The world is coming alive.

I recently took a workshop with qigong master Michael Lomax, author of A Light Warrior’s Guide To High Level Energy Healing: Medical Qigong & A Shaman’s Healing Vision, not the greatest title but certainly consistent with his personality. I had really good experiences with him, which I’ll maybe write about sometime.

One of the things I learned, or rather was reminded of, was what he called “tree qigong,” which was as simple as coming to stillness and making contact with the energy of a tree.

I’m brought back to my first steps in nature awareness ten years ago, after my Tracker School class, when I would walk very slowly around my dorm parking lot at night — seemingly not the most ideal place to practice awareness, but it was convenient and there were trees around. And at the time, I got to the point where I imagined that I could feel the presence of the trees, even with my eyes closed … but who would ever believe that?

I’m brought back to my first steps into the world of qi. After my first energy healing class ever, a Reiki weekend workshop eight years ago, for a little while I tried to feel the energy of trees and plants. I was new at it and completely lacking in confidence about my sensations, and also it didn’t seem to lead anywhere useful or functional. I abandoned it.

It’s different now.

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In learning to read we must break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and our ears in the surrounding terrain (where they had ceaselessly converged in the synaesthetic encounter with animals, plants, and streams) in order to recouple those senses upon the flat surface of the page. As a Zuni elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless — as mysterious as a talking stone.

And indeed, it is only when a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees become mute, the other animals dumb.

That’s a quote from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, which was recommended to me back in my Teaching Drum days, but I’m only now getting into it. It’s strongly endorsed by a number of neoprimitivists, among other people, because its thesis is that written, phonetic language was the herald for the dissociation from the natural world.

Why does this matter to me? Because the link between that nonlinear, trans-verbal realm of Divine connection, mystical consciousness, and Great Mystery, and the ordinary world of human society, lies in language. An experience, no matter how true or profound, has no influence unless it is communicated. Information doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

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I just posted this note on my Facebook account, and I thought I would post it here as well.

As fun as Facebook can be, I fear that my life begins to resemble a series of Facebook status updates. Something is wrong when what you do with your life can be reduced to a pithy statement. I go hither and thither accomplishing my tasks for the day, and though I meet goal after goal I sit back at the end of a day and wonder what I’ve been up to, and why all of that busy time ultimately feels so wasted. A piece of my soul is often missing, that part of me that belongs to something beyond merely what we all do to get to the next day.

When, in those unfortunately rare moments, I open to life just as it is, I see power and beauty. This mystical experience comes not just from a beautiful landscape or some other sublime and explosively awe-inspiring thing, but from something as absolutely trivial as a cardboard box sitting in my bedroom, or an ant crossing a dirty kitchen floor. In those states I see: Life is beautiful. I feel it shimmering in my body like a pillar of light. But conversely, if I’m in the middle of my hypnotic trance of mundane tasks, even the most beautiful music or the most glorious sunset cannot make me see those things as anything other than a distraction from my nose-to-the-grindstone.

Today I remembered, again, that I am dying. I’m dying, my wife is dying, everyone I love is dying. Everything around me falls to ashes, and what’s left beyond? What do you bring with you? Only what you’ve learned, only how well you’ve loved. Only those things that are real. So why are we all wasting time chasing phantoms? Why do we settle for so little?

I wish I could say that I’ve had enough and I’ll go live a real life now. Things are not so simple. But I do know that my death is not as far away as I thought, and I hope I do not forget it, because it makes me aware that I’m alive, that all things pass, and that the sweetness and the bitterness of this short lifespan we all have, and the tender, loving, dramatic, traumatic relationships we all have with each other, soon fade into nothing. We only carry with us what we can, in our memories, in our souls.

What will you bring with you?