Notes from Up North

In the past five days and nights Up North—in northernmost Minnesota, in Superior National Forest and Finland State Forest, next to the Boundary Waters, not far from Ontario—having experienced multiple encounters with loons singing day and night, ravens by the roadside, hearing wolves howling not too far away in the deep night, and wandering the land, I awake this morning knowing that the Northwoods has gotten lodged in my heart as one of my home places. It's in me for good. I will always need to spend some time up there.

I'm glad I was able to get away, however briefly, for a short camping vacation Up North, after a summer full of concerts, travel, stress (not all for bad reasons either), and mounting exhaustion. I had a few days on the land where I did nothing but read, play my flutes, chat with friends, and prepare satisfying meals. After five days and nights, I was ready to return home. But the return is also the re-entry to so-called civilization, crowded as it is with people and Things To Do, the re-entry itself can prove impossibly hard. So I find myself with my body back home, and my heart still Up North in the wildwood.

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On the drive home, a bald eagle resplendent on the median of the highway, just pausing a moment before flying back over the water. Life is all around us, if only we would be open to seeing it. Passing by within feet of the Great Spirit, unafraid and still wild at heart.

Blessing the remains of coyotes and deer killed by traffic, their carcasses on the road shoulders, a common sight Up North, where the wildwoods are not separated from the villages and roads. Always a reminder of mortality, and of spirits moving on. Blessing as we pass seems the least we can do.

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Since I'm a global nomad, without a real sense of hometown anywhere in the world, having grown up all over the world, having moved so many times when I was still a boy, I am often comfortable wherever I go. But I also have a small collection of places that have become special to me, home places, places where I feel connected to the Earth, where I feel at home, where I go to be reminded of those connections. Up there on Minnesota's North Shore, and inland, in the great Superior National Forest, and Kawashaway, has become one of those home places. This morning, back home in southern Wisconsin, I look at paintings and photos of Up North, images of ravens and the northern lights, and feel like my heart is still back up there. At least part of it always will be. Just as other parts of my heart reside in the Southwest, and elsewhere.

When you're a global nomad, a wanderer, certainly you take you sense of "home" with you wherever you go, as it resides inwardly. Yet it's also good to have actual physical places on this spinning ball of life-covered rock that you can also feel at home in. Good to travel. Good to be home again.

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It grew into an evening ritual: As the sun was setting over our small beaver-pond lake, which curves around the north of the land and to the west, I stand on an exposed boulder to the west of the cookhouse, and play my shakuhachi for awhile. I play for the pine and cedar trees; for the light on the water; for the day's ending; for the sunlight that haloes all the finest pine needles with white fire.

One afternoon I played for a long time, and felt the silence move in around me. The silence that is deepened by the rustle of wind in the trees, by the pauses between the last note played on the flute and its echo from the low hills across the lake. The silence that deepens because it surrounds the few sounds remaining. The afternoon becomes completely still, and the pauses in between breeze sounds deepens until you can hear the Void behind the least sound.

But the Void no longer induces terror or fear, no longer threatens. It just is. It's just what you sense, that grounded emptiness beneath The Ten Thousand Things, when the illusions of consensus reality have all dropped away. This is the familiar Void, the comforting stillness of Nothing. I set out on this vacation to Do Nothing, and there it was.

After listening to the silence—which is worth at least a month of any other form of therapy—after hearing the Void behind the Silence, linger for awhile, the afternoon late afternoon sunlight bright and hot on bare skin, warming my fingers as they still hold the bamboo of my flute, linger and absorb this peace, this serenity, to bear with you as you re-enter the fray of what most call consensus life. Itself the culture that believes in its own necessity, neglecting to know its own lack of substance. In the silence, the world is vapor, and the walls between worlds so thin that all you have to do is step forward in your heart to meet the Great God Pan, god of panic, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

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I awake in the late deep night, chilly and clear, the waning gibbous moon and the circumpolar stars all bright. I go out to the wall to drink some cold, cold water, and to the outhouse.

In the far distance, six or seven wolves howl. They are answered by a single wolf voice much nearer to me. The pack sounds about two miles away, on the land between two of the smaller lakes to the south and west. The wolves have been heard howling in our camping region for the past two or three summers, and tonight I get to hear them. Long low voices, singing in complex harmony.

These are not coyote howls. I know coyotes well, I've had many encounters with them, some very up close and personal. I know what coyote packs sounds like. These are true northern wolves.

