BY ROWAN KILDUFF
“Just like other beings, artists need earth to stand on, water to drink, and air to breathe in… global survival is the primary issue for artists just as it is for all other human beings.”
— Kazuaki Tanahashi
“People protect what they love”
— Jacques-Yves Cousteau
KOWAL: Do you ever feel like you’re a hopeless idealist?
SNYDER: No. Never. (Laughs.) I’ve always considered myself very practical.
— Gary Snyder interview, The Real Work
‘’WIND-TALK / FIRst nations’’ is out of my notebook. It’s really an illustration or accompaniment to the song / poem ‘’Give me wind-talk’’, (from Peace Songs) which has the basic point that we search and search the answer — for peace, for what it’s all about, etc. — but ‘every life is the answer.’ There is a bit of Buddhism in this in the idea of interconnection and interdependence; it has something from the First Nations / Native American new-old ways of listening to the wind, to the Planet’s voice, thinking of Earth Democracy, with the trees, the rocks, & the rivers all part of it. ‘’FIRst Nations’’ is from something I wrote about the old-growth clear-cuts in T’l’oqwxwat.
Future’s calling strong.
New songs will come,
and the machinery will one day
stop.
The colored arc is the sky, the sky shelter (interdependence again!) and is most definitely influenced by Japanese Brushmaster, Kazuaki Tanahashi’s colorful enso & one-stroke painting (of which I dreamt about, I was making it in blue, Kaz said I will maybe start to make my own circles); pencil is temporary, earthy for me — so the fir trees are pencilled. There are some lines leading out, through the arc, off the page — best make up your own minds about that. Also these lines appear in pencil:
Give me Wind-talk,
the love is sky and sunrise.
Give me Wind-talk
when I am searching the answer.
Give me Wind-talk,
all life is celebrating!
Give me Wind-talk,
Free or Not Free is mind.
Give me Wind-talk
because every life is the answer.
Give me Wind-talk,
now the clouded world is gone.
Where to go from here?
We and our environment create each other. Life is in the relationships, in the meeting points. It takes place on every level, with no higher or lower. There can be no special value assigned to our lives. In this there is great freedom. With all this in mind, collective consciousness and inter-species or multi-dimensional communication and interaction does not have to sound so far out. In fact, continuing to turn this planet's resources into money, and supporting global piracy and the complete destruction of our actual brothers and sisters (all species) shows a much bigger abstraction, far from the real world. We might just be the youngest members of the family here on Planet Earth, but we might just learn to listen to what the wind is telling us. We can talk to each other, seeing through the eyes of the other, without seeing any other. Try to stay in the center, life says; the center-point from which all bursts outward; the empty center.
(I'm thinking here of the Heart Sutra.)
Rowan Kilduff is a mountain-runner and peace activist. His work supports A World Without Armies, Greenpeace and The Rewilding Institute. Now lives in the Czech Republic with his wife and son, and many good friends around. Find his writing here: Rewilding Earth (from The Rewilding Institute, US. Previously Wild Earth). Wingspan (from the Raptor Research Foundation, US). Dragonfly Library dragonfly.eco, Mi’kma’ki, CA. Irish Poetry Reading Archive, Special Collections, Leabharlann UCD, IRL.