We sat around the hearth with the fire going to keep the midges away. The conversation turned to the work of personal and societal decolonization, a term I don’t yet understand. I asked Ludwig what he thought the foot of the path to decolonization was, and he said
"Listen to the birds."
We all sat and stared at the fire for a few minutes, letting the truth of that sink in. Six weeks ago it would have sounded trite, hippy-dippy, an excuse to sit around on our asses all day with dreamy looks in our eyes instead of getting to work.
Now, though, those words have weight and a vast hardness to me, like I've dug down through layers and layers of duff and found the bedrock of the universe. Or maybe like I jumped off of some height a long, long time ago and I've been falling in low gravity for years, yearning for the bottom but just bouncing off of the branches of trees, and finally I've hit the actual firm hard earth. I think that finding this solidness is what I came here for.
I don’t know anything about the world
I spent the first twelve years of my life running around the second-growth Redwood forests of the Santa Cruz mountains. I spent the rest of my youth running around a high desert mountain pass where the Southern Sierras and the Mojave smoosh into each other. I’ve backpacked, climbed, pedaled, and driven all over the backcountry of the western US for my entire adult life. "Being in nature", which is a phrase I don’t use but take to mean "not being in a city or other built-up environment," is not a novel experience to me.
So it wasn't obvious to me that my connection to and understanding of the nonhuman world is almost nil. When I go into a forest it's just a green wall. The desert is just a sandy colored expanse. I don't see anything there.
I can't name more than a couple of the plants or animals I see, and I don't know anything about their behavior or history or interactions between each other. I don't understand a bit of it. I have no real sense of connection to it - it is a thing that I observe, like a nice abstract painting. I appreciate a good sunset, I like it when the light diffuses through the underside of leaves, I find it thrilling when I see a coyote or an eagle, but it's all essentially aesthetic to me. I consume the world with my eyes.
There's a term in information security that describes a computer that is not connected to any external networks in any way. Such a computer is said to be air-gapped. To air-gap a computer is to make it physically impossible for anyone who isn't sitting right at that computer's physical I/O devices to interact with it. No network cables are connected to it, and the wifi card has been pulled out. To exchange files with this computer you need to use a physical device like a USB drive.
I feel like an air-gapped human. I see the world, but I'm not connected to it at all. I've accepted for a long time the idea that everything is connected and interdependent, but that belief was based on reason and intellect, on something I read in a book, not on direct experience and observation, on knowing.
How to listen to the birds
Shortly after arriving here Ludwig explained the fundamentals of bird language, and about how you can learn to hear the gist of what they're saying about the rest of the forest. He explained the practice of the sit spot, fox walking, and owl eyes. We spend our mealtimes discussing our stories of the day, asking each other questions about our observations and coming up with - and testing - our hypotheses about what we see happening around us. Ludwig learned these practices from his four years living in the forest (more about his story here), and uses the mentoring techniques developed by Jon Young and his team (who received their teaching from indigenous roots).
In the span of a few weeks, my eyes have been opened to the fact that there is a story unfolding before us every moment of every day, and this story is deeply contextual and weaves through everything going on in the world.
Have you seen the first Matrix movie? The part where Neo gets his first "download", learning Kung Fu in about five seconds via a cable plugged into the port at the base of his skull? He opens his eyes and says "whoa" as only Keanu Reeves can. That "whoa" is how I feel about this.
It took someone pointing out to me that bird behavior is not random to realize that there is a constantly unfolding story of vast richness and complete interconnectedness in the forest. There's a purpose to everything they do, which seems obvious now but had never occurred to me before. They're wild creatures, and they can't afford to just fart around. Their priorities are to eat, to reproduce, and to not become some other creature's food. And all the creatures in the forest are aware of each other. All the bird species listen to each other. The foxes and deer are always paying attention to what the birds are saying (or not saying!).
It feels like I was illiterate, but had always heard that books were great. So I looked at the books, and went to libraries and bookstores, and sometimes picked up a book and admired it and even flipped through the pages, and would say from time to time what a fine looking book it was, admire its shape and heft, the quality of the paper or the attention put in the binding, but I never actually read the books. The entire time I was feeling proud and oh-so-cultured about my fine opinions and sensibilities about books, I was completely and utterly missing the entire point of books, which is to read them.
I´ve spent my entire life being nature illiterate.
Imagine discovering for the first time that books weren't just aesthetic objects but they contained entire universes of stories capable of expressing awe and wonder, and being completely overcome by raw curiosity and wanting to do nothing else but read books and understand those stories. That's how I feel now. I'm still functionally illiterate when it comes to understanding what's happening around me in the forest, but now I understand that something is going on in a way I didn't before.
Why, though, would listening to the birds be a good first step to decolonize my mind?
Well, I don't know, I'm just at the foot of the path yet, assuming it even is the right path. But I have a guess.
I guess that it is impossible to have a colonial mindset if you understand the story of the forest. I think it's impossible to hold both deep knowledge of the more-than-human world and a colonial attitude in the same brain at the same time.
Listening to and participating in the more than human world require the skills of deep listening, an ability to empathize and think like a nonhuman, relentless curiosity and questioning, and result in a profound sense of the interdependent and interconnectedness of all life that is based not on intellectual reasoning or book learning but on actual observations and experiences. This last point bears emphasis.
It is easy to read in a book about interconnectedness and interdependence and let one's imagination take this in a Disney movie direction, to get lost in a sort of blissed-out, why-can’t-weeeeee-be-friends conception of the world. Watching a sparrow-hawk nab a baby songbird from its nest and feed it to its own young, and observing the behavior of the rest of the babies that got collaterally wing-slapped in the face as the talons sunk into their sibling, will quickly correct that blissed-out perspective.
At any rate, it seems to me that to a mind that deeply understands the interconnected dynamics of the world, and has a sense of just how deep and vast those relationships are, it just doesn't make sense to act in ways that treat the world like a collection of isolated components to be externally controlled for personal profit. How could it occur to a mind that sees the world as intricately interdependent to smash, control, dominate, pillage, exterminate anything? That makes as much intuitive sense as smashing your own foot, exterminating your own eye, pillaging your own skin.
That's one hypothesis, anyway. I'll continue my observations and see how it holds up.
