The Clearing

Joy. Division

‘Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.’

Rainer Maria Rilke

I’m going to be dropping these occasional streams of consciousness into this clearing like seeds into earth, words to the wind – each a simple kernel allowed to wend its way, wherever that may be. They are meditations, rather than contemplations because they seek to honour the "ood of a moment and to simply allow the "ow of what comes. My hope is that each will be of a moment, carrying some energetic alignment. And that each will be brave and authentic, perhaps exploring parts not so often explored. This one begins with an extremely simple premise and a concise de$nition of what we speak of when we talk about nature.

Nature is the absence of cultivation. Quite literally. It is what is when everything is allowed. It is authenticity in wildness – shaped only by what is innate and essential. Nature is never created, planned or practiced into being, but acts as she is – a harmonious, streaming event made of many events, made of many more, moved by all, like a murmuration. The awe she inspires, the terror, the beauty and power – one whole, one happening. She does not hide her pools of shade and red. Light and dark are one expression – each giving meaning to the other like day and night, sunlight and shadow, life and death.

In ill-health we tend towards fragmentation. The $rst cut, the deepest, is often the severance of the story of our own nature from that of an increasingly abstract idea of macrocosmic nature; nature as a whole. And our humanity from humanity more broadly. When we speak of the environment – we speak of something peripheral to our centred selves and civilisations. We fail to place ourselves in the world. The wheeling, flowing dance of ourselves is spun in the centrifuge of the thinking mind into every constituent part that had formed the whole – into micro-analysis of our deeds and proclivities, paths and potentialities, into alienation, isolation, a hardening, blaming, lashing out.

The whole will gather around our pain as the whole of our bodies will when we are wounded – to soften the pain with shock, to clot and stem the loss of blood, preservation of life force, increasing flow and oxygen, accessing our incredible bodily pharmacy of neurotransmitters and natural medicine. It will heal or deepen our fragmentation depending on the conscious direction we choose. Start to perceive threat or mistrust in the faces we encounter and we will increasingly see it everywhere – like if we start to count each blue car. We make patterns of our fear – we will find blue cars everywhere. It is a particular hue in a particular feather of a particular starling as it catches the light of a particular moment. But we begin to colour the world with it.

Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark. Zen proverb

Joy is experience before we get involved; beauty before we paint it with our conditioning. We may feel great joy simply in the presence of the kind of sunrise that soothes and washes the whole sky with warmth and colour.

Joy is in this direct, unnamed, un-thought-about immersion in such a moment – in life simply experiencing itself – before we begin to think about what is beautiful, why it is beautiful, what it is called, who is perceiving this beauty? How will we describe, quantify, document and share its full shape and colour?

Joy abates in all these things. It disappears into the story of the experiencer, who steps back from the event – not realising that this is not possible, that they are not separate and there is no outside into which to step. Joy lives in the merging that swallows the illusion of experience and experiencer - in oneness with nature and the moment, because this is the truth and only truth. Just the being of what is. All life is here, all heaven. In plain sight.

As the tips of the leaves on the trees reach from the tender stems, which reach from the woody branches, the trunk, the roots and their spreading, deepening fractals, the living earth, the congregation of microbes and micro-nutrients, the fungal networks where messages are transmitted and received. That which we have named a tree (and so drawn it out from the whole) is not possible without the sun and the rain, the breathing of day and night, the switching of the seasons – the inhalation and the long exhale, exuberance and introspection, the animals burying seed; the dissolution, death and debris, cycling fertility and shaping of landscape; the positioning of the moon, the planets, streaming of cosmic forces and delicate relativity of all.

A tree is, because it is everything. And so are we – a perceived particularity, an event integral within, and inseparable from, the timeless unfolding of the whole. Take the ‘thing-event’ of a bee, and that of a "ower as Alan Watts did. Neither exists without the other, so their co-happening is one thing, one system – each reliant on each acting according to their nature, as our human existence relies on this same, and innumerable other, natural dances and delicate ambits of play and circumstance. Zoom out - there is no boundary to this system, this being.

Division is superficiality, ego and, in our feelings of inadequacy and hurt, reverting to our smallest selves, submitting to the surface and illusion of it all.

On solitude.

