The Song of Medusa

"Older Yet, and Lovelier Far, this Mystery.  And I will not forget."

Robin Williamson, "Five Denials on Merlin's Grave"

Looking back through my files, I discovered that THE SONG OF MEDUSA, a short novel I wrote in collaboration with the artist and writer Duncan Eagleson, who I was privileged to know back in 1993, had disappeared, even though I completed it and had it self-published in 2000.  It wasn't on my computer, it wasn't on my website, I couldn't even find a copy of the book in my bookshelf.  Then I realized it was to be found here, on this Blog.  I decided to archive it on my website, and in the process had a lot of fun making illustrations for it, and doing a bit of editing. 

It needs a lot more work, true, and it seems sometimes  preachy or naive......but reading the manuscript after all these years was good for me.  To  be honest, this story, although I understand the sources of  its inspiration, remains a bit of a mystery to me.  I've never had the desire to write a novel before or since.  This character seemed to have a life of her own, a story that insisted upon being written down.  For example, I had no idea that the Oracle of Delphi breathed fumes from underground caves in order to reach an altered state of consciousness when this story flowed onto the page for me.    Maybe writers experience that all the time, the sense of being a bit of a "channel" for a persona that wants to be heard....but it was a fascinating experience for me.

                                 

"I, the Song, I Walk Here"

.....Lakota  poem

Reading  brought back  what I believe in still, the impulse from which this story arose.  And it was  inspired, obviously, by the work of archeologist Marija Gimbutas and Riane Eisler, a long fascination with mythology, and my own experiences in dowsing and visioning.  EARTHMIND,  the "Song of Gaia".  So here's the story resurrected.   Mr. Eagleson graciously and elegantly contributed to its telling, and I feel it shouldn't just disappear.   Thank you, Duncan. 

http://www.laurenraine.com/the-song-of-medusa.html

I doubt anyone reading this is going to take the time to read the whole story, so I copy below 

an excerpt .......I  especially like the "Afterward", because it brings back memories of when I lived in Vermont, the very real magic I always sensed in the land there, and some of the people I knew there and then.   An  a dream some of us had of a possible future where the Earth was sacred, alive, a Song we could  learn to harmonize with.  That's still a hope worth finding stories for.  

AFTERWARD
​
September 21, 2037 
 
As the trail winding up Spirit Mountain grew steeper, Susan was a little out of breath.  She could see the granite shelf summit ahead,  the  quartz and granite  bones of this place  common to this part  of New England.  Great rounded boulders loomed on either side of her,  painted whimsically with colorful abstractions of lichen and moss.
 
Susan remembered when she lived in Colorado,  the rock climbing she did when she was  younger, and was amused at herself;  the mountains of  southern New Hampshire  were among the oldest ranges in the U.S.,  great-grandmother mountains  rounded and soft,  folded and smoothed by  a long, long life.  These were not  the Rockies, and she knew she was out of shape.  
 
It was late September,  a brilliant fall blessed by the right amount of rain and sun.  The sugar maples were almost psychedelic in their glory of reds, yellows and  oranges.  The sun was  bright, tender and poignant with a frailty felt only during Indian Summer; the last and perhaps sweetest days of summer.  Such days were the grand finale to that great burst of  fertile creation that began in the Spring.  To her, it seemed as if all the land, and all the devas of the plant kingdom,  were giving their final concert, their master chorale for the season.  Soon the first frost would come, and Susan would walk with her morning coffee into a garden fallen overnight, a precious  world melting away like a  dream,  ready to sleep beneath the immanent blanket of snow.
 
Below her came  a long procession of  people,  making their way up the trail between rock outcroppings.  Some carried baskets of food, homemade bread, and torches, candles;  all carried flashlights and blankets.  Just behind her came Martin,  lugging the ceramic  dombek drum they had purchased on their trip to Morocco.  After him came his little tribe of drummers.  They met without fail every Thursday night  in their living room.    “You are amazing“, she thought, a momentary flash of sweet, familiar lust  surging through her as she watched  his long , denim clad legs stride up the mountain.  The cup of those brown legs around her hips....she inwardly smiled.  Another good sign, that after all these years, and on this day especially, she could feel that so strongly.    
 
