Cedric Wright: Words of the Earth

Verse

By Cedric Wright
Edited by Nancy Newhall

Have you ever watched a small white cloud dissolve
    into a background of blue space?
My Search is for the kind of consciousness which could do just that
    to the causes of world friction.

We have been lost within sterile horizons.

Psychic forces know no boundaries.
To understand the relationships and currents trying together
    the whole creation,
    we must use the whole horizon of consciousness.

We need an education of the spirit.
The most important things belong first, not last, or never.

In search of a new world, the wings of the spirit must not be clipped.

From time immemorial, the universe of the subconscious
    has been known most clearly in the wilderness---
    a universe of whose qualities and meanings words are faint symbols.

The insight of great creators penetrates the superstructure of consciousness.
Can those of us who have the arrow in our being be neutral?

 

A sound arises out of the earth---
    a singing, a friendliness.

There is mighty contagion in the qualities of things---
    primitive and authentic joy in closeness
    to vital running water, fire, wind,
    vast integrity in real experience of the earth, the stars,
    subtle and dynamic wonder in peak and cloud.

An inquiry now, into the roots of our being.

What is sanity?

Sometimes it seems as if only things like blades of grass have sanity---
    as if only through their serenity, their mute virtue and wisdom,
    could we gain a sense of life as it might become.

Generations have dimly felt that somehow within nature lies a template
    for guidance---
    that genuine revelation lies within the livingness of grass,
        of cloud, of light---
    a revelation sharpening our knowing of the roots of kindness,
        the beginnings of humility.

 

One foot of beach sand: see it, feel it.
Search out its lines, its arrangements,
    its acceptance of inevitables,
    of destiny in the laws of gravity and of light reflection.

A glistening silent world.
Imagine all that must be happening there, beyond our knowing.

 

A match, lit out of the wind in the cup of the hand,
    survives most surely if tilted down
    and slowly revolved when kindled.
The same thing happens to kindling twigs --- resinous twigs, picked
    not off the ground, but from the slender tips of dead tree branches,
    and broken to desired length by tapping over a boulder.
These should be held in the hand like a bouquet pointing downward until
    they blaze, then laid on the ground, and twigs of increasing size
    added at varying angles --- never parallel, lest you smother the flames.
Now set your can of water on flat earth or coals, and tuck small twigs
    about it --- small twigs caress your billycan.
Fire should be concentrated to windward --- away from the side to be grabbed---
    and if your billycan has a handle of bailing wire, a lifting stick
    made ready.
And, as soon as the precious hot water is poured into wash basin and cup,
    a second batch is put on to heat.
For what? Why, to get places socially!
    The arrival of free hot water is one of the most potent social entrees
    in the camping world --- especially if you give your first batch away!
I find this gentle puttering, making an art of a billycan fire,
    more fun than any game.
But the praise of billycan fires and humble generosity
    has never been sufficiently sung.

 

Firelighting stretches past frontier days into archaic vistas.
There is a long history of man and fire.
Something from the past descends
    and flows down silently on firewathcers,
    like the dim racial memory of rain.

Untrammelled, a roving spirit responds to faint implication and symbol---
    to the fall of rain.
In time of rain, the archaic being stirs.
The infinity of soft sounds, the silken pervasion of falling water,
    distills a love shelter, fireside, home, sweet air, greeness,
    timelessness, renewal.
All these belong to the gentleness of rain
    and the flow and benediction after rain.

Trouble is a fierce rain that drives us to the shelter of our friends.
And there is the rain of tears,
    distilling the memory of great love and its expansiveness,
    making of rain an inner light, a subtle possession of the spirit.

 

Consider the life of trees.
Aside from the axe, what threes acquire from man is inconsiderable.
What man may acquire from trees is immeasurable.
From their mute forms there flows a poise, in silence,
    a lovely sound and motion in response to wind.
What peace comes to those aware of the voice and bearing of trees!
Trees do not scream for attention.
A tree, a rock, has no pretence, only a real growth out of itself,
    in close communion with the universal spirit.
A tree retains a deep serenity.
It establishes in the earth not only its root system but also those roots
    of its beauty and its unknown consciousness.
Sometimes one may sense a glisten of that consciousness, and with such
    perspective, feel that man is not necessarily the highest form of life.

Tree qualities, after long communion, come to reside in man.
As stillness enhances sound, so through little things
    the joy of living expands.
One is aware, lying under trees,
    of the roots and directions of one's whole being.
Perceptions drift in from earth and sky.
A vast healing begins.

