Cracked open with love
Encounters with Kingfisher
Earlier posts offer an overview of the inquiry and an introduction to living cosmos panpsychism. In this post give a taste of what a panpsychic, ‘ontopoetic’ encounter might look and feel like.
There is a narrow finger of land between the Rivers Frome and Avon at their confluence in the English West Country that I have visited regularly since early summer of 2020. It’s a popular place for local people, dog walkers in particular, but my habit was to go early, often before dawn. As the months unfolded, the place became increasingly significant for me.
My visits were part of a wider inquiry with other human persons and Rivers round the planet. We were seeking to encounter the rivers, not as passive objects winding through the countryside, but as living, sentient beings, as River. We were finding our way into an explicitly animist and panpsychic view of the world; a world not of objects but of persons, human and more-than-human; a world of sentient beings whom, if we called, if we invoked their living presence, might offer a gesture in response. Of course, River includes not only the flow of water between banks but the whole community of beings: wind and weather, mud and rock, plants, insects, birds and animals; and the influence of humans over the ages.
Each time I visit I perform a little ceremony of engagement. I bow, introduc myself, and ask that we might converse together. Taking out my flask and breakfast cake, I offer some to River; then, sitting quietly, I do my best to clear my mind of rambling thoughts and offer River my attentive love.
‘We won’t save the planet unless we fall in love with it’ – it’s a sentiment that is often heard, in different ways and in different voices. But you don’t fall in love with a thing, and you don’t refer to your beloved as ‘it’. You fall in love with a person, with a subjective presence, with another being of depth and imagination. And when you fall in love, your own subjectivity is cracked open in this encounter: subjectivities permeate each other; and through this you become more alive to yourself and to the other.[1],[2] We modern humans will not be capable of falling in love with the planet in the fullest sense of this until we learn to encounter Earth as a sentient being in her own right, full of subjective presence.
As we think, so we live. The presuppositions and beliefs we bring to our encounter with the world act as a kind of invocation: if we conceive a world of objects with no intrinsic value or meaning, as mere resources for our use, then that is what will be revealed to us; if we call to a world of sentient beings, they may grace us with their response.
Gestures are essential, but words are nevertheless important. As botanist and Potawatomi plant woman Robin Wall Kimmerer has pointed out,[3] how we refer to sentient beings matters: to use the pronoun ‘it’ is not only odd and disrespectful, it objectifies. Yet standard English offers no alternative. Kimmerer suggests we draw on the Potawatomi word Aakibmaadiziiwin, which means ‘a being of the earth.’ She asks, ‘might we hear a new pronoun at the beginning of the word, from the ‘aaki’ part that means land? Ki to signify a being of the living earth. Not he or she, but ki.’ Following Kimmerer’s prompt, in this writing, rather than ‘it’, I am using ‘ki’ singular and ‘kin’ plural. I also capitalise the names of beings with whom I am in particular relation. This can feel awkward and may take the reader a little while to get used to; but the awkwardness in itself alerts us to our habitual objectification of the world around us.
My visits to this spot over the past four years are part of a wider inquiry with human colleagues and rivers.[4][5] We are seeking to encounter rivers, not as passive objects winding through the countryside, but as living, sentient beings, as River – River taken to include not only the flow of water between banks, but a whole community: wind and rain, mud and rock, plants, insects, birds and animals, as well as humans. We are finding our way into an explicitly animist and panpsychic experience of the world; a world ‘full of people, only some of whom are human’.[6] Persons are those one speaks with, rather than objects which one speaks about. And since other-than-human persons can’t be expected to speak human language, we must learn to converse metaphorically, poetically, with invocation through symbol and ceremony on our part; gestures from the world in response, gestures that convey intent and meaning.
I have visited River in the very early morning for nearly four years, often weekly, but at least monthly, introducing myself with some variety of the ceremony I describe above. Sometimes I just sit with open-minded attention; sometimes I bring gifts: songs and chants, drumming, rainwater brought from my garden, herbs and rose petals.
Does River respond? Is that movement of wind through the trees, that fish jumping, the duck landing at that particular moment, a gesture or a coincidence? It is not always easy to tell. That is, until I meet Kingfisher.
