Reborn into a Living World: a quotations blog

[geopsych]

this

[earthisaperson]

Earth intelligence, the mind of a place

[earthisaperson]

Perhaps each day our lives undertake unknown tasks on behalf of the silent mind and vast soul of nature. During its million years of presence perhaps it was also waiting for us, for our eyes and our words. Each of us is a secret envoy of the earth.

—John O'Donohue in Beauty, The Invisible Embrace

[earthisaperson]

You already believe the world knows you. That’s why you are so affected by those messages it keeps slipping you. The world is the only thing that knows you from the inside, as you do—all of the little secrets, the memories that still resonate, the private symbols of dream. No one else, no other entity, speaks to you in this direct but metaphorical language, imparting meaning straight into your psyche and bypassing interpretive screens.

—not attributed

[earthisaperson]

Thoughts about these posts

It isn't obvious when you're reading the posts on this blog one at a time, but there's a correlation between the descriptions of ecstatic or mystical childhood moments in nature, particularly the descriptions that mention how those moments have long lasting and inspirational effects, for example the quotations by Thomas Berry, Brad Steiger, Rupert Sheldrake, Edith Cobb, Virginia Wolfe and others, with the description in the post preceding this one which describes the vision quest traditions of the Lenape, sometimes called Delaware people of eastern North America. Their practice was to send a young person out into nature alone, often fasting—details differed from place to place. The hope was that the young person would have an experience that would result in their acquiring a spirit guide or helper that would serve as a guide for the rest of their lives. Lenape descendants I have met and spoken with told me that the place where they had that experience becomes special for the rest of their lives and they return to it in their minds and in real life to seek guidance when they need it. There is no agreed-on understanding of these childhood moments in Western culture, although they turn up here and there described in different ways. One person experiencing it may decide it is Jesus speaking to them. Another may see it as the land speaking to them or the gods they believe in or a spirit of that place, or almost anything that's deeply personal. It's an experience that happens to many people, in any walk of life. And because we don't have a culture-wide awareness of these experiences most people think they're the only one it's happened to. Contrast that with the Lenape culture in which at some point someone saw and understood the advantages these childhood experiences bestow on an individual and spread the word. Seeing that it was desirable for the group to have people with that kind of enhanced vitality and creativity, they created what became known to us as their vision quest tradition. So it seems as if, far from being a fanciful "primitive" tradition, the Lenape vision quest was devised as a real way to harness something that in our Western culture we barely acknowledge but that is so striking that numerous writer, artists, and others have felt compelled to speak or write about it, usually in glowing terms.

I don't really have a conclusion beyond that. Except maybe that as they grow up children should be given opportunities to be alone in a completely safe place in nature sometimes. It may give them strength, vitality and creativity that will last them the rest of their lives. It might also be good to find a way to talk about the moments with the child but as yet we have no culturally sanctioned way to talk about it. To say it's spirits or God or most descriptions you can think of makes it seem unreal. The best you can probably do is what the "rational" West does with most things that seem spiritual and that is to call it psychological. But? Maybe there's a third thing? and we should come up with it.

[earthisaperson]

The dream vision is of paramount importance in the life of the Delaware. This supernatural visitation is experienced during childhood, or less frequently, at the age of maturity. More commonly it occurs during the fast vigil of a youth at puberty, alone in the forests searching for a spirit guardian. It is usually to such individuals, considered by the Spirit-forces to be spiritually and morally pure, that this great blessing is bestowed. The gift is not restricted to the male . . . Not always is the revelation experienced in a dream. The neophyte may be walking alone in the woods, or even in a situation of apparent danger when the presence of the spiritual agent is made known to him. A voice from a rock, a bird, an animal, or even the sky is recognized as the medium through which the coveted power is conveyed to the fortunate one." [A footnote quotes someone named Harrington as saying, "The most vital and intimate phase of Lenape religion is the belief in dreams and visions, and in the existence of personal guardian spirits or supernatural helpers--concepts of wide distribution among the North American tribes, but rarely, perhaps, so vivid or well-developed as we find them here"]

—Gladys Tantaquidgeon in Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians

[earthisaperson]

The natural world has the extraordinary ability, especially when we are alone with it, of speaking to our authentic selves.

—no attribution

[earthisaperson]

We have the ability to listen to the trees and hear the forest, and not everyone can do this. Now the only way I can describe this phenomenon is when some people go to concerts and hear symphonies, and hear music when it is in its mathematical perfection because it’s between the musical notes, what you don’t hear, that makes the pattern that’s so important. And they experience a rush of feeling that comes into their chest that is almost a choking, a cry, and it pulls you all into yourself. So for some people, walking in the forest is like the feeling of going into a cathedral, and indeed the ancient forest is the cathedral of nature. Here you feel this same emotional pull in your chest. I think that most of the children of the world when they are very little will go into the forest and feel this. For them it feels like the trees are their friends and they can indeed talk to the trees.

—Diana Beresford-Kroeger

[earthisaperson]

Do you remember a special spot you had as a child, a secret place where you went in person or in your imagination? Children sometimes find a special place of spiritual sustenance in their own backyard, a “bliss station,” as Joseph Campbell called it.

—Tobin Hart in The Secret Spiritual World of Children

[earthisaperson]

Perhaps the greatest lesson for us to confront globally results from not grasping that the spiritual lives within the physical, that the earth is a sentient, spiritual being.

