A New Language: A Poem

I am back from my writing adventures both exhausted and energised, and trying to find some balance between those two feelings … and, I’m sorry to say, not having much success. Exhaustion is beginning to defeat me, so I think I need to disappear for a while in order to recover fully. Hence, this week I am just stopping by to share something that was on my mind in the days before Writing the Wild Soul began. This is something I will try to elaborate on in future posts.

A New Language

Perhaps finding a new language is our 

only hope. Perhaps we should listen more 

than we speak, these words merely clumsy 

ciphers, trying to say what cannot fully be 

said. Can a word, spoken as an incantation 

provoke a feeling that cradles a meaning? 

Can feeling, sensation, bring us back to the 

Real so that we return to understanding, to 

humility? For we are beings of dirt, of earth 

and no other place. We’d best look down, at the 

ground, and down into the being of our bodies

just as the stars look down on us

Wise Words: The Blinding Of The Stars

We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.

The blinding of the stars [due to light pollution] is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlines. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation … And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination.

(Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, Granta Publications: London, 2007, pp. 202–203)

The Feet Are The Link: A Poem

On Saturday I begin my writing course, Writing the Wild Soul, so I will be away for a few days, and may not post at all next week. Before I go I want to leave you with another of my intuitive pieces written in response to a line from a poem by Robert Bringhurst (yes, I admit I am a little bit obsessed with his words). I hope you like it.

The feet are the link 

between earth and the body. Begin there.

~ Robert Bringhurst, ‘Sengzhao’

Begin with the sole 

with fleshly soul 

with the whorls of skin 

the tough skin that touches 

dirt. With feet brown and blessed 

we plunge ever deeper into soil

into earth-bound stone, which holds us 

with the tenderness of a mother

What trials, what sorrows must we suffer

to be brought back to understanding? 

—this beginning that births us—

What fleshly cares do we embrace?

What reality is ours? 

The real is a cauldron of possibility

resting on a fire of spirit

boiling, bubbling

giving form to life

The feet are our connection 

our human roots, which bind us to 

the larger body, the earthly realm 

of nourishment and knowing

We cannot ask for more 

than what is given

(though we do)

We should lie back in acceptance 

of what is. But we burn for more

because we’ve lost what we had

turned away from earth

from simplicity of body and 

ancient sophistication of soul

We broke apart what was whole

what was contained inside 

the circle of eternity