wildlife is a principle, not a thing

the crows rustle and tumble in the twisting wind, chasing each other through swells and hollows in the invisible force of nature.  the latest of summers raging storms is rolling over the mountains with the fury of the gods tumbling in the clouds, soaking air and skin in rich waves of cool water, filling the river so that it happily flows at two whole inches deep, hallelujah.  children run and dance in the park, lovers roll lasciviously in the grass, teenagers smoke hookah with the detached cool of the adult archetype that they hope to become and the day moves on slowly, a celebration muted by the elements.

i'm very concerned about what's happening with the wolves here in our "land of the free".  here in the southwest, there are 52 mexican wolves left in the wild, most of them in a wilderness south of here called the gila.  

52.

in the interior northwest, there are a few hundred wolves in wyoming, montana, idaho, oregon, northern california, the dakotas.  not many.  enough to count in the mind.  for the last 20 years, there have been dedicated, ongoing efforts by a number of grassroots organizations to ensure the survival of the wolf in the wild.  it has not been easy for a number of reasons.  somewhere along the line, people cultivated a ferociously irrational loathing of wolves.  it has been perpetuated through stories and cultural memes for hundreds of years.  "mad as a wolf" and similar phrases are used to describe unscrupulous, dangerous people.  innumerable folk tales use the wolf archetype as a symbol of intelligent, depraved violence.  but wolves are not violent.  they hunt easy prey (which is partly why they hunt captive "livestock" like sheep and goats), mate for life, have extremely well cultivated social systems, and care for their young and for each other with awesome tenderness and dedication.  they are highly civilized, among the most highly civilized creatures of the animal world, on par with gorillas for order.  

so what an interesting thing to use the vilification of them as marauding, bloodthirsty savages as justification for hunting them in hellicopters and shooting their young in their dens.  what a very interesting thing.

somewhere, in the human journey, there came a conceptual form that urged to turn land into property, and move the sustenance base from hunting free creatures to raising "stock" animals (that term pisses me off as much as the concept of "game" animals.  how the fuck did any creature get to be "stock" or "game"?  where the fuck did that perversion come from?).  anything that didn't obey the sanctity of the border has been summarily exterminated.

buffalo.  

jaguars.

wolves.

indigenous people.

wolves are an amazing example of the perverse and petty fear of nature that has infected humanity ever since we got mutated and diverted from the divine blueprint by an invading alien race (yes, i'm serious).  they are a highly sophisticated creature with highly sophisticated social systems, family processes and interpersonal principles.  they are such a magnificent intelligence, such a miraculous wisdom.  they may choose to live in space with other creatures, including humans, but they cannot be domesticated.  they are inherently autonomous, i would say more so than humans.

they do not seek to dominate territory, their approach is more of a graceful magic than that.  they claim their territory, mark its edges with their piss, and root down into it energetically.  their presence, not their force, is their primary mode of maintaining the territory that they have described for themselves.  they do not seek to run us out of space, nor will they capitulate their space to our encroachment.  if a rancher sets up shop in wolf territory, the wolves eat from that ranch.  the presence of the wolf requires a sophisticated balance of energies, wherein everyone needs to be present to learn how to work with and respect each other.  

derek jensen, an environmental acitivist and writer, wrote about living somewhere in the company of wolves, and them eating chickens that he was raising.  one morning, sitting at his desk and looking out the window, he spied a wolf entering his yard, intent on the coop.  it felt his eyes on it and looked up at him.  in that moment, they exchanged a silent, energetic communication wherein derek asked the wolf to please leave his chickens alone.  they held silent presence with each other, and after a few moments, the wolf turned around and walked away from the yard back into the forest.  it did not come again.  

wolves are true sorcerers.  violence in never their first approach to a situation.  even in hierarchical fights, the violence they apply is symbolic, not actual.  it is an expression of potential power, and the process is a part of working out their social order which holds the whole pack in place.  in this way, they are actualized in the scheme of natural reality in a way that humans are striving for and only a few have achieved.  

true power has no need to express itself out of turn.  true power is transcendent, and entrains the things that it comes into contact with.  only imaginary power uses violent force to express itself.

being wild is a power.

