Hazel, Primroses and Belonging
How did I not see the hazel catkins in other years? So conspicuous now to me, hungry for native botany. The pendulous hang of the catkin proclaims the coming of spring and underneath, along the trail, erupt yellow primroses freshly blooming. In my unknowing unease in previous years my eyes did not detect these organic signals.
We underestimate how much our brains screen the world, admitting information deemed necessary and beneficial to our survival. The problem with living in an abstracted anthroposcape is that we are rewarded for closing our senses to the living world. Efficiency is the highest achievement. So many of us live in digital data streams, shirking the analogue as clunky and out of sync. To me, the organic ‘data stream’ has an unreplicable, fractal wholeness, whereas competing feeds of digital matter constitute a field of dissonance. Have you felt the mental exhaustion hit after using a smartphone for longer than you normally do? The strange tension between desiring release from this intense gaze and the reticence of a part of your brain hungry for another rewarding pulse of digitally-induced dopamine?
Hazel catkins
Forest bathing is rising in popularity, especially in Japan. Unmediated immersion in a natural environment gives your body a taste of what it is designed for. Successive waves of sound, vision and touch sweep across your awareness. These explicitly ‘natural’ locations like old growth forests or open grasslands offer a certain purity in this respect, but the true value of this activity is how it augments your orientation towards the world, which makes it something we can practise anywhere, anytime. Simply taking a moment to breathe, or noticing a cloud in the sky, or seeing intuitively how the bark of a tree shades from grey to brown along its trunk can reposition our conscious state, cementing us in the present. This momentary break in concentration is what modern tech refuses to provide, the more easily to corral us away from the real.
Information is passive, awaiting our masterly control, whereas meaning is active, constantly evolving from relationship. In our current civilisation we have forgotten the difference and fooled ourselves into believing that information repackaged creates meaning. Meaning is an emergent quality of the complex system of life; through our apprehension of the world and our ability to reframe it through language we become nodes in the cosmic web of relationship.
In the end we dig up the wisdom of all ages and peoples, only to find that everything most dear and precious to us has already been said in the most superb language.
C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
I’ve been thinking about what it means to be native. To me, when you root yourself in an area, when you come to know the other beings that inhabit it, when you know the weather patterns, when your nervous system extends itself confidently outwards, you become imbued with nativity. Walking the boundary hedge of the field around my house I find oak, holly, hazel, whitethorn, all intermingled in exquisite embraces, where before I saw only an unbroken, faceless barrier.
Primose (Primula vulgaris)
This landscape has changed so much in a few thousand years. The ancestors of these trees stood in community here before any humans came. They watched as we settled and expanded, pushing them to the liminal places, just like our own wildness was cut back to the margins of our psyche. If we can relate to the nativity of these trees we can relate to ourselves, and if we can relate to ourselves we can forge a closer bond with the earth, renewing the old ties.
In Ireland the land is subdivided into townlands of varying sizes, ranging from one acre up to several thousand. The natural history of the area is often recorded in the name itself. These same place names were in use at least fifteen hundred years ago in the early medieval period and their roots, in all likelihood, lie still further back towards the Bronze Age. The townland that I live in is called Gortlownan, from the Irish Gort Leamhnáin, which means ‘field of the elms’. I live on top of a hill overlooking the fields that undulate to Lough Gill and the bog reaching up the many lobes of Killery mountain to the northwest. No elms live here now, but their old native siblings still persist around the margins of fields and in rough hollows. I look out and envision a living forest spreading to cover the land, as it would have been six thousand years ago. The wild spirit of every place sustains itself around us, we merely have to open our eyes to see.