12

FOLLOWING GOLDEN THREADS

 

Complexity theory is a general theory of complex dynamic systems. The Latin complexus comes from the Greek pleko meaning to plait or twine. Thus a complex system is literally one consisting of interwoven parts.

TIMOTHY LENTON

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

JOHN MUIR

“Tell them they have to wake up twice in the morning,” Nyae continues.
     This means that you should first wake up in the morning and get out of bed. Then awaken your heart: walk out of the bedrock of objects and materialism and into a spiritual world guided by the felt lines of relationships that hold everything together. Now the ropes, rather than the objects they connect, are primary. They are the most important and the most real.

BRADFORD KEENEY

When you find you do have a response—trust it. It has a meaning.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

If you do use your feeling sense as your primary perceptual touching of the world you will encounter, from time to time, touches on your feeling/sensing that are out of the ordinary. These touches will capture your attention as nothing else in the feeling field does. From some place deep inside you will come an urge to turn toward that touching, a desire to immerse yourself in it, and to begin to follow it wherever it leads. These unique touches are what the poet William Stafford called golden threads.

He found the concept in one of William Blake’s poems (though Blake called it a golden string) . . .

I give you the end of a golden string

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.¹

What Blake was describing is movement through the doors of perception (again, another Blake descriptive) into the metaphysical background of the world. And for him, as it is for so many of us, that deeper world is a sacred one.

William Stafford used that concept in the creation of his poetry. But it is not limited to that. It is at the core of music, and woodworking . . . art of any sort, including deep science. It is at the core of Goethe’s work and Masanobu Fukuoka’s and Albert Einstein’s. It is necessary to understanding the invisibles that occur in every aspect of the self-organized system we know as Earth.

To get an idea of how Einstein and others used this to find the truths they found, it is easier to start with less complex systems: writing and wood and music. For these are perfect metaphors for the deeper work that must occur when you begin to travel deep into the heart of the world to understand the creating that Earth does during its dreaming.

Golden Threads in Writing

The great Japanese poet Basho described the presence of golden threads long before William Blake; all people who journey deep into the world, irrespective of culture, time, or geography, know of them. Basho, also talking about poetry, put it like this . . .

Your poetry issues of its own accord when you

And the object become one—

when you have plunged deep enough into the object

to see something like a hidden glimmering there.²

Basho knew that the boundary between self and other, of necessity, must thin for true poetry to occur. When the boundary thins, as the Kalahari describe it, the phenomenon that is being touched with the feeling sense moves into the core of our being . . . and we into its.

We become the other—whether a friend, butterfly, redwood forest, giraffe, or seahorse—through our intensely felt union with it.

Basho was speaking of this movement when he wrote . . .

Go to the pine

if you want to learn about the pine,

or to the bamboo

if you want to learn about the bamboo.

And in doing so, you must leave

your subjective preoccupation with yourself.

Otherwise you impose yourself on the object

and do not learn.

For deeper reasons that any of us can ever know, of all the connections that run through the world, there are certain ones that touch us more strongly, that call us, that become golden threads that generate in us what James Hillman called notitia, the attentive noticing of the soul. And from that noticing, as Hillman describes it, comes “the capacity to form true notions of things.” The connections that touch us in this way are special. They are the ones meant for us for reasons only the Earth will ever know.

William Stafford was deeply focused on the hidden glimmering that Basho speaks of. He was a master of following such threads. Deep meaning touched him and as soon as he felt it, he turned toward it, focusing on it with the whole of his attention. He began to follow it then, working to capture its essence in language. And we, coming later, can feel that thread and experience its deeper meanings as if they were our own.

Like this . . .

If you don’t know what kind of person I am

and I don’t know what kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,

but if one wanders, the circus won’t find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—

should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.³

Stafford spent his life, attentive to his feeling sensing of the world around him, being open always to the touch of golden threads. He said that it was essential to understand that: When you find you do have a response—trust it. It has a meaning. When something captures your attention in this way, trust it. Follow it home to where it lives, deep inside the world.