After awhile, the loon resident on our little lake begins singing, motivations unknown.

The sounds blend together under the bright silver moon. Eerie, atavistic, beautiful, transcendent. Cold silver blue moonlight and wolves howling: the perfect night Up North.

I go back to my sleeping place and have intense vivid dreams all night long.

Wolf Rules: Attending the Bones

I discovered this printed piece on the General Wolf Rules for Life, 25 years or more ago. I don't remember where I found it; it was a flyer, or an advertisement, or an article reprint. I was so captivated by it, it made so much sense to me, it was so right and true in an almost totemic sense, that I cut it out and saved it. I remember that at one point I made my own artwork around it: a flyer with clipart illustrations and this text; I may still have a copy of that somewhere, although it's probably 15 years or so ago that I made it.

Last week I was going through my box of old journals, looking for something else—looking for my poem journal from my teens, wherein I wrote my first hidden, furtive homoerotic poems, when I was 16 or 17 years old—and I found the Wolf Rules again, tucked inside the endpapers of one of my old journals.

I have thought about these Wolf Rules over the years. I look back on my life, and I realize that the Wolf Rules express my core values better than any formalized doctrine from any institutional religious tradition I've ever known. They resonate with those decentralized, informal, nature-centered religious traditions that I have been attracted to, at various times, from Native American paths to Taoism to Wicca to post-Christian creation-centered spiritual traditions. The lineage is Paleolithic. I hold very old values, not new ones. Not pre-human values, but values grounded in the earth, in living on the earth as part of the earth, not separate from it. These take us all the way back to our unitary consciousness, to the epoch of the bicameral mind, to the sacred heart of the shamans doing their healings by firelight, starlight, and moonlight.

The Christian doctrine of the "Fall" into "original sin" paradoxically raises many humans in their own esteem as placed above the Earth, separate from it, not part of it. It is this separation that many eco-centered poets—the bards of the earth herself—have rejected, from Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, among others. Jeffers reminded us that our place in existence is not at its pinnacle, but among its creatures; Snyder reminds us that Paleolithic values of interdependence and husbandry are not radical, but ancient. If poetry is a way, which it is, then poets such as these are its way-keepers.

These Wolf Rules for Life make more sense to me, even now, than many other formulations. There is a no-bullshit logic to them about what really matters. (The rest is mind-drama.) I realize that in my own way I've been living by them. I rove often, I cavil in moonlight, I attend to the bones, I make love, and I howl when I need to, sometimes from loneliness, other times from joy. Howling is a connection, a way of communicating. What is singing in a chorus but enacting the howl? What is writing but the howl? Tuning my ears has always come natural and easy—both in terms of literally tuning my ears, as a musician whose sense of pitch and timbre have always been precise and accurate, and also as someone who listens. I have always been hypersensitive to my sonic environment, aware of every sound, aware of their signal-to-noise ratio.

Attending to the bones means remembering my history, remembering where I've been. It also means knowing what lies where. Where my caches and special places are. I rove between my personal sacred places every time I get in the truck and do a roadtrip. My caches of bones are scattered far and wide, and I attend to them each time I travel, as well as when I'm at home.

Rendering loyalty is so fundamental to my worldview I rarely talk about it. it's just assumed. If you're my true friend, my have my loyalty, and I'll do anything for you that's within my power to do. I remember once, in a sweat lodge, when all the people in that dark and hot womb were invited to speak out loud the qualities we wanted to invite into the lodge, I remember speaking out with a voice much bolder than usual, "Come, fierceness and loyalty!" That outcry rippled around the lodge, with something more than usual force, it felt to me. I knew I was speaking a profound truth from a profound, ancient place within myself. A totemic place, a Wolf place.

Loving the children is something I've always done, even though I have no children of my own. I like kids, and kids seem to like me. Even kids shy around strangers often come up to greet me, at dinner parties and gatherings of family. Kids have pretty good radar about who they can trust, who genuinely cares for them. I remember a time when a friend's child came up and sat in my lap as I was working on the computer; just quietly sat there, asking nothing, just being present. I continued to work, and he just sat and watched for awhile, then eventually wandered off. I felt fiercely protective in that moment; a feeling I don't often get to feel often for specific people, but which I generally feel about the clan-circle of people who I care about, who are my adopted families, who are my close friends. And I feel protective of those my circle cares about, including the children.

