginner’ to perceive these deeper layers of connection. My own explorations had introduced me first to the individual personalities of the plants, but further meditations opened a powerful portal for me, directly into the heart of the earth
Listening to Ancient Stones
We are not talking to the river; we are not listening to the winds and stars;
we have broken the great conversation.
And by breaking that conversation we have shattered the universe.
We have to learn again how to listen to the earth,
how to open the ear of the heart. — Thomas Berry
Every summer, my artist friends Ed Bartram and his wife Mary Bromley moved up to an island in Georgian Bay where they lived for four months in a very beautiful and rustic setting, painting, gardening, and entertaining friends and family…I enjoyed visiting them both for twenty summers, (Ed died in 2019). While they painted and tended other projects, I would head out with my journal to commune with the ancient stones.
Listening in this landscape is very different than in my suburban garden. In my experience, while flowers tend to mirror our human personalities, ancient stones offer us entry into a deeper earth-story. Whenever I visit this island, I feel powerfully connected to the anima mundi, the Soul of the World. It usually takes me several days to settle into coherent resonance with this wild place before I feel sufficiently tuned and ready to receive the slowed wisdom of the stones.
Knowing how ancient and articulate this landscape is, when I approached the land in 2013, I paid particular attention when I heard ‘The things that are broken apart are still connected.’ The huge broken stones split open by ice or major earth upheavals had captured my attention and this phrase became the focus for our annual conversation.
Softening my tired body and opening my heart, I let my breath slow and deepen until my energy gently dropped into my lower body. As I consciously surrendered to the Great Mystery, once again the magnetic tug of the ancient stone drew me down into a slow, rhythmic pulsation where ideas begin to flow into consciousness like warm lava. I spent time throughout the rest of my holiday receiving information about ‘brokenness within the web of life.’
I realized that when we remember our kinship with this deeper conversation, the Long Song sustaining all Creation, it becomes natural to allow the necessary tectonic shifts to occur during the course of our life and especially at the moment our soul leaves our body. In reality we are all rooted in this Long Song, with the topsoil and the earthworms, bees and flowers, buildings, paintings and poems…
Remembering this and tuning myself to the Long Song, over and over and over again, has shaped my deepest and most holy connection with Creation. Though there were times in my life when the web ripped open, if I listened, I could still feel the Song shaping delicate new webs. Life’s mystery constantly invited me to open and stand in the new emerging beauty — in the midst of the brokenness.
Listening to Whales
“What we need most to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
We are living in a time where evidence of the brokenness within the sacred web of life is becoming more painfully apparent each day. I am concerned that our attempts to understand and make amends will be unfulfilled and counterproductive unless we can learn to listen to the Soul of the World. Without this deep communion, we will not understand how to participate in what is unfolding now. In a dream in 2009, I was given a glimpse into the nature of this time as an ‘awful birth’.
I’m called down to the shore of an island in northern Ontario by two friends who have just paddled in. Gesturing out to the water, they tell me about a huge creature they’ve seen. As they talk, a whale surfaces out in the bay. It comes straight toward us, arching and cresting through the water, and calmly beaches himself right in front of us on the small sandy shore. Sensing he wants to communicate I run up to the house to get my camera feeling no one will believe me if I don’t record the moment. When I return, the creature is gone.
I wake, horribly disappointed at the opportunity I’ve missed. Later that morning, still very upset at my self-serving behavior in the dream, I decide to commune with the whale through automatic writing. This is the message I received:
Do not run away. I have come a great distance to be with you. I have but a brief time. Hear me and speak for me. Set aside your shame at not being present in the dream…
There is a deep and painful aching in the oceans, an amniotic screeching within the watery womb of the planet. It must be heard and released… You are one who has been tuned to bear this awful birth, a birth of such agonizing pain and unknown consequence.
At this point in the meditation I broke down, weeping. With more to share, the whale waited for me to regain my calm.
We are not asking to be saved. That time is past. We know our immediate future and have accepted it. We present ourselves to you in a pledge, an invitation to work with you in creating a new way, one where our minds and hearts are in complete harmony and communion with you, with humanity.
You need us and we need you. The first step is simple: Be with us. Be present. Open and listen — beyond the grief, beyond the shame. Receive us as kin, with information you can attain from no other. Linger with us, for our speech works in your cells in ways of which you have only the glimmer of remembrance. Do not dismiss what you feel in these rarefied encounters for it is the beginning of a new language between us. We need your hearts and brains; you need our ways of knowing. What has been divided – human from animal – must be re-membered. There is little time for this work.
I was stunned by the statement that, from the whale’s perspective, we have passed a tipping point where all our best attempts to ‘save’ them is no longer possible. Loss of hope always feels devastating, yet I also heard the whale’s urgent call — to remember our ancient, reciprocal kinship through a new language, apart from the drama of extinction. When we are caught up in high-intensity drama it is easy to panic, become ungrounded, go into over-drive or simply go numb. But when we respond in these ways, we become deaf to the loving wisdom constantly available to us within the natural world. Trusting the wisdom needed for this ‘new language’ would rise from the deep river between our souls, I kept listening through my broken-open heart for ways we might access our ancestral kinship. Instinctively, I knew I must begin by trusting my own animal body.
Wild Animal Prayer
Over the next two years, I began developing ‘Wild Animal Prayers,’ a practice of spontaneous movement and authentic sounding that engages our bodies’ primal wisdom. Though this work may appear similar to other techniques using spontaneous movement and sound, my intention was to access this new language of communion, not just with the animals but with all creation. Gradually I found my way into this ‘common language’ through my soft animal body.
In his book Becoming Animal, David Abram writes about a terrifying experience he had while kayaking near large herd of enormous sea lions in the ocean near Alaska. “My encounter with the sea creatures initiated me into a layer of language much older, and deeper, than words. It was a dimension of expressive meanings that were directly felt by the body, a realm wherein the body itself speaks… It was a dimension wherein my verbal self was hardly present, but where an older, animal awareness came to the fore…”1
Rather than facing real dangers, my Wild Animal Prayers are done in the peaceful quiet of my living room, in my garden, or the open spaces of Georgian Bay. Yet even though the settings are safe, as I move and make my strange, unpredictable sounds, I am often aware of a distinct shift in the quality of atmosphere around me. It is as though a veil opens and I am no longer in ordinary space and time. During one session, a squirrel hung, upside down, on the trunk of the tree outside my living room, completely captivated by my sounds and movements. Only when I stopped after several long minutes later did he scamper away. On Bartram Island, I did a Wild Animal Prayer near a large water snake as he lay shedding his skin in a shrub. As intensely aware of me as I was of him, my own serpentine movements and slow, primal chant created a thick and intensely alive communion between us.
We sometimes judge others by saying, “You’re behaving like an animal” but this attitude conveys our ignorance of the tremendous integrity and natural wisdom of creatures. I sense the animals, whales and wolves, raptors and lions are anxious to access our consciousness not only through dreams but through our full body-listening. Allowing our bodies to move in uncensored, instinctual ways while releasing the sounds that want to pour out of us, we begin to loosen our ‘humanness’ and open to the ‘other’.
Each Wild Animal Prayer dropped me into the earthy depths of my body-soul where I often stood, quivering on the edge of the Great Mystery. It was very powerful to be witnessed by a colleague or a small group of women during the movement and sounding, for I was both intensely focused and utterly vulnerable. Coming out of the work, I sometimes felt incredibly exposed and shy; it was helpful to witness the changes in my expression in a small mirror. I have joked about how the Wild Animal Prayers are an anti-aging activity for invariably I look at least ten years younger, more open and alive after five minutes of focused movement and sounding.
I love holding space for others as they enter a Wild Animal Prayer. I hold space and wait, listening for the buried sounds to be released as the frozen, forgotten zones of her body begin to melt and flow. Whenever a woman lets out a whimpers or a growl, a soaring cry or a stuttering agony, some blocked energy is always liberated in the highly-charged atmosphere in the room.
Deepening into the work, I began to experience a potently embodied kinship with creation, richer and more viscerally engaged than my previous encounters with nature. In a strange yet tangible way at times I sensed I was tracking ancient songlines through the earth of my own body, perhaps like aboriginal peoples perceive and respond to their landscapes. Danielle’s discovery in my garden that her song was dancing with the earth’s song echoes Bruce Chatwin’s insight, “The song and the land are one.” Though this song has been long abandoned, it still hums within and between all of us — human beings, animals and the earth.
