The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.
– Jennifer Wenzel, How to Read for Oil
The identification of the harmony between the particulate and the planetary is a necessary condition for meaningful life in the Anthropocene.
– Malcolm Sen, “Godhuli,” An Ecotopian Lexicon
I.
Take note of this particulate physical space, this open patch of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, this pocket of air between elm and spruce, this perceived emptiness not higher than five feet above moss growth on the log below.
It all still rings with prior sound.
II.
At the level of a supersonic, subterranean soundscape, this particulate physical space still contains the revving chainsaw, the tearing scream of vascular cambium and core, the thundering collapse of spruce and all below it—fern, recluse web, pill bugs, and unhatched eggs on the precipice of tadpole transformation.
This space still holds the sound of men cheering, filling the particles with applause, whistling, and masculine thunder: the sort of celebration infantry or battery would make in wartime, proving the cheering men had been, in fact, at war with the woods.
This space is still ringing, still ringing. So, the war continues at the supersonic level.
III.
Today, this small sliver of deciduous forest exists better balanced in its space, undergoing processes of restoration.
Worms braid their bodies around arrow quivers buried below decades of soil, leaves, and dung.
Pika dig trenches among bullet shells and brass buttons.
Calibrated by densities and buoyancies, dew bubbles on grass growing from the nutrient bodies of subterranean colonizers and Chinook.
Two chickadees situate their place on an evergreen branch above, using their intimate dialectic to find proper parallel space.
IV.
A faint woosh begins to enter the soundscape of this particular space.
It could be Pacific wind, or a car driving through the nearby main road.
Then—the crackle of leaves.
An approaching white boy.
V.
The white boy is still best understood as an object positioned in relation to prior things; he is, principally and in principle, a son.
The son has been given things: a positionality in the world, a situation of history and environment, and a name.
He has been named Westley: the white boy, the son, the human animal.
The son, Westley, is without his parents at this moment, but he still moves through the world hearing voices of his mother, father, sisters, and brothers in hesitating steps, in the surprising splat his boots make in humming puddles below, in an impending call to return to civil society, to the socio-political construct of The Town.
VI.
According to the logic of family, he should not be here.
But Earth knows a well-intentioned heart and feels Westley’s nature; Earth knows Westley’s heart by the way he stabilizes himself, propping his skeleton in relation to the elm beside him; Earth knows by the way Westley’s eyes contain, absorb, and reflect the lightly clouded sun; Earth knows by the synthesis of molecules Westley contains in his backpack and in his clothing and in his skin.
But Earth also sees the son is still positioned in relationship to the human world that made him—a descendant of a way of thinking that isn’t compatible with Earth.
His good heart desires better; still, his heart is father-made.
VII.
The son does not see the entire evolutionary past, present, and future of this small sliver of open space he approaches.
The son does not know the history of this space—and attempting to understand the history, from the son’s inherited vantage point, would contain rigid and false epistemologies.
The son would be interpreting this history and thinking in terms settled by the supposedly-early, supposedly-original settlers here in these Oregon woods; of video games with cowhide wagon coverings, bonnets, and enslaved brown horses rendered in blue light pixels; of explorers named Lewis and Clark pictured in lightly-used textbooks; of a Lemhi Shoshone woman named Sacagawea who is now carved into the dollar coin.
VIII.
Earth does not know the coin or pixel but does not war with the coin and pixel.
Earth does, however, know the balance of particles grown in procreation with the Sun’s germinating light and vitamins and particles from outer space.
And so Westley, the son, though gentle and reverent, is seeing the mere, momentary sunlight burrowing through cracks in deciduous foliage, highlighting the physical space where sound particles pass over the spruce log.
He is still in the process of absorbing what Earth is offering: a revision of sight, thought, and relation.
IX.
