Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

-David Wagoner

Lost in the Modern Age

We live in an age in which it is difficult to get lost. A map of the entire world sits in our pockets, and it can tell us how to get anywhere from where we are. We can look at satellite images of our childhood home, or of a stranger’s home across the world. We have peered deep into the reaches of space and mapped the planets and stars.

Getting lost is a rare occurrence these days.

Yet, why do we feel so lost?

So many of us have a persistent sense that we are somehow not in the right place. That we have found ourselves living a life other than the one we were meant to.

Collectively, our culture has become utterly lost – so much so that we don’t even recognize that fact. A culture of extraction has us careening towards possible extinction. By in large, we have lost the traditions our ancestors practiced which kept us in balance with the rest of life. And so, we are exploiting the living earth around us far beyond its capacity to renew.

We have lost the rituals and initiations that helped us to peer into our own souls and discover our true place in our community and the world of life.

We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light, so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten. But our exiled spirits can tell. Deep in our bones resides an ancient singing couple who just won’t give up making their beautiful, wild noise. The world won’t end if we can find them.

Martin Prechtel

We know more about our geographical location than ever, and yet less about our place in the unfolding story of the universe.

We have become disconnected both from the wild soul of nature and from the inner treasures of our own souls. So we have created a society that is perpetually greedy and soul-less.

Bill Plotkin speaks of our disconnection from nature and soul in his book, “Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche.”

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

Bill Plotkin, in “Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche”

Finding Ourselves Again

David Wagoner’s poem provides a powerful antidote to our current state of being lost. As we read it, we realize that we might indeed be more lost than we imagined. An inner knowing, silenced by our culture, returns. A longing to know ourselves, and to feel at home in the larger web of life, reemerges.

We remember that being lost or found has little to do with knowing where we are in space, and everything to do with knowing who we are, and what our place in the story of the cosmos is.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

First, we must learn to simply be with nature. And to be with ourselves. To see the living, breathing world for what it is. To peel the lenses from our eyes that see the world as dead, as a collection of exploitable resources. To remember what our hearts have always known: that we humans are only one small part of a vast and vibrant community.

As Thomas Berry says, “The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightening and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees… all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.”

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.

We must shed our learned arrogance. It is not a human trait, it is a trait we have learned from our culture. Look at any intact Indigenous culture and you will see that the people do not possess the same arrogance towards the rest of the world that we have in Western culture.

And then, we must relearn how to listen.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

Oh, how welcome these lines are. For we have all left. Yet, the world never turns us away from her embrace. No matter how much we have devestated nature, her powers of healing and renewal are always available to help us remember how to live in balance.

And, no matter how much we have ignored it, the soul is always within us, waiting quietly to be discovered again.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.

We must forget the ways of seeing we have learned from a culture that strives on the exploitation of nature and people. We must re-learn to see reality as it is. Joy Harjo speaks to this way of seeing in her poem, “Remember.”

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.

Joy Harjo, “Remember”

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. you must let it find you.

Yes, now we hear what it is to be lost. We see early on that lostness has nothing to do with whether we can pinpoint our location on a map, or whether we know which direction to walk in to get a warm dinner.

We could be in the middle of the wilderness without a map and not be lost.

But “If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,/You are surely lost.” To be lost is to be disconnected from the living world, and from our own souls.

The collective lostness of our current age has had catastrophic consequences. Finding ourselves “Here” might just be essential to our very survival.