It is my belief that Nature yearns for this communion. Rather than coming with expectations to heal the earth, we are most available to life when we bring our completely open-hearted presence. Listening to the heart of Nature has been a long and compelling love affair; each encounter stretched my capacity to be an attentive witness and to receive Nature’s varied frequencies of love. As I communed with the natural world, I learned a profound truth: Whatever is not witnessed with love tends to wither. To me, this is the crux of the environmental crisis. Because we have forgotten how to witness the world with love, the Soul of the World is dying. Whenever I feel heart-broken about the state of the world, I try to remember the wisdom of the ancient Georgian Bay stones: The web may be broken, but the Long Song continues…
* * *
Experiencing Yin-Listening
Though I’d already been hosting workshops and retreats to assist people in communing with the anima mundi, the Soul of the World, I was inspired to carefully examine the intuitive listening process I’d experienced over the years to create a reciprocal relationship with Nature. There are several simple yet vital steps that help to re-establish our instinctual kinship and respectful etiquette with the Earth.
The first step is to allow yourself to be magnetically attracted to something in the natural world. Take time to be fully present in your body through meditation, deep breathing and slow, spontaneous movement, preferably in silence rather than with music. When you have consciously engaged your body, move outdoors and trust your feet to guide you. Walk slowly, allowing yourself to feel as though something in Nature is gently pulling in a particular direction. You may find yourself in a familiar place or somewhere new and unexplored. Though you might anticipate being attracted to a particular tree, when you get there, it could be the stone at the base of the tree that is actually calling your attention.
The second step is to closely observe what has called you – an animal, clouds in the sky, a flower, a body of water. For the purposes of this exercise, I will refer to trees… Gradually let yourself come into relationship with the tree’s ‘otherness’ by honouring and observing the details of its physical presence. Look with your heart’s eye, not just your usual vision, like a child who sees the world with a sense of complete awe and wonder before learning the names of things. You may have walked past this tree hundreds of times but never really paused and observed it closely. Take slowed time to really look at its body — the bark, the patterns of the branches against the sky, the play of light through spaces between the veins on the leaves as you let the tree pull you, slowly and quietly, through its physicality into a relationship with its soul.
The third step is coming into deep, respectful resonance. Let your breathing synchronize with the tree as you allow yourself to feel the tree’s energy in your body. Everyone’s experience of resonance is different. Over time, our bodies become more sensitively enlivened by our conscious contact with the elements of the natural world. Be aware of any subtle sensations occurring in your body: a slight tingling, a slow, sinking sensation throughout your torso or rippling looseness through your back could indicate that you are beginning to receive the tree’s energy and vibratory information. Try not to edit any of these subtle sensations. Trust your intuition, and continue opening your receptive body to receive the inaudible frequencies. When we doubt ourselves, our fragile heart-connection with Nature tends to wobble, closing the door to deeper intimacy. Staying present and attentive, we gradually become more comfortable and familiar with nature’s language of subtle sensation. This is the foundation of true kinship: our willingness to be fully present and radically receptive. (Imagine encountering a mother deer with her fawn in the woods. Naturally, we would want to be as still as possible to allow the creatures to feel utterly safe in our presence. In this way, we pull back our ‘humanness’ with awe and respect towards the other. For a time we are participants in a highly-charged atmosphere of resonance with an entirely different form of communication.)
The next step involves listening. Only when we have closely observed the tree and allowed ourselves to experience resonance are we are ready to hear the tree’s ‘language’ on its terms. As a harmonious atmosphere is established, information-energy begins moving back and forth between you and the tree in a fluid reciprocity. It is vital to set aside our personal agendas, assumptions and prejudices otherwise we are just talking with ourselves. Our task is simply to be open to receive. Posing an open-ended question to the tree such as, “Do you have a message for me?” is a good way to begin the conversation. As you listen, you may experience various physical sensations. An image may come to you — strong and clear or subtle and fleeting. You may hear a simple phrase or have a significant memory. Pay close attention to all the impressions, letting the experience unfold naturally until it feels complete. Then be careful not to immediately interpret your experience as this tends to break the fragile rapport. Simply receive and notice the effects of the tree’s presence in your body-soul and when the process feels complete, express your gratitude to the tree. Later, record your experience with as much detail as possible, holding it quietly in your heart-space to integrate within you. Containing and gestating these numinous experiences is important. Though it may be tempting to share your revelations with a friend, casually chatting about these experiences before they are fully integrated can dilute and distort what is germinating within you.
After listening, the information needs to be embodied. It may take considerable time to embrace and grow into the fullness of the messages you receive from the natural world. I am still attempting to integrate a message I received twenty years ago, ‘Teach like a tree and talk like a stone!’ Each person’s way of listening is unique. How the tree communicates with you may be different with the way it communicates with another person. How the tree communicates with your intuition and imagination may vary with each encounter. We are remembering, at a cellular level, a living language we have long forgotten.
I have found Nature tends to speak in poetic metaphors and with a tremendous kindliness. If you hear messages that sound like a harsh teacher or a flaky guru, you may need to get more grounded and centered before proceeding. As you become more familiar with these exchanges, you will begin to recognize a certain tone and distinct energy that is characteristic of your unique relationship with Nature. Magnetic yin-listening strengthens our heart-energy and invites hidden or buried parts of our soul to emerge. Observing people as they share their encounters with some element of the natural world, there is usually a beautiful blossoming in their expression. As we learn to listen and feel the Soul of the World in our body-soul, parts of ourselves that were lost or abandoned begin to be gently resurrected.
Witnessing each person’s communion with Nature is vital. As people share their stories in a safe, non-judgmental space, confidence in their embodied intuition strengthens. Listening open-heartedly, we honour these liminal moments together, grounding our experiences and making them more real. While sustaining a quality of intimate kinship in our conversations with each other, we deepen our relations with all of Gaia’s creatures and kingdoms. In these simple ways, we create sanctuary, for ourselves and for the Soul of the World.
Andrea Mathieson is passionate about restoring our conscious communion with Nature by listening to the spirit of the earth. Trained as a classical musician, she began the Raven Essence project in 1995, creating 350 flower essences and writing three books, A Love Affair with Nature;Gaia’s Invitation, Poems from the Sacred Earth; and The Book of Snake. A highly-skilled intuitive, Andrea offers webinar courses, intuitive consultations, sacred circles for women and private retreats at her home in Port Hope, Ontario. www.andreamathieson.com | www.ravenessences.com.
A renewed cosmological paradigm is required in order for humanity to evolve. And evolve we must, for we stand on the precipice of cataclysmic disaster. Having single-handedly instigated a Sixth mass extinction, the ravages of humanity’s extractive society are becoming increasingly evident. It is a meta-crisis that we face, borne of a profound ideological and spiritual chasm within us, and this is inextricable from the reductionist scientific paradigm upon which our prevailing worldview is founded. The current scientific paradigm – also known as materialism – speaks of a random and mechanical universe, devoid of reason, meaning, or intrinsic beauty, where we ourselves are ‘lumbering robots’, (to use Richard Dawkins’ colourful phrase). In contrast to this the new cosmology posits the universe as alive, conscious, and purposeful. Many minds across the ages have intuited this. From the Ancient Hermetics (‘All in Mind, and Mind is All’), to the Greek philosophers of the Axial Age, and the 18th century German idealists – to name a few. Although some details may vary, the metaphysics of these thinkers all point toward the same thing: a conscious cosmos. The metaphysics also point towards self-realising cosmos. Hegel, for instance, emphasised cosmic evolution as oriented towards ultimate freedom (‘the essence of Spirit is freedom’), Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggested the cosmos to be co-evolving with the ‘noosphere’ toward a hyper-realised ‘Omega point’, while visionary physicist David Bohm has proposed the ‘holomovement’ of cosmic becoming. The notion of an intelligent, teleological universe is far from novel. What I propose is novel nomenclature to codify this thinking, as well as refine it, as we move ever further into the twenty-first century.
The towering “pillars of creation” – a vast span of sculptured gas and dust located about 6,500 light-years from Earth.