It was the evening of  the Fall Equinox,  a very special Fall Equinox, because it was also to be a full moon.  She felt the pulse of the land beneath her feet, heat,   a coursing of energies she envisioned as a beating heart, humming through her and around her.  The  drummers would sing that heartbeat into their circle after the sun went down; she knew they were already attuning themselves to it even as they walked.  Susan took a deep breath, and let sensation come into her.  Her body vibrated, she knew she was moving into an increasingly ecstatic state of heightened perception. She folded her hands before her chest Indian style, and  greeted the presence she felt here.  And  Spirit Mountain greeted her.  She took her shoes off.
 
“Breathe, just breathe”.  With each inhale,  Susan  let the sense of  Gaia come into her.  She never knew what else to call it; “earth energies”,  “Creator”,  “Source”;  to her it was Gaia, and she visualized roots that grew from her feet,  roots that went down deep into the Earth, connecting her with the web of all life.  It wasn’t even that abstract;  that was simply what it felt like.  As if she became bigger.
 
Her breathing became rhythmic, releasing  the small concerns of her personal life, the tensions and conflicts of the day,   breathing in that light, that pulse that  rose effortlessly through her now bare feet, an erotic heat in  her vagina and womb, up her spine, into her heart. “Hello,  hello” she said out loud.  “Here we are.”  In answer,  currents flowed up her legs, into her hands.  Susan paused, close to  the summit, and leaned against a huge granite boulder, slightly dizzy.....“not so fast,   I have to open gradually to this ...”  Closing her eyes for a moment, she felt Martin’s hand on her back.  He was  feeling it as well.  She almost heard  his “Are you all right?”,  but he hadn’t spoken.  Speech was becoming difficult for him.  
 
The warmth of his hand on her back and his strong male presence steadied her.  A little further up the trailhead was an arbor woven of branches and grapevines.  Tanya and James stood on either side of it, silently ready with the sage smudge sticks they used as each person entered the place where the ceremony would be held.  A raucous crow flew suddenly across the path, to land in a nearby tree.  It squawked at them as if to say “well,  hurry up!” and flew off.  
 
Martin broke his trance to laugh;  they had, as far as he was concerned,  been welcomed.
 
The top of Spirit Mountain was flat granite shelf.  It was a splendid view;  to the east the spire of an old church rose from an ocean of trees, and the Connecticut River was visible, winding like a snake through the landscape.  Before her, ten boulders formed an imperfect circle.  Perhaps they had once been more  regular, but erosion or earthquake had, over time, worked them out of  alignment.   At the circle’s center stood a huge boulder,  shot with veins of quartz;  crystalline intrusions flashed here and there on it’s surface as it reflected the setting sun.  Susan wondered, as always, how the long ago people who once came here had managed to move rocks weighing several tons into these placements.  
 
The ancient people who made this stone circle millennia ago were a mystery.  There was evidence that Phoenician or Celtic colonists  had once settled along the Connecticut river,  fishing, sailing, and marking places that were sacred to them with standing stones and cairns very similar to prehistoric sites in Ireland and Europe.  Perhaps this was Tiranog, the “blessed land to the West” of  ancient Irish legend.  The controversy surrounding these structures and “calendar sites” had never been settled.  The vanished people who so laboriously moved enormous and carefully selected  stones to mark this place could just as easily have been native Americans long lost to history.  It really didn’t matter to Susan.    
 
What all of these mysterious places,  including Spirit mountain, did share in common was geomantic intensity.  They were places of power, ley crossings.  A divining rod held over the quartz boulder at this circle’s center frenetically turned like the blades of a helicopter.  To a geologist, they were places of geomagnetic force.  But it took no theory or scientific knowledge to experience the presence of  this place.  At last, just like the ancients who once came here,  people were beginning to realize that these were places of communion.  One did not build condos on them.
 
In the deepening twilight, people passed through the woven entranceway, seating themselves around the circle.  Some brought blankets to wrap themselves in,  and some of the older folks had folding chairs.   Beneath the white quartz  stone were offerings of food, wine and written prayers to the ancestors of this place,  as well as a  basket of seed as offerings to the animals and nature spirits who lived here.  And quite a few small personal shrines had been set up in an inner circle.  Susan saw her friend Margo’s little Goddess statue resting on a red silk cloth.  Nearby was a brass statue of the Buddha,  a photo of the late Dalai Lama placed at his feet.  From a crevice in the stone hung a laughing leather Greenman mask .  Candles in colored votive holders flickered like a shimmering rainbow around the base of the stone.
 
