Metal Eyes
I went to the woods this morning, the trails slippery from yesterday’s toad strangling deluges. The trees and trail were quiet, punctuated by bird song and the occasional ruffle of a deer. My brain was anything but. It ran earworm song loops, to-do lists and my interminable default of imaginary irritable conversations with a variety of folks.
So boring. So not present.
I kept trying to find my way back to the quietude I wrote of last post. The quiet spaciousness of the River of Abundance and Time. At that point, fall had just arrived and I had, for all I could tell, had simultaneously landed in a retreat microcosm of the Metal element. Everything mattered- both the filling of the water canteen and the momentary pause to catch the last drips from the spigot. The weeds and the corn, the meals crafted with care and the compost. When I got home, I thought my quietude was simply 2+ weeks out of normal orbit and incessant technological buzz. But it wasn’t.
My brain loops had been primed by a white knuckle drive home from Charleston, torrential downpours, hydroplaning, and loud music to stay awake. I had fallen asleep after an hour of reading but was wide awake and buzzing at 4am. Here’s some food for thought those of us wide awake in the 3 to 5am arena. (You know who you are.)
If we go back to the concept of the Chinese clock where each of the twelve organs has a two hour window, 4am to 6am (DST adjustment) is when the Lung comes online. Traditionally, the Lung as minister and chancellor faces towards the Heart, except for 4am when it turns to address the other department heads with the orders of the day. While it is entirely possible to sleep even with a level of sympathetic nervous system arousal, it’s not great sleep. Moreover, when our little animal self aka the Lung comes online at 4am, it will take this level of arousal seriously and impel us into wakefulness. Because the ‘bear’ of sympathetic arousal has not taken a break and is coming for us.
So the mystery of why I was running endless annoying brain loops wasn’t really about my return to daily stress monkey world. It was a highly focused drive home that merely started up again the moment I woke up. And then carried out into the quiet woods.
And it was about seeing.
Because we have many ways to use those little orbs of brain tissue that evolution pushed out our skull. Eyeballs are just an external interface for our internal brain. A focused gaze stimulates the production of epinephrine and norepinephrine, bringing sharper vision, mental focus and sympathetic arousal.
Like my driving home in the rain and the dark…
A soft wide-angle gaze (panoramic vision) such as practiced by Tom Brown and the tracker tribe signals the nervous system into more restful parasympathetic state.
So once I stopped drilling holes in the trail with my eyes and went panoramic, monkey brain shut up. I could drop into the slipstream and join the ten thousand beings in their dance. Panoramic vision isn’t just a way to calm the nervous system- it is a gateway into the metal element within all of us. A simple way to find resonance with the season and access that medicine.
Andrew Huberman has recently taken some flack re his personal life. Note that here in the West, we don’t respect teachers. We eat them.
Back in the treatment room, weeks have themes. The less great weeks are when I set it, something new I’m excited about and feel compelled to bring in. The better weeks are when it emerges organically. This week’s theme was wild animals and trauma. As in the fact they don’t get trauma because they have an innate way of dispersing high levels of sympathetic arousal. A period after the escape from the predator’s jaws when the animals trembles and shakes, small micromovements releasing stored energy. Humans and domesticated animals have forgotten this. As humans, we tell the bystanders that we’re fine and then proceed to cart around the stored energy/experience for sometimes decades.1
Autumn is a lovely time to reacquaint ourselves with the wild animal within us. The pagan exile that wanders the woods outside the village palisades…You have it too. It’s part of the original blueprint. In Chinese medicine, this aspect of our spirit is called the po. The po loves this earthly existence- the feel of wind on our skin and mud between our toes. The smell of leaves in autumn as we crunch down the trail.
It embraces life, all aspects including its inevitable ending, within its talons.
So take a moment to soften your gaze. To see both the light streaming in the window and the dust motes dancing within. Behold the sidewalk and the sky, the burger wrapper and the buzzard circling high above.
And know they all matter.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Peter Levine writes eloquently of this in In an Unspoken Voice