The term I proffer is ‘depth-cosmology’. This is inspired by ‘depth psychology’ – the psychoanalytic model most famously developed Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and which completely re-shaped our understanding of what it means to be human. One hundred years later, the next frontier is understanding the ontology of consciousness itself. Just as depth psychology sought to excavate the deepest caverns of the human psyche – its intrinsic nature and expression, its dreams and desires, its processes and its meaning – so depth-cosmology does for the cosmic psyche. Indeed, it understands that consciousness and cosmology are inextricable. This integrative approach speaks to Jean Gebser’s ‘integral’ structure of consciousness: an expanded perceptual framework that, in its ‘transparency’, sees through all illusions and limitations of prior thinking. Depth cosmology not only describes a new kind of cosmologist – whose thinking is grounded in coherent, trans-disciplinary praxis – it offers the foundation for a new worldview, one that supports our place at the heart of an enchanted and benevolent cosmos.
The fundamental principle of depth-cosmology is that the universe is a Mind, but it goes way beyond pan-psychism. This is not a static and transcendent universe, but dynamic, process oriented and – just like humanity – self-actualising. Furthermore, it supports the possibility of cosmic personalisation, the idea that the universe, in its unfolding evolution, is developing an increasingly individuated ‘character’, or identity. David Bohm’s cosmology hints at this idea, since he considered the human individual to be an ‘intrinsic feature of the universe, which would be incomplete – in some fundamental sense [if the individual person did not exist]’. Furthermore, he stated that within the Implicate Order there is, ‘a consciousness, deep down, of the whole of mankind’. After all, it is all one Mind. But I maintain that this Mind is not a ground of impersonal, Infinite Intelligence. Rather, I suggest that ‘it’ can be onticized. Since the universe is fractal in nature (and therefore self-similar across different scales), I argue that the human Mind, characterised as it is by a distinct sense of Self, is but a microcosm of a larger Cosmic Self. I propose then, that, we are neurons in the neural network of a cosmic brain, that the brain ‘tissue’ is the substance of the universe, and that this brain belongs to an actual Being – a Being of an order of magnitude so great, it is beyond what we will ever understand.
On the contrary to the physically oriented approach of materialist science, Depth Cosmology demands the emancipation of our imagination from that which is immediately perceptible. It asks us to swing the doors of perception wide open and elasticate our minds. Depth cosmology is more than a scientific approach, it is a pathway, a style of being-in-the-world. It is also a hermeneutic, as in, it echoes the methodology of literary critique; it speaks to the process of textual analysis and the felt experience of poetic wonder. Why? Because the art of literary criticism involves detecting patterns and interpreting the meaning therein, and becoming intimate with the cosmos requires a similar approach. Critiquing literature – like decoding the cosmos – is the process of deciphering. It is a teasing out of the meaning embedded in the text, which is shaped by the form: ‘the medium is the message’ in superlative literary art, the aesthetic merit wrought through the relationship between form and content. Phenomenology (such as that of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty) indicates that words are far more than perfunctory signifiers, they are things unto themselves and literary beauty emerges from the shape of the words, from the images and feelings they evoke; the motifs, the refrains, the rhythm, the cadence and the spaces in between. It is mining into this that allows deeper meaning to transpire, and which cultivates a richer aesthetic experience. It is from close, careful reading that we can come to understand ‘what’ has been moved within us, and why, so the depth cosmologist could thus be described as a ‘writerly reader’, to use Roland Barthes’ phrase. To behold the cosmos and commune with it is an aesthetic (and often mystical) experience; it is something to behold, to read, to listen to, and interpret. The depth cosmologist, then, has a poetic sensibility as well as a mathematical mind. She thinks with her intellect just as she feels through her senses.
In the words of Virginia Woolf, ‘…it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world.’ This universe is demonstratively aesthetic, and we must accept this as an intrinsic property – not something super-imposed by human consciousness. When we study physics, we are studying the architecture of the cosmic artwork; the architecture of the cosmic mind. This is why we need depth cosmologists who – like literary critics – reach toward the whole work of art; the cosmic gestalt: i.e., not just what is and what has been, but what will be; the recognition that on a higher order of reality, that it is all already realised, it is already written.
Richard Tarnas’ epic tome Cosmos and Psyche is an example of proto-depth-cosmology. Since depth-cosmology is a fully integral approach, it necessitates the creative synthesis of myth, poetics, astrology, philosophy, cultural history and the extensive exposition of mathematics and physics. Hard science is not a feature of Tarnas’s work, but he is pretty close. In regards to the fundamental question why it is that celestial, archetypal processes exist, he responds: ‘There are many possible answers to this question, not the least of which may point to some kind of intrinsic aesthetic splendour in the universe, and overflow of cosmic intelligence and delight that reveals itself in this continuous marriage of mathematical astronomy and mythic poetry.’ I concur with this statement and suggest that the cosmic psyche has an aesthetic, poetic topology. Not only is the universe realising itself in the grand unfoldment of becoming, it is a work of art in perpetual poiesis. And so are we. As consciousness evolves, we become ever-greater artworks – we are songs, we are poems, we are paintings. Perhaps, then, the process of cosmic personalisation could be seen as such: the writer writing herself into being; the sculptor chipping away at marble to discover what lies within; a process of increasingly complex expression, and ever-greater refinement. In the words of Spanish poet Jamie Gil de Biedma: ‘I believe I wanted to be a poet, but deep down, I just wanted to be a poem’.
Depth cosmologists understand this – they are poet-philosopher-physicists – they are polymaths and integral thinkers. The era of divided disciplines has come to completion – it is an atomistic and reductive approach that is no longer sufficient. While intense specificity on one area has its place (a molecular biologist, for example), it must no longer dominate. It is this that propagates materialist dogma, and a universe devoid of meaning. I suggest depth-cosmology as a means to take science forward into our blossoming integral age.
Arabella Thaïs is a writer, speaker, philosopher, and artist, studying for a PhD in cosmology and consciousness. Committed to the evolution of humanity, her work explores the intersection of poetry, mathematics, beauty, and time, which she teaches at her online school of consciousness, The Temple of Truth. She uses various aesthetic mediums – such as music, film, and experience design – in order to communicate ideas and propel human transformation.
Lydia is an Artist Lydia has a diagnosis of Schizophrenia Lydia is a daughter, a sister, a widow Lydia is also a mother, my mother
Mum received a diagnosis of schizophrenia when she was in her teens and growing up I used to think of her as “my secret”.
After a long spell in hospital Lydia was institutionalized in 2004. I’d enter her room with “Hi Mum” and be promptly dismissed as she ranted her demand I leave.
One day, I decided not to leave and instead sat some distance away in silence. Our time remained free of any verbal communication and visits continued this way for several months.
During one visit in 2020 Lydia was sitting in the day room where I noticed a drawing pad and some felt tip pens on a nearby table. I pulled up a chair and sat directly opposite her, perching the pad on her lap with the top of the paper resting on my knees. I then invited her to choose one of the felt tips. She chose pink studying the quality of how the pen felt in her hands for some minutes before removing the top and handing it to me.
She then made a mark, then another and another – her pen flowed effortlessly it seemed and it wasn’t random mark making. It was deeply considered and thought through. I offered her another pen but she was clear her drawing was finished. She had drawn a woman in meditation, perfectly peaceful and tranquil.
My visits to Lydia have become the highlight of my week, as I relish every moment of our time together.
Showing up with love, sincerity and curiosity has taught me how to listen deeply to what is available in Lydia. I am also fast learning that it is not so much me who is supporting Lydia but Lydia who is supporting me.
Lydia: Drawing a Connection
Lydia Assor is an artist with psychic ability and has been living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia since her teens. One culture’s “mad” can be another culture’s wisdom – https://www.outsiderart.co.uk/artists/lydia
Sally Assor is a Voiceover Artist and a Quietude Practitioner (end of life soul companion).
Sally is also a member of the Heart of London Threshold Choir and Companion Voices. https://www.sallyassor.co.uk
The Ocean has been the greatest source of inspiration and wisdom in my life. During my childhood, every Monday there was a TV program called Blue Planet showing the films of Jacques Cousteau. This and trips to the beaches in the south of Costa Rica, my country of origin, made me want to be a marine biologist at the age of four.
Photo by James Donaldson
As I grew up, this aspiration became clearer. When I was 16, I had a serious conversation with my mother about my future study at university. “I will study Marine Biology or Psychology,“ I told her. Her eyes widened and she said she did not understand the relationship between these two professions. Like a normal teenager, I rolled my eyes and answered: “Mom, the ocean is as deep as the secrets of the human spirit”. Today, I look back to this comment and I realize that all my adult life I have aspired to understand the relationship between these two disciplines, guided by the wisdom of grandmother Ocean.