Four drummers sat at each of the four directions,  already synchronized into a deep heartbeat rhythm.  They were in trance,  attuned to each other and the qualities of the element each drummer was inviting to be present, air, fire, water and earth.  Their rhythms flowed into the azure twilight as Martin sat down to join them, his dumbek between his knees.  Susan walked around the circle,  bowed to the center, and then picked up a pack of matches on the ground to light citronella torches mounted around the periphery.  
 
At last she sank down to join the chanting, to enter into deep receptivity.  She saw that she was a little nervous, and tried to shake it out of her body for a minute.  She was one of the focalizers tonight, and although she had served in that way before,  she never knew exactly what she would do until the moment arose.  Years as a public speaker and environmental activist still made it difficult for her to completely relax into a wholly intuitive way of working within a group, trusting that indescribable merging that always happened.  She took another deep breath and visualized her roots going down into the earth.  It didn’t matter, she remembered.  “It doesn’t matter in the least whether I’m nervous or not.  It’s not about me, and it never is.”
 
She could see it now, if she unfocussed her eyes;  a glow that seemed to come from the granite floor she sat cross-legged on, a pulse that attuned her to the drums,  light that seemed to pour from cracks in the ancient boulders.  Her unease was gone, unimportant.
 
Tonight they would offer thanks for the food grown and harvested throughout the summer; not just for them, but for all those who eat.  They would chant and pray and dance their gratitude for being fed by the Earth and all the beings upon Her, and, in a ritual of reciprocity, they would offer their prayers, music, gratitude and love back,  sending it down into the Earth to sustain and nurture the One who sustained and nurtured them.  Susan was one of the women tonight who would  become a kind of filament for the energies held by the ritual.  In the course of the ceremony, she would  open herself to communion with the spirit of place, with Gaia in all of Her manifestations; and what visions she received she would share with the group.  
 
Sometimes what came to her was empathic, a feeling of sadness or disharmony that needed to be witnessed by the group, or simply a tremendous love that radiated between all present, renewing them.  Sometimes she received images that were far from grandiose and very specific - once she saw a piece of baked  liver on a plate before one of the women present.  It seemed that she was both pregnant and anemic.
 
Later in the evening there would be feasting, baskets of pumpkin bread, cheese, and fruit  brought out, and bottles of wine and honey mead opened.  The drummers would continue to  drum until the sun rose, letting rhythms flow through them in constantly changing waves, moving beyond exhaustion into ecstasy.  Several couples would also spend the night on the mountain;  Susan could see three tents discreetly set up at the far periphery of the circle.  These were mated pairs who wanted to conceive,  and had chosen this auspicious place and time, the energies evoked by this gathering, to invite a child to join them.  It was doubtful, Susan thought, that anyone who stayed the night would sleep.  
 
Before closing her eyes to chant, Susan looked around the circle.  It was a big gathering;  it looked like nearly half the population of Putney had come, although she was sure other circles and gatherings were going on in different places.  South of her,  at the Temanos center,  her friend Jewell would be facilitating a gathering.  She visualized Jewell’s strong, lined face, her famous rattle in her hand, and a momentary flash of love, support flooded her;  she knew Jewell was aware her, and very busy.
 
“Gaia.  Gaia,  thank you.  I am here.”
 

 
The End
 
Copyright
Lauren Raine, Duncan Eagleson 1993 ​

La Mariposa

I've told this story before, but it seems like a good day to tell it again, because I made a new  mask for her.

LA  MARIPOSA

Once upon a time, in a dusty village like any other village, a  village with  three good wells,  fields of blue and yellow corn,  a white church, and a cantina, there lived a woman who was neither young, nor old.  She was brown of skin, and eye, and her hair was as brown as the sandy earth, and her clothes were  brown and gray as well. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, neither tall nor small, and she walked with a long habit of  watching her feet.

One day, she saw a tree alight with migrating butterflies.   Their velvet wings fluttered in the wind of their grace, and one circled her, coming to rest upon her open hand.  She thought that her heart would break for the power of  its fragile beauty, and she held her breath for fear of frightening it.  La Mariposa  was as orange and brilliant as the setting sun falling between indigo  mountains, as iridescent, as black and violet as the most  fragrant midnight.  At last the butterfly lifted from her hand to rejoin its nomad tribe, and its wings seemed like a whisper,  "Come with us, come with us..."

