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Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Elk Whistle Songs And Stories From Flutist Bill Neal
Monday, October 5, 2015
MUTE NATURE, LOST MAGIC ~ by Bill Neal Elk Whistle
I always enjoy seeing the words/images/ideas/prayers/exhortations in the posts by Jerry Pope on the Church of Sacred Ecology page on Facebook: Church of Sacred Ecology. I am often heartened and very often informed in those posts that strike at the very heart of what this page is about. I would like to re-quote a quote from one of Jerry's previous posts here and expand on it a little:
"In truth, the human experience of magic – our ancestral, animistic awareness of the world as alive and expressive – was never really lost. Our senses simply shifted their animistic participation from the depths of the surrounding landscape toward the letters written on pages and, today, on screens. Only thus could the letters begin to come alive and to speak.As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and abruptly hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless – as mysterious as a talking stone. And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees become mute, the other animals fall dumb."
~ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World
"In truth, the human experience of magic – our ancestral, animistic awareness of the world as alive and expressive – was never really lost. Our senses simply shifted their animistic participation from the depths of the surrounding landscape toward the letters written on pages and, today, on screens. Only thus could the letters begin to come alive and to speak.As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and abruptly hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our oral ancestors, so the ostensibly “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless – as mysterious as a talking stone. And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees become mute, the other animals fall dumb."
~ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World
Now, let us look more fully at the meaning here. We live in a world today in which our relations in the natural world have most often gone mute because we no longer see or hear what they have to say. It takes words on a page or a screen today, words just like these, or the words of a well-told oral story, stories like I like to tell in my "Elk Whistle Songs and Stories" programs, to remind us of the magic that we have lost. We find our magic today in words - they carry us to times and places we have never been or about which we have forgotten. We no longer hear the talking stones or the singing trees, we no longer hear in the moving waters the voices of our ancestors, or see the fire in the burning bush - but - there is something we can do about that. We can begin by informing ourselves more fully of what we are missing - and by having a better understanding of what we are missing, we reach a level of consciousness that requires us to be more aware of what is around us, all those other forms of life that co-inhabit this world, this reality that each of us has created for ourselves, the circle in which each of us Stands at the Canter. Those who know my "mushroom story" will recognize what I mean - it is about beginning to 'see and hear' again. Tom Brown, Jr., has done a tremendous amount of work to develop the art of seeing and hearing in nature through animal tracking and learning 'bird-language'. Sensory awareness can, indeed, help us bring back the magic of the phenomenal world of animistic nature, and I mean the real cactus, not the word or symbol for cactus, into each of our own lives. And David Abram, the author of the quote above has helped raise the phenomenology of nature to the level of philosophy - but it is up to each of us individually to regain the sacredness and spirituality of nature in our own hearts and minds and raise it to the level of magic (or substitute the word 'miracle') again! And thank you again, Jerry - s'gi ginali!
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