I call the Ocean ‘grandmother’ because life was created in her waters some 3.5 billion years ago, and a little bit later the continents also emerged. These are the beginnings of the Biosphere as we know it today, whose secrets lie deep within her. Slowly but surely, the first photosynthetic organisms started releasing tiny bubbles of oxygen from her depths into the atmosphere. The ocean’s oxygen production continues to this day and according to NOAA, phytoplankton produces up to 50% of the oxygen on Earth.
Grandmother Ocean spreads her wisdom across the world, sustaining the health of our planet and nourishing all living organisms. If you were a drop of seawater you would need to travel about a thousand years to complete the ocean’s thermohaline circulation: the way that Ocean waters move around the world. Oceanic currents flow like gigantic rivers regulated by seawater density, which changes in relation to salinity and temperature, constantly responding to and balancing the Biosphere’s changing conditions.
To prepare ourselves to dive into Grandmother Ocean’s mysteries, I put on my blue cloak and light the sacred sage in an abalone seashell to smudge myself and our surroundings. Close your eyes. Can you smell the sage burning? Can you see the smoke ascending to the realm of Spirit? I blow my conch in the seven directions to call on her powers. Here she is, soft as a breeze, powerful as a storm, sparkling like mother of pearl. Listen carefully because her voice is like soft rolling waves…
“Dear child, arrange yourself in a comfortable position and get ready to travel. Today I will take you into my currents so you can experience directly how all life is sustained.
We begin our journey at the North Pole. Breathe in and admire the beauty of the North Atlantic glaciers. Breathe out and listen to the rumbling thunder, as big ice blocks break off and fall into the water, making it colder. In winter, if it’s cold enough, new salt-free ice is created, leaving behind increased salinity. These cold and salty waters, full of nutrients, sink deep to travel fast along the eastern coasts of the Americas.
Photo by Annie Spratt
We are now near the coast of New Jersey. Beneath my waters, deep inside the Earth’s crust, freshwater is hidden in aquifers. You would not expect to find fresh water here, under my most salty waters but so it is. Freshness can be found in mysterious places, even in the darkest ones.
Continuing our journey South. I move like a snake along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, dividing the American plates on one side and Eurasian and African plates on the other. Yes, what you see are underwater mountains. When they are tall enough, they become islands and when they are very large, you call them continents. For me, they are my children where land-based life flourishes.
As we arrive between Patagonia and South Africa, circulating alongside Antarctica, we find more cold and deep waters. The current gets stronger and divides into two pathways: the wider one goes North to the Indic Ocean while the other continues along the coast of the Ice continent, with some water eventually moving up into the Pacific ocean.
Heading North, these currents start to surface, sharing the nutrients that support oceanic life, which feeds humans and other animals. Remember Child, the waters of the planet are like blood nourishing the body. They transport nutrients and clean waste, including waste that comes from human activities. Large sewage tubes, for example, enter my body. As wastes travel deep within me, they are transformed and reinserted as nutrients in the water cycles, or stored in the oceans floors.
Let’s continue our trip North along the East coast of Africa to the turquoise and warm surface waters of the Indic Ocean, where marine life blooms in extravagant ways, thanks to the nutrients we have been carrying. In this region, olive ridley sea turtles arrive by the thousands to the beach of Orissa – on the East coast of India – to lay their eggs in a huge arribada, knowing that the hatchlings will find enough food to thrive.
Image courtesy NASA
Remember that the deep waters which gathered nutrients on their way South through the Atlantic ocean, were divided in two in the Antarctic. The rich waters that travel along the ice continent support the life of large whales and swimming birds, the penguins. This current continues its path to the Pacific Ocean. Traveling along the ‘ring of fire’ – a horseshoe-shaped belt of volcanoes around the Pacific ocean – the current starts to warm up and many types of large fish travel with me. The beautiful tunas enjoy the abundance of food and the strength of the current to exercise their fast tails and strong muscles.
We have reached the furthest end of the thermohaline circulation, where one can find my oldest waters, some of them moving along with the current while others are stored in the “shadow zone of the Pacific” trapped in cavities on the North Pacific Ocean floor. Now is time to start our way back, together with the Whale sharks and large marine mammals. In the South Pacific waters, for reasons which still remain largely mysterious, the El Nino or La Nina southern oscillation takes place: waves of hot or cold surface waters move toward the Americas, affecting the rain cycle, (through changing evaporation conditions), and modulating the average weather around the world. These phenomena allow the planet to self-regulate and have started to change as human activities disrupt climate patterns.
Photo by Giga Khurtsilava
The Pacific is a very special place for me. Its human inhabitants, living on a multitude of small islands, have long understood and cherished my wisdom. They are the guardians of these sacred waters, taking care of my oldest memories in the North and in ‘Mother Earth’s kidneys’ in the South, the root energetic center that guides the global water cycle.
On my way back though the Indian and Atlantic oceans, I recover some parts of myself that nourished life along the coast of West Africa. As I move North, I gather the warmth of the Gulf Stream in the Caribbean sea and bring it to the shores of Europe, allowing its inhabitants to enjoy a temperate climate, now threatened due to human-induced climate change.
Dear Child, this is a short version of the story of my waters traveling around the planet to sustain life. It is part of a broader Cycle of Life that I have witnessed and nourished for Eons. Creation and destruction are always present in this evolving cycle. I usually do not speak in a clear voice; I use the waves and the beauty of the horizon to help you experience my wisdom. But my health is declining rapidly and I want you to understand that you need to take care of me so I can continue to take care of you. Otherwise, I will recover, but in the process of my recovery, humans will suffer greatly. I need storms, huge waves and changes in the rain cycles to restore the natural order. You belong to nature; we are all part of the great Cycle of Life and each of us needs to find its place and role in this sacred order.
It is time for me to go, I have shared my wisdom and my love with each of you that wanted to travel with me. But before I go, I want you to hear my final words
Who am I? I am the grandmother of every water drop on this planet, I am the vast ocean that goes deep into the darkness of ocean ridges, I am the power of a storm, My waves sing lullabies to all beings, My oceanic currents are rivers of life, I, grandmother Ocean, have given life to this planet. I am the nourishment that sustains life, My ancestral wisdom emanates from the planet’s history Each one of you needs me strong and thriving to live Here I am calling your attention to remember that we are One One Planet, One Ocean …”
The smoke is still burning. Her voice is gone but her wisdom is there for us, tangible and real as water, mysterious as the abyss. In these two dimensions the human spirit must find balance as well.
Emelina Corrales is Marine Biologist with a Master Degree in International Environmental Law and a Certified Senior Coach. She is a visionary of possible futures, with her knowledge and abilities she supports individuals and companies to envision their individual path or the path of an organization embracing consciousness. For more than 20 years she worked with NGO’s, Universities and the private sector, in sea turtle conservation, deep sea research and in coastal and marine management. Her mission is to support the understanding of the Ocean and share her wisdom. She is an ordained member of the Order of Interbeing in the Plum Village Tradition and she is a founder member of the Sacred Earth Council as well as the co-creator of the Politics of Being, She lives in the South of France with her husband and two daughters besides Plum Village, the Mindfulness center and Monastery founded by the venerable Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh.
For over twenty-five years, Paul W. Jacob (Jake) has walked the streets of destitute and raw urban areas offering food and companionship for his shelterless brothers and sisters while also being present with them on their spiritual journeys. At the onset of the Covid pandemic, Jake, and his wife, Jess, co-founded “Feed The Way”, a 501 (c) (3) charitable organization that provided Care Bags, sandwiches, warm clothing items, and spiritual support for homeless and marginalized people living rough on the streets of Seattle. Most importantly, Jake and Jess enabled many people who felt abandoned by society during a stressful and dangerous time to feel seen, heard, and loved.
“During the height of the Covid pandemic in Seattle, the homeless population had swelled to the thousands. There were destitute and homeless people lining the streets, strewn on the sidewalks, hidden in alleys, occupying abandoned buildings, and living in sprawling tent cities as well as sleeping in parks, parking lots, and in parked cars. Many of the privileged people who could afford real housing simply sealed themselves off in their dwellings while ordering food and other supplies from Amazon. In addition, most of the governmental, civic, non-profit, and religious organizations that had helped homeless persons prior to Covid simply closed their doors to them during the pandemic. The overall lack of organizational assistance for the homeless during this emergency time only made the socio-economic aspect of their plight more obvious.
