Walking in Beauty
Four of us – Dave, David, Luisa, and myself – have maintained a monthly practice of meeting to share our encounters with River. We are part of a larger inquiry group — seven at maximum — that has met in co-operative inquiry cycles of action and reflection, gathering in various combinations over the past six years. This post draws on Dave’s contribution at a recent meeting in which we explore different aspects of what we term ‘thresholds’ in our experience with River. Dave lives on land by the side of the River Fowey in Cornwall which his wife Mary inherited from her mother, a land and a house that has required a lot of building work over the past years, much of which Dave has undertaken himself. Before Dave reads the piece he has written, he makes a few introductory remarks
Okay, so this is an odd one, really. I’ve been a bit obsessed for weeks now finishing some building around my cabin, where I’ve got a sauna and a plunge. It has all been a muddy mess anyway, but now I’m just at the very final stages. Yesterday, late in the afternoon, mercifully it wasn’t raining, I was working… I’ll just I’ll say what happened.
It's a cold late afternoon I'm building steps below my office cabin. And pretty much finished. So I sit on the bench I made last week. Suddenly aware that I’m turning up! Called to take in what's around. Tall weeping willow spreads arms wide Lordly green being, you welcome my presence….. Bare branches dangle and sway on the breeze. I see a Green Man in the bark. Beyond this…. River. Wind-shadow catspaws gust downstream. A great carrion crow sits in the walnut tree Notices me, flaps to the apple tree. His mate follows: walnut…. Apple I sense a weird mutual interest. They fly off… Five hen pheasants come to drink at the pond Wary eyes watch and wait Hoping this human has grain. I've never seen them come to drink. But never do I sit like this. Here. Allowing beauty not to pass me by. Lord Willow reminds me of something that goes: Don't search for meaning Only sing and dance fully In being alive. I savour this Monkey-minding it SHIFTing into the senses. Seeing hearing feeling touching smelling…. what? So I linger; take photos. What do I feel? I feel grateful. Amazed at the land and River. Astonished to spend so much of life Not noticing how I walk in beauty.
He continues
So that was what was surprising: I just sat down thinking, my work was done, and then this little shift happened. It just came on, so I was suddenly noticing that I was noticing. And then, it sort of snowballed a little bit and, and, so I just, I sat for a while. Yeah, I was very happy; as I recall, it feels very warm, very affirming. Something good is going on.
I feel a little grieving, feeling that I walk around being so numb, so dull-witted, that’s my normal state, ‘Not noticing how I walk in beauty’. And then, oh, suddenly, a kind of woke moment without any drugs, you know? And it’s all going on all the time. The world is going on. It’s all live and proud and unnoticed. It’s okay. I’m glad you liked it. I really get something out of the writing being appreciated that it does seem to create something.
Reflections
In our panpsychic inquiries with Rivers over the past six years we have often spoken of ‘thresholds’ (for example here and here), those moments when the ‘veil’ lifts on the ordinary, conventional world of things, and a sentient, responsive world makes itself apparent. We may make ourselves available to this shift through disciplines of attention, prayer, or ceremony, each individual encounter part of a longer term practice of attending to the world as a living presence. Dave has often asserted that the essence of his own practice is to simply ‘turning up’ with the intention of witnessing the sentient world — hence his reference to ‘turning up’ above.
It is important to note that this shift of perception and experience is a gift that cannot for forced. As Patrick Curry writes:
The experience at the heart of enchantment is sheer existential wonder, and it comes, as William James (1897: 154) noticed, “as a gift or not at all.” There is no place for willing, making, or consciously doing here… The appropriate attitude to it was therefore nicely summed up by Freya Stark (2013: 107) as “fearless receptivity.”1
A threshold may be marked by a physical feature in the landscape, like a gate we walk through, or a bend in the pathway; it maybe an ontopoetic moment when the world responds to our invocation (like here). Sometimes, as with Dave’s account in this post, the veil lifts quite spontaneously and unexpectedly in our day-to-day lives. As Freya Mathews has written:
Each time the world arranges itself with poetic intent, each time it manifests in the poetic image of our invocation, it is as if it presents itself to us for the very first time. It is as if the veil of the ordinary is drawn aside and a mythic world that exists only for our eyes, pristine and untouched, still dripping with the dew of creation, is vouchsafed to us. There is such intimacy in this revelation, such incomparable largesse in the gift, such breathtaking unexpectedness, we cannot help but surrender to it.2
Luisa pointed to something we all felt, it was the wonder within the ordinariness of Dave’s experience that was significant, arising, not as part of a vision quest or ceremony, but just has he sat down to rest having finished his building work. She said
I love the phrase. ‘But never do I sit like this here/Allowing beauty not to pass by me.’…Yeah, it's like that, reminding us to be present and just feeling and sensing gives us access to beauty. But that’s the beauty, right? The encountering with beauty. It’s ordinary. It doesn’t… yeah, it’s, it’s a change of pace.
What do I feel? I feel grateful.
Amazed at the land and river,
Astonished to spend so much of my life
Not noticing how I walk in beauty.
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. The references are to James, W. (1897). The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Longman; and Stark, F. (2013). Perseus in the Wind. I. B. Tauris.
Mathews, F., Panpsychism, in Interreligious Philosophical Dialogues: Volume 1 G. Oppy and N. Trakakis, Editors. 2017, Routledge. p. 45-71. Available at