May my life shine with the way of nature.
May I sleep with the rhythm of the stars.
May I live in a home of the earth.
May I dance with the wind,
May I love with the grace of the flowers.
May I live so that every word, every breath,
Is a gift for every generation to come.
May my children and my children’s children bless my name
Because I have chosen to walk in the way of beauty
And I have given them the wisdom of life.
May the land bless my rising,
And when I fall, may I be complete
In the blessing of her sleep.
The rancho sits cradled in two veined snakes of ponderosa mountains, and there, amidst the whisper of rivers, singing of mountains, and glory of cattle, dogs, and donkeys, I rediscovered something of what it means to be whole. There, I found keys to my birthright lost amongst verdure dreams, the forgotten valleys of northern New Mexico.
It all reduces to virtue. Not the straight-laced, puritanical kind that civilized rigidity so butchered and disemboweled…true-grit, philosophical virtue as real and hard as the face of a mountain or as bright and burning as midday sun.
Aristotle defined happiness as activity according to virtue. And Aristotle was the first hippy; only because he redirected our post-agrarian, domesticated minds back to the virtue and power of nature, to the absolute importance, humanly speaking, of living in alignment with the law of one’s own natura, the wellspring of virtue. And though natural law may evolve, as nature herself will do, it never ceases to apply.
Moral subjectivity, modernity’s daydream, is practically speaking mostly hogwash. You get straight with reality or you die. It’s true that what is “good” for each will vary according to individual circumstances. And it’s true that the power of consciousness itself has vast and probably mostly untapped creative potential. But it does not therefore follow that the good in itself is subjective; in each case, it is, ethically speaking, just about as unresponsive to human whim as the grim face of a mighty mountain.
Nature will always win, and if you don’t like it, then you’re toast. To quote Agnes Obel, a favorite (and most ghoulish) Swedish musician of mine, “Nature will have her way/ Though you took her for a fool.”
I can ignore natura. I can ignore the fact that if you drive on the left side of the street in the United States of America you will probably die. I can ignore the fact that non-native electromagnetic frequencies confuse cellular signaling, dehydrate our extracellular water, and cause informational chaos and energy deficit on a biological level. And if I do, the bliss of my ignorance may shield me for a time from some temporary psychological discomfort. But when I get hit by an oncoming car, when I get a chronic diagnosis, I will assuredly experience discomfort of a much more lasting and permanent variety.
But I digress. Or really, this is the only thing that’s really worth talking about and the only thing most people won’t. Which, after all, is fine.
We are each faced with the choice to live or die. But wild ones, wild men and wild women are wild precisely in virtue of the fact that they are not loath to face the realities of this life and of their own hearts. That they look these realities fully in the eyes and embrace them for the growling wolves, the threatening angels they are.
We are forged by the fires of nature. We are made fathers and mothers of great nations by wrestling with angels.
And the paradox is that, the closer I am to my own nature, the more divine I turn out to be. There has far too long been imposed a false dichotomy betwixt the natural and the supernatural, human and divine. Nature is God, not perhaps in the strictest sense, but at the very least in the way that a map of Rome is Rome. It is an image and a way-shower. Nature is the way home. And home is God. Home is transcendence. Home is enlightenment. Home is what we are all looking for but very few of us ever manage to find.
Like Dmitri Fyodorovich in The Brother’s Karamazov, we are all looking for God all the time in everything we do. He looked for God through alcohol and women because that was the only way he knew. This quest is knit in the fibers of our being, and every action, every breath is an expression of the fundamental desire of all existence to Be and to Be and to Be until our each and every particle finds union with the highest expression of who and what it is. And is this not enlightenment; to be filled with the light that is life unto the fullness of existence?
And so the quest to reclaim a traditional way of living is the ultimate journey of homecoming; the expression of longing for the fulfillment of my nature in every possible way. Especially when there is no difference, really, between god and nature, mind and body, flesh and spirit, and when any perception of division was originally a product of man’s alienation from his own animal essence, a product of the demonization of the feminine, the wild, the chaotic as the source of all evil when really, the root of our suffering was the separation itself.