To the alert person, a golden thread may emerge from any ordinary thing and open a doorway into the metaphysical background of the world. Because it is impossible to know when or where or from what a golden thread will emerge, the writer (as all people must) remains attentive to everything that is encountered, always paying close attention to how everything, even the tiniest little thing, feels. Light pours through a window in a particular way, a person moves their body slightly, you enter a summer field and suddenly experience it as a property of mind. Something inside those things brushes against you. Meaning of some sort, not yet understood, touches someplace deep. Ripples flow up from the depths of the unconscious and touch your conscious mind. A particular feeling envelops you and you stop and focus your whole attention on what is right in front of you. Notitia. The touch of a golden thread.

Writers follow the threads by writing down, as concretely as they can, what they are experiencing, what they are feeling, what they are seeing, hearing, sensing. Robert Bly describes this, brilliantly, as “following the tiny impulses through the meadow of language.”⁴ It must be done slowly. Carefully. Feeling your way. Tiny movement by tiny movement.

It is the feeling equivalent of catching the hint of an elusive scent. You lift your nose to the slight breeze, a delicate touching. Seeking. Ah, there. Your feet move of their own accord as you trail what you have sensed through the meadow in front of you. You twist and turn slightly, following where the scent leads, adjusting your movements to the rise and fall of the land through which you walk. Following the scent home. Finding the core that gives rise to it. Following tiny impulses through the meadow of language.

Such threads begin with the simplest of things: A tiny, odd feeling in a social interaction or elephants walking, holding each other’s tail. Anything can become a door into deeper worlds. Stafford comments that “the artist is not so much a person endowed with the luck of vivid, eventful days, as a person for whom any immediate encounter leads by little degrees to the implications always present for anyone anywhere.”⁵ Golden threads touch all of us, every day, but most often only artists and children take the time to follow them.

This is why so many people such as Einstein and Luther Burbank were so childlike, they retained the wonder and sense of the living-ness of the world that all of us had as children. As Einstein once put it, “The pursuit of beauty and truth is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

The initial touch of a golden thread is always attended by a specific kind of feeling. Experience will bring trust in that touch and the feeling that accompanies it, familiar recognition at its emergence. You feel the touch of the thing, it captures your attention, then, if you are a writer, you work to encapsulate it in language.

Working to describe it, however, causes a slight movement away from the experience itself. So a writer will write a descriptive line, perhaps several, then stop and compare what has been written to the feeling they are trying to describe.

They look at the lines, focus on them with the whole of their attention and then ask: How does it feel? In that moment, a certain emotional tone emerges from the lines themselves just as it does from anything that is sensed in this way.

Because the writer is in the zone, dreaming as they are writing, the lines are an expression of synaesthesia, filled with feeling. The writer feels into them, tasting, savoring the feel of the words. Then they step back inside the thread and feel it. Then they compare the feeling of the thread and that of the lines they have written. They are going for congruency, for identity between the two. At the experience of any difference, they engage in tiny micromolar adjustments of the lines they are crafting, trying to get them ever closer to the thread that has touched them. Great art occurs when the lines and the golden thread become identical in feeling. When you, as reader, later read those written lines you literally experience the golden thread as if it were your own. Leonard Bernstein was speaking of this when he said . . .

Any great work of art . . . revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.⁶

The work of bringing the two to identity may not be completed quickly, shaping and polishing may take hours, or months, or years for some pieces. But in the initial shaping, the line that has been written and the feeling of the golden thread approach a congruency. They get close enough for the innate sense of congruency each of us possesses to give a yes, even if a provisional one. Some sort of polishing almost always has to occur later. That is when the first draft slowly becomes the final draft, where the work to make the two things identical at the tiniest levels of which the writer is capable occurs. The time where all the implications in the word are teased out and developed so that the experience itself flowers in those who read it.

Once a writer has captured those lines well enough that they approach a congruency to the thread, something very interesting happens as they turn to the thread once more. The thread takes them someplace new.