It is the first day of my encounter with River as other-than-human person: a fine spring morning, full of life and movement, with cow parsley and willowherb abundant, trees their brightest and freshest green. The wind is blustery, gusts drawing a rustling sound from the trees, squalls dancing through the vegetation and chasing across the surface; in the lulls, the clouds part, the sun warms my skin, the smell of earth rises to my nostrils. I settle myself in, sitting quietly and attentively, not yet choosing to engage in any specific ceremonies or invocations, just appreciating the aliveness of a spring morning and the water flowing past me on both sides.
My attention is grasped as a bird flies across the river in front of me and lands on a slender willow branch just a couple of metres away. A mid-size bird, with a pinky orange breast ruffled in the breeze, giving a rather dishevelled appearance. ‘What kind of bird is this?’ I wonder, taken by surprise. Staying only a moment before taking off, ki – here I follow Kimmerer’s prompt with my choice of pronouns – circles in a wide arc and away up the river; now, the deep iridescent blue-green wings and low whirring flight reveals ki as a kingfisher.
I was thrilled; who would not be? Yet, looking over my notes for that day six months later, I was taken aback to see the entry, ‘not received any gestures in response to my invocation’. How could I have missed the poetic resonance of this shy bird flying so close? How could I have not seen this as a response to my call, just as I opened myself to the sentience of River and the beings that lived there? Surely, I could have recognized this as a welcoming gesture, a recognition, even a moment of ordination?
In the living cosmos panpsychism view I am following, poetics is not only a way of speaking about the world, it is also a communicative engagement with the world, a practice Mathews calls ‘ontopoetics’.[7] For the expression of meaning does not emanate only from the human side: the world is capable of – actively seeks – engagement with us, opening the possibility of a communicative encounter with a presence that answers back in response to our call. This world is a place of enchantment – literally meaning ‘wrapped in chant or song or incantation’ – its subjectivity rendered responsive by human invocation.[8] Through the poetic we may see or ‘bring forth’ a world that refuses to be reduced to objects but is laden with meaning. This is necessarily a poetic order, conveying meaning in image and metaphor, taking place not in words or concepts, but through material form in a symbolic language of things. However, those of us socialized into the dualist Western perspective have forgotten how to live in a sentient world: we have learned either not to recognize, or to tune out these communications. But other beings have not forgotten: as soon as we start to observe the protocols again – by engaging in ceremonial forms of exchange with the wider community of persons of the kind I am describing here – other beings respond, by turning up at our rituals or offering other ‘signs’ of their attention.[9]
After this first encounter, I often caught fleeting glimpses of iridescence as kingfishers flew up or downstream, usually one, more rarely two. Of course, the place I was sitting quietly for hours at a time is in the middle of their territory. Yet the flights also seemed part of a response from River. As the inquiry continued, and I became more comfortable with making intentional invocations to River as a living being, I began to notice how their appearance became synchronous with these invocations. A kingfisher became Kingfisher.
This morning River is so quiet, reflecting that silence of the world I love so much. Where the sky – a thin blue with dappled clouds – reflects in the water, there seems a profundity, a depth of presence that draws my mind into it. As I sit, legs dangling over the bank, looking out over the water at the sun brightening behind the trees, I experience a moment of joy – quiet, fleeting, but unmistakable. And at the same time, I notice the noise from the nearby main road, and the contrail of a jet plane across the sky, so my joy is infused with a deep sadness at the damage our way of life brings to our world. I scribble some notes to help me remember this moment. Then, just as I look up – Kingfisher! No bright colours, but an unmistakeable low, whirring flight.
I have brought with me a bottle of water collected from the River Thames a few days earlier, as part of my preparations for a ceremony of invocation. Holding these contradictory feelings of joy and sadness, I stand to offer Water as Gift to River. As I do so, Kingfisher flashes past again.
From the bank I speak to River out loud and directly, invoking ki as living presence. I offer the Water and ask for teaching. Then I gently pour the Water in a stream, watching the twisting braids glisten in the low sunlight, the bubbles spreading out across the surface. As I look up, Kingfisher flies from the mouth of the River Frome to my left, downriver and under the railway bridge; then a second Kingfisher crosses left to right across the Avon in front of me. Each flight appears to draw a turquoise line across the surface. For a few moments, I feel myself in a different quality of presence: my internal chatter stilled, the world more subtly alive. Then all fades back to quiet persistence. Just as I notice this change, Kingfisher flies back low across the water; a breeze ruffles the surface and my face; the sun brightens; the contrails have cleared, and the sky, now a deeper blue, is once again dappled with fair weather clouds.
