Witchlines: The Dance In The House

Here is the second of my creative pieces written as part of my Witchlines study (the first is here). This story explores the inside of a Neolithic house, and the people who lived in it.

Model of a Cucuteni–Trypillia house (source: Wikimedia: by Cristian Chirita) 

The Dance in the House

The golden light of late afternoon passes through the open door, falling on my form, making the white lines on my body glow. In the shaft of warm light, dust rises—the dust of clay, soil, dried herbs, and the skin and hair of people, and animals, and life. It rises and dances as the air shifts with  the approach of night. The pots in the corner throw great bulbous shadows against the walls, and the weaving on the loom gleams, jewel-like, in the corner.

The room I stand in is empty, the oven beside me almost cold. There is a smell of earth, ash, the rich fragrance of bread recently baked, nut-brown and crisped around the edges. Silence inhabits the air, cradling the clay walls of the house, which sing out the last of the day’s warmth from their earthen skin.

The first to return is the mother, with the baby tied securely on her hip, a basket of greens in her hand. She looks in my direction and nods a greeting marked by familiarity and trust, before preparing tinder to relight the fire, to stave off the approaching darkness and chill, at least for a while. She lays the baby down on a well-worn sheepskin rug, giving her a crust of bread to chew, and then the mother crouches by the hearth, assembling cooking pots and ladles, grain from her store, and what food she has gathered from the wild hills just past the bend in the river. Her crouching form, wide of hip and graceful, shines in the bright sun, radiating life.

Next to return are the children—a girl and a boy—who, despite having run and tumbled and played all day, are scarcely out of breath. They bustle in, giggling, tummies rumbling, with faces brown and clear. They look in my direction, shy and awed, as children often are, before washing their hands in a basin of water, watching the dirt swirl away. They play with their younger sister, who is delighted that they are home.

Then comes the father, with his dog at his side. He tousles the hair of his children, kisses his wife, and sighs as he eases his sore muscles back onto a bench lined with a faded woollen rug. He pours water from a pitcher and drinks long and deep, then looks towards me and listens for what I might say, of the goodness of what is, what has been, what is to come. He is trustful, this man, who smells of sheep, who built this house with his own hands*, who has fathered three children, and who loves his wife.

Last to return, bringing cool night on her heels, is the grandmother, gratifyingly tired from her work at the temple, making in clay the image of myself and this world. She sits her old bones down on the bench by the standing loom, and drinks the cup of ale the father brings her. It is she who made me, who shaped me into being, and I have given her a good life, filled with beauty, children and grandchildren. As she sits and rests, her eyes on me, a draught through the doorway makes the loom weights jangle and clack together, and the light dims gently into dusk.

Now the house is full, with this family, these people, who have smoothed clay onto cracks in the walls, who have broken pots, and made new ones, who have eaten and laughed and loved within these walls, and without. I watch over them, eyeless, my earthen body my all-encompassing vision, my knowing. I dwell here, under this thatched roof, as under the sky, as everywhere, my wings spread in blessing.

They eat—the mother, the children, the father, the grandmother, and the dog—savouring the taste of herb and grain, meat and life-giving fat, filling their bellies with the gifts of the earth. The baby feeds from the mother’s breast, and a hush descends. The patterns on my body, and on the pots in the corner, shimmer in the firelight, circling and weaving and dancing a song of life. I pulse through the bodies of the people, the dog, the vessels of clay, the earth-made walls, and the world outside. They know me as themselves, and in the fading light, are lulled toward night’s embrace.

The children, suddenly exhausted, with eyelids unbearably heavy, make their way into the next room, falling onto their pallets and into sleep almost instantly. The grandmother, who has risen from her weaving work, tucks blankets around them like cocoons, before she yields to her own rest.