Of its own accord, the attention of the self suddenly shifts, moves in some new, never-to-be-predicted, direction. The part of the self that is intimate with meanings flows along the line of meaning—the golden thread that has touched the self—heading toward its depths. The golden thread moves and the deep self moves with it. The feeling of the thread is the same but there’s more to it now, it has deepened in some way, become richer. More meanings inside the thread begin to reveal themselves. New thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, emerge—spontaneously—into awareness. And now the process begins of capturing them in language. Stafford comments: “If I let the process go on, things will occur to me that were not at all in my mind when I started. These things, odd or trivial as they may be, are somehow connected.”⁷ The lines that take up residence in the writer’s heart, as the writer William Gass might put it, “father or nurture other lines, sentences, further feelings and thoughts of significance.”⁸ And they do so automatically. The thread takes us to whatever things it is intertwined with, connected to. And they are always things that appear to be unrelated to the thread we are following.

The writer is feeling his way along the string that has emerged into his awareness. He is using that capacity for nonphysical touch to follow a particular meaning that has touched him and captured his attention, trusting it to lead him where it needs to go to be itself, to emerge complete and whole in language. “Any little impulse is accepted and enhanced,” Stafford remarks. Over time you learn to trust the process, the experience, for, as Stafford continues, “only the golden string knows where it is going, and the role for a writer or reader is one of following, not imposing.”⁹

There is a kind of devotion in this, a returning, as Bly calls it, “like a swallow to the barn of yielding, to the little spark of light given off by the end of the thread,”¹⁰ to Basho’s glimmering residing inside the objects of our attention.

True writers (musicians, scientists, all artists) follow; they are servants of the process, not its masters. They follow the thread where it leads and write down what they find on the journey. They are, in a sense, transcribers, and good writers know it. Being too purposeful, Stafford observed, may break the thread. One must be careful not to pull too hard.

And what is that pulling too hard? Trying to control where the thread is going, directing it where the statistical mentality wants it to go, forcing it away from its nature and into the desires and needs of the individual. This may be conscious on the part of the writer who has too much investment in the psychological, the social, or in reductionisms of one sort or another. It may be unconscious in the writer that has not developed the skill of rigorous self-examination and introspection or in the writer who is still too afraid, who does not trust the dreamer inside him enough to let go of control. Ultimately, those limitations must be abandoned. To become good at the craft demands a yielding to the thread and the process of following.

Practice at the craft develops the skill of following the thread without pulling too hard. In the beginning all of us pull too hard, the thread breaks, we wander off and don’t find the park. But over time, as the skill is refined, the threads can be followed wherever they lead. The meanings of which they are composed are captured in language in such a way that the words themselves are an experiential map of the territory. They take the attentive listener deep inside particular kinds of meanings. The meanings slip over the self like a lens and you see aspects of reality that can only be glimpsed, as Thoreau described it, with the unworn sides of the eye.

Every golden thread, if followed, generates somewhere within it, often toward its end, a long floating leap into a moment or experience of what the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca called duende. It is a moment in which a particular kind of experience occurs, one that lies beyond mechanicalism, beyond reductionist approaches, beyond the linear mind and the statistical mentality.

This poem by Machado captures what Lorca was speaking of . . .

It is good knowing that glasses

are to drink from;

the bad thing

is to not know what thirst is for.¹¹

We start with something all of us know, glasses and using them for drinking. This simple description of a part of the world that is familiar to us comes first, capturing attention, firmly anchoring awareness and perception in one kind of reality. Then there is a movement into something else. The reality framework of the piece shifts entirely, leaving one paradigm, one reality orientation, and ending up in another, the two connected by the slenderest of threads. What the self sees, what it perceives, when that shift occurs is very different from what it saw before. Some new insight occurs. The world the conscious mind lives within expands tremendously and in an unexpected direction. For a moment the statistical mentality catches glimpses of something far outside its normal boundaries and perceptions. And there is just a little bit, or perhaps a lot, of a kind of awe at this unexpected glimpse of a reality unsuspected, a reality that surrounds us every day of our lives. There is, as Lorca put it, the trembling of the moment and then the silence. Duende.

