For Contemporary Philosophy Class

 

From: David Abram. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology 

THE FOLLOWING IS FOR CLASSROOM USE ONLY (ease of vocab lookup)

 

 [Division 1: Sympathy]

“The Speech of Things (Language I)”

The blades of my paddle slice the smooth skin of the water, first on one side and then on the other: klishhh … kloshhh … klooshhh … kloshhh … The rhythm matches the quiet pace of my breathing as I rock gently from side to side, gliding over the gleaming expanse of sky; the luminous vault overhead mirrored perfectly in the glassy surface. Tall, snowcapped mountains rise from the perimeter of this broad sea, and also seem to descend into it. In front of me, to the west, are the peaks of the Alexander Archipelago, the long cluster of islands off the southeast coast of Alaska; behind me are the glacier-hung peaks of the coast range. The liquid speech of the paddle sounds against the backdrop of a silence so vast it rings in my ears. The sky arcs over this world like the interior of a huge unstruck bell; the hanging sun is its tongue.

Between my kayak and those western slopes two smaller islands nestle close to one another. I am paddling toward them. I don’t know the names of those islands, for I’ve not been in this region before. A breeze raises a pattern of ripples on the water’s surface, then passes by: the mirror returns. Klishhh … kloshhh … klishhh … Sometimes another, more rapid rhythm becomes audible as a pair of ducks materializes out of the near distance, flapping just above the water’s surface. The thudding of their wings against the shallow layer of air swells in volume and then fades as their shapes dissolve back into the distance on the other side of my kayak.

The islands draw closer with each flex of my arms, widening their span and soon filling my gaze with green, gentling my ears with the liquid lapping of water against rocks. I sense vaguely that I am being watched. So I scan the rocky shore and the dense wall of forest above the high-tide line on each island, but can see no one. Only when a flash of white snags the corner of my eye do I notice the eagle perched high on a dead trunk jutting out from the coast of the more northerly island. Its lustrous head is cocked slightly—a single eye following the glints on my paddle blades. And perhaps the gleam off my glasses, as well, for when I turn my face toward it the bird launches with a few flaps of its huge wings, banks, and soars off through the passage between the two islands. I adjust my direction and follow it, gliding beneath the needled woods on either side. After a time I emerge from the channel; the echo of my paddle-strokes off the double wall of trees widens out and dissipates, giving way to a muffled sound drifting up from the south, a faint but dissonant clamor that rises and falls in intensity. Curious, I swerve the kayak to the left and begin paddling down the west coast of the southernmost island. When I round a spit of land, the noise gets louder, a low-pitched, polyphonic rumble that I cannot place at all. It fades to silence as I stroke across a broad bay, and then rises to my ears as I glide around another peninsula, although more intermittent now, and as I listen to this dark music I realize that it’s an entirely organic cacophony, a crowd of rambunctious grunting tones vying with one another. As I cross the next bay it fades again. Only when the kayak slips around the next point and I see the long, rocky spit on the far side of the following cove—its jagged terraces and angled rocks bedecked with a jumble of sleek, brown humps—do I recognize that I’m entering the neighborhood of a large sea lion colony.

Oddly, the brown bodies opposite are mostly quiet as I come into view; a few grunts reach my ears as they negotiate places on the rocks. I can’t make out any pups, and so this cannot be one of the rookeries where sea lions gather to breed and give birth, but must be one of their communal haul-out sites. A very popular haul-out site: I count over eighty adult sea lions as I paddle slowly across the cove, and know there must be many others hidden from view. But it’s their immense bulk that startles me as I gaze through my binoculars. These are northern, or Steller, sea lions, far larger than their southern cousins; later I learn that the bulls can weigh up to 2,500 pounds, and can reach over eleven feet in length. I see some of them staring in my direction as I paddle. When I’m halfway across the cove, one such bull on a slab of a rock near the water raises himself up on his flippers, dips his head a couple of times, and begins roaring in a deep, guttural voice that resounds in the hollow of the kayak and reverberates in the cave of my skull. Soon two other large bulls lying on a ledge above the first raise their torsos and begin hollering as well, and within a few moments it seems every sea lion on that rocky outcrop is sounding its barbaric yawp over the waves. The raucous din is unnerving, and an upwelling of fear rises from the base of my spine. I lay down my paddle, and in an effort to quell the oncoming panic I do the only thing that I can think of, the single savvy act that might ease the tension in this encounter: I begin to sing.

 

This was a response to animal threat that I discovered some years earlier when, cross-country skiing along a snow-covered stream in the northern Rockies, I emerged from the woods into a small, frozen marshland—and abruptly found myself three ski-lengths away from a mother moose. She’d been feeding with her child among the low willows. The moose looked up as startled as I; she was facing me head-on, her nostrils flaring, her front legs taut, leaning forward. Her eyes were locked on my body, one ear listening toward me while the other was rotated backward, monitoring the movements of her calf. My senses were on high alert, yet somehow I wasn’t frightened or even worried; I took a deep breath and then found myself offering a single, sustained mellifluous note, a musical call in the middle part of my range, holding its pitch and its volume for as long as I could muster. As my voice died away I already sensed the other’s muscles relaxing. Drawing another breath, I sang out the same note again, relaxing my own body and pouring as much ease as I was able into the tone. Within a moment the moose leaned her head back down and casually began nibbling the willow tips. I sounded that liquid tone one last time, finally pushing off with my poles and slipping on past.

The simple appropriateness of what I’d done slowly made itself evident to my thinking mind as I glided through the woods. For the timbre of a human voice singing a single sustained note carries an abundance of information for those whose ears are tuned to such clues—information about the internal state of various organs in the singer’s body, and the relative tension or ease in that person, the level of aggression or peaceful intent.

 

And so, floating in my kayak, assailed by a chorus of bellowing grunts sounding from throats large enough, it seemed, to swallow me in a few gulps, I find myself singing back. Although not, this time, in a particularly mellifluous tone. If I had offered a gentle, calm note, the sea lions would never have heard me through the clamor of their own growling, and in any case I could never have generated such a soothing tone from within my already freaked-out organism. Instead, the musical tone that I utter forth is as loud and as guttural as I can manage, with my head thrown back in order to open my throat—a kind of low-pitched, gargling howl: “Aaarrrrrrggghhhh …, Aaaarrrggghhhh …, Aaaarrrrggghhhh …” I hold each guttural howl for as long as I can, finally pausing to draw a deep breath, at which point I notice, amazed, that the sea lions have stopped growling. I lower my head to look at them; they’re now sniffing the air toward me, shoving one another to get a better glimpse of this large, brightly colored duck that can make such an ugly racket. My ears pick up the sound of fifty or sixty noses snorting and snorfling (and sometimes sneezing) as they sniff the breeze. My own nostrils can hardly sort the thickly mingled scents of salt spray and sea lion breath and the dense, floating beds of kelp as I take up the paddle and begin, like a fool, paddling closer. My own creaturely curiosity has gotten the better of my reason; I cannot help myself, enthralled by my proximity to these breathing bodies so weirdly akin to, and yet so different from, my own. The smell of them grows steadily stronger as I ease my kayak between the strands of kelp. When I get within about twenty-five feet of the rocks, that large male on the lower ledge—the same bull who initiated the alarm the first time—lifts his torso up on his flippers and starts bellowing. Straightaway a few others join in, and by the time I’ve laid the paddle across the kayak nearly all of the sea lions are hollering bloody murder. And so I am gulping air and mustering myself and about to launch into my own guttural harangue when, directly between me and the sea lions, the water’s surface begins to bubble. Small bubbles at first, which soon give way to larger ones, and then a huge upwelling of water as, without any further warning, a gargantuan body blasts! through the surface into the sky—flying on outstretched wings that, as I stare wide-eyed, resolve themselves into the splayed pectoral fins of a humpback whale. The whale twists almost belly side up before its bulk crashes down, drenching me with spray and sending a huge wave rolling over the hull of the kayak, slamming the paddle against my life jacket and almost sweeping it away before I catch hold of its end and drag it back. In front of the kayak, the long, pleated folds of the humpback’s underside are slipping slowly beneath the surface … and then the whale is gone.

I grab the paddle and desperately begin to back-paddle, thinking that the giant may try to capsize me, although after a few moments I realize that I’ve no idea what the whale is up to, or where in the depths it might now be. So I brace the paddle across the hull, gripping it tight with both hands, and simply wait. After a minute I hear the pip, pip, pip of tiny bubbles breaking, and by the time I locate them the water to my left begins boiling, and then upwelling, and before I can prepare myself that massive bulk explodes through the surface like a fever-mad hallucination—barely eight feet from the kayak—right side up this time and parallel to the boat although lunging in the opposite direction, immense pectoral fins dangling before it slams down. The swell catches my boat sideways and damn near flips me over, except that I counter-lean hard to the left, rocking back up in time to glimpse an incongruously small, almost human-like eye peering at me as it glides just above the waterline. The whale spouts, and a breeze blows its exhaled spray into my face, drenching my already sopped body, and then I’m overcome by the rousing stench of its breath. “Sewage-like,” I think at first, but then it occurs to me, “What a blessing, to inhale the breath of a humpback whale!” The smell’s intensity is jangling my neurons as the enormous apparition slides back down, leaving only a slim dorsal fin visible for a last moment before it vanishes beneath the surface.

I am left stunned, my entire body shaking in the kayak—the visual field trembling around me as I try to calm the tremor in my muscles. I feel as though the great god of the deep has just intervened between me and the sea lions, surfacing as a kind of warning, as if to say, Not too close, mortal, to these kinfolk of mine! Unable to quell the shaking, I lower my head to offer a mumbled prayer of thanks to these waters—but jerk my head back up as a loud SPLASH! sounds in my ears. My eyes widen in alarm. For the sea lions, apparently agitated by this visitation from the humpback god, are starting to dive off the rocks en masse. They’re sliding down from the upper ledges and waddling over to the lowermost brink, where they’re now plunging into the water in bunches, clusters of them tumbling into the brine and swiftly surfacing, and then surging—with their torsos half out of the water and with a holy clamor of guttural bellowing—straight toward me!

