Category Archives: Deep Ecology

Slivers of Reality in a More-Than-Human World

14 Sunday Aug 2022

Posted by in Deep Ecology, Nature, Science

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The Secret Garden, by Deborah J. Brasket

We like to think that we humans, with our five marvelous senses, are in full receipt of what this world has to offer in all its glory. But in reality, like all creatures, we tap into but a tiny slice of its vast fullness. We each are trapped within our own perceptual bubble, or Umwelt, that part of our surroundings we can sense and experience.

When we watch a bird coursing through the air, we might try to imagine what it feels like to fly, to have a birds-eye view of the world as it does. And yet what a bird in flight actually experiences with its wraparound vision, seeing in all directions at once, surfing air currents that are as palpable to it as they are invisible to us, tapping into the Earth’s electromagnetic fields to guide its migrations, seeing colors we can’t see and hearing sounds we can’t detect—it’s full bubble of experience—is beyond anything we can experience, even if we could fly.

This is true for all the other creatures that inhabit our backyards and the world around us, as revealed in Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness,” he writes.

The thing is, while a mocking bird will never know what a bee sees, nor a cat know how a bat navigates, or a mosquito see a spider’s web even while caught within it, for all our sensory limitation, we humans are the only creature who can pierce to some degree beyond our own sense bubble. Through our curiosity and imagination and intellect we can create the tools and technologies to penetrate, at least to some degree, this more-than-human world. We can begin piecing together all these slivers of reality into a much fuller sense of the world in which we are embedded. The technologies we create are just crude tools for piercing that darkness. But they open up windows into the far reaches of reality where our minds and imagination can soar.

I wish I could experience the wraparound vision of a bird, or the 3-D hearing of a dolphin, or smell the smorgasbord of earthly delights wafting up the hill as my dog does. I can only imagine what it might be like to do so. And because of this—my imagination—I expand my sense of the world’s vast potential, and deepen my appreciation for all its marvels. It’s an amazing gift, to be able to tap into other creatures Umwelten. This is our greatest sensory skill, Yong tells us. It carries with it an enormous responsibility for cherishing and protecting all those life-forms that expand our understanding of reality. We must ensure they do not perish from this Earth through our own neglect or indifference or ignorance.

That is one of Yong’s main messages in his final chapter about noise and light pollution: “Save the Quiet, Preserve the Dark.” He reminds us that as “the species most responsible for destroying sensory realms, it falls on us to marshal all of our empathy and ingenuity to protect other creatures, and their unique ways of experiencing our shared world.”

The Poetics of Place: Redwood Speech,Watershed Prayers

02 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Creative Nonfiction, Deep Ecology, music, Nature, Writing

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“I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a sensual earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity. I want to hear words coming from my mouth and your mouth that are so beautiful that we wince with joy at their departure and arrival. I want to touch words that carry weight and substance, words that have shape and body, curve and tissue. I want to feel what we say as though the words were holy utterances surfacing from a pool where the gods drink. . . . .

My language must be redwood speech, watershed prayers, oak savannah, coupled in an erotic way with fog, heat, wind, rain and hills, sweetgrass and jackrabbits, wild iris and ocean current. My land is my language and only then can my longing for eloquence by granted. Until then I will fumble and fume and ache for a style of speaking that tells you who I am.”   – Francis Weller

One of my first blog posts in 2012 featured a speech by Francis Weller that captures so eloquently how the earth, our natural habitat, speaks to us and inspires us to speak. How it shapes our language and the way we express ourselves, not only in literature but in art and music and dance.

You can read his whole speech at his website Wisdom Bridge – Modern Pathways to our Indigenous Soul. The excerpt above, my quote of the week, hopefully will whet your appetite to do so.

As you read his speech, you might want to listen again to how nature inspires and shapes music, here in Max Richter’s reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one of my favorite pieces.

Night Howl, Deep in My Bones

07 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in Deep Ecology, Life At Sea, Poetry

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Wikipedia Commons A_Rose_Made_of_Galaxies_Highlights_Hubble's_21st_Anniversary_jpg

Last month around this time when the moon was full, our nights were filled with howling. Almost every night we could hear the mournful cries of coyotes in the fields behind our house, along with ecstatic barking, yipping, chortling–as if they were celebrating a kill, or worshipping the moon, or engaged in some wild orgy.  Or perhaps they were merely giving voice to the irresistible life force pumping through their blood and brains and hearts, a force of nature too wild and fierce to hold back.

