Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Breathe In, Breathe Out as and with the Earth

But also, connection to nature is an internal thing. Do we internalize it and then carry it with us, then emit it in what we also do?

Perhaps there is an internal terrain of sanctuary, balance, biodiversity, the forest, that I can cultivate even when in a skyscraper. I can become, in effect, a wilding, widening gyre even in steel girders or flying elevators. The mountain I walked on Saturday morning can walk with me on Wednesday in the midst of dozens of grey cubicles. Perhaps it's more like inbreath (time outdoors); outbreath (sharing the spirit of outdoors while in built environments); inbreath (walking with a beloved outdoors); outbreath (copresencing the living spirit of Gaia on floor 24 of a large building); inbreath (time in the garden in the light rain, planting early spring greens); outbreath (emanating gladness and wild delight while sitting on the #9 bus). Also perhaps a countertempo of breaths: outbreath (walk up Mount Tabor and sharing love with the ferns); inbreath (taking in and letting Earth's vital catalyzing force instantly transmute the fear and desperation of the large company meeting); outbreath (sharing gladness with the unfurling turbulent sky about to break open); inbreath (taking in and translating someone's harsh or quick words as the sentence "I want to connect. I am feeling deeply disconnected but know that we all share kinship with Earth."); outbreath (praising the crocuses that have their faces wide open to the sudden bursts of sun even walking on the sidewalk in my neighborhood)...

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Weave and Mend

From a note to Malcolm...

Some people like to cut and dissect, others to mend and weave. I am a weaver. And I notice that cutting and dissecting are also movements of the systems of domination and destruction. I avoid the cutting and dissection pits (a la reductionism).

I like your point about the internal ecosystems of humans - the "inner workings... complex, dynamic, and interdependent." I was reading Spiritual Liberation (by M.B. Beckwith - New Age/Ancient Wisdom stuff) about "inner ecology" (p. 67+) earlier this evening. Similar concept. Loving it! It reminds me of this picture I want to try to find again, from a book about Chinese Medicine, which shows an outline of a person but inside it are mountain ranges and rivers; I can't find it exactly but here's something like it from an outpicturing of the NeiJing (Ancient Chinese medical classic): Human Torso and subtle energy gardens and mountain ranges and rivers

So as a weaver, I want to immediately start subverting the distinctions between subjective and objective. Perhaps, as our senses and system senses are awakened, I would offer that we can more easily/"objectively" see and sense systems and it becomes almost impossible to see things as separate. This is a kind of meta-objectivity, or an infusion across/underneath/among objective/subjective. Perhaps this kind of wholeness is what ritual nourishes, what you so aptly cite as LaChapelle describing 'the pattern that connects.' Perhaps as we regain our web-weaver-connectionist perception, our sight clarifies and deepens. This allows us to sense into emerging regenerations sourced from the Earth system, already undergirded and upwelling/groundspringing from the very fabric [fabric/mending/connections] of nature. I have a scythe and there are certainly times I find it useful, but I also have a needle and thread, I also have my outstretched hand, and eyes that weave...

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Who or what carries the lost wisdom?

About the Bari people, described in Ethnobotany and Conservation of Biocultural Diversity (Carlson and Maffi, 2004)

For now, and for the time to come when the wisdom is even more scattered to the winds, what do you think happens to that knowing? Do the trees carry it? Is it only alive while the Bari elders are alive, in the interactions/relations of the trees and the people? Or is it held by the Earth somehow? By the ancestors of the Bari who have passed? Or perhaps in the bodies or epigenetically or in the field of the Bari progeny?

Sometimes I think the air, every molecule that was ever a tree or Bari or the light that passed through a chloroplast, is quivering with this multigenerational knowing. Is this what sustainability education is, to re-member how to access this knowing?

This seems to me to be the greatest loss, the languages that have passed into air and branch, the biocultural, co-evolutionary complexity. The peoples whose millenial ways have passed through tortuous means from the vital living cultures of Earth. Is there some way we can summon the knowing in this time when wisdom, particular, specific, clarion, could help guide us?

Saturday, February 13, 2010

House Blessing

From the stirring winds of the sunrise, may your home and all who enter be blessed with inspiration. In the heat of the noonday sun, may your home and all who enter be blessed with creative spark and the blessings of fiery transformation. By the soft light of sunset, may your home and all who enter be sweetened in heart and nurtured in compassion. By the clear cool of midnight, may your home and all who enter be deepened and awakened in ancient wisdom. By the clarity of the sky, may your home and all who enter be blessed with guidance and connection. From the fires at the core of Earth through planet to your feet, may your home and all who enter be blessed with energy and strengthened in courage. From within the very center of all-that-is and the center of your hearth, may your home and all who enter be fully vitalized and activated as walking-blessings. May these blessings nourish and regenerate the earth, blessings unimaginable in their out-calling connecting. May this inspiration, strength, love, wisdom, clarity, presence, and healing of your home and life grow and blossom. This and greater yet, already unfurling, so mote be it, ache!

Sunday, February 7, 2010

For the people who work at and especially lead Monsanto

For the people who work at and especially lead Monsanto:
Death dealers, death-makers, destroyers of life,

We pray for you to be released from this mental/social virus that has possessed you. May you be released and may the Earth contain the illness you have wrought. All the cultures, the countless thousands of profusions of the creative life force of Earth, all the winged, rooted, fungal, footed beings that you have destroyed... Some tens of ten thousand million years hence, when Earth has made something new here, something completely different, when time has staunched the pain and ugliness of what you festered forth in the name of righteousness and progress, may you find peace.

We pray for you too. For your children. We pray for your children and grandchildren, as they suffer the cancers, birth defects, and species deaths, starvation and pollution. The unmaking and nanotechnic, genetic aberrations you make. We pray for compassion in your heart with yourself and the systems of destruction when you awaken and realize what you have wrought with your own breath and bone and mental effort. We pray to have the compassion of Walt Whitman when we help triage the wounded and dying. And as we pray, we unmake your unmaking with the very fiber of our being. We pray for strength and clarity. We commit ourselves to this.

The following is from a website of poems

The Wound-Dresser
By Walt Whitman
1819-1892
1

An old man bending I come among new faces,
Years looking backward resuming in answer to children,
Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me,
(Arous'd and angry, I'd thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,
But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd and I resign'd myself,
To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;)
Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances,
Of unsurpass'd heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)
Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth,
Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?
What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

2

O maidens and young men I love and that love me,
What you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls,
Soldier alert I arrive after a long march cover'd with sweat and dust,
In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the
rush of successful charge,
Enter the captur'd works--yet lo, like a swift-running river they fade,
Pass and are gone they fade--I dwell not on soldiers' perils or
soldiers' joys,
(Both I remember well--many the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.)

But in silence, in dreams' projections,
While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,
So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,
With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,
Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)

Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof'd hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.

I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes--poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that
would save you.

3

On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
The crush'd head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life
struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
bloody stump,
And has not yet look'd on it.

I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening,
so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast
a fire, a burning flame.)

4

Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
(Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested,
Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)