The Rhythm of the Cosmic Serpent
I’ve loved exploring rhythm lately. As a virtue, goal, dance style, way of life and everything in between. It’s like a north star for me, and at times feel like in an age of division and separation, that rhythm can be a unifying force that connects us all together. All playing different instruments in the grand symphony of life, all with different sounds but part of one greater and broader poly rhythm.
It is easy to see that in nature, everything has rhythm - the sun, moon, tides, plants, bees and beasts. Over millions of years of creative evolution, the unconscious has quietly danced and attuned itself to these eternal and reassuring rhythms of the cosmos, providing stability and patterns for consciousness to structure itself around. Neurologically, when I am in accord with these rhythms the conscious mind is soothed, feeding back information to me that is familiar rather than threatening.
To attune to these rhythms in the modern world is to attune to the cosmic patterns and wider macrocosmic experience of wholeness (and consequent oneness). Connecting with the eternal experience of rhythm also attunes us to the emotional experience of our ancestry. I resonate with the definition of rhythm by Lexi Eikelboom as “the intersection of organized patterns through temporal experience.”
Rhythm is what makes the shared experience of life in this dimensional structure possible. By keeping us aligned with a coherent flow of events, the feeling of past, present, and future delivers a deep sense of intimacy – a belonging within the unity of time and space, spirit and materiality, that all organisms living on the planet speak of through their gestures.
Rhythm is a sacred substance that connects and dances body, spirit, organisms and geography. In short, it is the way of nature – something which encompasses a structure within fluidity. Rhythm is what supports fluidity – giving space for playful and adventurous feelings of the inner child to emerge, freeing us from the serious asceticism from our modern world that denies and suppresses the wider cosmic rhythms. And when we can slip and slide between the rigid boxes and matrixes of modern neon culture, we attain a divine, graceful and angelic lightness and levity.
Rhythm names a mysterious dimension of existence in which I am embedded but do not control. Attending to rhythm makes the world and source/great mystery encountered in and through this world strange again, and reminds me what it means to be faithful to my identity as a creature.
I get in touch with this mystical feeling of rhythm mostly by walking, especially on the Bibbulmun Track. Day after day of long walks the legs find their own logic and the mind settles and just starts moving in a cyclical process. Sunrise, eat, sleep, walk, sunset, repeat. The horizon is doing what it always does with a slight little variation each time.
The Waugal is the symbol we follow on the Bibbulmun Track. It is the indigenous Noongar name for snake or serpent and is central to much lore about the land. The serpent also shows up in my Natural Perspectives logo beautifully crafted by Aimee Vandersteen. It is this intimacy with the serpent which is the inspiration behind the name ‘Way of the Serpent’ which is the three day guided bush walks I run for Natural Perspectives. The serpent has also been a symbol of kundalini and my inner journey as I have explored my central channel through pranayama, yoga, qi-gong and musical instruments. Needless to say the serpent has been close to me, as I unfurl deeper in to the rhythm of my being and life.
After a while the symbol of the serpent shows up in moments of symbiosis and synchronicity. I keep meeting it on trail markers, on rocks, in the shape of rivers. After a while the serpent stops feeling like a symbol and starts feeling like a presence. Something that knows about return. It is a gentle nudge and reminder that cycles, spirals and corkscrews are nearby.
This ecological exploration of rhythm is what has led me deeper in to the path of music, sound and the bardic path. I’ve carried the didgeridoo and the Native American flutes whilst hiking for many years now. Out here the playing becomes something else entirely. You put the instrument to your mouth and the birds are already mid-sentence. The wind is already in the middle of something. You're not performing. You're joining. Rhythm held by the whole place, all at once, and you're just finding your part in it. Insects. Breath. The creak of a tree somewhere. Nobody is conducting this.
That is what is so liberating about rhythm. It is not something you impose upon the world but something you fall back in to, something you surrender in to. It is so somatic because the ancient primal body knows it before the modern intellect can get a hold of it. It comes from feet on the ground and the breath in the lungs. It is the old pulse of the universe that underlies everything, running like a current. Or a serpent winding through the fabric of the universe.
Looking towards the ancient Greeks, they had the word Rhuthmós. It meant shape in motion, something that shifts yet holds at the same time. Like a wave or a season. Ecologies run on this. Things repeat in patterns but they never are exactly the same.
Zooming in on the alchemists, they had the symbol of the Ouroboros, which is the serpent swallowing its own tail. It represents consumption and renewal as one process. The end folding back into beginning. Many indigenous cultures viewed life cyclically and it is only in more modern urban times that we have seen the world through such a linear lens. What I love about the ouroboros and the cyclical symbology of life is that it shifts our perspectives towards more matriarchal systems; which has been lost in an age of patriarchal reductionist, materialism and hyper-rationality. More on that for another journal post.
In summary, the serpent and rhythm has been a close ally and guide. Teaching me to stop interfering, managing, optimising and trying to get somewhere all the time. It reminds me to read the ground and stay close to the Earth. To listen to the quiet vibrations and honour the cycles and seasons of life.
Way of the Serpent bush walks are mostly sold out for this season, and I’m stoked to share the beauty of rhythm with you all this season. These hike are an invitation to stop walking in straight lines. To let the pattern underneath things become audible again. May we all walk the way of the Waugal.
