Totem Country

Up here in the white country

any tree for a totem
any rock for an altar
discover!

this ground is suicidal

annihilates everything
but the most essential....

Kenneth White (excerpt from 'The Bird Path')



Why can't I be alive and dead at the same time? Alain Bosquet, No More Me


Not 'death', 're-organization'.  Dagmara, Guide to the Primeval Forest of Bialowieza.

There's no use being just 'alive' - such one-sidedness can surely bode no good for a universe and a self that is circular. No, simply being alive will not cut it. Instead, we have to embrace death too. Dead + Alive = Fullness of Being.

There's no better place to understand this equation and the nature of reciprocity than being in a wood or a forest. Sadly, for Scotland, most of our woods and forests have been felled, and replaced with monocultural plantations whose prime motive is not life and death but money and furniture. Thesev plantations are largely (if not entirely) devoid of the lively dynamics of an organic and natural woodland. Yet, there are patches here and there, patches of real woodland where 'death' is just as prevalent as 'life'. But then, when meditating upon the wood, you quickly realize that there is no death since there is no closed system. Everything is open to everything else - it's all process not product - and so death is just an opportunity for life to enter. Death is evidently not the end then, but a beginning of something else. This you will see, if you spend enough time in a forest or woodland environment. In the spirit of Whitman (all goes onwards and outwards) there is only the flow. The totem is part of this flow. It represents amongst other things this 'death', a rooted trunk, dead itself, yet harbouring all manner of life in, around,  and upon it. The totem, as a symbol of this reciprocity of life-death-being is second to none. Wherever you find such trunks you can rest assured that, as Thoreau implied, you are entering into the universe as a whole and and not as some tiny broken fragment. 

It's what makes these braes above Kilpatrick - this totem country - so special.

Totem Country, just above Kilpatrick....

It is not a question of having to die, but of being allowed to die.

Karlfried Durckheim, Absolute Living