My wife and I responded to this worldly withdrawal of resources by offering radically decentralized and subversive hospitality out on the streets. I say “subversive” because many of our actions in serving the homeless were technically illegal; however, acts of solidarity and love supersede all human laws because they come from a place of grace and necessity.
When the Covid pandemic was at its frightening height, I remember a doctor from Kaiser Permanente who treated Covid patients saying to me, ‘You and your wife are on the front of the front lines. At least here I have locked doors, armed security guards, other staff members, state of the art air filtration systems, PPE, medicines, bandages, and an overall peace of mind knowing that I am in a hospital. But you two have none of that out there.’
Plus, I didn’t have any health insurance.”
By entering the raw fray of the devastated streets of Seattle during the Covid pandemic day after day, my wife and I fed, clothed, forged relationships, and created a heartfelt decentralized community with thousands of our homeless sisters and brothers. Furthermore, all of our lives were changed forever because within those unadulterated places of sickness, fear, filth, hunger, loneliness, and marginalization out on the streets, we constantly discovered humble moments of mercy in the margins together.” – Jake
“Feed The Way” made and handed out over 10,000 Care Bags and sandwiches while procuring and delivering hundreds of pairs of wool gloves, winter hats, and warm socks to the unhoused in Seattle during the Covid pandemic. They stepped up when government, religious, and social organizations who had been serving the homeless prior to the pandemic, shut down. In addition, “Feed The Way” provided companionship and pastoral care on the streets, back alleys, parking lots, abandoned buildings, and in parks where homeless and marginalized people were living.
After their two years of doing “Feed The Way” in Seattle, Jake and Jess spent a year on the East Coast attending and accompanying unhoused people on the racially disparate streets of Richmond, Virginia, during the end of the Covid pandemic. Recently, they attended to marginalized and homeless persons on the streets of various Mexican locales.
During their time in Mexico, Jess (who is Mexican American) and Jake attended to homeless families of up to eight people, including children, who were sleeping huddled together on the sidewalks of strange cities. There were also many immobilized, incapacitated, and debilitated people on the streets and sidewalks who were often missing one or more limbs and simply cannot work to support themselves.
Now, they are serving in Thailand.
No matter where Jake and Jess live or travel, “Feed The Way” is committed to attending and accompanying those who either live on the streets or in the forgotten margins of society. This is their calling. To learn more, visit: Feed the Way.
Not long ago, artificial intelligence (AI) seemed to be primarily a theoretical question for academics and researchers to study. Now, with the advent of large language models (LLMs) like those behind the interactive text service ChatGPT and the image generator Midjourney, AI is a significant social phenomenon. Like other teachers of first-year college humanities courses, I will be spending some time this summer thinking about whether the ready availability of AI should change the way I present the basics of argumentative writing.
But this striking social phenomenon is also an intellectual one, with breathless claims by technologists that large language models represent a brave new world of artificial intelligence as well as a cadre of philosophers, journalists, and cultural critics willing to entertain or endorse their claims.
Yet versions of these claims have been made for decades. Nearly fifty years ago, John Searle, in response, presented a tidy argument against ‘Strong AI’, the idea that a system that imitates language use accurately enough through symbolic manipulation should count as understanding the meaning of its outputs.
Searle’s thought experiment imagines a person, isolated in a room and ignorant of a certain language, who reliably follows a book of instructions that convincingly simulates an appropriate output in that language on being given a certain input. Neither the person nor the book (a program or algorithm) seems capable of understanding anything in the language in question. Yet the linguistic output might well fool us into thinking otherwise.
My point in bringing up Searle’s half-century-old argument is not to dismiss the new generation of AI, but rather to note that the paradigm in AI research of simulating competence has not changed, despite the novel scale of the computational resources that LLMs employ. As a result, many debates over artificial intelligence circles back to a background assumption, namely, that thinking is itself a computational process.
Advances in empirical cognitive science, especially studies of memory, perception, attention, and decision-making, have made this computational view increasingly attractive to maintain. Moreover, thinking about the mind and the brain in this way seems to reflect a sober scientific naturalism, a departure from the metaphysically disreputable speculations of philosophers and religionists.
How, then, can we resist the claim that we encounter genuine intelligence in the programs that AI researchers are developing? And if we manage to do so now, when we use AI software on our wonted phones and laptops, then what about in a future where our lives are pervaded, physically, by robotic assistants?
The answer to this challenge, I believe, lies in the world we share with animals.
Dhananjay Jagannathan is a professor, scholar of Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and essayist. His academic scholarship centers on the ethics and politics of Aristotle and his first book is on Aristotle’s account of ethical knowledge and the possibility of ethical understanding.
excerpt | on animals, persons, and things
ByDavid Egan
For most people, through most of human history, animals have been neighbors: beings who live alongside us, near us yet separate from us. As our neighbors, they’ve opened a window onto a living world that’s larger and more mysterious than the one that’s structured and mediated by human institutions. When ancient people looked up at the heavens, they saw the shapes of animals. The stories and myths by which they made sense of the cosmos were populated by animals. Animals figured prominently in ritual and sacrifice, mediating between the human and the divine.
In these ways and more, animals have been emblems for a world that humans inhabit but can never fully control. Persons you can negotiate with, plead with, threaten. Things you can turn into tools and subject to your will. Unlike things, animals have wills of their own. Unlike persons, they’re hard to communicate with, their minds and motives often unreadable. When we resolve their animal strangeness to the categories of person or thing, we lose some of the mystery of finding ourselves in a world that exceeds our grasp. There’s a point of view there that we can’t imagine our way into. In their strangeness, animals inspire wonder and humility.
When an animal looks at you, what he or she sees is another animal. The experience can be disconcerting. The gaze of an animal strips you of so much of what you took to be your identity. The animal doesn’t care about your professional status or your sense of style. But that stripping down can be instructive. We get a little too wrapped up in those things anyway, and an animal’s indifference to them reminds us that we’re also, before and beneath all that, also animals ourselves.
Being seen by an animal—and allowing myself to feel seen by an animal—jolts me out of my anthropocentric self-absorption. Animals remind me that my own way of being in the world is one form of animal existence among others.
David Egan has a DPhil in philosophy from Oxford and has taught at a number of institutions in the UK and North America. He lives in Vancouver, Canada, and teaches online philosophy classesto the public at eganphilosophy.com.
excerpt | on (unironically) loving dogs
ByTara Isabella Burton
I’m one of those people who really loves dogs. If we’ve ever met in person, you may have seen me stop a conversation, mid-sentence, to shriek aloud with joy if a particularly fluffy Pomeranian, or an especially winsome red Cavapoo, happens across my field of vision. There are few dogs I see, crossing the street in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side, that I do not instinctively long to stop or greet or pet; only a veneer of human politeness stops me from absconding with some of them altogether.
Part of the reason for this is that I’m just a “dog person.” But I think there is, in my love of animals – and in my love of dogs specifically (I like cats fine, but find their veneer of superiority intimidating) – something more than mere aesthetic affection.
What I love about dogs, and the kind of affectionate, indeed loving, relationship we can have with dogs, is the utter straightforwardness of their being. Dogs play; they bark; they beg or fetch or sit or stay; most importantly, they dog. Which is to say: as both fundamentally social and communal animals, and simply as animals, dogs express their dog-ness with nearly every single action or gesture they make. When a dog plays, whether with another dog or with a human being, it does so with joyful instinct: with a giddy openness to play as part of the natural business of living, rather than as a frivolous add-on to more immediately or obviously necessary pursuits.
I expressed this, once, half-jokingly by saying that “dogs aren’t brain-poisoned, the way humans are.” Dogs don’t know who the main character of Twitter is. They have no conception of Discourse. But, more importantly, dogs – and our relationship with dogs – lack the capacity for any kind of irony. You can tease a dog in play – pretending to throw a ball, say – but your relationship with the dog can never be mediated, through allusive language or ambiguous glances or high-context responsivity, the way human relations can be and, I would argue, increasingly are.
Essays on “beauty as an ethical phenomenon; the understanding of social life as pervaded by questions of our perceptions of one another; the interrogation of the idea of life as art; coming to grips with the ancient suggestion that beauty is itself our aim in living well and living as we ought.”