I watch the mother and the father, and the infant now sleeping softly in the crook of her father’s strong arm, and tenderness fills the room. Joy dwells alongside sorrow, and in my body they join, spiralling into the centre and out again, in the dance that does not end. The mother and the father, together, move into the next room, to sleep, to dream. And here, in the fading firelight, my shadow dances against the wall—against the clay which is my substance, my source—until, with a last wisp of rising smoke, darkness descends.**

* I’ve since been reminded in my reading that women were often the house-builders in early matrifocal cultures, so this detail may not be entirely accurate.

** This story is written from the point of view of a clay ‘Goddess figurine’, representing the Bird Goddess, who stands by the oven, overseeing daily life and entwining it with the sacred.

Bird Goddess (inspired by a Cucuteni figurine from 4050–3900 BCE), watercolour pencils

Wise Words: Let Your Roots Grow Deep

‘... To deny the past is to deny the future. A man does not make his destiny : he accepts it, or denies it. If the rowan’s roots are shallow it bears no crown.’ 

(Ursula Le Guin, from The Farthest Shore, in The Earthsea Quartet, Puffin Books: London, 1993, p. 327)

Autumn Becoming

Notwithstanding the resurgence of summer over the past week, it feels like autumn has arrived already this year—today, of course, being the autumn equinox. For weeks now the mornings have been cool, and at times rain and mist have set in, making for days that are almost, but not quite, cold. The evenings are closing in earlier, as well, which I find comforting. Still, as soon as the sun reappears after the rain there are skinks running around and sunbathing—including the tiniest babies—and everything is green and warm and at its height. It will be some time before autumn-proper settles in, but I know it is coming.

As usual, there have been birds galore. This summer I spotted a species I have never seen before, no doubt because they are tiny and quite shy—the red-browed firetail. I’ve been lucky enough to sight them on three seperate occasions, and even to photograph a couple (not an easy task!). The first bird here is a juvenile, without the red crest; the second is an adult.

Here is a sweet little striated thornbill.

And here is a magnificent female yellow-tailed black cockatoo, one of a family of three. It’s rare to be able to get close enough to take a clear photograph, so it was quite a privilege to be able to get this shot.

The footage below is of one of the other birds, another female, possibly a juvenile. You will need to turn up the volume a fair bit to hear her speaking.

Summer has brought a great many things—new thoughts and sights and dreams. I am sure autumn will bring even more, as the painting of the inside of my studio begins, and as I continue studying the ancient Witchlines of Old Europe. Everything is changing and growing, blooming and dying back. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. But I want to learn to embrace the uncertainty of change, the glorious unknowns ahead of me, and within. So, now that the first autumn violets are appearing, I will be drinking violet tea, and contemplating what happens next, who I am (un)becoming, and what I can bring into being.

Wise Words: Original Instructions

… I think also about what so many indigenous people have said to me, that humans are to be guided by “original instructions” on how to live, including how to live in concert with one’s nonhuman neighbors, who presumably receive their own original instructions, too, all given them by their Creator. It is a person’s responsibility to live according to these original instructions. Many who do not live right lives do so not because humans are evil, selfish, and destructive, nor because of a Christian original sin, but rather because they have forgotten or actively ignored their original instructions, and they continue to forget about and actively ignore those who continue to give them their instructions.

…

Original instructions presume we come into this world carrying with us advice on how to live properly, how to fit in, how to do what is right; and even more crucially, we come into this world having been given a personal and social framework for looking for that advice, for finding it in our daily lives, in dreams, in our relationships with others, and in these others’ actions. These instructions are available to individuals through direct unmediated experience, and although one is often encouraged to ask assistance from one’s elders and one’s community in understanding these instructions and in comprehending messages one may get from dreamgivers, muses, others on other sides, and others on this side, one is also not only encouraged but expected to take increasing responsibility—from the root meaning, “to give in return”—for one’s own understanding and interpretations, and how this understanding translates into actions and behavior toward one’s community, which includes nonhumans and other sides. This is called “wisdom.” 

