top of page
Search

The view from the Poplar Path

Writer's picture: CroneCrone

After consultation with Crow, Crone takes to the woods.


She leans her head into Poplar heart-wood. Hears wood as wind and sky and weather.


The Poplar is in communion with air and earth and water and sun. She is the elements transmuted into life. As, she adds, are we all.


She is, with her fungal partners and earthy connections, more aware than most of the interdependence of being.


Crone feels earth beneath her feet, sunlight, humidity, breeze. She tries to become tree.


And she can't quite. She envies Ovid's Dryads, so often transformed into woody form. Her metamorphosis is more metaphorical.


This is her testimony.


We humans find it challenging to sense the value of a 'way-of-being-and-experiencing’ in which the individual self is only the first and probably not most important aspect of consciousness. That for other beings, consciousness may expand into a genuine group awareness and even community/ecosystem/place/biosphere sense-of-belonging-and-connection. They have not divorced themselves by abstractions and conceptualisations from the web of live, the eternal cycle of birth and death, growth and decomposition, eating and being eaten. This is not to say that the hare accepts being eaten by the fox, but that the part of her which struggles and experiences pain is not the whole of what she is. Her wholeness encompasses otherness. She is not Cartesian-ly divided or separated. It alters things in a way that I cannot yet make effable!


It is this, in my view, that makes other lives so precious - not JUST as individuals but as beings-in-wholeness.


I do not think ‘we’ can evolve into that, but maybe we can, to some extent, some of the time, let our prosthetic ideological and cultural accretions slip - so that we can sense the value in non-individuality.


This I guess is what psychotropic explorers and 10,000 hour meditators do - but I think it is possible simply by listening and paying attention… by a kind of care-ful curiosity and un-cultured contemplation.


It all leads back to the Kestrel, to Murdoch, to unselfing.

Recent Posts

See All
Bugbear

Bugbear

Comentarios


  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

©2019 by The Wisdom of the Crone. Proudly created with Wix.com

bottom of page