The next morning they were gone.  She held her hand out to the empty tree, as if to wave farewell, and saw that where the butterfly had rested, there remained a dusting of color, yellow, like pollen, the kiss of a butterfly wing.  And she thought  something had changed.

She went to the well to draw water, and saw her face reflected there.  She was not the same -  there were now minute lines, hairline cracks, along the sides of her face, at the corners of her eyes.  Later, she noticed  little webs of  light beneath the sturdy brown skin of her hands,  barely visible except in the dim  twilight.

This was a frightening thing.  She drew her  skirts more closely around herself, pulled her scarf over her eyes.  But as time went on,  there was something that kept emerging, something that would not be denied.  She was peeling open.  At first, it simply itched, like a rash, like pulling nettles.  As  weeks went by,  what had been easily born, could be endured,  became painful,  became an agony.  Try as she might, as tightly as she wrapped herself in her cocoon of shawls and skin and silence,  the comforting  routines of her life,  colors emerged from her hands, spilt from her mouth, colors and tears, deep waters that seeped from within,  washing away the dust of her life.

Soon, sleep became impossible.  Standing by her window one day, shivering,  she shook  with fear.   "Please help me", she cried, "I'm not the same".  

Then she noticed a beam of sunlight that fell across the floor of her little room like honey.  Motes of dust gathered in the golden light, becoming  a flurry of butterflies dancing through an open window into a sky as blue and vast as forever.   

And La Mariposa  opened her arms, took the gift of wings, and rose.

When her neighbor came to walk with her that evening, she found only a dusty shawl and an old brown skirt upon the floor, the early stars glimmering through an unshuttered window.

Weavers................

"Weavers" (2014)

 

Stories are not abstractions from life but how we engage with it.  We make stories and those stories make us human.  We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us.  The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?"   Insofar as I'm non-dual with my narratives, that question is just as much, 

"What stories want to come to life through me?"

David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 

Sometimes I become overwhelmed with the events of the world, and have to refuse to watch the news, even the worthy information that colleagues send me.  At such a crucial time in the evolution of humanity,  such a long awaited and brief window, the old and ugly stories of war, of greed, of old patriarchal tribal war gods endlessly demanding blood and supremacy, and endless consumer economies that can lead only to collapse........... and both leading to the end of hope.   No, you can't live with that.  So I stop, and walk into the garden, and remember the stories that are sacred, the myths that renew and sustain.  

  

It seems to me that we are every day planting and weaving the World Stories as tell our own stories in so many ways.  And, whether we realize it or not, we are doing so in collaboration with many others.  As  the generative  incubation of  winter quietly approaches, may we remember how important our task really is, how little time we really have:  to  plant seeds for the future that ever grow,  ever green, into  stories of the Sacred Earth and our true community with All Beings. 

"Midwives" (2014)

The New Story

"The Universe is made of stories, not atoms."

Muriel Rukeyser

"Stories are not abstractions from life, but how we engage with it.  We make stories and those stories make us human.  We awaken into stories as we awaken into language, which is there before and after us.  The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories?" as "What stories do I want to live?" ........ that question might be just as much, "What stories want to come to life through me?"

David R. Loy, "The World Is Made Of Stories"

I truly do believe that story is the name of the country where the archetypes enact their dramas, the Gods and Goddesses weave their relationships and teach their values, and we, consciously or not, live out the myths. Within the Mythic Realms we find the templates of societies, and as individuals, each of us is "in-formed" by story, by mythos.  So what are the stories we're being told, infused with, fed by, what are the stories we've internalized?

I've so often spoken of artists, and myself, as people who often elect for the uneasy job of re-mything culture.  Sometimes they get elected, whether they think they are or not.  The myths rise up from the collective Self, perhaps from the Necessity of the time:  but it's individuals who give it voice, symbol, a language, and they often have to plow through the old mythos with a fair amount of resistance before they find resonant ears.  Pollinators of story........that's what I think I've been, along with many colleagues.  Pollinators, re-discoverers and re-mythers of stories about interdependance instead of competition, stories about a living Earth we live within, instead of a "reward" somewhere else, stories about the return of the Great Goddess and the feminine powers and values, stories that heal instead of making war.  Sometimes I worry that I come close to being propaganda, as I repeat myself and my themes over and over..........but these symbols and sounds lie at the root, the base, and are taproots that I can sink over and over to renew myself, to sustain.

