Sermons in Stones

One of the first things people often ask during our Plant Listening walks is the name of the plants we encounter. I try to resist giving these for as long as possible, preferring to initially meet the plant through the senses. Using our hands, noses, lips and tongues, allows for a sensory greeting that helps to build a wordless map of knowing. After all, the names we use mean nothing to the plants themselves, and while our systems of order and categorisation are useful, they only take us so far into the mysterious life-ways of a mercurial, living world.

I recently met a man by some standing stones here in Galloway. I’d heard about Joseph from another local, who’d told me there was a man who could be found at Cairn Holy, a local stone circle, every sunrise and sunset. It’s taken me some time to go and find him, but this week I did, arriving with a friend to see a white-bearded man in a fleece and wellies measuring the lengthening evening light against the position of the stones.

’Will you tell us about them?’ I asked, but instead of speaking he motioned for us to look as he had been doing.

‘It’s always better shown than said’ he smiled.

A 17-year apprenticeship to Cairn Holy has done nothing to dampen the passion Joseph feels for a subject that continues to reveal itself with a slow steadiness in keeping with its nature. What is, according to the information board stood by them, a collection of ancient stones put in place by a Neolithic farming culture, is rendered a kind of dance in Joseph’s sensitive enquiry.

He describes the solid stones as gestures and the way they relate to universal patterns as melodies. Listening to him talk about the stones was to stop seeing them as ‘stones’ and understand them as a leaping-off point into an ever-moving and interrelated cosmos. A trained scientist, it struck me that this erudite man could easily present a sense of mastery about his chosen ‘subject’.

‘I could tell you something and you could believe me and I could play the game of expert’ he shrugged with a laugh. ‘But that would be missing the chance to discover something interesting together!’

Learning through shared enquiry is at the heart of Plant Listening. Each walk, at once a practical foray into the medicine, nutrition and folklore of plants and animals, is also a time of wondering. I can talk at length (and often do!) about a willow or a nettle, but as Joseph says, to come at each plant with a fresh gaze creates space for genuine encounter.

Mystery goes against the grain of a culture that likes certainty. It might seem a whimsical waste of time to wonder who a plant, animal or stone is and how they are woven into the fabric of the whole, instead of simply naming and categorising it. But there is much to be said for learning through repeated sensory encounter. We would have once learnt like this as earth-smart children, crawling on the ground and feeling our way into life - cold water, musty mud and bitter leaf - the textures and tastes of a risky, medicinal world.

I recently read about the relationship between the Nunamiut Eskimos of Northern Alaska and the wolves who share their territories. Both wolves and men rely almost entirely on caribou meat for their survival, and so hunt alongside each other in close observance of the other’s patterns of behaviour. In the last century field biologists went to spend time among the Nunamiut in order to also study the behaviour of the wolves who inhabit this region. The local hunters were very interested in the technology being employed to tag and monitor the animals, but did not want or need to employ those methods themselves. To know everything about the wolf was not their aim. Instead, as Barry Lopez writes in Wolves and Men the ‘animal is observed as part of the universe. Some things are known, some things are hidden. Some of the wolf is known, some is not.’ The reason for studying the wolf was not to achieve a mastery of ‘wolf’ but rather a way of getting ‘closer to the physical world in which they both live.’

This idea, of learning about one being so as to better understand the world you share, takes us beyond individual objectification and out towards a shared reverence. To see each being as alive and worthy of privacy and respect, makes us tentative in our quest for understanding. Instead of knowledge for its own sake, we learn so as to better live in inter-species community with each other. ‘How majestic was the wolf in the mind of the modern eskimo’  observes Lopez, making me reflect how extraordinary the stones were in Joseph’s presence, and how full of wonder a flower or stick is in the eyes of a child.