The sound, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, echoed long in my mind afterwards, like ripples of water moving away to the edge of consciousness and reverberating back again. Like something heard long ago deep in my bones, from an evolutionary or primal past.

They say we humans carry in our genes the imprint of life-forms going back to when the first cells emerged on earth.  Deep in our blood, our bones, our very atoms, lays some faint memory of our ancient beginnings. Phylogenists call it our “vast evolutionary tree.”

If we go back even further, traces of that time when the morning stars first sang together may still be felt when we look out on the night sky. We are the stuff of stars, after all, so say astrophysicists.

Carl Jung envisioned our Collective Unconscious as a reservoir lying deep within our psyches containing our evolutionary memories.  While they lay below consciousness, they break through in dreams and myths and fairy tales, in primitive urges, the call of the wild, in our more-than-human yearnings.

Sometimes we feel this wildness rising within when witnessing powerful displays of nature: thunderstorms booming across the land, waterfalls careening over cliffs, huge waves crashing against rocks, hurricanes lashing at trees, lightening forking across a dark sky,  earthquakes heaving beneath our feet.   It frightens and excites—creating both the desire to escape and to embrace that primordial power.  One wild howl elicits another—the urge to howl back, to voice our own wild yearnings—to sing or dance, or paint or play, or grab words from the air and fling them onto paper. I heard that howl and answered back one night on anchor watch in Pago Pago.  A hurricane was blowing a few miles off Samoa and we were set to ride it out if it blew into the bay.

I stood at the bow of La Gitana, hanging onto the staysail as the deck lurched beneath my feet like a wild stallion while the surging waves rose and fell and the chain from the anchor rooted deep in the mud below grew slack or tight.

Overhead a torrent of clouds crashed against a full moon, sometimes swallowing it whole, then washing away streaming moonlight. All around me the night raged while the anchor held tight, and I held tight, the terror and exhilaration pumping through my blood and brain.  The wild urge to let go and be carried away by the night was fierce. Later I tried to capture what it felt like.   Here’s what I wrote:

NIGHT HOWL

(Anchor watch in Pago Pago, Samoa)

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I watch,

                            moonlight and clouds wind-tangled across the sky.

Suddenly I am loosened, lifted, flung far–

fingers raking stars, mouth howling moon, mind mooning time

my heart-beat

riddles the universe.

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I stand, astonished,

gaping into the maw of some vast mirror.

It’s close to capturing what I felt, but the last two lines trouble me. “Gaping” and “maw” keeps the visceral effect I’m looking for, capturing the sense of trance-like awe and terror.  But mirror moves it away into something more philosophical or intellectual.

I’m tempted to stop with the line “my heartbeat riddles the universe.” That captures the physicality of my wildly beating heart breaking out of my body to become the heart-beat of the universe.  And it also hints at the mystery of human heartbeat itself being a riddle, the riddle of the universe, that the evolution of the universe over eons led to the creation of a human being, whose heart—its essential being—is the ability to reflect back upon the universe, to take it all in.

Human consciousness is the mirror through which the universe sees and knows itself, and through which we see and know ourselves—the fullness of being, our primal past and present standing face to face.

That’s a lot to howl about.

[Reposted from July 2012]

Sensuous Sunday: Air, an Enigma

31 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Deep Ecology, Nature, Uncategorized, Universe

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Cc PalojonoHills of Vietnam flickr-5224736618-original“What a mystery is the air, what an enigma to these human senses! On the one hand , the air is the most pervasive presence I can name, enveloping, embracing, and caressing me both inside and out, moving in ripples along my skin, flowing between my fingers, swirling around my arms and thighs, rolling in eddies along the roof of my mouth, slipping ceaselessly through throat and esophagus to fill the lungs, to feed my blood, my heart, my self. I cannot act, cannot speak, cannot think a single thought without the participation of this fluid element. I am immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea.

Yet the air, on the other hand, is the most outrageous absence known to this body. For it is utterly invisible. . . .

[T]his unseen enigma is the very mystery that enables life to live. . . . What the plants are quietly breathing out, we animals are breathing in; what we breathe out, the plants are breathing in. The air, we might say, is the soul of the visible landscape, the secret realm from whence all beings draw their nourishment. As the very mystery of the living present, it is that most intimate absence from whence the present presences, and this a key to the forgotten presence of the earth.”

