Oak and water

Three of us – David, Dave, and myself – are tentatively moving our inquiry from a focus on River to a focus on the places where we live, our Dwelling Places. With only three of us in this current phase, we have the luxury of reflecting in some depth on each person’s experience. This is a verbatim account for Dave’s report from his Land on the banks on the River Fowey and our reflections afterward.

This is Dave’s account

Four-thirty I head for Oak
fetching four candle jars from the summer house
I light the first candle and tell Oak of my intention to visit the water shrine I made about a year ago in the stream above our house.
I sing the Oak song and place the candlejar by the Buddha head.

Walk North uphill into the woods to the Big Oak and leave a second candle there
I give thanks.
now it's dark enough for the head torch
but I try not to use it as I head West
up through the woods and the upper orchard
singing my thanks to Mary’s folks for the Land and the Trees.

The stream is in spate
I climb off the rickety bridge into the surge
in wellies and with my staff it's a perilous steep fifty yards
up the rocky bed of the stream
I clean off the slate embedded in a cleft to the right side of the small waterfall
the amethyst geode has been swept away by the storms
I light the third candle jar and sing words of thanks.
there's nowhere to sit so I stand astride the torrent
when I turn off the torch the noisy dark feels very alive
very wild here standing in the stream in the loom of a single candle

For a while wondering how I can turn around without falling on my arse
I shuffle and slide back down to the rickety bridge
clamber up onto it and sit with my legs dangling
I can just see a faint glow of the candle upstream. I find this comforting
in the dark I sit for a time listening to the songs of the water

The bass notes gurgle in the banks
the percussive splashing trebles
the mumbling and gush of turbulence beneath my feet.
I look upstream into the dim cleft seeking a haiku
I sit suspended
in your moist ferny crevice
a poor man in need

Slowly the water songs drift me into a reverie
dreamy, I get that threshold feeling
a sense to being in the presence… of what?
of the elemental cycles of this land…
I get an inkling of its signature…
this little stretch between the bridge and the shrine is special to me
so I light my fourth candle on the bridge and sit a while longer

Struggling to my feet
almost pitch myself downstream!
then through an azelia thicket to the lane where a waterfall forms a pool
shoots under the road and on towards the backwater
I put the candle jar on the stone trough to take a last picture
no phone! Don't panic Dave!! Then quick back to the bridge
the phone isn't there!!!
I look over the bridge into the water but the phone isn't there!!!!
swept downstream???
aghast I look at the bridge again
and there's the phone

I thank the Pixies for their trick
and for not condemning me to far worse possibilities of their mischief
grateful I head back home to cook supper
it's been an hour since we began
I'll bring the candle to the table where we will eat.

In the conversation that followed we appreciated Dave’s account. We loved the idea of taking a candle from the ceremony to the supper table, linking the ceremony with the everyday. We asked if he could say more about the ‘dreamy threshold feeling. Dave responded”

“Yeah, well, it was a lovely, lovely, and very spontaneous. There wasn't much preparation to it. But when it was done, and again this morning when I went to collect the candles from under the Oaks, I realized that I somehow something was different in Land for me. There was now a circle. Somewhere still alive in my imagination is the fact and the feeling of that one-hour journey. That, to me, is that is a remarkable magical act. I don't mean that in a grandiose way, but in a very simple everyday, ‘Why don't you get off your ass and do this as a regular kind of prayer practice’ kind of way? I'm just very surprised, I go out my back door and I've got a magical landscape. This is for such a gift.

And about that ‘threshold feeling’: in my recollection, I am capturing hints, and I'm not sure whether I can do more than hints. As we said before, not to sound clichéd, if it were a wordable thing, it wouldn't be what it is. In a sense, the journey, the enactment, the enchantment – whatever that means – that is what's on the other side of the hint. And yet, at some point it kind of funnels into this very brief kind of condensation of effort and feeling and intention. I can see the elements of it: it's a bit like a recipe. There is feeling, there is intention, there is memory and there are words around it. And one can't go out looking for it, expecting it, so there's a grace element.

You’ve just got to turn up. You’ve got to turn up and you’ve got to show up – or I have to turn up and show up – in a transparent, innocent way. I used to think that trying to do recordings and trying to make words, to word it, was an interruption. Now I think it's become kind of part of the ceremony, because we are the congregation, you know, and so we're kind of writing the hymn as we sing it.”

Reflections

Since we had this conversation, I have come across the writing of Patrick Curry on enchantment and wonder, which I think both illuminates and confirms some of our own sense making about these experiences. Curry writes

The experience at the heart of enchantment is sheer existential wonder, and it comes… “as a gift or not at all.” There is no place for willing, making, or consciously doing here… The appropriate attitude to it [is] “fearless receptivity.”¹

Experiences of enchantment is neither objective nor subjective. They take place ‘upstream’ of these separations. They take in a precise set of place and moment. They are relational, taking pace between ‘cooperating equals’.

Curry tells us that enchantment is ‘an awakening to reality in which a truth is revealed, which breaks the deadly spell of modernist banality or despair’. And it cannot be willed, cannot be seen as a ‘resource’, even as a resource to restore or re-enchant the world. As I have written earlier, enchantment takes place in a ‘moment of grace’.

But while the moment of enchantment cannot be willed, we can ‘create the conditions that it favors, which encourage it to happen’:

Those conditions include… the opportunity to experience relatively wild nature on its own terms, including encounters with nonhuman natural others.

This is, with apologies, a short summary of Patrick Curry’s elegant and accessible writing. I include it here because I think it illuminate our own reflections on what Dave brought to our little inquiry group.

• Engaging in a ceremony with gestures and symbols conditions our own awareness. The language is physical, a language of gestures and things.

• Such ‘poetic’ language also calls to the sentient world and invites a response — enchantment is relational.

• There are certain steps that enable the experience of wonder and enchantment, it requires will and intents. There are elements of a ‘recipe’, but it cannot be forced.

• Any response is a moment of grace; we may be left with a renewed sense of luminosity in the Land — which we might describe as ‘existential wonder’.

• We experience ‘threshold moments’ as we teeter on the edge of everyday consciousness; these may be encouraged by movements in the more-than-human world – the rush of water, the breath of wind, the call of a creature; or a gateway in the physical world.

• In the end, one has to show up and commit in a transparent and innocent way. There are no half measures.

• We are a community of inquiry, a shared congregation, so while ‘there are no words’ finding ways to share experiences is important; reporting and reflecting in words and images leads toward experiences of enchantment becoming more available to us.

1. I have drawn on Curry’s chapter in a recently published book, Curry, P. (2024). Enchantment, Modernity, and Reverence for Nature. In J. Gray & E. Crist (Eds.), Cohabiting Earth: Seeking a Bright Future for All Life. SUNY Press., from which all these quotes are drawn. Patrick has posted a draft version here