There is simply no way that I can escape their rapid advance: the fluid sea, after all, is their primary element, and not the customary milieu of this oafish stranger struggling to maneuver in his plastic, prosthetic body. I do not know by what wisdom, or folly, my animal organism chooses what to do next. Of course, there are not many options, and no time to think: my awareness can only look on in bewilderment as my arms fly up over my head and I begin, in the kayak, to dance. More precisely, my upraised, extended arms begin to sway conjointly from one side to the other, with my wrists and my splayed fingers arcing to the right, then to the left, then to the right, to the left, right, left, right …

As soon as I begin these contortions, the clamoring sea lions rear back in the water and fall silent, as their their heads begin swiveling from one side to the other, tracking my hands with their eyes. Astonishing! Seventy or eighty earnest mammalian faces twisting this way and then that way, this way and that, over and again. And all in perfect unison, like a half-submerged chorus line. After a couple minutes I drop my hands down to take up the paddle—but straightaway the sea lions start bellowing and surging forward. No! My hands fly back up and I resume the dance, my taut arms swaying left, then right, then left again as the whiskered crowd falls silent, their necks craning from side to side yet again, over and over.

My arms keep up their ritual, the kayak rocking this way and that. As I consider the situation, my happy relief at finding a way to save my skin gradually yields to a deepening dismay. For I can find no way out.

Whenever I even start to lower my hands the dark-eyed multitude lunges forward—so halting my dance is not an option. I examine my predicament from every possible angle, but cannot discern any exit strategy. And so I keep my arms high, inclining from one side to the other, smiling rather feebly at all these attentive, whiskered faces while the muscles in my upper arms grow more and more exhausted. After a long while the ache in my shoulders has become intolerable; I can no longer think. My right arm is giving out.

Slowly I bring that arm down while the left keeps up the rhythm. The sea lions, weaving from side to side, are now focused on the single, swaying metronome of my left arm. My right shoulder rests. An idea dawns. My gaze stayed fixed on the sea lions off in front of me as with my right fingers I begin groping around for the shaft of the paddle. On finding it I heft it slightly, balancing it as best I can in an underhand grip. Then, awkwardly, with my left arm rocking side to side above my head, I cross my right arm in front of my chest and begin rowing as best I can on the left. My right hand scrapes the unwieldy paddle against the left side of the kayak to get some traction. I do all this blindly, for my eyes are locked on the weaving faces of the sea lions, my left arm still swinging above my head. Slowly, arduously, my clumsy rowing manages to maneuver the kayak around the right flank of the floating mob. When most of the sea lions are off to the side, I bring down my left hand as well, clasping the shaft now with both sets of fingers, and begin paddling, hard, into the open water, without looking back. After seven or eight minutes I sneak a quick glance behind me: sure enough, a few sea lions are still trailing me, but at a respectful distance, and with little more than their noses above the surface … (pp. 159-166)

 

 

 

 

[Division 2: Distributed Consciousness]

“The Discourse of the Birds (Language II)”

 

Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies. A nuanced creativity is necessary to orient and forage in a world of ever-changing forces. Equipped with proclivities and patterned behaviors genetically inherited from its ancestors, each wild creature must nonetheless adapt such propensities to the elemental particulars of the place and moment where it finds itself—from an unexpected absence of water in the usual watering hole, to a sudden abundance of its favorite food. No matter how precise are the instructions tucked into its chromosomes, they can hardly have encoded, in advance, the exact topology of the present moment. And hence a modicum of creative engagement in its immediate circumstance is simply unavoidable for any organism that moves (whether an elephant or an amoeba). It is unavoidable for any organism that must orient itself, now and then, to the rest of a steadily transforming reality. A spider sets about mending her web after it’s torn by a pounding rain, adding only those strands necessary to patch the precise dimensions of the hole. A monkey skillfully adjusts the strength of its arboreal leaps to match the distances of the various branches that loom up one after another. A foraging bull elk, stymied in his attempt to rejoin the herd by a newly flooding river, assesses his chances; will he plunge in to ford the swollen waters, or wait out the tumult?

Some may say that such decisions are not thoughts, that the animal is not aware of these choices. Yet it is clear that SOMETHING is aware in the present moment, monitoring the terrain and responding accordingly. It is true that we need not attribute such choices to a separable self within the animal, or to a thinking that unfolds entirely in some autonomous part of the creature’s brain before issuing its clear commands to the limbs. Never having separated their sentience from their sensate bodies—having little reason to sequester their intelligence in a separate region of their skull where it might dialogue steadily with itself—many undomesticated animals, when awake, move in a fairly constant dialogue not with themselves but with their surroundings. Here it is not an isolated mind but rather the sensate, muscled body itself that is doing the thinking, its diverse senses and its flexing limbs playing off one another as it feels out fresh solutions to problems posed, adjusting old habits (and ancestral patterns) to present circumstances.

This kind of distributed sentience, this intelligence in the limbs, is especially keen in birds of flight. Unlike most creatures of the ground, who must traverse an opaque surface of only two-plus dimensions as we make our way through the world, a soaring bird continually adjusts minute muscles in its wings to navigate an omnidimensional plenum of currents and interference patterns that alter from moment to moment—an unseeable flux compounded of gusting winds and whirling eddies, of blasts and updrafts and sudden calms, of storm fronts, temperature gradients, and countless other temperamental vectors and flows that may invisibly and at any moment impinge upon your feathered trajectory—whether from in front or above or below, shoving you from one side or the other or from several directions all at once. Flying is an uninterrupted improvisation with an unseen and wildly metamorphic partner. In order to stay aloft and on course (whether toward a certain stand of trees or an unsuspecting rodent moving among the grasses), tactile and kinesthetic sensations registering changes in the enfolding currents must translate instantly into muscular adjustments, diverse sinews flexing and extending to counter such perturbations even as those currents keep shifting, in a dynamic, rolling exchange between your wing muscles and the rushing muscle of the wind itself. It’s a kinetic conversation in the uttermost thick of the present moment. A barn swallow swooping, dipping, and banking for insects; a kestrel hovering directly above a field mouse; a crowd of crows mobbing a hawk; the bald eagle I once watched diving, talons first, toward a young loon; a gull kiting in the wind just above me, keeping perfect pace with the ferry I’m riding—whatever other styles of savvy these creatures may or may not display, all of them, while aloft, are thinking exquisitely along the whole length of their extended limbs. It is a brilliance we’re ill equipped to notice if we associate smartness only with our own very centralized style of cogitation. When we disparage the intelligence of birds, or the size of their brains, we miss that flight itself is a kind of thinking, a gliding within the mind, a grace we humans rarely attain in our contemplations (although if we’re following a falcon with our focus, we sometimes find our thoughts soaring as well). (pp.189-191) […]

 

Taking a cue from my friend Jon Young, a remarkably gifted tracker trained in several indigenous traditions, I’ve begun to tune my ears to the discourse of the local birds. Jon pointed out to me that there are five basic phrases in the vocabulary of most perching birds—a simplification, perhaps, but one that has enabled my listening to gain a first access to the language of the winged folk. The five elemental phrases that Jon identified among the perching birds (or passerines) are these: the song itself, the companion call, begging cries, male-to-male aggression calls, and the alarm call.

The song, a melodic string of tones and trills heard especially in spring and summer, is often particular to the males of a species. The song is a prime way of attracting females, and also seems to function as a territorial display, proclaiming one’s space and saying to others: keep out. Yet the songs of many species have also—to my ears at least—an exuberant and often celebratory quality unacknowledged by those who insist upon a strictly functional account of their intent. There’s often a palpable feel of contentment in the song (even, at times, a sense of real pleasure in the song’s production). It is this quality—the contented feeling-tone of the song—that instantly indicates, to a savvy listener, that there’s no overt source of distress in the vicinity of the singer. If a bird is sounding its song, we can be reasonably sure that there’s no evident danger lurking about.

The companion call is rarely indicated in my birding field guides. The call is commonly uttered by both the female and the male of a mated pair, usually in an alternating pattern. It seems a way of staying in close, auditory contact—a kind of checking in with one another—a brief chirping back and forth that lets each bird know the other’s whereabouts while both are foraging. Slight variations in the call may serve to indicate that the caller has found a good food source—“come on over”—or any number of other nuances. Whenever we hear the companion calls of one species flowing back and forth in a regular rhythm, it’s a clear indication that the birds are in a relaxed or “baseline” state, a condition of ease that expends little unnecessary energy. If the rhythm is interrupted—if one mate stops replying—then the other will call again in an irregular pattern, sometimes raising the volume. This interruption in the normal pattern is instantly noticed by other wildlife in the area (not only by birds but by squirrels, deer, fox, and others), alerting them to the possible presence of a predator or intruder. The alertness rapidly deepens if there’s no response for a long stretch. But if the first bird finally responds, then the rhythmic pattern of chirps will reassert itself, and the neighboring animals all relax.

The begging calls, usually heard in late spring or early summer, are made by fledglings calling for food, and cue us to look for the diligent behavior of the parents (darting hither and thither, hunting for the desired nourishment, and winging it swiftly to their young). Unlike the song or the companion call, begging cries don’t necessarily indicate a state of safety, since fledglings often aren’t sharp-witted enough to shut up when there’s a raptor or other predator nearby.

Aggression calls generally arise when a male songbird flies into the territory of another male from the same species. This call is often sounded on the wing, as one male tries to chase the other out of his space. The aggressive intent can usually be heard in the sound itself, and is especially obvious when one glimpses two birds with the same intense cry chasing one another. A good deal of energy is expended, but if we look around, we’ll see that other birds pay scant attention to the goings-on.

