Two poems came over the transom today, as every day, and sometimes one or both are wonderful examples of synchronicity at work, coincidence whose meaning is far more than accident. There are deep and special connections between two of C.G. Jung's most fruitful concepts, synchronicity and active imagination. Both come especially alive when I think, as I have been recently, of teaching young children.
I've begun to think again upon the wild child, not in the popular sense of Tarzan's early years, or a child raised by wolves, say, who encounters a human community later and inevitably with problematic consequences. I'm thinking of a more ordinary child -- but still extraordinary, perhaps now in our urban and electronic culture, more rare, even among the endangered species? If so, here is one that belongs on the list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and WorldWatch.
Because the child I imagine is simply he or she who grows even from infancy with an experience of the natural wild, the wilderness, in and around him or her. The wind and the rain, the arcs and play of light of sun and moon, the other species with which symbiotic relationship -- inter-being is a Buddhist term -- is less and less a matter of assumption, more and more a matter of necessity.
The climate crisis slips from our consciousness, yes, because we fear for our economic security and our safety, but more deeply because we've lost, or never truly have known, our membership in the natural world, our wildness. As life has literally disappeared - died - from hundreds and thousands of square miles of once fertile earth and river and sea, we do not experience that loss as a loss of home, a loss of soul, as it is.
So nourishing the wild child, passing on the wisdom of the wild elder, teaching wildness in our families, kindergartens and colleges, as a critical dimension or domain of our human development, is an urgent need. I want to know -- I am hungry to know -- who does it and how.
Here are the two poems that floated into my space today.
The first (afterward, check out the astonishing picture attached) reminds me of my love of Annie Dillard, who is a wild elder. I don't know Lynn Ungar yet, except through this poem, but it is a perfect example of the wild spirit, grown -- more, clearly, than that which we all begin, our experience of yearning. The wild spirit is now largely counter-cultural. it needs to be learned, and learned well, taught by those who are themselves taught, taught in the wild and taught, maybe we could say something like the prince tames the fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, to tame the wild also (not really, not like a pet), to bring it indoors, to bring it into conversation and companionship with other realms and ways of being.
Hawks
by Lynn Ungar
Surely, you too have longed for this --
to pour yourself out
on the rising circles of the air
to ride, unthinking,
on the flesh of emptiness.
Can you claim, in your civilized life,
that you have never leaned toward
the headlong dive, the snap of bones,
the chance to be so terrible,
so free from evil, beyond choice?
The air that they are riding
is the same breath as your own.
How could you not remember?
That same swift stillness binds
your cells in balance, rushes
through the pulsing circles of your blood.
Each breath proclaims it --
the flash of feathers, the chance to rest
on such a muscled quietness,
to be in that fierce presence,
wholly wind, wholly wild.
And then the second poem, as startling in its way -- harder to see in "the ashy city." The cry follows the sustained sight, breaks through the felt absence of imagination: "Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us," even here, even now. We need wise elders to teach wise children, or at least to teach those who teach wise children, and Mary Oliver is that kind of wise elder. This is the wise elder's sight, and a wonderful example of bringing that sight, that energy, indoors, as it were, into conversation with grief, into encounter with existential pain: the poet's "heart pumping hard," like "the pulsing circles of your blood."
Starlings in Winter
by Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
