Something is wrong, and we who have eyes to see it know it. Art is uninspiring. Music is noise. Religious institutions are frail. Politics is cartoonish. Personal relationships lack depth and trust. People are physically and mentally sick. Our air, land and rivers are poisoned. Our food is toxic. Our once great culture of achievement, virility, beauty, innovation, discovery and power has descended into a dark, modern age of mediocrity, ugliness, vulgarity, sickness, and decadence.
You and I have been born into this modern age of spiritual decadence, but life can be more. Religious and mythical traditions tell us of a golden age when our ancestors were full of spirit and vigor and pursued excellence, created beauty and lived out of the soul. We see vestiges of spiritual power and confidence in the great cathedrals of Europe or the mystically-arranged rocks of Stonehenge. But most deeply we sense a limitless Source of life and power as we walk in Nature. We saunter alongside a woodland creek, ascend the limestone crags of a little mountain, or wade in the blue waters of the sea, and we sense a universal impulse that we share with all of Nature. We know by experience that a divine Source feeds all of life, and that we are its benefactors.
It seems today that few people know and experience this divine Source in their lives. We are victims of a great enclosure of Nature and of the mind. Our ancestors walked wild and free for hundreds of thousands of years. We were born to walk, to roam, to move toward the horizon and explore what lies over the next hill. We ate a wide variety of healthy meats, leafy plants and wild berries. We drank fresh, mineral-rich water. We constructed small homes to protect us from the harshest elements of nature, but we were never more than a few steps from fellowship with Nature and the divine Source. This all began to change a mere ten thousand years ago, when civilizations were born. Cities were constructed, and walls went up, severing our ancestors from regular fellowship with Nature, our original homeland, and from the divine Source which speaks to us inwardly through images, intuitions, and instincts.
Civilization’s enclosure of space was accompanied by an enclosure of the mind. Just as city walls severed us from Nature, likewise, systems, dogmas and institutions grew up in civilization which clogged our natural intuition, weakened our instinct and diminished our experience of God. Within the Apparatus of the state, religion and science, a new kind of thinking that we now call “instrumental thinking” began to dominate how we think. Mechanical types of thinking – calculating, ciphering, organizing, mapping, constructing replaced knowing by intuition and instinct, and our primal ways of knowing were abandoned. We gave up instinctual knowing for rational assessing. More and more our institutions – government, academia, religion, media – presented us with stultifying dogmas, mechanical processes, official procedures, acceptable thought, and social conformity. Our way of knowing and understanding the world was enclosed within the limitations of instrumental reason, religious dogma and social conformity. No doubt, civilization created and maintained efficient and complex organizations, which produced the production of surplus commodities and a degree of protection from the vicissitudes of life. But as mechanical and rational thinking became increasingly the exclusive means of engaging and experiencing the world, we lost the ability to know and understand the world by intuition and instinct, the original and natural channels by which God communicates within Nature and within you and me. Today, we have material abundance but spiritual poverty. We have information overload but lack divine wisdom. We are safe and secure but fearful and anxious in a world seemingly devoid of God.
Religion emerged as a means to heal the wound opened by our severance from Nature and the divine Source. Prior to the great enclosure, institutional religion was unnecessary. As a people once intimately connected with Nature and the Source that speaks through Nature we had no need for institutional religion. We lived and moved in constant relationship with Divine. With the creation of civilizations, we were pulled away from our origin inheritance and were enclosed behind walls. Religion emerged to help us scale the wall and reunite with our Source. Religion is the connecting again (Latin: re-ligio, as in ligament) to something that has been lost. Religion is intended to reconnect us to our natural inheritance and reopen within us our closed-up receptivity to the inpouring grace of the divine into our souls. Unfortunately, in our day, institutional religion in large part has failed us. Religion has become one more wall, one more hurdle, to the Divine.
