Venture Further Into The Forest

Heading to uncharted places

Credit: Jonathan Foster

This week The Crow is back on track, literally and figuratively, with a raging poetic rising of thought pouring out from deep within that asks Can we not dismantle our creaking wooden ships and burn the wood in smokeless pyres?

(Thank you all so much for your kind comments after last week’s peek behind the curtain. I’m so privileged to have found myself in all your company.)

1.

The planet is slowly shrugging away from the sun, drawing winter once more toward the North, as the dog and I venture further into the forest than we have ever dared.

Mapless, heading toward the sun, we wander eastward in the soft morning light, through a sparkling explosion of delicate fungi that whisper of ancient things long forgotten, their delicate bodies, neither plant nor animal, seemingly from another dimension, softly emerging to hear the autumnal breeze sing its seasonal lament.

My attention is being pulled here and there as we forge along the silvery blue tapestry of wild paths weaving through the chocolate and orange pines, deeper and deeper into the forest.

Time is a trickster, forever deceiving with its flow of moments, encouraging an illusion of separation, cruelly masking the oneness from which we all emerge. Stripped of my delusions in this festival of forest fungi, I begin to glimpse beyond the constraints of knowledge and feel the warm sea of symbiosis lapping through all things.

We hear them, the dog and I, standing on the precipice of inevitable change, we hear the fungi, whispering their ancient incantations on the breeze, blowing through the whimsical walls built around us. We hear them calling to us.

So we continue walking deeper and deeper into the forest, heading straight for uncharted places where map makers once warned of barbarous dangers beyond the boundaries of their parochial vision. Here Be Monsters they scrawled, preaching to those who lived within the city walls, entombed in that place called civilisation.

There’s something about these civilised people, those who grin with such certainty, those who ignore the shrieking of the Banshees. Am I a barbarian because I am blinded by the light they do not see? Am I unsophisticated because I am deafened by the sounds they do not hear?

Further and further we beat a retreat, the dog and I, from this so-called civilisation to hide amongst the wild creatures and the fungi and the singing wind, where we wait for civilisation to track us down.

For they are coming. There are no uncharted places now, there are just resources and riches waiting for the real monsters to appear. And they are coming. They are surely coming. Creeping toward the lightest places with their darkest intentions.

2.

There is a storm raging through the world. It began brewing centuries ago. When creaky wooden ships crossed the oceans packed with men greedily conspiring to dominate and possess, sailing like knives, slicing through embryonic promise, silencing songs never to be sung, throttling thoughts never to be birthed, extinguishing loves never to cast their tender spells.

There are still wooden ships, they say, that sail clandestine inside this raging storm, wooden ships packed with billionaires, who press their pallid faces against the diamond railings and guffaw amongst themselves, “Well, well, look at them, fighting like cats for scraps, hoping for something to drop into their filthy laps, feed them a torrent of words, pour words upon them, until they drown themselves in wordy sacks.”

And then they sail on, leaving their wake of words that curse us all. Duplicitous words that twist and turn and fold us inside out. Powerful words packed with smoke and history, that choke us, that blind us, that deafen us. Words that demand sides be taken, that flags be planted. Words that kill and bury. Words that weaken and diminish. Words that come disguised as commonplace, inevitable and true. Words that offer no alternative. Wicked Words aimed at you.

But I’m bored to the bone with these words. I will listen no more. I will not live in this riddle of confusion. I will not drown in the wake of a ship full of billionaires on a planet full of poverty and choke on my own humanity. I will not sink to the bottom. I will rise up. And I will walk to freedom.

I do not want a fucking Tesla. I can walk thank you very much. I can walk on bare feet until I reach the edge of the forest where I shall plunge though the delicate membrane of so-called civilisation and return to uncharted territory. Until they come. For they will come. It’s all they know.

3.

“What are you thinking?” the dog asked just as I was crossing the point of no return and entering uncharted territory.

“I’m not really thinking at all,” I reply, a little out of breath, “my feelings are giving birth to thoughts, which then take all the credit, as if they’re immaculate conceptions, but it’s not really thinking.”

The dog laughed and said, “You’ve been leaning brain-ward for quite some time now. You know you didn’t always do that.”

“I’m not even sure who’s been leaning brain-ward,” I replied, “There’s seems to be multiple me’s paying attention to these feelings and thoughts and then squabbling and fighting about which one of them is the real Me. It’s Me by committee.”

The dog laughed again, “is that why you’re are always rabbiting on about finding inner peace and not taking possession of your thoughts, what is it you say? Let go of your thoughts?”

“Yep, that’s what I say.”

“Does it work?”

“You’re asking the wrong person, I’m walking through a forest thinking about injustice and talking to a dog.”

“That’s because you’re crazy and you think I’m a guru,” said the dog still chuckling to himself.

“So, when you say think…,” I say.

The dog, always on the verge of mirth, laughs again.

“I read,” I said, “and don’t take offense dear friend, but I read that one privilege of being a human is the ability to remake the social order, to decide to change the way we live and instead, to do something else. To reshape the world that we shaped in the first place. And if we can’t do that, we should be free to go someplace else.”

The dog is quiet for a time, then says, “But what happens when you can’t change society and there’s nowhere else to go? What happens when the uncharted places have all been charted? What then?”

And now I’m quiet for a time, not thinking but feeling, and I feel the wind and I feel bluejays squabbling in the trees, and I feel the fungi calling, and finally I say, “Are there not uncharted places waiting within ourselves? Places forever waiting in the vast territory of Love and Kindness and Compassion? Places beyond the reach of creaky wooden ships? Should we not forge toward these places? Should we not finally venture further than we’ve ever dared?

The dog stops and looks me in the eye, “But are those creaky wooden ships not sailing within you too? If you want to be free of them you can’t just sink them. You must take them to a dry dock and dismantle them and burn the wood until it is ash, and take that ash and build a shrine and pray that you never forget, or you will carry them wherever you go.”

“See, you are a guru,” I say, but the dog is already on the heels of a hare that bolted out of nowhere and I am calling him to my heel, like the fool I am.

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