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This series is an exploration of the works of Tristan Gooley. I’ll document my efforts to learn to read nature’s signs. If you enjoy reading, I encourage you to support the author by purchasing a copy of Wild Sings and Star Paths (UK) or The Nature Instinct (US). I’m in no way affiliated with the author, nor do I profit from sales of the book.
Last Week’s Work
To notice the sun as it beats down throughout the day. It tells us at every hour which direction we’re looking, if we can get it through our thick heads.
New World
This one seems almost too obvious to be worth calling a “sign.” The sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and hovers over south (for us northern hemisphere folks) at midday. A fair number of elementary kids know that. So what? Well, there’s a difference between knowing something intellectually, and having such an intuitive grasp that it’s simply a part of your background understanding. Gooley would have us build silent awareness about direction without ever having to look up at the bright ball in the sky and say, “it’s 5 PM, which mean the sun is southwest of west.” The goal with this book is to feel the signs. To know without even realizing that you know.
I won’t claim to have gotten there in a week. What I did learn is that I already had a notion of which way was which direction, and the sun begged to differ. My habitual “south” was definitely off, with the sun hanging southeast of what I thought was south at midday. My internal compass was close, but it was actually slightly tilted. Biased by maps that show my coast as being more or less on an east west line. In truth, it bends and stretches more WNW to ESE, with variations along the way. The general trend of a hundred miles or so means nothing in orienting myself to the landscape right before me.
The easiest way to feel the sun was to look for shadows of trees, utility poles, and people. These give a reference line that makes it even easier to see direction. I had to keep it conscious that the sun doesn’t rise an set at true east and west. The discrepancy depends on both my latitude, and the time of year. I also thought it was neat that there is a time component to this compass, unlike the ones we hold in our hands. The needle doesn’t turn as we do. It doesn’t care what we do. We get direction according to the time of day, which is determined by the very thing we are using to see direction. It’s both a spatial and temporal compass. If I study it for years, it will not only give me direction and time of day, but a sense of the time of year based on how high or low it turns across the sky.
For such an obvious sign, this on has a lot of nuances left to unlock, and I think it will be a while before I can honestly say I’ve grasped the sun anvil.
Key #4: Orion’s Belt and Wild Places
I jumped the gun a little with the earlier Orion sign. In the first part of the book, there are a few chapters that are more overview than about particular signs, and it’s from one of them that I honed in on the tick and the hunter. Here, we get an elaboration on Orion. It’s for the best, since it’s been so overcast I couldn’t see him at all during that week.
According to Gooley, Orion appears before dawn in August and leaves just after dusk in April (northern hemisphere). That means I may struggle to spot him in the evening as I write this in early September. A morning look would be better, but I’m sleepy. Who knows if that will happen. While last time I emphasized using Mintaka to find east and west as it rose and set, this time we are looking at Orion as a moving indicator that especially shows us south.
The constellation appears to turn across the southern sky. His sword looks like a needle on a gauge. At its highest point, the sword will point almost straight down at south. Gooley notes that any constellation can serve as such a gauge if we familiarize ourselves with its movements and where they point at what time. Orion is one of the easiest, but when he’s absent, others are worth learning.
He goes on to challenge our notion of “wild” places as those far from human influence. This is a transactional view, in his opinion, that attempts to reward us for a certain amount of travel. “A sense of wild is engendered by awareness, a sense of connection and deep understanding of any landscape,” Gooley says. It can be found in a vacant lot across the street or rural farmland as well as in any remote desert. The goal of this book is to build a sixth sense for meaning in nature based on an intuitive grasp of signs. We start with the wild places closest to us.
