we are not the sole bearers of consciousness
Headwaters
September 21, 2018
I have been thinking about the way we learn and talk about our shared, sustenance-providing, planet-place. I made the above photo-poem thinking about the camera and the image--what its place is in cocreating our present moment and why I am drawn to using it.
Thinking about how we receive and share our ideas, I want to share some thoughts on my barefoot walking practice with you. I know this process is transformative and for me has been healing, but I have yet to figure out how to directly share it with others in my humanimal community while also leaving room for each individual's personal exploration and expression. The following writing does not hope to hold or illustrate these experiences, but maybe it can be a direction or sign-post, pointing to the place where the body can go and no words can follow.
At the headwaters of the Rio Grande, I spent most of my time walking barefoot in the mountainsides cupping the river valley. This practice started as a way of grounding. I was reticent about it at first. I learned about it from my brother who is very open-minded--to the point of believing conspiracy theories that, to me, are escapist mental practices. Simultaneously, he is the one who introduced me to Pema Chödrön's writing, which is now foundational in my daily practices.
Once I began to feel the many, many textures and temperatures touching my feet, I felt a connection to and understanding of the places I walked more deeply than ever before. With immediacy, I could feel where the ground was moist and (for)giving, where the ground was dry and coarse (though no trail is as consistently hard and unforgiving as the concreted grids we fill our densely human places with), and where the ground invited or discouraged my steps.
I'm still not sure how to communicate the wholeness of these sensuous experiences (besides suggesting that you expose your feet and feel for yourself), but there is a profound exchange between my body and the multiform earth body/bodies. Like most open exchanges, vulnerability and risk are required to participate--a threshold must be crossed. My feet have been cut, scratched, bruised, and penetrated, and it hurt, sometimes for days after. But this pain and risk is endlessly worth it. To be able to feel the ever-shifting presence surrounding and permeating me--the humidity changing as I enter an underground water valley, the cool squish of mud in my toes, the warmth of sunbaked humus, the give of a moss patch, and to watch that same moss expand and erase my footstep--creates a sense of embeddedness with/in this seemingly endlessly expansive earth body, a feeling that I belong here.
"We can feel the trees and the rocks underfoot, because we are
not so unlike them, because we have our own forking limbs and
our own mineral composition, because...we are not pure mind-
stuff, but are tangible bodies of thickness and weight" (Abram, 46)
These feelings simultaneously relieve the alienation I inherited from my culture with its roots in hierarchical Judeo-Christianity, divisive Cartesian ideology, and dissociative Western science practices, and the anxiety created by the ideology that we humans are the only ones with the agency and thus the only ones responsible for healing our poisoned ecosystems (though we, as a culture, are responsible for the damage). Being taught, in church, that I am an implant on this planet--that I was created elsewhere and deposited here--and learning in school that the only way to understand this illusory physical world is by retaining this sense of objective outsiderness (the fact that we call these diversely co-created space that are beyond-human outside is telling), while at the same time feeling the wisdom of trees, rocks, seeds, cycles, giving, and grounding cemented this divide, assured the truth of my dissociative alienation.
When my culture tells me that to believe my intuitions and quiet sensations is to fall for folly--a weakness that must be tempered, conquered, and negated through strength of will, a courage to face the hard facts, and a coldness that enables progress--their truth is affirmed. I am divided. I do feel alienated, displaced, and confused, thus giving up my own will to that of the authorities of religion and academia.
To trust yourself is a risk--a risk that should be taken with criticality, gentle openness, and patience--that must be taken to unite our ancient bonds (and untie our modern bonds) that can heal our lonelinesses, anxieties, depressions, and destructively desperate habits of grasping for constant comfort, control, and numbing security.
I have been reading David Abram's Becoming Animal and his poetic, paragraph long points have filled my own thought-patterning this last month. So, now I share it with you, dear reader, in my writing and this quote from David:
"As we breathe out, letting mind flow back into the field that
surrounds us, we feel a new looseness and freedom. The other
animals, the plants, the cliffs, and the tides are now participant in
the unfolding of events, and so it no longer falls upon us, alone,
to make things happen as we choose. Since we are not the sole
bearers of consciousness, we are no longer on top of things, with
the crippling responsibility that that entails. We're now
accomplices in a vast and steadily unfolding mystery" (131).
Bibliography
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Vintage Books: NY, NY, 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment