Inner-Wilderness.com

One part of my regular Sit Spot routine in nature is to give thanks to the various aspects of nature I want to keep in my awareness, so that I remember to pay attention and to appreciate their direct relationship to me. Fortunately, there is a rich tradition of a Thanksgiving Address which may be over 1,000 years old and has been and brought to us via the Iroquois or Six Nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora people. This Thanksgiving Address helps me connect to and remember different aspects of nature just by visualizing our world in layers from the Earth’s core outward to the stars. It starts and ends with fire.

So, think of the earth in layers, starting at the center with a molten core of fire. Each layer moves some distance outwards from the center of the core. Up through the rock to the surface, to the water layer, the plants layer, animals, trees, and finally the atmosphere and celestial layers— the stars and our own Sun as we end as we began, with fire.

As I sit at my spot today and feel gratitude for the layers of nature, I give my Thanksgiving for all the following, any one of which humans literally could not survive without:

Earth Core Fires: To the molten fires of the inner earth that forever create new lands.

Earth Crust: To the soils that provide nourishment for growth and to the bacteria and microorganisms who live in the soils and decompose what is to be recycled.

Water: To the waters within me, underground water, streams to oceans and to all the fish and beings who live in the water.

Herbaceous Plants: To the plants that provide us all with food and medicine and provide our animal neighbors shelter, food and cover.

Animals: To all our mammal friends and human family, and to the amphibians, reptiles, and insects for their companionship, pollinating abilities, food, and medicine.

Trees: To the trees who give us every aspect of essential resource we need for shelter, food, shade and fuel and oxygen.

Air: To the air and the rotating air masses that cleanse us with seasons, storms and to the bird and insect wildlife who live above the ground.

Moon: To the moon—the ocean’s lover—who gives us tides, cycles of time and light to sprout our crops.

Sun and Stars: To the stars and our own Sun which guide us, mark time for us and makes all life possible through photosynthesis. We thank the steady fires from above.

Now are minds are one. May you find deep gratitude this Thanksgiving for the world that makes your life possible.

If you are already feel thoroughly familiar with everything woolly, then skip to the bottom for a photo quiz of some other fuzzy beauties. The brown and black woollies are not hard to find these days—you have to swerve to miss them as they book it across the roads in search of food, especially dandelion greens, violets and plantain. Yesterday, on a fifteen minute walk, I picked up and ushered five of the larvae to the other side of the road.

I like what these caterpillars represent to me: wriggling bundles of latent potential, patiently preparing for transformation. Preparing by putting on their fuzzy winter coats. I’m blissfully ignorant about these larvae’s fuzz, which is why I can so readily anthropomorphize about their winter coats. I have no idea why they are fuzzy. But I am not making up the transformation in their futures. Like the calm before the storm, they head into the calm slumber of winter, to curl into themselves, percolate, spin cocoons and eventually emerge in April as a seemingly whole new being: the Isabella Tiger Moth. Perhaps that is what winter is for— to pull into oneself, percolate and transform towards a lighter, airborne being?

Well, here’s the quiz: Can any of you supply some info about the identities and hidden potentials of these other three fuzzies?

This week has seen the Earth in a brief balance with the sun as the sun glides over Earth’s equator to bring the autumnal equinox where the night equals length to the day. This sets off the season when we allow the yang energy of summer to pass and we head towards the dark, yin energy of the winter. Or, as some see it, the summer is a time of extroverted, social, picnic and party activity lit up by the long bright days of masculine sun energy. For them, the sun now leads us towards the introspective, hearth-centered gathering time of feminine spiritual activities lit up by the fires and candles that sparkle during the long nights. In yet another perspective, Jung may have seen summer as outward, social, ego manifestation that now moves down towards a more unconscious, mysterious, deep soul time of autumn and winter. However one looks at it, the seasons bring change and this week we rest briefly in a balanced wholeness between two ends of different experience and ways of being.

Can you tune your senses into the shifting energy and seasons in the world and in your self? Can you experience and then hold the ephemeral balance in yourself? What would an internal equinox be to you?

