‘Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present…. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament—the gospel according to this moment…. I hear a cockerel crow far or near… and with a sudden gush return to my senses.’ —Thoreau, “Walking”
Back to the basics: in touch with the roots. Human feet on real earth, among the old trees. We start from here. We start again. One step at a time; each step new, past and present and future no more complicated than that, one step ahead of another.
Limit the possible not to what is predetermined, but to what applies on the human scale. Otherwise, why bother, for whose glory or self-seeking purpose? What nourishes?
Once entering the forest on foot, give self over to forest. Open to receive. Dance with what you and I might become, alone, together.
grandmother tree says,
mind your manners, wayward son
just feel me in you
A gang of teens arrives, from the nearby school. That’s different. Life a flock of chattering birds, or monkeys. They too become part of the forest, and it a part of them.
Are not the mountains, waves and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, and I of them?
—Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Sean Arthur Joyce, Words from the Dead
Where do we go from here? (projecting like it’s 1997)
In a time of the history of the world when the forests are the last great slave market, I hear an Abo prophet shout, “Citizens! Vikings, Mongols, Romans, lend me your ears! There is a new way coming!” And I have to wonder, will we still be around when it arrives? Will our home still be viable enough to sustain us in the era of our awakening?
I, too, postulate an awakening, because without it there is extinction and suffocation, mass misery and unartful collapse of the most serious order.
It comes down to the now, the moving now. Because without a new and moving now, the bones of our ancestors move us too slowly. With a new and moving now, we can come free into the present future and say, thank you ancestors for bringing us here, now what is to be done?
To stop the programs and looping routines long enough to wonder, what next? Which direction, of all those possible, may be more advantageous than the one I’m on, we’re on collectively, up to this point? We stand on a point of time, with blankness all around. One path appears before us: steps by steps continuing, an echo of the past. These steps too lead into darkness, but the motion of our past movement impels us blindly forward. If we were to stop and look around, we might envision creating footsteps, by our own simple walking, in paths as yet unexplored. There is a frontier yet to be tasted: not in any continent but that of the human spirit. Here too we may suppose it’s all been done: but the next moment is unprecedented, the conditions changed. The dynamics of the whole have come into play as never before, and will continue to create novel contexts by which to judge each next move. This game develops new and evolving rules, and twists of rules, all the time. Random factors are at work, giving us continual opportunities to change our expectations.
My cat, I notice, is a creature of habit. A predator, he leans on expectations of my behavior, another creature of habit. When the second alarm goes off in the morning, he arrives in the bedroom waiting by my clothes shelf to rub against my legs as I dress. If I linger in bed, he waits impatiently there, wondering what went wrong. His pattern is bred to watch the pattern of prey, those stupider animals on which he feeds, which run in predictable paths and so are caught through his watchful presence.
Do I pattern my behavior on mouse, or cat, or something more watchful still? In my freedom to choose my action at every moment, to walk at will through an untracked wilderness, is a power so often disused as to astonish me. To abdicate such power collectively is to allow the unimpeded, hyperbolic advance of planetary eco-collapse which appears on every graph of world-watchers since the middle of this century.
Even this perspective, one might say, is not new anymore. It’s just more fuel for the flames: computer time, paper weight. What words can poorly convey, however, spirit can take beyond. By leaving these tracks in the sand, I might see the route of my own departure.
Somewhere we fly together, dreaming, singing. Somewhere the dance goes on without end. The footsteps we leave are only the measures of our stride; ripples the mark of our course on the waters. Our freedom yesterday gives us nothing but another choice today.
Isn’t this mysticism? Of course. What else drives the world, gives us hope and purpose, than a connection with life-force, full force, filling us as full as we dare? Mysticism is a primitive skill.
Walking on the frozen flats at the head of the lake, I notice my tracks go straight; when I decide to change direction, the new direction is also straight; I walk a large zig-zag pattern. Coming into the sparse brush, I continue walking straight until I notice deer tracks, meandering with gentle curves through the brush. This brush is sparse enough that a straight path would still be convenient. Yet, following the deer’s tracks, there is a different consciousness at work. This meandering course of gentle curves, I discover, can only be made step by step, moment by moment, with decisions always tentative, subject to influence by the next whiff of air, the next attractive bud, the next whim of inspiration or pure serendipity.
Walking: this, too, is a primitive skill.
—from Before the World Burns: How to Make a Fire (March 1997). This article appeared with audio clips at The Animist – Electronic Journal of the Arts, January 2000. It appears in the 2014 collection, My Country: Essays and Stories from the Edge of Wilderness. (Free download now for Kindle or outside the US.)
