Instinct, intuition, holistic right-brain impressions, or just a gut feeling, we have a way of communicating with ourselves, a back channel that is far more direct and potent than what we get through our conscious language-based self-talk. Language is unable to engage the world as it is, raw, unfiltered, in the moment. Emotion is the communicative medium in this back channel. It would have to be. And, given the primacy of emotion, it is probably a mistake to call it a “back channel.” To think in this way is to submit to a civilized thought-form that inverts reality, one that elevates the deterministic, analytic, systematic, mechanical—the technological—above the organic, holistic, contextually-grounded.
I attended a powwow today, and it happened to me again. It happens every time. As the drums start and the dancers make their way into the arena for the Grand Entrance, the tears well up uncontrollably, and I am forced to hide behind my sunglasses so as not to make a public fool of myself.
Wolves affect me in this way too. Each time I visited Wolf Park, in Indiana, the tears came uninvited. And again, when I wrote about my Wolf Park experience. And again, when I edited what I wrote. And again, when I wrote and edited another piece about wolves. And even later, when I reread these pieces after they were published.
Indigenous Americans and wolves. There is an important message in this. What is it that my tears are telling me? I feel a kind of pressure here, as if I am supposed to do something, as if I have forgotten something vital, something that I need to remember before it’s too late. Too late for what? I listen intently, but my civilization-deafened ears are not equal to the task.
