Bush Spirits

There is a park, in San Francisco, at the top of a hill. There are trees criss crossing each other, stretches of forest you can’t cross without cutting your legs, unplanned flowers growing on the upward slope. It is a small wilderness: contained chaos.

There is a place, in our minds, where we keep our suffocated bush spirits. They bear their teeth at the walls around them, cry with anguish at trees falling; they can hear the whisper of storms in the pitch of the wind. There is no God but chance, no law but the rhythm of dance; a mass of unconscious existence.

The shape of our world defines our mind (or perhaps the other way around). In the daylight of consciousness, we tell ourselves that one plus one is two, tomorrow it will rain, trees belong in boxes on the street edges, I determine my fate, I am happy in my concrete box, my feet do not miss the earth. One plus one is two, next year I will still be alive, oil disappears from oceans when I am not looking, I am whole, I am in control, I am in control.

But the shadows are creeping closer.

2 million years, we have breathed with the forest. 200 years of smoke-choked intellectualism and we think we have tamed chaos, catalogued everything there is to know. Nature knows no rationality. It is a sickness creeping up the trunks of the hundred-year trees. We cannot subdue the forest - if we let it in it would take our breath away and remind us how to breathe. My body is of the earth. My body is from the insects and damp grass. I am bamboo, swaying, it is the only way to survive the earthquakes.

There’s a little bird on the tarmac by the side of the road. It bobs its head, pecking mindlessly at the concrete, but there is no warm, soft soil underneath. It doesn’t know any better.

Listen. Your bush spirit is beating against your heart. Listen. Let it in. It knows when the storm is coming.