the relentless attempt by the "powers" that be to eradicate the presence of wildlife is actually a more sinister reality than is commonly acknowledged.  it is an attempt to destroy that which is wild within the soul of all beings, it is an attempt to neutralize the dynamic beauty of life and reality into a grey monotone of easily controlled experience where people are feeders for the machine and all of nature is feeder for the people.  what is wild within us is free, and freedom doesn't subscribe itself to the inane bullshit that the system is always feeding us about becoming "responsible, contributing members of society".  we will only become that thing if we follow the truth of our essence and arrive to experience with all the unique magic that is only ours to carry into and through this life.  my friend the biologist tells me that i am that rare bird that ensures the survival of the species, because genetic diversity is what perpetuates life.  

we are wild.  we are sensory systems designed to interpret and interact with the earth and universe, which has been designed to interact with and inform us.  symbiosis of the highest order, the natural relationships between delineated aspects of universal source energy.  civilization, as it stands, is designed to rupture and fracture that natural relationship by streamlining the human experience into chairs (which disrupt the flow of energy from the earth core to the body), transportation modalities like cars and planes (which disrupt the connection of the body with the subtle spirit realm, the gravitational field and natural time), foods that are not natural or nutritious, frequencies that corrupt the natural electromagnetic field of the body, and boxes for houses, right angles that deaden energetic flow in space, separate us from sky, earth and air, dispell night with lights...  on and on.  and the social processes of human society are outrageous.  it's a taboo to be naked anywhere that someone can see you.  what?  everybodies naked!  get the fuck over it!  it's a taboo to say what needs to be said because someone might be offended by it.  it's a taboo to do all kinds of things that are the most natural things for us to do, and that's a slavery, kids.  it's not a cool thing.

consider the middle east.  

in muslim countries, women are covered head to foot their whole lives.  they cannot go around where they live on their own, they need to be escorted by a man, and then only one that is their husband or relative.  if they are seen talking to a man who is not one of these things, they can be tortured and killed for it, no repercussion for the man who does the torturing.  what's this all about?  the idea that a man cannot control himself if he sees a womons hair or ankles uncovered.  imagine that for a moment - there is a whole segment of our world where, instead of doing the work to learn to relate in a harmonic and balanced way of mutual respect and regard, the social system was designed to support this complete lack of relational development.  women are enslaved because men are considered to be totally incapable of controlling themselves in the presence of them.

give me a fucking break.

so the womyn get enslaved, and the men get relegated to a state of perpetual violent idiocy instead of having to learn how to deal with their sexual energy.  interesting solution.  and what gets killed in everyone through this method?  the wild spirit within that yearns for freedom, for breath and flight, for eros and love and ascension.  no one is free when others are oppressed - this means more than just my freedom to do whatever i want versus their slavery.  this refers to the system of slavery in which, no matter what position you are in, you are enslaved.  the slave master is a slave to his slaves as surely as the slaves are slaves.  everyone could be free if we all agreed to show up with the whole spectrum of our intelligence intact and available for the journey.

i have a proposal.  let's live like the wild creatures we are with the full possession of our potential for ascension intact in all of our relations.  what would that look like?  in the nice it looks like being naked whenever and wherever you want to be naked.  smiling at everyone you see when you feel good and growling when you don't.  eating with your hands, walking barefoot across lawns instead of always in shoes on the streets, dancing as often and as madly as possible, laughing uproariously at whatever you are amused by.  it means never excusing yourself for farting or burping, picking your nose when it's full of boogers, or touching someone that you pass in a crowded space.  acknowledge them, yes, do not excuse yourself.  it means being as erotic, clowny, challenging, stimulating and fascinating as you have the potential to be.

in the intense it means speaking up to injustice when you see it (how did it get to be "none of your business" when you see someone beating their dog or their kids?  how did that intervention get to be taboo?  violence only stops when the people intervene, and isn't that what we all want?  a peaceful world?).  it means being defiant when the authority structure is coming after your wild ride.  it means being ferocious when something you love needs you to be that, including yourself.  it means being totally in your power and not needing to wield it, but not being afraid to do just that if the need arises.  it means being dangerous, but not violent.  it means being fearless when the guns are drawn, when the moment calls for more than you think you can give, for something of the extraordinary to flow through you in an emergency.  wild people do not allow the world to crush the dreams of other beings.  because we are so passionate about our own freedom, we realize that we must use it to serve the freedom of the collective.  