So I felt like sharing again the video at the bottom of this post by Brian Swimme, and revisiting again the New Stories Foundation.

And here also is Someone I've been re-visiting, the ancient, and  ubiquitous,  Native American archetype of Spider Woman that has been so fascinating to me over the years.  Grandmother Spider Woman is more than an "archetype" to me...........She's also a wise mentor.  Since I seem to be going through a rather profound personal re-weaving at the moment, I've been renewing my aquaintance with Spider Woman as I ask for aid, a few of Her strong threads, through  friends, story, dream and synchronicity, to show me the way to go now.

Also called "Thought Woman" in Southwestern Pueblo cultures, Spider Woman is a primal creatrix who imagines things that come to be; she weaves the world continually into being and dissolution with the stories she tells. At the center of the great Web (symbolized by the ubiquitous cross representing the union of the 4 directions) that is always associated with her Spider Woman/Thought Woman sees the ever evolving pattern, the resonance, the harmonies and the disharmonies, the tears and new links. The gift of weaving, and the gift of story, are the gifts Spider Woman endowed her grandchildren with.  And as we are all, as it were, connected in the Great Web of life, the work is ultimately collaborative. 

Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman the Spider named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room thinking of a good story now:

I'm telling you the story she is thinking.

Keresan Pueblo proverb

In some Pueblo myths,  when the world fell so out of balance that it was destroyed,  it was Spider Woman who "midwifed" the New World by leading the people through the Kiva.  The "Third World" ended by flood, and She led the people into the  "Fourth World", which is our time.
As the Hopi (and Mayan) calendar or cycle recently ended, surely Grandmother Spider Woman is very present again, ready to lead us into the new 5th  world,  helping us to spin "new stories".  And if we look at what element "5", the "Fifth World" might represent, it is Center, and its color is white, the union of all colors.  Surely now is the time to tell the story of interdependence, connection, the story that ends with:

And We Are All One......

 http://youtu.be/TRykk_0ovI0

 

Storytelling and "Wild Ethics"

 "Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of that place by letting the land dream its tales through them."

 Because I'm thinking about masks that are about spirit of place,  I remembered an article by David Abram I posted in 2009 on this blog (he kindly gave me permission to do so).  I felt like sharing this article from Wild Ethics.   David Abram is a cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist, and the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. He is the author of "The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World" (Pantheon/Vintage), for which he received the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An early version of this essay was published in Resurgence issue 222, and another in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Taylor and Kaplan, ed., published by Continuum in 2005)

Storytelling and Wonder: on the rejuvenation of oral culture

by David Abram, Ph.D.

In the prosperous land where I live, a mysterious task is underway to invigorate the minds of the populace, and to vitalize the spirits of our children. For a decade, now, parents, politicians, and educators of all forms have been raising funds to bring computers into every household in the realm, and into every classroom from kindergarten on up through college. With the new technology, it is hoped, children will learn to read much more efficiently, and will exercise their intelligence in rich new ways. Interacting with the wealth of information available on-line, children's minds will be able to develop and explore much more vigorously than was possible in earlier eras -- and so, it is hoped, they will be well prepared for the technological future. How can any child resist such a glad initiative?

Indeed, few adults can resist the dazzle of the digital screen, with its instantaneous access to everywhere, its treasure-trove of virtual amusements, and its swift capacity to locate any piece of knowledge we desire. And why should we resist? Digital technology is transforming every field of human endeavor, and it promises to broaden the capabilities of the human intellect far beyond its current reach. Small wonder that we wish to open and extend this powerful dream to all our children!
It is possible, however, that we are making a grave mistake in our rush to wire every classroom, and to bring our children online as soon as possible. Our excitement about the internet should not blind us to the fact that the astonishing linguistic and intellectual capacity of the human brain did not evolve in relation to the computer! Nor, of course, did it evolve in relation to the written word. Rather it evolved in relation to orally told stories.

We humans were telling each other stories for many, many millennia before we ever began writing our words down -- whether on the page or on the screen.  Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge. Oral tales told on special occasions carried the secrets of how to orient in the local cosmos. Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if the hunt was successful, as well as specific insights regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and -- more generally -- how to live well in this land without destroying the land's wild vitality.

