(This is a lightly edited crosspost from my Substack.)

 

I told the forest: I want to know you. I want to know you as an animal does, living with you, in you, as you.

I’m learning the feeling of instinct. I first recognized it during natural childbirth, the way I felt pulled by something deep inside me to move in complex ways I’d never practiced, never even heard of before.

All month I’ve listened to the acorns falling at night, and in the morning I’ve gathered them from the ground, picking through the fallen leaves and sticks, sorting the good ones from the underripe, molded, cracked, or weevil-eaten. Every afternoon, I’ve sat on the ground cracking acorns with a hammer against a flat stone. I tried a modern nutcracker, but the hammer is much better.

And I’ve felt the instincts for cracking nuts and sorting the shells from the meat. What does instinct feel like?

I suspect it’s a confluence. A harmony. I suspect I’m always driven by instinct, but there are situations for which I’m very well adapted, and situations for which I’m not. The latter is perhaps most of modern life.

There’s something sacred about situations for which instinct is enough.

How does attention know where to go?

It seems a zillion flying insects of some species I can’t ID have come out all at once, presumably to mate. The angle of the sun is low, so as I sit on my porch and look up the hill, it illuminates all these floating motes. I keep wanting to watch them, instead of watching my pen and notebook.

It’s also the sounds. A woodpecker knocking on a dead oak branch nearby. A spotted towhee scuffling in the bushes. Finches gathered around the feeder, chittering. A flock of geese in the distance. Nuthatches echoing. A raven croaking from high in a ponderosa. The creek.

I want to be here and take it in, and there’s a rightness to it. A this is how things should be. A feeling of alignment with evolutionary adaptation, maybe.

When I looked up after gathering acorns for a while, I was surprised to see the wood pile a few yards away from where I’d expected it to be. I’d lost track of my location, wandering in a way that’s driven more by the acorns than by deliberate navigation.

This is the foraging trance. I do not need my prefrontal cortex to forage for acorns. It down regulates, and when it kicks back on later, I notice a discontinuity.

I notice that fire is entrancing, especially at night. As I watch it, something in my mind relaxes, and my thoughts drift and wander, almost as they do while I’m falling asleep.

There’s such an enoughness to watching the fire. I’m perfectly content to gaze at it and do nothing else for half an hour at a time.

What does beauty have to do with instinct?

I drove Cadence to school today. Mist was rising from the ground, from ponds, pouring out of the trunks of trees. Everything glowed golden or glittered in the sunlight.

And what about ugliness, revulsion, disgust?

I cracked open a rotten acorn, saw the brown and black patterns in the meat inside, made a disgusted face, and dropped it in the discard bowl as quickly as I could. I didn’t even want to keep touching it for a moment longer than necessary.

Was there “rightness”, of the sort I’ve observed before? Maybe. In the certainty, in knowing so clearly and immediately that this acorn doesn’t belong among the food. I wanted to “get it away from me”.

Was there trance? Yes, in the automaticness of it. I was like an automaton as my hands moved to the discard bowl.

The urge to toss little things into the fire to see what happens. I tossed in a potato chip. It went black around the edges and sizzled. Puffed up a bit.

What is the relationship between “instinct” and “subconscious”? Is something instinctual just ‘cause I can’t see the origin of the thought? Surely not, as that’s true of all thoughts. But there is some kind of feeling of a spirit reaching out from the deep past to make me wonder how a potato chip behaves in a fire.

The feeling of being on a team during the performance at the end of songwriting class. Elation, camaraderie, a united front. There was a lot of “us/them,” but not in an adversarial way. The us-ness of the class just felt a lot stronger with outsiders there to watch.

Why does it feel instinctual? Something about not having anticipated the feeling, I think. And not having aimed for it. A large feeling emerged from the context, and there was a great rightness, as with the morning light on insects, or the feeling of gathering acorns.

After a tense session of couples therapy, I felt… something. Being physically apart from my spouse felt bad. I wanted reassurance of our bond in the form of hugs and affection. It felt mammalian. It reminds me of two mammals in a burrow sleeping beside each other, cuddled up together.

“I didn’t realize how overstimulated I’ve been,” said the woman sitting across from me in the dining car. We were somewhere in Midwest, on day three of our trip, and the train had no wifi. No cell service either, much of the time.

She was a preschool teacher, born and raised near the San Francisco Bay. “I had no idea,” she said. “But then we started moving. Phone away, laptop closed, and I was looking out the window. Just… looking.”

I’d brought All Of Us, a collection of poetry by Raymond Carver, thinking that perhaps four strangers forced to sit together would do so in awkward silence. Instead, someone picked up my book, opened it at random, and started reading aloud.

We spent our lunch reading poetry to each other.

How did they know to pick up my book? I wonder if they still would have done it, if not for the dropping away of all the usual noise. 

Instinct seems quiet, most of the time. There is so much that is louder.