wildlife is a way of being.  bring it off the playa, out of the festival, out of the house party, into the streets.  wield the wild within in a place that it's not safe to do it.  use your own wild nature as an invitation to others to engage the world through their inner wild.

people love a leader.  it is easy to lead by example, to be a context in which people are safe and encouraged to make their inner beauty radiate out into the world.  you don't have to hold anyone's hand, just hold yours open as you live to your fullest.  your beauty is an invitation.  remember that always, and everything that you are shy to express will flow from you in that most conducive of riverbeds - service.  if you want to go there, but you're scared, remember that someone or something around you wants to go there too, and needs a pal to make it feel right.

be wild.  scream and howl, laugh and dance, be luscious and lascivious with a spiritual flavor and an irreverent grace of dedication.  oh yes, get your groove on, right in the middle of the street.  or the train, or the office, or the house.  just get it on.  

you'll love it.  i promise. 

holographic grace

"the solution will not be created at the level of the problem." ~einstein

i got trained to facilitate the "Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream" symposium for the Pachamama Alliance a year and a half ago.  the symposium is an incredible body of work, and it was a wonderful experience to be trained, filled with hope, bright possibilities, eager awareness blossoming in the water fall of a new tool to use in the ongoing quest to Wake People Up.  so many good and wonderful things there, so much honest, earnest dedication to the earth and to change in the good way.

and yet, something about it didn't fulfill me.  

changing the situation that we're in collectively is not about finding new "green" ways to live the paradigm that has so divided the spirit of the world, so strangled the mother home.  we cannot hybrid-car and solar-panel and energy-efficient-lightbulb our way out of the the animal holocaust, or the melting ice caps, or the perverse and pervasive war mentality fueled by political and religious ideologies that say "do as i say or die".  or even just "die, regardless of what you do". 

that's not a mind issue.  that's a frequency filter issue.  

form follows energy.  the being is not the origin of impulse, it is a transducer of impulse.  it takes the impulse of the universal continuum, translates it through the particular energetic grid of itself, and motivates action according to that relationship.  we each hold the whole spectrum of creation within us, and yet are each specifically and differently calibrated to channel it in specific and different ways.  intellectually, we know this.  energetically, i don't think that's widely or deeply understood.

what that means is that no one is separated from source.  that's not possible.  if one is breathing, source is flowing through.  if you've ever seen a dead body, you realize that it's dead because source and spirit are not there anymore.  the body doesn't work without them as fuel and fire.  but what can feel like separation from source is actually a state of corruption in the transducer.  the filter is fucked up, so the signals are moving through it in a compromised way, causing compromised energetic impulse and action in the being.  that can be fixed!  but not through the mind alone.  the mind is one ally in the work.  the whole self needs to be involved in the process, or what hasn't been accounted for will pull the being back out of alignment.  like if you get chiropractic work and not massage : the bones will move to where they're supposed to be, but then the muscles will pull them out again because they haven't been realigned to the original blueprint.  they're still over there in compensation mode.  isolation approach doesn't work.

so something like the symposium is a wonderful attempt at solving the problem at the level that it was created.  it is a mind approach to a frequency filter issue.  it doesn't touch the core.  it goes deeper than most mind approaches go, because it gets into the emotions, but that's still not the root.  people come to the symposium, get all fired up to Change the World, go off on it for a few weeks or months and then go back to doing what they were doing, perhaps a little more greenly, a little more intentionally, but still, mostly back to where they came from.  that's the average.

so how do we affect the transducer?  in ceremony.  ceremony and ritual* work at recalibrating the frequency of the individual and the collective through accessing more of the being in transcendent (non-ordinary) states of consciousness.  in this state, and through this mode, alterations in the fundamental organization of the being can occur.  it is precisely the transcendent nature of ritual that has made it the medicine of choice all over the world for thousands of years, until the perversion of the dogmatic western mind outlawed it and killed people for it.

