Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Wild Child, Wild Elder

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.

A winter's tale

A few weeks ago a friend and I, inspired by our similar responses to Scott Russell Sanders's wonderful essay in Orion magazine called "Mind in the Forest,"  decided we would try an experiment of finding a particular tree in our respective necks of our woods, hang out with it regularly as the seasons change, and see what kind of relationship began to develop. Here is part of my most recent report, which turned out to be a reflection on a poem of Ranier Maria Rilke as well:

Winter has come here in Norway, with cold, several days of soft snowfall, and sometimes a little wind, more darkness. My own habits are slower to change; I am not leaving my room as easily; I find reason to linger in the house, even beside the low circle of paraffin flame of the little stove in the front hall. (My coat and boots are right there, in the closet.)

So today I began to be an animal in winter, just as light was beginning to fade around 2:30 in the afternoon. I found my good winter gloves under the cake pan (where else?), my boots, vest, jacket, watch cap in the closet, and I set out for my tree. Of course it was there, at trail’s end, in a place long ago—probably 300 years or so—named “the end of the world,” I imagine because the farms and fields ended there; only wilderness—trees—stretched beyond, and one could see far into the distance. “The last before the infinite.” (See below.)

The old birch I had chosen grew there, with another grandfather birch that stood close by and as tall—I would guess 200 feet easily. Not so close that I could reach both with my arms spread, but if I stretch out on the ground (now wet snow) with arms extended I can feel one trunk with my feet, the other with my hands.

Now the fact that strikes me is that I can’t remember which I chose that first time. I have two trees, two hairy grandfather birches, covered with green gray lichen. And I stood with them quietly for a time, perhaps a little like Robinson Jeffers’s image of mankind as
 
a moving lichen
On the cheek of the round stone...
 
On my walk back I thought, this is going to take a very long time, but perhaps there is one way of understanding Rilke’s last lines,

When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.

You—I—we—have as long as it takes, as long as we need. Done with our grasping, our will, even with its—our—meaning—tenderly we will let go.

Garrison Keillor tells us that yesterday was Rilke’s birthday, December 4, 1875. And Keillor also reprints these lines of Rilke, without saying where they came from in his poetry. Wherever, they served to move me from my room, into winter and into the trees, where discovery awaited.
 
Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go.
 

Pigs as Angels

I've re-read once more today Galway Kinnell's poem, "St. Francis and the Sow," and thought again of why I love it so, and why it came to me again this morning, by chance and by email. 

I am moved by the blessing, the self-blessing from within, and our need and gift for both relearning and reteaching, "in words and in touch / it is lovely / until it flowers again of self-blessing." 

And I am moved to remember a friend last evening telling us a story of her serious illness some years ago, a moment of sitting still, tired, waiting in the seat of a car, surrounded by wind and rain, glimpsing in the bushes a small thing so covered with earth she could not recognize it. So she opened the door, walked a short distance in the wind and rain, picked up the small thing covered with earth, which turned out when washed - a blessing - to be an angel, made of stone. 

So this morning, reading Kinnell, I thought to myself, when have I written before of this poem, and why? I discovered three occasions, two and three years ago, and I decided to weave together something new today, but drawn also from each of those occasions. (You can find them in Reckonings if you do a Google search there - in the right column - for Kinnell.)

One more personal word. I normally send these occasional musings and gifts of poems to friends anonymously, using the bcc line, and I'll do that here as well.  But I want to send this message openly (To:) a small group of people I have known so well for so long they are as family, my fellow members of the board of directors of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation, because the spirit evoked here has intimately to do with our search for a way to focus our attention and resources on a deeper conception of sustainability and responsibility for the earth's health than is common. 

Galway Kinnell's A New Selected Poems appeared in 2000. He was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his first Collected Poems in 1980. In the autumn of 2001 he was interviewed by Elizabeth Lund, poetry editor of The Christian Science Monitor, and in her resulting account there is the following passage:

"Whether he's writing about his family or describing the loveliness of sows, Kinnell's work reveals affection for creatures both great and small. 'The other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels.'

"A pig as an angel?"

