Conversations with Wild Ones
Image: Magpie by Anahata Giri
As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and hills
- Gary Snyder
Most modern people have lost the ability to converse - that is, to listen and exchange meaning - with animals, plants, elements, with any feature of land and sky, from an earth-bound rock to the far away stars. If you are yet to experience a meaningful exchange with a hopping yellow robin, or a staring male kangaroo or a cliff with faces of ancestors embedded in it, then these wild and transformative conversations are a precious and revelatory gift waiting for you.
Our current fast and highly technological society breeds a widespread malaise: a profound sense of separation between humans and the rest of the web of life. Many people feel alienated and fearful of wild places and wild creatures. When we attempt to truly connect with nature we may find ourselves in the disappointing roles of outsider, consumer, or spectator. How do we truly have a conversation or meaningful exchange with a rock, heron, river, cloud, ant?
One of my first conversations with a wild creature happened in a guided deep imagination practice. Somehow I managed to put aside my scepticism, when my guide asked me to welcome in an animal messenger. Magpie walks into my consciousness. I see his long, strong beak, staring eyes and black and white feathers. I admire the way Magpie is utterly himself, with contained power, fierce protection of his sanctity and boundaries, intelligence and with a focused intent that is breathtaking and a bit scary also. Now whenever I see Magpies in waking life, I feel a connection - Magpie helps me focus on my love for this wild world.
It is worth remembering that most of the 300,000 years we have lived on the planet as homo sapiens, our lives were intimately, inextricably entwined with the web of life. This capacity to listen and share meaning with our wild nature friends may be dormant in our modern hearts, but surely there is a residue of this ancient and embodied knowing, imprinted in our bones, in our DNA, in our psyche, in our memory. We can return to a vivid conversation that we were once a part of, and in doing that, emerge from a kind of isolation and desolation that we are not even aware we experience, until we reconnect with our nature friends.
Poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder writes: “It has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness..Nature is not a place to visit, it is home”. Wild places created - and create - who we are as humans. To return to wild places means to pick up a vast, evolutionary thread of wondrous becoming. Who do we become if we only stay inside walls and technological confines? Who do we become if we return home to wilderness?
We open the door to connection with nature beings when we recognise the sentience and intelligence of all life forms. Each life form participates in and co-creates this wondrous, living, breathing world. Snyder describes the aware, engaged and relational capacity of the living web: “The [natural] world is watching: one cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one's passage. The thrush darts back, the jay squalls, a beetle scuttles under the grasses, and the signal is passed along. Every creature knows when a hawk is cruising or a human strolling. The information passed through the system is intelligence”.
Nature beings are not inert or lesser objects, they are autonomous subjects. We let go of the habit of speaking about who we meet in nature, but rather we speak directly to nature beings (as you will see in the practice below). When we converse with wild ones, we learn, as Snyder writes, that “each creature is a spirit with an intelligence as brilliant as our own.”
We wander through nature, then pause where we are drawn to be, with a magpie, a hollowed out tree, a vivid cloudscape. We do not connect with our nature kin through intellect. The strategic ego occupies only a small part of the vast territory of our own consciousness. To listen we need to reside in, rest into, our embodied and felt experience and our present-centred awareness or consciousness. This embodied presence is a vast reservoir underneath the thinking, analytical mind. We feel, sense, breathe, look, smell, listen, perceive. We attune to sensations, emotions, images, insights, in response to the living world around us and to the nature being that we are meeting. This happens moment by moment. When we attune to our feeling, sensing self, we become more permeable to the world around us.
Snyder describes the act of conversing with our nature friends as ‘talking across species boundaries’. Alongside embodied and intuitive awareness, this conversation is also helped by trust in our own deep imagination. Deep imagination is not making things up, it is a free flow of sensation, perception, metaphor, insight and revelation to emerge from the co-created field between us and the wild being we are interacting with. Encounters with wild ones may evoke synchronicity, reciprocal knowing and seeing, giving and receiving, living and celebrating.
On the first night of my quest, the discovery of a broken tent pole and an impending storm, triggers self-doubt and fear. I lie awake in the tent, hungry from fasting and in a kind of torment of fear. I feel claustrophobic inside the unwanted tent. Just before dawn the next morning, I go for a short walk before committing to my sit circle. I ponder that my claustrophobic tent is like a cocoon and I am the caterpillar. At the precise moment of thinking about the cocoon, I see, moving very quickly across my path, a very fat, hairy, brown and black striped caterpillar. I see that my fear is a cocoon that will transform me. I give thanks for caterpillar medicine and walk on.
