Writing with the Earth, with World, with Country, with Body, with Breath, (capitalised here because we experience them as animate forces, as ‘persons’ if you will) can be done in a number of ways. I introduce it in co-becoming courses through a meditative state, because this is a sure way to depth, but we can do it ourselves at any time simply through attuning and listening, through taking in exactly what is happening. In the process-oriented psychology I studied this was called the world channel. Sometimes we may have a specific question, other times we may be completely empty – either way is fruitful.
I thought it might be useful to break down the process of the little piece I wrote for the solstice:
I wanted to give a solstice greetings to friends far and near, but what to say in these strange times?
I asked the mountain, dear Donna Buang, what do I say? She said, as she always does, listen. Notice, exactly, what’s happening.
It’s twelve o’clock on the shortest day and the currawongs are carolling. Great flocks of the large black birds gather, they whistle and whoop in the bare trees, and their gold eyes gleam like the low, vivid sun. This, their mass, a song like ladders of longing lifting high in the blue, it plumps me with yearning, always the currawongs sing together at this time of year.
After this long night, sun will return. This beautiful, terrible world, always changing. Gather together, sing this moment. Whistle and whoop, circle around the fire. Be loyal to the aliveness, eyes gleaming, shining, loving, bright within the darkness.
I wanted to share, to reach out at a special time in the year. But how to say something when so much in the world feels troubled, how to share without being shallow or insipid, without being ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ when really, we’re in such uncharted waters, and no-one knows where we’re going. But we all know there are many big feelings.
The way I know I need to do it is to listen. Sometimes, like this time, I needed the mountain to remind me of this. Then I write ‘exactly what is happening.’ And as I do, the images, always far more complex than abstract human thought, coalesce, and reveal an agency, within the images themselves, that I am in relation with. Remember, evolutionarily we were monkeys closely watching this world for millions of years before language emerged. Language emerged out of the field of relationships that the images had already revealed to us. The images came first, they grew our soul, they taught us to think, to think aesthetically, metaphorically and relationally. So when we return to things in themselves, and loyally record their ancient and intelligent ways, we discover we can think with them, we get involved in their complexity, beauty and irreducibility. We learn from them. We become like them – we co-become.
And why is it that there is so much meaning to be found in ‘exactly what I happening’? Mostly I don’t know, which is as it should be. But if I sit with this question, I would say that attending like this, listening accompanied by a big question, is a sure-fire synchronicity generator. Synchronicity – linked things happening by chance. I might say that, despite our culturally conditioned perception, we are nothing less than everything, and therefore everything is involved with this question. So let’s open the door for their contribution. At the deepest level, we are the universe, asking this question of itself. If we understand that we are part of the cosmos’s fascination with meaning, we may experience meaning to be most rich when it matches the qualities of life: complex, patterned, beautiful, transformational.
In this particular case, looking out of my sunny window seat on the shortest day, the sun low above the mountains, the bare trees, the flock of currawongs carolling in what seemed to me like celebration (for those who don’t know their call, it’s weird and wild, musical, compelling). This, combined with my memories of countless encounters with those vivid eyes, the image of brightness within the blackness became recursive: the eye, the fire circle, the sun. The behaviours of birds and humans become linked, both uplifting experience of practicing culture together, both beautiful. And the tilted earth held by and spinning around sun, this relationship, also culture, also love.
For me, this was succour, this was instruction. Be like the birds. Be beautiful. But no, not like this – to say it bluntly destroys the complexity of the relations and the patterns – it makes it far more straightforward than it truly is. Which is why the poetic can communicate in such complex ways, and why to reduce a poem to what we think we know loses much of the point. The point is to stay with the images – to let them work on us, like dreams, like the great questions of soul.
This is part of why we go so deep in workshops together – we create long praise songs, given more-than-human instructions – they absorb us into their knowing, we give ourselves over to deep listening long enough that we are changed. I’m profoundly grateful for being able to share in this experience, and how over time participants seem to b giving themselves deeper and deeper to the process, this is generating great strength field. Together, we become another way of knowing.