Large Fierce Mammal

“No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.” ~ Gregory Bateson – Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Welcome back thou frayed and fraught traveller. We’ve kept your seat by the fire warm and ask that you pay no attention to the vacant ones. We live in hope those empty places are merely a result of lateness in the sense of mere tardiness, and not the other kind.

Each year as Winter approaches, I go to the Green Places I know. Not to imply this doesn’t occur in all the other seasons, only that there is a greater drive through Harvest into first snow.

When I call a place “Green”, I refer to something transcending what most speak of within the more limited context of “holy”, or the broader, and only slightly more comparable “sacred”. The limitations of both are that they are anthropocentric. and so valued not as a Constant of Nature, but rather only within the ideological fluidity of Human entitlement and desire.

Whether my pilgrimages are compelled or summoned, I cannot say beyond that they are undeniably more than a polite invitation, and to dwell on the distinction would be a waste of effort because the outcome is the same — I go to converse with the Genius Loci — the Spirits of Place — who dwell there.

My time with Them is a period of reflection on where things are and where they need to be on a scale that runs from now to forever, and the communication eschews the language of Man, for any level of verbosity draws upon conscious thought with all its intrinsic limitations. Rather the conversation, either in substance or condition of even beginning, may be made of hot and cold, wet and dry, tired and vibrant, hungry and sated, thirsty and slaked, denied and indulged, hard and gentle, focussed and blurred, fast and slow, quiet and loud, painful and ecstatic, thriving and dying, living and dead. In all this, one thing it never is nor ever will be is Safe.

To say that I go to these places to converse implies the sedentary or even meditative, and this can be the case for some Places, although others may be demanding of more physically feral expressions of Worthiness — walking, swimming, harvesting, eating, drinking, fasting, remembering, forgetting, embracing, rejecting, creating, destroying, copulating, watching, listening, touching, chasing, hiding, stalking, killing.

There is a time and place to speak aloud of what has come from these audiences. Never in a Green Place of course, but here with you, Goode Reader, in this 10th season of Dark Sentiments, is a different story.

Until tomorrow.