Archive: A Heron Stands Fishing
Antidotes to the Hubriscene, part 1
Welcome to the first of my planned archive pieces. Each month, one of the regular Monday morning slots will be filled with an essay from my first year or two on here that you may not have read, especially if you have only recently subscribed. It will be something that still resonates, still speaks to my ongoing passions and to the shape that Uncivil Savant has taken over the years. It’s a good way of directing you to letters and conversations that have formed me and my writing. I’ll always put the word ‘Archive’ before the original title, and write a new introduction.
It is also a way to help me avoid burnout, while keeping to the weekly 7am UK time on a Monday publishing schedule which I really love and that people seem to appreciate.
This week’s piece from November 2023 begins with a passage from an email to a friend during a months-long conversation about mind, meditation and thinking. It ends with an intuition I received from a heron and a sandbank while crossing the river Tweed at Berwick on the East Coast train line, as I travelled north to teach T’ai Chi in Aberdeenshire, (as I did each month from 2006-2020). So many times, looking down at the waters of the Tyne, the Tweed, the Tay and the Dee, great eastern rivers of this land, words would bubble up, waterfowl would offer guidance and the North Sea would reflect back to me a sudden clarity. Meanwhile, laptop open, I would try to catch these fleeting waveforms, and send them to my friends via rivers of electrons. This was also the very first piece in what became ‘Antidotes to the Hubriscene’, (which is my take on the more prosaic ‘Anthropocene’).
That’s mostly how Uncivil Savant started. Paying attention to nature, finding a way of knowing that could not be grasped, in communion with friends who could not be seen for months on end, but with whom I was in hearty conversation nonetheless.
And now it is my great pleasure and privilege to also be in conversation with you, dear reader. See you next week, with more new writing. Until then, all the Imbolc half moon shining best to you.
If you want to quieten your mind do this: go to the river and stare at the surface, do not allow your eyes to move at all. It is best when it is an entirely monochrome scene in your field of vision, as it is for me now if I position my head correctly. When the grass of the far bank is obscured by the top of the windows, I can rest my eyes on the water. At some point the motion just stops, and the mind also stops, and I am left with the awareness of empty standing waves, which is a good picture of what thoughts are really like in the mind.
The mind is what the brain does. The brain is not what the mind is. When I once told a man that there are many ways to think without words, he almost threw a fit. It was like describing feeling shame to a narcissist: ‘It cannot exist!’1
Ah, but… Had he never met a choreographer, a painter, a chef, a singer, a T’ai Chi person, a lover? They, we, all think perfectly well with other tools than words: movement, colour, sensation, sound. Jokes can be told with not one word spoken. Not everything has a word-label, and even if it did, the label has been applied after the fact. You cannot taste my damson jam by licking the label.
In Britain, it is better to sit wearing a woollen cape, preferably with a hood. Our ancestors upon these isles prayed or meditated or worshipped thus. This is a draughty damp land, this Archipelago of Brigid2, and a cape covers all tender places and prevents the pernicious cold damp wind from entering and causing untold ailments. Sit on a cushion or two, I prefer a zafu on a small flat cushion, it’s just the right height for kneeling or sitting, which I like to alternate. Then I bow until my forehead touches the ground. What am I bowing to? The Tao, perhaps, but really, I am just joining my skin with the surface of the earth, the planet where I am at home, saying, ‘I am here, I am listening.’
Bowing is the antidote to hubris, from which I suffer like a postnasal drip. Constant wet dripping hubris, down my throat, it changes my voice, horribly. My true voice is only heard in surprise, in unknowing, or when knocking at the door too soon, and through grace, having it opened. I have sung from that place once or twice in my life. It took a final hour of dismantling to get there, after a decade of patiently unbricking the door, and a bit of full-scale demolition from my teacher.
The original Taoists got all their knowledge not from books, (as it was before books), and not from secret teachings, (as there were no teachers). They paid minute, close attention to nature, and saw things from the perspective of not-self and looked at the world through the antennae of a butterfly, or famously, from the happiness of two fishes in the shadows under a bridge. They did not make themselves too useful, and so did not get cut down, they were bent and gnarled like the useless oak tree, and thus got to live long. Work was hidden, everything could be accomplished whilst seemingly doing something else for a living. Duties were fulfilled, those who reneged on this were scorned in books for centuries – read Liu I Ming: ‘Those who leave their families and responsibilities to “follow the Way” deserve nothing but contempt’.3
We show others what we most need to be shown. This is not just a way to do things differently, this is how to unravel the great binding and free one’s natural energy. This is how we learn to trust our innate wisdom. And if you ask earth to let you meet a good teacher one day, then I trust that soon enough, when you are ready, one will walk into your life, and you will know them. They might not be a human. Pray for that and wait. This works, you know. How I was in a spruce grove in Romania was only and exactly all this, no more, no less. Empty, humble, practicing, mindless, rested, vibrating, full of awe and wonder, with simple materials close at hand, prepared.
True knowledge comes from the land not words, but words can help make a bridge to the land if need be. You have to find a way that works in your own place and see the truth of nature in the wells and water there. Maybe it is closer than you think already and waiting for your request. Ah, wild readers, we have all been chosen for work. The earth needs us, and perhaps you think you’ve got nothing to give. It is hard, yes, but there is always help at hand and hints are left scattered all around like hazelnuts in the old leaves. Living things wish to persist. Are we on the side of the living? Dead things wish to compost and rot down, to become living things again. Are we willing to transform?
Now as I write, a heron stands fishing on the bank, still, poised, natural, following its instinct, relaxed, aware, ready to strike. There is not one thing missing from this instruction.
If we would do only one thing, with utmost sincerity, the entire Milky Way would be like a seam of chanterelles rippled in moss at our feet.
This piece on meditation and method is from 2017 when I still lived in a small boat on the river Thames. It was revised and updated this evening, to say thanks to the many people who have subscribed to my newsletter this week. Greetings to you from the blustery south coast of England, on the largest of 6000 or so of Brigid’s Isles.
This was at Dark Mountain Basecamp in 2016. I said, how do you think choreographers and martial artists execute their incredible arts? It isn’t without thinking and it isn’t with endless words…
For more about the Isles of Brigid, read Julian Cope’s ‘The Modern Antiquarian’.
Liu I Ming, (1737-?) ‘Awakening to the Tao’
There is a tyranny of words in my house that is sometimes painful, especially as expressing myself with words is full of effort. How many times I want to smile and bubble like a child, and just say "La!" when something or someone pleases or delights me, like the water, and the woollen cape, and the bowing, and not making oneself too useful. And how I bristle when I hear a parent say, "Use your words".
Hello again Caroline from the west coast of Canada, I may want a hooded garment for we have a similar damp to us here.
Of late the writings of Iain, Martin and you have joined me in the liminal. The magic made rich and richer, words falling and falling away through words.