An excerpt from my PhD A Secret History of Listening
There is no way to engage in this kind of perception as a way of life, especially if you go deep with it, if you do not do specific work with the various consciousness modules that make up the self. It is crucial to understand that the unconscious parts of the self are a great deal more powerful than the conscious mind. They respond to caring, to respect, and to negotiation. They never respond well to force. (Buhner, 2014, p.480)
Stephen Buhner’s Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth tells it like it is for me, whether I like it or not, whether I know it or not. I’ve been struggling to write about his work for many months now. Something keeps me from it. I try to force it. I fall apart. Perhaps it’s time to listen better to what he tells.
The work that I have described in this book has called for more courage than I ever thought it possible to have, more interior work than I ever thought it possible to do. What I did not know when I began it was just how hard it would be, how difficult to feel all the things that would touch me, how hard to remain balanced in the face of them, and how much grieving would be necessary. (2014, p.467)
It’s interesting. Now that I’ve admitted my difficulty, the anxiety has fallen away. My body is much more comfortable, my heart is calm. I’m recovering patience, now, and only now, that I’m willing to admit I’m a recovering patient. I’ve been heartsore. To go from feeling deep, deep intimacy with the world to forgetting, or to try to describe it from the outside, on some level this cuts. To find that intimacy, then look around at a human-shaped world severed from this knowing, this hurts. To allow myself this empathy and brokenness and confusion is a kindness to the child within, the “consciousness module” that Buhner says has greatest access to depth perception. And I can recover from my heartsoreness when I take time to listen to what my body seeks to say. My body says: hold close the broken child. And, when I’m able to, open myself to the suffering of others: honour the damaged children everywhere. Malidoma Some, stolen from his village in Burkina Faso at age four by Christian missionaries, suffered immense abuse at the hands of his captors. In his late teens he escaped, seeking to return to traditional African ways. At a far older age than custom dictates, he sought to undergo initiation. This is what he overheard the elders saying of him:
Whatever he learned in the school of the white man must be hurting his ability to push through the veil. Something they did to him is telling him not to see this tree. (Some, 1994, p.209)
Human Nature is Nature
…part of poetry’s true perception is found only in relinquishing more and more of the self to more and more of the world. I do not know any prescription for doing this. (Hirschfield, 1997, p.152)
Stephen Buhner’s work is key to my research because of his study of specific and effective prescriptions for ‘relinquishing more and more of the self to more and more of the world.’ These techniques are based on the practice and cultivation of depth perception, but it is what he does in conjunction with this that has made such an impact on me. My world turned upside down when I came to understand, under his tutelage, that ‘human nature is interesting not because it is human, but because it is nature’ (Bly, 1980, p.281). Buhner introduced me to Goethean science, explained much of my experience to me, and respectfully supports and validates many indigenous ways of knowing. He writes on the history of and how to widen sense perception and explains cultural strictures against doing so. I’m very much at the beginning of this learning journey, but I’m committed to a thorough investigation of the method. Which is important, it seems:
Goethe stresses the importance of training and education. … He also reports that as a person’s abilities to see outwardly improve, so do his or her inner recognitions and perceptions become more sensitive… As one learns to see more clearly, he or she also learns to see more deeply. One becomes more ‘at home’ with the phenomenon, understanding it with greater empathy, concern and respect. (Seamon, 1998)
Buhner compiles scientific research that explicates extraordinary similarities between human and plant physiologies that suggest far stronger kinship and likeness than our culture educates us to believe. As a practicing herbalist, he has many decades of practical experience with plants as teachers; he has experienced first-hand the intelligence and awareness of non-human nature. And while he cites numerous studies and research articles to undergird his understanding, he is not prepared to surrender the depth and breadth of his experience to the limited measurement capacities and reductionist stories of current (mainstream) science.
There is…a network of patterns that runs through everything. Any of us can perceive them if we shift our perceptual orientation. Once perceived, we can train ourselves to look for them…and then let them take us deeper into the depths of the world… The physical forms that we see every day, in many respects, are only the temporal shadows cast by those patterns, patterns that run in their myriad billions through the ecosystems of the planet. (2014, p.152)
I trust how he trusts his feeling self, which meant stepping away from formal schooling as a fifteen year old and making his own way, outside the system, ever since. I identify with Buhner as an angry teenager, sickened by injustice, because I was one myself, and the best of me has been made by my refusal to compromise. I experience myself as someone for whom anger, rebellion, despair have eventually led to empowerment through following my instincts and honouring my emotions.
