Pop 89: A Fortunate Rhythm
By Madonna Hamel
One of the best things about living in Val Marie is: the animals outnumber the people. Critters remind me that I’m just another creature among many. And sometimes, the least dependable creature of all. Animals know when to grow more fur in anticipation of a cold winter ahead, to duck and cover before a storm, to save food for later. They know where to find the shady spots, the bushes with the most berries, the sturdiest trees for the coziest nests, the best route down a steep hill. They know all of this because they don’t let hubris or stubbornness get in the way of their decisions.
This comes from observation. When the seasons are announced by birds and beasts, not fashion trends and Giant Sale Events, you get humbled by the brilliant innate awareness of creatures. Not to say animals don’t have unique characteristics. The Indigenous belief in animal totem medicine is based on specific character traits inherent in animals. Our totems are animals we connect with, animals who can teach us about our abilities, talents, and challenges.
Left to their own devices, animals will be themselves. And are content to be so. Or so it seems. I’ll never really know if a bat secretly wishes it were a butterfly, but I suspect, having seen both bat and butterfly in action, that they are pretty much occupied with their own style of flying. And eating, sleeping, and dying. They don’t complain they could have been something else. While many of us never reach our full potential, butterflies and bats appear to embody their full butterflyness and batness.
Animals don’t seem to care how they look, either. They don’t fret over their whitening muzzles, their dragging rumps, or withered tails as they age. They don’t pester their humans to buy them a step-counter or get them a tummy tuck. They don’t scroll social media posts comparing their insides to every other pet’s outsides. What you see is what you get. And they don’t, according to vets, try to stave off death when it approaches. Though I’m sure they sense something is coming. Do they know when the end is near? And is it not disconcerting for them because they’ve never died before, at least not in their doggie memories?
I’ve known dogs who’ve wandered off to die. I’ve come across a dead bison in the Grasslands. I smelled him first. I was walking along a ridge when a mangey scent rose up to my nostrils. My first thought was that I was about to encounter a live bison, as it’s happened before, by surprise. Usually we frighten each other and we both gingerly back away. This one was a young bull who’d probably lost a fight over a mate. One of his horns was broken off and maggots were dining on his chest. He found a place to die in a coulee. I’ve begun to think I’d like to go that way—if I knew it was the end, I could stride into the park on a cold day and walk till I dropped and fall peacefully asleep.
But meanwhile, I want no regrets. And no desire to be anyone but who I am. If the beasts can do it, and children can do it, then so can I. How do they do it? For one thing, they don’t go looking in books for answers. They don’t second-guess their sense of wonder. Or their suffering. They don’t grieve the road not taken; they play where they are. There’s no: if only, what if, woulda coulda shoulda. They follow instinct. And the rhythm of their hearts and the day.
Last night I watched a documentary about the fabulous actress Judi Dench and her love of Shakespeare. She is, as one person put it, a Shakespearean jukebox—she can recite him for hours. Why do you love him so much? she was asked. “It’s the rhythm,” she said. “It’s my heartbeat. It keeps me here.”
Animals know that rhythm inherently. It’s in the flapping of wings, in the solid thumping of hooves hitting the ground. I believe every day has its own rhythm, and we need to find it and ride it.
And now I’m going to quote myself, so bear with me. This comes from something I wrote for the music magazine No Depression. It’s my description of the way musician Kelly Joe Phelps managed to slip into a relationship with rhythm and how it released him into a connection with his listeners, his music, his own body, and, ultimately, his God:
“His tempo is like that of a mountain stream in spring, melting its way to the sea in the way a kid runs down the staircase on Christmas morning. The joy in the strings makes us giddy. But the words and singing bid us sit by that very stream and watch what lingers on the banks, or how the stones, who have been there for years, day in and day out, find different ways of reflecting the sun’s light.
“It takes a light touch in a heavy-handed world to make that kind of absorption possible. It strikes a balance that creates what the mythologist Joseph Campbell calls ‘a fortunate rhythm,’ when the aesthetic experience comes from beholding the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. And there is an epiphany.”
In 1991 I lived in Memphis, where I “held a wake for my bones” by listening to live blues on Beale Street almost every night. In a way, it was like living here, in rural Saskatchewan, exposed to the way animals follow the seasons, un-seduced by the rigid, man-made rhythms of the office and the markets—worlds that demand we move at the same pace, whether it’s a hot August day or a freezing January morning. I got my sanity back. I found a fortunate rhythm.