"'I try to see past the usual clichés about things,' he smiles.  'Pig' is a pejorative word, but if you get to know them, get a feeling for them, you see that they have an extraordinary beauty. When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older.'"

On another occasion earlier in 2001 he said:

"I don't think of myself as a 'nature poet.' I don't recognize the distinction between nature poetry and—what would be the other thing?—human civilization poetry? We are creatures of the earth. All the creatures have their intricate ways of living on earth. Humans are unique in one respect: we've taken over. We've taken over so successfully that we've become a threat to many of the other creatures and even a danger to the earth itself, so that's why I don't think of myself as a 'nature poet.' Poems about other creatures may have political and social implications for us."

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as St. Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of

the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking

and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

 

~ Galway Kinnell ~

(Mortal Acts, Mortal Words)

 

Imagine, in yourself, the expressions of consciousness - in St. Francis, in the sow - Kinnell evokes in the poem. Imagine the blessings you have received, and those you have given, by touch. 

Kinnell says, "The other animals are the angels. Human babies are the angels... When creatures don't have an extraordinary beauty, it's because the person in contact with them is not seeing it. I feel more and more in love with other creatures as I get older.'" 

So what  creature does not have an angel within, if we can see? How do we say or teach and learn the intimacy of seeing and being? How close is the consciousness Kinnell describes to that of his fellow poet Robinson Jeffers when he writes, 

..... I entered the life of the brown forest,

And the great lfe of the ancient peaks, the patience of stone, I felt the

     changes in the veins

In the throat of the mountain... and, I was the stream

Draining the mountain wood; and I the stag drinking; and I was the stars

Boiling with light, wandering alone, each one the lord of his own summit;

    and I was the darkness

Outside the stars, I included them, they were a part of me. I was mankind

    also, a moving lichen

On the cheek of the round stone...

"I was mankind / also, a moving lichen / on the cheek of the round stone..." That is as lovely an image of homo sapiens as I know--as lovely and as necessary to absorb into our hearts, that we might renew ourselves and restore the earth we continue to destroy. There is a task worthy of our learning.

Pouncing fox

I was arrested by this image. I think the photographer caught a quintessential moment when there is no turning back, the literal height of suspense. It may be all in a day's work, but I imagine extraordinary joy. 

Download Pouncing fox (a .pdf file, so I couldn't post it as a picture).

Listening, and listening

I don't think my Amherst College classmate (1960) Dave Wood would mind my repeating here a short Facebook exchange he and I had in response to my earlier post of Scott Russell Sanders's reflections on listening to trees. And speaking of the pleasures of one thing putting another in mind, I am reprinting below a moving and closely related poem by David Wagoner, who still spends a lot of time listening in his beloved Pacific Northwest.

DW

This puts me in mind of the sounds we hear at night at our remote lakeside camp in eastern Maine--historically, Wabanaki (Penobscot and Passamaquoddy) land. The loons--and there are many--are there as soon as the ice is off the lake in the spring, and stay (at least the young ones do) until late in the fall. They have an other-wordly and complex language, one that clearly has social significance for them. Each night, an hour or two after sunset, they begin calling from all over the lake, as if trying to locate each other as they settle for the night. This goes on for several minutes, then quiets down. Then (if the night is still) we can sometimes hear barred owls ("eight hooters"), and bullfrogs croaking from the marsh across the lake. During the day, the ravens are raucous--and their language, too, is complex. By mid-summer the mergansers that we see courting in May parade proudly up and down the lakeshore with a dozen ducklings in tow, the mothers clucking orders to their brood (the males seem to disappear after their job is done). It's a wondrous world.

JRB

Many thanks, Dave, for your stories of living with the birds of eastern Maine. I share your love of loons, who feel like lifelong companions - along with mourning doves - I listen for them wherever I am, wonder at their voices - most vividly on early morning and evening kayaking on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where I lived for several years. Ravens, too, are special companions of a different sort - I'm influenced by Raven's large and problematic place in Indian legend, not unlike a winged Coyote. It is indeed a wondrous world. My gratitude for membership is unbounded.

