To express the inexpressible: isn’t that the business of life?
The headache that hangs like a cloud but can’t be identified by origin, shape or consequence; the life that didn’t quite hold all the right things can hardly be conveyed in totality from one human to another. What to say of the panicky throb in the chest when the traffic swerves too close?
Nor should the verbally unreachable be presumed to be all negative, though it seems to me sometimes that only poets inhabit places of verbal grandeur. Huge three-dimensional experiences make their way through the tiny aperture of the mouth or the ball of a pen or clackety keyboard. Whether with skill or floundering, we seek to express what we experience. The lake lost in lupines is wrapped in mists of nostalgia and captured like a wild bird, conveyed from one being’s perceptions to the experience of the other person. The shaded rocks that marched through time without losing a single sunbeam through the late, late dusk; the love for life tugged from the belly by the baby’s smile–how is the transfer of these experiences possible? Nothing short of a miracle takes place when I take in someone else’s experience verbally.
Near the beginning of therapy school our graduate class collectively pulled a medicine card and became the Grouse cohort. Some were confused. Some were disappointed. Others were wondering, appreciative and transported. Regardless the reactions, over time, collectively we came to take on this bird’s characteristics. The magnificent family of western ground birds (including sage, sooty, blue, dusky, ruffled grouse) can be viewed most easily on YouTube, the males puffing out magnificent chests, feathery white equivalents of the pecs on a body builder, and making sounds that vary, everything from the low hoo hoo of an owl to the puff of a train. I have never until today seen one strutting its stuff in the wild. Nor did we as a cohort, though we came to put on displays, verbal and visual. We learned to make the “right” kind of sounds in therapy. We puffed with indignity. We modeled confidence and equipoise. We flapped our emerging new wings. Over time we came to identify with the grouse in many ways.
On the edge of forest in Wyoming’s Tetons a grouse was finally willing to show itself to me. He threw out his chest and from his throat and came a low, low vibration, part hooty blowing, part bass singer’s lingering vibrato, part single drum. He seemed to appreciate his audience: me, my friends and two native Americans. The older man stood quietly maintaining an obvious connection to the grouse that was equal in expansive quality if not showing the same audacious actions. I watched them both and sometimes I stood beween them feeling the energy of each presence, sending and receiving the breath of life. The sensations passing through me signalled the inexpressible. An ecstatic moment. I stood between two experiences very different from my own and allowed my own presence to float outside of my body. I couldn’t begin to convey this experience to another human being, precisely because it was beyond shared reference points. But that is what we do with the ecstatic we try to capture it like a bird and when we fail we grouse about it.