I tried to experience this myself on my recent Labor Day kayaking trip. I launched at sunset on the day of a full moon. On full moon days, the moon rises in the sky directly opposite of where the sun sets within minutes of the sun slipping under the horizon. I pointed my kayak north, extended my paddles west to the sun and east to the moon and tried to viscerally feel the world being in balance, knowing that this brief transient moment would soon tip towards the descent into autumn and winter in the world and in myself.

I had the good fortune to spend a weekend at the beach with a good friend near where the tidal Potomac meets the Chesapeake Bay.

On this trip, I kept being drawn out onto the water at moonrise as darkness arose. My kayaking partner and I set out to explore the back coves of an estuary off the Potomac. Kayaking at night brings on a whole alternative set of sensations and opens a whole other world as we traded our dominant vision perception for some of our often lesser-used senses. We were familiar with our route as we glided amongst the grassy islands, but still the dark was disorienting and every island started to look like the same dark mass. I could feel the water with my paddle stroke, but couldn’t see it. I only knew of the water’s tidal movement by the odd tug it put on my boat as it moved me in directions other than where I paddled. At times, I felt I was sitting still, but I drifted, pulled by currents underneath me, unseen. Even with the bright, full moon, relationships to above water figures and objects were shadowy, at best.

I thought about the close parallels between how my kayak was balanced on the surface edge of water and sky and how my conscious mind negotiated and rocked on the surface of my vast unconscious mind, which contains life forms of its own. Occasionally I’d hear a fish jump, (or was that a shadowy emergence of a part of myself?) Jung stated that, in dreams, fish are always symbols of unconscious contents.

During these night forays, I consciously kayaked the surface of my unconscious mind. Just taking this parallel inner/outer perspective generated in me a state of awe and wonder, both at the wonderful natural world I was in, and of the magical metaphor that delivered extra meaning. I allowed the dark night and fantastic moon to create a dream-like experience.

And, just like in a dream, the unexpected occurred, its anticipation wonderfully thwarted by the darkness. As we rounded the last island to paddle back to our beach, we flushed a flock of forty or so Canada Geese who had come in to set for the night. The big, powerful, birds exploded out of the waters surrounding us, with wingbeats, honking and splashing coming into our ears from all directions.

That night, I lay in bed listening to the surf breaking on the shore below our cottage. And as I drifted to sleep, I imagine I seamlessly slipped down into the dark water of my unconscious sleep world, joining the unseen, yet-to-be known fishes in the depths.

NPR’s Living On Earth segment ran a story this week about silence in nature. Though this story could be interpreted as decrying human noise pollution, another listen could help us focus on being mindful of our ears.

Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton in the NPR piece reminds us that “all the higher invertebrates have the ability to hear, but not all of them have the ability to see.” He stresses that hearing, and even more importantly listening, is critical to all vertebrates— and that includes us. We have eyelids but no earlids, again indicating biology’s strong emphasis that we need to listen.

But smart, large-brained mammals like us have compensated for a lack of earlids by tuning out and turning off our senses. The sounds of the natural environment around us can be drowned out by the mental chatter we tolerate inside of our heads. I know this from experience. I work diligently at nature awareness, and yet I am astounded at how I can walk out to my barn— head full of ideas—and nearly totally miss the scolding catbird, the croaking bullfrog, and the rhythmic cicadas.

This week I was out with a local group at the Middle River at nightfall. The group stood in a circle that tightened up as it grew darker and darker. We listened to the silence and punctuated it with stories, laughter and jokes. Followed by more silent periods of listening to ourselves, to each other, to the land and its critters. It was as if the group was floating down the stream of natural engagement with the culture amongst us and the wilds around us—the total ecosystem. Laughter was our gift to the whole tableau. It didn’t feel totally human-centric, nor did we seem like intrusive noise-polluters violating a sacred silence.

I’m sure the experience spoke differently to each person present, as is always the case. We may hear the same sounds, but the same acoustic waves filter through our bones, brains and hearts so that listen creates a different message for each of us. Which creates diversity— that old commodity that allows nature in and around us to thrive.

Mindfulness of self and nature: sensory-based, non-judging, in the present moment–the total opposite to tuning out.