From The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram

Making Music Wherever We Go – The Rhymes and Rhythms that Move Us

03 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by in Creative Nonfiction, Culture, Deep Ecology, Family, Human Consciousness, Writing

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4.2.7Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a fine horse.
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall make music wherever she goes

When I recite these lines from Mother Goose, especially the last two, the pleasure centers of my brain light up. I relish the rhyme and rhythm and repetition. I feel them in my body. I delight in the silliness, the leaps of logic, and the rich imagery.

I sense something deep at play here. Something serious. Something I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around for a long time now.

I grew up on nursery rhymes and fairy tales, as many children do. I read them to my own as well. My mother bought a whole set of books, twelve in all, meant to carry a child from the nursery into middle school. They were called My Book House and edited by Olive Beaupre Miller. I have them still, full of poems and stories, myths and legends, and fairy tales from all over the world.

The rhythms and rhymes and images of those books seeped into my growing bones and imagination and made me who I am today. I am sure of it. And the older I grow and the wider I read, the more I realize how these nursery rhymes speak to us on a deeper level than we might suspect.

Babies’ brains crave repetition, rhythm, and rhyme. They lap it up the way cats do rich cream, according to child psychologists. Reading nursery rhymes to infants facilitates language acquisition and creates early readers and lovers of words.

Even as adults, when engaged in rhythmical activity, whole portions of our brains light up in anticipation and pleasure, so musicologists will tell you.

We’ve long known how rhyme, rhythm and repetition are used by oral traditions as mnemonic devises to store and retrieve information. Somehow they tap into the deep roots of our memories, even as they light up the pleasure centers of our minds.

I can’t help wondering if it’s all linked somehow: rhyme, rhythm, pleasure, memory. Something deep and primal is going on.

No doubt some of the pleasure infants take in listening to these nursery rhymes comes from associating these sounds with similar sensations while being held in their mother’s arms: The rhythm of her rocking body, the sound of her heartbeat, the movement of her breath flowing through her. others they hear being held in their mother’s lap, or rocked in their father’s arms. I wonder if they hear in these rhythms and rhymes their own heartbeats and the feel of their breath moving through their bodies. Perhaps they recall the other pleasant and soothing sounds they hear all around them, day by day: their parent’s footsteps going up and down the stairs, the tap of raindrops on rooftops, and creaks of trees in wind storms, the chatter of squirrels and trills of songbirds when they wake in the morning?

It could be that listening to nursery rhymes recalls even the deeper memories. The pleasure of being in their mother’s womb, perhaps. Feeling the sway of her body as they walk together. Hearing the cadence of voices they recognize and take comfort in, even when they make no sense.

Perhaps the rhythms and rhymes and rich imagery first heard in the nursery tap into some ancestral memory still stored within the cells of our bodies, recalling the dreaming earth and seas from which life evolved. Perhaps we feel ourselves once again drifting in those ancient tides, swaying among the sea fans. We feel within ourselves the circling of the sun, the swirling of the galaxies, and hear the morning stars singing together.

Some linguists and philosophers say that language, rather than being some purely abstract phenomena, has its roots in the sensuous world around us.

“Ultimately, then, it is . . . the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world: if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths. . . . .It is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world itself, speak within us.” (David Abram from The Spell of the Sensuous)

“Language,” writes the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, “is the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forests.”

This I know: The use of rhyme and rhythm in language, the repetition of alliteration, speaks to our deeper selves. In a way, we were made to make music, and to hear it, wherever we go. We carry the rhythms and rhymes of the universe in our swaying bodies and singing voices, in the memories and dreams that we weave and weave us, in our poetry and art and nursery rhymes. And in the language we spill across our pages like the patterns moonlight makes tracing tree leaves across grassy meadows.

POSTSCRIPT – I think my love of art began when browsing through the gorgeous illustrations of nursery rhymes and fairy tales found in My Book House. I created a Pinterest page to bookmark some of my favorites. You can view it HERE. It’s a work in progress

“A Strange and Beautiful” Entanglement

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Creative Nonfiction, Culture, Deep Ecology, Human Consciousness, Nature, Recommended Authors, Spirituality

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Big Sur and Mothers Day picnic 076Recently, when most needed, I came across the essay “A Beautiful and Strange Otherness” by Wisdom Bridge founder, Francis Weller.

