Everything lives. Thunder lives, and rain lives, and sunshine lives. But not in the personal sense, writes D.H. Lawrence in Mornings in Mexico (in the chapter entitled The Hopi Snake Dance).
And
yet, some indigenous tribes, the Maori of Aotearoa (New Zealand) for
instance, have accorded mountains and rivers personal status. This is
not some kind of perverted anthropo-morphosising on the part of deluded humans but an understanding of
these entities as being alive, as accommodating the same vital impulses
as any living creature. Because we may not understand them, and their
place in the wider context of Earth, we are often reluctant to see them
like ourselves. This is further compounded by a general lack of
understanding of our own selves at an essential and fundamental level.
Lawrence continues:
How is man to get himself into relation with the vast living convulsions of rain and thunder and sun, which are conscious and alive and potent, but like vastest of beasts, inscrutable and incomprehensible. How is man to get himself into relation with these, the vastest of cosmic beasts?
Man
no longer knows how to respond to Nature (his own included) because he
has been sidelined and blindsided by a system of being that boxes him
up, and which does not accord aliveness, but which accords 'death' in
the simple accumulation of the non-essential. Death, one could argue,
did not exist before man's manipulating hands began to upset and pervert
the natural order. Death is a construct devised by men to explain their
loss of aliveness, to explain their separation from their own
imperishable selves. There is no death, really, something of which I'm
sure mountains and rivers are aware, only a revolutional circumsession
in which all goes round and round.
Man's 'personality'
has been fashioned not by Nature, but by a perverted state of affairs
that seeks to take advantage of Nature. Man no longer sleeps beneath the
stars but in the dark. He breathes badly, and moves even less fluently.
He is, by all estimations, his own worst enemy, and yet to tell him that, this little
self-made god, would be to incur the wrath of a devil.
The cosmos is a great furnace, a dragon's den, where the heroes and demi-gods, men, forge themselves into being. It is a vast and violent matrix, where souls form like diamonds in earth, under extreme pressure.
All
our acts, if not for the forging of the human, are pointless. As many
wise creatures have already made out, the end result of culture is the
recognition of a circum-cess (as opposed to a pro-cess) that is deeply
alive and deeply interconnected. That is frugal and fruitful, that
flourishes and blossoms. After all....
Man is as a flower, rain can kill him or succour him, heat can flick him with a bright tail, and destroy him: or, on the other hand, it can softly call him into existence, out of the egg of chaos.
We
are all flowers, emerging from the plant and the clan (these two words
are actually the same word with the Celts changing the 'p' to a 'c' and
doing away with the end 't'), and blossoming because of Earth. Nowadays,
one's flow- and flower-hood has been severely compromised if not
entirely negated by a broken system of earth-management. The flower has
wilted in most cases, in the most severe taking the plant with it. And
unless we recognize, once again, life and feeling in all things, unless
we can relate to streams and rivers and woods in this deeply fundamental
and personal (per sona, sounding through, 'speaking with us')
sense (and not just in a superficial one), we will forever be condemned
to the man-fashioned constructs of 'death' and 'loneliness', and a
one-way ticket to hell.
The answer is simple. Move by yourself. Embody space. Think critically.
And be (with) nature.
God grows weary of great kingdoms, but never tires of little flowers. Rabindranath Tagore
