Intimations of Ancient Being

I was a spaced-out child, rather stupid and day-dreamy. I would go about in my personal dream-haze, drawn to things of the imagination, feeling-images, strange states of mind. I'm sure that my memories are selective, but what I remember now, half a century on, are these perceptions alternate to reality, and mostly I remember those relating to Nature. Is it that I was conditioned to respond to Nature in terms of Nature-romanticism? There was enough of that around, in children's literature, children's television programming. The first movie I ever saw was Bambi! But I probably had a bent toward this, and not much to cars and jets and sports and such, despite that being normal. Nature was where the wonder was. We were surrounded by woods, in our small apartment development, and there was also a meadow and stream. People, by contrast, were alien, incomprehensible-- what could you do with them? The meaning of life came from dream-visions, that were elicited by television, or books, or just day-dreaming, and when the season was favorable, by being outside with trees and grass and sky. And it all blended together.

When adolescence changed my life, the "strangeness factor" came to the fore. I was drawn to almost everything that was uncanny, mysterious, odd-- in short, Romantic. I knew I was a weird kid; I even took pride in it. But there was so much that was strange about, if you looked for it-- especially in certain stretches of the public library shelves-- and it all blended not very well, and so there was tremendous teenaged cognitive dissonance confusion, to add to all the other traumas, one of which was from being a teenager in the Sixties, when too much was happening at once, too much to make sense of it all.

But Nature still loomed large in my inner life, and I still spent a lot of time wandering in the woods, or day-dreaming on my bed, remembering places, some of which I had never been. One of the great appeals of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was all the description of wild places-- in my romantic imagination transformed into otherworldly panoramas, with the sort of mystical states of mind illuminating them as when I was a child. I wanted to live in Middle Earth-- at least, the nicer parts of this Other World. This was where the meaning of life was, in these dream-visions. If only I could stay in this blessed state forever.

One thing about Middle Earth was that it was so ancient. Ancientness, or timelessness, was an important part of the meaning. I can remember on a family vacation trip when we drove through a very rugged upland valley, and the trees were so real, and the rough rock-faces were so stark, and I got this powerful feeling of timeless gnarly ancientness, primeval majesty. And now I recall other times, while vacation-traveling, having similar experiences, or in bed-top reveries. There was a powerful mystical presence in wild Nature that you could experience sometimes, more real and meaningful than anything else. Nobody else seemed to know anything about it. All they cared about was human things like cars and houses and shopping, and entertaining yourself, having a good time.

But I wonder if there was a time when everybody had these intimations of ancient Being from Nature, a strong sense of the unique essence of particular nature-spots, of the ancient everness of them. And because few of us do, anymore-- we're so adapted to incessant flux and distraction and innovation and novelty and upgrading and stuff to cram our lives with-- we blithely, heedlessly destroy the Earth so we can have the good life for ourselves-- cars and houses and shopping and all the goods and experiences that make life worthwhile, that you've got to have-- what life is all about. So they say.

But give me the mystical-visionary experience of Ancient Being and Natural Mind in unspoiled Nature, not the ersatz monstrosity that passes for real life in the human world.