The alarm call is uttered whenever danger is sensed—when, for instance, there’s a potential predator in the vicinity. It’s both an expression of dismay and a stark warning to others, and it usually varies in volume with the degree of sensed danger. This call is the clearest sign of felt peril, and a clear departure from the baseline state. Upon hearing an alarm call, even birds from other, neighboring species halt whatever they’re up to, opening their attention toward the possible threat. Other animals, too, commonly stop and take notice. Wild mammals are generally familiar with the alarms of the local songbirds; hence, whenever such a call is uttered, the entire neighborhood is drawn to attention.

Avian alarms are also often triggered by us humans as we approach—although, caught up in our own musings, we’re usually oblivious to the wary commotion we set off as we wander the woods. If we’re alert to such cries, then the trajectory of another person walking among the trees can readily be tracked by our listening ears as a spreading ring of alarm accompanying that person as she moves, radiating outward in concentric circles from her presence.

Since many songbirds are ground feeders, they fly upward into the trees when they first sound the alarm, usually alighting (and this is crucial) on a branch just high enough to be out of harm’s way. So if we hear a series of alarm calls moving slowly through the forest, and the calls seem to issue from a height around seven or eight feet above the ground, it’s very likely that a human is setting off the disturbance. But if those alarms are sounding from a height of only three or four feet, it’s probable that a smaller, ground-dwelling predator is moving through the woods—a fox, perhaps, or a weasel.

If, however, the alarms all seem to sound from the upper canopy (from those birds, like chickadees and warblers, that hang out in the high branches), then an aerial predator is likely soaring or swooping nearby, and if we cast our eyes upward we’ve a chance of glimpsing the raptor that is causing all the hubbub.

Because the calls of birds often carry quite far through the tangle of branches and trunks that so easily confounds our gaze, by learning to distinguish the various vocalizations of the local songbirds—and by noticing whether a call gives evidence of a relaxed mood or expresses a state of alarm—we can suss out much of what’s happening at a fair distance from us in the woods. If, by consulting the neighbors and a few pocket field guides, we familiarize ourselves with the most common predators in our area, then by listening to hear the general elevation from which alarm calls are sounding—and by following, with our own animal ears, the passage of such calls as they propagate—we can glean the possible identity of the intruder, and even trace the trajectory of that creature as it moves within the forest. Such simple skills, honed by continued practice, clue us in to the activity of other animals, enabling us to move toward them and sometimes glimpse them without triggering such alarms ourselves.

As we begin to tune in, there’s an eerieness that dawns when we realize that most other animals are also listening closely to the discourse of the birds, and have been doing so all their lives. Since birds are by far the most agile creatures within the forest, able to swoop from place to place and to gaze around as they fly, they naturally know a great deal more about who’s presently afoot in the woods, and where, than the other animals. Their spoken utterances, each species with its distinct phrases (varying in tone in different circumstances), serve to keep the entire forest well apprised of what’s occurring within its depths. By familiarizing ourselves with the most basic terms of their language, we avail ourselves of a detailed outlet for “the news” already relied upon by numerous creatures.

Perhaps for this reason, the sacred language regularly attributed by tribal peoples to their most powerful shamans is often referred to as “the language of the birds.” A keen attunement to the vocal discourse of the feathered folk has been a necessary survival skill for almost every indigenous community—especially for the active hunters within the group, and for the intermediaries (the magicians or medicine persons) who tend the porous boundary between the human and more-than-human worlds.

There are, however, a few perching birds whose vocalizations are notoriously unreliable—wingeds who wield their words in highly unpredictable ways that seem to vary according to their whim. These are the same species often viewed as tricksters in oral traditions around the world. In many traditions, for example, the raven is rumored to be the most mischievous entity among the birds. For the peoples native to the Pacific Northwest of North America, Raven is generally held to be an outrageously prodigious trickster—far too clever for his own good—an audacious and somewhat self-absorbed magician whose antics actually created (largely by accident) the very imperfect world we now inhabit. In other regions of the world, a primary winged trickster may be Crow, or Magpie, or one of the insatiably curious jays. These birds—ravens, crows, jays, and magpies—compose the main members of the corvid family (Latin: Corvidae). The large, long-beaked corvids are all, by and large, omnivores—a trait that they share with human beings, bears, raccoons, and a clutch of other creatures, most of whom exhibit an intense curiosity in their cognitive as well as their gustatory habits. Uncommonly social, long-lived, and weirdly resourceful, corvids are able to adapt themselves to human settlements more brazenly than other birds. Their broad range of utterances seem to be spoken for different reasons in different circumstances and moods; hence their reputation, among some humans, as disreputable scoundrels whose discourse is not to be trusted.

It’s a reputation well worth heeding when eavesdropping on birds to glean a sense of what’s afoot in the wider landscape. Still, alliances can sometimes be forged with particular corvids. In the Alaskan interior, a collaboration between ravens and hunting wolf packs has been well documented. Soaring above the boreal forest, able to oversee much of what’s happening on the ground, ravens will sometimes lead wolves directly to an ailing deer or caribou. Their help is well repaid, since after the kill the wolves allow the ravens to partake of some remains. Human hunters, too, have been known to benefit from the raven’s scouting. When my Alaskan colleague, the ethnobiologist Richard Nelson, is out hunting deer to feed his family, he takes particular notice if a raven winging overhead starts to somersault in the sky—as though it wished to capture his attention. He’s learned that if he follows that raven’s trajectory he’ll likely be led straight to his prey, and so will have a chance to reciprocate the favor of the dark-winged trickster. (193-197)

 

“Mind (Knowledge II: The Ecology of Consciousness)”

[…] There seemed something more than metaphoric here, something strangely right about this resonance between thought and the earthly terrain. For clearly there’s something about the psyche that exceeds us and overflows all our knowings, confounding every notion of mind as a self-contained space within our head. Certainly, I still felt that there was an interior quality to the mind. But my encounters with other styles of sentience were loosening the conception of my own mind as a closed zone of reflection, stirring long-slumbering memories from my earliest years of life, bringing faint whiffs of a forgotten intimacy between awareness and the elemental earth. As though the leap and vanish of a deer into the forest or these other movements of shadows and grass and rain were not merely metaphors but part of the very constitution of the mind, of its real structure and architecture. And it was then that a simple thought burst upon my awareness—not like a bolt of lightning, but rather like a gentle rain beginning to fall around me, soaking my head and my chest, moistening the ground and raising its mingled scents to my nostrils: What if mind is not ours, but is Earth’s? What if mind, rightly understood, is not a special property of humankind, but is rather a property of the Earth itself—a power in which we are carnally immersed?

What if there is, yes, a quality of inwardness to the mind, not because the mind is located inside us (inside our body or brain), but because we are situated, bodily, inside it—because our lives and our thoughts unfold in the depths of a mind that is not really ours, but is rather the Earth’s? What if like the hunkered owl, and the spruce bending above it, and the beetle staggering from needle to needle on that branch, we all partake of the wide intelligence of this world—because we’re materially participant, with our actions and our passions, in the broad psyche of this sphere?

It was a thought that sparked and rippled along the whole surface of my skin, as though all the pores of that smooth membrane were opening at once, as though the skin itself were coming awake. Or as though I myself was awakening as that shimmering membrane at the outer bound of my body—as this luminous shape resonating with the other shapes that surround me: rocks, grasses, trees—each contour a sparkling surface of metamorphosis and exchange between that being and the charged air around it, as a sort of eros played between us, an electric tension binding us all into the expansive Body of the place. The sensations along my skin were subtly shifting, I realized, in tandem with the changing scents of soil and wood and dusk as these wafted in at my nostrils, my own tenor transforming with each alteration in the breeze, my face awakening to the innumerable nuances drifting in the vorticed air around me. And my eyes widened with the recognition that a similar interchange was going on throughout the whole invisible ocean of air as it riffled through the forest needles and twisted the grasses and washed against the rock escarpments, each gust carrying chemical insights between the insects and the swaying blooms of this valley, every breeze exchanging pollen between the trees. I was alive in a living field of experience.

The full-bodied alertness I now felt seemed no more mine than it was the valley’s; it seemed a capacity of the land itself that had been imparted to my body. Much as the life then beating in my chest and rolling through my veins was fed by the mountain air of that place (by the calm or blustering atmosphere that surrounds us wherever we are, and that we’ve been imbibing, ceaselessly, since the moment of our birth). Is not awareness, too, a kind of medium or atmosphere—a capacity that blooms within us, swelling and subsiding, only because we are penetrated by it, encompassed by it, permeated? Are we not born into mind as into an unseen layer of the Earth, gradually opening ourselves to the nourishment of this medium, adapting ourselves to its lunar rhythms, aligning ourselves with the way it glimmers and sings in our particular species?

Mind as a medium, yes. As an invisible and ceaselessly transforming layer of this world, a fluid medium that permeates our bodies. As though the air itself were aware! As though the unseen air that enfolds us, and circulates through us, were the very stuff of awareness. Yet not merely the air considered as a mix of gases; for isn’t there also a kind of sparkle and hum to awareness, an electric quality—as though it were charged with a kind of tension, or snap? Not the element of air alone, then, but the element of fire as well, mercurial—a subtle flame dispersed throughout the medium. Much like the way the sun’s radiant fire is buffered and broken up by Earth’s atmosphere, dispersed and scattered among countless molecules of gas, and thus muted, transmuted, into a medium suitable for spruces and bears and belted kingfishers. Not exactly the air of this world, then, but the way sunlight lives in this air—this unseen medium charged with fire. This awakened atmosphere. This awareness in which we and the mountain trees are immersed. This mind. […]

By suggesting that we all inhabit a common awareness, I am not claiming that your thoughts and dreams are the same as my thoughts and dreams, or that my awareness is the same as that of a magpie, or a coyote, or a mountain hemlock. For we each engage the wider intelligence from our own angle and place within it, each of us entwined with the breathing Earth through our particular skin. This ecological articulation of mind thus yields a radical and irreducible pluralism. It is only as palpable bodies that we participate in the immersive mind of this planet, and as your body is different from mine in so many ways, and as our limbs and senses are so curiously different from those of the pileated woodpecker or the praying mantis, just so are our insights and desires richly different from one another. Each creature’s experience is unique, to be sure, yet this is not at all because an autonomous awareness is held inside its particular body or brain. Sentience is born of the ongoing encounter, the contact, the tension and entwinement between each body and the breathing world that surrounds it. While each of us encounters only a corner of this world, it is nonetheless the same outrageous world—the same Earth—onto which our various senses open, the same inscrutable Earth that each engages with its fingers or its feathered wings, with its coiled antennae or its spreading roots.

