Finding True North

The Inner Compass and Navigating the Map to the World's Riches

Finding True North

The Inner Compass and Navigating the Map to the World’s Riches

In my heart, the wild is synonymous with peace and home. The smells, sights, sounds, textures - and almost more importantly - the thoughts, that are afforded to me when I step into the more-than-human world are some of my most treasured jewels. These are the riches no money can buy. Money is a most wonderful thing. I like that we can exchange dollars for an infinity of delightful and useful goods. That said, it is the wild sensorial world that to me, is where my wealth originates and abides.

I most recently became much more wealthy as we traveled through the Salmon-Challis National Forest. We had left the Pine Flats Hot Springs of Lowman, Idaho, heading north and east, questing for a forest to call home for the night over the Montana border. My eyes beheld the craggy peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains. My mind was permeated by not so much thinking as feeling, the perception of the road’s rhythm. The flow of our path wound up and around, through mountain passes and high elevation valleys full of lodgepole pine and subalpine fir. Just after we crossed the Banner Creek Summit, Victor decided to brush his teeth. When it became necessary for the spit and rinse, I pulled over at the next available pull out - which happened to be mile-marker one eleven. Later on, as we descended from the high valley town of Stanley at 6253 feet in elevation, my eyes caught the winging of osprey after osprey. We were traveling along the Salmon river, fly fisherman up to their knees or waist in the tumbling waters. I held my attention upon a singularly important personal thought, and an osprey flew into my view not more than five feet off the left side of the windshield. I was driving, and the lithe, black and white dappled body of this fish-hawk captured almost the whole of my attention. I exclaimed out-loud to Victor “oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness.” No other words came forth, either from my lips or my mind. The responsiveness of Nature laid bare before my eyes.

For those of you who are reading True Nature for the first time, I must mention that the osprey thread starts in the first issue - A Wild Mythos. For everyone else who has been along for whole ride so far, I know you will indulge me as I tell you in detail more about what has occurred between me and the osprey.  Let us take the round-about way of a meandering stream that sometimes doubles back on itself, or curves left when its ultimate gravitational path is far to the right and down over those distant hills.

I completed A Wild Mythos during our last day at the Umpqua, one of the mighty Oregon rivers, formed by the confluence of the northern and southern Umpqua rivers just outside the town of Roseburg. The northern portion wells forth from Maidu Lake in the Cascades, the southern branch from the Rogue-Umpqua divide. Together, they travel one hundred and eleven miles, down through the Coastal Range, until their waters, mingling with those of the Smith River, pour into the Pacific Ocean at Winchester Bay. By the jetty where they grow oysters, and fisherman cast their lines for surf perch and lingcod. Where porpoise play, the seals try to steal crabbing bait, and the swift black cormorants dive and bob. Where you can see surfers of the most committed devotion, thickly clad in wetsuits, paddling out into what appear like insanely powerful waves. “You see sharks all the time,” the surfer-UPS driver told Victor and Josh, our cousin-by-marriage. They were on a Dungeness crabbing mission, picking up supplies at the local bait shop. “Usually only one person gets bit a season, by a white-tipped,” he said shrugging. It’s not a big deal apparently. But those elephant seals, he warned. Better be careful while mating season is on, or you run the risk of an eight-hundred pound ocean-god chasing you back to shore, down the sand till you’re good and gone.

A few miles up-river, past the town of Reedsport, the water turns brackish with salt marshes on either side. Snow white egrets stand stock-still amongst the water-loving grasses; parting the green curtain of giant sedges and tall, hollow reeds like a light. Here the fishing is in boats, for fish like chinook salmon, steelhead, and shad. Just a bit further the marshes give way to more solid earth, scorched black this summer from the fires they purposely lit. In a week or two, the land transformed from a charry loam to lushness in the making, luminous shoots of grass poking up by the trillions. A favorite of the elk who frequent here. And the single black cow, who seems to have found acceptance within the herd. Mid-july, the bulls and cows (the elk that is) were still staying separately as is their habit. The yearlings were obvious amongst the full-grown mothers. The bulls were off lazing together in the fresh pasture, their svelte, winding racks reaching at least a meter above their crowns. By the end of August, the magnetism towards more life, more elk, more hoofs in the herd, became visible. The fraternity dispersed, each seeking a personal invitation to wed and bed with the sacred daughters of the mountain. If you have never seen, or rather felt, the presence of a bull elk amongst the harem of queens - it is something to aspire to. Radiant majesty. A vision of primal power. Authority. No backing down. Awareness, utterly self-possessed.

