Perfection of the Morning (15 page)

In fact, the experience with the scraper made me think of the Bushman, Dabe, in
The Lost World of the Kalahari
, telling Laurens van der Post that the other Bushmen, miles back at their camp in the desert, would already know that Dabe and the other hunters had killed an eland. Dabe explained his people’s ability to communicate over miles by comparing it to the white man’s “wire”, which he claimed Bushmen had in their chests. When van der Post and the hunters returned to camp that evening, they found that the waiting Bushmen did indeed already know, having made all the preparations for a big kill, which they would not have done otherwise. There was simply no way at all, miles away in that vast desert, for them to know about the kill of the eland.

It may be that what I felt in my chest was a remnant of a way of knowing that the Bushmen never lost and have developed so well that they can willfully use it to gain information as we use the telephone or the post office. It may be that if we take this possibility seriously and make the intense effort required, we might find again this way of knowing.

Not long ago, walking on the prairie, I nearly stepped on a large garter snake which raised its head as it coiled back from me, then stopped, waiting for me to attack or retreat. I felt a powerful sensation of combined shock, fear and something that might have been pleasure. The strange thing is that I felt all of that in my lower abdomen, in my womb, and it was a moment before I responded in the expected places: my intellect—“Oh, my God, a snake!”—my pulse speeding up, sweat breaking out on my body, and so on. Even a day later when I was thinking about it, what I remembered was the surprising and powerful sensation in my lower abdomen, rather than how my heart pounded, or how I trembled, or screamed. In fact, none of which I did, the abdominal sensation being sufficient until I got over my shock.

Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, in their fascinating study of the human female menstrual cycle and its implications, both mythic and actual,
The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman
, note that “the uterus is strongly supplied with consciously sensory nerves, but also with many filaments whose function is not clearly known to anatomy, as though these supplied an unconscious component—it is probable that all that the tissues of the body experience is in some manner accessible to our consciousness.”

I believe that areas of the body other than the recognized five senses are able to apprehend information about the world which often is not available through the acknowledged senses. Although we North Americans for the most part don’t, other cultures around the world believe in the existence and efficacy of one or another of these places, and make use of them as reliable gatherers of information, the Bushmen of the Kalahari as reported by van der Post being one of these groups. Stories abound too, for example, of the abilities of the holy men of India and Tibet to know things not available to the five accepted senses.

I begin to think that our technological prowess has outstripped, overwhelmed and in some cases destroyed abilities which we all once had, and which people who remain close to Nature have maintained. This would be of little consequence if technology were improving life and leading us on to greater things, but instead it destroys the natural world, and we thus lose a dimension of our humanity.

We are, after all, a part of Nature too. Why should we not be more capable of being tuned in to her than, in our urbanized, mechanized, indoor lives, we have memories of? If, put in a natural environment, being still and alert to new sensation, expecting only whatever happens and nothing more nor less, accepting such sensation as real and acting on it gives us new information about the world and/or extends our understanding of our place in creation, then it seems to me a practice worth pursuing. It may be that most people are so tense, so bombarded by other external stimuli and so disbelieving, such hard-core materialists, that they simply don’t notice intuition when it does strike. It is possible that if we spent more time alone and in Nature our intuitive abilities—another way of gathering information about the world—would strengthen.

I walked every day. I was in a position few people, especially women, are ever fortunate enough to be in: alone, in no danger of meeting anyone, without a job or a boss, no small children to look after, no family, no pressing personal problems, no commitments and no plans. It was the first time since childhood I had experienced such freedom.

When I first began going out into Nature for my walks, I had been concentrating, usually for a fairly long period of time, and I had either grown too tired to think or I had run into a problem that I thought would be more easily solved after a break. My state of
mind was nearly always reflective; I was usually sunk deep in myself, and I had trouble concentrating on just being in Nature.

On my return to the house I would sense that I had wasted my walk, since I’d been lost in thought the entire time.

One evening in early spring I was walking down a dusty, narrow country road between the river and a field of wild grass. I was alone and I had been walking a half hour or more when, for some reason I’m not aware of, I turned and looked back. I saw an animal hopping through the tall grass and I thought, Oh, kangaroo, and turned away again. Then it came to me that the animal couldn’t possibly have been a kangaroo and I turned back to look at it, expecting it to be a fox or a coyote.

It was a four-legged animal, all right, leaping up on its hind legs in order to see over the high grass. It must have been a young animal because it was hopping with the delight of a child, playing, it seemed, although I knew, since it was sunset, it must have been on its way to the river to water. As I watched, it moved into shorter grass and then saw me, and it paused in its jumping and stared down the road at me as I stared up the road at it.

I was trying to identify it; the configuration of its ears and head was wrong for either fox or coyote; it was too big to be a fox; it moved the wrong way to be a coyote. I kept staring, waiting for it to change its position so that I could see I had simply been wrong and it was one or the other. But it didn’t, and finally I realized I was staring at the first bobcat I’d ever seen in the flesh. And I think, given that it showed no sign of fear even when I clapped my hands, that it was staring at the first human being it had ever seen.

I had been in a reverie and for a moment when I saw the animal I didn’t even know where I was, thinking that I was looking at a kangaroo here on the Great Plains. That is how far removed I often was from the world around me. Increasingly it seemed to me that if I was
fortunate enough to have noticed certain things about the natural world out of my own unhappiness and consequent vulnerability, I had been given a gift, and I was throwing that gift away by not paying attention to my surroundings. I tried harder to pay attention.

Eventually I had done so much wandering that having gone in most directions many times, I couldn’t decide which direction to go. When this happened—no direction looking more interesting to me than any other, no direction seeming to be the right one, although I’ve no idea what I meant by that—I would stop walking and simply stand there till I felt drawn in a certain direction. To do that I would concentrate, not on what was going on in my brain, which I tried actively to suppress, but instead on what I felt in my body, specifically, what I felt in my abdomen, especially in my solar plexus.

