A trans-local exploration of connection to place, relational being with the world and belonging in joy and grief and all else.
A collaboration between Joe Culhane, the Co-Founder and Project Director of Institute of Relational Being, and me.
Last year, I set the intention to create a piece of writing for my Substack each month. This year so far, I’ve not been able to honour that. I am now sharing a collaborative text that Joe Culhane and I delved into last year. This collaboration emerged following a conversation in which we connected over the feeling found in connecting to place, to its aliveness and beings, to what it means to relate and belong, and fold into that belonging, and the joy and grief that that experience holds in these times. Our format is lose – we decided to free-write section that the other would then pick up, weaving together a trans-local, personal yet shared exploration. Enjoy.
Rachel: I think of birdsong.
When my mind disappears into a memoried imagination, populated with places of my past, it wanders through visuals, faded and undefined but yet profoundly felt. The quality of these memories is often foggy and sometimes static, like photographs or an old moving picture – jolty and grainy. And like an old moving picture, often, these memories are silent.
They say that smells transport us through time – they can evoke strong memories, pulling to the fore even those that are buried deep. I think that sound can be similar.
Recently, I was listening to “the sounds of summer in the UK,” a collection of birdsongs – little feathered beings bellowing out. It was stirring. My body flooded with nostalgia and heartache, colliding in a feeling that I guess is what the Portuguese call “saudade” – a profound longing for something or someone beloved yet absent.
I miss those songs. I miss being held by a place I deeply know and that deeply knows me. I say “deeply know”, recognising that, actually, I wouldn’t be able to identify these birds by the names that naturalists of yesteryear gave them, often only by sight and sound.
There’s a particular bird call that, when I hear it, I rush with memories from when I was a child walking with my grandma in a woodland near her home. There are other calls that weave together to remind me of specific times of the year: early spring, late summer, early autumn. The memories bring forth and thread with the smells of fresh garlic, wet leaves, and the heady perfumes carried by the warmth emanating from soil that’s been sitting in the sun all day.
Joe: I’m in awe of how I could feel held by a Hummingbird.
Where might the lines be between the imaginal realm and the real? Was I held by this sweet, tiny being? It felt that way. Recently, while sitting with some more-than-human companions – which by other names we would call a “yard” or “garden” – I sunk into my grief, which had no name but might be called something like an ecological state of overwhelm. This space I was contained within was mostly emotional, ethereal, intangible. Thankfully, while in the depths of this, this body, which consists of a multitude of beings, flowed through a process of surrender. And there is where Hummingbird came near and held me.
This leads to memories of sorrow and empathy I’ve experienced for many moons now – all of whom are the same moon of course, a being who cycles through light and darkness over and over again. But I digress, although this does point towards the concern I first referred to in that sorrow and empathy I have shared with nearby Trees. The sensation of yearning for darkness and proper rest is what resonates in this reflection and sensing with. Feeling such privilege that I can move away from the brightness of light when it is night, while many of our dear Tree and Plant companions still cast shadows. I feel for them as they remain looming under these electric lights that we humans have set up. To not be able to rest with the rest of nature while we have spun away from Sun brings immense sadness. And while few light poles are still made from Trees, there is a great irony and tragedy for many a Tree who’ve been cut down, who then have a second act propped back up, sunk into the soil but so much less connected and entangled with the living systems that comprise it, and then each night, casting light back down on our kin.
How important it is to remember that light doesn’t always mean “better” or “good”.
And that dark gets such a bad rap sometimes. Doesn’t it?
Rachel: It does. Perhaps it is because we humans – in recent times, in modern ways – have been taught to fear the dark. In that pooling inkiness, our senses shift in their perception. Our sight is all but knocked out. The world bounds in differently, in ways that may feel disorientating, especially when we are so used to today’s electric-light fiesta. Out there, in the dark, we humans are vulnerable.
Vulnerable to what? Yes, there’s the obvious answer triggered by rational survival: vulnerable to being preyed on. But I suspect there’s something more.