(Derrick Jensen, Dreams, Seven Stories Press: New York, p. 445)

To Be Embodied Is To Heal

Consciousness is indefinable, except in how we sense it, allow the sensuous to give it form. When the mind is elevated above the body, we become unselves: half-alive, half-dead. 

I am my body, for good or ill (ha!); but to be embodied is to heal.

The physical world is primary—without it we cannot survive … and without it we cannot think, feel, perceive, experience. Without it there is nothing. 

All meaning inheres in what is, in the material—MATERial—Mother Earth. 

If we destroy the earth, we destroy ourselves. Every drill fracking down into earth’s flesh is violating my own.

(Thoughts adapted from my notebook, July 2017)

Wise Words: Culture Protects Nature

The forests have been tended (cultivated) for millennia by Amazonian people. (“The wild is not the opposite of the cultivated,” says Vandana Shiva. “It is the opposite of the captivated.”) Nature and culture may be distinct; a house and the garden are domestic spaces, and have a different quality from the wild forests, but it is not an opposition. Further, one can be “at home” not only in a house but in the natural world outside. For nature and culture find trysting places in the forests, interweaving and reflexive in a lovely gyre of mutuality. Swedish ethnographer Kaj Århem writes, “Among Amerindians of the Amazon, the notion of ‘nature’ is contiguous with that of ‘society’,” and he notes that “the same can be said of many, if not most, indigenous peoples of the world.” Sometimes, writes Århem, even animals “are attributed with ‘culture’—habits, rituals, songs, and dances of their own.”

For forest people, nature is defended by culture: many rules concerning hunting and the nonexploitative use of resources—blunt ecological truths—are encoded in the myths and magic, tales and enchantments that makes up a society’s culture. Shamans and thinkers of the forest know that the mind learns best this way. Myths, comments Århem, are “extremely efficient” for the purpose as they are “at once ecologically informed, emotionally charged and morally binding.” If you scrape off the magic, then the raw facts and laws are harder to recall and harder to impose. So culture protects nature.

(Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Penguin: London, 2006, p. 45)

Witchlines: The Vessel Filled With Time

In aid of my unlearning and unforgetting, I’ve been taking part in Sylvia Linsteadt’s Witchlines Study Guild, in which we are exploring the pre-patriarchal, Neolithic cultures of Old Europe. The studies are centred around the multi-disciplinary ‘archaeomythological’ work of eminent Lithuanian archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994). As Sylvia writes:

At the center of this study guild is my belief that the native witchcraft traditions of Europe are a late manifestation of an ancient, indigenous, earth-based culture that predates the arrival of Indo-Europeans during the Bronze Age, and finds its roots far back in the culture that archaeologist Marija Gimbutas calls Old European (which spanned roughly 7000 to 3000 B.C.E.), and likely even earlier, in Paleolithic and Mesolithic traditions.

…

Together we will be following the tenuous pathways that lead us back to the roots of a culture in which reverence for the web of life and a feminine divinity (in many diverse manifestations) were valued at the center of European culture. My hope is that this journey into the deep past can inform our present, and hopefully our future, in a time when the Earth is more and more in need of those who would revere the sanctity and regenerative powers of the natural world, and each other. (https://www.witchlines.net/about)

This is a subject and a cause that I feel very strongly about, for I am sure that beneath the accreted historical layers of our destructive modern culture, lies something old, wise, and entirely different—a matrixial culture that was born from and existed in reverence to the earth. For those of us of European descent, this culture is part of our indigenous heritage, which for far too long has been lost to us. 

Though much controversy surrounds Gimbutas’ work, what she unearthed through archaeological excavations, and the study of linguistics, folklore and symbols, is of vital importance. It also seems to be gaining more and more acceptance, especially now that one of her main detractors, Colin Renfrew, has conceded that Gimbutas’ ‘Kurgan Hypothesis’ is indeed correct.         

I hope that what I learn as I go in search of the witchlines that bind us to the earth will both inspire me creatively, and teach me more about how best to live—bringing reverence back to a world characterised so much by irreverence.

