Practice: Sensing Place

“Our Homo sapien brains, our neuronal pathways, jolted and fused and tenderly sprouted new branches every time our eyes scanned the complexity of a living world, trying to make sense of its miraculous expressions, our bodies learning how to live by sensing the minutest details of topographies, foraging, tracking, hunting.

We were often nomadic, and as we moved through landscape, we became landscape and landscape became us.”

- Alexa Firmenich

SYNOPSIS:

This is the first of the Lifeworlds ‘bonus’ episodes, designed to help us tune in somatically to the living world. Somatically means through the body. We need to be grounding our connection to other lifeworlds into our very bodies for them to become lasting and real. Here we discover how to access these states through things like mindfulness, art, wilderness practices and poetry.

The skills of listening and deep observation are at the core of understanding the lifeworlds of nature. It’s how we begin to fine tune ourselves, like an analogue radio, to frequencies that appeared invisible beforehand. What you will begin to pick up on are nothing less than the dialects and languages of the earth itself.

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PRACTICE AND TRANSCRIPT:

To start us off this week, we’re going to engage with a basic practice that I think everyone should and can do. We’re going to understand the ground we stand on. The place that we call home. And that’s because our home is a doorway into the greater whole – it’s where the hyper object, the things that are too large to grasp, become touchable and intimate. As poet, philosopher and farmer Wendell Berry once said, “You can’t know who you are until you know where you are”.

This practice of sensing and grounding in land is one that’s centered on the skill of observation. Last week on Lifeworlds you heard from Michael Ableman that the act of observation, that the power of observation, is probably the most important agricultural skill.

Michael shared with us that when he walks his farm, the plants, the animals and the soil do in fact tell him what they need. It’s not that he’s hearing voices in his head, but there is a form of interspecies communication that occurs and from that communication results a very clear list of the projects and needs of the week. This is both a spiritual practice and a survival practice. When we track the undulations of the land, the crack of a branch above, the soaring densities of clouds gathering in the horizon before a storm, we are at once rewilding ourselves and learning the skills that our bodies and our neural circuitry are literally hardwired to do.

Our Homo sapien brains, our neuronal pathways, jolted and fused and tenderly sprouted new branches every time our eyes scanned the complexity of a living world, trying to make sense of its miraculous expressions, our bodies learning how to live by sensing the minutest details of topographies, foraging, tracking, hunting. We were often nomadic, and as we moved through landscape, we became landscape and landscape became us.

So ask yourself – if the richness of human imagination is dependent on and emerges from the richness of a biodiverse landscape, then today’s exponential disappearance of that landscape is also an exponential loss of all the ways we can read and understand ourselves and all of life. We are stunted by simplification. New generations have a distinctly impoverished baseline from which to know the world from.

Onto the exercise.

I’m going to share with you a list of questions, and the invitation here is to work through them until you know intimately the answers to all. Uncovering these responses is often incredibly rewarding, and can lead to a giddy adventure into the underlayers of the place you call home, and if you’re anything like me, you might find yourself trailing behind a recycling truck or packing an overnight bag to treck to the top of a river source. It’s playful and yet utterly serious, like learning how to play a new instrument. Appreciate the subtle shifts in your body that might occur as you go further and further in. Observe how the place you call home starts to change. “Rootedness in a place is the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”, said Simone Weil. Let’s start rooting.

Which way is north?

What phase is the moon in?

Can you describe the soil around your home? How does it change over the seasons (in texture, in smell, in color)?

What plant grows closest to your front door?

What kinds of trees, fruits, or animals are native to the area?

Do you know three edible plants in your region, and the season they flower in?

What is the first wildflower to bloom in the spring?

What birds visit your spaces?

What wood in the area is good for making things with?

Where does the water from your tap come from? And where does it go once it goes down the drain?

Where does your trash go when it leaves your house?

When the rain falls, where does it flow? Could you sketch out these little rivers, eddies, and currents, around your street or your house?

Slowly draw a map of 1km with all the plants and elements of the land, off memory

What are the myths of the land? Are there any folk tales or myths? Any elders you can ask about their memories of such a thing?

Take all this, and begin making a 365 day calendar. The Japanese have a beautiful calendar that’s based off 72 micro seasons (rather than our four blander ones). The 72 sections (or kō) last for only around five days each, yet perfectly describe what is happening as life blooms and ebbs.

For example: East wind melts the ice (Feb 4th - 8th); Bush warblers start singing in the mountains (Feb 9th - 13th); Mist starts to linger (Feb 24th - 28th); First peach blossoms (March 11th - 15th); Caterpillars become butterflies (March 16th - 20th); Wild geese fly north (April 10th - 14th); First rainbows (April 15th- 19th); Insects hole up underground (September 28th - October 2nd); Farmers drain fields (October 3rd - 7th); Deer shed antlers (December 27th - 31st); Wheat sprouts under snow (January 1st - 4th)

I’m inviting you to create your own micro calendar based off your observations and the answers to the above. Set yourself an hour, every few mornings or evenings, to go and sketch and observe what you see. It’s useful if you stay in a close circuit and don’t wander too far.

I recommend using INaturalist to help identify the species you meet: https://www.inaturalist.org/

So go out there and see what you discover! Have fun with it! Add your own discoveries and questions to this list – these are only here to get you going.

• — — — •

"Naturally then, the mountains, the creatures, the entire non-human world is struggling to make contact with us. The plants we eat are trying to ask us what we are up to; the animals are signalling to us in our dreams or in forests; the whole Earth is rumbling; straining to let us remember that we are of it, that this planet, this macrocosm is our flesh, that the grasses are our hair, the trees are our hands, the rivers our blood, that the Earth is our real body and that it is alive.”

David Abram

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