Luděk Čertík: In the Landscape

"I once asked a man at Anaktuvuk Pass what he did when he visited a new, unknown place. 'I listen,' he replied. And that's all: listening to what the land is telling us. Wandering through the land, my senses alert to what it has to say to me—long before I have uttered a single word myself. If one enters with such respect, one can trust that the land will open up to him."

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

Looking for life

When I was still living in my native České Budějovice, I had the opportunity to walk through the countryside in its immediate vicinity every day for a while. Like Thoreau in Concord, New England, whose books were an invaluable inspiration to me at the time, I could observe day after day how a particular section of the world changed over the course of the year – the arrivals and departures of migratory birds, the budding and flowering of plants, summer thunderstorms and showers, fogs at the border of summer and autumn, the changing colors of leaves, the first and last snow. I walked through pastures, crawled under fences, fought my way through reeds and brambles, lay down in uncut grass, hunched over in the pouring rain, waded through streams, wandered across the frozen surface of ponds, and on one occasion fell into a drainage ditch. 

I had no small goals. I longed to get to know a certain landscape so intimately that I would know when and where certain meadow flowers bloom, what they look and sound like at any given time of year, what shades and scents they have in any given month, when certain birds appear and what their local voices sound like –⁠ I even wished to (re)cognize individual birds, their habits. During those few consecrated months, I had the opportunity to get to know the landscape of the Budějovická basin and the nearby Blanský Forest really up close, in a way that is denied to a large part of people today. But it was not only about knowledge, it was also about deepening the bond, strengthening the relationship that I had known unconsciously in childhood, but in adulthood – like most people – had forgotten.

I was looking for life, for attachment. Who doesn't?

Luck

When you spend some time in the open countryside, just you and all the lively chatter of life that makes up it and that you can pay attention to, something enters you, something breaks through. It begins stealthily, perhaps with a wolf or a hummingbird visiting you in your sleep, messengers from another world. Or on a sunny afternoon you are overcome by a strange waking vision in which you see the surrounding countryside as a maned animal, covered with all life like a map and rushing silently by your side. After a while you get the feeling that the countryside, the earth, is talking to you. Not in the way that another person might talk to you. It is much more an incomprehensibly warm feeling or a premonition of some extraordinary presence, comparable to the presence of a loved one with whom you have an unspoken understanding: a presence ancient and vast, preceding all human categories.

When you find yourself far from the free landscape that has struck up a conversation with you, you start to miss it, just as we miss someone close to us among humans. By then you are firmly caught in its invisible webs, you can no longer be separated from it (and it from you). Anyone who wants to can see this as irrefutable proof that the world around us is not just an inert mass passively accepting our caresses or blows. That we do not stand apart.

One of the most fulfilling moments of happiness, comparable perhaps only to the birth of my son, I experience every time I return to České Budějovice by train from Prague and just before the city, a generous view opens up from the Lišovský Prah elevation of the horizontal Budějovice basin and the forested mountains on the horizon in various shades of bluish haze: Kleť, Kluk, Buglatu, Vysoká Běta, Chlum, Libín, Boubín, gentle, time-worn silhouettes. At that moment, I know that I am home again in the deepest sense: I feel complete again.

The more time you spend in the landscape, whether it's a few days' hike or a long-term stay in a remote location, the stronger the mutual resonance will be. The longer a person spends in the landscape, the more they are able to feel the landscape, to connect with its needs and distress. This sensitivity can be trained and honed in the same way that we learn to master playing a musical instrument.

Joy and pain

Entering into a close love affair with the landscape is a great joy, but of course also a considerable risk. It opens you up to the possibility of loss, a special form of grief that is difficult to assuage. Many places that I discovered during my wanderings and that became important to me for some reason (for example, because I saw a white-tailed eagle or a hoopoe there, heard the call of a male quail, admired a mother bird), did not have the same value for others and without warning ended up under a blanket of asphalt and concrete, transformed into parking lots, supermarkets, car showrooms, bypasses. Their fate was often decided many years in advance, which I had no idea about at the time. All I was left with was a deep sorrow that is difficult to explain to others. Thanks to similar experiences, I can connect with the pain and helplessness of anyone who has their land stolen from under their feet. The pain is the same, whether you come from the Most region or North America.

