beyond the flesh
making friends with spiders, Indigenous philosophy and modes of being, happiness running through the centuries
I awoke this morning to an unexpected presence in the kitchen sink. A skittish eight-legged critter, the pebble grey spider initially inspired a reflex of disgust. They were too big to flush down the drain, and luckily for them and my conscience, I calmed myself with a few breaths and reacquainted as friends. “Hi lil guy” I telepathically expressed as I scooped them up in a glass and released them outside. I felt ashamed for my initial human instinct to destroy the unknown, to express my superiority through violent control. But in this instance, my curiosity and compassion came through and I reflect this moment into others where I must dance between my desire to control my fear and to meet the moment with kindness.
Image stitched by Adipocere
A few nights ago my partner asked me if I thought imperialist ways of living were fated. As in even if it wasn’t white colonialists, looking at our human history of tyrannical leaders, was humanity always destined to have the oppressed and the oppressors? While I am more known for my cynical, dark takes of impending apocalypse, in this instance I am certain that this isn’t the only way of being.
I look to the history of First Nations people and how they were able to live in a mutually sustaining way with our environment for over 60,000 years. This number is one we need to sit with. Many think of our modern life as the pinnacle of scientific and technological advancement and yet within a few hundred years we have polluted the earth and the space that surrounds it on a nanoparticle level. One of my university environmental~activist peers, was on a team that discovered to my horror, microplastic in Antarctic snow. New studies come out every day detailing plastic within our bodies, carcinogenic chemicals in our soils and food, species becoming extinct at unfathomable rates, our planet’s temperature and rhythms thrown into catastrophic disarray. All that to say, we really can’t be all that advanced if we’re going to kill ourselves and take the world down with us.
So - 60, 000 years. An incredible Kombumerri person and academic, Dr. Mary Graham, wrote a paper on the philosophical underpinnings of Aboriginal worldviews that speaks to how their symbiosis with the earth is held through both mind and practice. She elucidates the two axioms of Aboriginal worldviews which are; “The Land is the Law” and “You are not alone in the world”. The earth is a “sacred entity, not property or real estate; it is the great mother of all humanity.” There is love in this law, a deep respect so devoid in our Western world.
Similarly, there is no psychological alienation between one and their environment as there is no separation between the observing mind and anything else. First Nations logic does not rely on the binaries of Western logic with its division of self and the not-self, and the resulting necessity for things to be true/false and to appear to ‘be’, excluding all that exists in-between. Instead, there is no external reality to inhabit, the spiritual and the physical interpenetrate and inform each other. With no rigidity in thinking or being, a transformative dynamic of growth is expressed, as all perspectives are valid and valuable, and so the entire vibrant spectrum of what is possible becomes available. In the words of Graham; “to allow this natural wisdom to assert itself within the limits of accumulated community experience and knowledge is what custodianship consists in.”
Who could we be, as a united human species, if we were to embrace our custodial duty to the earth?
There is so much to be learnt from Indigenous elders, and from Indigenous communities all over the world. This modern world has, as Graham expresses, lost our spirit.
“But what is the sacred, this domain of spirit that has been lost to Western society? What does it consist of? Where does it reside? From an Aboriginal perspective, it resides in the relationship between the human spirit and the natural life force. When there is a breach between the two, or rather, when the link between the two is weakened, then a human being becomes a totally individuated self, a discrete entity whirling in space, completely free. Its freedom is a fearful freedom however, because a sense of deepest spiritual loneliness and alienation envelopes the individual. The result is then that whatever form the environment or landscape takes, it becomes and remains a hostile place. The discrete individual then has to arm itself not just literally against other discrete individuals, but against its environment-which is why land is always something to be conquered and owned. Indeed the individual has to arm itself against loneliness and against nature itself-though not against ideas. It arms itself with materialism, ownership, possessiveness (not just vulgar materialism).”
As I find my way back to my own understanding of the sacred and the spirit, I consider all the certainties the Western world told me to hold tightly and I loosen my grip. Time is not a linear marching band of minutes, it stretches and slows with illness, with pleasure. The earth is not a dead collection of rock and mute trees, it is constantly communicating, thriving from an atomic level to bacterial to vibrant lichen breathing and filtering the air. Right in this moment, giant blue whales call to each other in deep moans of a language we do not speak. I am never truly alone. You and I are connected, our feet touch the same earth, no matter how far apart.
Sometimes we connect to each other beyond death. Each day I read a poem from an old anthology book called “Sisters of the Earth” that I found tucked in a shelf of my local secondhand bookstore. They vary in length and feeling, and reading from it lends me eyes and ears from lives long gone. This morning’s poem was “On the Hills” (1924, published exactly a hundred years ago! I love such serendipitous syncronicities) by Elizabeth Coatsworth, detailing the fragrance of peace, walking through hills with cypress for company.
“… Being alone
I could not be alone, but felt
(Closer than flesh) the presence of those
Who had burned in such transfigurations.
My happiness ran through the centuries
And linked itself to other happiness
In one continual brightness…”
I close my eyes and I can feel her joy emanating through time. I see her hair blowing gently on a breeze, soft wrinkles around her eyes from smiling to herself, murmuring the faint words of the poem as the landscape channels them through her. I feel her, feeling my happiness, as I feel hers, beyond the flesh.