An outsider can be such because she understands the impossibility of being on the outside. Conformity is rooted in the fear of exactly this status. Nature teaches us that harmony does not depend on thought or effort. Thought, like language, is a capsule containing the shadow of an authentic response – the coin with which we might buy back a flicker of the feelings that are gone as soon as they arrive. Often we hoard such money over the newness of feeling that is free in every single moment – like a pile of photographs in a box.

There will be harmony, authenticity when every entity is simply allowed to be the event that it is. It may be that rote-learned morality breaks down here, but this is no anarchic vision. It is the well from which true moral waters are drawn – eradicating within ourselves, as it does, all violence and control, competition and condemnation. It is only human to grasp for everything that lies beyond us – beyond comprehension, beyond our capacity, beyond and behind the ambits of our human senses and the reach of our human thoughts. In letting go of this grasping we do not exist in isolation, but exist in everything. We are not cultivating ourselves in order to attain to our realisation. We have realised.

It has been here all along, on the other side of our ego, competition and distraction.

We tend to hate in others the parts that we have been taught to fear in ourselves – a kind of prison of civility, hatred of nature itself. Dupes that we can be, to become estranged from our brothers and sisters, from the very scope of human potential and experience, over harmless expressions of joy and life that some politicking priest or priestly politician has called sinful or uncivil. To be afraid of all the stories of what we might become if we do not obey – if we are not moulded, sculpted and cultivated. So we begin to celebrate this superficial exclusivity, the near-sightedness of zealots and ideologues and act as their proxies; as teachers, preachers and parents.

Imagine the opposite, the tension that may be alleviated in the act of allowing. The cognitive dissonance we might overcome, the permission and potential, the joy we might allow ourselves and our children – the sparing of spurious expectation, poison of anger, blame and fear, obligation, tradition to preserve, narrowness, constriction of learning. Each great tragedy and challenge faced by humanity is not a single issue, but an expression of the whole of collective consciousness. Climate breakdown is the expression of deep human injustice, of profiteering and imperialism, as much as the dividing of human nature from nature as a whole. It boils in the denial of these parts; rages in the simplistic, complicit turning about of blind eyes.

Division is the device of would-be rulers and despots. We are starting to get it. Each time a corrupted politician pivots to scapegoating and demonising those fluttered folk and wild – the most vulnerable – those differently dressed migrants; those wrong kind of refugees, whose revolutionary flags are not flying over the flapjacks on the village green, but whose hospitals were also bombed. Blow hard on dog whistle. Mongering of freshly caught fear. Forget who has taken everything. No civility here.

‘The ego seeks to divide and separate. Spirit seeks to unify and heal.’
Pema Chodron

Joy, as I have described it – our unfiltered merging with what is and experience without analysis, is less the apex of some Randian dream, than simply to love and trust without condition. To love enough to allow. We will $nd the basis for our action here in "ow and "ood. We’ll strip the paper of our conditioning like many layers of old wallpaper marked with the heights of those children that grew and "ew. There is no normal way of being, no correct entry to the world; no ideal of nature, identity or neuro-type. These are an expression of the vain preferences of those so unwell as to seek ownership. The perfectly- imperfect miss the point too in their acceptance of this false dichotomy.

As with a garden, or these rolling fields, our cultivation, our favouring of one flower over another spuriously anointed weed only renders the whole less whole. The dandelions, meanwhile, help to bring balance and vitality to the soil and health to the living garden. The bees drink deeply at the willow-herb. There is beauty in the oil-black plumage of the crows, in the slickered ultraviolet colours hidden from our human eyes. There is beauty in the spilled carrion, viscera at the roadside where they feed. We depend on these too. These too are us.

I started writing this from a yurt on a secluded hillside in Devon. Cream teas abound in these parts, but you’ll find that they come with the decree that the cream must be applied to the scone before the jam. In Cornwall the jam precedes the cream.

It couldn’t be less important, but curious sometimes how we can focus on the most superficial of differences – how fragile our identities are when we strip away the stories at their surface. And how these stories cleave the grikes between people and possibility. The trouble with a cream tea. Others here are simply surfng the waves, responding to the tides that come, merging with the weather of each instant.

‘We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.’
Rabindranath Tagore