The course work includes creative writing exercises, which I plan to share here. The first of these was inspired by a drawing of a pot/vase found in the pages of Marija Gimbutas’ The Civilization of the Goddess (1991). Below is my own drawing of it, and the story that emerged of its making.

The Vessel Filled With Time

Round-bellied, full and heavy, lined with time’s marks. Her sides bulge. Each mark is a word, snake-tongued, flickering like fire, spurting sap. In clay is breath of snake, breath of mountain, exhaled. Earth, water, fire and sparks of light.

Her quick old hands are slick with clay, grit between her fingers, and she sings as she works at the shaping, the stroking into being of a new vessel. Love lives under her skin and in whatever she sees, whatever she touches. Her own daughter has a child now: so she is now a mother’s mother, an old one, blessed by time. She knows well the way of the making—in love, and life—and her hands move, building coil on coil, smoothing, rounding the form up and over and to its lip.

A child peeks in at the door, dark eyes quiet and shining, wondering at the house of clay, at the old woman sitting in the shadows, humming as she works. A spirit crouches by the door also, and in the shadows, looking upon the women, the child, the vessels made whole, made from earth, called forth to be formed, marked, transformed, held.

The old woman ceases her singing and smiles at the little girl, and the presence she can feel but cannot see, except in the making. That presence has always crouched there, gentle and attentive, beckoning songs from the women, from the clay. It fills her hands with knowing, with a shape that is good.

When the vessel is made, the child gone to play, and the spirit has enlarged to fill the room, her body, the woman begins to sing again. A different song this time—lower, softer; wordless, yet speaking. She lifts her tool and begins to mark the soft surface of the clay, to carve lines into its flesh: snake, tongue, mountain, river, tree, breast, milk, womb, soil, time.

There is no time—only the song, the making.

Light shines through the door and moves across the floor, and the song ends, trailing off the woman’s breath and back to the air from which it came. The inscription is complete, and as the woman rises, she stretches out her spine, loosens her stiffened knees. The vessel is taken to the kiln, and she prays for its safe transformation, its journey to change substance—soft to hard, shapeable to shaped. Born anew.

And from its heavy, round belly a voice will then speak:

Her mountains taste the air. Her mountains spill forth their milk into the sky and across the land. The snake coils and uncoils from her spiral, her knowing centre, and she is time, earth-born, bearing gifts of life. In her body you grow, become; and in her circling arms you will sleep.

Live well, and give gifts of beauty to the one whose name is Earth.

Wise Words: The Divine Womb

DERRICK JENSEN: … You quote Wendell Berry as saying, “Perhaps the greatest disaster of human history is one that happened to or within religion: that is, the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from the creation.”

MATTHEW FOX: Religion in the West has fallen into theism, just as science has. Theism is the belief that we’re here and God’s out there someplace. It’s a very Newtonian idea, that God is behind the universe with an oilcan. And of course the next step after theism is atheism. It’s very easy to reject a God who’s way out in the sky. I don’t know any other civilization that has invented atheism except the West. The word does not exist in indigenous languages. The spirit exists.

What I’m about theologically is the replacement of theism with panentheism, which is the idea that we’re in God and God is in us. And by “we” I don’t mean just humans, but all beings. The image I have is that the universe is a divine womb. We’re all in here swimming together. It’s an image of interconnectivity.

And it’s a mystical image. By that I mean it isn’t something conceptual; it’s something experiential. People experience the divine in their lives. They always have.

The divine is not separate from anything in nature. Aquinas talked in the thirteenth century about the immanence of God in all beings. The mystery of existence, the goodness, the beauty—all of that is divine imagery, divine footsteps.

(Derrick Jensen, Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros, Chelsea Green Publishing: White River Junction, Vermont, 2002, 2004, p. 69)

Thoughts On Thinking

Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, 

is sitting in her room 

and whatever she thinks about 

appears. 

She thought of her sisters, 

Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i, 

and together they created the Universe 

this world 

and the four worlds below. 