In the mythologies of indigenous people who evolved alongside these ungulates, Elk is stamina.

Elk…

Your antlers reach for the Sun.

Show me that strength

and stamina are one.

~ From Medicine Cards by Jamie Sams and David Carson

Years ago when we lived in Montana for a winter, Victor and I took a mid-January trip back to Wisconsin. We were driving Victor’s steadfast, 2001 forest green Ford F250 with the 7.3 liter engine - its own kind of unflagging stamina. It was our first trip through the Swan Range, near Seeley Lake in north-western Montana. Highway 83 is the scenic route between the Flathead Valley and Interstate 90, the main artery eastward. We both immediately fell in love with this swatch of road. It is lightly traveled, winding through unending pine, spruce, larch, and hemlock forest, interspersed with the occasional lake and classic mountain cabin. Like the Wisconsin Northwoods, this road invokes the feeling of pure wilderness living. A sense of big and vast and untamed. I can trace these feelings far back into my childhood. Rising in memory as a warm, sweet dream spoken into being by my mother’s voice, as she read me Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. From Wilder’s true life story, I learned that black panthers used to roam Wisconsin and eight feet of snow on the ground was a regular winter. From Wilder’s memoir, my own yearning to experience the velvety darkness of the deep woods was born.

Highway 83 gave me all these feels and more, drawing my childhood daydream into reality. As we drove along, I gazed out the window half in this world, half in the Other. Victor was at the wheel, basking deeply in his own private reverie.

Between vision and reality there exists a place that can only be felt. And if we feel it deeply enough, it draws the vision further into physical expression. The light of our mind, condenses powerfully into electricity, then atomic, now molecular density. Until the dream’s ephemerality begins to abide by the terrestrial laws of gravity. It is at this point we can sense with our own vital bodies, its manifested presence in the living elemental tapestry of the external world.

Our silent meandering along with road, forest, mountain, and vision, broke to the body of an elk crossing the highway. And another and another and another. In steady succession. A procession. A wild parade. They crossed in no hurry or concern for our perpendicular trajectory. Their steady pace all their own. We had slowed to a crawl in the light of their presence. Our eyes only for their brown-honeyed forms with dark auburn capes of contrasting fur ensconcing their necks. The regal mothers, making their way to what wild pastures I could only imagine.

We made our way respectfully through an opening in the crowd. If it is possible to offer homage through vehicular motion, we did, bowing the whole way through. At the very last moment, both our heads turned of their own knowing accord. In resplendence, standing taller than any fleeting pride can inspire, was the bull with the lofty crown presiding over the crossing. I think we both gasped. Nobility, to be sure, is not restricted to just one species. True kings do still exist. And it is something to witness. Something to know. Something to celebrate and sound loud horns about. Something to beat the drum for. Something to tuck into the heart and call upon to seed another dream. Another alchemical crossing of mind to matter.         

Victor and I each have frame drums, a simple circle of wood - steam bent, covered in elk hide that is fastened tight with sinew. When the drums are awake, taut and wanting to play, they radiate the most ethereal, all-encompassing tones. The reverberation of their humming is like singing bowls caressed on the rim. These tones entrain our brain waves, drawing us into alpha, then theta. Across the border of this physical space-time dimension, into what Dr. Joe Dispenza calls time-space: “the nonphysical quantum world - an inverse reality based on unknowns, endless possibilities, energy, and the multidimensional multiverse where we also live (which consists of infinite time).”¹ We find the cusp of the quantum field by drawing inward and outward, diffusing into the waking state of conscious creation beyond the defined physical laws of our three dimensional space-time. Once our brain is entraining to the frequencies of theta, we have access to the limitless space where the perennial wisdom of the ages - past, present, and future - abides: the thoughts, ideas, understandings and dreams held in perpetuity as our rightful inheritance. Everyone has access to this, and everyone has their own way to tap in. I like drumming. I like listening to the wind, the waters, the frogs, the cicadas. I also like to simply close my eyes and stop thinking. Its not how we get there, but what we experience when we do. More and more people are now helping to build the map, as Dispenza is doing, as Stephen Harrod Buhner endeavored to do throughout his life. To create an accurate picture of what it looks like to access the metaphysical background of the world.