And then there's another thing. 

It is often the case that the dismal state of the world around us (as well as its small beauties) is revealed to us only when we walk through it, body to body, unless we just whizz through it by plane, train, car. It is not for nothing that the filmmaker and writer Werner Herzog, himself an experienced walker, claims that walking is, for better or worse, the best way to get to know the world.

Walking through immeasurable fields, chemically stained for decades, where in a few hours of walking you will see a single white-tailed deer, hear a single lark, is a frightening and bitter experience, but at the same time necessary if we are to fully realize the true scope and seriousness of the problem we face as a culture and civilization. The industrial agricultural landscape is often referred to as a modern-day desert, but the comparison is grossly inaccurate. The desert is a healthy ecosystem: harsh and merciless to all its inhabitants (the smallest mistake costs you your life), but diverse and prosperous. And, like the Arctic tundra, full of life, if you know where to look. Unfortunately, this cannot be said of an industrially squeezed landscape, artificially stretched to the limits of its productive capabilities. 

If you go out into the countryside, you will discover life and with it an inexhaustible well of joy. But inevitably you will also discover places where life is disregarded, where it has been completely forgotten, where life is enemy number one. There are many such places and they are not far away.

Small meetings

I touch the black, deep orange lichens, these are also mountains

We live in a culture that is grounded and oriented in time. We do not ordinarily derive our nature from a particular place. We do not tell ourselves that this lake or this rock is the place of creation of our people, that this is where the first living beings, our animal ancestors, came from. But we desperately need to reorient ourselves to places. We need to anchor ourselves, to understand ourselves in terms of place. But not just externally, seemingly, by occupying a place, fortifying it, fencing it in, and claiming it as our own. A truly fruitful and considerate relationship to place begins with attention. Attention to even the smallest life. Its symmetry. Its needs. It begins with bowing down to a roadside sedge, to the striped shell of a tapeworm, to the azure jay feather.

When I look back on all my trips to the countryside, I realize that what is really important is not the spectacular views or the variety of terrain, but all the small encounters with life along the way. It is these that subsequently determine the relationship to places, give them contours: an unexpected encounter with a fox on the path below Srdov (with one leap it gracefully disappeared into the grass, maybe it wasn't even real, maybe it was some local kami), a skunk rolling a ball of dung on the top of Oblík, silvery sedges ruffled by the wind and the windy songs of meadow buntings on the slopes of Raná, the singing of a nightingale in the moonlight while spending the night at the Stradonice fort. All of these are encounters with the liveliness of places that concretize places, make them tangible. Thanks to them, we can remember the concrete, love the concrete, relate to the concrete, strive for salvation or at least recognition, recognition of the concrete.

It only takes a little to say: for us this mountain is not just some abstract and distant, high point on the map. For us, this mountain is everything that was imprinted on us that cold winter day when we lay at the foot and last year's dry grass rustled around us.

The whole world is a gift, once here, once there

Look and marvel

When I translate Native American poets today, I understand much better what these people are trying to express in their work. I understand when they talk about being the places they inhabit, about being a river or a mountain, why place, the relationship to a particular place, plays a central role in their worldview and spirituality. 

How to become a place? Live from place, generation after generation after generation, until all the land around you is the bones of your ancestors, until even the last earthworm sings: I am your brother, your blood.

How to understand this? Go out into the countryside, return to the same places at different times of the year. You will soon discover that places feed us with something that cannot be measured, but which forms the very foundation of our being. Let's call it the bliss of anchoring.

Do not underestimate the power of proximity. The process of gradual rapprochement, of growing closer, of getting to know each other (it is never just you who is getting to know each other) can eventually result in a landscape as unpredictable and treacherous as the shifting ice sheet in the Arctic waters or the tuff slopes of an active volcano gradually becoming friendly and providing abundance. What was unknown and dangerous becomes close, home. Remember Herbert's Dune.

Isn't this one of the peculiarities of Earth, a living world among barren worlds?