On the rancho, for a blessed moment, I was given a precious space of reunion. Reunion with myself, with my nature. With the Way of Life. Everything around me was as it should be. Everything, every bite, every breath, every vision was the nourishment for which my mind body and spirit has so long been in thirst, for which it was designed, tuned over millions of years to receive.
Really, wellbeing and life itself is a matter of nourishment, of interdependence. It’s true that no man is an island. But it’s much more than that. Not only am I not an island; I am simply one strand in a vast glorious mycelium and perhaps it is actually relatively impossible to know where I am and where you or the tree beside me begins. And the greatest delusion of all is that I can be anything or anyone apart from the endless sea of influx that determines my expression, the way I spin and sparkle and shine at any given moment in time.
We moderns tend to hyper-focus on material agents of causation, such as diet, when it comes to health and wellbeing. But this approach is truly myopic. Why, when food is only one of an almost infinite number of causal, informational inputs our bodies minds and spirits receive on a daily and momently basis?
As science advances it confirms what ancient humanity has always known; that matter itself is a crystallization of energy and information, that all of creation is a flux of crystallized knowing at perpetual, perceptutual play with itself in the brilliant phenomenon of mind we experience as the cosmos.
So why such a near-sighted approach? Probably because the pervasive influence of mechanical, Newtonian physics has dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment. Only the material is real, and only material things have influence, are vectors of force. Food is the most obvious material input, and so any other possible relevant factors have for too long have been overlooked and ignored. More ethereal sources of nourishment have been passed over or altogether denied.
This is simply a fallacious model of reality, flawed in the sense that it is incomplete but also in that it outright denies the reality of other vectors of influence. Every input, every source of nourishment is determinative. From light to relationships to houses, every aspect of my environment can and will influence my wellbeing for better or for worse.
For so long I have struggled, have had an echoing sense that I was missing some key that would finally unlock the garden of my bliss. No matter what diet, what intervention I tried, it was never enough. And this is why. My diet might be pristine, but if my relationships are poisoning me, I will stay sick. I can eat just ribeye or raw kale all the day long, but if I’m lonely, or I’m creating circadian chaos and informational toxicity by exposing myself to too much artificial blue light or by not getting enough whole sun, I will remain in imbalance, in a state of dis-ease.
Really, this is the yoga of the modern age. The ancients had it easy. Already their foundation was in place. Their light hygiene was pristine; they rose with the sun, slept with the moon, lived in electrical communication with the earth and in relatively intensive communion with one another. There was no DDT, no Roundup, no growth hormones, no GMO’s. They had a ten-year head start, at least, over any spiritual seeker of these times.
How can I seek union with the divine when I am disassociated and disconnected from my own nature? How can I have peace of mind when my body is riddled with dis-ease?
The dichotomy between mind and body, psychology and medicine, is just as false as the one between god and nature. This is why the first pillar of yoga was Ayurveda; we must balance the body, tone the body, heal the body as a foundation on which to build a ladder to heaven.
And so, for a moment on the rancho, I experienced Foundation as it should be. Whole House, Whole Light, Whole Sounds, Whole Air. Just the moon, the living stars, the gorgeous sun. Just the fresh breath of the river as it sang its way through valley rocks to the sea. Just the pristine arms of ancient adobe nourishing my soul, its spirit holding my heart, and me remembering what it was to be loved, to be fed, to be held by a dwelling. The passage of time, weathering its walls, imprinted memories as scars of bright wisdom, giving me the medicine of its being, collected beauty of decades, rooted nature of earthen walls enfolding the sweet, sweet passage of time. And the bloom of it all was the knowing of myself as a being rooted deep in the earth that has given my ancestors and my ancestor’s ancestors the glory of life on this land.
There’s no going back. This way of life is too real, its promise the only thing really worth seeking. Each new discovery leaves me with a deepened sense of wholeness, a more complete relationship with myself and by extension the whole of all being. So that I begin to live backwards; I die now and like Benjamin Button or Jesus Christ with every day and every death I am born, little by little, anew.