A certain feeling of connection and relationship comes over me when I think about the elk whose body became my drum. Whose now-seasoned hide carries me over the threshold of what-is, to what-has-the-potential-to-become. It is more than just a skin of an animal. It is the sun, the living soils, the grasses, the fires, the rains, the mountains, the stars, the winds - all the elements as old as time itself. It is the powerful locking together of the antlers between elk kings. It is the sweet milk of the mother-elk-queens and the soft bed-down sleep of their tiny, hoofed children.  Lulled to sleep by the crickets. Wrapped in the blissful well-being, radiating from the heart of the Earth herself.

When I think about the stamina and power of the elk, I draw both from the living visions I have from life in the wild, and the physical experience of holding that drum, slightly heavy in my hands.  I have learned to prop my elbow in the fleshy crook between my left hip and rib cage, so I can drum for longer than just a few minutes.  Perhaps even more Elk-ish than the mean muscle work, is the stamina I have long been cultivating.  The steadiness required to focus the mind freely beyond the discursive day-to-day. Tuning clearly to the frequency of the unreal - what is not yet in form - without doubt, worry, or concern. Then, I find, the seed-patterns held within the kingdoms of my heart, find passage upon the prevailing winds of belief, and take root in the common lands of the waking world I walk within.   

Our trusty steed named “Boss”; bed in the back, camp in tow

When we set up camp on the Umpqua river, it was the beginning of July, and our osprey momentum was already running at a swift clip. The days passed into weeks and more, and I grew accustomed to waking to the osprey’s long piercing chirp. During morning coffee we would see them overhead through the broadleaf evergreen canopy of the myrtlewoods. Diving for fish on what Victor deemed, “the best television channel ever.” We passed their huge, twiggy nest driving westward into Eugene - for groceries, sailing lessons with my uncle, and tacos from our favorite spot. Victor would arrive back from fishing with tales of the osprey taunting the juvenile bald eagle, or more of its snatching fish out of the water. When we went to pick blueberries at the farm across the river, two ospreys circled and chirped the whole time.

I felt a noticeable shift in my perspective after my first snorkel in the river. It wasn’t just the seeing of the small-mouth bass, as I first told you about in A Wild Mythos. Part of the change was the deeper connection with someone whose body I took into my own as nourishment. I eat fish, among many other kinds of fauna, flora, and fungi. Sharing an intimate moment where soul-essence was exchanged with someone whose physical elements are feeding me, brought up a number of thoughts. To be clear, this is not the first time I have come face to living face with what I choose to make my food. It was however, a revisiting of a contemplation. It brought to my mind a quote I had read years ago attributed to the Inuit - The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls. At first reading, I really clung to the word “peril,” which I surmise was the translator’s personal choice of an English equivalent to the native Inuit word. I took the statement to mean there was a danger in being alive. That the very basis of our reality was fraught - from the beginning. This fit with other frameworks I was dipping my toes into, or sinking in all the way up to my neck. These thoughts felt terrible, an indication that my inner compass was encouraging me to find another place on the map - but at the time I still believed that if it felt good it might be bad, and if it felt bad - well, lots of things that we do to be “good" humans felt bad, its just a part of the rub here. The old story that there is something inherently flawed or wrong with the human condition, and that we must strive to perfect ourselves in order to be worthy. And so I thought:

How is it that we live in a world where we all eat each other? What kind of reality is this? Why in the world would we have chosen something like this? Did we choose this?