Take Mars or Venus. Beautiful and unique worlds at first glance, but deserted, devoid of life, and in the case of Venus, where sulfuric acid rains from the sky, downright inhospitable. We find no life on them, no sentience. And if it was present on some of the planets, as it apparently was in the case of Mars, when its surface was covered by ancient rivers and oceans, now lost forever, it was probably only microscopic, hidden from anyone who would look on without a technological handle. The absence of life means only one thing: there is no one on either of these planets who would inhabit it in any way, who would call it home. Who would express their relationship to a certain place (anchorage-home) with their songs, whose songs and speech would reflect, express, contain a certain place. And this is precisely where Earth differs so much from the rest of the solar system. Here, every place is home, here, everywhere you look, wherever your eye falls, is home, or even more precisely, more concisely put: This is home.The Earth even hosts so many forms of inhabiting the world, dwelling in it, that it's mind-boggling.

Going to the countryside means, among other things, this: going out to discover different forms of inhabiting a place, life place, various forms of anchoring, seasoning, birthAnd what is important, not only the human, but also the non-human.

Look at how many species of life are home to a single handful of soil. Look at how many species of life are home to a single drop of water.

Look and marvel.

See places

My girlfriend often asks me what I find so appealing about landscapes that are heavily marked by human activity. For example, the flat landscape northwest of Prague, a landscape of large agricultural fields and faceless satellites.

I think she understands much better today that even such places deserve attention and respect. Even the most devastated and transformed place is still a home, or can be one again. A home with a history.

I try to see into places, their hearts. I try to see beyond the scars, the bleeding. I try to understand places through careful walking, careful silence.

I've written it before, and I must repeat it for sure: you can try as hard as you want, you can't find any anywhere in the world. And the more you've experienced the landscape, the more you've paid attention to some small patch of land, some place, even if it's just a small circle of land in the forest behind a housing estate, the stronger that conviction will be.

There are so many forms of knowledge, and not all of them are hidden in books.

At home

Even though I live in a big city today and the experiences from the days of daily South Bohemian wandering seem distant to me, I can still draw from them and live on them, no one will take them away from me. Because I have heard and listened to the Earth once, I can no longer return to the state of being indifferent and deaf to it. Opening up to her songs has profoundly transformed the way I perceive the world. This experience has expanded my heart and taught me to perceive urban space, once so narrow and hostile, differently. It has taught me to be more deeply at home. Here and now. Everywhere at the same time.

I cannot live without contact with trees and birds, without listening to their stories, without seeing just a personbecause I know that the one we call human is not an isolated being, but a complicated form of coexistence, holobiont. We don't even know if the mood we're currently experiencing really belongs to us. What does it come from? Who does it come from? And when was the air we breathe yesterday? How many killer whales' lungs did it pass through? How many eagles' lungs? But I think that I don't necessarily have to live in solitude near the forest to find a way to non-human beings, to not lose contact with them: to be able to to listen.

We are too often blinded to the inhuman by our own ideas and generalizations that make invisible, erase shades and subtle nuances: and one of them is that cities do not welcome the inhuman.

Try to visit all of Prague's natural monuments and reserves sometime.

Or go around the tree in front of the house. You might find a nest of bluebirds in it.

He is alive!

Many times, during my wanderings through the countryside, while observing kestrels hunting or during the rare moment I spent with a dying hare, I have been touched by what the Italian poet Antonia Pozzi describes in one of her poems: I was the vast / summer sky / at dawn / above the boundless / fields of wheat / and my heart / a trilling lark / measuring / eternity. It is an experience of transcending and stepping out, literally. stripping myself (unselfing), as the writer Iris Murdoch talks about it or as JA Baker describes it in his iconic book The Peregrine (Sokol). The experience of radical otherness, as well as radical kinship: radical fusion.

Such experiences would be hardly imaginable were it not for extra-human life.

I believe that philosopher and musician David Rothenberg is right when he claims that we move internally by paying attention to the rest of our lives. And that, conversely, we suffer and wither away if we lack this opportunity, if it is denied to us for some reason.

That's why, among other things, I go to the countryside. So that I don't lose that living connection, so that I don't forget it. So that life can fill me with living light again, rekindle the spark in me that everyday life stifles.

