During the time of which I posted about in a lengthy aside, I had been listening to this great offering of prose on the meandering roads to the campsite. (quick aside: I too have a limited funds for books and opt for a less expensive e-copy, then utilize an app, Evie, for reading the text; hence audio is available for most books . . . it can lead to profound listening experiences . . . I suspect though that Buhner’s style is best read on page though and will be purchasing the book soon) His opening autobiography is a refreshing journey into that which depicts the over(arching)story of what occurs when we encounter nature and that meandering path that may lead us back to ki, to use Potawatomi à la Robin Kimmerer.
Akin to Psychedelic Mike (and an underarching theme of the book, this seeking access to the Divine), I had utilized a catalyst during this meandering drive and found myself increasingly attuned to his words; his personal distaste for the edugenic harm schooling caused; his rebellion; and the education waiting to be received. What really transported me into the imaginal realm was his depiction at the beginning of Chapter 1 of just that: the experience of entering “a world that lies underneath and behind the one that most of us see every day.” “Everything seemed to have become more itself. Everything seemed charged with meaning, some deep meaning that i could feel but not understand, at the time, with my mind.”
Plant intelligence merges with animal intelligence merges with sky intelligence (the clouds had turkey feather patterns on that drive) merges with the tilt of the steering wheel around a bending branching in the road merges with memories of times meandering in forests. What roots any emerging experience of the full canopy of the ever-present is the child’s gaze; the child’s listening to world music with a still-eyed stare (eyes are offline). Buhner makes use of a Goethe quote "To know how cherries and strawberries taste, ask children and birds.
I finished Werther last night. A prose written by a child’s meandering heart. And a budding adult with a keen eye for the primacy of a child’s world-vision, the world at their fingertips, tipsy drunken. I suspect wine was a catalyst for Goethe and his genius. I noticed the ebbing and flowing of Werther’s emotional decanter was uncorked in time with the seasonal changes. Spring brought a fever dream. Winter brought a bullet to a head with a headstrong Lebensekel (life-disgust). In Mann’s Lotte in Weimar, a depiction of a much later encounter between Charlotte and Goethe, long after the resentment that followed after Werther’s publication, Goethe plays the role of a complex soul, child still in residence but a world-weariness directed towards the petty puppet show that was strung around him. Goethe was quite the dreamer. I think in this thread we are doing more than just dreaming with Goethe. Perhaps we can enter ever further into that Becoming of his era, not only finding the parallels between his spheres and ours but by entering into that imaginal realm and find him lying in the grasses with important people like you and me, sharing stories and tastes and visions.