In a time that has all but banished the magical, mythical and mysterious, that has surrendered it all for logic and rationale, in darkness we may be vulnerable to being spirited away into realms we cannot so easily explain, into dreamscapes that mingle and blur with “reality” because our senses can’t perceive where one ends and another begins. I posit that for our eternity of becoming, as we co-evolved with the world, ebbing and flowing between daylight and darkness as the planet spins, we are supposed to inhabit these dreamscapes just as much as the places flooded with light. Both are just as much our reality. Could it be that the darkness and all who dwell there miss us humans?
Last night, I walked a dark path near my home to get some air before bed. The darkness was deep. My partner turned on his torchlight so we wouldn’t stumble. But then I spotted something: a tiny flash of light just up the trail. Then again but a couple of metres from the first flash. My partner rushed to turn off the light. Dotted in front of us were probably ten or more tiny flashing lights, little beacons of luminescence in the night.
I couldn’t help but imagine what firefly season would have felt like before electric lights. The magic of it. I wonder what invitation these beings may be offering me: a glimpse of another realm, of another time, perhaps. The soft glow of faraway streetlights and the moon illuminate the night sky and cast shadowy silhouettes of the trees and bushes along the path. The fireflies dart in and between the shadows, rhythmically pulsing their light, distorting my sense of perception, playing with scale and distance, reconstructing my sense of reality.
The fireflies collude with others in their toying. The wind chants hypnotic melodies in my ears, weaving sounds with the ocean, who plays its percussion of waves hitting the cliffs, another player in this orchestral soundscape. The sounds move through the air in dance; a tango or waltz perhaps. They bounce off the valley side. My faculties can’t locate the reverberating sounds and their sources. I am disorientated. Reality is a cacophonous confusion.
The fireflies, the moon, the shadows, the ocean, the wind, the cliffs, the valley, the seen and unseen; it feels like they are all beckoning me somewhere. But where, I wonder?
Joe: Indubitably, you are being beckoned back to a place of remembrance, though it feels more like source calling out to source.
Somewhere magical.
Everywhere mythical.
Somehow mysterious.
Perhaps you, and we, are being beckoned back to the depths of darkness, where little bits of light shine through, sometimes overwhelmingly bright, but only temporarily. Darkness in all its glory and power really seems to dominate our shared dominion of being.
Is this where you, and we, belong?
Collective breaths of being,
inward and out,
through darkness and light,
and so on and so.
To dance with darkness through a meadow of Fireflies is one of the most glorious experiences of my life. My youth was incredibly filled with such experiences that render me utterly grateful, and now looking back with warmth and joy, I also feel the depths of sorrow, for I know the youth of humanity in that area I grew up will not share in these experiences, both with the richness of the darkness and the lack of little light beings fluttering through the night.
Yet opportunities for a present and future filled with such possibilities abound. We – that is the “we” of humanity – must embrace a more holistic, caring and, yes, brave relationship with the dark. For some, that will come much easier; for many, it will not. The great spectrum of human experiences, and the myriad, odd, queer and curious ways our bodies present themselves to this reality will all need to be welcomed, cared for, loved, respected, and wherever possible, protected. For only then will we all more collectively be able to embrace and love the dark.
In this regard, we have a very long way to go.
But time and space do dance together in mysterious ways
and so, we may arrive there sooner than some can imagine.
From the context of a self that has more outward-facing privilege within the positions from where power currently rests in our prevailing paradigms, I surrender to not knowing what exactly it will take for us to make these small and great leaps towards collective belonging and becoming. Though speaking to these power dynamics and demanding they change is a start. And then participating wherever possible in this transformation, together. Welcoming a world collective and care and reciprocity for all beings is commonplace.
Where we love and celebrate the dark as much as the light.
As a being who embraces that there are a multiplicity of truths and personal experiences and perspectives, and that I am comprised of a complexity of living systems as a member of an ecological community (inside and out), I will attempt to humbly open myself to both the personal and collective healing, regeneration, renewal and repair necessary. And may I and we be available to embody a continuous ability to be guided towards being of service to this more holistic, caring version of reality.
Is this where we are all being beckoned back to? I would like to think so.
Rachel: Me too.
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It was a pleasure to co-create this with you (and our multispecies companions)💞
~Joe from IRB