SENSES: Senses 04.06.2013

For Jonathan

Come to your senses they said. Be practical. You aren't young anymore. In a dizzying array of misunderstanding, I look across the grand chasm and wonder how to traverse the other side. That is exactly the point. I have, finally, come to my senses. Each one fuel, each one wind fanning the latent embers. It is a joyous homecoming. I welcome them all and I am terrified.

I knew a man who sat for 14 years. Every day he would go to the same spot in nature, without distraction, and sit. Through rain, frost, snow, glorious temperate perfection, humidity and starving insects. Sometimes for 15 minutes, sometimes for an hour. Sometimes overnight. Every day. Same place.

.

Something happened to him. Like the purple crocus I saw this morning yearning towards the light, he experienced an unfolding. His brain developed new neural pathways. The stillness allowed Nature to seep in and recover his nature. He came to his senses. Without the noise, they revealed themselves, layer upon layer--a genetic chain of ancestral memory and survival. He remembered the intimate co-evolution with his surroundings. For haven’t our eyes developed because of our relationship to the sun, to light?

The Lakota have a name for this cultivation of quietude. Wowahwaka. As Gilbert Walking Bull, a Lakota Elder shared, you need to be in this state in order to hear the sound of Spirit. It is this deep inner quietness that develops our 6^th sense.

We once were at the mercy of large predators. And perhaps we have them to thank for fine-tuning the smell of danger or the ability to hear the subtle snap of twig signaling potential harm. The way our adept eyes can read the tracks and sign--the stories--of the landscape. Helping us to know whether we were the hunter or hunted. Our senses are the link between life or death.

The dulling of the senses is sure to be the end of us. Our large predators now buried in tar pits, locked beneath sand and rock, or stuck immobile in museums. Extinct. Can we remember and re-calibrate ourselves, unearth that cellular memory without having to sit for 14 years?

A friend of mine took leave of his senses. Gravity took him 220 feet down at 75mph, back to salty origins. I have spent many a grief-stricken night thinking about this: After he jumped, did he have a regret? Did he come to his senses seconds too late? Was the predator within so strong he felt this was his only means of escape? Is this what happens when the hunter and hunted battle within the same body? 

It is torture this unanswered thinking. I can’t let it draw me into its sweeping current. Instead I go outside into the woods and sit on last year’s leaves. They crackle beneath my weight. The wind is sharp and brisk, the return of the sun, brilliant. Pushing up through the decay, regal in their purple elegance, the crocuses.

There is a fragile burning inside each one of us. We are all firetenders. Do you feel it nestled inside the deepest chambers of the heart?  In the place where anatomy has no name? It is there beneath the numbing, the smoldering. Beneath the fear of fires blazing. I tell you this with concern and care...get a shovel...right now...Go...STOP READING THIS! And begin to dig! Uncover that place. It belongs to you. It is you...waiting with every heartbeat. We are so patient with our demise. Where is the urgency??? This IS an attack of our heart! Excavate those dying embers and tend to them. Feed them fuel. Give them breath. Then go outside and find a place in nature and sit. Wowahwaka. Let the wisdom of the senses guide you and ask: 

How will I love my life?