I’m sitting on a sand dune as the tide comes in and looking out over the mudflats, watching the wading birds. There are dark clouds in the sky and autumn’s evening glow is descending.
It begins to rain. It doesn’t matter that it’s raining, or that I’m getting wet. There is quiet here – all I can hear is the wind and the piping of oystercatchers and redshanks. A feeling of belonging comes over me. A feeling of rightness. There is a sense that I am meant to be here, in this communion with the weather and the sea and the birds. An intuition of timelessness, not only in the scene but my participation in the moment comes over me. I don’t have any agenda. I’m not looking for anything in particular – I’m just sitting here enjoying this moment. I’m not desperate to see a new species, frantically thumbing the pages of my bird book. I’m not meditating in the sense that many people would understand the word, but my mind is both focused and relaxed. I’m open to the magic of the moment and the magic of the place and everything seems complete. There is a presence much greater than I could ever put into words in all of this, and that for me, is at the heart of what I would call spiritual experience.
It’s so easy to become bewitched by exciting philosophies or esoteric methods but nothing could be further from my mind. I haven’t been fasting, taking strange drugs or doing some kind of ritual and yet something profound is happening to my body, energy and mind. It has something to do with finding my place in the natural world. This is neither the beginning nor the end of some kind of quest for knowledge, power or inspiration, but there is a sense of the source, the wellspring of all these things, should I need them. Somehow just by being myself, being open and patiently sitting here I am deeply connected with my world. This is the art of conversation with the Genius Loci.
I’m walking down my street. A crow is making a racket from someone’s chimney pot. The sparrows are chirruping and the sun comes from behind a cloud. Masses of people, walls and moving vehicles lie all around me for miles and miles. There’s a peculiar smell in the air from some factory. There is a puddle on the path and a flash of sky at my feet. As I walk, I admire the emerald green of the mosses growing on a wall, while at the same time I sense the labyrinth of the post modern world buzzing with all its voices. Here too, I can feel the same presence. Would it be easier away from all the roads and the smells and the subliminal noises of the city? Maybe, but even here the spirit of the place speaks to me and I engage with it, sometimes with less or with more awareness. Really being where I am and engaging my senses with my surroundings is, in itself relationship, and despite the familiarity of the scene and its ordinariness there is a recognition of depth and meaning.
We have been taught to be consumers. We have certain desires and expectations of life and we measure each moment against them. Often our hopes and dreams fail to appear and we become bored or distressed, so we visualise the other place, the other time, in which we will fulfil our program. We locate authority, power and the sacred elsewhere, sometimes by means of religious or political belief and we learn to lower our expectations, particularly our expectations of ourselves. We call that ‘knowing our place’, but is this really knowledge? Do we really know our place? That is what The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci is about. It seems that we have become closed to our surroundings and that happiness or magic are always just around some corner or available as a reward if we jump through the right set of hoops. Have we lost something which we had as children – our sensitivity and our curiosity? Maybe we have, and we mourn that loss, that is until the next entertaining distraction comes along. Life’s meaning didn’t go away; our feeling of it was drowned by the needs of the immediate situation, or our many preoccupations.
We seem to have fallen into a trap. We rail against our limitations but we rarely explore them. We hold our assumptions about the nature of reality close to our chests, like a kind of protection from madness, but we never look at them closely. Then we encounter a large old tree, an empty house, the eye of a bird, a fossil, or the moon and we feel an instant of recognition. We lose it because we start to tell ourselves what it means (or doesn’t mean) as if the whole world was a cipher and we had to crack the code. But it can be simpler than that. We have been carrying so much baggage that, in the words of the poet Philip Larkin, ‘Beauty passes by as unheeded as the threshold brook.’ The art of conversation with the Genius Loci involves mainly one thing: spending a bit of quality time with the threshold brook, in a sense of curiosity and wonder, listening to what it has to tell us and then sharing our feelings – something of what we are – with it. To many people from our society that is hard as it doesn’t fit in with the secular, materialistic culture in which we find ourselves. Oddly the smallest gesture from the heart can make a huge difference to how we feel about being here. A quiet friendly greeting to the crows on the playing field. A small bow to the big old oak by the side of the road, not in a superstitious way but in a sense of celebration and connection. Many of us are already engaged in this kind of greeting, this kind of relationship with our environment, but we rarely recognise its importance or take it further.
For we are connected! We are connected even when we feel disconnected! We are animals and part of life’s web. That is what ecology is about. That too, is what The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci is about, rather than philosophy, belief or formal spiritual practice. It is a way to rediscover our true place in the world.
Literally translated the Genius Loci is the ‘spirit’ of a ‘place’. You may experience this as a vague presence that seems to respond to you. Or as a subtle being who lives there. Initially, I think it is better to set out with a more open ended model. A good one is to see the Genius loci as a composite – imagine an ecosystem with feelings. Its many dimensions may be constellated within space – as energies, structures and relationships – in time as events, or in other ways. You could study it scientifically if you wanted too, identifying the plants, animals and rocks. You could read up on its history, perhaps.
My view is that if you want to form some kind of genuine relationship with the Spirit of Place then the study of these subjects to some level or other is very important. The establishment of a rapport that will be more than just escapist or parasitic depends upon our own good will and inner balance. Anyone (most of us) may get lost in the forest of their own projections.
I believe that ultimately we all should get out into our world and learn to feel it again. That we need to learn to interact with it in a more playful and wholesome way instead of taking ourselves so seriously. That we should take time to explore our local landscape and locate our personal places of power. That we should try to find out how to start a conversation with them. What for? Well, the point of it all is simple.
The heart of the matter is nothing less than the meaning of life. Relationship. Relativity. The ‘Unified Field’. The nature of reality. The discovery and manifestation of our timeless, essential being.
From The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci, © 2006 by Barry Patterson, published by Capall Bann.
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