Now, if my experience arises from the interaction between this body and the elemental field that surrounds—if my awareness is thus provoked by the same vast and compassing planet that calls forth and sustains your awareness—then how much sense does it make to continue to say that each of us has our own self-sufficient mind neatly tucked inside our particular head, while the surrounding Earth is just an object, utterly bereft of all intelligence? Is it not far more parsimonious to admit that mind is as much a property of the windswept Earth as it is of the myriad bodies that flock and congregate upon its ground? Shall we prolong the painful split between mind and body by continuing to neglect our carnal entanglement with this immense Presence, or shall we finally heal that age-old wound by acknowledging Earth’s implicit involvement in all our experience—as the solid ground that supports all our certainties, and the distant horizon that provokes all our dreams?

As long as we overlook our ongoing intercourse with the Earth, then we are compelled to double each human body with a separate mind—since mind’s wild fluidity, its creativity and openness, seems then of an entirely different order than our corporeal, physical frame. But as soon as we recognize that our bodies are always intertwined with the broad flesh of the Earth, and that our conscious experience is sustained and steadily informed by that very involvement, then the need for a multitude of individual, immaterial minds drops away … There is a profusion of individual bodies; there is the enveloping sphere of the planet; and there is the ongoing, open relation between these. The fluid field of experience that we call “mind” is simply the place of this open, improvisational relationship—experienced separately by each individual body, experienced all at once by the animate Earth itself. […] (pp.122-127).

 

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END OF REQUIRED READING.

REST IS OPTIONAL

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[Division 3: Radical Integration]

“Depth (Depth Ecology II)”

Many years ago I journeyed through Southeast Asia, making my way as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician, performing on street corners and at small family inns. One afternoon, I found myself walking alone between two tiny hamlets high in the Nepali Himalayas, under a towering mountain called Ama Dablam by the Sherpa villagers. […] I hoisted my pack and quickened my pace, with the intent to reach my destination—the isolated home of a Sherpa jhankri, or shaman—while the visibility was still good. (p.87)

 

“Sleight of Hand (Magic I)”

[…] the door was opened by the jhankri [whose name is Sonam] and I found myself gazing into that face slowly breaking into a grin—I was all but overcome by a sense of familiarity that reverberated through my organism, as though I had never really left this place. It was then, I suppose, that my apprenticeship began. […] (p.222) […]

At one point I emerged from a harrowing stretch to see Sonam far off in front of me, and so I hustled along the widened path to catch up. The sun slid behind the mountains and a chill rose from the canyon. I had gotten to within forty or so feet of him when Sonam rounded a fold in the slope and vanished from view. As I approached that bend I heard the guttural squawk of a raven, loud, from somewhere nearby. After a moment I heard it again, and then as I rounded the bend I finally saw the raven, poised atop a boulder jutting out over the gorge, to the left of the trail. The bird was facing across the trail; as I watched, it hopped twice to angle itself more toward me, its eyes blinking like camera shutters as it cocked its head. It uttered another more subdued “squaaark” and then hopped down onto the trail. Yet as it did so the raven suddenly seemed to swerve toward me, for it expanded rapidly in apparent size. My arms instinctively flew up to shield my face, but then the bird simply alighted in the middle of the trail. Still, there was something all wrong about the way the raven landed on the dirt—its shape was contorted somehow, and the landing much too loud, until I realized that I was looking at Sonam, and not a raven at all. I blinked. And realized to my utter perplexity that Sonam was much farther from me than where the bird had been. What the hell was happening? I took a few steps toward him, whereupon my eyes discovered that the boulder on which the raven had perched was itself much farther than I’d thought, not eight feet in front of me but about twenty-eight feet away, and hence was a hell of a lot bigger than I’d perceived it to be. So it was this much larger rock from which the raven had just jumped onto the trail, transforming its feathers into clothes in the process. I stood there in a kind of shock, straining to fathom what I’d just seen. Straining even to allow what I’d just seen: a man turned into a raven, and then back again. A man I knew. A perfectly impossible metamorphosis had just unfolded before my blinking eyes.

Sonam was looking at me from where he was, his head tilted to the side. I could feel a tremor riding upward from my feet, my legs starting to buckle. I eased off the backpack in order to set it down, but Sonam walked over and hoisted it on his shoulders, motioning that we’d better keep going, as though nothing unusual had just happened. I took a few steps, then stopped and stared around, shaking my head rapidly, trying to make sure that what I was seeing was really there. Had what I’d just witnessed been merely a mistaken perception, a momentary confusion of my senses …? Sonam strode past me and headed along the trail. After a few yards he spun around and stared hard into my eyes. He swiveled his head from one side to the other, then opened his mouth and squawked—a perfect series of raven’s caws—before turning and leading the way down in the blue mountain dusk. (226-227)

“Shapeshifting (Magic II)”

The human body is precisely our capacity for metamorphosis. We mistakenly think of our flesh as a fixed and finite form, a neatly bounded package of muscle and bone and bottled electricity, with blood surging its looping boulevards and byways. But even the most cursory pondering of the body’s manifold entanglements—its erotic draw toward other bodies; its incessant negotiation with that grander eros we call “gravity”; its dependence upon cloudbursts not just to quench its thirst but to enliven and fructify the various plants that it plucks, chomps, and swallows; its imbroglio with those very plants and a few animals, drawing nourishment from them for its muscles, skin, and senses before passing that chomped matter back to the world as compost that might, if we were frugal, be used to nourish the soils in which those plants sprout; its bedazzlement by birdsong; its pleasure at throwing stones into water and through glass; its mute seduction by the moon—suffices to make evident that the body is less a self-enclosed sack than a realm wherein the diverse textures and colors of the world meet up with one another. The body is a place where clouds, earthworms, guitars, clucking hens, and clear-cut hillsides all converge, forging alliances, mergers, and metamorphoses.

We’ve already explored some ways that our body is altered and transformed as it moves through different lands. If this is so, it is because the body is itself a kind of place—not a solid object but a terrain through which things pass, and in which they sometimes settle and sediment. The body is a portable place wandering through the larger valleys and plains of the earth, open to the same currents, the same waters and winds that cascade across those wider spaces. It is hardly a closed and determinate entity, but rather a sensitive threshold through which the world experiences itself, a traveling doorway through which sundry aspects of the earth are always flowing. Sometimes the world’s textures move across this threshold unchanged. Sometimes they are transformed by the passage. And sometimes they reshape the doorway itself.

Despite the unending attempts to define and diagnose the body as a determinate object, the metamorphic character of our flesh makes itself evident in the most disparate contexts, whether when extricating oneself from the muddy suck of a swamp, or while caught up in the electric buzz and bustle of the city. Lest the experiences recounted in the previous chapter leave the impression that the capacity for metamorphosis is an entirely exotic affair, endemic only to peculiar persons dwelling in far-off mountains, allow me to provide a few very mundane examples, drawn from an ordinary life in North America, before taking up once again the matters that unfolded during my sojourn in the high valleys of Nepal.

The modern world of commerce and entertainment engages our corporeal susceptibility in multiple ways. I was in my late teens when I first became aware of the lingering influence that certain films at the local cinema had upon my organism. I am not referring here to the obvious trance we all fall into while immobilized before the big screen, but to the uncanny way that certain films would surreptitiously enter into my bloodstream, like a contagion. James Bond films were especially effective in this regard. When after the closing credits I filed out of the theater into the open air of evening, I’d naturally shift my thoughts to the practical matters of the moment. As I approached the corner of the block, however, trying to remember where I’d parked my car, my body would unexpectedly leap to the edge of the corner building and flatten itself against it, then slowly peer around the edge. Ascertaining that no one was approaching, I’d dash across the sidewalk to duck beside someone else’s automobile along the curb. I would survey the street beyond by gazing through the side windows of that car, moving slowly to keep my body’s contour from obtruding beyond the outline of the vehicle, and so from becoming visible to any eyes on the far side of the avenue. But from whom was I hiding? Whose presence was I hoping to glimpse as I slunk through the shadows, or later as I drove home, keeping the speedometer steady, slowing to stop at each traffic light with unusual precision, my peripheral senses keenly alert to the cars on either side of me? Who or what was I tracking? I had no idea. I hadn’t really chosen to enact any of these instinctive behaviors, but simply became aware of them as they were happening, amused and slightly startled by the curious spell that my organism was under. After fifteen minutes or so, the weird veneer of secrecy tinting the whole of my perceptual field would finally dissipate, the possession of my bloodstream by a phantom agent of espionage now finally exorcised by the press of homework or taking out the garbage. […]

During my sophomore year of college, for example, I first became aware of my unsettling propensity to inadvertently take on the accent of whomever I was speaking with. Whenever I was on the telephone, my housemates always knew the nationality of the person I was talking to. If my lips were pursed, they knew I was conversing with one of our French classmates, while if I was talking in gutturals from the back of my throat, it was obvious that I was talking to a Russian classmate. If my arms were gesticulating wildly, flying through the air around the phone as I spoke, it was a safe bet that I was talking to a student from Italy. When one of my housemates, laughing, pointed all this out to me, I was appalled. I’d had no idea! Surely, I suggested, everybody else does the same? He shook his head. And indeed, once I began paying attention, I found that the vocal inflections of most folks varied hardly at all when they spoke to different people. But in myself this mimetic proclivity was instinctive and unconscious; it was only with a great effort that I was able to interrupt such changes in my own inflection and accent. Unfortunately, such interruption also disrupted the easy flow of my conversation, making me trip over my tongue and get tangled in the words. I finally gave up trying. But it was disconcerting as hell to know that my voice so easily took on the attributes of those with whom I conversed. I wondered what circumstance had rendered me so darn spineless, so passively porous to the style of others. […]

I discovered the real value of my hypersensitive nervous system, however, only when I ventured beyond the confines of civilization, and began lingering in traditional indigenous communities. There, for the first time, I found myself surrounded by folks who assumed that every part of the land was alive. The feelings that played through these persons seemed less confined or bottled up within them, and more a part of the general circulation between cedar trees, humans, woodpeckers, mountains, and lizards, between cloudbursts and streams studded with trout. My porous nature seemed much less of a problem here. That permeability had always meant that I was too easily affected by other persons—by other nervous systems shaped so much like my own. Yet such porosity was just right, I now realized, for engaging nervous systems very different from my own. It was just right for entering into felt relation with other, non-human forms of sentience.

