Miki Dedijer
‘Sitting out on the land is very different from book-knowledge’
Last autumn on a sunny afternoon I went out on the land asking the question what I was supposed to be focusing on workwise in 2020. As the woods and the meadows turned golden I found myself sitting under an old plum tree until all that was left was guiding the wilderness solos, holding space for people to spend time in solitude in the wild. I felt a pang of longing to take the ritual back up to Scandinavia and walked home with a sense of love and direction. The next morning I found a mail in my inbox from nature connector and writer Miki Dedijer who had just spent a night out at the coast in the west of Sweden and was wondering if I would be open to explore the possibility to hold a solo on the land around his farm together. In the meantime we have arranged everything for a Swedish solo or sitout to take place this summer. Many conversations with Miki have happened, circling around the topics of belonging, being of place, European roots and language. Time to share some of it with you all.
Before I forget. Who is Miki? An eloquent farmer, a tracker of community and animals, the grandchild of a Swedish forrester and a Serbian shepherd, an outdoorsman and a student of our relationship to nature, a loving father and an inspiring mentor. But why don't you keep on reading so you can get to know him through his own voice?
Miki! Let's warm up with the question everyone is asked who is being interviewed for the Why Wild blog: what does 'wild' mean to you?
Wild is what is absolutely not within my control. It does what it does, it is what it is and it lives the way it lives with no consideration for me, my feelings or needs. I think of the word 'bewilderment' and the kind of stupor included in that word, the sort of absolute confusion because all the known references, everything that is domesticated is gone. I am being tutored by something which is entirely unfamiliar and unknown to me. It is relentless, chews on all my certainties and peels away layers that I enclose myself in habitually. It doesn't care for me one way or another; it's not good, it's not bad. It's just life. An encounter with the wild is both amazing and frightening at the same time.
The space we will hold for people this summer is also an invitation to be tutored by the wild. I have been calling this thing I offer a wilderness solo, we have decided to call it a sitout in an attempt to root it more in the Norse traditions of the place where we will be. Could you share a bit more about sitout or utesittning and what that means?
There are some old sources that mention uteseita which translates as 'to sit out'. It is often mentioned in the context of practices for strengthening or establishing a relationship to the wild and everything that feeds life. That includes death and everything that is dying so that we can be here now, alive. Utiseita was done traditionally overnight in places that held cultural significance to the Norse people: on burial mounds where they could get in touch with the ancestors, by streams, sometimes on high peaks.
For me, to use the word sitout or uteseita is a way to begin to attempt to remember what it is to be tutored by the wild in this location - in this specific place because this ritual has always been placebound. The farm where we will have our basecamp is from 1388 as a donation from the local monastery, and is situated by a trout stream at the foot of a twenty meter high bedrock cliff by the ocean. The life that is here is very particular to this place.
Sitting out on the land here is very different from book-knowledge. By coming here and sitting here it will be an extremely local experience and that is not available in any of the sources that speak of a sitout. On the one hand it is about trying to understand the practice that we know by so many different names now - wilderness solo, vision quest, vision fast – on the other hand this is an attempt to turn towards ancestry locally and begin to remember with our bodies through a primary experience.
BLUE TIT
An interesting thing that has been happening to us is that we have set up calls to talk about the sitout and have ended up talking a lot about language. That has gone hand in hand with talking about listening. Could you share about the importance of listening and how it relates to speaking?
This morning on my walk I was thinking about how deep listening to the land comes out in our speech and how much of language is mimetic. Take for example 'raven' which is 'hrafn' in Old Norse. You can hear the animal just by saying the word. It comes from the land and from someone who listened to it. That's one way a word comes through listening.
Then there are all the rhythms and tones this time of year and just the sheer number of voices speaking. Writer Martin Prechtel talks about how each animal and everything in life speaks its name. When we hear the bluetit go (whistles) it's speaking its name. By listening we are learning the names of everything in life because they are telling us their names and they are asking for our name. It is our ability to use our tongue in a way that is recognizable to them that makes the listening a conversation. That conversation comes from deep empathy, is local and is entirely connected to our relationship to the life in our immediate surrounding.
The power, the force and the mimetic capacity of the language gradually vanishes when that connection and ability to listen to the local life speaking its name disappears. This happens because we are no longer of place – you are Belgian, I am Swedish and we are speaking in English. By coming and sitting on a place for four days while listening intently to what the land is saying we have an occasion to re-immerse ourselves in that relationship and for our tongues to feed some beauty back into life.
I'd like to zoom in on the sitout we are holding a bit more. I know that before you got in touch with me last autumn you went out on the land yourself to listen. Is there something you could share about that experience without disclosing too much of what happened out there for you?
You asked me about the wild before. We are wild, we have wildness in us. When we have a chance to sit long enough in the wild so that we begin to remember the wildness in ourselves, our indigenous soul, there is the trust that there is a relationship that begins to build with it. It comes in dreams, voices, sudden insights, intuitions. It brings things that control and planning wouldn't.
