Into The Wonder
‘Tenalach’ (pron. Ten-a-lok), Landscape and Kairos time.
Tenalach and Landscape
Tenalach n.Irish - The relationship one has with the land and air and water, a deep connection that makes you one with nature
When we go out alone into nature, into the wildness of the landscape, it has the beautiful ability to bring us into contact with a sense of space. Space to be, to breathe, to become curious, to think, to be in touch with the interiority of ourselves. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty had a lovely phrase for this - “the world and I are within one another.” That is what tenalach also means.
In the busyness of our day-to-day lives, we often feel stressed, overwhelmed, and disconnected from any sense of space or connection with ourselves. When we go to the mountains, to the fields, to the wide-open spaces of landscape, the feeling is akin to returning home, to a sense of self that has been lost or forgotten. We are within ourselves again and ‘within one another’ with nature.
Landscape and Embodiment
Poll na Brón, Poulnabrone, Co Clare, Ireland
Landscape connects us to the present moment, the here and now ground at our feet, to the breath as it comes in and out of the body. It also connects us to the ancient past, to everyone who ever walked this piece of the earth before us.
Ireland has a beautiful sense of that. The Irish landscape is alive with memory. Not only in the ruins of old houses but also in the bog land, stone fields, Cairns and Dolmens, and the Neolithic and bronze age remnants of our first farmers. These markers on the landscape bear testimony to our ancestors, to their appreciation of landscape and the natural world, and their respect for the need for ritual to make meaning of life and the human condition. They lived close to the earth. They were ‘within one another’. Today, in the Irish landscape, we can connect to that. We can reach out and touch it and feel, in turn, a connection to them - stretching back thousands of years.
Kairos ‘Deep Time’ and Deepening the Senses Programs
A slow unfolding happens for us when we go to nature. It is a slow dropping down into the body, into a place of presence and ease. We drop into the sensing body, into what the ancient mystics and philosophers called ‘kairos’ time. Which is the Greek word for ‘deep time.’ This time is distinct from Chronos time, which means chronological ‘clock’ time. The Irish philosopher John Moriarty called it ‘dream time’.
This Kairos time is a beautiful in-between time that speaks of metaphor, symbol, dreams, myth, and imagination. It is stepping out of the rational concrete world and into the symbolic life. It is the world that my Deepening the Senses Workshops, particularly the deep dive Intensives, explore and cultivate connection with.
To have a space to come into the inner world of the soul and how that feels in the body. To return to a place of wonder and mystery. For centuries, we have, as a human species, tried to make sense of the darkness. We have attempted to give life meaning through ritual and reflection. In this Kairos world, we become curious about the images that arise from this ‘deep time’ place and see how that can guide us in the outer world and our daily lives.
Inner World
In our inner worlds is a wilderness, an unexplored territory that is deep, unknown, and mysterious. The wild physical landscapes in our outer world invite us to let go of cares and duty and come into presence and being. We glimpse at our transitory moments of inner life in the shifting light that crosses the faces of the mountains and the stone fields when we hear the language of stream and sea, the call of blackbird and curlew, and the smell of the changing seasons. We feel a connection and a stirring deep within us.
Landscape gives us another wonderful gift, too. Long after we leave it, it stays, like an echo or a ripple, in the psyche and soul. There are places we visited many years ago that are still alive within us because they touched us so deeply.
This is a gift that passes down the generations, too, and across cultures. I recently wrote a post on social media that speaks to the need within us all for a sense of belonging and a sense of place and how connecting to the past and knowing who our ancestors are helps build that inner anchor. So many people from all over the world commented on the meaning that held for them. The yearning to know the tribes we belong to, their history and landscapes; we dream of reconnecting with that, and how having a relationship with the land, as indigenous communities have often spoken about, is vital as an anchor for all of us.
Into the Wonder
When I go out into the darkness and look up at the night sky, I am reminded of how everyone who has ever lived has known the same moon and stars. I wonder what they made of the night sky, what it must have been like to look up, with no artificial light, at the wonder of it and the expanse of the universe above their heads. It’s such a beautiful gift to ourselves to go out under the night sky and look up, to see the vast expanse and the wonder.
When you are next out in nature and landscape, notice what it feels like in the body. What does looking up at the night sky, moon, and stars feel like? Notice what dreams may come that night when you go to sleep and what our unconscious world has to say about that.
The Jungian Analyst Marion Woodman once said that you cannot walk on American soil and not dream about the Indians. The inner and outer worlds are connected. Perhaps the invitation for us is to be open and curious, to breathe into it, and to step into the wonder.
This beautiful William Stafford poem is one of my favorites. I wanted to share it with you because it speaks to that very place within us all.
One Summer evening in the world, the air
warm, I walked from home
out into a field, open, alone -
grass and hills. And there I lay down
with my face pressed easily deep into the grass,
to smell the green smell, and feel with my hands
the firm steady earth. Only an hour
I stayed there on the ground, breathing slow breaths,
for just being here, for the lives around me,
for childhood, for all that has been, and for now.
Grá agus beannacht
Eileen
References:
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945) Phenomenology of Perception - Routledge.
Stafford, William (2014) Ask Me - 100 Essential Poems. Greywolf Press.