And Westley, the son, is still best thought of as the son, because to name him the son is to suppose things have preceded him, but nothing has yet come after him; the son has been a creation, not creator; the son is the trickle-down effect of the water pooling in the guttural caverns of divots in tree bark, but not the raindrop himself; the son is the spruce, murdered and descending into its mossy, prostrate, oblong, germinating future, but not the saw or human behind the saw; and so, the son is very much like the wind around him, which came from Pacific jet streams and meteorological habits; from the dictated physical laws of moon and sun; from a factory steam roller in the other hemisphere; from the tilt along polarities; and this son, like the wind, found himself in this moment isolated, resting in the momentary speckle and sparkle of a space consumed by one particle: a wolf’s howl followed by gentle wind, offering Earth’s own imitation.
And now: the collection of howls.
The supersonic particles of the wolfpack howl enter into this particular particle space above the spruce log, traversing the nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, nestling into Westley’s open ears.
X.
Earth has been habitat for such communications and interactions before—and Earth feels a momentary shift in the stabilization of this deciduous sliver.
The interim pacing between chickadee calls quickens.
All the birds of the forest interpret and translate the howl and chickadee call: the wren, robin, finch, and awakened owl.
Ferns, moss, logs, bark, branch, and leaf refract the howl with their presence, with their own structural compositions at the level of both the cellular and skeletal.
The moment of a wolf’s howl, though, is organic to Earth—and hardly an unwelcome destabilization. Earth embraces howls—Earth, collectively, and the particular physical space here, above the spruce log, with its particular balance of particles: nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
This space, here, had lost all howls for a time.
Wolves and their howls had been lost to the saw, rifle, and American home, once with a range including Apache plains of wheat, Wampanoag wood, the Jamestown settlement, plantations in the Georgia colony, mesas of Hopi life, in the communities preceding the Mayan Empire.
And then: guns, games, extinctions.
XI.
Earth feels Westley’s shifting composition because, through this encounter with the wolfpack, Westley is confronted with an evolutionary opportunity.
Westley feels his body react to the howl before his brain can process; and, in this feeling, Westley begins to understand what it feels like to be nature, to find knowledge and meaning through the body first, before the mind.
And this mind, still habituated by what has come prior, is beginning to sense a conditioned fear.
He now understands himself as the prey of an animal; the less equipped soldier in the battle; the lab subject squealing under the gloved fingertips and technological needling of a science experiment.
Only the son, who descended from those supposedly-original, supposedly-early settlers would understand the relationship between human and wolf, in this moment, as a confrontation between predator and prey.
But Earth is not experimenting or encouraging confrontation or warring.
Simply: two radiant forms of life are being.
XII.
Earth offers Westley respite and release in the form of the tree beside him: an oak partly leafed, blanketed with bristle bark, intended to be held.
Westley touches the oak with his palm to receive an offering and begins to undergo shifting—reorienting his way of thinking toward Earth, suppressing what has been socialized into his muscular, vascular, and skeletal systems.
Cool, Westley whispers, using the language of Earth—and this soft, intuitive expression of mood enters the particular physical space above the fallen spruce log.
And while the log could, understandably, fear all human presence for the rest of its time as organic physical matter, it can distinguish between threat and co-operator.
So, the log and its surrounding space remains cool, collected, and collective as the howling begins again.
Another wolf replies, and an orchestral intuition among Earth elements emerges more nuanced and sophisticated than Westley’s ears and mind can process.
XIII.
Earth feels Westley attune his ears toward the discourse of wolves, and Westley picks up on the slightest distinctions among calls—varied duration, distinctive inflections, and the lingering pauses which suspend the dialogue in temporary stasis: in the possibility of impending breath.
Westley begins to engage these nuances, hearing variation in the initial call of the wolf, at the moment of pursed wolf lips; before the sound becomes a howl, there exists a short fragment of time when the emitted noise from the wolf could not be discerned as a howl.
Instead, the howl is an attempt, or a potentiality, or an introduction.
XIV.
Understanding and knowing this new understanding of the wolf call, Westley, the son, feels himself moving both toward and away—toward his own wolf call and away from the language fed to him.
The son has learned all sorts of words in other ways: trap, millimeter, barrel, revolver, powder, dust, carcass, silence.
These words are his father’s, the words Westley will soon see as destructive, evil, and masculine when he exists among Earth and away from worlds which seemingly necessitate the words—the words of militarization, the words of perceived revolution, the words of freedom to do what is pleased without reproach, the words a snake would hiss if tread upon.
