A Storm of Wild Being
Poetic meditations on the climate crisis and transformation of our cultural identities.
As I write this, the snowfall I can see outside my office window has momentarily paused. Its cessation fills me with a deep sense of quietude.
This will likely be the last snowstorm of winter here in New England. Our rural Vermont town is hurriedly preparing for a ‘big one.’ Weather apps and websites are flashing with cautionary notifications about storm preparations and road safety.
All of that, though, feels so remote, so distant from this moment’s utter stillness.
I had been holding my son, Ollin, earlier this morning. Together we watched big snowflakes tumble from the sky onto the naked arms of maple and birch trees. He is unusually calm. Maybe he feels the stillness too.
Later today I am supposed to drive with my brother to Albany to pick up a friend from the airport. We had intended for her to stay with us and our community here for a few days before traveling to Burlington for the eclipse.
Now nature — and perhaps Mercury Retrograde, which starts today — has thrown a wrench in all our plans. Like our friend’s flight, we remain suspended in the air. We wait to hear whether her connecting flight has been delayed.
On Mercury and messengers: weird weather is one of those emissaries from the unthinkable present, a voice that arrives booming at the doorstep of an all-too-human world, an ersatz world which habitually seeks closure and capture.
This stormy messenger does not recognize our language of closure. Its tongue is simultaneously familiar and strange, ancient and ever-new: when it speaks it speaks of becomings, and we find ourselves dizzy with the sense that inside has suddenly become outside. Our identities start to hum and vibrate. Is there any other way to describe it? We fluctuate. Inside and outside undulating like the rolling waves of the sea, our limbs becoming like reeds whipping in the current. We find ourselves delighted and trembling as we stretch out our senses, which, in this moment, seem to have become everything. There is a moment of mutual recognition: the wild messenger knows us and we know its tongue. This language of wild being is more intimate to us than all our self-prescribed identities, all our stories, of kingdoms and states and grains and nations.
We begin to sense that this stranger, this emissary from the unthinkable present, is in some greater sense calling us and all our gods home.
Yes! This storm, which is the voice of our own homecoming.
The fluctuations persist. The parochial becomes strange, the strange becomes familiar.
Weird weather indeed.
Weird, from the root wer-, meaning “to turn, bend.”
Weirding and wilding, if we would remember them—are these tools not the gifts of transformation?
And so the flurry of snow outside my window, the surprise of a late winter storm is at the same time a recollection of what we are and how we become. We should celebrate; we have come home, we are all lit up with the recognition. Present and conscious is the wild being of our becoming.
The snow lands on the limbs of the birch tree and the snow passes silently through the inner sky of my heart.
The dizziness recedes. The fluctuation settles into a sure and full affirmation of every limb and being and body in relation, human and mountain and creek altogether yet wholly and fully singular and exquisitely discrete.
The storm carries on.
Ravens, or are they crows? No matter—more messengers from wild being to wild being—flutter about in the snow.1
I thought of Stu’s engimatic crows and wonderful music only after having written this piece today. You can imagine my awe and delight after discovering what Stu wrote about their significance (bold emphasis added): “These crows are one of the main ways I ruminate on / in this language, IS. They are important signaling envoys for me, I feel them as emissaries of the Big Within.” Speaking of the tongues and languages of wild being! I’m appreciating this moment of creative and diaphanous entanglement. Thank you, Stu.
Gratitude! I woke up to snow today here in Kristiansand, Norway.
Souls are now weaving again together to rconnect to Source's Web of Life, how beautiful and heartwarming.
As you marvelously express:
"We should celebrate; we have come home, we are all lit up with the recognition. Present and conscious is the wild being of our becoming."
As for me, I am getting ready to fly home soon accompanied by this revealing song by Jacob Collier
https://youtu.be/c4ymjzdUAGE?si=7T0yTfhaBOxK7RuG