Coming to Our Senses

After several sodden vision quest days in Nova Scotia, wishing for sun, I decided to just “love what is.” It was a good decision!  And this love letter to Nature, to the primal reality of a wet and dripping world was one of the results. Enjoy!

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Wind moves in the branches. This morning brings rain and fog, the call of a lonely sparrow, the tapping of dripping leaves. Water is everywhere, above and below. It surrounds and permeates everything, gray upon gray like an endless slate ocean. The grasses are bent. Their wispy heads fill with liquid like cotton-candy spun with dew-drop strands; soft, spongy clouds that shed their cold cargo upon sodden shoes and passing pants.

Waves beat upon the shore in unremitting splashes of salt, and rocks rattle as they tumble across the round stone beach. The spray is gathered up by warm breezes and spread over the landscape like hot, humid breath, spit hanging in the air. All is wet and womb-like. The atmosphere is pregnant with silence and waiting, its motion measured in trickling cadences.

The sun is invisible; the clock slows down. Light, sky, and shadow are all absorbed in dark, spongy tissue; contrast and change are impossible to determine. One might feel close to eternity, but the mind doesn’t like it. Space and time seem constant and endless, everything all at once. The air feels clammy, uncomfortable, and confining; smothering, sickening, ill-at-ease. There is nothing to do. Mist continues to fall.

Meanwhile, a different and joyful mood is manifesting at our feet. Roots drink in moisture like manna from heaven. The soil softens, its arteries opening to expanding rivulets as elements mix and melt, what’s formerly separate dissolved or held in suspension. Newts and salamanders emerge from musty leaves, their skin – tender as newborns – caressed by the damp and dew. Earthworms dance below the ground. Molds, mushrooms, and fungi declare a holiday. Snakes slither in sensuous delight.

But our eyes are looking up. We set them toward the sky, for it’s there we’ve placed all goodness – heaven, exalted planes, the infinite stars. We seek progress, growth, and achievement defined as “higher” education or income brackets. Children are “raised,” adults grown “up.” Jesus ascends to heaven; athletes elevate their game; generals rise through the ranks. We overcome our problems; seek a peace or perspective that’s above it all. Everyone wants to climb up the ladder of success, get the big raise, become part of the upper class, and have that office or penthouse on the top floor.

Our minds go against gravity and its sense. A bad day is a downer, shame a “fall” from grace. Reason is drawn to clear horizons, clarity, and light. It is wedded to the eyes, distant and visual. It longs for sky, wants off the planet. It desires objectivity, an abstract existence, space, grand vistas, generalizations, a bird’s eye view, vision…

But the rain is falling. Birds stay in their nests, their damp feathers too heavy for flight. Mud, mist, and wet leaves whisper ancient secrets to the naked skin. The scent of the air is rich with moist earth as other, older senses hold sway. A voice asks us to remember, to remember…Come down. Come down from the sky, from your head. Come down to your feet, the feeling of toes grasping the solid or slippery earth. Come back to the animal body, scents sent and received, the nose and its knowings.

Come down to the darkness and enter the shadows where exalted gods, once honored, reigned: Poseidon and dim Pluto, god of underworld riches…. Snake, Salmon, thundering herds led by great bulls… carriers of hoof, horn, fin, and tentacle, beings before becoming. Return to earth, to rest, to your roots. Return to the Garden, to knowledge born before the awareness of time marched onward, separating mind from body, nouns from verbs, and beast from beauty. Come home.

Come home to image and magic, to a golden age when people were out of their minds. Come back before language became human and written into stone, parchment, or key strokes. Come back to a time before words, when living was given and god awe-filled, when mysteries were felt and not solved, before sensing had to “make sense.”Honor your dark roots, the rain, and what’s irrational. Each one of our choices has been a way not chosen; every new freedom is also a form of forgetting. The world is pregnant with possibility. The sparrow calls again. “Come down. Go deeper.”

Treasures are hidden in caves or rest at the bottom of the sea. Riches are awaiting us in the underworld, our bodies, and on the earth. Feel your feet upon the ground. Live within this world. There you must find your power, your purpose, and your humanity.

The air is musty. Rain continues to fall. Animals walk softly in the Garden. Spiders are spinning nets that catch dewdrops like necklaces of silver. New seeds reach out amidst death and decay.

Find your gift or a god given craft – like great Daedalus – and build a bridge to the sky. But do not try to live there. Gravity is a force of attraction, and we must all come to earth, one way or another…. like Snake… like Bear…. like Christ in his manger…. or like Icarus, who never grew down.

~ Sparrow Hart… April 22, 2019