The Peace of Wild Things
- Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
“Morning Walk,” - Paul Shaw 2020
Places in between
Have you ever considered the resiliency of roadside plants? Particles insults their veins as their branches pull and bend in the artificial wind of passing machines, fueled by their ancestors. Is it bitter irony or natural progression?
“Everyone is in a hurry to be where they are not,” they share when I let my hand brush against their bodies trailing the fence line.
There is something sacred in these liminal spaces. Lessons on fortitude and patience and unconditional giving.
Take time to pause and listen more. The world is talking, but do we actually hear it?
Inspired by the topic, I found myself sharing the sentiment of Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, who poetically describes his walk through the Hoh rainforest in Washington State:
“OK. So I get out of my car, all right? We’ll still hear the pinging of its engine. We’ll hear other cars and other visitors, and we’ll hear the “beep-beep” of our modern world as people are locking their cars and the rustling of our artificial fabrics against our bodies. Some people will be chattering away on cell phones. But then the sound of my backpack goes over my shoulders, and we head off down the trail. And no more than 100 yards along these tall, tree-lined, ferned path with moss drapes that add sound-deadening to the experience, we’ll hear the call-off twitter of a winter wren, this very high-pitched twittering sound that might be coming from 100 feet away.”
Hempton elaborates later by describing:
“Up close, it’s actually quite a guttural, adrenaline-filled assertion of what it means to be male and wild. But when you hear this experience from a couple of miles away, isn’t that amazing? When you’re in a quiet place, your listening horizon extends for miles in every direction. When you hear an elk call from miles away, it turns into a magic flute as the result of traveling through this place that has the same acoustics as a cathedral.”
There is great import in connecting to these places which anchor our bodies to the primordial Mother, the roots of our existence. For more on the interview click here.
Walking
How many time have I walked these woods? Enough to see the story change.
Webs and roots, a familiar tread.
I had forgotten myself. I knew,
but I couldn’t breath.
A venom had crept in, paralyzing
sour perception.
It took time to soften
like some hard stone, patiently
chiseled away, each groove
a laugh
a gesture
an entreating to take a new form.
Neith - extending a lifeline.
“Don’t get caught in your own web darling,” she whispered.
So, I walked
dislodging the sediment
skimming the murky surface of shame and guilt
made gratefully able to bask in the downpour, cleansing
a burst of unbridled renewal.
-Paul Shaw
“ When we listen to a place on planet Earth, we very quickly realize that Earth is a solar-powered jukebox.”