The Words Of The Wild Soul

Weary of all who come with words but no language

I make my way to the snow-covered island.

The untamed has no words.

The unwritten pages spread out on every side!

I come upon the tracks of deer in the snow. 

Language but no words.

~Tomas Tranströmer (1)

What can be spoken without words?

Once, everything was spoken without words, though the world was made entirely of stories, and all of the stories were told in wordless languages written across life’s pages. To read these stories was to see them, to hear them, smell, taste and touch them, and to participate with them in reciprocal relationship. To tell stories was to live them—to grow, unfold, bloom, make, procreate, kill, eat, and die.

The stories were sacred, were steeped in the effortless beauty of life on this blue-green world, floating like a drop of preciousness in a soft and enfolding darkness, studded with stars.

Why did our focus turn outwards rather than remaining inwards? I don’t mean inwards in an arrogant, self-referential way. I mean inwards in the sense of knowing that everything we need, everything we are, and everything we could ever want, is right here, not out there. 

Why do we feel the need to seek other worlds, to colonise them? Why are we never satisfied with what we have? When did we lose touch with reality? When did reality become not enough, something considered malleable and subject to our human whims?

* * *

Recent events have been making me feel quite angry. Not in an overwhelming or uncontrollable way. It’s more that I just feel fed up, so sick and tired of what is happening in the world: the contempt that is shown for women; the contempt that is shown for the earth; the lack of action on climate change (though any action will never be enough, and will never be what is actually needed, because what is actually needed is not even considered an option, if people are even aware of it—and this in itself makes me angry).

I feel so frustrated. I don’t want to sit back and do nothing, but what can I do?

I believe that there needs to be real, direct action, structural change, the destruction of certain harmful institutions and infrastructure. But I also believe that this must happen concurrently with spiritual and psychological change—a complete alteration to our perception and consciousness. We need to fall in love with life, with the earth, for we cannot, and will not, protect what we do not love. But how do we find and foster this love?

That is part of the reason why I am going to be Writing the Wild Soul. I want to find ways to fall in love with the world, and in particular with my own small part of it—these mountains, escarpments, forests and hanging swamps. And then, when I have felt that love, formed that relationship, I want to do my best to speak for the earth—to use language to speak for what is, not just for myself. That, perhaps, is the most important thing I can do with words.

Self-expression is easy. Expressing what is 

is a little more difficult.

~Robert Bringhurst (2)

We will not fall in love with the earth via scientific facts or statistics—for all the importance of such things—but only through poetry, myth, story, and art. It is only though the poetic and visionary, the sensuous and emotive, that we will really begin to feel love for life in its wholeness, its completeness, its enoughness.

‘Technological solutions’ will not save us. I do not believe that they exist, though many people like to think they do.

It is poetry that will save us; art, stories, local mythologies and new cosmologies founded on principles of biophilia, and human humility. All of this needs to be communicated, at least to begin with, with words. Thus the challenge is to find a new way of using language that de-centres ourselves, and re-centres the wild; that speaks for the needs of the earth, rather than the selfish wants of human beings who have lost any connection with the Real.

This is the challenge I am facing, with fear and apprehension, but also with a seed of joy in my heart. I only hope I can live up to it. 

References:

1. Tomas Tranströmer, quoted in Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, Chelsea Green Publishing: White River Junction, Vermont, 2017, p. 96 

2. Robert Bringhurst, from his poem ‘Xuedou Zhongxian’, in Selected Poems, Jonathan Cape: London, 2010, p. 91