Every time I feel that life is slowly ebbing away from me, that I am losing touch with my own living center, I go for a wander into the countryside. Its life, unfettered by human regulations and demands, its songs and desires that I may not even understand, the mere presence of other lives, small and large, always manages to straighten me out, to direct me on the right path. For long days, sometimes even weeks afterwards, I still feel the stormy rush of life flowing through me like a wild river. This is ultimately the greatest gift that the world of non-human life bestows on us: it lifts our souls out of lethargy, dullness, it revives us.

This is what indigenous people mean when they say that the outside world (non-human) is what establishes our humanity. The outside world always has an impact on what goes on inside us. 

How could he not? He's alive!

Great work

Nanao Sakaki writes in one poem: Only life can give you lifeHow true these words ring to everyone who walks through the countryside, who has opened up to life in the countryside, who has surrendered to it, who has made it his own. lives.

woodpecker, jay, hoopoe, oriole, bunting, nightingale, starling, woodcock, woodcock, pipla, snipe, oak, hawthorn, pine, good friend

Just life, just life.

What is needed for this? Perhaps just more trust in the world that we have before our eyes, that we perceive with our hearing, smell, that we can touch. And then it's easy: go somewhere, settle down somewhere. In the sand, on the jingle, in front of the cameos, as you please. 

A person who has set out to pursue life does not seem to do much. He walks or sits. He listens or watches. But in reality he is doing a great work. 

The pilgrim's activity goes against the grain of the belief that we must constantly be doing something. It undermines the very idea of progress, it is brazen and bold. What? What would I do there? There's nothing there! He is afraid of his surroundings. But the pilgrim knows his way. He knows what needs to be done, or rather, what needs not to be done.

And here we have it, open to the gifts of life, its music, its lights.

Happy as summer.

Put on your shoes and run.

Western thinking is driven by a desire for understanding, but paradoxically it often leads us away from direct experience. I believe that if we put more emphasis on direct experience with the living world, some fundamental transformation can really happen. It would make little sense to think about listening without also going on sound or listening walks. 

If you are looking for a framework by which we can measure truth, the outside world is it: it is a well to which we can return for anchorage, for grounding. It is difficult to determine what is truth and what is fiction in the fluid digital hyperworld, it is easy to dilute facts, to let them drown in a swamp of Internet ballast. But the truth of the marble or the truth of the kite cannot be shaken.

Everyone should have the opportunity to experience something like this at least once in their lifetime.

Anyone can experience something like this right now.

Put on your shoes and run, nothing is holding you back.

To liveliness

It was and is easy for the indigenous hunter or nomadic herdsman to model his entire world, his religious life and rituals, on a relationship with non-human creatures: he lived and communicated with them from morning to night. Our relationship with nature, on the other hand, is entirely recreational. We do not need to understand bird warnings or recognize animal tracks to survive. We only go into the forest in our free time and there is no great danger there. Despite the profound difference in our lives, this does not mean that our access to such an experience is irretrievably closed. It is still possible to approach this experience if we step out of the networks of exclusively human (human-oriented) stories for a while, which is also why I remain cautiously optimistic in this regard.

Returning to such an experience does not require me to travel thousands of miles to the other side of the world to the center of the Australian continent, far from big cities and wandering people. Even a person as well-off as I can achieve such knowledge and keep it alive in the ordinary, like regularly feeding a gift of leaven. It only requires that we pay more attention to the life around us, to spend more time outdoors and to trust our own senses more: to focus them purposefully on the non-human, to see them not as isolated Others, but as mutually flourishing Those who gaze upon us, who listen to us.

A heightened awareness of the nonhuman around us may not be useful for obtaining food and clothing, but it nevertheless nourishes and fulfills us in a certain extraordinary way. In a way that is perhaps not as obvious and immediately useful as obtaining food, but ultimately no less essential. Contact with the nonhuman nourishes our soul, dreams and imagination, allowing us to know the secrets and depths of our own existence: the corners into which no human will allow us to peer. It allows us to remember our own life.Keep your finger on her pulse.

It would be foolish to think that we could ever return to such an experience in its former fullness. We simply live differently, have different needs and goals, different mental settings. Moreover, nostalgia can inappropriately idealize the hunter-gatherer-herder way of life, stripping it of unpleasantly sharp edges. And then: our lives may seem somewhat impoverished in this respect, but they have other advantages.