Because the writer focuses so completely on the feeling of the thing he is describing, getting it as fully as possible into language, the words become imbued with life force, filled with meaning. The writer piles up meaning behind the word like water behind a dam. The longer the thread is followed, the more meaning that piles up, not only behind the words but behind the sentences and paragraphs. A powerful forward movement takes hold, an inescapable inertia toward some destination occurs in the writing. You reach the end of the linear world, a chasm appears, and you take a long floating leap up, out, over, landing for a moment on the other side. Duende.

A golden thread may lead only a short (writing) distance, as in the poem by Machado, yet still possess a long floating leap into the unconscious and tremendous duende. A golden thread always leads to such a leap if it is followed; it always generates an experience of duende somewhere in the piece. And those moments of duende may be strong or mild, they may be connected together in an interwoven duende conversation, or they can stand individually. Golden threads always lead to a shift in perception, a traveling from one state of mind to another. Bly comments, echoing Blake . . .

If every detail can by careful handling, through association, sound, tone, language, lead us in, then we live in a sacred universe.

We find, always, when we follow golden threads, the metaphysical background of the world. As you focus more deeply on the feeling that touched you, your sensory gating channels will begin to open more widely, much more widely. It is then that you begin to leave the human world behind, then that you begin to enter the imaginal world, then that you begin to find that, as Robert Bly once put it, the owl’s dark eyelids cover a luminosity our reason cannot grasp.¹²

Golden threads are an experience of the extensive interconnections that touch the nodes that we know as physical objects, what Gregory Bateson called “a vast network or matrix of interlocking message material.”¹³Anyone who begins going deeper into the metaphysical background of the world will encounter them, will find golden threads; the experience is widespread. It is limited to no culture, continent, or profession. The Kalahari Bushmen of Africa talk about it like this . . .

Strong ropes connect you with everything in the universe and when it is important to know about the other end of a rope, it will tap or pull on you.¹⁴

Many of the Kalahari, similarly to Stafford, remain sensitive to the emergence of a thread, or rope as they call it. They feel its touch, its pull, as a tapping. Through their heightened feeling sense they turn toward it, follow it to its end. They know, from deep experience, that the thread is something emerging from the metaphysical background of the world, capturing their attention; they know there is purpose in it. Among the Iroquois, for instance, it is said that when a person needs a plant, “it stands up where it grows, calling to you. That is why it is easy to find a medicine you seek.”¹⁵

Golden threads touch us because something deep inside us needs what is on the other end of that thread. It can be the need for words, for poetry. It can be the need for medicine for our healing or, in the case of the Kalahari (sometimes), food, as they put it, “A Bushman hunter feels something tapping on his arm when it is time to hunt.”¹⁶ But the key to it is the feeling sense, as the Bushmen say it . . .

The rope is our track. We feel it pulling us. When you wake up your heart and find yourself alive with good emotions, it not only makes you tremble, it also enables you to feel the pulling of the ropes. The ultimate tracking is not achieved with the mind but with the heart.¹⁷

In other words, the mind can never find the way; it is in our capacity to feel that we find the heart of the world.

Wood

The cabinetmaker James Krenov was a master of following golden threads in his relationship with wood. He used his feeling sense, touched the wood with it, listened to what it told him. And he described what the process is like, trying to capture the invisibles of it in language . . .

Getting into this matter of listening to wood, of composing, weaving together an intention with what you and your chosen wood have to say, is an experience difficult to describe. To me, it is the essence of working with wood.

A painter or sculptor visits a certain place and sees and feels something there he wants to interpret: a person, a scene, the way the light falls. A time and a place. A sense of life. Something similar happens with the cabinet maker—he who is more than a maker of cabinets. He has an idea, maybe a sketch. A boxlike object with a few gentle curves whose meaning he only guesses. Or a more sculptural piece where he imagines the play of light on shapes; serious or with humor, difficult or easy. And there before him is the wood he has chosen. Wood—and with it a mood.

Then within this mood, all these other aspects: the shadings, accents, tensions—that which corresponds to the painter’s inspiration and later on, often much later, all those bevels, roundings, shapes within shapes which will clarify and enhance what has been an intention and a hope.¹⁸

“Wood, and with it a mood.” There is Goethe’s intimation of mood or feeling again. Krenov finds a piece of wood and for some reason the mood in the wood captures his attention—notitia. He begins to listen to what it is telling him, responds to the conversation, begins to follow where the wood is leading him. And out of that comes a shaping, a shaping composed of two living beings in deep conversation. Something more than the sum of the parts then comes into being.