Such practical intelligence, intimately related to a particular place, is the hallmark of any oral culture. Continually tested in interaction with the living land, altering in tandem with subtle changes in the local earth, even today such living knowledge resists the fixity and permanence of the printed page. Because it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert -- or coastal estuary, or mountain valley -- this kind of intimate intelligence loses its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular persons and practices that are a part of its terrain. Such place-specific savvy, which deepens its value when honed and tempered over the course of several generations, forfeits much of its power when uprooted from the soil of its home and carried -- via the printed page or the glowing screen – to other places. Such intelligence, properly speaking, is an attribute of the living land itself; it thrives only in the direct, face-to-face exchange between those who dwell and work in this place.

So much earthly savvy was carried in the old tales! And since, for our indigenous ancestors, there was no written medium in which to record and preserve the stories -- since there were no written books -- the surrounding landscape, itself, functioned as the primary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for preserving the oral tales. To this end, diverse animals common to the local earth figured as prominent characters within the oral stories -- whether as teachers or tricksters, as buffoons or as bearers of wisdom. Hence, a chance encounter with a particular creature as a tribesperson went about his daily business (an encounter with a coyote, perhaps, or a magpie) would likely stir the memory of one or another story in which that animal played a decisive role. Moreover, crucial events in the stories were commonly associated with particular sites in the local terrain where those events were assumed to have happened, and whenever one noticed that place in the course of one’s daily wanderings -- when one came upon that particular cluster of boulders, or that sharp bend in the river -- the encounter would spark the memory of the storied events that had unfolded there.


Thus, while the accumulated knowledge of our oral ancestors was carried in stories, the stories themselves were carried by the surrounding earth. The local landscape was alive with stories! Traveling through the terrain, one felt teachings and secrets sprouting from every nook and knoll, lurking under the rocks and waiting to swoop down from the trees. The wooden planks of one's old house would laugh and whine, now and then, when the wind leaned hard against them, and whispered wishes would pour from the windswept grasses. To the members of a traditionally oral culture, all things had the power of speech. . .


Indeed, when we consult indigenous, oral peoples from around the world, we commonly discover that for them there is no phenomenon -- no stone, no mountain, no human artifact -- that is definitively inert or inanimate. Each thing has its own spontaneity, its own interior animation, its own life! Rivers feel the presence of the fish that swim within them. A large boulder, its surface spreading with crinkly red and gray lichens, is able to influence the events around it, and even to influence the thoughts of those persons who lean against it -- lending their reflections a certain gravity, and a kind of stony wisdom. Particular fish, as well, are bearers of wisdom, gifting their insights to those who catch them. Everything is alive -- even the stories themselves are animate beings! Among the Cree of Manitoba, for instance, it is said that the stories, when they are not being told, live off in their own villages, where they go about their own lives. Every now and then, however, a story will leave its village and go hunting for a person to inhabit. That person will abruptly be possessed by the story, and soon will find herself telling the tale out into the world, singing it back into active circulation.

There is something about this storied way of speaking -- this acknowledgement of a world all alive, awake, and aware -- that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us. Our animal senses know nothing of the objective, mechanical, quantifiable world to which most of our civilized discourse refers. Wild and gregarious organs, our senses spontaneously experience the world not as a conglomeration of inert objects but as a field of animate presences that actively call our attention, that grab our focus or capture our gaze. Whenever we slip beneath the abstract assumptions of the modern world, we find ourselves drawn into relationship with a diversity of beings as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves. Direct, sensory perception is inherently animistic, disclosing a world wherein every phenomenon has its own active agency and power.

When we speak of the earthly things around us as quantifiable objects or passive "natural resources," we contradict our spontaneous sensory experience of the world, and hence our senses begin to wither and grow dim. We find ourselves living more and more in our heads, adrift in a sea of abstractions, unable to feel at home in an objectified landscape that seems alien to our own dreams and emotions. But when we begin to tell stories, our imagination begins to flow out through our eyes and our ears to inhabit the breathing earth once again. Suddenly, the trees along the street are looking at us, and the clouds crouch low over the city as though they are trying to hatch something wondrous. We find ourselves back inside the same world that the squirrels and the spiders inhabit, along with the deer stealthily munching the last plants in our garden, and the wild geese honking overhead as they flap south for the winter. Linear time falls away, and we find ourselves held, once again, in the vast cycles of the cosmos -- the round dance of the seasons, the sun climbing out of the ground each morning and slipping down into the earth every evening, the opening and closing of the lunar eye whose full gaze attracts the tidal waters within and all around us.