I simply had not noticed this gift back where I grew up, since other animals and plants were not acknowledged there as sentient beings capable of creative expression. But in traditional and tribal communities I found myself among people who practiced paying attention to the polyvalent speech of a landscape assumed to be quivering with intelligence, and who regularly turned to the sensitives among them to interpret the land’s gestures. Here, such empaths were valued for their ability to dialogue with the leafing earth and its animal powers. The fact that a person was too impressionable to be at ease in the fuss and tumult of the human throng was a sure sign that she should make her home on the periphery of the village, working as an intermediary between the human settlement and the wider community of animate beings. Most of the medicine persons whom I met were precisely such individuals, whose sensitive nature empowered them to tend the boundary between the human collective and the local earth. By communicating (through their propitiations and their chants, through their dances and ecstatic trances) with plants, with other animals, and with the visible and invisible elements, the medicine persons’ craft ensured that the boundary between the human and the more-than-human worlds stayed, itself, permeable—that that boundary never hardened into a barrier, but remained a porous membrane across which nourishment flowed steadily in both directions.

 

Sonam was just such a person, keenly empathic, given to living at a distance from other two-leggeds so he could more directly hear, and engage in, the layered conversations occurring between the milky ice-melt rivers and the rhododendron forests and the monsoon clouds creeping slowly up the valleys like glaciers in reverse. He struck me sometimes not as a person but as a walking piece of the mountainside, acutely sensitive to the grasses sprouting from his loamy surface, and to the animals, large and small, that moved among them, but also as implacable as the rock that underlay that shallow soil, and as inscrutable to me as the weather. Sonam had an especially close rapport with certain beings of the neighborhood, including a cool wind that poured down the slope behind the house shortly before each dusk; it issued from a single small pass in the high ridges, and Sonam would climb up there to immerse himself in that rushing intelligence. There were other familiars to whom he introduced me, and certainly many that he never shared. But Sonam was an especially close ally, and apprentice, of Raven. In this he was similar to his maternal grandfather—that deceptively immobile old man whom I’d watched endlessly flicking prayer beads in the corner of the first Sherpa household I’d slept in.

In the days after the thought-shattering transformation I reported at the close of the last chapter, when I saw Sonam turn into a raven and back again, I was able to piece together some elements of how, I suspected, that remarkable feat was accomplished. For only after that event did I become aware of how thoroughly Sonam gave himself to the patient observation of those black-feathered creatures, gazing silently at a group of ravens perched and arguing in a cluster of low trees, or at a single dark bird standing on a near rock. Before the transformation, I had sometimes seen him from behind when he was sitting facing the gorge, cross-legged and immobile on the ground as his head rolled slowly from side to side between his shoulders. I had assumed this was some kind of yogic practice for relaxing the neck and spine. Now I recognized that the slow swiveling of his head was actually accompanying the flight of a raven as it spiraled, riding a warm updraft along the cliffs to the upper slopes. Sonam turned his whole head rather than his eyes, his focus fixed on the bird’s body as it banked and turned.

I discovered that he could sometimes call a soaring bird out of the sky, uttering a croaked cry with such precision that the raven would break its trajectory with a tumble and swerve onto the roof of the house.

It was not just the loud squawks that Sonam had perfected, but a whole lingo of conversational croaks and gutturals that I happened to have heard him deploy only once, when he thought I was not around, in interaction with three birds perched in the branches of a dead tree. The ravens had alighted in the snag while I was resting on the dirt with my back against a boulder, and soon began gabbing among themselves, clicking and aowawing and yawking, generating an impressive array of fairly soft, garrulous sounds I’d never really noticed before, and after a while another raven seemed to join the conversation from somewhere on the ground behind me. I listened for a time, and then peered around the rock: it was Sonam himself standing there, talking with the birds. As soon as he saw me he stopped. Now he was just listening to them. I bowed silently and walked away, wondering if he had merely been copying them or whether—although I could not quite bring myself to believe it—he was actually exchanging specific meanings with those birds, and they with him.

What was clear was that he had learned to precisely shape his throat and tongue in order to utter sounds that seemed, at least to me, perfectly indistinguishable from those of a raven. I recalled that just before I witnessed his avian metamorphosis, I had heard a raven’s loud caw coming from around the bend in the trail. It was only then, as I rounded that bend, that I caught sight of the raven, which cawed at me twice before, well, transforming into Sonam. And so I reasoned that Sonam had waited for a certain moment along the footpath (a trail whose twists and turns he knew intimately) when he would be out of my view for a long stretch. After positioning himself, he had used the loud croak of a raven to set up an expectation in my organism—an anticipation in my eyes—that as I rounded the bend I would encounter a raven.

Of course, there was much more involved. As a student of ravens, Sonam, I’m quite sure, had long practiced holding himself in the various postures of that bird, had practiced Raven’s ways of walking, of moving its head, of spreading feathered limbs. Learning to dance another animal is central to the craft of shamanic traditions throughout the world. To move as another is simply the most visceral approach to feel one’s way into the body of that creature, and so to taste the flavor of its experience, entering into the felt intelligence of the other. I have witnessed a young medicine person in the American Southwest summon the spirit of a deer by dancing that animal, have watched a Kwakiutl magician shuffle and dip his way into the power of a black bear, have seen a native healer dream her body into the riverdance of a spawning salmon, and a Mayan shaman contort himself into the rapid, vibratory flight of a dragonfly. In every case, a subtle change came upon the dancer as she gave herself over to the animal and so let herself be possessed, raising goose bumps along my skin as I watched. The carefully articulated movements, and the stylized but eerily precise renderings of the other’s behavior, were clearly the fruit of long, patient observation of the animal other, steadily inviting its alien gestures into one’s muscles. The dancer feels her way into the subjective experience of the other by mimicking its patterned movements, and so invoking it, coaxing it close, drawing it into her flesh with the subtlest motion of a shoulder, or a hip, or a blinking eye.

A key element in such kinetic invocations of another animal is the magician’s ability to dream himself into the wild physicality of that Other, allowing his senses to heighten and intensify as he becomes possessed by the carnal intelligence of the creature. The shaman himself must be convinced of his transformation if we who watch are to have a chance of experiencing the animal’s arrival. There is no room for fakery or mere illusion here; if the magician does not feel himself undergo a full metamorphosis into the other, then we who watch will never be convinced of the change. Yet this is not to say that there are not specific techniques employed to loosen our senses, particular perceptual methods used to enhance the invocation of the animal. Merely calling to the creature in one’s imagination will never suffice; one must summon it bodily, entering mimetically into the shape and rhythm of the other being if the animal spirit is to feel the call. One must unbind the human arrangement of one’s senses, and those of any humans watching, if the animal is to feel safe enough to arrive in our midst.

And so I was sure, now, that Sonam had timed his transformation along the trail so that it took place close to dusk, a moment when our eyes are less certain and more apt to confuse things. Further, he knew precisely at what distance he’d have to situate himself in order to appear, from that bend in the path, like a much closer figure about fifteen inches in height. He may well have chosen in advance the very boulder on which he’d stand, a rock whose plain surface, seen when rounding the bend, would allow it to appear as a much nearer and much smaller rock than it was, with not a man but a raven perched upon it. Sonam had waited till he was well out of my sight around that turn in the trail, had climbed onto that boulder and faced the path, bending his knees sharply so only the lower legs were evident. He had leaned his torso steeply forward while extending his arms straight back alongside that torso, his wrists and straight-fingered hands jutting past his rump like folded wingtips, entering the feathered mind of the raven by dancing that long-beaked form. He squawked very loudly as he heard me approach the bend, and then again LOUD, forcing the expectation in my organism that I was about to meet a raven at close quarters.

As I rounded the bend he simply kept up his dance, hopping on both legs together as he turned, swiveling his head in jerking movements, blinking his eyes like shutters and opening his beak to squawk one last time before hopping to the ground. During that descent to the ground Sonam lifted his arms and came out of the trance, or rather I started to slip out of the trance, for the way in which the raven dropped seemed incongruous. As my brain worked to make sense of what it saw, it first concluded that the raven was somehow much LARGER than a normal bird. This sudden growth in perceived size made it seem that the bird was swooping rapidly toward me (for such is often the case when a thing appears to grow rapidly larger), and so my hands flew up in front of my face. But then as it landed on the ground the sound was all wrong, somehow, and what had been a much-too-large bird resolved into a much-too-small person, until I realized that it was Sonam standing there, though much farther down the trail than the bird had been.

It had taken some time for my senses to recalibrate themselves. The shock of the encounter, my first wholly conscious witnessing of a full-bodied metamorphosis, was extreme. Certainly the transformation was made possible by Sonam’s rapport with the ravens. But it was also enabled by a strange contortion of spatial depth—by a temporary reversal of near and far along a precipitous trail in the mountains. The metamorphosis was activated by a momentary slackening of the grip that my eyes and ears commonly have upon the space around me. A momentary derangement of my senses, provoked by the precisely timed utterances and antic contortions of Sonam’s body.