I carried these thoughts around for twenty-four hours, and my heart contorted every time I focused on them. I wondered other unpleasant things, like how to do anything in this body without imposing myself in some way upon the wild. Without taking something, modifying something, hurting something. These were old thoughts. Thoughts I resolved years ago in the light of new and different direct experiences with nature. Sometimes though, old thoughts crop up if we tune back to the channel they’re on. When we know hard rock is on 98.7 FM, it would be futile to turn to that channel expecting a symphony. And yet, sometimes we try! And then get mad or depressed because we cannot find different thoughts on that frequency.

So I felt the soul exchange with the bass, received them on the level of a person, a deeper level of relating. Then I felt despair. Despair because my focus turned from awe and pure perception to discursively thinking “oh my god, there is something wrong with this scenario…something wrong with my need for other bodies for food” Never mind that the options left after all breathing life is eliminated are minerals. And light - but god, who masters that? And why would we be here in these bleeding bodies if only to try to do without them. Didn’t we come from the non-physical realm?

I have heard it said that there are actually only two emotional states - feeling good and feeling bad. In feeling good our inner compass is fixed at true north.  In feeling bad, our inner compass is guiding us to find another place on the map. Recently I have been reading Marshall Rosenberg’s NonViolent Communication², in which he points out that our feelings are only ever about what we are thinking. We may be observing something and making a value judgement about it - a preference. However once we step into the realm of making a moral judgement - this is good or bad - we are not having feelings about what we are observing, but rather what we think about what we are observing. How we are interpreting and assigning meaning. And connected to our observations, preferences, and feelings, are our needs. Our desires.

Desire and yearning are not the same thing. Desire is the pure energy of the heart. Yearning is that desire, blocked by a belief in its impossibility.  When the ancient texts speak about eliminating desire, they are not talking about the pure full-body somatic emanation of satisfaction and well-being. They are talking about releasing yearning. Many things can be lost in translation - especially if translators are not completely up to speed with the transmitted meaning. Then there are people like me, thinking at the ripe age of twenty that I need to completely give up everything that makes me human, and try to strive to not want anything.

That’s like telling a tree not to give shade.

When we want and know we can have it, there is no yearning.

It just is. Becoming.

Why can we have it? Because as Dispenza points out, we exist both in the multiverse and this physical space-time. At the same time. We are that which we desire.

It is an energy we are already connected to.

It radiates from us.

All we have to do is know that, and not get confused before it manifests.

Rosenberg blessedly highlights how important our needs are. He posits that understanding this about each other is a key to cultivating compassion. I find this useful for inner clarity as well.

With the small-mouth bass, I observed my inner state moving more towards tension and discomfort. I asked myself the Nonviolent Communication questions: what was I observing, feeling, thinking, and needing. I was observing the beauty and value of life. I felt terrible, because I was thinking that my living was inherently harmful to those I was observing. I was wanting to feel better. I wanted a different way of seeing that would help me understand these subjects from nature’s perspective. Deep down, I knew that if nature explained it to me, it would not only feel good, it would feel perfect and whole and right. Rosenberg points out that when we truly feel heard, and suss out what our needs are, there will always be an accompanying palpable release of tension. A sigh of relief.

Even without a detailed answer, simply moving my focus from the thought of the problem, to the idea of a solution, brought me a sweet release. I immediately felt better. A movement from yearning back to pure desire. In feeling better I knew the answers were coming. They always do when I relax.

That evening, I sat gazing at the river feeling satisfied, my thoughts easy and simple. I watched the willows on the opposite shore as they made silly faces and gesticulated in the coastal breeze blowing upriver. The thoughts about living and eating came back to me, their sting softened a bit, though I felt the tension come over me again. I relaxed my mind, and my body relaxed too. I stated clearly my good-feeling request for a different perspective. And then it flowed in:

You are looking at this from a very narrow viewpoint.

(I feel that.)

The human perspective can only see so much.

(Agreed.)

You have to expand outward to find a broader knowing.

(Yes, please help me do that.)

Your ideas are predicated on death being a problem.

(Ah. That one again.)

What about the fishes’ perspective?

What about the cows?

(A very good question.)