Is all this a direct response to my invocation? While the rational Western mind may be reluctant to accept this, the synchronicity is compelling. Whatever explanation I might put on the whole experience, and in particular the flights of Kingfisher, this is certainly a blessing.
I pick up my backpack and walking pole. As I leave, Swan snorts and Kingfisher flies by once more. I walk across the fields back into the taken-for-granted world, saying “Good morning!” to the early dogwalkers as I pass.
In the following weeks, Kingfisher showed up many times. Often this seemed synchronous with and in response to my invocations and ceremonies – when making offerings, chanting, or drumming. There was something about these occasions – the timing, the unexpectedness, the weirdness – that suggested kin were manifesting a poetic presence. At other times, the birds seemed to be going about their everyday business with no reference to me. And at these moments the quality of my attention changed too. Once, I was excited to see a kingfisher actually dive for fish from a branch across the river, then fly up from the surface, wings scattering water drops. The following week the bird returned to the same branch, and I watched intently, hoping to see another dive. But, at the distance and with no movement, however much I peered, the orange breast blended with the background. When I found myself wishing for binoculars, I realized I had slipped out of invocational intent and become a birdwatcher.
And yet, the next week, we meet once more. Now into autumn, it is raining hard with a gusty wind. After a week of wet weather, the river is swollen, the powerful stream carrying mud and debris downstream, the water maybe two feet higher than in the summer months. In these conditions, I have no expectation of seeing Kingfisher. Yet almost as soon as I arrive, a tiny silhouette whirrs in front of me. And as I chant the Morning Song from the Rainbow Dance tradition, sung with a heartbeat rhythm, Kingfisher flies across to the far bank and settles in a willow tree, its blue iridescent bright even on this rainy day.
From the perspective of living cosmos panpsychism, mind and matter are two dimensions of a single reality. Mind is a fundamental aspect of matter, just as matter is a fundamental aspect of mind. The cosmos is a coherent field of mind/matter, so the empirical world of classical physics is the outward appearance of a field of subjective presence. All things, including the Earth herself, are integral to the fabric of the living cosmos, all of the same sentient cloth. The cosmic One, as a process of self-expression, differentiates into Many, a multiplicity of living beings that are in themselves self-organizing and self-actualizing. Such beings – the community of life on Earth – are best imagined as field-like ripples and folds in the fabric of the cosmos; embodied subjects, souls or intelligences which come and go, interpenetrate, and communicate, as expressions of the cosmic One.
We human persons are part of a world that has depth as well as structure, meaning as well as form. Experiences with River and Kingfisher such as those recounted in this writing cannot be dismissed as romantic projections: they are encounters with other beings in the world, are deeply felt and unassailably authentic. They have their own authority, offering intimations of a world quite different from the materialist, brute world into which we moderns are socialized.[10]
The first challenge, certainly for this Western educated man, is not just to theorize a communicative world of meaning but to experience it directly, to have it ‘proved upon our pulses’ as the poet Keats put it.[11]
Several months later, in early Spring, I visit River again. Later that day I will open Living Waters, a panpsychic inquiry workshop through Schumacher College, with philosopher Freya Mathews, biopoetics author Andreas Weber, and Gaia theorist Stephan Harding, twenty-four human participant inquirers and the Rivers and waterways round the world whose living presence they are invoking. I am visiting River with the specific intent of telling ki about our inquiry and asking for blessing.
The fields are frosted when I arrive. Mistle Thrush sings from high in the lone tree I pass on my way. When I reach my spot, a moorhen, disturbed by my arrival, takes flight across the river, prompting me to pause before starting any ceremony or invocation, waiting, watching, and listening. After maybe five minutes, Kingfisher flies across in front of me at head height and continues down the left bank and under the railway bridge.