As we listen and learn from our nature friends, we receive their guidance and wisdom and in return our love for these wild ones deepens and naturally we want to give, care, protect and love our wild creature friends in return. We find ourselves with a wider circle of friends and a deeper capacity for love that we ever thought was possible.
In another guided practice, I am deeply burrowed into the earth. I am the size of a worm and the huge majestic Magpie towers over me. I feel intimidated as I look up into his fierce eyes and his splendour! I feel a layer of human arrogance slip off me. There is some kind of stripping back. Magpie tells me to be a “small human”. It feels like a deep reorienting of my place in the world, taking my place as human-creature, as creature. When I draw Magpie and his shadow, I realise that Magpie feels like a shadow, masculine part of myself. My soul journey has been showing me my fears, fear of: the dark, night, the unknown, my shadow, my power and fear of fear itself. Magpie seems to be showing me both my fears and myself beyond my fear, including my song, yet to be revealed.
Another encounter, in waking life, on the last day of a vision quest, I sit with Magpie, who looks inquisitively at me and then sings and sings. The carolling song of the Magpie is moving and beautiful. I feel mute but I sense that my own song will emerge from within me.
Nature Practice: Conversation with Wild Ones
The aim of this practice is to experience a way of having conversation - of listening and exchanging meaning - with a nature being: an animal, plant, element, a geographical feature like a rock, any aspect at all of the whole web of life. You are not mentally fabricating anything here. Instead you are slowing down, feeling, sensing, listening, intuiting, perceiving and letting experiences, images or metaphors arise in response to this moment in time as you connect with this nature friend. If the head, or strategic mind, overthinks, we let thoughts pass through and trust what emerges from our body, heart, deep imagination and awareness.
It is best to have an intention of wanting to know more about this more-than-human being, rather than be attached to receiving a message about yourself, though both may happen. By having a relationship with, or even a single conversation with a nature being, we can discover new aspects of our own wild heart and soul that may never be mirrored back by another human. We also learn more about our wild kin and about the whole web of life.
Read through the steps here and then give this practice a try in as wild a place as you can, preferably where you will not be interrupted by humans. This practice can be done as often as you like, for as little as one hour, or an extended version could be for a whole day or even a few days as a key practice in a vision quest.
Step 1: Wander and cross a Threshold
Begin to wander in a nature place. Go off-track and slow your pace down. Tune into your senses of seeing, listening, feeling, smelling. Feel your body’s response and let your body find the way. Find a threshold that you will walk through, to symbolise moving from the everyday, ordinary consciousness life into sacred, liminal consciousness. This threshold could be crossing a stream, between two trees, or over a line of rocks or anything that evokes a threshold.
Step 2: Wander until you are called by a wild being and observe
Wander until you are called by any life form. Do not choose from your strategic mind, simply wait to be called by anything at all from the web of life: a leaf, a rotting stump, a lizard…Sit with this being for some time and observe in detail what you see, hear, sense, feel about this nature friend. You can journal what you notice.
Step 3: Introduce yourself out loud and share the deep reasons of why you are here. Then share what you notice about your nature friend, with the nature friend. You can speak, sing, dance communicate in any way, sharing what features you notice in this nature friend and also what this evokes in you. Keep communicating, maybe up to half an hour or so. It can feel awkward initially, but speaking out loud is a powerful way to shift into a connected relationship with this other.
Step 4. Stop and listen. Let go of the thinking mind. Listen with your ears, eyes, skin, belly, heart, intuition and imagination. Is there anything that this nature friend wants to communicate with you? Let this message emerge from this co-created moment of you interacting with this nature friend, in this place and time. You are not searching or grasping, let the communicating emerge naturally - if it does and it may not at all, or it may not arise for hours or days. If a message arises, breathe it in and honour it.
Step 5. Keep the conversation going, moving through rounds of observing, speaking and listening. You might learn something about your nature friend, yourself or about the web of life. Journal your experience.
Step 6. To bring this to a close, give thanks to your nature being. You might offer a gift, a song, dance, poem, leaf or other gesture of thanks. Then walk back through the threshold and return.
Source: This practice is adapted from Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin, pages 167-177
References:
Practice of the Wild, Essays by Gary Snyder, North Point Press San Francisco 1990
Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin, New World Library, 2003.
Anahata Giri www.soulriver.com.au
June 2024