Reference: National Public Radio”s Living On Earth, August 21, 2009. Author Gordon Hempton’s new book: One Square Inch of Silence; One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World.

Workshop participants recently set out to practice a silent movement technique called fox-walking. The goal: to move silently and stealthily through the environment so as to not be readily heard or seen by the wild neighbors. Fox-walking is a stalking skill passed down from indigenous peoples worldwide, and perfected here in North America by some of the most skilled, the Apaches.

Fox-walking slows one down and frees one to keep one’s eyes looking ahead and around rather than looking at the ground. It minimizes bobbing body motions, helps make ones’ movement smooth and steady. You to feel like you are blending in with the natural environment—because you are!

In this day’s practice at the Belle Grae Inn, participants came back reporting that the pet dog of the inn was observing the practice and started a low growl at people sneaking around the grounds. A clear validation that participants were able to change their relationship to the environment! Feedback we get from other-than-humans is some of the most reliable and gratifying and tells us that we can create new relationships to the wilderness—even in downtown Staunton!

But, the question was raised, if fox-walking sets off alarms in animals, how does that help us? It’s great question which led to a discussion about how the domestic dogs may perceive change in human behavior and how that may or may not relate to wild animal responses. Also it allowed us to introduce the concept that nature has a baseline “language” that can be sensed by animals (and humans) which tells everyone that “all is well.” Often human behavior in the woods inadvertently sends messages of alarm out into the environment which is then picked up well in advance of our arrival by the birds and the other critters, giving them time to flee or hide before we even get near them. On this day, stalking behavior triggered an alarm response in the dog—who read fox-walking as a departure from baseline.

So while we learned that silent movement is one aspect of blending into the environment, the dogs taught us that we need to  learn skills for how to avoid alarming the birds and other critters. We left wanting to learn how our human presence can maintain the baseline of calm in the woods that animals need to feel safe and not flee from us.

I got a wild hair some years ago living back in D.C. and decided I was going to spend the whole summer barefoot- an experiment in “back to nature”, urban style. Of course, there were places I wasn’t allowed to go without shoes, but amazingly there were not as many of them as one might think. I just carried a pair of flip-flops in my backpack for when they were needed.

The experiment was weird and painful at first— a nuisance that slowed me down— but I quickly got some “toughness going” and then it became an amazing reawakening of something that was primal. My feet became a major source of information, like foreign correspondents who send in constant reports from the field. We’re so used to getting all our primary sensory information only via our head senses. It really is something to be in constant touch with all the varied textures of human-made and natural textures and temperatures throughout the day under your feet.

Recently I read in Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine (June ’09) about barefooters who hike the Appalachian Trail. The article in the magazine reports there is a new Barefoot Hikers of Virginia group based out of Lynchburg. Amazingly, you can even check out a book all about it, The Barefoot Hiker, by Richard Franzine.

It’s true that at first, barefooting, can cause muscle soreness and you have to strengthen your bare soles. And you have to walk a bit differently— no shuffling, for example— to keep from stubbing toes. But being barefoot certainly aids in walking more quietly, and reportedly reduces stress on knees and back from being a more natural posture.

Now I don’t expect many people will be in a position to radically abandon footwear, but, perhaps a little bit of your time outdoors barefoot is feasible? And I don’t just mean in the backyard. Next time you are able to take a wilderness walk, I challenge you to take your hiking boots off for part of it. Plan to go very slowly. Allow yourself to get dirt and mud on and between your toes. Be gentle stepping though leaves where you can’t see what’s underneath. And for your first try, barefoot somewhere where the terrain isn’t too rocky.

You’re one step closer to forging a stronger connection with the natural world! I know from experience that these visceral experiences can reawaken something enticingly primal which can lead to other observations that take you inward. Pay close attention to what the earth tells you through your feet. When the earth talks to us, we want to be ready to listen. Brave soles/Brave souls?

photo by Karla Souder

What superpower would you want? The ability to fly? Wallcrawling? Telekinesis? The superpower most animals seem to want is invisibility! It’s what keeps them alive to see another day. Can you see the animal in this picture?

