The Real

...For the settled, in their suburbs, steeped in that stagnant and tepid sink, time is sluggish with routine: a bleary sunrise and a blearier sunset. There, the past is framed in a fixed photographic grin, and the future is tamed with a pension plan. Nothing in nature is suburban. Nothing wild is phlegmatic and complacent. Nothing compares to the grotesque infantilism of the suburbs, sucking the dummy of the supermarket and every week squirting out the waste into giant plastic nappies, the bulging trash bags by the closed gate. In the suburbs, the alertness of all wild creatures is degraded into neurotic curtain-twitching. The curiosity of all animals degenerated into bingeing on Sky News. Queasily obedient, here life is just dull lull, tethered to a bungalow, an index-linked nap between two sleeps.
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We were made to walk through our lives wildly awake: our minds mobile, quick, changeable. We all are mercurial, our minds as winged as our feet, receiving signals and responding, volatile by nature; sunshine and showers, storms and dog days, we are various as the wild weather on the way and wet with it."

--Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

Does dreamtime ever seem more real to you than objective reality? I don't mean just sleeping-dreams, but the dream-state like on a forest walk when your mind breaches its usual confines and curls out like mist and flirts intimately with the birdsong, the Aspen leaves quaking in the wind, the sound of each step landing on soil and snapping twig ringing so crisp, your breath, the mind clearing and emptying and connecting to this ever-present realness; or a daydream state one can fall into while watching the leafy tree shadows dance across the curtain when you find yourself lying in the middle of the made bed on a Tuesday at 1:00PM, in momentary rebellion against Zoom meetings and answering emails and "being found well." This state, it's the least we can do for our overstimulated modern minds, the precious things, bless them. What an era we've been born into- we, who are still archaic up our spines, staring into various blue-lit screens and trying to make sense of this big new world, giving all sorts of diagnostic names to what boils down to going too fast, having too much [but never enough], and feeling alone.

The world is a weird place these days, and maybe it has always felt this way to the people of each time. But I don't think so. There are so many accounts of indigenous cultures talking about the connectedness they once felt before time and money were ever introduced to them. Depression isn't heard of. Not even back pain! Somewhere in the world, right this minute, there is a woman who has birthed a baby and is being tended to by the other women of her village. She doesn't have to look or act a certain way, be edgy nor politically correct to be loved by them, they have grown together, they know one another's grandparents and have sang songs together under harvest moons and on amber-lit dewy mornings, and she isn't alone in the threshold-crossing, or ever.

I don't feel lonely, and I think this is because of my connection to the land and nature around me, which I feel so fortunate for as any reader of this blog knows well, but I am aware of what we have let go in some distant past, and I do long for that, and reminisce...

Do you remember the mornings the village would wake singing together and the song would be carried throughout the day, like in Los Angeles circa 1870, each person stepping in as needed to keep it alive. Such songlines are in our blood, and in our bone-memory, we can recall how it felt to sing the rain in, to sing the morning in, to sing a weaving song, a wheat threshing song, to meet our lover in a shared song, that dissipated into a hum, then a rhythm of breaths, that boulder-old sacred dance of oneness, mmm. 

"It was the custom of the town of Los Angeles in all of the families of the early settlers for the oldest members of the family to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star and at once strike up a hymn. From house to house, street to street, the singing spread, and the volume of musical sound swelled until it was as if the whole town sang."

-- The West, Season 1 episode 7

We are made to move and we are made to have meaning in every single act of life. We are made to rejoice and cry and be held and to hold, to sweat and be covered in wild dust from dancing around evening fires with our kith and kin.

In Old Tahiti when Europeans had first met the place, it was written how the people, those mystical Polynesian bloodlines, were upright pillars of health. I read an account of the women bathing in the natural pools, rubbing the oil of coconut over themselves, and scenting their skin with the gardenia blossom. Can you feel the warm sun of that pre-industrial past?

Can you imagine the vitality of a Mongolian reindeer herder riding out across the grass steppe, a song forming in his throat, harmonizing with his horse's whinnying. All he knows is freedom, and light, fur of beast, and hoof-printed earth. 

Or the Himba people, still holding onto the remnants of root-gathering women, sitting relaxed on the earth in the mid-day sun, braiding each other's hair. At night, dancing together, singing, happy, celebratory, in harmony still with a natural order.

All of the unique cultures of the world are now being blended together under globalism and multiculturalism and as boundaries blur and world travel becomes a norm, we lose these distinct lifeways, each unique color of the palette smearing together into a muddy blah.

I crave the richness, the distinction, the sharp raw realness of life lived true and potent, under the sun, sprinting barefoot through the woods, singing with galloping untamed voices. I want to be with my husband in some highland canyon at noon in the nude, not in front of a computer screen. We need work that is real, and we need to sit together around fires and not worry about seeming some certain scholarly Western way, but just opening our hearts in song and dance and earnest connection. We need true rest, and we need ancient rhythms.

This society is dying for something to change, dying for some heart to come back into life. I don't mean Sunday morning in a building singing hymns kind of heart, but a divine daily exuberation that was once inherently ours, before we domesticated transcendence, before we tamed powerful pure expression.

Do you remember the look we once had in our eyes before cameras and mirrors everywhere made us so aware of our own faces? It was happy and honest, curious and present.

We are weakened by too much artificial light, too much noise, too much complacency. The world now a mere simulation of the myths and tales we used to live inside of, so we curl up on couches alone clutching our wine glass, desperate to find some story we can fall into, some other story, one that is not our own.

It breaks my heart to see a man who would have been a valiant warrior, you can see in his eyes, now made soft and skinny by the modern world. Or a woman who could be out under the sun growing flowers and vegetables, taking a noon swim, smiling instead of furrowing her brow behind a 9-5 desk. 

We wanted progress and we wanted to extract, and we wanted these things because we wanted to ensure our survival, but at what cost? The long-term vision is blurring, if ever there was one. Now we are unwell, and we've normalized this way.

I don't type out this stream of consciousness tonight because I'm unhappy. I feel contented in life while also noticing utter societal disfunction and having-gone-awryness. I have made peace with what is and am grateful for my work, my home, my love (who is thankfully as untamed at the core as I), this land. But, I have a  streak tucked down in me that is alive and sometimes writhing with restlessness, so writing about these thoughts is an antidote I suppose to disrupting my safe routine, which is needed, which I must maintain, to function well in the world as it currently is.

From my little campfire at this mountaintop to yours, a light in the dark, a flickering in the foggy night. Is that vital force still in you? Don't let it go out. Remember the wild water, the freedom, real laughter, how your body feels when it's strong and open, how your mind feels when it's clear and serene and confident, remember loyalty, and honor, remember pure love for no gain whatsoever, remember sacrifice, remember dark starry night, remember the dew of morning, remember divine connection, remember what is at the center of you that wasn't born and doesn't die, because it will be there when the sun casts a flare that shuts the modern world down and we have to return to something more real, when we have to rely on one another again and lay down all the pettiness we currently have the gluttonous leisure of wasting so much destructive time on. Remember goodness. Remember non-destructive pleasure. And the sacred balance of all of it.