Ways of Being in the World

Some beautiful, thoughtful prose to start the weekend—though everyone should be out enjoying the gift of time, some good music and company, dogwalking, early fruit trees, an excursion by water, a good writers' café, a museum, a street fair or indoor market, something fun.  Time enough to read blogs later!

I look up.  The sky is shimmering.  If we could hear it, we’d know the sky is howling and its cry is spreading wide across the darkness.  I have never seen the northern lights before.  The sky is filled with them.  They are dancing, the color of roses, the green of springtime.  The lights shimmer and move around the black dome of sky.  The Anishnabe call them dancing ghosts.

Surrounding us are the trees, the shadowy world of wolves.  Magic is above us.  Underneath us, beneath these lakes and islands, is some of the oldest rock in the world, more than three billion years old.  In places, the iron is so concentrated in the underlying stone that the needle of the compass points away from magnetic north.

You could say this strange place has its own north, a pull of its own.  I feel it tugging down the bones and muscles.  There’s a fire beneath the land, farther down in the molten core, a heat at dead center, and even the dust from solar storms moves toward it.

We walk up the road.  None of us speak.  Then there is the howl.  It is soft and long.  Even the loose skin of the trees holds still.  Everything listens.  There is another slow, rising howl.  It is a man.  It’s a man speaking.  In a language he only pretends to know, he calls out to the wolves.

We wait.  We are waiting for the wolves to answer.  We want a healing, I think, a cure for anguish, a remedy that will heal the wound between us and the world that contains our broken histories.  If we could only hear them, the stars themselves are howling, but there is just the man’s voice, crying out, lonely.  Not even those of us standing behind him answer.  It is a silence we rarely feel, a vast and inner silence that goes deep, descends to the empty spaces between our cells.  The dancing ghosts still linger above us.  I know this woeful song.  I have heard it before.  I have heard women wail this way in grief, heard the wild, lonely song rage up a rising scale of sorrow.

We have followed the wolves and are trying to speak across the boundaries of ourselves.  We are here, and if no wolf ever answers, or even if no wolves remained, we’d believe they are out there.  And they are.

—Linda Hogan, Dwellings:  A Spiritual History of the Living World

image:  Fish-eye lens view of the northern lights taken mid July 2004. (The Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major is on the left and on the right is Queen Cassiopeia in the constellation Cassiopeia. Between them in the middle, is the Little Dipper in the constellation Ursa Minor. The end of the Little Dipper’s handle is Polaris, known as the North Star.)  Observatoire Mont Cosmos, Quebec, Canada