Thought-Woman, the spider, 

named things and 

as she named them 

they appeared … (1)

* * *

Earth-Thinking

I find myself thinking about the nature of thinking: What is thought? How should we think?

Part of this line of enquiry has come about because of meditation—or, more specifically, the lack of it in my life—over the past year or so. It has become a troublesome concept, no longer a beneficial (or at least neutral) practice, but one tinged with complexity, and ideas that make me feel uneasy; and so I have been avoiding it.

We are often told to stop thinking when we meditate, or at least not to cling to thoughts as they pass by. Thinking is so often seen as the enemy, the thing to be controlled or conquered on the way to experiencing a ‘proper’ meditative state, some kind of ‘thoughtless’ spaciousness or emptiness.

Many spiritual traditions also see thoughts as a problem, particularly the stories we tell and believe about ourselves and the world, relegating them to ‘ego constructs’ and thus mere illusions.

I find myself reacting strongly, quite viscerally—that is, bodily—to these ideas. I wonder why; and then I think and think and think, and eventually write, trying to make sense of things.

The thing is, I don’t believe that thoughts or stories are illusions. I believe that they are the sensuous fabric of reality. However, this doesn’t mean that all thoughts and stories are equal. Some are clearly damaging, or at least incorrect. We can, for instance, get stuck in very restrictive personal stories, continually living out the same old patterns, and never progressing beyond. It is only when we shuck off those limiting stories and retell our lives in new ways that we can grow as people. Yet in this instance we move from one story to another, from one that is old or no longer needed, to one that is new and helpful. One story naturally evolves into another—without beginning, without end.

Stories are necessary. The creative process of Life manifests itself through a myriad of stories—cosmic, earthly, human, nonhuman, geological, biological, and so on. Thus, in a completely real sense, stories are what the universe is composed of. Story moving to story—thought to thought—events occurring—evolution taking place—death following life following death leading to rebirth …

The task is not to eliminate these thoughts and stories, or to stop ourselves from thinking, but to learn how to discriminate between good thoughts and bad; between true, helpful stories and untrue, harmful ones. Thinking is not inherently bad—it is ‘distorted’ thinking that is the problem.

So how do we know when thoughts are distorted, or when they are correct?

The way to do this is to compare and align our thinking with what is, the real world around us—the earth, and the processes of Life. Thoughts that cleave to earth-reality are, in general, true thoughts, arising from the land and our interaction with it. These are thoughts woven into the wildness of the world, and inseparable from it. These thoughts possess a naturalness, an organic morality and beauty, an integrity. They may be thoughts or ways of thinking that are human/cultural, yet they respect the connection of the human with the earth, and do not attempt to sever or ignore this bond.

Distorted thoughts or ways of thinking have broken their connection with the earth—either from an ignorance of its existence or need; or by a deliberate attempt to transcend the realities of what is, in an arrogance stemming from a belief in human superiority. This is the current (and longstanding) situation in the Western world, at least, if not increasingly elsewhere.

But if we thought ourselves into this mess, we can surely think our way out, by returning our thoughts to their rightful habitat—the earth—physical reality itself.

So, the questions we need to ask are: How do we realign our thinking processes with the earth?—which is where our thoughts ultimately stem from, after all. How do we make our thinking wild once more?

It is the process of discrimination that is the hardest part—knowing when a story is true, and when it is not; when it is earth-given and natural, and when it is an anthropocentric distortion. The ways we are taught to think (or not) in this culture; the ways we are forced away from what is, and what is right, towards ways of living that are separate from the earth—these things limit us, and give rise to distorted thought after thought that lead nowhere, and result in nothing good.

Woman-Thinking

I’ve been thinking these thoughts for some time—thoughts that want to be thought—and struggling to find ways to articulate them; as well as struggling to find ways to refute the negative views on thinking, that repel me so physically, whilst also making it clear that some thoughts are indeed harmful.

