To be a bird

"To go beyond and become what - a seagull on a reef?  Why not.  Our nature is no particular nature; look out across the beach at the gulls.  For an empty moment while their soar and cry enters your heart like a sunshaft through water, you are that, totally.  We do this every day.  So this is the aspect of mind that gives art, style, and self-transcendence to the inescapable human plantedness in a social and ecological nexus.  The challenge is to do it well, by your neighbors and by the trees, and maybe once in a great while we can get where we see through the same eye at the same time, for a moment.  That would be doing it well."  Gary Snyder

Sometimes when I've been reading Snyder I'll stop and say "holy fuck, has this guy had access to my things?"  He writes, often enough to be unsettling, the uncreated yet creating consciousness in me.  I've been interested lately in the idea of crossing over.  Not to some metaphysical "other" plane like television psychics claim to.  Nor precisely like biology means either, though it is closer, a process in which two chromosomes pair up and exchange genetic information resulting in unique genetic material and thus, diversity.  I mean crossing species.  I mean imagining yourself as that particular junco right now.  What sensations would I be feeling?  Would the early afternoon sunlight still seem dappled?  That breeze that's just risen from its lunch up-canyon, how would that feel on my feathers?  Could I see air?

This might seem strange to many of us, but it's really got quite a long history.  In both Buddhist iconography and Native American art there is an intermingling of 'animal' and 'human' eyes.  In Western mythology of course the examples are innumerable of humans becoming and unbecoming animal.  Often as punishment.  Rarely is it a positive experience in the West, to assume the form of an animal.  And crucially, it seems the human mind is kept even with the body not belonging to it.  This seems impossible.  That junco could not "know" running for running's sake.  But does the junco look back at me with its black eyes and cross over into me?  Do we exchange parts of ourselves and in doing so create some new form? 

Deep Ecology teaches that every life form has intrinsic value.  Intrinsic value.  And that it is also possible to identify with every life form.  Radical, isn't it?  It is a powerful experience to imagine yourself as another animal.  Or as a Wood's Rose.  Or as a mountain.  Or as Puget Sound.  It dissolves our inherent solipsism, vestiges of our selfish anthropocentric "guardianship" and "management" of the wild world, the world at all.  We are wild.  Our very language is wild.  We cannot contain it.  See       it          walking               away.

Forever

walking


away.

Like the preternatural glance of the Blue Heron, a breathing and perfectly alive hieroglyph on the creek bed.

Or like this visitor...