And so not merely a confounding of my sensory organization, but an alteration of Sonam’s as well. In order to take on the attributes of Raven, in order to feel the hollowing out of his bones and the feathers sprouting from his flesh, Sonam had necessarily to alter his own organization. Only thus would he have been able to discover the flight muscles within his breast, and the precise posture for his head and neck. I believe it was his thorough immersion in the experience that so completely compelled my own participation in the metamorphosis.

 

Sonam and I gently but carefully avoided speaking directly of the event. It had happened; this I knew, and he knew that I knew. The transformation on the high trail had clearly been a demonstration of sorts, but it was also a lure, a suggestion of skills to be attained, a visual conundrum that served to clear my mind of distractions and train my attention on the simple tasks that Sonam now set for me.

These tasks mostly took the form of perceptual exercises that Sonam instructed me to practice in between various daily chores. The most consistent of these involved sitting or squatting on the ground while steadily focusing my eyes upon an arbitrary spot on the near surface of one of the huge rocks in front of his house, and doing so for long stretches without wavering, and preferably without blinking. This was easy enough for a few minutes, but then increasingly difficult; my eyes would begin itching, and fill with tears, and so I’d have to blink if I wanted to see anything at all. After a single blink I’d keep them focused there, at that spot composed of flecks of gray and black and tan and silver, gazing and gazing, until the surrounding surface of the stone appeared to melt and started to writhe, while the still point where I was focused maintained its circular quietude, a calm pond in the midst of what now seemed a seething nest of serpents. A series of blinks, or a minute shift of focus, would suffice to return the rock to its solid composure. I kept gazing. Sometimes the rest of the surface would stay stable, but the very patch where I was focused would begin to give way, dissolving backward, it seemed, into the interior of the boulder, and my focus would lose itself in that molten thickness.

Sonam seemed aware of the different instabilities that the exercise would bring on; after a while he began to enhance these odd effects by instructing me to place my focus not on the surface of the boulder but inside the rock, at a point about a foot behind the spot I’d been staring at. This was far more challenging than the earlier task. (Such exertions, however, were not entirely unknown to me. The challenges posed by Sonam were at first analogous to visual experiments I’d undertaken some years earlier, in the course of developing various sleight-of-hand effects. Yet his exercises quickly pushed my sensing organism far beyond the limits of my earlier practice.) Several afternoons later, Sonam instructed me to fix my gaze at a point in the air midway between myself and the boulder—a spot he indicated first with his forefinger, so I could train my eyes upon his fingernail before he withdrew his hand, leaving me to maintain that focus, as best I could, for an hour or more. This was plainly impossible. Like the previous exercise, focusing inside the rock, it amounted to letting two flat images of the rock’s mottled surface float off there in the near distance, like immaterial phantasms, while steadily resisting the impulse to resolve them into a single solid surface. It was a nerve-racking challenge, endlessly frustrating and headache-inducing. Nonetheless, I diligently brought my awareness back, and back again, to a point in the unseen air between me and that boulder (often imagining that a tiny insect was hovering there), and within three or four days I had developed a knack for keeping my focus suspended there, at least for a few minutes at a time.

The next directive was especially confounding. Sonam asked me to gather both of my listening ears into that small point in the air where my eyes were focused. What?!? I could not ascertain what he was asking until he acted it out with his hands: just as our two eyes regularly come together in a single focus, so also our two ears often converged upon a single point of sound out in the world—a yak bell ringing, a child crying. Sonam was simply asking me to concentrate my listening upon the very location where my two eyes were already focused. (I have since practiced this in crowded restaurants in the West, trying to pick out and listen in on a particular conversation within the general clamor of voices. To my surprise, I discovered that this was indeed much easier if I focused my eyes upon the specific couple whose precise words I wanted to hear. I did not need to see their lips, only to fix my gaze, and hence my awareness, upon their table.) This was no mean feat, given that there was no sound whatsoever coming from that point in the air between my face and the boulder—but once again I kept at it, trying to hone my concentration, letting ambient sounds fade into the background as I tuned the focus of my listening ears, always hoping that I might actually hear something at that spot if I listened intently enough. But I never did hear anything.

After fifteen days of such exercises, my muscles stiff from the long periods of immobility, Sonam took me hiking in the late afternoon up the slopes behind his home, switchbacking this way and that as the house slowly shrunk below us. After a while the grade became too steep for our legs alone; I had to use my hands as we climbed up between the jagged facets, finally reaching a small piece of level terrain—a narrow shelf beneath high cliffs. Through a break in those cliffs I could see the uppermost part of a single, resplendent peak to the northeast, its snowfields still agleam in the rays now long gone from the valley below us. We sat and waited in the crystal silence. Soon a breeze, quiet and cold, began pouring through that cleft in the rocks, and my friend began speaking a prayer to the moving air. The breeze became stronger. Sonam had me stand and face into it, as with his cupped hands he poured the gusts over my face, and then cupped them over my chest and stomach and legs. He had me turn, then, and directed the wind against the back of my head, onto my shoulders and my arms and the back of my legs, praying aloud the whole time. I understood nothing of what he said, and had no need to.

We made our way down slowly, with Sonam showing me where to place my feet. After a time, the wind fell silent and stopped. We reached the house as the dark itself settled around us.

On the next day, Sonam changed the exercises. I was no longer to gaze into boulders, but to train my vision—gently but unwaveringly—upon ravens. What if there were none around? No matter: I was to wait for them, to stay attentive to them, to be ready. While a few individuals seemed to hang out often enough near Sonam and Jangmu’s home, there was a particular place that Sonam showed me, less than a mile along the slope to the southeast, and just a short way above the main footpath, where the valley’s ravens liked to stop and linger. It was at the edge of a small patch of forest with assorted large rocks strewn about nearby, affording me several good sitting places, as the complexly bent and spreading branches of the low trees afforded perching for the ravens.

As before, it was a matter of the precise confluence of my eyes. Sonam asked me to try to focus upon a point just beneath the head of a raven, between the shoulders of the bird (he showed me on his own body) or, if the bird was facing me, at the top of its breast. But the ravens there, I found, rarely perched very long in a single spot before flapping to another. Still, the instruction was to keep bringing my attention back to that spot on each bird’s body, until I found myself gazing at an individual less nervous or ready to move, a raven that was more relaxed in the moment of our meeting. When such an opportunity arose, I was to sink my focus as best I could into the body of the raven, to a point midway between the top of its breast and its shoulders (near the base of the bird’s wishbone) and hold it there.

Sometimes there were no ravens present; more commonly, there were several haunting that forest edge, but at a distance of twelve or even twenty feet from where I sat. So this sinking of my focus into the body of a bird was a mostly imaginative act; the ravens were at first too far away for me to register or physically feel such a slight shift in the focus of my eyes. But Sonam was after something specific: he wanted me to feel the experience of meeting up with myself inside the bird. To feel the two sides of myself joining up with each other over there, in the torso of the raven. Although he spoke in simpler terms (constrained in part by my modest vocabulary), it seemed that Sonam was inviting me to notice the left and the right sides of my sensorium meeting up with one another over there, outside of myself, at that location in space where the separate gaze of my left eye and that of my right eye converged into a single focus.

The more I practiced this unorthodox meditation, the more I was able to sense what Sonam was after. If, while I was gazing one of the ravens, another swooped down and alighted somewhere between me and the bird I was watching, that interloper would hardly be noticed by me, or would be felt only as a vague ghost hovering between the solidity of my person and the solidity of the raven upon whom I was focused. It was as though I were no longer entirely located over here, where my body was sitting, for some piece of me had also gathered itself over there, beneath the purple sheen in the night-black feathers of the bird.

There was one male, however, who displayed a greater audacity than the others, swerving over to ponder me from close by (whether looking down from a near branch or peering sideways from the ground or—after a few days—from a perch on the same rock as I, although always just beyond the reach of my extended limbs). I at first thought there were several such individuals winging close to feed their curiosity, but soon realized that it was always the same fellow. If he was in the trees when I arrived in late morning, he’d soon swoop out of the leaves to look me over at close range. If he was out and about, then sometime later he’d likely drop in from elsewhere and bank onto a neighboring rock, squawking a few times, his clawed feet turning first one way and then the other to scrutinize me from each eye in turn. If I tried to utter a raven-like croak he’d answer me back straightaway, as if correcting my diction, yet he was still more garrulous when I spoke to him in Sherpa or even English. I got to thinking about how, in many species, there are certain individuals who stand out among the others of their kind for their curiosity and cleverness.

Many months earlier, in a village near a wild forest preserve on the south coast of Java, I’d been warned by the local fishermen that there was an unusually bold individual among the bands of monkeys that roam the forest canopy, a particular monkey much more daring and skillful than the others, especially at stealing things from humans. Because I wear glasses, I was urged by the fishermen not to enter that forest, for that sly monkey was known to silently accompany people in the branches far overhead, waiting for an opportune moment to swing low and snatch the glasses from their face. The villagers had had to organize several search parties for missing visitors who turned out simply to have been wandering half blind for several days, unable to find their way out of the woods.

Similarly, when I lived in the northern Rockies there was an old bull elk who was legendary among the local hunters. Larger than the other males thereabouts, he had once had the biggest rack of any bull in those mountains, although in recent years (folks said) his antlers were smaller. He was glimpsed often, yet no one had ever succeeded in planting a bullet anywhere on his person. His ability to elude hunters was uncanny, enabling him to melt away and vanish even as the hunter registered the glimpse. In earlier years the locals had taken the large bull’s readiness to show himself as a challenge, with each hunter eager to finally shoot him and be able to boast about the fact. But after so many years, the old one’s continued defiance of hunters had made him not only a legend but a revered spirit among the hunters and everyone else in the region. Hiking one October evening with a friend who’d grown up in that area—and hearing now and then the most beautiful of all earth-born sounds, which is the autumn bugling of elk—there abruptly sounded from far off the most heart-wrenchingly lovely of any call I’d ever heard, a bugling that was the most full-throated and deep and at the same time the most ethereal, ascending slowly upward through a sequence of clear overtones before ending in a series of gutteral grunts. I looked wide-eyed at my friend. It was the unmistakable call, he said, of that great elder, the phantom.

