As a child, I adored living things. I wanted to know them. Every way. It was agonizing to discover that there was a conflict here; one so terrible that I would miss nearly all of its signals for most of my life. It was this:

What I »thought of as ‘being friends with living things’ usually got either me horribly injured, them killed, or both.

My ‘heart’ ached for their companionship, but »my ideas about companionship were founded in human and cultural fictions. And when I tried to »enact these ideas, it often »destroyed the creature or situation I was attempting to bond with and adore. Ironic, no?

The problem is that our species is more like me than I was. More, each day, in fact. And nothing will survive that. Humans have the absolutely wrong idea about what ‘Nature’ is, ‘is for’ and does. And »every enaction of these ideals damages us first, and often »obliterates what we are pretending to revere or ‘preserve’. We do not ‘relate’ with nature, and our fascination is falsely based because »we left the context of communion on purpose. The purpose?

Knowledge. A representational ‘replacement-artifact’ for True Relation.

Overstanding.

To ‘love’ the beings I adored was not to capture and subject them to our own isolation from everything true, real and alive. It was not to ‘bring them into my world’, as it often seemed. It was not to ‘bring them into the human realm’, and dress it up with pieces of leaves or plants, so that cages seemed to be little paradises to human eyes. To love them, it turned out, was not to ‘bring them into the fictional world of human ideas, worlds, and poses’, but rather… something it took me nearly a lifetime to discover and which was impossible to properly frame, let alone imagine…

… to return to the world of communion, with and for them rather than my ideas, fears and fantasies. To become, rather than possess them. This involved a radical transformation in the polarity of my perspective. I was the one bereft of actual understanding or insight. And they, seeming simple, were the living lightning of its sources. I was not ‘above them, lifted from primitivity by language and knowledge’ — quite the opposite. I was an idiot, who, in a fantasy, imagined himself a god.

I had to learn to go to them. Naked. Innocent. Without language or culture. To love them was to become ensconced in the womb of their true natures and … relationships. It is locked against those who are encumbered with deadly fictions. To actually love them was to return to unity and communion. Not once. Or with a method. The opposite. Forever. In absolute exstasis of all possible methods.

Understanding.

Rather than see or think, I had to be with and for and as them. As the salmon ‘becomes miracle’ in retracing the steps to the waters of its living source, so, too, our souls must ‘retrace the steps by which we descended’, and find again … their first true waters. In relation — not thinking.