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ONE AUTUMN'S DAY I STOPPED AND SAT

One day last winter when I was walking through the woods over at the cemetery I saw a chipmunk dart into a hollow tree.  I assumed that he had made his home in there, or had at any rate made the opening to his burrow inside the tree.  The next time I went into the woods I brought along a couple of nuts from a bag I'd bought for myself to eat and placed these inside the tree.  I checked the next day:  they were gone.  Throughout the winter, summer, and into the fall I continued to place nuts inside this tree; also I've spied out a number of other chipmunk holes in the cemetery and woods, and have often thrown a nut or two down these as well.  What began as a whim soon turned into something more:  it gradually became a way of "honoring" nature, my tokens of nuts taking on the connotations of a votive offering.  Slowly I became aware that I was seeking to formulate a more specific relationship with nature via my gifts to the chipmunks, though what expectations I held for that relationship I could not precisely say.  To answer this question I must look to the communicative aspect of my behavior and consider this in light of its creative potential:  it's as if some new intention has been taking shape because of my actions and through my actions, but without any foreknowledge or conscious design on my part.

I have read of Native Americans using animals as spirit guides, and know this to represent a manner of thinking common to many indigenous peoples before "civilization" destroyed their cultures.  Was this, then, what I was asking the chipmunk to be for me – a spiritual guide?  But why the chipmunk, of all possible creatures?  Perhaps it's because, like it, I am both nervous and nervy; quick witted, but also temperamental.  At any rate, I began to feel that a kind of affinity existed between us, and what the recognition of that affinity might portend no longer really mattered; all that mattered was the recognition itself.

Today, however, as I gazed into the eyes of a chipmunk, I understood that what I had thought was affinity was actually something much more.  That chipmunk, I perceived, was one of the gatekeepers to a knowledge that I myself am only beginning to be able to comprehend.

Often as I walk through the cemetery and, more particularly, the woods beyond, I am overtaken by what I can only describe as a form of internal orgasm.  Sometimes it occurs as a kind of tickling sensation in the brain, or it may be that I feel a tingling at the base of my spine.  Whichever it may be, it's potent enough to compel me to stop and undertake various spontaneously invented breathing exercises, meant to circulate the tingling sensation throughout my body, up along my spine towards my head, down my chest and through my belly to the base of my spine again.  My eyes roll upwards; my tongue curls automatically to the roof of my mouth.  Frequently I feel a tightening in the region of my solar plexus, and I have to squeeze and relax the muscles of my belly many times before the waves of energy subside.  Anything might cause this rush of energy:  once it occurred when, caught in the woods during a summer shower, I watched raindrops hitting the leaves of the trees and bushes around me.  Another time it happened when I found myself standing in the midst of a tangle of branches that had fallen to the ground, creating a sort of ring into which I'd stumbled.  Another time still it happened as I watched a single dead leaf on the branch of a tree being pulled and twisted by the wind.  At any moment I might see something that sets off this sudden discharge of energetic awareness.  It always catches me by surprise.

Also as I walk about I sometimes find my consciousness slipping free of all its guises.  That is to say, I find myself no longer defined by or limited to my thoughts and feelings; I have no specific center.  The thread of consciousness that attaches me to the contents of heart and mind has not been severed, but rather, elongated:  my awareness spins free of such constraints, floating like a balloon beyond them.  I am not, unfortunately, able to describe the experiential nature of this condition in more concrete terms.  But I would like to begin concentrating all my purpose towards the continuation of these experiences, if I can.  I think I have learned at least one basic premise necessary for its accomplishment:  it is a matter not so much of doing, but of practicing the art of not-doing.  This much at least I have understood of what the chipmunk has to teach me.