I did not become a fish or a cow. But I will tell you that suddenly tears streamed out of my eyes with relief and thankfulness. I felt a very deep love. A stream of connection between me and life. A life that loved me completely. A life that nourished me, that wanted me as I am. I did not have any specific thoughts of this is how a fish or cow feels about being eaten. I cannot say to you my relief is a truth everyone should know or abide by. I do not believe there is a right diet or way of eating that applies to everyone. I will say that after this release, many other examples came to my mind, and I asked rhetorical questions such as:

Is it wrong for the mountain lion to do as she does?

Is it wrong for the bear? For the shark in the sea?

And then I asked myself:

“Is it wrong for the osprey to eat the fish?” I felt a resonant, “of course not,” and at that exact moment, the osprey dove in front of my face and plucked a fish out of the water, carrying it away for its dinner. My inner compass fixed resolutely upon my true north. The knowing that it is okay to be a consumer of life. In fact, everyone here is. The osprey and fish are inextricably united. The same life force flows to and through both of them. And me and the mussels I plucked from the rocks at low tide. There is mystery and beauty in our relating. For possibly the first time in my life, I chose to relax into the mystery of it - rather than needing to dissect and “figure it out.” I do believe that love is the strongest force in the universe, that the basis is All Good, that we are all completely ok, and worthy and valuable just as we are - no “perfecting” or “purifying” needed or demanded. When I tune to that channel, everything feels good. And my inner compass goes haywire when I start to think there is a problem that needs to be fixed, that some people are wrong and others are right, and that death is the great and terrible end we all must face, as penance for a life lived in an impossible debt.

Sunset seen from May Creek Campground in Wisdom, Montana. Not pictured are the twenty or so nighthawks flying around like dragons.

Three years ago, Victor and I had thanksgiving with his niece and her husband in Salmon, Idaho. We had elk instead of turkey. This was an elk they had harvested themselves a few weeks prior. Before the hunt, they sent their intentions to Elk. Their pure desire, their need. Elk agreed, and a queen offered her body, in the closest possible location in relation to their vehicle, broad side of her body presented for the cleanest possible kill. They used everything. A life fully honored.

Many people hunt elk, as they do other animals. And many people are not successful. Cocreative ways of thinking and relating acknowledge agency on all points of consciousness. Nature is responsive. Not just to my personal thoughts, but my thoughts about nature itself. If I believe she is red, tooth and nail - this is what I will read, hear, speak, see, find. If I believe in struggle, that is what I will encounter. I have tuned to those channels in the past, but now I am choosing to believe there is more to the mystery. That things can be softer, kinder, easier. That if I need the elk, and she agrees, she will be there for me. That if we need the rain, it will come. That nature is taking form according to the channel I am tuning to. I have had nature scare the living daylights out of me, and I have had nature offer me the deepest soothing I could ask for. In either case, it was my prior focus that elicited the manifestation. Remembering this, I want to tune to love and connection, and certainly the most heart-felt appreciation I can draw forth. The chords of inherent reciprocity and all is truly well are the ones I am reaching for, the ones I am learning by heart.

The next time I was in the river with my snorkel, I thanked the bass - out loud, through the plastic tube in my mouth. I almost cried underwater. Not in sadness, just appreciation. Thank you for feeding me and my family. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I have heard before that words are never enough, but that is only if they are disconnected from the heart. We all know when the words we speak are true.  We can feel it. Our inner compass tells us so.  

The Sawtooth Range seen from Idaho’s Highway 21

Last Thursday left the river. We drove over the Cascades into the the vast deserts of Eastern Oregon. Into the kind of quiet where your own electrical system becomes one of the loudest sounds heard. That and the coyotes, and the wind when it picks up and rustles the dry grass. Endeavoring to look ever forward, I left the osprey at the river. Trading sight of their signature dark underwing spots, for the red-rust brown hawks with big white bellies atop the telephone poles every few hundred feet. The desert may look dry, but there is good eating to be had if you are a red-tail. An abundance of big fat hawks means an abundance of rodents and rabbits, and that means the cycle of life is rich and providing. The mystery is in full flower.

