Follow your Nose
As I will describe in more detail elsewhere, my experience with falling in love, with flirting and crushes and romance and human intimate relationship, has been markedly atypical. I have never really experienced a “crush” on another person in a similar manner as I have heard others describe this powerful experience. I have loved in my own way, but the somatic experience of “falling in love” with another human, as I have witnessed in movies, books, and in the lives of friends, was foreign to me. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but I know now that those walks at Oxbow were the start of a profound falling in love with the world.
The walks at Oxbow would put me in a peculiar yet delicious state of being, one that was at once settled and open; one that was primed for relationship. This was a degree of richness, of participatory aliveness that I had never known before. A full spectrum of color had replaced a world of grey; a fullness, a humming tone of magic permeated everything now, even the halls of the COVID clinic. I felt happy in my body like I never had before. I was giddy; I was not on mushrooms but I was high. I wanted more.
After one late-evening spring walk, I returned to my apartment to channel this pulsing vibrancy into an application to attend my first of many courses with the Animas Valley Institute. This one was a five-day experience called “Coming Home to an Animate World.” A five-day date, if you will.
August in the Tetons is a time of life, of flowers and flowing rivers and of bellowing moose in rut. One day, out on assignment from the Animas guides, I find myself stalking Mystery through a dense willow thicket. A tingling, unfamiliar sense comes over me, hairs stand on end, a silent alarm sounds from the depths of my abdomen. Danger! I stop, look around, listen for a bit. My mind doubts the unease in my body. Hmmm…well, it’s probably nothing, and I can’t stay frozen here forever. I push a little further through the branches when all of the sudden I smell it, a musty animal scent, the inner alarm now a blaring foghorn. It’s a few more seconds before momma moose crashes through the bushes. She has chosen to move away from me rather than at me, thank goodness. Charging moose protecting their calves are statistically more dangerous than the grizzlies in this neck of the woods.
I am electric, brimming, overflowing. “Always follow your nose” – Gandalf was spot on, heck I sniffed out a moose! New superpower unlocked. Intuition is real, incontrovertibly so, not “woowoo” but a simple fact of living in a living world.
My time with the Tetons is packed with such revelations. Before I bring the thistle to my nose, I tell the strange, alien tendrils of pink, “I invite you in.” Something changed in that moment, a bond was made, I and the world merged. That single flower lives in my being, etched in neuronal connections evoked by memory, by smell, still a living presence that to this day regularly makes itself known.
I lie in the depression of grasses in the wildflower field, where deer had rested the night before. The blooms above my head proudly announce their beauty and fecundity to the world. After a few minutes I dare to raise my head up to their level and peak out, before ducking back down again into the green sanctuary, the contours of the place hugging my body, camouflaging, providing safety in concealment. Both valid ways of navigating the complex relationships of life here.
Sometimes this relationship with the world gets weird, winds into unfamiliar territory. I am wandering off-trail when I come across the pile of bones; I catch the path again and walk a little farther until an unseen boundary stops me in my tracks, physically stops me as if I had run into a force field. The four trees surrounding me are pulsing with things to say, if I can learn to listen.
Sometimes this relationship becomes downright terrifying. I find myself by the river at night. Suddenly I hear a splash, followed the loud huffing of a an unmistakably large mammal. I’m quite certain I’m about to die a horrific death by bear mauling. After a long moment frozen in terror, I make a blind dash up the dark embankment and then the shaky journey back to camp. I find I am suddenly more in love with LIFE than ever before.
Sometime it is comforting. The nurse log speaks during the hours I passed immersed in the starbursts of moss covering her surface; “nothing is trash here” she whispers.
Then, there is the place of shocking abundance by the river, the place where the cup of the world runneth over, a holy place where the Earth graced me with a glimpse of her true face. I immerse myself in those waters and they feed my soul even now.
By the end of the program, I’m hopelessly undone. I’m infatuated, and I still want more, I want it all, the beauty, the terror, I want to get to know the weirdest nooks and crannies of this place. I would drink from that cup and immerse myself in those waters until the end of time. And yet, there is a new dimensions of this relationship calling. I want to learn how to listen better, how to hear, how to communicate, how to really know this world.
I look back on the days of Coming Home as a beautiful “honeymoon period.” Those remain some of the most vibrantly alive, erotic even, days of my life. And next must come a deepening. What shadows does this relationship reveal? What possibilities? What, really, am I up to here? In all of this vast world, what is for me, particularly, to give? What is my niche in this vast humming web?