My ideas have been helped along by reading the work of two ecofeminists: Jane Caputi and Charlene Spretnak; as well as the wisdom of two indigenous writers: Leslie Marmon Silko and Paula Gunn Allen. For their sharp-witted, gynocentric knowledge, I am grateful. As I am also grateful to the creatrix of the Southwestern Pueblo Indians—Thought Woman (also known as Grandmother Spider), ‘who thinks and dreams and spins the world into being’ (2). Caputi writes:

As Paula Gunn Allen explains, “The thought for which Grandmother Spider is known is the kind that results in physical manifestation of phenomena: mountains, lakes, creatures, or philosophical-sociological systems.” Unbalanced, phallocentric thought, on the other hand, results in the physical manifestation of phenomena such as social inequality, pollution, nuclear weapons, genocide, and gynocide. (3)

This is an important distinction to make: there is balanced, generative thought (characterised in this instance as female); and then there is the unbalanced, destructive kind (characterised as male). Both types result in the creation of physical reality, yet it is clearly the former that should be focused on.

Spretnak elaborates further on this idea. Referring to the work of Claudine Herrmann who analysed the ways men tend to operate linguistically within the systems they have created, she writes:

Man generally prefers himself to what surrounds him, to the extent that he places his mental categories before those of objective reality. His structures of thinking are external to him (and are entirely foreign to women); he is, therefore, stunned by everything and seeks to impose control over it … Moreover, every man has a tendency to organize the world according to a system in which he is the center. Men’s space is a space of domination and hierarchy, of conquest and expansion. (4)

On the other hand, women think differently, having a talent ‘for grasping the gestalt, or big picture, in any situation, as well as for perceiving an awareness of the dynamic interrelatedness that is involved’ (5).

I want to make it clear now that I am not saying that all men think as the above quote suggests, or that women don’t or can’t think in that way also. (Also, I am not suggesting that that form of thinking is innate to men, or the way they have always thought.) However, there are specific differences and tendencies that have been found to exist in men and women, and this is important to point out, seeing as the masculine way of thinking is the norm, and women are expected to conform to it. It is what we are taught, whether we feel comfortable with it or not; and it is what has shaped the structure of our culture, to our detriment.

What particularly interests me about Spretnak’s quote is that Man ‘places his mental categories before those of objective reality’—that is, he ignores what is in favour of what he wishes to be—his own, necessarily flawed, perspective of reality. This is precisely what has come to my attention over the past year or so: the Western/masculine/postmodern flight from the Real, in favour of some humanly constructed realm of ideas, which lacks both meaning and material reality.

Thus, my ideas about thought are gravitating very much towards both a female and an embodied stance. Importantly, gynocentric thought is subjective, and rooted in personal, embodied experience, in contrast to the masculine objective point of view. Yet the very crucial difference is that the subjective experience of women tends to be very firmly attached to what is, rather than the flawed view of reality that ‘Man’ tends to hold. (Thus, though men pride themselves on their rationality, their thoroughly objective and empirical view of reality, the truth is in fact quite the opposite. They have so distanced themselves from the Real that they can no longer see it as it is, and therefore their thinking rarely reflects what is.) 

Body-Thinking

Except perhaps in the case of Thought Woman (and perhaps not even then), thoughts do not emerge from nowhere. For embodied beings thoughts arise due to our immersion in and interaction with the world around us, so thoughts are a physical phenomenon. (This idea of embodied cognition seems to be becoming more common.) Thus, if thought originates in the material world, and our felt experience of it, it would be true to say, as Carol P. Christ does, that ‘Feeling is the origin of thinking’ (6). Thinking, at its root, stems from sensation, sensuousness.

What Christ also means is that thoughts are not separate from feelings—instead, they work together, intermingle. There is no such thing as pure thought, no such thing as pure feeling, only a combination of the two. 