Buhner knows, from experience, that earth systems are the larger part of who, or what, we actually are. He has had a long time to get used to this concept, so alien to the modern sensibility. I’ve been lurking by the doorway, while he roams freely through the territory. He describes himself as a barbarian, and here he is, attacking current orthodoxies:
You must not extend awareness further than your culture wants it to go…. For if we should recapture the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, go below the surface of sensory inputs to what is held inside them, touch again the ‘metaphysical background’ that expresses them, we would begin to experience, once more, the world as it really is: alive, aware, interactive, communicative, filled with soul, and very, very intelligent — and we, only one tiny part of that vast scenario. And that would endanger the foundations upon which Western culture …is based. (2014, p.19)
An awareness is slowly growing as I write: that perhaps part of my love for Buhner’s work is a sense of relief at his clarity and mastery, his no-bullshit authoritative voice. This research has been so slippery and confusing: sometimes I just want someone to tell me what the hell is going on! He is the elder I always hoped for, reassuring and challenging, empowered and worthy. He’s set me on the path of something worthwhile to grow into. Like this:
Art — real art — connects artists, and their art, and those who experience their art, to the metaphysical background of the world, to the imaginal world that lies deep within the physical. That is, in part, its ecological function. … Sometimes, merely reading about it can again bring the experience alive once more. Robert Bly, speaking of Thoreau, talks about that this way… ‘As we read Thoreau’s work, especially his prose, we slowly become aware of a light in and around the squirrel, the ant, the woodchuck, the hawk, that belongs to them and not to the eyes observing or the brain producing words.’ Throughout the years, I have met many people who have had moments of perceiving the light in and around the squirrel. …that is what all my years of teaching have been about. Without exception, all of them have reported how difficult it has been to keep that perceptual experience alive. (2014, pp.19-20)
To create art that connects myself and hopefully others to the imaginal world is my aim, an aim that, when I’m not engaged in that perceptual experience, which is most of the time, I forget. I’m not in that mode right now, I’m in an uncomfortable in-between state where I’ve come back to the page after a break and I remember there is this state that has an intelligence that I can’t, in this moment, access.
The flowers in the vase on my desk have just caught my attention. I remember that this means things might get interesting. I’ll describe what I see and see what happens. It’s a long twig I pruned from the plum tree maybe six weeks past. I’d left the pile of prunings under the plum, which a week ago burst into blossom. And so did the prunings. Six weeks cut, yet they flowered together with the tree. Such life in the severed piece! I put it in the vase a few days ago, and yesterday the leaves began to emerge. Lush green leaves, almost a centimetre larger than they were this morning.
Cut from the tree. Cut from its life source yet awakening now that it’s spring and sprouting the life stored within the stick.
So, let’s see if I can tell what I now know, having entered the pattern with the help of the life before me. I can feel gratitude, and a delicate sense of intimacy. And I know that the details of the story of the life of this branch have relationship to me. They are part of me somehow, they are telling me something about my own, what I thought was human, nature. I notice I’m smiling, and my throat and heart are leaning in toward the spray of fading white blossom and fresh leaves, this flesh of tree. Flesh to flesh, listening. Severed, still growing. The will to flourish is enormous, regardless of the cut. We, together, are in life, and life does what it does. Flesh obeys.
You have it in you Maya. Plant yourself. Be still. Listen. Listen more often. Be attentive to the signals of your heart, your heart which is learning and which is attuning you. This branch has not one whiff of self-pity! It trusts, it emerges into what is given. This is the model of natural life. The world is a sweet and tender and patterned thing, all of us together. And soon the energy of this stick will come to an end and I’ll throw it on the compost pile and its body will become other, become others. The knowing is in the thing, all things, all interconnected things that are the one great thing. Our knowing could be identical, but my cut, my cut, is deeper.
That a vase of prunings could deliver me from severance for a time is appropriate to the path of paradox. Generous, wise, and innately poetic. Unexpectedly funny. And something else. I’m thinking of how Rilke said it in his poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing:
‘…Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.’
This is the nature of the way, the way of nature. No light around the blossom, although I have seen the light, sometimes. Practice, says Buhner. To learn how to communicate with the metaphysical background, you must habituate yourself to its ways.