Theodore Sturgeon captured some of what this is like in his story “Slow Sculpture.”

The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree; it takes both, and they must understand each other. It takes a long time to do that. One memorizes one’s bonsai, every twig, the angle of every crevice and needle, and, lying awake at night or in a pause a thousand miles away, one recalls this or that line or mass, one makes one’s plans. With wire and water and light, with tilting and with planting of water-robbing weeds or heavy root-shading ground cover, one explains to the tree what one wants, and if the explanation is well enough made, and there is great enough understanding, the tree will respond and obey—almost. Always there will be its own self-respecting, highly individual variation: Very well I shall do what you want, but I will do it my way. And for these variations, the tree is always willing to present a clear and logical explanation, and more often than not (almost smiling) it will make clear to the man that he could have avoided it if his understanding had been better. It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times, doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree.¹⁹

With everything an artisan attempts to shape the process is the same, whether a living tree or a piece of wood or music, or these things we hold in our hands that we call books.

Following a golden thread, irrespective of the craft we practice, starts with noticing something that touches us and captures our attention. (As the painter Marion Milner once put it, she simply let herself “find what the eye seems to like.”)²⁰ We then begin to follow it to find out where it wants to go. Paying close attention in this process to what is . . . not what we think is, is crucial. Most often we see only what is in our minds, not what is in our eyes. Mostly we feel only what we have been taught to feel, not what we truly feel. With the attentive noticing of the soul, we step away from our programming and what we think we know. We feel something and then we stop and genuinely look, identifying what has caught our attention. Then we begin to really see it, noticing whatever it is as if for the first time. The senses begin to bring us tidings of invisible things, all of them filled with meaning. To do this work, to develop excellence in the craft, we have to genuinely see whatever it is that we have felt, then follow wherever that feeling takes us. Krenov, in his book The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking, describes it like this . . .

I wonder if people notice that with all the technical skill, love, and care put into them, many of his bowls still lack something? They are not all of them alive. It is sad, almost tragic. . . . Because of ignorance, as well as prejudice, we exclude so much. We need to see better. To see—in the way that Yanagi meant, which is to sense and notice (in that order) even before we know. That seemingly odd bevel, that uneven curvature of line, the surface flat yet somehow alive—these we see only when we have first sensed the meaning of their conversation. The craftsman works, looking and looking again, from one revelation to another—often by way of mistakes, listening to the material, coming upon unexpected signals. Good things and bad things: knots that should not be where they are, fascinating colors that appear as if out of nowhere. It takes effort. But it gives something more in return.²¹

That perfectly describes it, doesn’t it? The craftsman works, looking and looking again, from one revelation to another—often by way of mistakes, listening to the material, coming upon unexpected signals. But always following that feeling, following tiny feeling impulses from one revelation to another.

Golden threads always start with an experience, a moment being lived. They are not something that belong only to those who write. It’s just that some of us work to write them down after we have lived them. It’s possible to follow golden threads behaviorally not just linguistically. It is a skill that belongs to living an inhabited life. Something touches you and you begin to follow it, to find out where it leads. It signals that something important is happening; it captures the attention of the deep self.

A house, a cabinet, a wooden bowl. If these things are crafted with this kind of feeling attention, following the golden threads that reside in the wood, allowing their conversation with you to emerge into form, what you find at the end of the process is a house, a cabinet, a wooden bowl that is filled with feeling and aliveness. Houses that are homes. Cabinets that greet you with joy each time you pass by. Wooden bowls that contain something ineffable. Always.

Music

Although every musician has their own approach to the crafting of their music, for me . . . it begins with sound, with a musical sequence. It always begins the same way. In the midst of playing something, anything, some sequence of sounds captures my awareness and halts what I have been doing. Something in the sound sequence in that instant emerges as a golden thread. I stop then and begin to follow it. Everything else fades from my awareness; there is only that sound sequence and I begin to play it over and over again. I only have a little bit of what it will become but I play that first note and then the sequence that follows over and over again.

