Everyone Is Invited
The night of the winter solstice, after the moon set and the soft rain stopped, wind came up and cleared the sky. At about 3 a.m., the starlight was so bright coming in through the windows that it wasn't possible to sleep. Not only because of the brightness, but because the light itself was so active. It glowed its way into skin, flesh, muscles, organs, bones and blood in palpable squiggles of warmth and color. I lay still, pinned to the sheets, and felt it. Something wordless was being healed. After a while, it stopped, and the light became itself again - just regular starlight. I jotted down the thought, The Earth is going all out for connection. And She has help. This is so much bigger than whatever we think of as G-d.
Being awakened by starlight felt momentous. A bit unnerving. Had it been foretold, and, if so, were there indicators I had missed? Auguries unnoticed? Conversations unheard? Of all the birds in the garden, the raven seems the most mysterious - the messenger that flies between worlds. But nothing in the raven's call seemed different. Partly camouflaged at the top of the cypress tree, s/he swayed with the branch as s/he trilled, raunk, raunk. Raunk, raunk. There was nothing in the onrushing foam of the waves, smaller now than in recent days, even as the stars arranged themselves in unexpected patterns, Jupiter and Saturn dancing shoulder to shoulder for the first time in 800 years. The air turned cold. Something gathered itself. Perhaps you felt it, too.
Who does a Story recognize as worthy to receive it? How is mythic telling authorized? Those of us who do not know the answers to these things - are we automatically disqualified? Just as an animal totem begins as a lived experience of unmistakable alliance, so, too, perhaps, a story must become an event in a lineage, and continuously express itself until it arrives somewhere beyond question. The raven leaps onto an invisible current and loops back toward the trees. The great blue heron veers out over the water, threading the seam of the seamless. They lend us their wings. Without wings or claws, fins or fur, we are unreliable.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a Russian ethnographer recorded a conversation with a Chukchi shaman who patiently explained, Nothing created by man has any power. This statement has captivated me for several months now, until perhaps I have begun to understand it. Spirit, Mystery, and maybe some versions of G-d, have the ultimate power of creation and destruction, yes, but there's more to it than that. It seems to me now that the power the Chukchi shaman was talking about is derived from the complexity of relationships that make Creation; the fluidity of form that is the expression of those relationships; the way that time and patterns play out in the cycles that shape those interactions. Relational density is the true nature of power in this context.
If this is true, or at least moves us in the right direction, then the power of an action, of a human or other-than-human being, is entirely dependent on those relationships. Place and story and the intrinsic nature of things also bring relational momentum. Karma. Intention. Directionality. Those encounters, in turn, shape and reshape the relationships from which they arise. This kind of power is necessarily shared. Distributed in ways that enhance it, protect it, dissipate and redistribute it in an ongoing response to nuance and transformation. Power can never be static or solitary. No wonder, then, that 'man's' creation is so puny: true power, like everything else, is communitarian and always in motion.
At low tide, the sea lions haul themselves onto one particular rock scattered among the boulders and sea stacks. Why that particular rock? I wonder. When the tide goes out, the seaweed and anemone-covered ledges all look the same: low enough for a sea lion to wriggle out of the water and bask in the sun, high enough to remain dry until the tide comes back in. But, when the tide turns, that one particular rock remains dry long after the others become swamped. Yesterday I finally realized why: the edge of the rock that faces the sea is elevated. Its foot extends out into the water just beneath the surface, breaking the force of the waves. The water that pours toward shore splits into a divided stream that flows on either side of the sea-facing edge, causing the water to eddy in rock-slowed riffles that protect the sunning platform even after the other rocks have begun to resubmerge. I've lived in this house for almost four years, watching the sea lions, wondering why they consistently choose that particular rock and not the others nearby. Only yesterday did I discover the secret of why.
I find myself thinking quite a bit about how to see, really see, what is literally right in front of me. And to listen, really listen, to what I hear all around me - the call of the herons at twilight as they settle in for the night, with their cranky squawking if I go for a walk and disturb them; the way the waves are rumbling even now, and the way they grow suddenly quiet. Mostly, I ask myself how to silence the unhelpful thoughts that distract me from the seeing and the listening. Because the thoughts intrude, I do not hear. Because I am distracted, I do not see, and my relationship with the Natural World is impeded. Because the relationship is impeded, I struggle to write what I have been given to write.
I have worked at this distraction from the internal perspective; the psychological; the meditational - all are helpful to diminish the volume and frequency of the noise inside my head. But this way of relinquishing what intrudes becomes its own call and response and repeats in a loop. Now I see something else: self-improvement and self-mastery as paths to unobstructed connection are embarrassingly anthropomorphic because they posit that the answers lie within an individual mind, accessible there if only one will try hard enough to convince the monkey to sit still. But that's not what this is about: the Natural World isn't just something to pay attention to, to learn from, and be guided by. It's a living invitation into primary relationship. Responding to an invitation is different than wrestling with distraction.
And so, dear pod, I am stepping away from this virtual Earth Altar to attend to the tangible one; to listen with undistracted, relational ears; to write the book that has been trying to come through but has had to compete for attention with the thousand linear things that generate noise over quiet; to follow the breadcrumbs of intuition; the freedom of whim. To receive the invitation fully and say Yes to its mysterious beckoning. I will keep you informed as future plans and projects evolve.
Thank you for reading the words that have come during these past three years. More than anything, thank you for your splendid accompaniment as we continue to co-author our extended love letter to this melting and deeply loved Earth.
