Tane the songster!

Robin world is feeling that little bit brighter...

YES! Subsong! The little chap stayed with me for quite some time! Then I did not see him the next day and already feel rather miserable.

But I have been thinking about my close encounters with robins, stags and hares - the boxing hare from the coppice and the one that lay down close to me, rather than all the hares I scare from their forms. Nastassja Martin's book In the Eye of the Wild, has given me a new way to think of this. She is a French anthropologist who survived a bear attack in Kamchatka. She had been living with indigenous people in Russia and before that in Alaska, all of whom were animists, and was inclined to feel some connection with the bear. She came to embrace a wider sense of who she was. The bear attack was significant, not random; but the bear did not “mirror” her internal rebelliousness or anger, he was not a symbol, he was a being with his own journey, albeit a journey that led him to her, just as Nastassja’s journey led her to the bear. She did not reject him from her psyche nor merge with him. She writes:

It’s not about depopulating the soul so as to enjoy the insular little strip it still harbors; rather it’s about making of ourselves the place, the ecosystem where those we have chosen—or who have chosen us —become, beyond the gulfs that divide them, commensurable.  (Martin 2021, LOC 693)

She did not accept that the bear was something other than himself. Still, she talks of a "resonance". She says:

[O]ur bodies were commingled, there was that incomprehensible us, that us which I confusedly sense comes from a very distant place, from a before situated far outside of our limited existences. I turn these ideas over in my head. Why did we choose each other? What truly do I share with this wild creature, and since when? (Martin 2021, LOC 728)

Martin broods over this throughout her recovery and a return to Kamchatka. She concludes that there is no straightforward sense to be made of it:

For it was I he sought; and it was for him that I appeared. It is hard to leave sense unmade. To decide: I do not know everything about this encounter; I shall let the assumed desiderata of the bears’ world alone; my gift shall be this uncertainty. What we need, then, is to reflect on the places, creatures, and events that lie in shadow, surrounded by empty space, where we meet the experiential crux that no standard relationship can describe, that we cannot map our way out of. This is our situation right now, the bear’s and mine: we have become a focal point that everyone talks about but no one understands. This is precisely why I keep coming up against reductive and even trivializing interpretations, however lovingly meant: because we are facing a semantic void, an off-script leap that challenges and unnerves all categories. Hence the rush on all sides to pin labels to us, to define, confine, and shape the event. Not allowing this uncertainty about the event to remain requires normalizing it so that, whatever the cost, it can be made to fit into the human project. And yet. The bear and I speak of liminality, and even if this is terrifying, no one can change that. Branches crunch behind me, someone is coming. I decide: They can say what they want. I mean to stay in this no-man’s-land. (Martin 2021, LOC 974)

[T]here is an implicit, unspoken law specific to the predators seeking and evading each other in the depths of the forests and upon the mountain ranges of this earth. The law is as follows: when they meet, if they meet, their territories collide, their worlds turn upside down, their usual paths are altered, and their connection becomes everlasting. There is a kind of suspension of movement, a holding back, a hiatus, a dazzlement that grips the two wild creatures caught in this ancient encounter—the meeting that cannot be prepared, nor avoided, nor escaped. (Martin 2021, LOC 1240)

Now, not only have I not been mauled - though, in this context (and given some similarity in our injuries), I do think of being kicked by the horse, nor am I dealing with predators... BUT, the way she talks about this, the liminality, the "the experiential crux that no standard relationship can describe", that seems apt. And the first quotation I offered feels so right to me. And it asks something different of me than to expect the "other" to explain me to myself or provide insight into my purpose or inner being or whatever. Instead, it is something other, separate, agential within the self... a self as an ecosystem inhabited by me and various independent others....