The Liminal Compass: Without Words

Entering the rainforest for the first time is a little like becoming a toddler again. On the cusp of learning to speak, in possession of the first few fundamental words with which to describe the world around you. But not much more than that. You do not yet own the labels with which to name the myriad of species you encounter, with which to paint all the new, never-before-experienced strangenesses of the forest. I have never been anywhere else, where I encountered so much that was new to me in such a short space of time.

Everywhere I looked was something else I couldn’t name or classify. All the weird, shimmering, irradescant, furred, spiked, gossamer, armoured beings glimpsed from the fringes of the path; I had just one word - ‘insect’ - for them. The dark umber, dove grey, mustard hairs, silky and stubbled of shapes that I couldn’t determine as plant or animal. Was this tree-resident or tree-skin? I had no knowledge to help me fit them into a neat category. In the face of so much unfamiliarity I couldn’t even be sure of the vocabulary of warning spoken in this strange new place. What was harmful? Who would bite? Within the rainbow pigments of wings, shells, leafs and limbs did there lie a message of invitation or a fair warning statement of poisonous defense?

So…..mute, defenseless without the superior knowledge of those there to guide me, equipped only with the most basic language to describe what lay around me; this was my initiation into the rainforest. A toddler in a new green world.

But there is a lot to be said for an infant’s eye view. Without the chance to wrap each new sight up in a single title or latin classification I had to expand the process of naming out into a sprawling map of sights and sensations.

Butterflies: The ones that came in clouds of yellow. The one whose wings were fringed in black, whose centre was the pale yellow of sherbet fading into lightest mint. The one all in grey, whose wings looked like old silk, dies tidemarked into seams the colour of dark clay with bleached patches that glowed when the sun shone through. The one, heard before seen; the huge blue wings as large as a bird, shifting the air in whispers on its path through the mid heights of the understorey.

Leafs: The ones with waxy fronds that shone emerald in the gloaming. The ones whose soft, rubbery skin was marked out in geometric veins of pearl white sitting in a deep blue grey mosaic. The ones whose arteries formed river routes for a bright apple green to seep into estuaries of darker colour; the blending of the hues mixing like dye into water.

In the absence of a language with which to name at a distance I had to draw on a more intimate vocabulary. Describing to yourself what you encounter in this way means drawing on details. It means gathering together all the subtleties to form a coherent naming that can measure up to that single clear word you don’t yet know. If knowing the title of what you see could be thought of as a column carved from a single piece of stone, then describing in this other way would be a tower formed in the small bricks of every detail seen. And not just seen but heared, smelled, touched. The language of the forest calls on all the senses. It is so much more than only what is seen.

When we are very young, before we become preoccupied with with being told the handy labels of things, before our focus shifts to trading in shared taxonomies, before we are initiated into the language of words, we are already fluent in the language of the senses. We move through the world touching, listening, tasting; getting close enough to sniff, lick and stroke. Anyone who has walked with a two-year-old knows the difference between the degree of attention an adult will give to each object, animal and plant encountered and the reverence and curiousity a toddler is prepared to offer, step after diligent step. A toddler’s attention might be sporadic but so too is it non-judgmental; a muddy puddle as fascinating as something much shinier and more novel from an adult’s point of view. All is sensory. All holds the capacity to be sensational.

For me, there was something about finding myself in a sea of things I couldn’t name that returned me to that early state, not only of wide-eyed wonder but of a heightened way of sensing. Everything encountered felt personal. My unfurled map of sensations noted against each piece of the forest was mine and mine alone. Each time I looked closer there was more to see. The more I paid attention to the scents carried on each breath of forest air, the more complex the story of what was present and what had been appeared. The forest was a sea of contrails marking the passage of animals, people, earth, root and vine. I’m many years more than two, so I knew better than to learn through touching everything that crossed my path, but I could feel on my skin where the heat of the air rose and fell in pockets of cool shade and slices of warmth cutting through the foliage. And the more I noticed around me the more I noticed within me too.

Each step up through the vertiginous stairway of the hillside was a bodily effort. Raise your arms up, place the tip of the stick you hold in damp hands to a crevice, one foot beside it, push with the other, hauling your body upwards, find the next step. Over and over till the top is reached. It could be named Breathlessness. Tiredness. Heat. Pain. For me it was all of those. But alongside the discomfort lay quiet little pockets of pleasure. The bright zing of sensation where the movement of air met the sweat on the nape of my neck. The play between envelopment and resistance that came with each delicious footstep placed in the thick, buttery mud. The sweet exchange of hot out-breath for a new taste of the forest on each inhalation, like a glass of cool spring water. In this state of heightened sensing, like the wide-eyed toddler, everything seemed sensational. Both the pleasure and the pain. Robbed of its usual headline-grabbing power, the discomfort and exhaustion I was feeling became a curiousity, something that dwelt alongside pleasure in the ecosystem of me in that moment, perhaps even living symbiotically with it. I felt the cool, springwater breath trickle through my body, seeking out the aching joints; soothing the burning muscles.

I didn’t come to this experience as an unobservant person. I’d been inducted from when I really was a toddler into the practice of noticing by artist parents for whom every walk in the beautiful landscapes we lived in was a cause for exclamation on the colours, textures, sounds and scents around us. But being in the rainforest did something to me that has lasted long beyond my time in the place I had no words for.

We often implore people to ‘return to their senses’ but like so many turns of phrase we forget to pay attention to what is really contained within those well-worn arrangements of words. A return to my senses is what the rainforest gave me; a kind of reset. A return to a sense of justification in allowing time to notice what my senses present to me, step after diligent step. A return to greater fluency in the language of senses and less attachment to rushing in to describe what I experience with the language of words. Now I have perhaps, a little more patience in processing what I encounter and a little less eagerness to label it immediately. And I’ve found quite often, that if I pay close attention, that slowly unfurled map of sensations often tells a very different story to the one clear word I might have reached for before.

The human world we live in doesn’t hold much patience for this way of being. Like a harried parent it wants to keep us moving along; just a quick look, because we have places to go. And the places to get to can often only be reached if we turn a blind eye (and ear and nose and tongue) to the sensations passed along the way. The slow, patient fascination necessary to construct an honest account of the world is a luxury we only afford to the very young and sometimes not even to them.

It might sound like a small thing to pay attention to your senses. How does noticing what your skin is telling you or listening to vocabulary of sound around you make a difference to you or anyone else? But these are your building blocks. These are the bricks with which you construct your reality; of the world around you and that ecosystem of thoughts and feelings that lie within you. Learning the language of the senses is a gateway to conversations with the world you live in, not through the screen of names, abbreviations and labels we share as shorthand but directly, as if through an open door. It can be transformational. It can make the world sensational. It can make you more honest. Perhaps it might help you build new stories of what you are. And in a world that wants to hurry you along to destinations we might be better avoiding….it might just be an act of radical resistance.