This Oregon runs blood-red, through Red River in town—named for the Chinook, Tillamook, and Shoshone blood which ran through it upon genocide and the perception of victory it represented.
This red is the deep red of perceived freedom the son has been educated to believe in, but he feels more deeply human and self and Westley when among other palettes: browns, emeralds, blues, and clays.
Westley knows from his time on Earth and from the radiance of simple observation: Red River is not red any longer.
Its crystalline opacity reflects dark sheens of black shadows crafted by trees, branches, fractals of leaves, needles, and canopy.
And, Westley knows, Red River was never likely red—as the deep red of blood turns mahogany-maroon-brown upon its exposure to nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
XV.
Westley knows more than he thinks he knows; and the son thinks he knows little because knowledge has been framed in certain, inflexible terms.
Quizzes and tests create knowledge, he has been led to believe, and not walks in the woods.
Earth knows better and does what Earth does to keep Westley in nature—which is, simply, to be, knowing to be is all that is necessary.
As the howls cease, Earth feels the son loosen his shoulders, unlock his knees, and rest back into the meter, tenor, and mood of the woods.
XVI.
The wolves, the son feels, are probably in motion now.
The son wonders where the wolves are off to—whether approaching or distancing, whether ambling or pacing, whether feeding or playing.
And so, Westley considers this spruce log, here, laying in front of him, considers how the log became a log and not a tree—whether it had been murdered by human machinery or fallen through natural processes like lightening electric, trunk decay, or carnivore hit.
Earth feels the balance of Westley’s action: to sit on the log and fill the particular physical space of particles—nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide—that inhabits space above the log.
XVII.
As Westley enters this space, he feels a deep communion with air—for what he is breathing and what he is not breathing; for a perceived journey and epoch of elemental construction; for what he will provide it—his own breath, speech, and gaze.
At this moment, Westley begins to feel in his body the sensation of being—resting and living and feeling and touching and tasting and speaking into the particular particle makeup of this space.
Cool, he says, using the language of nature.
He feels his words undulating and propelling through each wave of sound and fragment of matter here.
He feels his words as propulsive particles, bursting through space and time until hitting the nearest flora and reverberating back into his mouth—the mouth and ears and breath that had originated the sound of cool in the air.
He feels an acceptance and rejection in the makeup of his anatomy—of the anatomical components and the tinge of a nervous system in midst of realization.
XVIII.
Westley can give language to what he is rejecting: bullshit and Xbox; pixelation and artificial fixation; exploration for the sake of detonation; destruction and compulsion; the tale of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea.
He is not rejecting his own body—which is alive, whole, and living like the woods—but he is rejecting what his body represents and what ingrained epistemologies are found in such a body due to factors of society, nation, and father.
And his father, too, is what Westley rejects; and that he is a son, Westley rejects, presupposing a belonging to the epistemology of the prior.
What came prior still exists; and it is precisely because it still exists that Westley is able to reject it.
Most of all, what Westley finds most remarkable is the manner, medium, and mood through which his rejection comes: in the form of his breath, vision, and mind.
XIX.
While Westley has language to express his rejection, Westley cannot quite express what he has accepted.
This is, in part, because he has been given a gift-weapon: English.
This word, English, the son understands as both a parliamentary monarchy used to claim ownership of nearly the entire world and, also, as a language meant to organize, institutionalize, categorize, weaponize against the way of intuition present in the sound of a wolf or wind howl.
This language the son has been gifted and weaponized to use moves from the left to the right, like troops marching on the plains.
The son is beginning to understand and give language to what he accepts using the gift-weapon he has been endowed.
XX.
Westley realizes: Earth does not exist within this linear and temporal restriction—like the motion of the march, the motion of English, the motion of father to son.
Earth exists within the cycle, spiral, radial, honeycomb, shiver, rainfall, dance, gallop, lightning, howl, trickle, and flowage.
Earth is patterning, repeating, pausing.
Earth is synergy, energy, lethargy.
Earth is explosion, emulsion, erosion.
Westley feels these wood ways in his body.
And these new understandings—these wood ways—inform Westley’s awed vision of the wolfpack, whose erected ears and bouncing fur begin to crest over the ferns at the edge of Westley’s periphery.