The Line of Beauty is a joint effort of Tara Isabella Burton and Dhananjay Jagannathan. https://lineofbeauty.substack.com/
THE ENDING CAME three years ago, from the day before we went to the river. One version of the ending, anyway. She and I sat at a picnic table near a stream with a therapist who was also my uncle, and we said out loud in the summer June air that we couldn’t give what the other wanted. She said she couldn’t live with me anymore and be who she wanted to be. I said I couldn’t live indefinitely separate and fragmented. We said these things for the purpose of freeing each other, though freedom didn’t liberate like we thought. There have been numerous endings. Another ending came down by the river, three years and a day later.
I’ve come to learn that transitions don’t often look like crossing a straight line. We circle back, or in some way forward, because circling is rarely a straightforward repetition of what came before. Instead, it’s a need to follow-up, continue, revolve. Grief is the emotion and the practice that accompanies irreversible transition – like final goodbyes, certainly all kinds of death, even births because all beginnings start with an ending.
Grief never completely goes away either, circling like water cycles, tears turned to thunderstorms, so pieces left from these endings didn’t get cleaned up, growing back together again in a hurtful dark. John O’Donohue, poet-priest from Ireland, pictured this process like being “ambushed” in the middle of daily tasks, when you think you finally have your heart back. Ambushes, small and large, kept surprising me, so I knew I needed to transition again, or make visible a practice of my transition. I felt ready to cross the threshold into the next time of my life, to leave behind an architecture I no longer lived in but perhaps occasionally squatted in, a memory palace where particular dreams still had a haunting life. As far as I was concerned, those dreams were welcome to remain encamped there, but I needed to move out.
Another poet, David Whyte, once remarked that the greater difficulty of a relationship’s end may not be leaving the person but leaving the shared dreams. No matter who or what comes next, he said, “no matter what species of happiness you would share with them – you will never, ever share those particular dreams again, with that particular tonality and coloration.” The end is an extinction.
But I was ready, really actually ready, for a new lease on a house of life. Life was moving on, as it always does, and I was mostly living it, though parts of me weren’t. I needed help to step through the doorway from this dying house. So two friends came to help me cross the threshold.
***
DAVE AND KYLE have been involved in all this from the beginning, from building that house, talking about its construction, to sitting in its loneliness with me, now helping me move out. Kyle and his wife Ginger even officiated the wedding, the ceremonial moving in, talking in the thick damp Arkansas heat about marriage as coevolution, which confirms the end is indeed an extinction. Kyle also first offered me the language of architecture for understanding the close intimacy, the careful maintenance, of inhabiting a marriage, and the many painful ways its borders can be violated. Dave was at the wedding too, reading Wendell Berry’s “The Country of Marriage,” a long poem about marriage as a place to adapt to, where general affection becomes particular love and an unfamiliar landscape becomes home. Country is a distinct metaphor from architecture, though similar enough that selectively re-reading the poem now eerily surveys a different country. Or perhaps the same one, now seen with grief after exile, anguish after extinction.
Instead of moonlit longing and restful union, consider insomniac nightmares held captive by the one you love: “I dream of you walking at night along the streams . . . You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.”
Or the dizzying unknowing of why we were drawn together at all, times when no words came, ambushed instead with unexpected visions:
Was it something I said that bound me to you, some mere promise or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death? A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood still and said nothing. And then there rose in me, . . . the words of a dream of you I did not know I had dreamed . . .
And then, with a twist of finality, twisted from the abundant freedom of self-release into the suffocating abandonment of drowning:
What I am learning to give you is my death to set you free of me, and me from myself into the dark and the new light. Like the water of a deep stream, love is always too much.
Grief can do that to you, make you question everything you thought you knew or understand, like poems or people. Did I hallucinate all that tenderness? Those times that felt easy and comfortable? Did I make that whole country up?
Dave has crossed through this country in his own life. I’ve sometimes been jealous of his journey because he was much less responsible for its ending than I am for mine. But I no longer want to linger on the sharp fault line edges of my flaws, though the voices in my head, sometimes spoken in her tone, remind me of who I’ve been when I tried to defy my failings. It always takes at least two, but could I even be good, the voices asked, when I’m so imperfect? Doesn’t imperfection mean I deserve what I got? “Flickers of guilt kindle regret/For all that was left unsaid or undone,” wrote John O’Donohue about the heat I’ve felt. Guilt is a real condition, regret a necessary emotion, but I no longer hate myself and I want to keep it that way.
My friends came for a June weekend and we talked, hiked, looked at my gardens and the nursery where another friend and I grow trees and ourselves. That first night, successively drinking whiskey, bourbon, and gin, I told them that I couldn’t shake the image of threshold, its old word-roots grown from a double sense of treading and separating, walking and winnowing. Crossing over something into somewhere else, returning changed to a changed place. In her manual on power, Cyndi Suarez reminds that rites of passage always “begin with a threshold – a challenge one cannot meet without transcending one’s current idea of oneself”: a strategy for meeting needs no longer works, a story no longer rings true, an initiatory move into a new age. That transcendence was what I was looking for. The earth also has thresholds, from one biome to the next or when slow small disturbances finally crest into quick changes. That’s where I was, at the biome doorway. I needed to physically walk through a threshold, to separate myself from the past by treading, not just talking about it.
They listened, asked questions. Dave wondered if there was anything else I needed to say to her. I knew there was, especially towards the very end, but I’d never really let myself speak directly to her those words out of fear of making it worse, out of fear of sounding like I was avoiding myself. I spoke countless things to her in our short shared life: some beautiful, some vulnerable, some cynical, some that still taste bitter in the mouth. After too much time defending and deflecting, the bitterness baked into a story solely filled with all my dysfunctions and imbalances. Usually all I could see were those sharp fault lines, all my worst moments carved in stone. Dave told me that a grief ritualist suggested to him that he say his unsaid words out loud, as if to his former partner but directed to a rock. Your soul, the ritualist explained, doesn’t know the difference between the firmness of the rock and the firmness of her. Your soul simply needs to speak. Maybe, Dave added, I also needed to say out loud a counter-narrative to the bitter stone story.
I told them I wanted to be by the river. I’d spent a lot of time there, crying my grief into the flow, ritualizing my return to this chosen home, joyful play with friends floating in the current. The river felt right. Partly because I think emotions move like water, and grief is like their river. My friend Karla McLaren, loving guide to emotions and empathy, says that grief is unlike sadness, which arises to help us let go of what’s no longer working but we could choose to hold onto. Grief arises when something is actually lost, a never-to-return loss, taking us down to the deep places because they are the only places left to go. Grief moves at extinction events, when things die. I decided to take grief to the South Fork of the Shenandoah, to the river I know.
Before Kyle and Dave came, my grief had already moved me to the river, stepping in, lifting my feet, floating further down. I swam over to a shelf of rock cropped out from the steep bank beneath the road. I undressed, reentered naked, with my grief, to midriver where the current swept swiftly. I bore my feet down into the stone and used an old drifting mop handle to anchor myself. I didn’t know what I was going to say, with so little to draw on in my so-called culture, this whitewashed colonizing culture, death-denying and therefore grief-avoidant. Martín Prechtel says that it “is a terrible source of grief in itself to not be able to grieve.” So I made up what I needed to say on the spot. “So be it,” wrote Cormac McCarthy in The Road. “Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.” I constructed a ceremony out in the otherworld of water and I screamed it under the thudding slip of the current.
Unable to grieve, we’re haunted by what we’ve lost, trapped in-between, never separated enough from the loss to tread to another union. Grief can’t be outrun, outthought, though it can be outsourced, pushing the burden to someone and somewhere else with unforeseen consequences, grieving turned to grievance. Grief is a powerful enough riverine force that it needs ritual, instinctive or inherited, to help responsibly shape its course, charting the changes that always shape our lives. Francis Weller identifies two gifts ritual offers grief: containment and release, the safe holding and the free letting go, a kind of vessel for pouring. Ritual doesn’t erase wounds, doesn’t forever remove the burden of grief, but it maintains and tends, helps us offer gratitude where we can, provides regularity for the maintenance and tending. Repeating a ritual doesn’t mean anything is broken. Maybe my grief wasn’t stuck, just unfinished, maybe never quite done, the ritual never completely over. My desire for a threshold was a need to find my ground, to create an altar or shape, like the river itself. An actual river to correspond to what Weller names “riverbeds in our soul” carved by sorrow.
