Wild Signs and Star Paths: Key #6, Building a Sign

[kylec]

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 where the wind is coming from and “anchor” it to a point in the landscape, then pay attention to its shifts.

New World

I missed a few weeks of essays due to being very busy, and it may happen again because the activities that demand my attention haven’t abated. I’ll be as consistent as I can. The good news is it gave me more time to observe the wind.

This lesson felt very much like learning to crawl. It took some time to even remind myself to pay attention to the wind when I was outside. Most of my practice was the struggle to remember, and to find it. I think that’s fine. Wind hasn’t been a significant part of my life. I don’t sail, fly, fish, or anything else that causes the wind to have an impact on my daily activities. And the winds where I live are very mild and consistent. Part of me wants to feel like I failed the lesson, but if I went from no awareness whatsoever to a passing acquaintance, that’s an improvement I can build on.

I used Gooley’s technique of finding the direction by turning my face side to side until I felt the wind evenly on both cheeks, then I marked some conspicuous distant object to anchor the wind. Most of the breezes came from the nearby Pacific ocean, never more than a mile and as little as a few feet away from my habitual haunts. But they didn’t always following the prevailing direction, and sometimes the wind came from inland, off the mountains. It was almost always difficult to find due to its mildness. The lightest of leaves on a tree struggled to rustle most of the day.

While I didn’t learn anything profound about its shifting origins, noticing the shift is a nice first step. The ancient Greeks named the winds for the directions they came from, so there’s a fine tradition of anchoring the breeze to anything from an object to a minor deity. Nothing arises from nothing, so a wind without an origin is just too abstract a concept for most brains. When we anchor it to a landmark, we no longer even need a word. It’s more concrete than any label a language can give it. The origin tells us a lot about it, like how far it’s traveled, whether it’s typical or rare, and gives us clues to its potential strength and temperature. The wind brings the clouds and weather, so folks who live in more weatherly climes than I will find it very helpful in predicting their next few days’ activities. Any sudden shifts or unusual directions are a sign to pay attention.

I also noticed that the wind I felt often came from a very different direction than the wind that moved the clouds overhead, which was different still from the prevailing wind. There can be many wind directions at once depending on both altitude, and where we stand. That’s because of the effect our environment has on shaping the wind. I could often feel a little accelerating gust down the side of the house, while tree branches overhead waved a different way as the wind was funneled through the only available opening. One interesting tidbit from the chapter is that objects can alter the wind we feel for up to ten times the distance of their height downwind. So a 30 foot tree can cause a wind shadow, or an eddy, or a few other things depending on the specifics, for up to 300 feet downwind. Counterintuitively, a big unblowable object like a building can also alter the wind upwind. The breeze bounces back the way it came, rolls over itself, and creates a ramp that the rest of the wind rides right over, so we will feel less wind standing exposed against a wall than if we walked out even just a matter of yards.

Noticing where the wind comes from and the way the obstacles of the land shape it is a lot of fun when I remember to do it. Hopefully it will become second nature.

Key #6: Building a Sign

This is the last of the high-level introductory part of the book before we get into the nitty-gritty chapters. Gooley draws inspiration from the field of semiotics—the study of symbols and signs. He realized that what we’re building when we try to recapture our sixth sense for nature is a fast, intuitive ability to associate things we sense in a meaningful way. There are no shortcuts. To build up our library of signs, we need three things: Knowledge, experience, and emotion. We need to know a few things, like the signs we read about in this book, or some characteristic of a tree. We need to experience them firsthand, many times over. And we have to care. We are inundated by countless potential signs at all times, but we will ignore whatever doesn’t matter to us, for survival or just keen interest. He says the first two combine to form wisdom, and the third is also essential. I think you could argue they all three combine to form wisdom.

For #1, Gooley says to treat the attention like money spent. Our attention and money are finite, and it matters where we direct it, so if we want to learn sign reading, we should spend more time noticing the wind, the trees, the sun, etc. Knowing where to focus, instead of doing it randomly, speeds the process along, and we can start with the signs in this book. There are plenty of others, but there’s a method to the ones he chooses and the order he writes of them.

For #2, We get out and experience things to build associations. He has a lot more to say of this, but for the homework, I’ll try to notice things that 1) resemble each other, 2) occur in the same time or place, and 3) cause or are caused by certain other things.

For #3, “We attach greater importance to the things we recall most easily, and these are the things we are most exposed to.” Spend time outdoors. The more hours we put something in front of us, the more we care, and the more it compounds until it reaches a tipping point.