a good friend of mine wrote a poem called "the sacred function of words" in which there is a line about holding the wound in place through unconscious speech.  something i've marveled at over these last few weeks is the way that my mind will inflict and re-inflict a wound ad infinitum.  it blows me away!  why does that glitch happen?  how do i smooth the field so that the mind flows?  how am i energetically corrupted that that can be such a powerful process, so relatively intractable?  big questions, good questions, and the mental understanding is one aspect of the answer.  the innerstanding resides in my attention to my instinct, to my own comprehensive intelligence and it's process and perspective.  when i perceive through and move from my whole intelligence, my experience is completely different.  there are subtleties and there is depth the likes of which rival the ocean for richness, complexity, awe-inspiring beauty, wonder.

existing in 

the light of this intelligence  

i am the aeon

the eternal child of creation born with all the wisdom of the ages.

i am original medicine

the joyous art work of the one

birthed into the earth to worship

to guide

to grow and learn

for the universe

for i am the universe

transcendent

brilliant

invisible

i am the scope and depth of consciousness

because i am simply and completely 

fully

present  

as the magic of my whole being

ritual, ceremony and exstatic processes and practices allow the self to fully open.  they allow the whole self to be present in the same dimension.  the full intelligent mechanism of a sensual (and by that i mean sensorily attuned, feeling and experiencing) being is an awesome body of wisdom.  each of these senses is a different intelligence, and when they are activated, aligned and integrated, the being is a channel for pure source energy to easily flow through.  we have somehow been fractured, because the source energy is not freely and easily flowing through us as individuals, or as a collective.  everyone has it flowing through some channels and not others.  most people yet do not have it flowing through fully.  and the collective?  well, we don't need to go into that.  we all know.  the people who do have it flowing are our exalted guides and wisdom beings.  it's interesting, no?  when someone is fully activated, they shine so bright it is astonishing, entrancing, inspiring, nourishing.  people want to follow them and learn from them and become them.  most people don't realize that they can become that themselves.  

each one of us has that capacity.  so how do we activate the reality?

that's my quest.  to find out and to share it.   and...  i'm diving deeper 

more soon...

primal healing

solstice did not dawn with a radiant sun blessing, the sky merely brightened behind a heavy hanging of rain clouds that soaked and saturated the celebrants of this holy day, driving me deep under cover after a night of dancing and exploring the inner world in the embrace of silent desert winds.

i'm okay with that.  the sun rose in my morning dreams, and the extra hours put pink exuberance where wan dedication would have been.  praise weather.

my sunrise ceremonial plan wet and chilled, i dropped deep into contemplation when i finally rose from my cloud.  the ceremonial life is my way, but the teachings of the wheel are not to be heard by my terrestrial ears - all this is learnt through the vast river of knowledge and experience in which i swim, the many gracious and well-worn mentors who bless my days with their beauty and wisdom.  better that way - my understanding is an innerstanding, a synthesis of information and experience, a personally grown wisdom.  i laugh as i oscillate between "i want a teacher!" and "i am the teacher." and "all wisdom is inherent in the divine hologram of incarnate experience."  in the mayan (arguelles) i am lunar worldbridger, part of that definition being that i "polarize in order to equalize".  

why, yes.  yes i do.  the pendulum is my horse.

anyway, spent half the day channeling my own understanding of the wheel, mapped and graphed, key-worded and archetypally codified, far from exhaustive (aaah, the infinite journey of archetype).  then finally, almost confusingly, the bright sun burst through the dispersing clouds and the land re-issued that sweet and insistent invitation to her skin that had been pulsing in my inner hearing for the week.

yes, yes, i am coming...  quick, quick, it is late to spread land between me and other monkeys.  abiquiu, i come for your mojo.

abiquiu is northwest of here, mesa country and rolling hills.  that sublime, masterful sculpture of ancient terra that once was ocean floor flushes and waves before the astonished spirits eyes in gently painted tones of powdery green, deep rusty red, rich brown and deep blackened brown, softest pre-dawn blue...  gnarled tufts of juniper and pinon pine dot the gentle angles of the hills, a beautiful accent on the symphonic dance of demure colors.  and always there plays a magical renaissance sky overhead, the creative studio of the elements radiant for the joy of being and the beholder.  where better to purge the flotsam, purify the spirit, invoke the essence, honor creation?  it is a breathtaking temple of natural grace.  