There is a mood in the sequence and the beginnings of a conversation. As I play it over and over I begin to get inside it and it inside me. Nothing is in my attention now but that sequence and the meanings that are beginning to emerge from within its deeps. And as the process continues the musical phrase begins to become mine, it begins to express itself out of the depths of me, to become something I am saying from the deepest parts of myself. The nonlinguistic part of me that resides deepest in body memory begins to speak, and the speaking is composed not of words but pure meaning held in sound. Somehow the sound sequence that has emerged of its own accord and captured my attention has come alive. It merges into my deepest self and begins to speak through me. The composer Jimmy Webb is touching on this when he says that in this process, “we learn that chords are living things.”²²

So with deepening attentiveness, core meanings begin to emerge out of the sequence. And in that continual playing of the sequence my fingers begin to emphasize this aspect of it, that chord a bit more than another, finding contrasts, sharpening them, deepening them, evoking the mood and meaning held deep within the note sequence. To really allow music to come alive in this way, Jimmy Webb notes, takes great attentiveness of mind. “It is our responsibility,” he says, “to pay attention.”²³ And in the process I find, as I always do, that, as Mozart said, “The spaces between notes is music, too.”

Then, there comes a moment, always, when the sequence has fully become itself, when I have internalized it enough that it is now my voice, when I have finally found the true mood of the thing, have found the contrasts that make it come most alive, when I have the spaces between the notes emerging as strongly as the notes themselves, that the golden thread moves. In that moment, the sound sequence takes the next step, the step that has been inherent in the sequence from the beginning, the sound sequence I could not remotely see when I began. And the step seems, always, inevitable. The music begins to emerge of its own accord from the place music lives when no one is playing it. And slowly it emerges into this world, saying what it uniquely is meant to say, I only the medium through which it expresses itself. My job one of following, not imposing.

And yes, some songs just write themselves in a few minutes.
Others take months or years.

Once the melody line has been found from beginning to end, its mood and meaning developed from continual replaying and digging deep into its heart, the words begin. The words that fit most effectively with the piece are those that do two things: 1) the lyric lines themselves echo the nonlinguistic meanings held inside the notes and the note sequences; and 2) the words themselves, when said conversationally, naturally possess a faint shadow of the melody line that runs through the song. Still, not all songwriters begin with the music, of course. Rosanne Cash speaks of what happens when the words are where the song begins . . .

I’ve found that melody is already inherent in the language, and if I pay close enough attention to the roundness of the vowels and the cadence of the words, I can tease the melody out of the words it is already woven into. I have found that continual referral back to the original “feeling tone” of the inspiration, the constant re-touching of that hum and cry, more important than the fireworks of its [initial burst of ] inspiration.²⁴

When it comes right down to it, neither the words nor the music come first; they both emerge at the same time. We just perceive one of them first. The entire composed piece is inherent in each of them; there is no background, no foreground, just the thing itself. And we, following the golden thread, pay close attention, feel into the thread, allow the song to emerge from the background of the world into form. Thus, when lyrics and song are combined in just the right way, the song feels as if it is one organic whole . . . because it is. The lyrics were already inherent in the song . . . they were just allowed to come into a linguistic form (and vice versa).

And because all songs crafted in this way begin with some deeper touch of the world upon the self, something that catches the attention of the soul, there is some deeper element of the metaphysical background of the world inside them. They begin with a feeling, thus they express the deepest feelings in the human heart. There is something more in the words and melody lines than simple song. As Jacob-Ernst Berendt put it in his book, The World Is Sound (Destiny Books, 1991), “Music is more than music.”²⁵

And it is fascinating that as a songwriter works to tease out the melody that is already woven into the words, they happen on a deep truth about human language. It is partly composed of song—and always has been. Depth analysis of human language has found, in fact, that the expressive and emotive layer of it is identical in its structure to birdsong, something Charles Darwin speculated long ago.

