Centrepiece

Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet

A moose skull | Photo credit Adrian Scott

Centrepiece
The eye sockets of this moose head
were once liquid and full of sight.
That nasal cavity could smell
a wolf
on the wind from a great distance away.
Those teeth, redundant now,
ground the grass for all its life,
digesting green sunlight.
Those antlers butted and battered others
to win for itself a mate
and extend the strands of its DNA.
When all that is gone,
this is what is left:
the hard reality of skeleton.
The life was in the marrow of these bones,
fed by the blood, the sap of being.
If he were to stand up
into his old life in this room
full of people,
we would all pay attention.
He is a relic now;
but we are not.
Let’s pay attention to that.

—This poem and Arizona Dreaming are dedicated to the time I
spent with men from Illuman in Oracle, Arizona, USA.

This photo of the moose skull was taken in April 2017 - I was attending a leadership retreat for an organisation I was part of at the time called Illuman. It stemmed from the work of Father Richard Rohr with men that I had been involved in since 2002. We were in a place in Arizona with the resonant name of Oracle. We were being trained in the Way of Council with a couple of facilitators from an organisation called the Center for Council now called Beyond Us and Them . If you want to know more about this transforming way of communicating then read The Way of Council by Jack Zimmerman and Gigi Coyle.

Illuman leaders practicing council | Photo Credit Adrian Scott

The four rules of council are these.

Listen from the Heart

Speak from the Heart

Be Spontaneous

Be Lean of Speech

The process is governed by a speaking stick that is passed around the circle in a variety of ways. When you have the stick in your hand the floor is yours, you cannot be interrupted, but you also commit to practice the four rules. It sounds laborious and one wonders how decisions will be made. Let me say that it is almost like alchemy, in fact it is alchemy in the way things emerge and become clear. I hosted a men’s circle at the house we have just moved from for around fifteen years. Every month on the dark of the moon we would make a fire to stand and hold silence around. In the fire would be stones that heated up gradually. Then we would carry them into in our garden room and place them in a bowl. Having place incense on them and then water the room filled with fragrance and steam.

The room where it happened | Photo Credit Adrian Scott

After a period of drumming the speaking stick went round - no theme just speaking from the heart. I was always amazed at the way a theme would emerge and in two rounds we would inhabit each other’s stories and lives. The nights we spent there have never left me.

So in Oracle we engaged in three days of this intense listening and sharing and during one of the silences the poem above rose up in me. I was reflecting on our connection with the animal world - or rather our lack of it. The way our ancestors were so much more in touch and wedded to their animal natures and how the four legged world informed their myths and stories. The poem was a demand coming from my unconscious to wake up again to that part of my ancestral inheritance. If you get the chance watch the wonderful BBC show Human it really reveals where we came from and I took it as an encouragement to connect more with the natural world that we should never think of ourselves as above or superior to.

The thought that this creature whose skull we had chosen as a centrepiece might reanimate among us would certainly have woken us up. I took it as a call to wake up to my animal self. As David Abram the writer of a wonderful book called Becoming Animal says:

“Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.”

Our Men’s Circle fire | Photo Credit Adrian Scott