Out of the Egg of Chaos

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