Naturalists are the Truest of Believers
Reconnecting with nature through sensory experiences
The accused unbeliever is the true believer.
“Back from a hiatus we’ll say?” Saffron welcomes Licorice.
This next ritual exercise in fragrantness is prone to act upon our senses or spirits with unpredictable effects: breathing slows or quickens, or eyes water, or skin tightens, or emotions well up, a feeling of disassociation may take hold, or percipients may break down and cry, or fall into a laughing fit, perhaps landing peacefully prostrate or assuming a prone position. Our interest here is to direct these poorly understood influences.
“I’m pleased to be back,” Licorice sort of smiles.
What a discomforting position I reluctantly take when I admonish those susceptible to concocted narratives borne of esoteric names and numbers, stones and stars and letters, when I throw cold water on sparks of otherworldly phenomena that vivify our mundane lives.
(I hope Licorice is not put off by this line of criticism.)
“Someone marvels at a fluke one-in-one-thousand perfect hit, and you feel obligated to point out the preceding nine hundred ninety-nine misses,” Saffron says to me.
Better to shush and enjoy the stimulation? to appreciate unusual lights in the sky for which there are no tidy explanations? tears running from the eyes of a clay-sculpted Virgencita for which there are no outwardly-obvious interpretations?
“No coincidence no story, goes the Chinese saying.”
I’m distressed to witness plants diminished so: a blooming buttercup, according to a polygraph test we’re told, becomes panicky when a person plots to do it harm. Redwood trees supposedly scream in pain when violently felled, reacting in the manner of stricken people. Ferns growing indoors are depicted to be effectively soothed when pampered by nightly lullabies, just as children are comforted.
“Water, when spoken to harshly, becomes unhealthy by the corruption of its molecular structure.”
We carry on like easy marks, inclined toward half-baked rackets and ruses to relieve the numbing abuses of Life-reducing secularism, which reduces along with the Earth-abusing materialism. We’re disposed to quackish spiritual stimulation conjured to satisfy our yearning, to help us contend with the hurting, which is concerning … our estrangement from the sensuous World of concrete Nature. Whatever Earthly tethers have privileged humanity in the past are today practically clipped.
“Hey, who flipped off the switch to the light within?” Licorice appears not to be impressed.
Believe … attune to find meaning, not by your heightened solipsistic imagination but by your sharpened sensitivity to transmissions of Life, especially (this is where we make our pitch) those emissive messages most ancient and prevailing, much as they can sometimes be difficult to construe.
“And furry northern-woods monsters with big feet?”
Believe … in fragrant agents of aliveness, scented signatures and communiqués of the living, yet not readily submitting, nonetheless within the reach of your interpretation, servants and emissaries of metabolism not easily yielding yet primed for revealing, to those making the undertaking, those who venture to endeavor.
“And unidentified screams in the night?”
Believe … in the unsuppressed integrity of headspace volatiles to be found hovering around rosemary shrubs (rub some needles between your palms, cup your hands over your mouth and nares and inhale deeply — your bodily tissues and operations are now informed by splendorous herbal Life).
“And the miraculous manifests as parting seas or visits from biblical heroes?”
Believe … the testimony of Nature isn’t delivered in the form of prose or poetry, nor does painting properly channel the information, nor does song convey the warnings and cries of Creation. The olfactory perception of compressed stories isn’t contracted out, rather the chemical wellspring is experienced first hand, as perfume. The storytelling compounds are accessed on their own terms, processed free of surrogation or mediation.
“Still, able guidance is here available,” Licorice pokes fun.
Believe … naturalists have known all along, investigating Spanish moss and gypsy moths, slugs and bugs and flower buds … naturalists have known the whole time, studying hyacinths and water mints, fruits and roots of dandelions … taking copious notes, then filling libraries with intricate accounts of inconceivable variety, of elaborate forms and processes and patterns, of curious exceptions and unanswered questions, of deep mystery (born of inquiry not the denial of history, of intrinsicality not paranormality).
“So naturalists are the truest of believers.”
Believe… in the urgency of this primeval organic messaging system throughout Life (in any case, we expect resistance from the churches of super-Nature and physicalism and strange-to-Nature and humanism and crimes-against-Nature and cabalism, and from the reigning chemical orthodoxy with its munitions of vapory knavery, all of whom are in positions to be threatened by plant perfumes for their real close affiliation and real fidelity to Creation).
“When they ask to see your gods, your book of prayers, show them lines drawn delicately with veins on the underside of a bird’s wing,” Saffron recites from her journal of clippings.