I take this as a prompt to bow, call my names, and speak to River. I tell ki about the inquiry, of the twenty-eight human persons round the planet invoking Rivers as sentient beings. I thank River for all teaching I have received over the years that have brought me to this point, and for the opportunity to lead this inquiry. And I offer the bundle of found objects – bits of dried grass and twigs – I put together with artist James Aldridge while walking the banks of the Wiltshire Avon, as a tangible token of human collaboration with Rivers.[12] I throw the bundle out into the stream and watch as it slowly drifts downstream, under the bridge and out of sight. Gazing intently like this is itself a practice that helps change my perception from a world of separate objects to an interacting whole.
A wren flits through the undergrowth and sits for a while no more than a metre away. Then two Kingfishers fly out of the Frome and across River toward the right bank, low across the water. Kin do not fly straight and true as usual but seem to frolic together in the air; I wonder if kin are courting. Then another follows behind, showing both red breast and turquoise wing feathers as ki seems about to land on a willow near me, but then flies on. I am amazed at this response to my call and get to my feet to give thanks. As I do so, two more Kingfishers fly past.
To be visited six times by Kingfisher on one occasion seems like a full – almost extravagant – blessing to our inquiry.
Rainer Maria Rilke tells us ‘There is no force in the world but love’[13]; Leonard Cohen that ‘Love is the only engine of survival.’ It is curious that both resort to physical metaphors, almost as if love is something you can possess.[14]
Love is best seen as a practice, a way of being, rather than as a possession. Biopoetics writer Andreas Weber tells us that ‘being alive in an empathic way is always a practice of love.’[15] Love is an ecological practice that blossoms fully in reciprocity, subject to subject. One-way love, like one-way sex, is really an instrument of power and possession; while love in this fullest sense means ‘surrender of the means to control the world’.[16] It is at these moments that one’s subjectivity is cracked open.
Over fifty years ago, at a party with dancing to live music, my new girlfriend and I step outside for a breath of air, sweating, panting, grinning at each other, not saying much. After a few moments, she says, “I smile because you smile. But why do you smile?” And I find the momentous and quite spontaneous words, “I smile because I love you”. Over fifty years later, re-counting the story still makes us both laugh.
River is so quiet today after this long, dry period. Slow, smooth, with only a hint of eddies. As I sit in my spot, my mind quietens with River. After a while, a movement grabs my attention, an apparition, flickering sunlit green/turquoise/blue. Ki flashes into view from upstream, whirrs low down the far bank, over the ducks dabbling in the mud, under the new green leaves on the willow branch that hangs over the water, round the bend, into the shadow of the railway bridge – and out of sight.
And I laugh! I laugh totally. Kingfisher catches me, unexpected, unheralded, not looked for. And for a few moments I am more than just me: utterly present, yet out of my body, out of my mind. Cracked open.
Notes
[1] Mathews, F. (2003). For Love of Matter: A contemporary panpsychism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
[2] Mathews, F. (2023). The Dao of Civilization: A Letter to China. London and New York: Anthem Press.
[3] Kimmerer, R. W. (2017). Speaking of Nature: Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world. Orion, March/April. Retrieved from https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/
[4] Kurio, J., & Reason, P. (2021). Voicing Rivers through Ontopoetics: A Co-operative Inquiry. River Research and Applications, Special Issue: Voicing Rivers.
[5] Reason, P. (in press). Extending Co-operative Inquiry Beyond the Human: Ontopoetic inquiry with Rivers. Action Research.
[6] Harvey, G. (2017). Animism: Respecting the living world (Second ed.). London: Hurst and Company, p17.
[7] Mathews, F. (2009). Invitation to Ontopoetics. PAN Philosophy Activism Nature, 6, 1-7.
[8] Mathews, F. (2003). P. 18.[9] This point is made by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, (1998). Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 469-488.
[10] Mathews, F. (2003), p.54.
[11] Keats, J. (1818). Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 1818. In A. Motion (Ed.), Keats (pp. 254). London: Faber and Faber.
[12] For James Aldridge’s work is at https://queerriver.com/
[13] Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters on Life (U. Baer, Trans.): Modern Library Inc; Reprint edition;
[14] Leonard Cohen, The Future.
[15] Weber, A. (2017). Matter and Desire: An erotic ecology (R. Bradley, Trans.). White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, p.xiv.
[16] Ibid, p.21.