At some point in our human evolution, conceptual and discursive thought came into existence. This is the kind of thought that tends to dominate in modern humans. Yet it was different for our ancient ancestors. As Reginald A. Ray says, in relation to hunter-gatherers: 

Conceptual thinking plays an important role, but it is very much in balance with the more somatic functions, and also serves them—thinking is embedded in and is in service to the interpersonal and natural worlds accessed through sensation and feeling. (7)

While I do agree with Ray, I think he is only half right. Thinking is (or should be) embedded in and in service to the world of sensation and feeling. Yet I think it goes both ways, for feeling is also embedded in and in service to thinking. 

Ray goes on to say:

Thinking … tends towards disembodiment: it separates in that it involves a disengaged stance whereby—based on past experience—we abstract from the living and invaluable other, think him as an object, ignore him as an independent actor, conceptualize him, and consider how to manage our relation with him. It is cool, apart, and noncommittal—in other words, disembodied. Thinking, when it stands as the primary or sole function of interrelation with the other, leads us, in the words of Martin Buber, into an “I-it” rather than an “I-thou” relationship. The most important human cognitive function since the invention of agriculture, thinking has come to be more and more predominant, while the other functions or ways of knowing have, in many modern people, atrophied. (8)

Again, I believe this is only half true. Most of us modern people (myself included!) are mired in a kind of abstract, typically verbal, thought that is very disembodied, and this is a major problem. Yet since all thought is connected with feeling and physical experience, I don’t think we can say that it is truly disembodied, only that we perceive it as such. Or, our thinking is disembodied in the sense that we are denying or numbing our feelings, denying the reality of our embodiment, and this gives rise to distorted, untrue thinking.

Interestingly, the ‘objective’ kind of thinking that Ray is discussing sounds very much like the ‘masculine’ objective thought that Spretnak spoke of. Thus it is only one kind of thinking, the one that has come to dominate over the somewhat different ‘feminine’ subjective thinking, which is not ‘disengaged’, not ‘cool, apart, and noncommittal’, and not an ‘I-it’ relationship at all.

So the problem, I believe, is not thinking as such, but the separation of thinking from feeling and the physical world. After all, in order to write this essay I have needed to think in abstract and discursive ways. I have needed to think rationally, to structure my words and ideas so that they make sense. Humans are thinkers, and this is natural. We also use language, which is also natural (at least in oral form, as writing is optional). But what I have written has come about because of what I was feeling. I felt there was something wrong with certain views on thinking. I felt uncomfortable. I feel in my body that there is a very real problem here, and thus my feelings have inspired my thinking, my thinking has been born from my feeling.

The problem in so many areas is that of separation: mind from body, culture from nature, spirit from matter, thought from feeling. Reconnection is the key.

I will remain a thinker. I will not try to silence my thoughts. Instead, I intend to be mindful of what I am thinking, what purpose my thoughts serve. If my thoughts cease to flow, if I get stuck in rumination or thoughts that cause distress, I will drop down into my body, seek those feeling-thoughts, sensation-thoughts, or a communicative wordlessness that brings me back to a deeper way of knowing. This, I think, is the kind of meditation I wish to engage in—an embodied, somatic kind.

Further, I like the idea that meditation be not about silencing thoughts altogether, but silencing our very limited, mundane, objective and distracting human thoughts, in order to open the ears of our hearts to the nonhuman voices around us, to the thoughts of the earth, to a language older than words (to use the title of one of Derrick Jensen’s books). David Abram says that we should

[turn] aside, now and then, from the churning of thought, dropping beneath the spell of inner speech to listen into the wordless silence. Only by frequenting that depth, again and again, can our ears begin to remember the many voices that inhabit that silence, the swooping songs and purring rhythms and antler-smooth movements that articulate themselves in the eloquent realm beyond the words. Only thus do we remember ourselves to the deeper field of intelligence, to the windblown thinking that is not ours, upon which all our thought depends. (9)

Connecting with and listening to this ‘deeper field of intelligence’ is essential for the creation of our own thoughts, ideas, feelings and creative works. In a sense, we do not think ourselves, but are thought by the world. Thought by Thought Woman herself.