Maybe, I told Kyle and Dave, we could make a threshold on the ground with sticks or stones like my fault lines, dismantling them once I crossed to recognize the movement. But the image still looked too much like crossing a straight line, even though taking it apart afterwards disrupted the linearity. Whatever the threshold, it needed to be actual, made with the world itself. Dave encouraged me to write down what I needed to say, then burn it. Then Kyle said maybe the river is the threshold. We should cross it and on the far shore make a fire and burn the words there and then cross back over. The flame and the flowing moving place were to be the doorway in time, a grounded sense of time, which moves in cycles and not lines. I said that’s what we needed to do.
***
Moving in circles, I had carried grief to the river before and yelled an underwater ceremony. I had also burned words before, a disposal to signify an end. Nothing broken, only maintenance and tending, moving in circles. Six months after the picnic table ending, I moved out of the Shenandoah Valley to be near family, to separate and heal, maybe to run away. In the ensuing weeks I couldn’t sleep for feverish turning, fitful weeping for her. For months prior I carried a stack of printed emails, ostensibly to provide a thorough history for therapists, but also somehow evidence of chaos-making communication, a paper trail to defend myself.
One late night I evoked the form of a ritual. I typed her a new email, this time in a different tone than before, no more ands or buts or also, simply “Yes, I am sorry.” No excuses or defenses, just responsibility for my part without expectation and a list of all the gifts she’s given me. I told her I felt more broken open than ever before, remembering all the instances when I was demanding, stubborn, condescending, overly assertive in my presence and desires, the ways she then backed away, lay low, withdrew in response. I told her I felt sick at my immaturity and misunderstandings that led to arguments, silences, turnings away. I could taste the dismissing tones in my mouth, could hear their off-key pitch, could feel their imprint in the squint of my face. I told her I was sorry. I apologized because I needed to so I could be who I wanted to be. Because apology is a kind of naming. Because sometimes we do wrong things, and it’s important to admit them. Then I shaved my beard, cropped my hair close, stripped, and made a fire in the yard. I burned the hair and I burned the paper trail so I couldn’t follow it again. The ritual did something only it can do, what talk therapy can’t get at. After sending her the email and burning the papers I slept more soundly than I had in recent memory. I also still had my grief when I woke up.
At some point, a time between the burning in the yard and the burning by the river with my friends, after many more things had been said, she also wanted a ritual to end our marriage. She told me she wanted to break the wine glasses I gave her for our first anniversary, at the homestead where our marriage lived and struggled the longest. After a week of trying to convince myself to do it, I replied no, thank you. I understood, even respected, the intention, but the tone and the act felt nearly violent in the midst of unrequited words, unreciprocated responsibility, and premature for what I actually wanted at the time but felt was no longer possible: to repair all this shit, to resurrect extinct dreams, to be with her light and warmth.
***
I feel some awkwardness writing all this down now, a little embarrassed at the melodrama of it. Perhaps that’s true of intimate moments of transformation told aloud. I’m tempted to temper the personal focus, abstracting my experience into a general meditation on marriage or the grief of this time, from viruses to civil war vibes. But that’s not what this story is about. I’m attempting to write vulnerably, a version of truthfully, without self-pity but with detail to the ritual of grieving heartbreak and mistake. I don’t want to distract from that with generalities or dilute it by drawing attention to all the ways I was hurt too. Each ritualized time felt ordinary, almost exactly natural, an invitation to feel deeply without selfishness. Weller believes that sorrow connects us to the world, the personal to the planetary, and all this personal talk of endings does make me think of the planetary ones. He says that grief finds us through five gates: the reality that we lose everything we love; the places that haven’t known love; the loves we expected but never received; the sorrows of the world globally known but individually felt; the unmetabolized grief inherited from our ancestors. Gates are, after all, thresholds, and all of Weller’s gates involve separation and treading. They all weave together the solitary and the social, the personal and the pandemic.
As for embarrassment, Prechtel affirms that this is grief’s natural and necessary sound, indifferent to misunderstanding. Purposely done, he believes, true and free grieving as an entire people could revive entire cultures, it could “make life more deliciously alive.” And Grief is in fact the best friend of Praise, dwellers in separate chambers of the house of Love, which is the heart. “Grief is praise,” Prechtel vows, “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” Both “are very practical versions of love in motion,” a river not a bog.
We can never praise if we never grieve.
***
WE DROVE DOWN out of town to the river, in the gray spray of rain. Parking roadside, we descended a footpath to the wide floodway, filled with trees along a tributary creek. The green of the place met my vision and focused me down under the canopy to the cool wet air and earth. Dizziness clouded me in recent weeks, unable to steady my gaze, as if I were looking through a screen or the long lens of a telescope. But the green and gray, the silvered brown of the river, brought me to attention.
A Cottonwood on the Shenandoah, courtesy Virginia.gov
We treaded the soft last path to the bank, colonnaded by rows of Sycamore and Cottonwood, some of the tallest and roundest of either tree I’ve seen in this great valley. Every time I walk that path I stop short before them, each time struck by the size of their immense gorgeous growth. Tree size isn’t a good gauge for age, and both Sycamore and Cottonwood grow very quickly, but those trees have certainly been there a while. Some of the trunks would take all three of us to wrap our arms around. On this day, Sycamore and Cottonwood appeared out of the gray like gatekeepers, druidic in their rooted silence, calm in the lengthening rings of their lives that regard as restless my sense of patient time. Prechtel says grief “is what living beings experience when what or whom they love dies or disappears.” Living beings: more-than-human, more-than-mammals, more-than-creatures-with-brains. I wondered what loves those trees have seen disappear, and what arboreal grief sounds like. I touched the living barked beings closest to the path as we passed, toward a ritualized past.
I felt my stomach coil as we came out of the trees to the water, heard before seen. Not a resistance to what we were doing, but a hesitance. I had symbolized my grief here before to make this place home, but the invitation for grief to come in the company of these friends, to cross a threshold at and as this river, moved down in my body with appropriate gravity. What moved in my gut also seemed to move through the land, circulating through me and the water and wind, then grounding itself in the imagery of a house, with a doorway I needed to cross to make a new home, one I was already preparing for and should step into, resolvedly, committedly, readily. I was now in a relationship with a wonderful person, Christen, and we had been dreaming about that new home, both relational and physical. But I hadn’t been fully ready to plan, with dates and announcements and communal ceremonies to witness the commitment made, which was another threshold I would need to cross. First, I needed to step over this one, to separate and tread, winnow and walk, in a communal ceremony with my friends.
I looked at the river and questioned if we should cross. The current’s clip was swift. Not dangerously so, but enough that we needed to move carefully and alertly. Dave found a soda bottle with a twist-on cap and shoved into it a lighter, a pen, and some paper. We stripped to our boxers and I descended into the cool water, kept a foot on rock until I was part of the way over before shoving off and plunging at an angle for the river to sweep me across. A thick stand of young Sycamores greeted me on the stony sandbar, with river’s fast flow behind me and slow pools ahead before the actual bank. Dave and Kyle followed and we crossed the shallow divide beyond the Sycamores and came to the far shore. For our purposes, we came into the otherworld.
The gray rain gave the world the pallor of ash. Lament was in the air, rain falling steadily like a kind of sadness. John O’Donohue heard in water the “voice of grief.” In one praise poem, he hailed the “grace of water,” its “liquid root” working through “the long night of clay,” and also the “humility of water,/Always willing to take the shape/Of whatever otherness holds it.” The water from the sky shivered into the water through the land, expressions of a cycle turning over and over into one another. They met, flowed with persistence, a quiet but firm insistence that this day is what we had to work with, the water and the grief will not be unbearable, but they’re also not going away. So we made our ceremony with what we had, and I tried to imitate the humility of water by taking the shape of its own liquid root.
I separated from the shore and ducked further inland, just enough to where I had some solitude. I found what seemed like a path, another shape humbled by the flow of water. I knelt, opened the mason jar in my hand that held some torn pieces of envelope and biochar, wood from the stream in town cooked down into carbon to absorb nutrients. I carry the jar in my backpack, my homemade version of incense or anointing oil. When I remember, I leave a sprinkle at the feet of plants where I harvest food or gather seeds, or at the landfill when I contribute to its leaching burden. Biochar takes what is often discarded and turns it into a sponge to hold fertility, which is a kind of memory releasing over time.