In these cases, and I could mention many others, the uniqueness of the individuals seems to reside not just in their intelligence but in their skill at interacting with other species. Since we notice their uncommon savvy in their dealings with us, we might assume that these animals display such chutzpah only toward humans. But this seems unlikely. That old elk doubtless relies on his remarkable wiles in relation to other predators as well, and (I can’t help but suspect) in his relation to every aspect of those wooded slopes, to unexpected changes in the seasonal cycle, or the sudden arrival of roads, and clear-cuts, in a favorite part of the mountains.

The observation by indigenous peoples that there exist particular individuals—among other animals as among our own two-legged kind—who are in a strangely different league from their peers has led some native traditions to posit that there exists an entirely different species to which such individuals belong, a class of entities who are able to cross between diverse species, taking on the ways of various animals as needed—able to trade wings for antlers, or to forsake paws for scaly fins or even fingered hands. This is the class of those who are recognized, when they’re in human form, as shamans—as magicians or sorcerers. But most contemporary persons, lacking regular contact with the wild in its multiform weirdness, have forgotten that such shamans are to be found in every species, that in truth they are a kind of cross- or trans-species creature, and hence a species unto themselves.

 

There was an odd thing about this one corvid whose curiosity led it to settle closer to me than the others dared. Its proximity, of course, made it the best possible subject for the practice Sonam had prescribed, fixing my gaze as best I could upon the feathers just below the bird’s head and then, once it was stabilized there, sinking my focus into the center of the bird’s flesh. Well, that raven had no problem with my gazing back at it, concentrating my eyes upon its ruffed feathers. But whenever I tried to accomplish the last step in the exercise, letting my attention penetrate behind the bird’s feathered surface, it would squawk and flap away to some farther vantage, as though offended by my intrusion. When, shortly after, the same bird would swoop back to gawk at me from a near perch, it took time for the two of us to reestablish some sort of basic trust as we pondered one another. Still, whenever I tried to move my focus into its body, the raven would get distressed and fly off.

It seemed hardly possible that the bird could notice the shift in my attention, for there appeared no movement on my part, only a tiny change in the angle of my eyes, while the larger changes in my focus (accompanying the bird as it moved) seemed not to faze it at all. Nonetheless, it happened again and again whenever my gaze dropped deeper; clearly I was violating the etiquette between us, and so I was never able to complete the exercise with this particular corvid. I finally gave up and started paying more attention to the other individuals.

Sonam came by one afternoon to check on whether I was making progress with the ravens. I had told him, the day before, that I was unsure whether I was really able to move my focus into a bird’s body, but that I did have the feeling that I was doing so. So he came ’round to watch and feel for himself whether I was getting anywhere with all this. He must’ve been satisfied, for he now added a further step to the exercise. I was to bring another sense, specifically my tactile sense, into the juncture where my eyes were focused.

It took me a while to fathom what Sonam was instructing. He first indicated the sense of touch by moving his fingertips across a rock’s surface. When I concluded that he was talking about the fingers, he said that was not what he meant. He began pinching the skin of my arms and legs and face until I finally got that he was talking about the sense of touch in its entirety. He wanted me to combine feelings of touch with the visual sense, or rather to bring my tactile sense to bear, over there, where my two eyes converged into a single focus. This became clear only when Sonam offered the example of looking into the fire at his house: if he just gazes at it with his eyes, then the flames will be interesting to look at, but when he adds his tactile sensibility to the focus of his eyes, then while watching the flames he will soon—as he mimed with his body—come to feel more and more hot inside his chest. He then led me through the woods to where a small brook gurgled its way down the slope. Here, he said, if he looks at the brook with his eyes alone, then he can see all sorts of things, including the surface patterns and the pebbles on the bottom, yet he feels nothing different inside his body or along the skin of his arms. However, when he brings the sense of touch into the focus of his eyes, then (as he again acted out for me) he begins to feel the fluidity of the water moving within him; it cools his insides and eases any tightness within his muscles.

From these demonstrations I gleaned that for Sonam, the tactile sense comprised not just the surface sensations of his skin but also all the visceral sensations within his flesh. I tried to feel something of what he was talking about while gazing into the cascading brook, without success. No matter. It takes much practice, he said, and will be easier if I practice with the ravens, with whom I was already getting somewhere.

So: while watching the corvids I was to marshal my tactile sensitivity and join it, somehow, to the focus of my eyes. A tall order. But I poured myself into the effort … with negligible results. It was rare enough that I could settle my gaze on a bird whose stance was quiet and stable. But then whenever I tried to bring my tactile awareness into that focus, the here-ness of my various body sensations would break my concentrated attention over there, unbuckling my eyes from their grip upon the bird, and so it would take me a while to find that focus again.

You might think that pondering these dark birds day after day would be boring. But this was hardly the case; ravens are outlandishly interesting creatures, graceful and awkward at the same time, cantankerous, keenly responsive to one another and to events in their vicinity. They are stunningly skillful fliers, as compelling on the wing as any raptor, yet apt to break into crazy looping stunts, sometimes in tandem with one another. The ravens in that valley had a wide range of cries, some grating and some bell-like and smooth. By lending them my attention I discovered as charismatic a creature as can be found carousing anywhere on earth.

After several days of exasperated effort spent on the baffling task set for me, the fruition arrived unexpectedly, when I’d given up for the afternoon and was making my way back toward the hut. A couple hundred yards along the trail I came upon a raven crossing the dirt to peck at the corpse of a small rodent. As the bird leaned forward, I felt something inside me tip forward as well, and lost my balance for a moment. I regained my equilibrium as the bird kept pecking at the carcass, but now couldn’t help noticing a sensation in my neck every time the raven reached its beak toward the ground. After a few tries, the bird succeeded in loosening a large morsel from the remains, and swooped up onto a shelf of rock with the gore in its beak; as it did so I felt a sudden weightlessness in my chest, which abated as the raven settled onto the ledge. Had I really felt that? Yes!!! I knew immediately that this was what Sonam had been nudging me toward. The sensations were subtle, but unmistakable. As if the bird outside me had somehow awakened an analogue of itself inside my own muscles. Or, rather, as if the raven were not only pulling apart that bit of blood and meat out there on the rock ledge, but was also doing so in here, within my own organism.

 

In truth, I was not sure whether I had induced, by my exertions, a new set of impressions within me, or whether I’d simply become awake to a range of visceral sensations that had already been present below the threshold of my consciousness. For I soon noticed such inward sensations accompanying most of my outer, visual experiences—whether I was watching trees flexing under the press of a strong wind or a boy bent low beneath a load of wood as he climbed barefoot up the trail, or water buffalo moving through the terraced fields, goaded along by a little girl with a branch twice as long as her own body. In every case, their outward movements coincided with faint sensations within me—dimly felt tugs, torsions, and twists within my sensorium echoing the visible tensions and loosenings in the bodies around me. A field of wildflowers, too, could be inwardly felt if they were moving in the breeze, and now even the small white cloud huddled atop a single peak across the valley was, whenever I glanced at it, a kind of coolness on the back of my neck. The next morning, that same cloud was blowing off to the eastern side of that peak, except that it never dissipated, billowing there all afternoon like a flag—the chill no longer centered on the back of my neck but rippling across my left shoulder.

Was this, then, the truth of perception—the body subtly blending itself with every phenomenon that it perceives? During those days, it began to seem as though my body was not, properly speaking, mine, but rather a piece of the sensuous world—and seeing was a steady trading of myself here with the things seen there, so that this sensitive flesh became a kind of distributed thing, and the visible terrain a field of feeling. And yet, as I noted—scribbling—in my journal, there was still distance and depth. The commingling of myself with things did not dissolve the distance between us, and so the sentience at large was hardly a homogeneous unity or bland “oneness,” but was articulated in various nodes and knots and flows that shifted as I moved within the broad landscape: that round rock overhanging the cliff’s edge feels like the right knee of the valley, as that jostling bunch of trees across the river far below seems an agitation within the groin of the world, and the ribbon of water way down there is now, yes, a thread of icy clarity winding up my spine.

Perception alters, and with it the earth. The magician’s body is a kind of cauldron brewing potions that alter their powers according to the precise blend of senses involved; he offers these in turn to his apprentice, whose creaturely body slowly awakens, loosening itself from societal, fear-induced constraints.

It was through Sonam’s tutoring that I came to recognize the astonishing malleability of my animal senses. During those weeks in his valley I discovered these simple truths about perception: that neither the eyes, nor the ears, nor the skin, tongue, or nostrils ever really operate on their own; that each sense is steadily informed by other senses; that as we explore the terrain around us, our separate senses flow together in ever-shifting ways.

 

Neuroscientists give the name “synaesthesia” to the blending or coalescence of different senses. Synaesthetic experience is often studied as a confusion of the nervous system, and has commonly been viewed as a kind of pathology. Synaesthetes—that is, persons beset by this supposed affliction—are liable to hear the sound of certain colors, or taste the flavor of certain sounds. Our civilization prizes analytic precision, breaking things down into their component parts; it becomes frightened when things refuse to stay separate, when a person’s senses flow together, so that her entire body begins to function as an interrelated organ of perception, as a single, complexly gifted sentience.

As a conjuror I had long been fascinated by the mutable character of perception. Back in college I had even written about the way the practice of sleight-of-hand purposely confounds the conventional segregation of the senses, making use of a synaesthetic propensity much more prevalent than science assumes. In the mountains of Nepal, however, I came to recognize that synaesthetic experience is not just commonplace; it is the very structure of perception. In our encounters with the world, our senses steadily intercommunicate and meld. Only by conjoining different sensory modalities can our organism garner insights into the specific otherness that confronts us at any moment.

