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Friday, 22 February 2008

The Feeling

By Rabon Saip of Elder Times

Sunday morning. The sun feels warm and friendly; the air is clean and bright. I’m riding my bicycle down Wilson Street, looking toward a distant band of clouds near the horizon in the southern sky; and then it happens. IT is a sudden, profound feeling of extreme well being, an oddly alien, and just as oddly familiar, sense of completeness. It’s me but not me, like a vague memory I’m having that belongs to someone else. But the feeling is so strong and so deep inside me.

I think back to other incidents of my experience with this same feeling, which is always associated with scenery. I think back to that first dream, a vivid dream, of lying far forward on the bow of a sailing vessel, moving slowly between massive glacial walls, in what I can only describe as a fiord.

Then, at a later time, I dreamt of a deeply green and steeply terraced valley wall, with wide wooden balconies at various levels, with hanging plants and artful mobiles floating and turning, with wind chimes softly singing. And each time I had this same deep and awesome feeling of belonging.

Eventually those dream feelings began returning during my waking hours as well, and always, as with the band of clouds in the southern sky, a bit of scenery has triggered the feeling. At first I thought this feeling was only associated with the containment of high walls, whether green or icy, which would speak to a sense of security. But, as with the distant sky this morning, open and soaring like a wild, joyous spirit as it ricocheted off the cloud bank and into infinity, the feeling of boundless elation is always the same.

I remember how the priest and poet, John O’Donahue, wrote so eloquently of his beloved Irish countryside. He introduced me to the unique and wonderful idea that certain Irish landscapes were conscious, even conscious of him being conscious of them. I think I’ve experienced something like what he’s talking about, in what I would call power spots where I sense something similar to an "awareness" in nature. I recall, mostly as a child, discovering such secret places in the woods, places that somehow felt alive.

And this brings to mind the so-called "primitive" notion of animism, of world soul, a belief that all things on earth, whether animate or inanimate, are alive. This world view is still common among many cultures (including Native Americans), and was long held by the general population of Europe. Such was the common belief, a kind of Christian Animism, during the Middle Ages. The concept of "soul," which we think of as something contained within us, somehow within our bodies, was then conceived of as something that contains us. Soul does not dwell in us so much as we dwell in soul.

None of this, however, can really explain the feeling I’m talking about. It’s somewhat like what I’ve heard concerning past life experiences, somehow triggered by the aesthetics of nature. To be with such a powerful sense of well being would have to mean a life far beyond any struggle to survive, a life so pampered and supported that not the slightest doubt of self worth, or self confidence, could intervene. A child being raised to be a king might feel this way; or a man with such unquestioned power and authority that his bidding was automatically fulfilled by a host of subjects.

Or, could this simply be the feeling of one who is secure in his relationship to nature, in his sense of belonging to the natural world? One of my favorite writers, Laurens van der Post, has made the following comment:

"The great need of our time is somehow to get rid of the pretense, this awful secrecy in life, where people profess to be one thing and live another. Somehow that has to be brought out in the open, so that we will stop pushing the natural part of ourselves into a corner."

I wonder if what I feel, as I ride my bicycle down Wilson Street, is this "natural part" of myself trying to get out. In spite of the tragic disunity of our civilizing technology, this natural part of me still labors to breathe, even though compressed beneath the unnatural layers of our quest for comfort and convenience. Can you imagine explaining a fitness salon to a laborer in the field who works hard to gain a living from the earth? I wonder if we are not insulating ourselves out of existence. Or, as I think it was Neil Postman who said, "Entertaining ourselves to death."

There was a man, a Lakota Sioux Chief named Luther Standing Bear, who said, before he died in 1936:

"I am going to venture that the man who sat on the ground in his tipi, meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures, and acknowledging unity with the universe of things, was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization."

It occurs to me now that this "true essence of civilization" could only be a matter of taking responsibility, of reinterpreting the meaning of our property rights as written in the Book of Genesis. We who have learned how to exploit the earth, to control and destroy and dominate it, have done so with a seeming vengeance, almost as though getting even for those thousands of years during which we felt so much at the mercy of nature.

And so, as I ride my bicycle down Wilson Street, looking toward that distant band of clouds in the southern sky, I wonder if this sudden feeling of joyous belonging is but a blessed glimpse through a hole in the civilizing insulation that surrounds me. For miles in every direction, we have rearranged and overrode any natural ecosystem that stood in the way of our culture of convenience.

But then, the natural part of me wonders why I can’t just ride my bicycle down Wilson Street and enjoy "the feeling" without investigating it to death. It occurs to me that the human mind is like a babbling monkey that never shuts up, a conflicted creature of cascading associations forever ready to run with the slightest notion, ad infinitum. Perhaps, after all, it is the duty and the destiny of our poor species to do exactly what we are doing.

Posted by Ronni Bennett at 02:30 AM | Permalink | Email this post