Invisibility isn’t just about not being seen, but is also about not being smelled or heard. Think of the scentless fawn who can safely hide “invisibly” in the tall grass while it’s mother is away. Or think of the soundless walkers—those from the feline families who “invisibly” sneak up behind their prey.

To increase the feeling of truly being a part of the natural world one benefits dramatically by thinking in terms of senses and invisibility, because that is the way the animal kingdom functions. It is easy to see how if we learn how to be more invisible to animals we will be able to see and experience much more in the wild than ever before.

That’s what practicing visibility does for us. But, what does it do to us? The very act of practicing being invisible in nature, even if one is really bad at it, is that the practice itself shifts one into a non-ordinary state of ego consciousness. So even if you are sneaking around, trying to be all invisible and every single bird, mammal, amphibian and everyone else can hear, see and smell you coming a mile away, it still is of benefit to you to do it!

Just the experience of a non-ordinary state of consciousness in nature helps our psyches. How? Clearly, practicing invisibility through silent walking, natural camouflage and expanded sensory perception is NOT like eating hallucinogenic mushrooms to expand one’s consciousness, or any other sort of dramatic chemical or otherwise induced state of altered consciousness. That’s not what we’re talking about. Instead, we’re talking about a subtle shift towards a non-ordinary state of consciousness which can allow our unconscious to become a bit more accessible to our normal waking ego consciousness—somewhat like in the way we have communications with lesser known parts of ourselves when we dream at night.

Another shift is that nature runs on “nature time” which is far different than 21st century human timeframes. When we practice invisibility, we naturally slow down to a speed more like animals use. That puts our bodies and psyches even more in synch with the environment around us. We learn to move when the wind rustles the leaves, and to stand still when the other sounds are still, so as to blend in.

When you believe you are invisible and you do the things that support that—like silent walking, slowing down, attention to how you look and smell– you become truly a part of that ecosystem for the time you are there, rather than the clumsy visitor— the tourist— just passing through. Your psyche can tell the difference. Something in you reawakens. And you’ll know it when you feel it.

Perhaps this change towards an intensely tuned, slowed, outward physical behavior and inward psychic behavior takes us back to our childhood experiences. Human children are instinctively and passionately drawn to hiding games (being invisible) because, just like bobcat kittens or any wildlife youngster, they sense their vulnerability. Rescue trackers who seek to find lost outdoorsman— adult or children— report time and again that lost people often have the seemingly irrational urge to hide, making the rescuer’s job that much harder. I and others can attest that after awhile of practicing invisibility out in the woods, one gets strong urges to hide, for example, if one hears a car coming. I think it is because this shift in consciousness harkens our psyches back to a different time and way of being, and manifests a latent prehistorical behavior in us back to the surface.

Invisibility, a superpower? A latent skill waiting to be rekindled? A door to the unconscious psyche? There’s one way to find out! Come, learn some of the outer skills of invisibility and see for yourself. And the animal in the picture- a Whitetail Deer, facing left, head down.

Our unconscious minds speak to us through images. These images can come to us in our nightly dreams, but also can come to use through real objects and scenes in nature that evoke emotional responses in us. In this way, we can say that nature acts as a mirror for our internal selves.

For example, a man and a woman take a walk in the woods and see a gnarled tree trunk with bare branches. On the tip of one branch hangs a solitary leaf. Let’s say that for both persons, the image creates a little tug on his or her heartstring. The image is the same for both people but the meaning may be different.

After exploring the feelings about the images for a bit, the woman may connect that the “meaning” of that image is really of her grief about her own aging, symbolized by the gnarled body of a tree trunk and the memory of younger “leaves” of yesterday. For the man, a similar self-analysis reveals the “meaning” of the image to be a symbol of his own inability to let go of a past relationship- symbolized by the hanging-on by the tree long after the leaf should have naturally been let go.

We project our personal meanings and stories onto images we encounter in nature. At night in our dreams,  our unconscious parts of ourselves speak back to us in images, as well. You may have heard of a psychological test called the Rorschach Inkblot Test. Taught today in up to 80% of graduate psychology programs, it has been around now since the 1920’s.