a single fine white mesa with a special tilt to its top called me to the flame, graceful and sparkling, rising slightly above its earthen surroundings.  a sky temple, carved of ivory.  a mesa is a mountain with its top gently raised by a band above the body of the mound.  i've climbed a lot of mesas in my earth journey, but never one like this - when i reached its base and began to scale the curve of the mound beneath the band, i embraced the strange phenomenon that it is crafted out of some kind of white, powdery sand.  truly seeming as a deliberate sculpture, its form is that of the desert but its mass is porous, and it crumbles in the hands as one climbs.  being the lizard that i am, i climbed anyway, caution not even be damned, caution wasn't even entertained.  this is how i do.

along the mound, which is steep, there runs one long sensual ridge, up which scampering is a pure delight.  at the latening hour, the bright sun shone directly into my eyes, causing sweat to stream down into them and tiring me quickly.  it occurred to me as i climbed the ridge that the mountain was actually very steep and if i got to the top, getting down was going to be a bitch.

something about climbing, though.  just go.

so i got to the band, and there was no readily visible place to climb it.  i began to traverse the body of the mesa and it became apparent that there probably wasn't a good place to scale it because the band of a mesa is usually straight up or slightly curved to overhang, which is fine when the rock is solid.  when the rock is crumbly and the mountain is steep, that's not fine.  so, sun blazing in my eyes and the mountain offering me the challenge at the price of my skin, i continued to traverse, looking for the way off or up to the top.  i found one potential portal of ascension where the band narrowed and there were only a few feet of scaling to pass to the next slope towards the top.  i put one foot on a ledge of soft stone, pressed on it gently with my weight to see if it would hold, and decided that if i hopped from there to the handhold that i could see, i could scramble over the edge and be fine on the slope. 

as i stepped, i felt the stone twitch beneath my foot and before i could actually grasp the handhold i was reaching for, it gave way beneath me.  the sound of tumbling stone fell away below me as i gripped the mesa with my body, willing myself into place.  that one stone that i had stepped on?  that one rested against my now dented shin with a new red spot to mark my presence and my passage.  it was a great deliberate movement of faith to lift my foot so it could fall, laughing at me, away down the slope.  then a great, bemused silence surrounded me as the last tiny pebbles pitched and rolled away, and sudden signals of pain arrived from all the little scratches on my bare skin.  blood offerings.  no worries.  

fuckin' hell, man.  this loveland of mine is a sharp kiss.

laughing and giving thanks that i didn't fall down the side of the mesa over cacti and into the chasm beneath me, i opted not to be attached to the glory of the top and to instead float down into gentle communion with the grass on the plains and the much gentler rise of the brown mesa right beside me.  

i think you have to fly to an ivory castle anyway, right?  or go around the backside.  HA!  next time.

by then, of course, my clothes (my Ceremonial Solstice Whites) were sweaty wet and dusty, so i took them off to walk the plains naked.  i was beside and below the gentle mountain that had so captured the heart of georgia o'keefe, the black mesa.  its top is broad with a great sloping skirt of hills radiating out from it in all directions, and it does indeed, emanat an arresting pulse of graceful elegance.  of this mountain she once said "perhaps, if i paint it enough, god will give it to me".  i think god did, and it is she who sits there still, painting the sky with her ephemeral brilliance.  it is only the desert that offers a sky blessing like this.  great drifts of cloud piled upon each other in interdimensional layers with light playing through them, a game of hide-and-seek played by god and form.  some edges pearlescent, some masses infused with an etheric light, some faces flat grey, rays of sun shining through openings in great shafts of blessing light, angels dancing in their yellow-golden glow, all woven on the vast blue fabric of infinity stretching behind.

so slowly, so slowly, climbing the graceful slope of the brown mesa to it's top to look out over the valley.  the land, blessedly free from the slavery of the level, rises and falls in it's own rhythms, so feminine in its curves and swells.  the lake laid there on the plain between rising forms of weather worn ancient mountains, a flat expanse of pearlescent blue laid into the fluctuating earth colors that seem to dance in the wind.  those ancient mountains layered on each other stretching back to the horizon, softening in shades of blue as they peered out from behind each other as curious and elegant animals may.  such perfection in this transient beauty.  such love and healing, such being and wisdom.

each step a question and a prayer as i rest deeply into every breath, knowing that what i thought was truth is now underscored by an awareness so much more vast that there can be no assuming anything about anything, least of all about myself.  i have heard the call, i have come as an answer, and a deeper stillness and presence than ever have i held is asked of me to know what the call is for, what the answering will mean for my being.  