Too bad his followers are so religious

Human language is a fusion of the kind of communication birds, whales, and dolphins use with a more utilitarian type of communication used by, for instance, chimpanzees. As Robert Berwick, a professor of linguistics at MIT puts it . . .

What got joined together was the ability to construct these complex patterns, like a song, but with words. . . . All human languages have a finite number of stress patterns, a certain number of beat patterns. Well, in birdsong, there is also this limited number of beat patterns.²⁶

Birds, dolphins, and whales use a more holistic communicatory language, filled with meaning as a gestalt rather than a linear cause and effect process. Each melody they create is a single unit of communication holding within it the essential meaning as an experiential gestalt.

And that is in part why our songs can be so potent in their impacts. They, too, when done well, carry within them an experiential gestalt of communication that is far larger than any of the parts that have gone into them.

Cetaceans and birds learn, over time to combine those gestalts in more complicated patterns. They literally create conversations composed of experiential gestalts rather than a series of linked meanings. And some trace of that capacity resides in human language.

It is this inherent melody line deep inside our spoken language that song lyricists, if they are good at the craft, bring out when they join a crafted melody with lyrics. They find those linguistic melody lines when they drop down deep inside the words and in their dreaming allow the melody underneath to emerge into awareness. And something from some other place comes into the world. As Rosanne Cash put it . . . “Sometimes these songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became important as time went on. . . . [But] I don’t consider these postcard songs prescient as much as just coming from a source of creativity outside linear time.”²⁷

Depth Immersion

The secret to the following of golden threads is immersion in the thread through the use of the feeling sense, an immersion so deep that you forget everything else but the touch of that thread and the effort to bring it into form in the world. Everything else disappears. Nothing remains but the thread and your relationship to it . . . and your movements, so gentle, so careful, to shape it into form in this world. In those moments, nothing else matters . . . or even exists.

You can get a feel for what this process is like in this story about a musician by a gifted young writer just completing his first novel . . .

“Think about the sound your guitar makes when it’s not being played.” McKenzie was looking very intently at Michael. “Think about what it’s like inside the guitar. How it smells. Think about the wood and how it’s shaped. How the shape shakes with the music.”

Michael nodded. And started to think about his guitar.

The smell. That’s what he thought about first. The smell of his guitar. So good. Good wood. Kind wood. Smelling light, smelling of pine. And the strings, metal strings, smelling of metal.

His guitar smelled unlike any other. It had taken him awhile to realize it. But he had smelled other guitars and each one smelled slightly different. Slightly unique. Just like his. He could recognize his guitar by its smell alone.

He smiled.

And suddenly there was a sound that came through the house. That surrounded the house. A sound soft and subtle . . . but overtaking all others. Michael could feel a vibration resonating up his arm, could feel it moving around his hand, like a current in water. Moving on the current, through the water.

“Yes,” McKenzie whispered. “Yes.”

Michael knew that sound, knew it well. He had heard it after picking up his guitar, but before striking a note. After playing, but in between songs. When he was at rest, with one hand on the neck and another hand resting on the body. He had felt it, felt the vibration of his guitar. The sound that happened all by itself. A sound that couldn’t so much be heard as felt. Yet a sound that existed just as much as anything else, that was part of every song just as much as the sounds that rang out loud. A sound that made Michael’s guitar completely unique. Because, even though there were guitars that looked exactly the same as Michael’s, his was different. Different because of the wood that made it, different because of the hands that built it, and different because of the history it had lived, the songs it had played, and the places it had been.

When a guitar is first finished, it is still very much like a tree. The wood, the grain, the molecules, all the small things that hold the wood together, that make it what it is. They still think and behave and hold themselves like they are part of a tree. Because that’s what they’ve always known. That’s what their life has been up to that point. Only after a guitar is played does the shape of those small things begin to change. All those notes. All that noise. All that vibration. Song after song. And the small things that hold everything together start to shift. The vibration of the songs played take hold of the wood and shape it. Until it is no longer like a tree, but like a guitar. A guitar with a very unique history.