For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world. However much we may obscure this ancestral affinity, we cannot erase it, and the persistance of the old stories is the continuance of a way of speaking that blesses the sentience of things, binding our thoughts back into the depths of an imagination much vaster than our own. To live in a storied world is to know that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate earth itself, in which we humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each watershed, each community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there, in the living stories that unfold in that valley, and that are told and retold by the people of that place.

Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of the place by letting the land dream its tales through them.  Today, economic globalization is rapidly undermining rural economies and tearing apart rural communities. The spreading monoculture degrades both cultural diversity and biotic diversity, forcing the depletion of soils and the wreckage of innumerable ecosystems. As the civilization of total commerce muscles its way into every corner of the planet, countless species tumble helter skelter over the brink of extinction, while the biosphere itself shivers into a bone-rattling fever.

For like any living being, earth’s metabolism depends upon the integrated functioning of many different organs, or ecosystems. Just as the human body could not possibly maintain its health if the lungs were forced to behave like the stomach, or if the kidneys were forced to act like the ears or the soles of the feet, so the planetary metabolism is thrown into disarray when each region is compelled to behave like every other region – when diverse places and cultures are forced to operate according to a single, mechanical logic, as interchangeable parts of an undifferentiated, homogenous sphere.

In the face of the expanding monoculture and its technological imperatives, more and more people are coming each day to recognize the critical importance of revitalizing local, face-to-face community. They recognize their common embedment within the life of this breathing planet, yet they know that such unity arises only from a vital and thriving multiplicity. A reciprocal respect and interdependence between richly different cultures -- each a dynamic expression of the unique earthly place, or bioregion, that supports it – is far more sustainable than a homogenous, planetary civilization.

Many of us have already worked for several decades on ecological and bioregional initiatives aimed at renewing local economies and the conviviality of place-based communities. Yet far too little progress was made by the movements for local self-sufficiency and sustainability. To be sure, our efforts were hindered by the steady growth of an industrial economy powered by the profligate burning of fossil fuel.

 Yet our efficacy was also weakened by our inability to recognize the immense influence of everyday language. Our work was weakened, that is, by our inability to discern that the spreading technologization of everyday life in the modern world (including the growing ubiquity of automobiles and telephones, of televisions and, most recently, personal computers) had been accompanied by a steady transformation in language -- by an increasing abstractness and generality in daily discourse. Local vernaculars had fallen into disuse; local stories had been forgotten; the oral forms and traditions by which place-specific knowledge had once been preserved and disseminated were no longer operative.

We in the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE) now recognize that a rejuvenation of real, face-to-face community – and the sensorial attunement to the local earth that ensures the vitality and sustenance of such community – simply cannot happen without a rejuvenation of the layer of language that goes hand in hand with such attunement. It cannot happen without renewing that primary layer of language, and culture, that underlies all our more abstract and technological forms of discourse. A renewal of place-based community cannot happen without a renewal of oral culture.

But does such a revitalization of oral, storytelling culture entail that we must renounce reading and writing? Not at all! It entails only that we leave space in our days for an interchange with one another and with the earth that is not mediated by technology – neither by the television, nor the computer, nor even the printed page.  Among writers, for instance, it entails that we allow that there are certain stories that one might come upon that should not be written down -- stories that we instead begin to tell, with our own tongue, in the particular places where those stories live.

It entails that as parents we set aside, now and then, the storybooks that we read to our children in order to actually tell our children a story with the whole of our gesturing body – or better yet, that we draw our kids out of doors in order to improvise a tale about the wild wind that’s now blustering its way through these city streets, plucking the hats off people’s heads…And among educators, it entails that we begin to rejuvenate the arts of telling, and of listening, in the context of the living landscape where our lessons happen. For too long we have incarcerated the potent magic of linguistic meaning within an exclusively human space of signs.

Hence the land itself has fallen mute; it now seems little more than a passive backdrop for human affairs, or a storehouse of resources waiting to be mined for purely human purposes. Can we return to the local land an implicit sense of its own inherent meaningfulness, its own many-voiced eloquence? Not without renewing the sensory craft of listening, and the sensuous art of storytelling. Can we help our students to translate the quantified abstractions of science into the language of direct experience, so that those abstract insights begin to come alive in our felt encounters with the animate earth around us? Can we begin to affirm our own co-evolved, carnal embedment within this blooming, buzzing proliferation of life, stirring within us a new humility in the face of a world that we did not create – in the face of a world that created us? Most importantly, can we begin with our students to restore the health and integrity of the local earth? Not without restorying the local earth.