Eating. Well, I'll come out of the closet, finally, as a foodie. I love food. I love all kinds of food. I love cooking, and I love eating. I have dietary restrictions now, because of my health, and I have known foods that I'm allergic to, or that trigger bowel irritations I'd rather avoid. I've been enjoying reading through roving chef Anthony Bourdain's books, and quite enjoying them. I know that I can't eat half of the foods that he loves to eat, because of my health issues; but what we have in common is a lust for life, a lust for good food, and a love of great cooking, no matter where we find, no matter who does it. I have memories of great meals at roadside foodstands in central Java, where I was the only foreigner eating amongst the neighborhood locals: saté-skewered grilled meats and tubes of sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf doused with ketchap sauce. My own neighborhood in central Surakarta was renowned for its many foodstalls, and I knew several of them intimately, or at least had tried everything on their menus. I love to cook, and I've become a pretty good chef. I have no pretensions to being a chef, and I have not the technique of a culinary institute graduate. But I love to cook, and that's what it's all about.

The Wolf Rule it's taken me the longest time to learn was to rest. It goes against the grain of my natural impatience, which is driven by the anxiety I've always felt that time is running out, and there's so much more I want to accomplish before my time is up. A sense of mortality I've always had, from a very young age. Perhaps it came from seeing dead bodies when I was a boy in India—those images of bodies being burned on the ghats at the side of the sacred river; those beggarfolk in the street who finally let go and pass over—perhaps it came from seeing my own grandparents pass over in my teens. It doesn't really matter. I've always been impatient. I deal with it all the time. And I've learned a great deal of patience, especially in certain arenas, and it's taken me a long time to learn it. I remember the "Weird Al" Yankovic ant-mellow parody song, "I'll Be Mellow When I'm Dead." That could have been my theme song, at one point in my life. I still appreciate passion, the lust for life. Sometimes I've only learned to rest only because my physical body forced me to stop, and rest, and take care of myself: take a pause. In recent years, though, I've learned the value of rest. Of sitting in the morning sunlight, sipping my orange juice, not thinking about anything in particular, meditating, whatever. The virtue of doing nothing. Rest is recharging, revitalizing, refreshing. What a wolf knows that we could all stand to know is how to rest, in the moment: to take any opportunity for rest, and inhabit it fully, before getting back to roving. Just stop. My chronic illness has one symptom, a debilitating fatigue, which I've had to learn to manage, and the Wolf Rules have been invaluable for this. When you're tired, sit down and rest. When you get going again, you'll have more of your strength back than if you'd kept pushing yourself so hard that eventually you splatter yourself against a wall of exhaustion—and then you'll be forced to rest, whether or not you wanted to. I'm learning to just take lots of little rests—lie down, pant, pause for awhile—before getting back up to rove on.

So the Wolf Rules have served me very well in life, and continue to serve. I realize that these little values, these ways of looking at the world, are core to my attitude. I might forget them for awhile, but they're my touchstones. I always knew and believed them, even before I encountered this formulation, on that old flyer or ad or whatever it was. I felt so charged, so alive, when I first read the Wolf Rules—such a feeling of innate recognition—that it seems obvious in retrospect that what happened was my recognition of an elegant formulation of something I already knew to be the way of life, deep down in my bones. There's a very Zen aspect to the Wolf Rules: a wolf can teach you many lessons about living in the Now, in the present moment, and not getting caught up in worry and mind-drama. Of living completely immersed in the experiences of the moment; of full commitment to whatever one is doing at the moment, and living it fully. Then being able to let go of the past, and shift immediately to the next thing that needs your attention. No clinging, no hating what's gone, just the Now.

The wolf eats the monkey-mind. Zen Master Coyote Roshi smiles slightly, leading the dojo in zazen, a few bright canary feathers still caught in his mustache.

I attend to the bones by looking again at the Wolf Rules, and finding them still an accurate summation of my core values, what I know in my bones to be true and real. All the rest is mind-drama, which can be healed and undone simply by returning to being in the Now, to living by the General Wolf Rules for Life.

Wolf Rules

General Wolf Rules for Life:

1. Eat
2. Rest
3. Rove in between
4. Render loyalty
5. Love the children
6. Cavil in moonlight
7. Tune your ears
8. Attend to the bones
9. Make love
10. Howl often