i felt my mind racing, chattering along about things that weren't there - stories, so many stories, all perfectly valid, all perfectly inconsequential.  not here, not the moment.  mind business.  busy-ness.

so much more discipline to cultivate.  

i laughed at myself a lot yesterday.  learned a lot.  grew in understanding.

and i walked.  the sun shone intermittently as a game with the clouds, a chill but not cold wind blowing over the crest of the magical mountain, very little of the suns kiss to the skin, but much of its magic in the sky.  a beautiful plateau lays across the plain from the mountain, and to its edge i walked, to a spot where i laid down and drank a brief sunkiss into my naked temple.  purification.  sensual saturation.  the earth, the rain and sun come to me as lovers, soak the skin to madness, rapture.  pure healing.  no mind.  the wind blows over me and i slip, deeply breathing the dampened earths saturated musk in through my cells, through my skin, through my loving creation.  slip, relinquishing my body, a gift to the sky, through the veils into pure communion.  trance. 

drink deep the fleeting light.  grow a garden of beauty within the temple in which all of creation may dance.  i am eden.

i laid there long in trance, sinking into the sound of the birds, the wind, the silent open space of earth.  then the breeze suddenly chilled at the same time that the light darkened, and i sat up to see where the storm was coming from.  the storm, lit from within with a golden fire, was flowing over the mountain, consuming her.  the streaks of rain flowed softly between her and i, a veil of life over a fertility dance.  i had mere minutes before it came for me.  i took my rain coat out of my pack and wrapped it around the pack to keep it and my boots dry, and stretched my naked vessel into the arc of the oncoming tempest.  so cold the wind that flew against my skin, penetrating my fears and flushing my resistance.  my earth cells contracted against the expansion of my transcendent being into that gift of fresh sky water, but for this had i come and into this would i gratefully go.

"naked in the storm" is this time.  it has been my metaphor, and up 'till then had been a statement of suffering, of enduring.  now was given the time to transform the tenor, embrace the storm through my ferocious devotion to loving grace, and to be liberated in this embrace.  now was the time for "naked in the storm" to be carnal grace, original passion, primal healing.  joy.

first softly the rain began to fall, pattering frigid against me, and the current of cold that rushed through me took my breath, began to draw the blood in from the edges of my form towards my heart.  where the rain touched, my skin contracted.  the spaces between kisses was warm and still expanded, so a wondrous undulation of temperature flowed and flowered through my skin.  i stood still on the plateau as the storm enveloped me until a rhythm grew up through my feet into my body and moved me into dance with sky, earth, elements, self.  

then ferociously the rain began to beat down in thunderous sheets.  i ran, leapt, twirled, jumped, danced in its raging tide.  i laughed insanely and innocently.  i howled and called the animal kin in their own voices.  screaming a fierce and guttural scream, i purged the poison that had been churned by the weeks of trial, endowing it to the storm who took it with honored grace and swept it away over the plains.  then i sang, weaving the tale of becoming into the universe as the clouds moved across the sky, and in that way that only the earth can love you, a  rainbow began to grow.  as the storm rolled over me, and as i screamed and danced, the rainbow grew to arc perfectly across the sky, a whole crescent of spectral beauty, drawing me into its magical portal of transformation.

another of michie's gifts.

i screamed a name into that great arc of creation, and the call came back from across the plains.  as i raised my voice, my prayers, my becoming into the golden storm now almost passed over me, the coyote clan raised their song in solidarity.  i could hear in their tones that there were big beauties and little new babies, and they were singing with me, welcoming me to their hearth, witnessing my journey.  then, as i lowered my arms back down towards the earth, the thunder rolled in closing, blessed my ceremony, and completed my circle.

dripping wet, naked and noticing that i was very cold, i went back to my bundle, unwrapped it from its protection (raincoat!  what a miracle) and re-arrived in to the tangible world through the portal of my clothing.  my hands had that thick, not-quite-functional feeling of freeze, so i held them in my armpits as i wandered around the base of the mesa back towards my little red time-machine.