With Michael’s guitar it was a history played by him. So that the songs he played, the notes he played, in a very real way, shaped the guitar into what it was now: a thing unlike all others in the world. A thing with its own history; a thing with its own unique sound. A very subtle sound. More of a vibration than a sound. A vibration that Michael knew just as well as he knew the smell of his guitar. And Michael was feeling that vibration now, hearing that very soft sound in the current that moved through the room. It was being carried with the current surrounding the house, filling up the space inside the stone walls and resonating deep inside Michael’s bones.

“Oh,” Michael spoke softly. “Oh my.”

“Go. Go play,” McKenzie said to him. “Quick, go play now!”

McKenzie pushed him towards the door. The sound was still going, still vibrating through the house as McKenzie directed him toward the room where he had awakened. The room where his guitar stood in a corner, making the very same noise that filled the entire house now.

“Hurry! Hurry!” McKenzie said.

Michael picked up his guitar and sat on the edge of the bed. He sat with one hand on the neck and the other resting on the body. He sat listening to the noise.

Something inside him started to twist and move; a streak of excitement. He had an idea, another idea, for a song. . . . And then, Michael began to play. He played. And played. And it was very, very good.

The sounds were taken, carried on the current, and amplified through the house. And sometime, hours later, Michael played the last note. And he felt that particular feeling that comes when something good is completed, something true. There was the feeling that there was something more in the world, something alive. Like a living being with a life all its own, breathing and smiling, strong and proud. And that being, that song, had been born through Michael.²⁸

Every one of us can do this, can immerse ourselves deep inside the golden threads that touch us; it is the secret to finding the heart of a thing, to finding the connections between things, to journeying deep into Earth, into the metaphysical background behind and inside everything.

The focus creates a task set that overrides habituated gating parameters. The immersion and continual feeling into the thread opens the gating channels more widely, and the more deeply immersed we become, the more widely they open. We begin to find then the reality that underlies the surface world that we live in during our daily lives.

Artists go deep but natural scientists go very deep. When the world itself is the focus, something new enters the process, something very much alive and intelligent and aware in its own right. And that changes things. We find then something that responds to our questing, sensing with its own desires and intentions. And the journey itself begins to become something else, something very different.

That is what people such as Goethe, Luther Burbank, Einstein, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Barbara McClintock did. As Einstein once put it, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” It is where their deep insights came from . . . and they all knew it . . . and they all described what they did so that those who wish to follow them can do so. Reductionists hate it however. The schools do not teach it. Few books contain the story. As Aldous Huxley puts it . . .

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully formed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts on the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.²⁹

Or as ecologist/Gaian researcher Stephan Harding says it . . .

No student of ecology is ever introduced to this new mode of mental discipline—in our schools and colleges. There is no culture of experiencing oneness with the natural world. All one does on an ecology trip is to collect and measure. Deep contemplation of nature is considered to be at worst a waste of time, at best something to do in one’s spare time. . . . Truly great scientists had this connection, this sense of the greater whole of which they were a part. Without educating this sensitivity, we churn out scientists without philosophy, who are merely interested in their subject, but not thoroughly awed by it. We churn out clever careerists. . . . It is this kind of training which leads to the mentality responsible for the massive social and environmental mistakes of Western-style development. Trained to shut down perception of the world so that we see it as a mere machine, we are perfectly free to improve the clockwork for our own ends.³⁰

Nevertheless, this deeper, feeling approach is where real science begins . . . and, no, you don’t have to have advanced degrees to do it. In fact . . . as Barbara McClintock says, science “gives us relationships which are useful, valid, and technically marvelous; however, they are not the truth.”³¹ To get to the truth, to see the world as it really is, there is a “necessary next step,” as Evelyn Keller puts it. And that next step? “The reincorporation of the naturalist’s approach—an approach that does not press nature with leading questions but dwells patiently in the variety and complexity of organisms.”³²

She’s talking about the necessity for nonscientists, for the unique approach that comes from your own inherent genius, for the restoration of the human as an integral part of Earth understanding. One of the things we have lost is the diversity of multiple points of view, eyes looking out from other realities and sharing what they have seen, creating a diversity of understanding that allows our species to adapt to a never ending and always changing universe.

Keller is talking about that, about the necessity for a different kind of thinking.