XXI.
Earth is full of moments like this between Westley and the wolfpack.
Earth is full of such confluence: the convergence of a sunrise—the night world below and the yellowing sky above meeting in the shape and lineation of our oriented horizon; the wave, meeting beach to erode sand again; the process of pollination, in the fragmentary merging of animal and plant when the bee engages flower bud; in a trickling icicle, transfiguring from solid into liquid; in the moment of a lit fire, from rubbing elements into a fluttering lifeforce; in ecotones—the space of transition between biological communities where merging, melding, and blending create blossoming connectivity for wading life forms to find ecological bindings.
The wolfpack, a community of four wolves moving with collective intuitive energies, is crafting another such converging space now, as if it were a wave, a sunrise, a bee, an icicle, an emergent fire.
The wolfpack community is attuning its nostrils to smell the scent of Westley and move in his direction.
Westley understands the directional motion of the wolfpack by the way the wolf ears are facing, and how they grow with each bouncing wolf step.
He sees the wolves’ ears crest higher and higher above the horizon of fern, moss, lichen, logs, and shrub until the dark irises of the wolves emerge like the sun at the moment of sunrise—and these eyes, these blackened suns radiate their vision of Earth and this particular particle makeup of Earth, containing nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, the son, and the remnants of a reverberating sound: cool.
XXII.
One wolf, and his contained, collective vision of the entire wolfpack, fuses his vision along Westley’s line of sight.
These life forms are linking, blending, morphing, transitioning.
There is alchemy here in vision, a different sort of alchemy than the compositional makeup of this particular physical space, which contains elements (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide) and sound (the son’s breath, the faint reverberations of all previous sound).
The space now contains a passing vision; it contains both the wolves’ visions, passing through the space and holding the space in vision, for the briefest of moments, as well as Westley’s vision, which appears fixed, yes, but also in the process of deep evolution and adaptation.
Westley, in this quality of holding and progressing, is more Earth than he has ever been before.
The wolfpack and Westley pause in their emergent evolution of thought, knowledge, and ways of the woods.
XXIII.
Earth reaches moments of subtle evolution, so subtle they appear to be in suspension—and in the moment of suspension, abstract ideas like possibility are also contained in particular physical spaces.
Earth contains elements and lives that must make do with this suspension—which is evolution moving so cosmically slow it appears as a complete, resolute pause.
Earth granted these lives and any life the combination of free will and fate-by-composition, fate-by-species, fate-by-history (history being merely a murky, narrative, human way to understand intuitive evolution and adaptation)—and it is through this combination of agency and animal that the future evolves without Earth’s direct manipulation.
This is one of Earth’s greatest mysteries: how Earth crafted, intuitively, this balance of agency, animal, and fate; how it had crafted such balance in the way life had been created—however it had been created—humans have attempted to understand, without walking among the woods toward a discovery by feel and intuition.
If they had, they would experience what Westley is experiencing: to live while habitation underwent its cycling processes, moving non-linearly like a cloud and patterned like honeycombs.
XXIV.
The wolfpack and Westley are each other—because they are both Earth.
Both are attuned to their natural processes—a synergy of physicality and cognition—and both have fully entered an era of their relationality which, in the lifespan of an ant, is an enormity; or, in the lifespan of the moss below, is a fraction so small it could be rendered negligible—that is, if the moss were not so attuned to engaging the Earth around it.
Earth is entering itself—entering Westley’s body and branching intravenously into Earth’s creature until Earth has remade the son back into its Earth-self.
XXV.
The son, in this moment of accord with the wolf, is resisting everything he thinks he knows and allowing the Earths to branch into him.
The son has been taught by example, multimedia, and imitation to pet animals of the canine variety—but Westley feels, in his bones, how wrong this gesture is in this moment and how it would demean or incite.
Neither should he run, he feels, as there is not a definitive threat posed in the aura or temperament or positioning of the wolfpack.
There is no way Westley would know this truth—to not pet or run from this wolfpack—via the typical modes of knowledge acquisition in education systems, social media systems, or familial systems.