Love-Thinking

There is yet another way to look at thinking that I have come across, and that is thinking as thanking, thinking as love. David Hinton writes

… we can trace [the word] think far enough back to see that it converges at its vanishing point with thank in the Indo-European tong-, which means love. So it seems likely that thinking was early on experienced as gratitude or love for the world. (10)

Thus, thinking is not and has never been inherently bad. We must simply strive to have the right kinds of thoughts, engendered by a love of what is. 

And because thoughts and stories do literally influence and create our world, we need to be very careful about what we are thinking: whether it is balanced, generative, and based on love; or unbalanced, destructive, and based on hatred.

We must ask ourselves: What are we thinking about? What does our thinking serve? What does it result in? What stories are we telling? 

If thought is rooted in a love of what is, in embodied truth, then, however flawed our thinking may sometimes be, it will rarely be ‘wrong’ or harmful. 

The way we think can change, can flow into something new, can reconnect with feelings and the physical. We can begin to reject harmful stories and tell more fruitful ones, in the knowledge that even those stories will change, go backwards on occasion, spiral back over old ground. But they will keep being told, regardless of where we are headed, for they are what the universe is made of.

We must also remember that it is not just humans who think and tell stories. The earth thinks. The earth tells tales. We are thought by and through Her, and we participate (either well or badly) in the telling of the tale of Life.

I wonder how we can return to thinking as thanking, to truly embodied thought—thinking that may or may not be verbal—and I think of how the earth once spoke through humans in myth, in the earliest poetic utterances—through a sense of awe and an awareness of beauty. I think these are good places to start, in myth and poetry, to get a feel for how the earth thinks and dreams, and of what we need to know. Writing and speaking in these forms brings us closer to the roots of language, the roots of human culture, and the primordial nature of the land.

Art is another place in which the earth speaks—through imagery rather than words, particularly in symbols. This may well be even closer to how the earth naturally communicates.

I also think of women’s cultures—of the creations and crafts, wise ways of speaking and thinking, of women, and I want to take part, in my own way.

Myth. Poetry. Art. Symbol. Dream. Feeling. Love.

If we think, speak, write and create in these ways in order to show gratitude, we give much-needed gifts back to the earth.

I refuse to believe that thinking is the enemy. And I refuse to be forced to think in the dominant way, however hard it is to break free of it. We must find other ways. We must think, speak and act thoughtfully, combining the rational with the intuitive, the logical with the mythopoetic, words with images and visions. We must return to the body and the earth as the origins, the roots of our being. 

Thought Woman gave us thought. She meant for us to think, and to give our thoughts back to Her in thanks, so we must use our thinking capacities well, and gratefully. And in particular, we must respect the thinking and speaking of women, for

It is as the old ones have told: 

the name of the Female Principle is “Thought,” 

and she is more fundamental and varied 

than time and space. (11)

What are your thoughts?

References:

1. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Penguin: New York, 1977, p. 1

2. Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993,  p. 202

3. ibid,  p. 78

4. Charlene Spretnak, ‘In the Absence of a Mother Tongue’, Women’s Voices: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, Spring Journal: New Orleans, Louisiana (Fall 2014), p. 87; you can download a copy of this essay here: http://www.charlenespretnak.com/events.htm

5. ibid, p. 91

6. Carol P. Christ, ‘Woman and Nature: Our Bodies Are Ourselves’, 26 June, 2017, Feminism and Religion, https://feminismandreligion.com/2017/06/26/woman-and-nature-our-bodies-are-ourselves-by-carol-p-christ/

7. Reginald A. Ray, Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body, Sounds True: Boulder, Colorado, 2008/2014, p. 36

8. ibid, p. 39

9. David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Vintage Books: New York, 2010, p. 178

10. David Hinton, Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, Shambhala: Boston, 2012, p. 57

11. Paula Gunn Allen, in Caputi, p. xx