the light was slowly vanishing from the land, the sky moving more steadily in its progression from wild golden fire to muted prussian blue.  distantly the thunder of divine council rolled across the land in the contours of the storm, traveling to nourish and inspire the earth and its creatures.  wet desert has a smell that is the beginning and end of the world.  it is the most grateful, rapturous, joyous, sensual, blissful scent that could ever bless the senses.  it rose around me every step i took towards the regular world, soaking into the olfactory sense of my being, into the energetic signature of my soul as a perfect romance, as a guide, a gift, a remembrance.  

i am a desert child.  she dances for my joy and i sing for her pleasure.  we are kin, symbiotic and devoted to our love and its fulfillment.  

this is the joy of place.  

the truth of love.  

the beauty of being.

this is what matters.

the essence

the storm has passed, and the sea in which my boat gently rocks is now thick with churned flotsam, the treasury of my mind, beautiful and ugly.  i do not discriminate in this moment, it is all information metabolizing into wisdom.  if not for the tempest, i would not know the mysteries of the deep.  i would not innerstand.

all it requires of me is presence, initiative, the steady hand of a clear mind to honor the gift of awareness. 

grace help me if i chose to move forward too fast - surely i would plunged into the madness of lesson again.  thank you, that's not necessary.  i am fully attentive.  

this degree of witnessing is deeper than any i have experienced previously.  it calls me to truth in a new way, with new imperative, with new urgency.  i have been stripped naked in the storm, battered by the weather to learn of my capacity, and of all the thorns on my rosebush.  i have been gifted deeply valuable relationship with the mystery, savagery and beauty of my being.  and there is yet more unfolding every moment.

only fulfilling the essence matters.  ceremony is the way.

"wanderer, there is no path.  you lay down your path by walking."

i know what that means now.  i know why it means something to me.

as servant, lover and mentor, i move in truth.  

the temple of the mountain

the sky again hangs close, its promise of water cooling and heavy in the dance of grey and white, curled and coiled into and through each other.  it was the bright sun that warmed me to waking after a cold night of not-quite-sleep had passed in the watchful embrace if the star filled sky.  this sky, my eternal beloved, holds a perfect peaceful space for me unknown in human relation, witnesses and receives me, guides and chastises me, guards and exposes me in the continual dance of becoming we dance together.  creation, my mentor, is the essence of truth i hold space for in human relations.  and i am so blessed, i find it so often.  

animal relations are yet more pure, bereft as they are of the artifice of the word, the politics of mind.  the absence of speech is such a soothing gift in relating.  and animals hold the knowledge of time very differently in the mind - their minds are not biased against healing, attached to trauma.  what they experience, they learn from, but they allow to change with time and presence, being ever available to loving communion once the communion has been established.  that's what they remember.  love.

i am not yet this gracious.  so from my beloved animal companions i learn.

i was walking across the barnyard of my great grandmothers farm fifteen years ago, when she was still alive and the farm was still a sanctuary in my world, when i first encountered the most blessed heart i've yet to know in this world.  michie (whose name was blackie at that moment) was laying in the dirt, her tail languidly thumping the ground and that perfectly serene expression on her face, gazing into the hills with all of the wisdom of creation perfectly balanced in her being.  everything about her spoke of peace, elegance, deep knowing.  i was instantly in love, and asked my mom and grandma if she could come with me.  she's been with me ever since.  it is amazing what she's taught me, by the very nature of her being, over these years.  she has travelled all over the country with me, lived in more houses that i can even remember, been a gauge for all of the relationships of my life that have passed through her knowing field (she knows when someone isn't a good fit for me, and when someone really is), nourished and nurtured me in my challenges, received all of the elation of my ascensions, been the cutest thing i've ever had the gift of cuddling, sat with me in ceremonies and rituals, healed me and my friends, gracefully withstood the annoying gracelessness and jealousy of our other cat, triumphed with miraculous equanimity over sicknesses that were supposed to kill her, and been the most magical and yummy blessing i could have ever asked for.  when i went to australia for three weeks, she slept on my pillow the whole time, occasionally leaving the room to wander the house and see if i'd come home yet and she'd missed it, then went back to the pillow.  when i lived with david, she would lay down between us when we were in a state of unbalance and offer her belly as the unifying field that would help us to remember what was really important.  when i was sick, she would lay with me, rest her head near mine and do energy medicine on me, which always served to expedite my healing.  we used to sit for long moments with our faces touching, sharing deep breaths and soft tides of loving wisdom.  sometimes when she would be cleaning herself or eating something, afterwards she would look up and look around and the little pink tip of her tongue would be pressed out between her lips in her little black face, and i swear she knew it was cute and would do it when i needed to laugh or she wanted me to get my face out of whatever i was doing and give her the good loving.