Rather, Westley is tapping into an understanding embedded within the human body that he rarely uses and has been conditioned to reject.
XXVI.
The son begins to tap into revelation: human anatomy contains systems and epistemologies of the animal kingdom, still.
The animal within the human is rejected due to constructs of society, nation, and man: logics, technologies, the ad-hominem, the advertisement, and walls.
But Westley, here, regains a sense of his animal being, understanding in his animal body that he must not pet or run from the wolfpack here—because the wolf is not a dog, as much as it may appear to be, and because a possibility is emerging that he would never want to run from.
XXVII.
Westley thinks outside instinct and logic, for just a moment, moving his mind to a different space: a memory, a brief recollection of his family’s hound at home—a mutated variation of this animal.
He does not know the history of hounds and their service to agriculture—but he doubts it is a good history.
There are few good histories here in home of settlers, guns, and colonial homes.
He wonders how the hound would behave in the wild, among the wolves, and imagines the whimper of his good boy back home, of the obedient animal, of the domesticated wolf—the dog—and returns to his body and this communion, here, with the wolfpack.
XXVIII.
Westley finds a new word to describe the gaze of the wolfpack: noticing.
He has been noticed, simply.
He has not been hunted or stalked or attacked; he has not been passed by or ignored or distanced.
Instead, this noticing is the simple act of seeing and absorbing intuitive bodily understanding.
Westley replies to being noticed with his own noticing and thinks of how he might begin to notice better, when he returns to his town—an ecotone itself, on the outskirts of Portland with close connectivity to both forest and city.
He might notice the grooves of wood constituting the cabins, colonials, bungalows, and Victorians; the languages of schoolyard and railway graffiti; the wild cats who approach front porches seeking milk for their young; the temperament and ethical stance of the white picket fences; the blurring of Earth tones, the cool blues and hot reds; the infinite understandings of particular physical spaces, of the particular matter and makeup of these spaces, like the one Westley is breathing into and looking into now, with nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and incalculable former and future breaths that will speak into this space.
XXIX.
Noticing does not always produce a product, because the ways of the woods are not industrial or colonial or capitalist.
And so, the wolves—having noticed—simultaneously sense each other’s desire to move east and notice again.
The wolfpack turns away from Westley and bounds deeper into the woods.
Westley is standing, leaning on his spruce.
Westley intuits his own expansive self.
Westley, the human, exits linear-temporal space, thinking forward toward what will become of him as dictated by his evolution, catalyzed by the wolfpack.
The human has learned—the first stage of adaptation.
Now comes the human’s great challenge—an undertaking the human believes and imagines the human will embody.
The human takes a deep breath into and with this particular physical space—inhaling and exhaling the space.
The human’s thinking begins to explode in the spirit of an origin story—a Big Bang event, to catalyze universes of being.
This explosion allows the human to see it all differently: soon, the human knows, the father will ask the human to come hunting with him—to turn deer to venison; soon, the human knows, friends will move to the city, where ecosystems have been obliterated by the grey repurposing of raw Earth materials; soon, the human knows, the market will require him to consume and purchase at the expense of workers in former British colonies; soon, the human knows, the Tillamook will speak and the state house won’t hear it; soon, the human knows, society will demand expansion—the widening of cities and towns and continued colonization; soon, the human knows, there will be a return to The Town and family and the prior ways of thinking, speaking, and being.
XXX.
Through gaps in the shrubbery and trees, the human sees a metallic twinkle—The Town, sparkling with colonized and repurposed trees, stone, and precious minerals.
The human must return to it all, to his socio-political form: Westley.
Inquiries flood his mind and float on synaptic arks.
The human breathes deeply and returns to the limited experience of the human timescape.
The human re-enters the physical realm of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.
The human returns as this particular human must: as Westley—still Westley, and Westley anew.
Larry Flynn is an environmental writer whose work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, West Branch, New Letters, The Greensboro Review, StoryQuarterly, and other magazines. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and UMass Amherst’s School of Earth & Sustainability, as well as fellowships from the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and Columbia University’s Teachers College. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he is an MFA candidate at UMass Amherst.
Header image generated by AI prompts using Adobe Photoshop.