This practice led me to the first of my strange experiences on the prairie, the one where I first found the stone circles—where I felt drawn to them—and where I found myself trying in some simple and direct way to acknowledge the power I found out there. After such an experience, which felt to me complete in itself, I could not doubt the rightness of the approach, and I incorporated it into my daily walks. I began to tune in to this strange new perceptual experience which came from where I didn’t know, and for which I had no name, and which required of me stillness, intense alertness and if not a casting away of the will, at least a subjugating of it to what I sometimes thought was a larger will.

I began to try to stop thinking about anything else but the dirt on the road, the grass beside it, the stones, the fields spreading out on each side, the hawks circling overhead, the song of the meadowlark or red-winged blackbird, the sound of the wind in the grass, a particular rock high on a hillside. This required concentration, I
found, and a constant calling myself back from thoughts of other things to my surroundings at the moment.

I remembered something I’d read years before in Carlos Castaneda’s
Tales of Power.
Don Juan had told Castaneda that he should learn to stop his “internal dialogue,” stop the busy buzzing of the conscious mind with its flitting from subject to subject, stop the constant interior talking to oneself. Don Juan tried to explain to Castaneda that the internal dialogue is constantly shaping and reshaping the world for us, and that without it we would find ourselves in a different place, we would experience the world differently. To this end he gave Castaneda an exercise to do while he was walking. Castaneda, recalcitrant pupil that he was, found it a difficult task which he says he spent years trying to do and failing. But one day, walking alone down a city street, he suddenly found that he had inadvertently succeeded in stopping his internal dialogue.

It had never occurred to me that such a thing could be done, much less that it was desirable to do so, but out of the difficulty in maintaining concentration, I tried it, and to my surprise, not only could it be done, but I did it. Not for long, of course, only for a few seconds, and I noticed immediately that when I did it, I stopped breathing, which was a severe limitation on the length of time I could do it.

Inner stillness, which is what I was trying to produce, sounds like formal meditation. I had tried traditional meditation, strictly on my own without teaching or enrolling in a class of any kind, and had found it not only difficult but irritating in the extreme. I had used the classic approach: sitting quietly, alone in a room, my eyes closed, in absolute silence. I had concluded that it might be all very well for some people, but it was emphatically not suited to me. Yet at a writers’ school one summer I suggested to the group that they might try “stopping their thoughts” as I had, in order to concentrate on a
particular writing problem. I said I had tried but given up on meditation. Another writing instructor present who had had long, intense experience with meditation said to me afterward that he had laughed when I had said that I’d given up on meditation since my description of stopping my thoughts was in fact an excellent description of meditation.

Altered states of consciousness can have purposes other than gazing inward in a search for God. My reading on the subject increasingly leads me to believe that, for example, the best, the most successful of Aboriginal hunters are clearly in altered states of consciousness when they wait for and track game, and that this is brought on through intense concentration on the matter at hand and the exclusion of all irrelevant stimuli. Even the artist’s moments of absolute absorption in his/her work takes place, I believe, in an altered state of consciousness and is a kind of meditation. The same might be true of surgeons or cabinetmakers, fishermen, or children learning to read.

These strange experiences, although they’d happened one by one with long, uneventful periods in between, were beginning to seem to me to be parts of some whole which I’d never noticed before, or dreamt of, having to do with a way of understanding and being in the world. As a result of them I’d begun to approach the unbroken prairie in the way people approach a church or a great work of art—with a sense of awe and reverence at entering a powerful mystery. Once I had had one strange experience in it, how else might I have approached it, if I were to approach it at all? If wilderness has anything to teach us, it is about our own weakness, our failure to control much less understand this earth onto which we were all born. And with this growing humility in the face of the unknown, slowly a sense of being in the presence of some great consciousness, other than one’s own, begins to grow too.

I became cautious. I thought, What if I am walking inside the mind of a creature—call it what you will—what if the earth really is a living being and my presence here is only on sufferance? If I am learning new things about myself and extrapolating from these things to this natural world and its nature, then it behooves me to walk carefully, to pay attention, to show my growing respect in every possible way.

I stopped picking wildflowers; I went around rocks instead of stepping on them; if I picked up a stone to study it, I put it back as nearly in the place and position I had found it as I possibly could. I did not glance at plants or lichens on rocks or on the ground, I studied them. I practised inner stillness in order to hear, really hear, the wind, the birdsong, whatever else might be in the air. It took tremendous effort and I failed more often than I succeeded, but I persisted out of a sense of discovery and of need. What is life? I asked myself. Why am I here? Or anywhere? What is the meaning of these stones, this grass, this landscape? I hoped that if I listened hard enough, looked hard enough, was still enough and quiet enough, the answers would seep into me.

One chilly, damp spring day as I was out on a rocky hillside by myself, I sat down on the wet grass and leaned back on my elbows, looking out over the landscape near me. Even in this desert country—if it isn’t a really bad drought year when the hills look about to turn into hoodoos and there aren’t many insects around—I have an impression of lushness, of many different kinds of grasses and shrubs growing against each other, resulting in a scene busy with so many different textures, patterns, colors, shades of colors.

I looked twenty feet away to a large patch of badger and rose bushes growing thickly in the cleft of a small coulee, a place where I knew deer often bedded down out of sight, and rabbits, when there
are rabbits around. I shut off my internal dialogue for a minute (about all I can manage before I have to stop and start again), at which point all the sounds of the environment—birds, insects, wind in the grass or the sky—become clear. I was studying that copse with such intensity that something strange happened to me.