Meeting Aliveness

An enquiry into all that arises in the meeting place of aliveness with aliveness

Over the last few years, I’ve been walking myself into place; often with my husband, W, sometimes alone.

I’ve walked myself into place in other parts of the world but there’s something about walking myself into the viscerally ancient rivers, forests, and hills of Dartmoor, England, and the generous ecology of this part of South Devon’s Jurassic Coast, that is medicine, and newly felt.

I stand barefoot in one tiny part of the English Channel shoreline as it’s cupped in the tender golden light of a summer evening - the water, first, shockingly cold; soon, gently presencing - and the aliveness of this place and this meeting is medicine. I rest on a fallen branch on the banks of a Dartmoor rivulet with W, eyes closed to better be with the chattering Chiffchaffs and the rivulet’s babbling, and the alivenesses I can be a part of amaze me. W and I hike through a stretch of staggeringly tall trees and cliff-faces rooting out of Devon’s distinctive red soil, a few steps from the dinosaurs that will surely come into view soon, and this immediate contact with deep-time and the present is medicine.

I have never doubted the aliveness of myself or the living world but that knowing was logical and intellectual, and this meeting is a living thing. Animal. Direct, sensory, visceral. Medicine. Walking myself into this place, I reach out often to feel leaves and bark, tread grass, stone, and water with bared feet, eat leaves a local guide has invited me to try. I’m meeting this place through its smells, taste, texture, feel, and sound.

I’m fascinated by the ways we human creatures meet the aliveness of ourselves and all the other ways aliveness exists in the ways that we currently know of. I have come to view this universe as fundamentally ecological, with all that exists formed of - and forming - an entanglement of meetings, interactions, and processes. From what we know of the nature of the smallest matter to the largest complex living systems, everything seems to be in relationship with something else.

Walking myself into this place has particularly deepened my fascination with how language, ideas, concepts, and stories inform - and are informed by - the encounters between us human creatures and other alivenesses: whether a human creature researching what matter is formed of, W and I sitting by a river in Dartmoor closing our eyes to better be with the sounds around us, or someone engaging in regenerative agriculture, each interaction between human aliveness and another aliveness is saturated with - and saturating - the meeting between us.

A circle of mushrooms is storied into a faerie ring; a sacred, magical, suspicious gateway into another realm. The moving of a living system from depleted to healthy is conceptualised into ‘regeneration’; this languaging then ripples out into multiple fields of interest, from organisational design to architecture. The sun’s movement across the sky has been (and still is) a mythological being engaged in a godly task, a symbol of cyclical renewal, a reminder of the power of a singular god’s creation, proof that Earth is at the centre of the world, a foretelling of harvest or starvation, a visible manifestation of the divine, and the movement of a home planet around a yellow dwarf star at the centre of a galaxy.

All things would exist without being languaged by us human creatures, without being understood, categorised, made story of. Yet, in those interactions, in those meetings, a relationship is born that houses an aliveness all its own.

Each meeting worlds - and is worlding - a relationality of language, story, framings, meaning, and relationship.

As I walk myself into this place, into the red soil of this place, the movements of the rivers here, the different birds that visit and make home here, the curves and juts of the coast cliffs here, I am becoming more and more attuned to and excited by aliveness as both reachable and utterly different, knowable and unknowable. I am drawn over and over again to Sophie Strand’s holding of animism, shared in The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. ‘When I think of what I believe in,’ she writes, ‘it is closest to a form of animism - the belief that all plants, creatures, and parts of the earth are animate and alive. But it is an animism of chaotic difference. Of woven contamination. It is an understanding that my being alive does not mean I should assume that the aliveness of the hill or the river or the wild roses is the same flavour of my aliveness.’

I can commune with the red soil here, attune to the waters of this part of this one tiny part of the English Channel shoreline, know intimately the generous ecology of this part of the Jurassic Coast, be in relationship with these birds, these rocks, these winds, this climate, these grasses, these reeds, these animals, these movements, these histories, these stories, these possible futures of this place. Yet, to imagine any of these alivenesses as being human-like, as knowable in ways that disregard the mystery, the alienness of these other alivenesses seems disrespectful, unhelpful, untrue (with a lower case true).

Yet, there are things about these alivenesses I can know. I can know the language, the concepts, the understandings, the stories that arise in these meetings and that are co-birthed through our relationship. I can know the ideas of knowledge, truth, and wisdom I hold that flavour these meetings. I can know the worldviews and cosmologies that shape and tend and prod these meetings. I can know other what arises within me as I meet other alivenesses - the memories, the yearnings, the emotions, my relationship to place, to neighbourhood, to ancestral lines and inheritances, cultural stories and human histories, social systems and ecosystems, the more-than-human and this Earth. I can know alivenesses through embodied fascination, living enquiry, animal curiosity.

I can slip into different ideas, different stories, and be curious about them. If a rock or the wind or a word is animated, does that mean it has consciousness? Does animism hold the animation or agency of a rock, or the wind, or a word as biological or something more? Does this agency or animation change over time or does it stay the same flavour and shape? If a bowl is animated, at what point on the lathe does the bowl become animated? And, is the animation of a rock, or the wind, or a word an animation that we humans would, or could, ever truly imagine or connect to?

As I walk myself into this place, I tread these enquiries into the red soil, breathe them into the wind, trickle them out from my toes into the waters, combine them into the chatter of the Chiffchaffs. As I do, a deeper enquiry arises: can I, for one moment, be with chaotically different alivenesses with as little interpretation, understanding, language as possible? Can I be with alivenesses that are reachable yet chaotically different?

Can I meet these alivenesses as they are?

How marvellous, that we human creatures meet other alivenesses, and in the doing, form language; and are formed by it. Weave stories; and are weaved into them. Make meanings, concepts, framings; and are made by them. And, when we pay attention to all that’s alive within those meetings, we might find enough space alongside them to enter the liminal space between stories, beyond language, beside meaning. In that space, we might find that some stories, language, meanings, and framings become more rooted, some dissipate, and new ones rearrange and are rearranged.

In the meetings, we might find medicine.

Around 1.9 million years ago, Homo erectus underwent the significant evolutionary changes that made us Homo sapiens into the walkers we are. Their pelvises and lower limbs reshaped, bringing their knees and feet underneath their bodies' centre of gravity. Changes to their skulls and spines forced a more upright posture. We also know that until around 10,000 - 12,000 years ago, we humans were mostly nomadic or semi-nomadic creatures. We were made to walk; and we were made to know a place through walking. We were made to know a place through chemical and biological and ecological and emotional interactions. We were made to know the medicine of smells, taste, texture, feel, and sound.

It seems to me that we human creatures were made to know aliveness through relationship. And, when we become aware of all that is alive within these meetings, we might find our way closer to being with our aliveness and other alivenesses just as we are.

Naming the impossible-to-trace lineage of enquiry overall as a living practise - including enquiry into how we experience our aliveness, other alivenesses, and what’s alive in the meeting of the two - that has been, and still is, being practised and held by many peoples and cultures individually and communally throughout humanity’s journey on this tiny planet amongst so many stars.

Image shared with this is Katsushika Hokusai’s Japanese owl, Album of Sketches (1760–1849) paintings. Original public domain image from The MET Museum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.