—Marcus Mason

[earthisaperson]

At age eleven, Debbie was by herself, lying back on her swing set. As she described, "I was looking at the sky, just watching. I don’t know how it happened but it all opened up to me. I don’t know how to say it, but I felt everything was perfect and connected. I can’t say I was thinking about anything—it’s like there was no room even to think. It felt like my chest could just burst open and fly into a million pieces. It felt like I could explode and be the sun and the clouds.”

—Tobin Hart in The Secret Spiritual World of Children

[earthisaperson]

My mythic beginning can be traced to those magical hours when, as a boy of three or four, I sat unseen in the midst of a clump of lilac bushes on our Iowa farm and surveyed the boundaries of my known world from the perspective of my sacred vantage point. With one arm around Bill, my big collie, connecting me with the warmth and love of a faithful animal companion, my little rump nestled in the moist, black soil of Mother Earth, I experienced the first of many epiphanies. Today, even at the age of sixty, whenever I need help in rescuing my center from the insults of the material world, I go back in memory to that special, sacred place, my mythical moment of beginning. Whenever I need a fortress against the stresses and pressures of the unyielding physical world, I return to my little Medicine Circle in the lilac bushes. It is from this eternally secure and sheltered vantage spot that I can regroup my spiritual and physical energies, shore up my mental faculties, and resume the quest with renewed strength and guidance.

—Brad Steiger in Totems

[earthisaperson]

The planet is attempting to speak. Everything that can signify is reaching out toward humanity to try to claim us for the family of nature from the rather pathological trip we’ve been on for a long time. The elementals, the voices, the promptings of discarnate entities are to be carefully considered and studied. We are wandering in a wilderness and they are a prompting voice.

—Terence McKenna in Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness

[earthisaperson]

[grieving her father’s suicide when she was twelve years old] Standing in a tall, silent grove of maple, oak, and birch trees, tears streaming down my face, a gentle stillness filled me. My hands relaxed and opened, and the ache in my heart lifted and vanished. In that moment, the place within that grove of trees became as vast and infinite as the universe. The shafts of light through the trees filled each thing they touched with a strange ethereal glory. I was enveloped in what felt like a compassionate embrace from the trees. All time seemed to condense into a few everlasting moments that stretched for an eternity. In that otherworldly sky of leaves and branches, I understood and felt connected to all living beings. I stood on the Earth, on ground dappled with tender golden light, and realized that death is a continuum and a person’s soul is immortal. It was as if I could see the invisible threads of life that kept us all held together within a compassionate and wise cosmos. In that moment, I knew that all living beings—no matter how seemingly small or lost—always find their way back home.

—Catriona MacGregor in Partnering with Nature

[earthisaperson]

…there are profound moments in which the division between self and other drops away. It’s Freud’s notion of the oceanic feeling: you’re swept away. And when that happens, you need to share it, to say, “This wasn’t just a regular day. There was magic here! Did you see it?” So much of literature and art is the artist’s way of saying, “Yea, I saw it. Bloody hell.” It doesn’t take ascending to heaven; it isn’t supernatural. It happens right here, where the spirit meets the nature of reality. There’s a tremendous puzzle in it for me because of the violence in the world. It will never feel appropriate, the level of violence that I know to exist. You look at a black hole, which is this implosion where time itself is distorted and torn to bits,. And the ocean can display such incredible violence. But somehow that doesn’t begin to diminish the beauty that’s all around us. If anything it makes the beauty more astonishing. As much horror as there is, there is still a place here flowers bloom and outside the front door it’s spring. Out of this crack in the sidewalk, life comes again, God damn it. You can use all the weedkiller in the world, and it will still come.

—Ran Ortner interviewed in Sun Magazine

[earthisaperson]

For many, their spiritual or mystical experience seemed to be of supreme importance, but they were unable to discuss it with their families and friends for fear of ridicule or being thought mentally unbalanced. This research has revealed in fact that there is a widespread taboo in our society against admitting to such experience…. If nature is inanimate, then experience of a mystical connection with a living presence or power in nature must be illusory, and so it is best not to pay too much attention to it lest it have an unbalancing effect on the rational mind. But if nature is alive, such an experience of a living connection may be just what it seems to be.

—Rupert Sheldrake in The Return of Nature

[earthisaperson]

One day while I was by the brook catching trout, I heard a loud humming of insects above me in the gnarled spreading branches of an old willow tree. It was a beautiful warm spring day, and the sky was bright blue. The tree was covered with yellow pussy willows. Woolly black and rust-colored bumblebees were buzzing here and there. Willow warblers and pied flycatchers were hawking flies. The combination of sights, smells, and sounds gave me a delicious, light-headed feeling. Many years later during my Ph. D. oral exam at UCLA, I was asked why I wanted to study biology. I answered that it was because of what I saw and felt that spring morning in the Hahnheide. Of course, this was an inadequate answer, but I didn’t have a better one. How could I explain the Hahnheide and all that led to it, to a group of five no-nonsense professors? Some things cannot be explained in three sentences.

—Berndt Heinrich in A Patch of Fireweed

[earthisaperson]

In order to experience [this feeling], we have to walk the land. At a certain time for everybody, the land will take over. The land will take that person. You think you’re following something, but the land is actually pulling you. When the land start pulling you, you’re not even aware you’re walking—you’re off, you’re gone. When you experience this, it’s like a shift in your reality. You start seeing things you never seen before … all of a sudden [the training process you have acquired through your upbringing] doesn’t fit anything. Then something comes out of the land, guides you. It can be a tree, a rock, a face in the sand, or a bird.

—Freya Mathews in The World Hidden Within the World