I’ve been reading Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book, Right Story, Wrong Story this morning, and, as all his work does, a complex web of feelings and thoughts have been evoked within me as a result. In particular, I am musing about signs and symbols and relationships and meaning in the land. He mentions “Something,” a concept that could be and is often dismissed as a coincidence. He says about it,
There’s nothing woo-woo about this ‘Something’ concept. I’m not manifesting these things with my positive thoughts, and neither is some god or spirit invented in a monastery five minutes ago. When the land communicates with you and give you everything you need, that’s just ancient, dynamic systems doing what they do (as long as you’re a part of them).
There are measurable informatics occurring in these systems that coordinate all of their parts. If you’re one of these parts, and you’re in right relation, you’ll always have what you need (although that isn’t always what you want). You only need to have enough awareness to see or hear or feel the pattern of the system, and everything you need is always nearby.
Right Story, Wrong Story, pg. 49-50
Personally, I struggle with, well, all of this: with being one of the parts, with being in right relation, and with having the awareness needed to recognize what is being communicated. It is something I want, but it is hard when I don’t really know how to achieve it, when how to rightly relate has been lost (or deliberately destroyed).
I have a tendency to read into things, events, Somethings, especially when I am out on the closest thing to ‘the land ‘ that exists where I live. Those Somethings definitely feel like they have meaning, like there is something attempting to be transmitted or conveyed or carried. If I am generous with myself I think I can recognize that there is some communication even if I have no idea how to decipher it. I’m reminded of something Thoreau wrote about in Walden, about a game of chase with a loon:
As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. He manœuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon…
I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.
Walden, “Brute Neighbors,”
It would be easy to dismiss this whole account as meaningless—Somethingless—that the loon was just doing what loons do when approached by humans or non-loons. Interpreting its actions as playful, as a game, surely gives more meaning than it deserves; all behavior can be explained (away) by appeals to biology or chemistry and there is a very simple explanation for this.
Even easier to dismiss is the coincidence at the end of the episode, when the loon howls and the rain begins. That Thoreau makes Something out of Nothing is perhaps just a desire to find meaning and purpose where there isn’t any. Worse yet, it is a desire to find meaning just for him—he is the only one who witnesses this Something so surely that he interprets it as Something is self-serving.
And yet…
How many times have I done the exact same thing? (a lot)
I really resonate with Thoreau here because it really seems like he wants to—and this is borne out in the rest of the book—to be in right relation to his neighbors, to know them, and so to see the pattern of the system of which he is part and parcel. I want this too. I have always found in his writings that he voices my longing for this better than I myself can.
Later in the same chapter Yunkaporta writes a description about Michel Grobbe, a Frisian ecologist, and the ancestral knowledge he maintains and teaches to others. What struck me most was how much he knew not just about his place but his place in the system, that all the Somethings are not indecipherable like the mind of the loon was to Thoreau:
Wild ducks were harvested when hazelnuts were ripe and these were eaten together to unlock the full nutrition of both. Holly produced medicine for colds precisely in the season when people were catching colds. Tree species whose branches or bark were only suitable in certain seasons for making tools, baskets or bags were felled by beavers in those exact seasons. Roots were dug when the maythorn was flowering. When the bear constellation reached a certain location in the night sky, the birch trees were ready to tap for their sap, and roe deer could be hunted…
…Piles of branches were placed beside dams and ponds for snakes to nest in, to keep the frog population from overgrazing on insects essential to the health of the system. People followed the mating dances of birds to locate eggs hidden in the tall grass, taking all the eggs early in the season and leaving those that are laid later in the season to hatch. Birds hatching early in the season do not thrive, so this was a symbiotic relation between people and birds that was essential for systems health. When the late-season hatchlings grew old enough to fly away, this was a seasonal indicator that it was time to cut the grass for hay.
Right Story, Wrong Story, pg. 59-60
Thoreau, late in his life, began to make phenological charts about the seasonal shifts and Somethings that he noticed and tracked. I have a desire to do something similar, not just to know my place that intimately but to be a part of it, to influence and be influenced by it, to be integral to the whole and not just an outside observer. Thoreau wanted this too, I think, and much of the internal conflict he felt over the burgeoning scientific methodologies of his time were, in part, because of this. In other words, he didn’t want to be an aloof and detached observer and that the ways of knowing that came from that were flawed and incomplete.
It is overwhelming though to try to recover (or learn for the first time) this type of knowledge and this way of being when there is absolutely no one to help you. But that is what I want, what I desire, and what I think we all need. To not just know the patterns of the system but to be in right relation to it, to be in it and of it. I think that’s why I struggle with these Somethings, those things that seem to have so much meaning but that can also be dismissed as coincidence. I want to learn the patterns and to be part of the pattern, to be integral to the system, not just a hyper-perceptive observer. Perhaps when I perceive or intuit that there is Something meaningful being communicated that is an opportunity to be in right relation, to not just observe but participate.