We must learn how to reopen our intuitive and instinctive channels through which the Source pours into our whole being. We must begin the long work of reconstituting ourselves, our families and our communities to live in fellowship with Nature and the ever-present God. Until this happens, we will not escape the trap of the Apparatus. We will continue to experience only physical sickness, mental illness, weakness of soul, ugly landscapes, ecological destruction, spiritual darkness, loneliness, alienation and general decadence.
There is a place and a way back to a direct relationship with Nature and her Source. That place is what I call the forest’s edge. The way is sauntering. By forest’s edge I mean both the literal and figurative verdant, liminal area that separates the Apparatus from the wilderness. The Apparatus is the world of the exclusively rational mind, of Apollonian order, of walls, fences, cubicles, careers, assembly lines, maps, charts, interstates, 24/7 screens, conformist mass society, and stale, dogmatic religion. Wilderness is the world of the unconscious, darkness, Dionysian chaos. We cannot survive in either world for long. The Apparatus suffocates us. Wilderness overtakes us. We go to the Apparatus for safety and security but find tyranny. We go to the wilderness for ecstasy, but it leads to insanity.
The Apparatus is civilization. The wilderness is chaos. The forests edge is culture. Walking at the forest’s edge we accept from the Apparatus basic order and security and receive from the wilderness a fresh inpouring of fire and raw energy. Away from this thin space of the forest’s edge we either atrophy in the dead materialism of the Apparatus or we lose ourselves in the unsustainable frenzy of the wild.
The forest edge saunterer is the one who creates culture. He is the poet, the painter, the saint, the philosopher, the dreamer, the artisan, the mystic, the nurturer, the mother, the father. He is the one who sought to escape the suffocation of the Apparatus by fleeing to the wilderness. For a season he strides among the brambles and bogs of a wild wetland. He roams through the dark silence of a primeval forest. His senses come alive. He feels the impulse of a Transcendent vibration in his sinews, reconnecting him to his soul. He becomes Emerson’s transparent eyeball in the blithe air of a cool evening. But the body and mind cannot endure such enthusiasm for long, so the weary soul begrudgingly crawls back toward the Apparatus. However, when he arrives at civilization’s wall, he cannot bare the thought of returning to the suffocating regulations, policies and procedures, conformity and dogma there within. Having known an unmediated relationship with the Source, the saunterer dare not return to the Apparatus. He will surely die there, but the wild can only be taken in doses. Where is he to live? The forest’s edge.
Life and culture are brimming along the forest’s edge. Here are the majestic oaks and aromatic cedars, wild huckleberries and blackberries, darting redbirds, noisy blue jays, timid rabbits and shady gardens where one can walk slowly among the wild creatures, soaking in the divine Source. Here the freed mind can wander, dream, and create new worlds and new possibilities whispered to him by divine voices. Along the rural countryside, fencerows and forest’s edge, geniuses such as Thoreau, Nietzsche, Kant, Wordsworth, and the Bronte sisters found their inspiration. Here is where the saunters of Van Gogh lead to a Starry Night and the meandering walks of Beethoven produced symphonies. Here the poet, the philosopher, the dreamer can lose himself, lay down his masks and social roles ascribed by the Apparatus. Here he can feel alive and imagine new worlds. Here he can breathe, intuit and know beyond knowing.
The aim of the Sauntering Society is to promote wellbeing of body and soul at the forest’s edge. Sauntering is protest, worship, health and art practiced with each contemplative step and imaginative thought. Life in the Apparatus has broken the will and enclosed the soul with its crushing grip on our minds and our freedoms. As a result, we find ourselves in a sick, lonely, weak and decadent society, lacking virility, fire, power and passion. Sauntering in body and soul along the forest’s edge reawakens our senses and reopens our channels of intuition and instinct so that we might experience and know the Source of all life and power. To that aim, The Sauntering Society meets for saunters and conversations that promote wellbeing of body and soul. You are invited to join us for one of our upcoming saunters. Check out our events page for more information.