Mother Tongue

I read once of a whale, a hybrid between a blue whale and a fin whale. It was dubbed the loneliest whale in the world because it swims the oceans, singing into the deep indigo wilds, and no other whale answers because no other whale has the vocal chords to produce the same song. It’s the only one of its kind.
​
Whenever I tell this story it seems that whale’s song strikes some tuning fork inside a human heart, underneath our masks and myths, to the place where we relate, we relate. We call it the loneliest whale in the world because on some level it is how so many people feel. Endlessly calling, never met.

I think that many (most) people have a sense of being so different they can never be understood, not truly. The feeling of separation is inevitable; if I have a body, there is a me and a you, and there is space in between, the ocean between us. We are consciousness wrapped in flesh, swimming together, singing our songs with brash courage, with shy hope, with tender affection, with cataclysmic rage. Singing all our colours in the yearning hope that another will sing back, the one who shouts in recognition… It’s you! I’ve been looking for you! Here you are! Daring to hope that there is one who mirrors our sweet music. But of course no-one can, not really, we can only sing our own liquid notes, our own perfect melody, unique and terrible. So at a deep level we relate to the loneliness of that whale, the only one of its kind. Perhaps that whale isn’t lonely at all, but to us, this seems impossible, so perfectly do our own hearts echo its music.

And I wonder.

What if this miracle of a planet, our home, is another huge creature, swimming through space? What if we are cells in the vast body of a being so huge we cannot begin to comprehend the interconnection of life that we take for granted, life that supports us: oxygen to nutrients to muscle to water to life to death to decomposition to regeneration. What if we are fleas on the back of an elephant, making meaning of the hairs we see, calling them trees and thinking we are kings of all creation because we can hop through the forest like rampant gods.

And I wonder.

Does Gaia, an entire living creature hanging in space, call out into the abyss like that whale, never to hear anything back from the void? It is such an anathema, to our human psyches, for there to be only one of any life form. We live and sing and dance and kill and take and share and create and war and destroy and build and construct citadels of beauty and devastation on the back of this incredible creature, but how often do we see that she is truly alive? Does she sing, this living blue spaceship, hurtling through time and the endless breath of velvet dark? Does she sing for a mate who will never come?

And I wonder.

Does she also sing to us constantly, crooning her eternal love song, those endless infinite murmurings that show a newborn how to suckle, a spider to spin, a bird to weave a nest, a nestling to launch for the first time from a high branch, opening cunning hollow-boned wings designed to trap the breeze and call it tamed? All living things bar us listen. All living things bar us know their place in Her.

Humans have this amazing cerebral cortex. We think therefore we are. We have the ability to make meaning of the world, to see not Capital R Reality, but the infinite realities spawned by our own complex minds; casting our shadows on the world and calling them true, missing the honest brilliance of the light that generates them. All we see is our own shape, reflected, distorted; not the canvas upon which it falls. We have the ability to hear our own voices, and we have fallen so in love with their sound that we stopped listening to the warp and weft of deepsong through which they twine, like pretty spring flowers pushing through trellis, to bloom for a minute, then wither in the summer heat.

And through this meaning-making facility we have created marvels. Our minds are made real in the world; we are indeed tiny gods, giving our most wicked and marvellous thoughts structure and shape, making monsters of men and men of monsters. Soaring spires and crenellations, temples of worship that push to the heavens like antennae straining for some refrain of that song, those songs; the one we know in our hearts from Her, and the one we know in our spaces from the star-dazzling Divine through which She swims.

​We suffer terribly in these prisons of flesh, and then, wonder of wonders, we shape that suffering into art, casting our wounds across creation as ephemeral butterflies of unutterable beauty, each of us shining for a moment of  brilliance, a shout in the dark, made more perfect by nature of its transience. Here. Gone.

---

​Ah. I have brought poignant sadness to the party, haven’t I. Speaking of the loneliness of living things, the separation of being cast into this physical space from wherever it is we come, the yearning once we're here for connection, oneness, completeness. 

And yet for me, there is a comfort in this naming. This is the Capital R Reality, the bedrock of me. If I lean into this, accept that yes I feel separate, yes I have lost the wisdom of my ancestors, who had to listen to the lovesong of Gaia or they would die, yes I project my own shape across my world. In this acceptance I acquiesce to this layer of separation, this veil of delusion, and now I can drop into the gritty roots of myself, into the heart- knowing still drumming from Her through my bare soles into my bear soul. I can start to relearn to read the book of nature, start to remember the skills of those who lived and died wild, and whose voices sing from my bones that all is not lost, because nothing ever is.

For me this is such a simple thing, and is all the things.

Listen.

Go outside and listen with every cell and atom. Lie on the good earth, dig my fingers into soil, breathe in the rich delicious scents of woodrot and loam. 

