Such was the beauty of this sunset light, and its stark contrast to the rest of the day, my mind leapt to understand it more. Could it hold some meaning? Was it a sign of some kind, perhaps a portent? It was fascinating to think that, if everything in the universe is truly interconnected and inter-related, an appearance of this kind had to have meaning on many levels.
I believe that a leading edge of development for Western culture in its recovery of a respectful relationship with nature is the ability to read it intuitively. We have to learn the languages of the natural world, understand the way that everything is speaking to us, and honour people with the ability to do so.
The orange band on the horizon might be interpreted by an Indigenous person as the presence of a dreamtime creator being, by a Hindu as the dance of devas or the revelation of Shiva, by a Christian as the radiance of God’s grace in the world. A priest or medicine man/woman may divine in it a message for the future or a sign of how things are in the present. Whatever the levels of science or rationality in these beliefs, they express a fundamentally intuitive relationship to nature. And it is the valuing of the intuitive mind that is sorely needed in our highly rationalist, grossly material modern society.
We start with awe. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell believed that awe in response to the great mystery of life was the source of all religion. Awe places you in a position of humility in which there may not be simple answers but only an attitude of questing openness. With this receptivity, we start to cultivate what in Hinduism is called “buddhi”, the intellect or intuitive mind. The Catholic monk and Hindu scholar Bede Griffiths describes buddhi as “the still point” at which we open to the transcendent, unitive order of things. We find ourselves in the psychic domain, aware of a deeper reality beyond the world of the senses.
In the liminal, unitary consciousness of psyche, we start to recapture the soul of the world, the essence or nature of things. From this view point everything is radiant with meaning, everything has a purpose of some kind. To translate this meaning into the concrete world requires storytelling, the ability to weave the strands of the psyche into forms that speak to everyday experience. The creation stories of Indigenous people achieve this by linking the work, crafts, rituals, ceremonies and family life of the people with the magical activities of creator beings and animals.
What is achieved through storytelling is a poetic consciousness that values and incorporates both the literal and the metaphoric in a more inclusive, holistic vision of reality. Good poetry is always doing this – speaking of the concrete while pointing to the unseen. And unlike empirical science, which is focused on literal explanation of the world, poetry embraces mystery, the unknown and unknowable. One of my favourite examples of this is Robert Frost’s classic short poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: we don’t know why the author of the poem stops by the forest with his horse or where he is going, but there is a strong sense of the attraction to mystery. The last lines of the poem are: The woods are lovely, dark and deep/ But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.
Perhaps sometime soon we will recover storytelling as an integral way of meaning-making in our culture, and create new stories that connect us holistically and deeply to our world. We can re-engage with nature by appreciating it both literally and psychically, and in doing so create the kind of consciousness that will value all life. The orange band that captivated me on that wintry evening may, then, be an invitation to look deeply into the heart of the cosmos and to spin dazzling and wonderful tales anew.