I love how he opens his essay:

“When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and in some strange alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no “out there;” we share one continuous presence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing.”

In the second part of his essay he lists four ways we can reconnect with this “continuous presence.”

  • An Apprenticeship with Slowness
  • Uncentering the Human
  • Drinking the Tears of the World
  • Entering the Storehouse of Myth

Each is beautifully articulated, and I urge you to read his whole essay.  But the third resonated most with me that day, and I’ve extracted it here.

Drinking the Tears of the World. How can we fail to love this achingly beautiful world when we are so completely jumbled together with it all? It is our myopia, our species-centric blindness that cuts us off from the actual world. To love this world, however, is to also know sorrow. Our grief is intimately connected to how far we allow our love to reach into the world. Think of those indigenous tribes willing to fight to the death to protect their homelands from being destroyed by mining or oil companies. They know their lives are inseparable from the animals, plants, rivers, spirits and ancestors of their lands. Our love was also meant to spill out into the world, into the forests, the rivers and cloudbanks. It was not meant to congeal in a single person or even a single species. As Thomas Berry said, “We have become a singular species talking only to itself.” When this happens—when the arc between our bodies and the great body of the earth breaks—we fall into an attachment disorder of epic proportions and everything suffers. Grief work is the third way we restore the bond with the world we inhabit.

The good news is we are supremely crafted to feel kinship with this breathing world. We are giant receptor sites for taking in the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the caress of a lover, the scent of rain. Paul Shepard said we are more like a pond surface than a closed system: We are permeable, exchanging the vibrancy of wind, pollen, color and fragrance. Life moves into us and through us like a breeze, affecting us and shaping us into a part of the terrain. We are inseparable from all that surrounds us. To mend the attachment disorder, we simply have to step out of our isolated room of self and into the wider embrace that awaits each of us. When we do, something magical happens. As we build our capacity for transparency and allow the world to enter us, our feelings of love blossom and an erotic leap occurs, bringing everything close to our heart.

IMG_2758One of the reasons this essay resonated with me is because this idea of a “larger Self” is a theme that has been developing in my writing and my personal narrative, something I’ve been playing with for ages.

I see it everywhere now as I review my life and examine my writing. You can find it here on this blog as recently as “Us, Ancient” and “Infusing I and Other” and “La Gitana, Our Larger Self” and in so much of my meditative poetry.  Even in my revamped writing website traces of this thought can be found.

I think I return to it again and again because it reminds me to move beyond a personal, limited sense of self and experience myself in a larger, more expansive way. A way that rings more true to me.

It is certainly not a new idea, this sense of connecting with nature, with others, of an overriding, embracing Oneness. But I’m experiencing it in a new, more personal, more immediate way.   It’s become a lens through which I see my personal and public history writ large.

I’ll be writing about this more in future posts.

The Joy of Aging

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in Creative Nonfiction, Deep Ecology, Human Consciousness, Science, Short Story, Spirituality, Universe

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Das_Stufenalter_der_Frau_c1900 clearer picOliver Sacks wrote a piece for the New York Times last month called “The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding!)”. It ended with this:

“My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”

While I am still a long ways from 80, I’m beginning to feel this way more and more too. If this is aging, I hope it never ends!

I just finished a short story on this subject–my first flash fiction, 300 words! It’s called “Us, Ancient.” I can’t share much here because I’m sending it out to some journals and they frown on that sort of thing. But excerpts, I understand, are fine.

So here’s the first and last lines. See if you can guess what comes in the middle.

Beginning

Isle du Pins cropped“You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.”

Ending

“Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe . . . That’s how I see us.”

I’m not sure what it is about “the universe” I find so inspiring. I’m not alone. Humans have gazed at the stars in awe and wonder since the beginning of time. Perhaps, like me, they feel some strange kinship. They say we’re made of star-dust, after all.

I’ve always felt that’s why I have such an affinity for the sea. Seventy percent of our bodies are water. And that’s where life on earth all began, in the sea. Each human as well begins its life in the womb surrounded by a type of sea water. Amniotic fluid is salty.

They say that the molecules, cells, and even DNA of our bodies have a type of memory. Might that memory carry traces of its beginning at the dawn of time? I like to think so. I’m not sure how else to explain the feeling of deep empathy with the ocean and the night sky–as if I know them well, as if we are old friends, as if once I was rocked to sleep in their arms. As if I’m not done with them yet, and we are only partly parted. Something of me remains in them still.