Listen. Spend an hour watching a beetle navigate a forest of giants, each blade of grass an obstacle. Lie on my back and track veiled faces in clouds; now a dragon, now a cup, now a child, now a kiss. 

Listen. Actively hunt the skills of my ancestors; re-learn to live on the landscape, solving the eternal problems facing all mammals… shelter water fire and food. 

Listen to the birds as they teach me who and what is on the landscape. 

Listen to the wind as it shows me that rain is coming. 

Listen to the rocks as they bid me find a cave to sleep in. 

Listen to the trees and shrubs as they show me this stalk hides fire in its tiny spaces. These leaves give me energy. This root heals my wounds. 

Listen to the deepest songs that hide and nestle and creep and crawl everywhere I could possibly turn my ears.

This journey, in my meaning making facility, I call Rewilding, but it is more honestly Remembering. It is never too late to turn our ears in. It is never to late to stop talking and finally fall into the Silence that is the death of all that I think safe, and learn that it is awake and aware and teeming with life.

And so I take myself out in ceremonies of Listening. Vision Quest is one name, a beautiful journey of awakening, sitting for four days and nights with no distractions, alone in my terrible loneliness, to learn that I can never be alone. Survival Quest is another: roaming the landscape with only a knife and a daypack of some calories and basic gear, hunting and gathering with no sleeping mats or sleeping bags, making shelter and fire for warmth, finding water by following the birds, learning by doing, where my choices have consequences and I can learn more from a night of true cold than I could learn in a decade of reading books about it.

Listen.
Remember.
​Learn.

---

I am no master or expert; not even close. To be an expert I would be able to live completely wild, gather all my calories from the landscape, be self reliant without any technology. Read the book of nature as it flows across my senses, absorb the intimate tales of wind and weather and season without thought, without translation. Track and trap and weave and tan and shape in the flowing dance of an untamed creature, listening to what is true and understanding the pure poetry of wisdom encoded in the high flight of a hawk, the silver flash of a fish, moonlit waves of cloud marching single file from south to north, promising rain in three days; make shelter, take cover. Everything is fractal. Everything in nature is teaching us everything, if we know how to listen. 

Gaia sings in a song I can still only half hear, I do not know all the words, I’ve grown in a petrie dish of culture estranged from her deep roots, a culture of boxes and measurable outcomes and entitlement and food in packets and addiction to convenience and the reckless splurge of energy that comes when you don’t have to hunt for everything you need. I do not speak my Mother Tongue, and for this lack and loss I mourn, I mourn.

​But I am listening, and in these times of chaos and confusion I have turned away from the babbling stories of my culture. I have one bare foot firmly in the wild mud, and the more I stalk these ancient pawprints, the louder Her song grows, until I wake under moonlight with the urge to howl like the wolf I am, howl into the desert and forest, howl with my head thrown back and my throat to the night, howl and sing with my whole soul like the loneliest whale, like the living planet, like the abandoned child, like the grieving mother. Howl knowing this is part of what makes me human, and that when I strain my ears I am met, not with silence, but with the sweetest music of a chorus of howls across canyon and ridge and valley. And further away, the song grows and grows, because deep down, we do remember, and space is not separation if I can hear the song of another, just one other voice, no matter what language its tongue shapes the sounds. When I listen, I take them in as they take me in and now we are connected, now we are joined. Now we are one.

I do not need to hear the words to know the music. 

And I wonder. 

Maybe the loneliest whale isn’t looking for an answer. Maybe the loneliest whale is listening to all the songs, collecting and catching them, and is answering in the only way it can, singing to us all across thousands of kilometres, singing through deepest oceans, singing around the whole world… ‘I’m here, I hear you, I love you,’ over and over, like a beacon in the night. 

Singing in the Mother Tongue.

---

*Most pics in this piece are from a recent Survival Quest in NSW, on Dharawal country. I'd like to deeply thank the Dharawal caretakers and ancestors both on the land, and displaced; thank elders past present and emerging, and thank my teachers.
I acknowledge all indigenous custodians and owners of this country and grieve what has been lost.
We walk on stolen land. 

*If you're called to Vision Quest or Survival Quest, check out these programmes run by Lee, Gina and Hannah at Wild Heart 
https://www.wildheart.life/vision-quest-information.html
https://www.wildheart.life/vision-quest-protector.html
https://www.wildheart.life/thrive-2020-wandering-quest-8-day-survival-trip.html
Or get in touch for referrals to other earth schools and Quest facilitators in your area.
I'm also running bespoke weekend Survival Quests for 1-3 people, message me on gina@wildheart.life for details and availabilities.

As always, thank you for your support, for reading these postcards from a wandering heart. Thank you for listening to my wild song. Please comment and share if you're at all moved... adding your own notes so we can all listen and learn from each other's unique music.
​
Big love, Gina