Unlike hunters and gatherers, we do not necessarily rely solely on our physical senses. Taken to their fullest extent, they provide us with only a limited slice of what is perceptible.

Take our hearing. We hear a lot, but we are still practically deaf compared to many other creatures – we cannot hear the vast majority of what is happening, what is being transmitted, what sounds in the infra and ultrasonic frequency bands (i.e. below the lower and upper limits of our hearing), we are unable to perceive many subtle nuances in bird song, sounds that are too quiet, fast or sporadic (such as the voices of freshwater turtles, the singing of large cetaceans).

If it weren't for the technologies that allow us to hear these frequency bands (sensitive microphones, hydrophones, and various sensors), we would have no idea about them – and we would still live in the illusion that the vast majority of non-human creatures are mute. We would know nothing about the infrasonic communication of elephants, we would have no idea that voice and sound expressions are also characteristic of crustaceans and fish or water beetles, we would know nothing about the complexity of dolphin vocalizations, including the fact that every dolphin or beluga has its own sound signature (name, if you will), we would know nothing about the amazing sound world in the soil, or that bats have songs and forms of communication as complicated as birds.

There are fears that digital technologies will distract us from the world around us, that they will dull and dilute our attention. Such a danger will always be there. However, we should not forget that there are also completely positive examples. Let's take the numerous mobile applications for recognizing plants, mushrooms, insects or bird calls, thanks to which even a person without a scientific background can learn about the non-human life around them. These applications can restore interest in the world in us, and I see it in many people around me. And although it is true that identifying plants with the help of an application does not motivate the user to laboriously learn the subtle recognition features, as a botanist or an indigenous tracker does, it is an incomparably better option than the absence of any interest.

Anything that can bring us closer to the world of extra-human beings again, anything that can rekindle in us awe over their lives, anything that can make us just a little more sensitive to their fates, anything that can make them a little more humane to us, to bring closer, we should welcome that. 

We live in a world where, in an absurdly short period of time, in some cases within just a few decades, over eighty percent of all wild creatures have been wiped out – a number so vast it defies comprehension. And the fate of the remaining twenty is certainly uncertain. Will delicate digital tools help us protect what can still be protected? And can they achieve such a thing without an ethical basis in bodily experience? Only time will tell.

Lesson learned? Don't be afraid to go out into the countryside with your mobile phone in hand.

Technology may not only be a tool of alienation, but also of connection, opening.

The most brilliant path

For the vast majority of human history, the animistic perspective has dominated human thinking about the world, i.e. the belief that the world is soulful and alive. Animistic experience is inherent in every child from birth, only later is access to it denied to most people because it is officially labeled as stupid and immature. But is it really something naive and childish, some lower form of human spirituality? 

It is similar with human nature or character. We know that children are born with an inherent tendency to be selfless and sociable, and that many psychological experiments that have attempted to prove otherwise have, to put it politely, been on clay feet. However, mainstream culture constantly tries to build the impression that humans are inherently evil and destructive (look at all the destruction around us!), which is what a large proportion of people come to believe at some point in their lives – and thus, through their own actions or political choices, they unknowingly make this version of the world a reality. 

And don't we constantly hear something similar about human exploitation of nature?

If we were to consider what the great task for Western culture, for human civilization as a whole, consists of, perhaps it could be this: To remember the (other) earthly basis of our own thinking and culture, to find our way back to places and landscapes, to establish ourselves in the world from which we are so vehemently trying to detach ourselves, our eyes fixed on an indefinite sometime. To remember the water in the river, its memory, its clear forms. The forest floor. The mountain wind. The midnight starry sky. The little trees that live their lives under the windows. All that used to feed human stories and spirituality, what anchored a person and prevented him from losing his soul, lost directionAnd it could, for example, cause mass extinctions.

We need to be brought back to the Earth, to the Earth as a place for life, a life-giving place.

The only one we know of so far.

A place where shadows rest under the stone. Where the wind whistles in the thorns of the saguaro cacti.

One of the clearly marked paths, the path most radiant, waits out there,

in the landscape.