The Medicine of Not Knowing

Notes from the Forest's Edge Dec 10th 2023

The dawn barely made a difference. The dark grey gradually softened but the dense mist has diffused the light so thoroughly that I can't see the familiar shape of the mountains. The sun is still hidden behind the eastern ridge as we head towards this turning point of the year.

The earth is saturated with water, my boots sinking in as I walk to the barn. The air too saturated with water, hangs around me, cloaking everything known with mystery. I love it! Mist to me is a blurring of the edges, a softening of the hard lines we draw between this and that, between here and there. Mist makes a mockery of our labels, our boundaries, our sense of direction.

Mist renders us confused and therefore open to the unknown.

We have a tendency to seek clarity, we want to know what is where and where here becomes there. Mist invites us to surrender all that striving and to be present to what is, here, now.

This mist shrouding the Southern Appalachian mountains is the same mist that rolls through the land that nurtured me, the borderlands of England and Scotland. It whispers to me of stories that feature a mist, a swirling wet grayness sent to confuse and disorient, a damp threshold between what was and what might be.

In a beautiful old story from the edge of the Isle of Skye (Scotland) a maiden becomes lost in the mist, separated from her village, then guided by deer to a cave. Here she discovers the Dream Makers, those who send us dreams at night. She finds that they craft both dreams to be followed and dreams meant to confuse us.

There seems to be something essential about being confused, about not knowing, not being certain but being willing to try something anyway. It appears there is something in that experience our souls need to grow. Something in the searching around, the grasping at straws, the fumbling and stumbling along that is good medicine for us.

Only when we allow ourselves to not know, can we discover something new.

What are you confused about and how can you surrender to the mistiness?

Or what are you certain about that maybe could be softened around the edges?

Below is an recording of one of my tellings of the Dream Makers story

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Notes from the Forest Edge is a bi-monthly exploration of the liminal space between human and forest consciousness, rooted in a small farm in the Southern Appalachian mountains.