When I did this five day ceremony I was sitting out one night by the ocean. I went through all these phases of what am I doing here, this is boring, the bed is comfortable, it is warm inside, I'm hungry, it's cold – it was cold in November by the sea – but I stayed faithful to the longing and was praying for instruction and suddenly the waves weren't waves anymore. The rhythm and the sound of the waves opened up, killed off whatever happened and in that moment I had this pull to contact you and offer a sitout on the farm. I didn't question it and it turned out you had a similar experience and image. That is where you get into synchronicities, where unrelated events begin to merge in ways you couldn't have foreseen and guide us in ways that our rational selves would never be able to. That's where the magic and the mystery comes in. Most of it is learning again or remembering how to be in relationship to mystery, which is healing.
It also gives me a sense of relief to be part of that big web and not the creature that has to control all the rest. I feel like I am being placed back in the right relation to everything else.
We are all exhausted by that, aren't we, by the planning and exerting control? We get it wrong every time. Sooner or later all our plans fall apart and we think it is about us, I did something wrong, I gotta work more on myself, I gotta read the next self-help book, I gotta earn more money, I gotta get a new husband or wife... We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to fix ourselves in that way and exerting even more control, trying to do human things to humans. This is different. To say 'I can't do this anymore', to acknowledge that and to say 'I need help', being in tears, crumbling. 'Would something help me, preferably not a human being?' This is not misanthropy, nor self-hatred. It's recognizing the limitations of our habits, and that our ability to change changes when we deepen our relationship with what is other-than-human. The discipline here is to submit, to yield, to surrender and to become more of the earth.
MULCH
You have been mentoring a lot of people over the years, also a lot of parents. How could the sitout experience be something that's relevant to parents specifically?
Parenting is a lot about yielding so that we can see what's needed in the moment. It is about being flexible and fluid so that we can parent our children the way they need at different life stages. It is about letting go of a lot of our expectations, not even to have any, to be present, to be good listeners, to be empathetic and understanding that a child is not raised by us. We are custodians. We can feed them and put them to bed. The spiritual crafting of a child's life is the community. There is a tremendous amount of trust, vulnerability and letting go needed for that.
Every child is born wild. It falls mostly on parents these days, and increasingly on single parents, to cultivate the child, to socialize and in many ways domesticate the child. A parent's main challenge is to do this without entirely extinguishing the child's wildness, what we might call their gift, and their relationship to that gift. Through a ceremony like the sitout, if we listen attentively, we ourselves may be reminded of our own wildness, the unruly vitality that is our birthright. As we return, this new-found vitality will help us keep our children's wildness alive too.
To me, a sitout is one of many spiritual practices, a deepening of our relationships to all of life. It is one of the most powerful and profound practices for that and it is really well suited when you are in big transitory times; being pregnant, becoming a mother or father, divorce, seeing your child grow into a teenager and changing before your eyes, illness, moving to a new place. It is a wonderful ceremony to be with all these different changes that we might want to resist but we know for our own health and the health of our family we shouldn't.
Another thing I know you have been trying to find your way back into are good practices around death and dying, a huge taboo in our society that feels very relevant to a sitout since it is a symbolic death and rebirth.
What a sitout and dying have in common is that it pulls at our cultural or modern civilization's unwillingness to acknowledge and befriend endings and limits. Much in our civilization is averse to endings. It is evident in hospices and palliative care and many other places where in just a few generations our relationship to death has shifted tremendously. We have a barn outside and a century ago we would have put the dead person in there for three days. Now we know what happens with a dead body in the hospital; you go home and the body stays in the hospital. So we have very limited experience around limits and endings or acceptance for it.
Going on a sitout is often triggered consciously or unconsciously by a desire for something to end so something else can begin. In that understanding of life, death is essential for anything to live. It feeds life. In Norse mythology, Odin sacrificed his eye for a sip of the wisdom of Mimir, the giant whose name means memory. This isn't saying we have to mutilate ourselves, but it clearly says that remembering who we are is expensive, that there is a cost to wisdom. We have to give something up in the exchange. What that is differs for each of us, but all of us are required to give something up to receive some of the wisdom we seek. That's inevitable.
The moment we pick a seed and put it in the earth it is getting ready to die. The seed has to die, it is never going to see the light of day again and it is gone. But out of that death emerges a new sprout. It is the same with a sitout. We go on the hill for something to end. I wouldn't say it's symbolic; something does die. That is a struggle. If we learn more about the necessity of death to happen in order for something else to live in us we'll come a bit wiser to our own deaths. It's not a promise but a possibility. I see the sitout as spiritual activism because it holds not the hope, not the promise, but the possibility of culture emerging, one person at the time. It's countercultural to go and sit outside. Another way it is so is that initially you might come to the sitout for your own sake. You might come and say 'I am in this place in my life' but most people I know are coming back from a sitout wanting to mulch it down in the soil and fabric of their lives, family, community so the death that happens there in solitude with the wild, eventually and somehow feeds life.
ldco
More info:
The sitout is happening from July 20th-29th. Interested? Get in touch.