This is what aging does, I guess. Allows us to slip the reins of reason and rationality into poetic license. I write elsewhere:

“There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore. That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering, maybe, around the body. But more outside than in.”

115766587_75aefa9480 photo by Naotakum Creative CommonsI feel that way more and more, as if this body that has contained me all these years is slowly evaporating, and I’m becoming freer to be what I always was but never quite realized. A poet called it “mostly Love, now.” Mostly joy works too.

Personification – Infusing “I” in “Other”

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by in Creative Nonfiction, Deep Ecology, Human Consciousness, Nature, Science, Writing

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MoonlightThe personification of nature and inanimate objects is age-old, something we humans have done as far back as we remember.

It may be an elemental part of who we are, to see something of ourselves in the world around us. To infuse the other with parts of ourselves.  Chairs have arms and legs, clocks have faces and hands.  Leaves whisper, kites dance, winds caress, storms rage and die.

We think of personification and other rhetorical devices as tools, something we use to describe the world in terms our reader can understand or empathize with.  But maybe it’s more instinctual than that.  Maybe it’s a type of knowing. Knowing the other as ourselves.  Knowing there’s no true separation between ourselves and the world around us.

man in a dark forestPerhaps it’s an uncanny acknowledgement of our interconnection and interdependence.  A way of knowing the world as a larger body, or embodiment, of ourselves.

And perhaps by opening that door, we allow the other inside us, where it too finds a larger embodiment of itself, dwelling in our minds, our words, our stories.

“Language is the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forests,” writes phenomenological philosopher Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible.

David Abram in his Spell of the Sensuous expands upon this idea:

“We regularly talk of howling winds, and of chattering brooks.  Yet these are more than mere metaphors.  Our own languages are continually nourished by these other voices—by the roar of waterfalls and the  thrumming of crickets,  It is not by chance that, when hiking in the mountains, the English terms  spontaneously used  to describe the surging  waters of the nearby river are words like “rush,” “splash,” “ gush,” “wash.”  For the sound that unites all these words is that which the water itself chants as it flows between the banks.  If language is not a purely mental phenomenon but a sensuous, bodily activity born of carnal reciprocity and participation, then our discourse has surely been influenced by many gestures, sounds, and rhythms besides those of our single species.  Indeed, if human language arises from the perceptual interplay between the body and the world, then this language ‘belongs’ to the animate landscape as much as it ‘belongs’ to us.”

InfinityThe more I write, the more I see how language not only shapes the worlds we inhabit, but how that “perpetual interplay between body and the world,” between I and Other, shapes us, our language, and how we know each other.

This all may sound rather mystical, but theoretical science makes similar claims.  Noted physicist Werner Heisenberg once wrote: “What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”  His colleague Niels Bohr echoed that observation:  “It is wrong to think the task of physics is to find out how nature is.  Physics concerns only what we can say about nature.”

HST_-_Hubble_Directly_Observes_Planet_Orbiting_Fomalhaut_(pd)The importance of language in shaping not only what we know about the world but what we can know about the world is the subject of Bruce Gregory’s Inventing Reality, Physics as Language.  At the end of his book in which he writes about the work of Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, and other modern physicists, he concludes:

“Physics shows that while the world shapes us, the language we use shapes the world.  We might even say the language we are shapes the world, for language undoubtedly defines us more profoundly than we can begins to imagine.”

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Endless Emerging Forms – Photos of Fog and Mist

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by in Art, Deep Ecology, Nature, Oak Trees, Universe

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Cc Palojono Hills of Vietnam flickr-5224736618-originalI’ve long been drawn to photos of fog and mist.  Part of it is the feel for the ephemeral and mysterious, things half formed, half hidden.  Emerging from a soft nebulous background but not fully formed.

Things caught in a state of transition, in the midst of becoming what is or could be.  Or slowly dissolving back into mere mist or shadow, what was or could have been.

Cc photo by Larry 1732 flickr-6991649439-originalSome of my fascination has to do with the contrast between the softness and starkness of the images, how things are reduced to their elemental forms the way black and white photos will do.

All but the starkest, darkest trunks and branches revealed while the fog swallows the rest.  All that’s left is the essential, the finely sculpted, restrained and elegant.