I enclosed myself in a circle of char, smeared the stain on my fingers onto my forehead. Then I wrote. The rain quickly dampened the paper, but it took the words I needed to say. I wrote to her as if I spoke to her. I said the words that still stung me, the stories still hounding me, the regrets still hanging over me. But the only water that fell was the rain. I felt the heaviness of grief’s gravity pulling at my face, but my tears remained up.
When I finished writing, I slowly walked toward the bank. I smelled smoke, then saw clouded curls of it. Despite the damp, my friends had made a fire beneath a Sycamore and a Walnut. Between the two trees, past floods had packed bark, leaf, and twig into a dam from which Dave pulled enough dry material to ignite with the lighter. More sticks and small branches fed the smoky flame, the smoke becoming part of the overhead gray. We began placing rocks around the fire’s edge and huddled close to feed and feel its small warmth. I bent over my knees, elbows tucked down, face close to wet earth, holding wet paper that held the marks of my grief-wet words.
I read them aloud, parting the rain with their clearness, and my tears broke through to fall with the rain. My body had been holding more grief, a flow in need of moving before I had enough room for my life. I could have forced my way forward with it stuck, but I’d done that before, trying to be ready to move on when I wasn’t prepared, and I knew eventually grief would flood me again. The ritual made room, both to feel and for the feeling to pass on and make room for something else to move in. “It becomes hard to trust yourself,” wrote the again-wise O’Donohue.
All you can depend on now is that Sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way And will find the right time To pull and pull the rope of grief Until that coiled hill of tears Has reduced to its last drop.
My tears kept falling, uncoiling themselves as I spoke words I’d wanted to say to her but never fully said, now without concern for consequences. No attacks, no excuses, only honest and unhedged, stitching two stories out of the fault lines. Kyle and Dave didn’t react, saying nothing, maybe listening, watching the fire and offering company.
I finished what I had to say and crumpled up the sorrowed paper. I tossed it into the fire and despite the damp it too caught the light. I breathed audibly, a gasp of relief as those words turned red, then white into ash, then were gone. Dave gently stacked more of the river-racked tinder from between the two trees, our huddled shapes under them converting them into altars.
I heard the river rumbling, somersaulting in currents down toward the sea. Everything around us – the leaves, the rain, the airy nutrients – gravitated downhill with the river, including our tears, including my grief, anything with the slight weight of loss. O’Donohue calls this the “courage of a river” continuing to believe in the gradual descent of ground. I had no more words of my own, so I sang a song to match the plumb line of that courageous direction, my voice cracking from the strain of being honest. Dave knew the low rolling tune so he sang too, and Kyle hummed until we sang through the cycle again.
We sat a few minutes longer, wind shushing through us, until I said I was ready. The fire died enough that I could scoop some white ash into the jar of black char, a symbol of dark carbon absorbing the nutrition. We spread the stone circle back out and let the rain dowse the embers. I picked up a small smooth stone, warm to the touch, about the same size as one I plucked from the shelf in my apartment at the last minute before driving to the river. The one she gave me after the last time she left, with a note telling me she was giving me this small stone, “a little guy” that she’d put a lot of love into.
I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted to keep holding it with a special place on my shelf-top altar. I could have done so and doing so wouldn’t be wrong except I knew it was no longer right for me. The small stone was just large enough to block the threshold into the next room, the room made by walking and moving the grief and that one small stone with love in it.
Kyle and Dave crossed the river first, fumbling in the rapids with goofy grins and laughter. I waited in the otherworld, crouched on the rock-rolled shore beneath the Sycamore stand until they crossed. Then I waded into the same river where I had shouted my grief the summer before. I swam to midriver, slipped underwater to the underworld, braced myself against the turning current. I opened the jar and poured the ash and char into the pastel river, bending up by the mountain but carried down to the sea. I came up out of the river and across the threshold.
I later learned that Karla McLaren suggests five rules for a good ritual. First, be clear about your intentions, to know why you’re having the ritual in the first place. Second, mark a clear beginning, with a phrase or sound or movement, so you know what came before and what comes after. Three, define the location of your ritual, with clear boundaries to know where the edges are in time and place. Four, feed and tend your altar or shrine, to stay alert and aware for as long as the ritual lasts. And five, close the ritual with intention, with a phrase or sound or movement, clean up what needs cleaning, remove what needs removing, and celebrate because good work has been done.
The three of us sat on the trunk of a branch, worn smooth by water. I retrieved a pipe from our bundle of shirts in a stump, along with a jar of dried Mullein leaves. We lit a small fire in the bowl, passed it between us, puffing herbal smoke into the smoky rain. We didn’t talk, just smoked, a quiet sober celebration at the ritual’s end. Dave and Kyle grabbed their clothes and I stood at the water’s edge, small love-filled stone in hand. I let it go in an arc to midriver where it crossed the surface line of the water, following the liquid root down, a disposal to signify an end. A story in firm stone to heal a fault line. Maybe my grief wasn’t stuck, only unfinished. Maybe never quite done.
We passed along the soft path back up the creek, beneath the cathedral Cottonwoods and Sycamores. Kyle hugged us, got in the car back to Connecticut. Dave and I drove up out of the river’s floodplain and back into the heights of town.
***
ALMOST FOUR MONTHS later, Kyle and Dave came back to the watershed, only a score of miles upstream from our river threshold, for my wedding ceremony. The two of us, Christen and I, decided a few weeks after the ritual that we were ready to move into the next room, the biome beyond the many small disturbances. We stepped below the spring house and across the small stream that cuts below our new home, carrying the water down toward the creek that enters the river at the point where my friends and I crossed to release my grief. She and I stepped on stones over cool water to the gentle otherworld bank, to plant two little Willows while loved ones sang to us, waiting for us to cross back from our past grief, from the future of those Willow roots, to the present of our lives on the other side.
Jonathan McRay is a father, farmer, facilitator, and writer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He grows beautiful and useful trees that cross-pollinate food sovereignty and ecological restoration with Silver Run Forest Farm, a riparian nursery, woodland collective, and folk school practicing agroforestry, watershed health, and restorative justice. As a facilitator and mediator, he supports grassroots groups and community organizations through conflict transformation, popular education, and participatory decision-making. Jonathan is also learning to give up erosive perfectionism in favor of joyful growth.
Every summer, my artist friends Ed Bartram and his wife Mary Bromley moved up to an island in Georgian Bay where they lived for four months in a very beautiful and rustic setting, painting, gardening, and entertaining friends and family…I enjoyed visiting them both for twenty summers, (Ed died in 2019). While they painted and tended other projects, I would head out with my journal to commune with the ancient stones.
Wild Animal Prayer
It is my belief that Nature yearns for this communion. Rather than coming with expectations to heal the earth, we are most available to life when we bring our completely open-hearted presence. Listening to the heart of Nature has been a long and compelling love affair; each encounter stretched my capacity to be an attentive witness and to receive Nature’s varied frequencies of love. As I communed with the natural world, I learned a profound truth: Whatever is not witnessed with love tends to wither. To me, this is the crux of the environmental crisis. Because we have forgotten how to witness the world with love, the Soul of the World is dying. Whenever I feel heart-broken about the state of the world, I try to remember the wisdom of the ancient Georgian Bay stones: The web may be broken, but the Long Song continues…
“Feed The Way” made and handed out over 10,000 Care Bags and sandwiches while procuring and delivering hundreds of pairs of wool gloves, winter hats, and warm socks to the unhoused in Seattle during the Covid pandemic. They stepped up when government, religious, and social organizations who had been serving the homeless prior to the pandemic, shut down. In addition, “Feed The Way” provided companionship and pastoral care on the streets, back alleys, parking lots, abandoned buildings, and in parks where homeless and marginalized people were living.
I heard the river rumbling, somersaulting in currents down toward the sea. Everything around us – the leaves, the rain, the airy nutrients – gravitated downhill with the river, including our tears, including my grief, anything with the slight weight of loss. O’Donohue calls this the “courage of a river” continuing to believe in the gradual descent of ground. I had no more words of my own, so I sang a song to match the plumb line of that courageous direction, my voice cracking from the strain of being honest. Dave knew the low rolling tune so he sang too, and Kyle hummed until we sang through the cycle again.