Suppose that you are out strolling near your home, and a neighbor’s dog comes bounding up, eager to be scratched under his collar and to chase a stick that he hopes you will toss. In order to do so, you must wrestle the stick from his slobbering mouth, a matter that can be accomplished only with a great amount of tugging to one side and yanking to the other, with the mutt yanking back, growling in the back of his throat while keeping his teeth locked upon the wood. Soon he will probably let you have the stick, but for now the gusto of grappling with you is irresistible, and the hound is putting up a good fight.

At such a moment, you do not have distinct experiences of a visible dog, an auditory dog, and a tactile, furry, saliva-dripping dog. On the contrary, the dog is precisely the place where those divergent senses link up and dissolve into one another, merging as well with the dusky odor ghosting around him like a cloud. Perception is this very commingling of different senses in the beings we perceive.

To simplify matters for a moment, let’s consider only the sense of sight. Even here, within a single sense, we have not one but two eyes—two organs, each with its own angle of vision. Yet we don’t commonly experience our left eye’s perspective on, say, a clump of moss as distinct from our right eye’s perspective on that moss. No, rather, that clump draws the two gazes together; the separate perspectives of our two eyes converge and merge in that emerald softness, and by virtue of their collaboration we glean a sense of the thickness and depth of the moss. Hence, the simplest act of seeing is already a kind of synaesthesia, folding two gazes (from two discrete eyes) into a single vision.

Now, just as a phenomenon seen by only one eye lacks apparent depth, so an object that impinges upon only a single sense—provoking neither the participation nor even the imagination of the other senses—remains a vague and insubstantial presence for us. It will gain in substance and reality to the degree that it tempts the involvement of one or several of our other senses. The faint, high-pitched hum of a mosquito near our ears may be sufficient to set our arms swatting at the air, yet this is because the sound already provokes a tactile association that distresses us. If we manage to catch a glimpse of that whirring sprite as it weaves through the space around us, then the mosquito will acquire a more vivid and precise reality, and if it succeeds in drawing a bit of blood from our ankle or buttock, then the tangible sting will combine with that sound and that blurred motion, yielding a still stronger sense of this tiny being as a keen and willful adversary—as another shape of intentful life.

Strolling through Manhattan in the winter, listening to Marvin Gaye on my MP3 player, I stop to watch a graceful figure skater cutting sinuous patterns at the outdoor rink. With my headphones on, the skater seems a pretty piece of the scenery, nice to notice but basically just part of the view. When I slip off the headphones, however, the audible scrape of her blades fuses perfectly with the visible spray of fine powder as she swerves and whirls, and so I’m tugged into visceral relation with the skater. The conjunction of my listening ears with my gazing eyes induces a subtle collaboration of my body with hers. So when the tip of one blade catches unexpectedly on the ice and she teeters, her limbs akimbo, before her shoulder slams down against that rock-hard surface, I feel the abrupt disequilibrium and then cringe as the ice seems to collide with my own bony shoulder, sending waves of excruciating sensation radiating across my torso before they subside into the sight of the skater climbing to her feet.

The empathic propensity of our body is in large part a consequence of the differentiation and divergence of our several senses. For it’s only by turning our bodily attention toward another that we experience the convergence and reassembly of our separate senses into a dynamic unity. Only by entering into relation with others do we effect our own integration and coherence. Such others might be people, or they might be wetlands, or works of art, or snakes slithering through the stubbled grass. Each thing, attentively pondered, gathers our senses together in a unique way. This juncture, this conjoining of divergent senses over there, in the other, leads us to experience that other as a center of experience in its own right, and hence as another subject, another source of powers.

Incomplete on its own, the body is precisely our capacity for metamorphosis. Each being that we perceive enacts a subtle integration within us, even as it alters our prior organization. The sensing body is like an open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the surrounding earth.

 

The bird walks forward, swaying from side to side with each step, then stops, cocking its thickly feathered head to watch another raven flapping by. It tilts its head the other way, caught by the rasping sound as Jangmu begins grinding chili peppers between two stones, then turns its whole body to peer, it seems, at me. I am gazing intently, not at those dark eyes but at that point just beneath the ruffled neck feathers. The raven knows I am watching, and perhaps can even feel the grip of my gaze within its chest. Soon, however, its neck feathers smooth back down and I sense it relax. It can hardly be very agitated, for it has not ventured beyond this small patch of ground since alighting here over half an hour ago.

Sonam had pointed out this bird to me when it swerved above the house. “It will happen today,” he said.

We had just carried a long piece of deadwood from the main path down to the stone house, to be carved into a thin bench. “What will happen?” I asked.

“That is the one you must watch this morning,” he said. “Wait until he finds a spot on the ground. Don’t sit too close.” He gave me one or two other instructions while the raven made a wide circle above the boulders. Then the bird, with its wing feathers splayed, banked into a landing on the bare ground close to the edge of the gorge.

I wandered over quietly, slipping past the clustered boulders and crouching down about six yards from the bird, facing it, with the edge of the canyon off to my right. My right leg was folded beneath me, my right buttock pressed into its heel, while my left knee was upright before me with my left forearm resting crosswise upon it. I keenly remember this asymmetrical posture, for it has become, since that day, my preferred position for grounding myself and drawing clarity to meet the contortions of the world.

Sonam had warned me not to look directly at the bird’s eyes, but to sink my visual focus into that place within its breast, and to hold it there. I had been doing this for a long time without altering my position, my eyes fixed steadily upon the raven as it walked and as it rested, peering this way and that. Now it leaned to peck at the dirt—seeds, I thought at first, although when it straightened up I saw that a large beetle was in the beak, which quickly opened and snapped shut around it.

“You can taste what he is tasting?”

Sonam’s voice was soft beside me; he’d come up without my noticing. He spoke again: “You can taste that bug as he swallows it?”

“No, I can’t,” I said.

“Yes, you can,” he replied. “Try.”

There was a gritty bitterness to the saliva in the back of my mouth as I shifted my attention there. I tried to sense what the raven might be tasting, letting my eyes close a bit as I did so.

“No! Keep your eyes open!” whispered Sonam. “Let them meet inside the bird. Hold them there.”

“Okay, yes.”

Sonam was now on both his knees beside me, his torso leaning forward, staring—like me—at the night-black creature.

“Now bring your touching to where your eyes meet.”

“Like before,” I whispered.

“Yes. Move all your feelings into the bird.”

Once again, I tried to marshal my tactile and visceral sensations into that place, over there, where my eyes were focused. This was tougher now, for I was aware of Sonam next to me and felt very self-conscious. But then I noticed Sonam’s hand on my left shoulder, his fingers pressing into my flesh.

“Move into the bird,” he said, and I heard his voice as if at a distance. “Keep your eyes open. Eyes open. Watch.”

The bird is now hopping, not walking, toward the edge of the gorge, and I feel each hop as a slight jolt. Its shoulders expand as wings spread and lift, and then with a lunge we are aloft … The rim passes under us and the ground falls away into a terrifying emptiness, as the whole canyon opens beneath us. The cliffs just below are glinting silver and pink in the sunlight; they descend in ledges and shelves that expand as we swerve toward them and then tilt away from us into the sky. The horizon angles up sharply and a series of vertical crevasses open and close like pages of a book as we glide past, and then the immensity of the canyon yawns around us with the rush of the rapids far below. A vertigo rises from my belly into my throat and I’m falling, I’m Falling, Gonna Die For Sure, but suddenly hear this voice—“Eyes Open!”—and feel Sonam’s fingers pressing harder into my left shoulder, and I stretch open my eyes to see more. Now we’re following the blue ribbon of water as it gets bigger and wider and louder, its many voices swelling as a freshness fills the whooshing air. I’m gulping for breath as I watch water charging over rocks and spilling around boulders, splitting and rejoining itself over and again, but now we’re swooping faster than the river’s flow; the green of a few leaves and then whole trees heaving and sighing just beneath us as we turn (can this be that thicket of rhododendron trees way downriver?) and it feels like we’re gonna land here yes oh please yes please please yes but we tilt away and now two other black birds are flapping up outa those trees, calling back and forth. Then cliffs are slanting past and the river’s falling away, and then the cliffs close by again, then the river, then the cliffs, then that abyss, and I finally realize we’re spiraling up the side of the canyon, riding one of the warm updrafts like I’ve watched ravens do so many times. Soon we’re above the main gorge, rowing up through air’s thickness into a small valley without trees, then tilting out of the valley, flapping hard to rise above a ridge, the air humming around us as we stroke toward the shadowed face of a pyramid that grows rapidly larger and larger, ice fields in its furrows and dark deltas of tumbled rock as this black wall fills our sight, its upmost angles blurred by mist, until I recognize by some detail the same banner of cloud that I look at every day from far across the canyon, streaming off the top of this peak. We’re banking in a wide arc toward the right, and then the vision that opens beneath us shudders through the breast and backbone: glacier-hung mountains upon mountains spreading off into the white distance. A gleaming, glistening world without people …

And I’m balancing, floating, utterly at ease in the blue air. As though we’re not moving but held, gentle and fast, in the cupped hands of the sky. Stillness. Through a tangle of terrors I catch a first sense of the sheer joy that is flight. Falling, yet perfectly safe. Floating. Floating at the heart of the feathered thickness that is space. Aloft at the center of the world mandala, turning it beneath us, the whole planet rolling this way or that at the whim of our muscles.

The cliffs at the far side of the gorge now rising to meet us as we dive. Among the rocks scattered near the chasm’s edge there’s a rectangular boulder we’re falling toward. A wisp of smoke is rising from that boulder, evident only as we bank above it. The thought comes that that rock is maybe a house. And there, off past the other rocks toward the edge of the precipice is an odd creature—no, two creatures, two clothed people crouched together on the ground. Their faces are upturned, staring steadily at us even as we glide downward, their heads turning together as they track us perfectly with their gaze. The eyes of one are especially compelling, achingly so, staring straight toward, straight up into …

 

 

 

me.