Here is David Wagoner's poem:

The Silence of the Stars

 

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.  They looked at him,
Half-smiling.  They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened.  One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No.  They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now.  On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

 

~ David Wagoner ~

How do we hear the rest of the natural world? By learning to listen. Would we listen to nature if our lives depended upon it?

"I live on Tolowa (Indian) land. Prior to the arrival of the dominant culture, the Tolowa lived here for 12,500 years, if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa, they lived here since the beginning of time....

"How do we hear the rest of the natural world? Unsurprisingly enough, the answer is: by listening. That’s not easy, given that we have been told for several thousand years that these others are silent. But the fact that we cannot easily hear them doesn’t mean they aren’t speaking, and does not mean they have nothing to say. I’ve had people respond to my suggestion that they listen to the natural world by going outside for five minutes and then returning to say they didn’t hear anything. But how can you expect to learn any new language (remember, most nonhumans don’t speak English) in such a short time? Learning to listen to our nonhuman neighbors takes effort, humility, and patience.

"The Tolowa believed the nonhuman world had something to say, and that what the nonhuman world had to say was vital to their own survival. Given that they were living here sustainably for 12,500 years, and given that we manifestly are not, perhaps the least we could do is acknowledge that they were on to something, and maybe even explore just what that kind of relationship might look and feel like."

from Derrick Jensen, "Playing for Keeps: Would we listen to nature if our lives depended on it?", Orion Magazine, November-December 2009

A Shabat walk through the image of Noah's raven

Sometimes I write back and forth to my son who is a rabbi. He knows I love the poetry of W.S. Merwin, and a few days ago he sent me Merwin's poem called "Noah's Raven." I awoke very early this Shabat morning, and thought of Raven.

Raven, you remember, is a scavenger. He collects and hides what is precious, as well as a lot of junk. There are many stories of Raven in native American traditions, but I decided to stick, in my walk through Google, to the associations to Noah's raven. Here is the circle of my Raven-like going and coming home (back to the ark):

Dear Joshua,

My early morning Shabat studies...

Noah's Raven
 
Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them. The future
Splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment, I never made promises.

 

                       - W.S. Merwin

I confess I forgot long ago the presence of Noah's raven, and I'm very happy that you introduce him to me through Merwin. Yes, ravens endure an ominous legacy, black carrion birds, Hitchcock creatures. The Biblical passage is one inviting commentary, isn't it. From a medieval Islamic scholar quoted in Wikipedia: "Noah spent five or six months aboard the Ark, at the end of which he sent out a raven. But the raven stopped to feast on carrion, and so Noah cursed it and sent out the dove, which has been known ever since as the friend of mankind." 

So the dove, white and pure as a bride waiting for her groom, gets all the credit. No sense that the raven has paved the way. He never made promises; his knowledge would not fit into theirs. There are no easy lessons; it is, if not always, still usually beyond them/us. 

From Genesis: ""And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made. He sent out the raven, and it kept going and returning until the drying of the waters from upon the earth. And he sent out the dove from him to see whether the water had subsided from the face of the ground." (Genesis 8:6-8).  The key passage, "He sent out the raven, and it kept going and returning until the drying of the land. 

"The Rashi, the preeminent Torah commentator, explains that initially, Noah was intent on sending the raven to search for dry land. However, the raven was hovering around the ark instead. Why did it refuse to go on the expedition? According to the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 108b), the raven refused to go because it was concerned for the preservation of its species. It challenged Noah along these lines: "I am hated because seven of the clean species were taken in the ark, while only two of the unclean (of which the raven is considered; see Leviticus 11:15.) were granted refuge. Yet you choose to send me out!" It reasoned that were harm to come to it during a reconnaissance flight, there would only be the female left of its kind.  from upon the earth." 

Midrash passages are wonderfully contradictory, but seem to settle on the raven as among the unclean and mostly cruel:  He "was prepared for another mission, during the days of Elijah the prophet. To reproach the people and their wicked King Ahab, Elijah decreed a drought upon the land, whereupon no rain fell. G-d instructs Elijah to journey to the desert: "It shall be that you will drink from the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to supply you with food there." Thereafter, ravens brought Elijah nourishment. (I Kings 17:4-6).