For our senses have become exceedingly estranged from the earthly sensuous. The age-old reciprocity between the human animal and the animate earth has long been short-circuited by our increasing involvement with our own creations, our own human-made technologies. And yet a simple tale, well-told, can shatter the spell – whether for an hour, or a day, or even a lifetime. We cannot restore the land without restorying the land.

There is no need to give up reading, nor to discard our computers, as long as we recall that such mediated and technological forms of interchange inevitably remain rooted in the more primary world of direct experience. As long as we remember, that is, that our involvement with the printed page and the digital screen draws its basic sustenance from our more immediate, face-to-face encounter with the flesh of the real.
Each medium of communication organizes our awareness in a particular way, each engaging us in a particular form of community. Without here analyzing all the diverse media that exert their claims upon our attention, we can acknowledge some very general traits:

~ Literacy and literate discourse (the ways of speaking and thinking implicitly informed by books, newspapers, magazines, and other printed media) is inherently cosmopolitan, mingling insights drawn from diverse traditions and places. Reading is a wonderful form of experience, but it is necessarily abstract relative to our direct sensory encounters in the immediacy of our locale.

~ Computer literacy, and our engagement with the internet, brings us almost instantaneous information from around the world, empowering virtual interactions with people from vastly different cultures. Yet such digital engagements are even more disembodied and placeless than our involvement with printed books and magazines. Indeed cyberspace seems to have no location at all, unless the “place” that we encounter through the internet is, well, the planet itself, transmuted into a weightless field of information. In truth, our increasing participation with email, e-commerce, and electronic information involves us in a discourse that is inherently global and globalizing. (It is this computerized form of communication, of course, that has enabled the rapid globalization of the free-market economy).

~ Oral culture (the culture of face to face storytelling) is inherently local. Far more concrete than those other modes of discourse, genuinely oral culture binds us not only to our immediate human community, but to the more-than-human community – the particular ecology of animals, plants and earthly elements in which we materially participate. In contrast to more abstract forms of media, the primary medium of oral communication is the atmosphere itself. In other words the unseen air, which is subtly different in each terrain, and which binds our own breathing bodies to the metabolism of oak trees and hawks and the storm clouds gathering above the city, is the implicit intermediary in all oral communication. As the most ancient and longstanding form of human discourse, oral culture provides the necessary soil and support for those more abstract styles of communication and reflection.

The Alliance for Wild Ethics holds that the globalizing culture of the internet, and the cosmopolitan culture of books, are both dependent, for their integrity, upon the place-based, vernacular culture of face-to-face storytelling. When oral culture degrades, then the literate mind loses its bearings, forgetting its ongoing debt to the body and the breathing earth. When stories are no longer being told in the woods or along the banks of rivers -- when the land is no longer being honored, ALOUD!, as an animate, expressive power – then the human senses lose their attunement to the surrounding terrain.

We no longer feel the particular pulse of our place – we no longer hear, or respond to, the many-voiced eloquence of the land. Increasingly blind and deaf, increasingly impervious to the sensuous world, the technological mind begins to lay waste to the earth.

We can be ardent readers (and even writers) of books, and enthusiastic participants in the world wide web and the internet, while recognizing that these abstract and almost exclusively human layers of culture will never be sufficient unto themselves. Without rejecting these rich forms of communication, we can nonetheless discern, today, that the rejuvenation of oral culture is an ecological imperative.


*A few personal notes:

1 I am reminded here of the Australian Aboriginal ideas of the "Songlines", tracks in the land that bear the "stories of the land" and the "history" of ancestral beings, animated by the walking itself.

2 Like Spider Woman (Keresan, "Tse Che Nako") as the Earth Mother/Creatrix, stories are spun into the world, and become the conversant world, from a kind of universal, ensouled, non-local imagination, a participatory kind of creative consciousness that includes, but is not exclusive to, us.

3  "Story" includes the Numina, the participation of the intelligences of Place, and in this respect, the author is saying that an oral tradition is a much richer tapestry of direct experience that includes body movement, sound, the environment, and the various psychic energy exchanges that go on in the prescence of such.