I had Derek
Jensen’s 2011 book Dreams -- a work which explores the relationship between human consciousness and our treatment of the planet -- with me on a trip to an island off
of South Carolina last summer. My partner had
a work conference on Hilton Head, and so I did a little background reading on
the history of the region and learned that the island has been inhabited by
humans for approximately 12,000 years. I read of a “shell ring” at least 10,500
years old created by the island’s original human inhabitants (of whom little is
known presently) and that remains in a nature preserve on the island.
The beach
in front of the hotel where Christine’s work put us up was beautiful, but in a
wide and empty and somehow eerie way. The landscapes internal, external and
eternal that Jensen explores in Dreams were very much part of
my experience of it and of the whole island. I saw the several million-year-old
design traces in the saxophone-shaped bills of the large seabirds gliding the
air currents outside our third-floor window and over the beach. I felt the warm
water tides arriving and receding as part of something deep in me – but a me is
older than anything of which I had previously conceived -- and as part of a
self that is not only me, but exists in relationship with all
of creation.
Becoming
evermore aware of the heightening Earth crisis in which we find ourselves, one
question pounded incessantly through my head during the trip: How did
the original people of the island live for 12,000 years here without fucking it
up? Practicing a version of the sacred insight Jensen writes about
frequently – learn to see the world as subjects to be listened to
and not objects to be exploited - I asked the flora and fauna and
waves and sands and rocks of the island this question. But I also asked the
question to the spirits of the original humans of the island. And I knew I must
pose this question at the site of the accumulated pieces of shell and pottery
placed in a ring on the island over the centuries for reasons we no longer
know, but for reasons that were vitally important to the people and suggest a
gesture of the sacred.
The day
we went to the nature preserve, a tropical storm was predicted. It never
arrived, but there were dark clouds rolling above, mixed in with the sunshine.
We made it to a large, open pond where two seabirds - one long-legged and one
round and plump – stood motionless in the soft rain that had begun to fall.
From the little gazebo where we sought shelter to the shell ring was not far.
Walking to it, the forest surrounded me with a presence that felt at once
unsettling and old/known/familial.
Being a
sound-oriented person, I experienced our approach to the sacred site as a
rising dull tone in my body. And all the while, the question surged within me:
How did you live here so long without destroying this place? I saw the
ring out of the corner of my right eye and at this moment I heard a loud
clattering. I looked up to see an enormous branch falling down directly toward
Christine. I yelled for her to move and physically jerked her back to avoid the
branch that really could have hurt her, falling from such a height. My question
had been answered.
The
answer was clearer and resonated on levels that a message formed in words
cannot: You must stop this terrible destruction or so much more will be
lost. This, the violent gesture of the forest and of the spirits of
the original inhabitants told me. I experienced the message in the very ancient
part of my brain that goes back to the dawn of the evolution of creatures – in
the “fight or flight” spot of the brain. I will be living the consequences of that
message for the rest of my life.
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