Wise Words: The Stories We Need

New stories—or old stories in new form—will not be purely individual endeavours. They will not arise from research, from thinking, from analysis, from planning. They will not be utopian, globalist, all-encompassing, neat and satisfying. If we are to develop different ways of relating ourselves to the earth or to some new spiritual methodology that connects us back again to our natural heritage, this isn’t going to come from our rational minds. It may not come from us at all. The mythologist Martin Shaw speaks of stories as being “an echo location from the Earth.” The old folktales and foundation myths, he says, were not purely the creations of human minds. Rather, those minds acted like aerials, telling a story that a place, or the spirit of a place, wanted to be told. Such new stories, again, are the oldest stories of all: they are a retelling of the eternal story, from before we felled the tree. And they are not the product of thinking. They are the product of listening.

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What if the stories we need, the new ways of seeing, are right here under our feet, waiting for us to notice them? What if they are dancing through the canopy in the sunlight? One of the most startling claims that [cultural historian and ecotheologian, Thomas] Berry makes in The Dream of the Earth is that our human ability to question ourselves and question life, to measure and explore and think about the nature of everything, represents a necessary evolutionary leap. Human beings, he says, are the universe made self-aware. To care for the universe, then, is to care for ourselves. Respecting the earth is a form of self-respect.

(Paul Kingsnorth, ‘The Axis and the Sycamore’, Orion Magazine, https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-axis-and-the-sycamore/)

Red, And Readiness

Autumn is advancing, reds becoming redder. I have been seeking them.

A red-crowned Gang-Gang cockatoo must have passed this way.

Late harvests of tiny tomatoes.

Holly berries.

Red-robed Olwen, by Alan Lee (an illustration from The Mabinogion).

A somewhat unseasonal callistemon bloom.

Red birds, inside the pages of a birthday gift.

A red mask—an artwork in Brian Froud’s World of Faerie (2007).

Red shoes.

A wine red cardigan I finished knitting several months ago, but only completed recently after acquiring and attaching the toggles. It is so cosy, with extra long arms with thumbholes to keep my hands warm, and, best of all—pockets!

Red warms the heart, so that as the threshold of Samhain approaches, I am ready to cross over into the blue of winter.

Wise Words: I Am, Therefore I Think

… Each of us tells stories, and each of us is a story. Not just each of us humans, but each of us creatures … We all tell stories to ourselves and to each other — within the tribe, within the species, and way beyond its bounds. Roses do this when they flower, finches when they sing, and humans when they speak, walk, sing, dance, swim, play a flute, build a fire, or pull a trigger.

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[Stories] are probably our best maps and models of the world — and we may yet come to learn that the reason for this is that stories are some of the basic constituents of the world.  

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… (1) To be and to think are the same; (2) To be and to have meaning are the same. The implication of the Greek verb νοεῖν [noeîn] is that thought and meaning form a unit which ought not to be dissolved.

The English words noesis, knowledge, and narration all stem from the same root. Thought and meaning are connected not just to each other but to storytelling too … To be and to tell a story are the same. Or: To be is to be a story. Or: I am, therefore I think — and not the other and more arrogant way around.

(Robert Bringhurst, ‘The Tree of Meaning and the Work of Ecological Linguistics’, in The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2006/2008, pp. 167–168, 172, and 173)

(Take that, Descartes!)