That night we parked out on BLM land. Just us, the monochromatic dusk turning to a blanket of stars and the waxing moon. I dreamt vividly - in particular about roses, playing my guitar, and a man named Osprey who was looking for an important piece of information. I had the information and was happy to offer it. In his gratitude, he gave me a crisp hundred dollar bill. At first I did not want to accept it, it felt like too much given for something that was so easy. As the sequence faded into another, my cognitive awareness thought how wonderful it was that someone found value in what was natural to me.

The next day, on our way to the Pine Flats Hot Springs we stopped for a picnic lunch. As we turned into the Wild Rose Park, I remembered there were roses in my dream. That felt nice. As we sat eating, Victor pointed out an osprey circling above us. I then remembered the man named Osprey in my dream. That felt nice too.

I took my time packing up to leave the park. I walked slowly to the bathroom, saying hello out loud to the large silver maples, telling them how lovely they were, thanking them for being there. I meandered to the catalpa tree with its big leaves and hanging seeds, admiring its branching pattern - finding it similar to the myrtlewoods’. Then I walked to the car and slid into the driver’s seat. Sometime later, down the road absorbed in thought, I happened to look at the google map details of our intended journey.  The time was 2:22 pm, we had 1 hour and 11 minutes left of the drive, and we would arrive at the hot springs at 3:33 pm. I excitedly pointed this out to Victor. Then I thought about it, feeling the joy of fun synchrony. Fun because a few years ago I told the universe I wanted triple numbers to be the sign that I was in personal alignment. Especially synchronous as I had taken all those moments to regard nature at the park. When I mulled over the thoughts again for the pleasure of it - and an osprey flew alongside the passenger window, aloft in the winds blowing over the river bed below.   

As more of the sensorial world reaches my conscious awareness, phenomena like this become hard to ignore. And why would I want to look past any speck of proof that there is an intimate relationship between me and Nature? I want to feel whole. I want to feel connected. I want to know that the world is a web of relationship that I am a part of. I want to see how my tugging at this string or that one, shifts the slant of the entire wisdom mandala. I want to witness and feel my importance in all of this. Not more important. Not exclusively special. Important just like that blade of grass who feeds the bison. Important like the dragonfly who landed on my arm. Special like the sunrise, the falling rain, the house fly. A part of the utterly pervasive, precious importance of all life. I want to know that when I sincerely thank the fish people for their precious offering, they receive that in kind. I want to know my life is adding to the beauty, the kindness, the compassion, and wisdom of the world. I want to know that what I have to share is valuable. I want to know my wealth is ever multiplying, the riches and treasures of the world lying at my feet, waiting to be sensed. Drawn forth from the limitless. Their location clear upon the map. 

And when I do know these things - my inner compass points true north.   

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A Personal Note + New Paid Subscriber Benefits

Treasured Friends,

I want to take a moment to thank you. In sharing True Nature, I am sharing my deepest thoughts and most heart-felt contemplations. The ones that have moved through me, transforming the way I see myself and the world. To receive such profound appreciation from so many of you personally has been a shining affirmation. Every message, email, and comment has appeared like a magical crocus, popping out of the soil suddenly to say hello. I cherish your feedback.

I have to mention that after I spent the morning in the forest writing most of the elk section, we stopped in Bozeman, Montana for lunch at the restaurant Revelry. I had one of the best burgers, to date, in this country. (I am keeping tabs, and Fred’s in Burlington, WI still wins - likely on account of their daily fresh ground meat and fresh baked buns.) After lunch we took the long way back to our car. Victor pointed out there was more shade on the opposite side of the street, and so we crossed over. The art gallery on the corner looked very inviting, so we ventured in. We both turned slightly to the right and walked up to a very large painting set on the floor with an entire herd of bull elk depicted wandering about. The painting was entitled Where the Elk Go When They Go Away.

See you next Thursday! The upcoming issue will be of a slightly different ilk (or elk as it may be)

With All My Love

Emma

1. Dispenza, J. Becoming Supernatural. Kindle ed. Hay House Inc., 2017.

2. Rosenberg PhD, M. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Kindle ed. PuddleDancer Press, 2015.