Cc photo by Jean-Michel Baud Birch-FogBare branches naked and exposed, live wires lifted in soft white hands

I think photos of mist and fog speak to me because they ring true.  They reveal in stark and dreamy notes how ephemeral it all is, this life we live, the forms and forces of nature. All in flux, in constant motion, emerging and dissolving over and over, without end.

The first law of thermodynamics, so they say, states how energy changes from one form to another, but never disappears.

Photo DBrasketThe new fourth law proposed by some scientists is still uncertain, but moving toward the emergent, a law of motion where things are constantly pushed to the edge of chaos and the brink of “perpetual novelty,” an immense field of endless potentiality.

I see that too in these photos.

At noon in full summer, in the bright sunshine, with all our leaves shimmering, richly detailed, brimming lushly, dripping with  color, we hold life firmly in hand, our hearts aching with joy, with the pure bliss of being, and we think we will last forever.

Photo DBrasketBut when the day is in transition, at dawn or dusk, emerging from darkness or drifting toward it, when mist or fog hides all but the faint essential lines of life, we see a starker and at the same time softer reality.  But just as beautiful, and just as enduring.

For what could be more constant and eternal than the fleeting?

Cc photo by Olga Oslina flickr-5718973451-original

Or that which emerges, fragile and half-formed, from the fertile wombs of earth and stars, seas and seeds, dreams and desires and the lusts of ages that brought us all to the brink of being.

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Birthing and Rebirthing

09 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in Art, Deep Ecology, Nature, Universe

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My granddaughter was born a few days ago and my heart fell apart.

There’s something so  breathtakingly tender, and heartbreakingly sweet, in the newly born.

We’re astounded again and again by the miracle of life, the birthing of a brand new being, although its occurrence  is older than eons, as common as pollen dust carried on butterfly wings, more numerous than grains of sand washed by countless waves, more prolific than the bursting of billions of stars.

Even so, each tiny finger, each soft sigh, each rose petal ear, seems a miracle that melts us.

How did she, do we, come to be? Is there ever an end to our becoming? Was there a beginning?

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” writes Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality. “Not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”

And this is but an echo of Shakespeare’s thought, in saying that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on: and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

When the morning stars first sang together, did we sing with them, as scripture implies?

Is our “little life” the whole round of creation, beginning with the birth of the cosmos, as so beautifully imagined in the film The Tree of Life?

Do bursting stars and the splitting of a single human egg, each set into motion a whole panorama of evolving life?

All I know is that the whole world was changed with the birth of this child.  A whole new universe of possibilities was opened up.

Her birth forged bonds and relationships that will forever be a part of our becoming.

The birthing of a child is the rebirthing of man as a father, woman as mother, parents as papa and nana. Another child becomes brother or sister, siblings become aunties and uncles.  A whole new set of relationships and shared histories evolves.

No one is quite the same as before.  Nothing will ever be again as it was.  The whole universe is slightly skewed to make room for this one child and infinite number of changing possibilities that occurs with her birth.

They say the stirring of a butterfly wing can set into motion a string of events that lead to the creation of a hurricane of the other side of the planet.  Surely the birth of a child must have an ever more stirring effect on the remaking of the world.

We live in a universe of relationships in which everything is connected to and influenced by its surroundings. We are all tumbling together in the wash of time and space, breaking against and polishing each other.  Shedding what we were in becoming what we will be.

What if all we are is a constantly becoming with no end in sight, with endless sights and sounds and relationships and experiences to sculpt and renew us? Birthing and rebirthing each other, over and over, ad infinitum, en potentia.

It’s not hard to imagine.  After all, I remember not at all my time in my mother’s womb.  Huge potions of my childhood self are largely forgotten, sloughed off as I became something new.  The woman I was as a young lover, a new mother, I am no more.

The strands of my becoming are still unfolding, surprising me day by day, even as this newborn child breaks my heart and takes my breath away.

We hold each other in our gaze and see faraway in each other’s eyes our own evolving selves.

A brand new thing has burst upon the world in the birthing of my granddaughter, and nothing will be the same again.

But I cannot help believe that in some deep and unfathomable way she is not new at all. She has lain in wait in the womb of the universe, tucked away in the folds of time and space with the singing stars, quietly biding her time as the world evolved around her leading to the very moment when she emerged into our midst and recreated us anew, her very presence here a rebirthing of us all.