"This, then, is the meaning of the Torah’s statement that Noah’s raven "kept going and returning until the drying of the waters." The raven’s calling was ultimately fulfilled when the rains "dried up" during Elijah’s era."

At the end, that particular teaching is lovely, if a little less than full of reminders of the struggle: "The raven teaches us to be merciful, patient, and forgiving toward others. Even if they do wrong, we must love them, reach out to them, and be compassionate to them. Everybody is important. The raven reminds us of the famous saying of our sages (Ethics of Our Fathers 4:3): "Do not be scornful of any person, and do not be disdainful of any thing, for you have no person without his hour and you have no thing without its place."

Found near our little house in South Hadley, MA, perhaps once a desert - a fossil that came to be known as the raven's footmarks:

There's a lot about Raven violating the prohibition against procreation aboard the ark, and impregnating his wife....

"... many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." Daniel, 12:4s

"Why should I return?" Yet he returns, again and again, like a bodhisattva. 

Love on this Shabat morning,

Dad

Rain

"In From the Rain" (New York Times, 2 August 2009) is Verlyn Klinkenborg at his best, observant, attentive to the small dramas of the earth in ways that convey their familiarity and their sometimes ominous mysteries. Like him, I have been thinking much of water this summer, and especially of the power of rain. 

Grey wall moving. 

Darker air, fresh wet smell, 

wind filling the trees. 

When the rain comes, 

there is nothing else. 

- John R. Boettiger

Rain, photo by John R. Boettiger

"Witness," a poem by Denise Levertov

WITNESS

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

~ Denise Levertov ~


Note: For commentary on Levertov and three more of her poems, click here.

A cultural cocoon

Michael Kahn reminded us recently of Arnold Toynbee’s conception of a “creative minority” culture, a cocoon that is woven beside and beyond a dominant and dying culture, nourishing the seeds of succession, life that accompanies and follows the dominant culture's failing and demise.

To speak or write of two contrasting cultures is caricature, as are the two images I sketch below. They may nonetheless be useful if they serve fairly to describe a challenge and an opportunity, as I hope they do.

Our still prevailing culture (or what I’m calling a culture) has been named the “industrial growth society” by Joanna Macy, “the military industrial complex” by Dwight Eisenhower, and just “the empire” by David Korten. Whatever its humane accomplishments, for 200 years it’s been relentlessly shutting down the essential life systems of the earth. One of those life systems is human development—the integrated growth of our bodies, hearts, minds and souls, our gifts of companionship and imagination.

Today’s dominant culture of industrial empire is pathologically adolescent rather than truly adult or mature, as if the developmental path was lost in the pre-transformative, pre-right of passage stage of adolescence. So the culture is largely egocentric, anthropocentric, hierarchical, materialistic, competitive, violent, conflict-driven, racist, sexist and ageist, riven by economic and social inequity, unsustainable and fundamentally unnatural because its relationship to the earth is instrumental or alienated, neither organic nor intimate. (I am particularly grateful here to the work of Bill Plotkin.)

The successor or alternative culture I have in mind—the cocoon or embodiment of Toynbee’s creative minority—is life-sustaining and life-nourishing. It is eco-centric (nature or earth centered) and soul-centric (let’s say imaginative, holistic, integrative, spiritual, conscious of the whole web of life). It is egalitarian and democratic, cooperative, community-based, just, compassionate and sustainable. We could call the movement, as David Korten has, a transition “from empire to earth community.”

The scope and vitality of that movement is the subject of Paul Hawken’s recent book, Blessed Unrest (2008). “Life is the most fundamental human right, and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment, and freedom from external tyranny. Whenever and wherever that right is violated, human beings rise up. Today they are rising up in record numbers, and in a collective body that is often as not more sophisticated than the corporate and governmental bodies they address" (p 67-68).

When I see compassion as describing and driving our mission and our practice, I am imagining our service to that alternative culture and that transition, and our membership in that community and movement.