In that test, a person is instructed to report what images are seen in random inkblot images. Meaning can be derived from interpreting the images “seen.” It is much the same  when we lie on our backs, look at the sky and tell stories about what we see in the clouds. It is also how humans have come to we came to make stories out of the star constellations. As a species, we attribute meaning to nature images. And some of the meaning and images express our deep personal stories. Humans have done this throughout history.

Why nature images and not urban images, for example? Nature images are important as mirror our projections because our human experience with nature goes back 40,000 years. Post-industrial revolution images only go back 200-300 years. The experiences that have shaped our DNA throughout our evolution have been saturated since the beginning of time in nature images, even if now in the 21rst century we are more insulated from the wilds.

Images of the natural world shaped our human experience and crafted our human instinctive response. Rare is the person who has a sudden encounter with a snake in the grass just ahead and doesn’t jump back out of instinct. That snake produces a real psychological and physical effect even for people generally not afraid of snakes. Nature images have deep meaning that runs across the human culture and is embedded in our unconscious.

So we have the opportunity to use nature to explore the deep meanings it holds for our individual selves—not just as an intellectual curiosity, but as a highly personal tool of self-exploration. Through using both real nature images and our nightly dreams, we can enter onto an alternative path of deep psychological self-discovery.

Black-tailed Deer, Odocoileus hemionus

Looking back to early human societies and their relationships to nature can inform us today about our “modern” cultural beliefs we hold about the natural world; beliefs held, perhaps, unconsciously.

If we want to use nature as a mirror, it is helpful to think deeply about the assumptions that underlie our culture’s belief system. Throughout his various books, the mythologist Joseph Campbell examined primitive human cultures and their relationships to their food sources and how this impacted their belief systems about nature broadly. He specifically compared hunting cultures and planting cultures.

Primitive hunting cultures relied on individuals making often dangerous forays out to kill wild animals which were then brought back and shared with the small village. In these cultures, death nearly always came via violence, for the animal or for the man. Hunting cultures often held beliefs that while the corporal animal dies, the immortal essence of the animal does not, and the animal essence is absorbed into the eater. Hunting cultures often believed there was a self-sacrifice on the part of the animal to the hunter and they also often believe there was a magical, mystical “unity” between the hunter and the hunted. Success in the hunt was due to individual skill plus luck. Campbell wrote that hunting cultures often organized themselves patriarchy, with the focus on strong individuality, as it was the strength and skill of the individual men that brought food to the village.

Planting cultures, on the other hand, often held very different world views. In planting societies, the village group planted seed as a community effort. The plant dies at the end of its fertility cycle and is annually reborn via seed. In these cultures, death is seen within a cycle—a phase within life— often followed by rebirth elsewhere. Communal agriculture in village life follows a predictable solar calendar and success is built on consistent group effort, nurturing and respect for the elements. Campbell says that planting cultures are usually matriarchal, as in these societies women— who physically embody the natural rhythms of nature in their bodies— could play a more dominant role as food providers for the village.

These hunting and planting worldviews are ancient to us as a species. They are the bedrock of humanity’s social formation and have become archetypal in the human races’ consciousness. So how does this link to our individual inner selves, today? One way to think about it might be to ask yourself the questions, “What is my inner mythology?” “Do I feed my inner village as a hunter would or as a planter?” There are no right or wrong answers, only increased insight into your inner processes.

Can you identify what is the “food source” part of you—the inner part of you that nourishes and sustains you on a daily basis without which you could not survive? Once you get some picture of that food source part of yourself, you can take the next step and look at whether the rest of you relates to your food source part from the hunters’ or the planters’ perspective? Can you tell? Is there a blend? What effect does that have on how you experience yourself?

Outer cultural myth and inner individual psychology can be approached as similar models on different scales. Humans have a long and complex relationship to nature and that history informs each and every one of us…sometimes consciously and— more often—unconsciously. Let’s shine some light into the ancient parts of ourselves that are still operating within us today, make them more conscious, and see what we discover.

For a nice overview of Joseph Campbell’s lifework from which I drew many of these hunter/planter descriptions, here’s the reference:

Segal, R.(1987). Joseph Campbell: An introduction. New York: Penguin Books.