WILDNESS
As humans, we need a forceful dialectic of physical, sensuous, elemental interaction with landscape. If you look at the wildlife about us—rabbits, birds, foxes—there is a seamless kind of wildness in them. There is a sense of fluency with the place they are in and the way they move in it. One of the reasons that the post-modern mind is so packed and tight is that we have lost touch with our wildness. One of the most natural ways of coming home to your wildness is to go out into a wild place. Visually, this is often evident in people’s faces. Years ago, when people worked more on the land, they had a winnowed look on their faces. Now there is a great homogenization of our appearance. Similarly in the way people walked. Land people walked in a land kind of way. The spread of the land was on them, as we would say. Now more and more people walk in a corridor fashion, unlike the peasants who walked the land in their own way. I love the word “peasant.” Those who use it in a derogatory manner are just uninformed, naive and vulgar. It is very difficult for people of the land to find a vocabulary for the dignity of their work and presence and belonging in the land. So much of modern opinion is fashioned in the urban world and by urban forces. How much of the television we watch refers to the land in a way that would make the people who live on the land feel they are in a noble setting? Very little, I suspect, and yet if we go back in folk consciousness there was a time when that was the most beautiful way to dwell on the earth.
WATER
Having climbed up Máméan we have a bird’s-eye view and we realize how much water there is in this landscape. There is a huge conversation in Connemara between granite and water. All around us are beautiful lakes, with mountain streams pouring into them. I love mornings after heavy rain when you hear the music of the water finding its way down the mountains. Chiffon-like streams ornament and bedeck the mountain as they weave their way. I wrote about this in a poem about Gleninagh, which is only down the road from here.
Gleninagh
The dark inside us is sistered outside
in night which dislikes the light of the face
and the colors the eye longs to embrace.
Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,
a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass
and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.
Something has broken inside this Spring night,
unconsolably its rain teems unseen
onto Gleninagh Mountain’s listening depth.
Next morning the light is cleansed to behold
the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt
out of unknown pores in the mountain’s hold.
From Echoes of Memory
Now it has started to mist and rain. The rain is never far away here! I welcome it because one of my fears is the way the government relentlessly nurtures the tourist industry. Ireland is a small country and if the tourist numbers aren’t modified it could be overrun. Voyeuristic commercial tourism can do a lot of damage. The English scientist Rupert Sheldrake was asked what single change he would recommend for the new millennium that could make a difference to the world. His reply was that every tourist should become a pilgrim.
There is something eternal about the landscape. It wants to address us but we are not subtle enough to pick it up. The radar of our senses, while beautiful, is incredibly limited. This is illustrated for me by a parable I was once told. There was a stone in the corner of a meadow and under that stone lived a colony of ants. They were just ordinary ants but among them lived a genius ant, an Einstein ant. One day the board of the colony addressed the genius ant, telling it that there was nothing more for it to learn and it would have to leave them and go out into the world. So on a misty October evening the colony bestowed its valediction on the genius and it made its entry into the world. There happened to be a totally non-metaphysical horse grazing nearby. Regardless of how brilliant our genius ant is, it will never be able to perceive the horse, such is the disproportion in size….So I wonder are there presences all around us, that because of the disproportion between our senses and their presence, we are not picking up at all? We are seeing a lot more vacancy and voids in the world than actually exist. Maybe it is the role of the artists and mystics to attend to the seeming emptiness about us and find incredible riches there. Wendell Berry is one such artist. He is a farmer and writer who lives in Kentucky and he attends deeply to nature. I will conclude with a beautiful poem of his from the series Sabbaths, entitled “I Go Among Trees and Sit Still.”
I Go Among Trees and Sit Still
I go among trees and sit still
All my stirring becomes quiet around me like
circles on water,
My tasks lie in their places where I left them,
asleep like cattle,
Then what is afraid of me comes and lives
awhile in my sight,
What it fears in me leaves me and the fear of me
leaves it,
It sings and I hear its song,
Then what I am afraid of comes,
I live for a while in its sight
What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it
leaves me.
It sings and I hear its song
After days of labor, mute in my consternations
I hear my song at last, and I sing it.
As we sing, the day turns, the trees move.
In Praise of the Earth
Let us bless
The imagination of the Earth.
That knew early the patience
To harness the mind of time,
Waited for the seas to warm,
Ready to welcome the emergence
Of things dreaming of voyaging
Among the stillness of land.
And how light knew to nurse
The growth until the face of the earth
Brightens beneath a vision of color
When the ages of ice came
And sealed the earth inside
An endless coma of cold,
The heart of the earth held hope,
Storing fragments of memory,
Ready for the return of the sun.
Let us thank the Earth
That offers ground for home
And holds our feet firm
To walk in space open
To infinite galaxies.
Let us salute the silence,
And certainty of mountains:
Their sublime stillness,
Their dream-filled hearts.
The wonder of a garden
Trusting the first warmth of spring
Until its black infinity of cells
Becomes charged with dream;
Then the silent, slow nurture
Of the seed’s self, coaxing it
To trust the act of death.
The humility of the earth
That transfigures all
That has fallen
Of outlived growth.
The kindness of the earth,
Opening to receive
Our worn forms
Into the final stillness.
Let us ask forgiveness of the earth
For all our sins against her:
For our violence and poisonings
Of her beauty.
Let us remember within us
The ancient clay,
Holding the memory of seasons,
The passion of the wind,
The fluency of water,
The warmth of fire,
The quiver-touch of the sun
And shadowed sureness of the moon.
That we may awaken,
To live to the full
The dream of the earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit and light.
From To Bless the Space Between Us
ABSENCE
“While we are here in the world, where is it that we are absent from?”