 

The days of our lives must become precious.

In all heaven and earth, there is this one thing to do:
    take your time.
Enjoy the perfection of what you are doing.
Enjoy accomplishing it exquisitely.

Human life must know ecstasy.

 

I take my mountains as music.
The mountains wake a singing undercurrent,
    then overtones,
    then sing with you.

Music haunts the high country like a hymn,
    floats in the cold sunny air
    moulds the clouds
    filtering those floods of light and shadow
    that forever clothe the mountains anew---
Stop and listen to the birds on these high ridges!
O, to emulate this mountain music!

Music arrives in the deep hum
    of river and wind through the forest,
    speaks through wave-lines in sunlight
    and in shimmer of wind rippling---
    until we too fuse with it,
    fairly humming its key and clef,
    swelling the chorus, joining its universal breadth.

 

We crossed the pass on a day of thunder.

Cloud tunnels into the far reaches of space
    revealed an unearthly design and motion,
    and a towering resonance filled the canyons.

From here we must go down, down ten thousand feet,
    down to accustomed levels,
    down to the blare and cry of ordinary living.

From within the sounds and banners of the vast horizon,
    without words, into an inner silence, came:
    Remember well this magnitude.
    Lift your eyes,
        that the great meanings shall not flow by unheeded.
    See.
    The world's beauty carries in trust
        the importance of your salvation.

To some who think themselves wise, mountains are piles of dirt.
To them, science and the microscope reveal the wilderness to be
    a record of struggle and failure,
    a battleground to the death.
And they conclude that our main concern,
    under the same unaltered laws,
    is to prepare for a life and death struggle.

Yet the aggression of weeds against flowers, if left alone,
    create a balance and fitness.
Within each species lies its destiny,
    its place in the wilderness economy and order.
Where do flowers look do well as when left to natural law?

 

Design of deep momentums---
Trees tragic, trees broken by winter, trees in all stages of decay,
dead branches and pine needles strewn upon the snow,
    in patterns dictated by subtle law:
    of wind, gravitation, carefree instinct.

Yet each fallen bough, each dead stump,
    intensifies the richness of the forest.

Out of the vast process of evolution through need,
    out of the cycle of passing forms,
    arises eternal, elemental beauty.

Intense beauty is liberation.

 

Here again, as everywhere,
    the great river passing---
    I passing,
    you passing . . . 

    . . . forever flowing down through time,
            flowing through many channels,
            fading out of the embrace of its names . . .

            . . . simple as the voice of a child
                    and never to be quite known.

In this light and breeze are resurrection echoes.

Suddenly one becomes aware one lives in an eternity,
    and hears strange footsteps
    ascending anciently trodden pathways.

Consciousness projects itself
    like a headland into the seas.
Headlands acquire sea atmosphere;
    headlands are poised
        in the sound of waves,
    headlands extend
        in long dreaming lines of shore.
From the unknown,
    from the immense and infinite,
    weaving into consciousness
        like long fingers of fog
        through coastal canyons,
    comes a far-off singing.

Out of the sea, in vast currents,
    a mystic essence arises---
    essence of the infinite godliness
    which creates worlds.

 

A new astronomy of the spirit
    should become a conscious goal of man.

Our lives like dreams endure
    and reach out over the universe.
Nothing real is to itself alone.
There are sidestreams to rivers; there are overtones to thought.
Great love reaches out
    and is involved in the world's purposes.

Our loves are only symbols of an unknown immortality.
Where communion is deep, there exists no separation at all,
    for what needs telling those we love is understood already,
    and what is supposed to be gone and past
        is often more real than ever.
Through the sculpture of experience,
    the part of ourselves which survives,
    like cloud, resolves continuously.
This is the spirit of my hope and my religion.

Love and the loss of love,
    the loss of life, frustrations in one's hopes, birth---
    to each of us these are mysteries.
Through these come love and pity for the world's misery
    and a sustained wonder at the long-range continuity
        underrunning all events, all material things,
        rooted in a spiritual universe.
Faith in a deep purpose dawns.

There are days when a high cold wind races out of space,
    the space of stars.
Within vast vistas, one feels alone.
In such solitude, true religion is born.

From these mountains and cloud haloes
    ascend eternal meanings.
A great world music floods consciousness.
A larger love flows into living,
    from which vast and subtle change
    shall descend upon the nations,
    bringing healing.

__________

Wright, Cedric. "Cedric Wight: Words of the Earth."  Verse, Edited by Nancy Newhall.
    The Sierra Club, 1960, pp. 16-90.

 

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