totally amazing animal.

when i came back from california this last time, she was especially attentive and always looking for cuddles.  being that she had always been very independent, that caught my attention.  i first thought that maybe she just missed me, but then i started to feel that maybe she knew that her time was coming to closure and wanted to share as much love as possible before her journey over the threshold.  i wouldn't quite admit that to my full awareness, however, because michie is my baby, and for her to leave this world was a concept too strange and unpleasant for me to imagine.  life without michie?  hasn't she always been here?  won't she be here forever?

my mom came up and said that she'd become incontinent one day, and so after it happened twice, i took her to the vet.  at that time, she was still the bright, beautiful michie-love that she'd always been.  when i took her to the vet, the vet found a tumor in her bladder that was big enough to be the real deal, and we talked long and seriously about what that meant.  i was already emotionally taxed, and that pitched me over.  i was scared and so...  saddened.  i got on the computer and checked out everything i could find about animal cancer and possible treatments.  the allopathic options were traumatizing, limitedly effective and extremely expensive.  alternative treatments were for animals whose cancer had not progressed that far as to having a huge tumor already established in the body.  but, health worship in hand, i got a plan about fasting, superfoods and reishi mushroom supplements.  my mind was in total turmoil because everyone around me was saying she was going to die, die, die, and i was working to be clear that she may be able to move through it in the way that i'd seen her do before.  

so with my plan in place, i had her fast for one day before beginning her on the supplements.  that day that she fasted she was fine, bright and cuddly and beautiful.  the next day i woke up and she was laid out, curled up in a box, her vitality low and her eyes just staring.  i fed her that morning and she threw that food up, so i began to feed and water her with a syringe.  she laid in my arms most of the day as i sang and prayed with her, passed the hawk feather over her, filled her with light, touched her with loving healing, just pouring myself into her to aid her process in whatever way i could.  i had decided that if miraculous healing was going to take place, i was totally available on every level to support that, but it had to be her choice.  i wasn't going to pump her full of prescription medicines if all they would do was lessen the symptoms and prolong the process.  

she totally stopped drinking and eating, and then started to just throw up no matter what.  her body began to shut down and her soul really started to leave.  my mind was racing, grasping at possibilities, grasping at everything in an attempt to hold her life in the body in place while simultaneously working to be equanimous with the reality that she was totally done and that was a natural reality of time and physical being.  i grieved and grasped and prayed and blessed and dropped into a transdimensional state that lasted for the last few days of her life.  i sat with her in vigil through all the nights, holding my hand back from "ending her misery" by taking her to the vet for sleep.  it's curious to me that me that we have the option to end an animals life if it is suffering unnecessarily, but we are tabooed against that same grace with humans.  one more of the examples of how differently we value these modes of life.

it was my work, my honor and my place to hold space for her transition, as long as it took.  the only other death i've directly experienced was my great-grandmother whose decline was so steady and long that it was no suprise when she died.  she was also in her nineties and just tired.  she would say she wanted to go be with god and be done working so hard in this life, and i wanted that for her.  she was one of those women who took care of ungrateful people all her life, worked hard for everyone and everything and was the most purely loving being to embrace and be embraced by.  michie, having come from grandma's farm, was an emissary for her spirit in my life.  all of that being gone, the prospect of michie leaving had a spectacular significance of rending my last roots from the ground and casting me into the wind with no highstory to source for my  physical life in this world.  all of my childhood is gone, all of the eras of my life are gone, everything is gone from my physical experience.  more often than not i feel like a spirit that only occasionally solidifies to experience this place.  i do not feel fully incarnate in the world very often, and it is place and relationship that helps me to feel that incarnation.  it is also a part of why i gather the mystical ephemera of my rituals and travels to save in glass jars around my altar, it is a part of why i have tattoos.  these things root me in physical experience and time, give my body longevity and help to hold the fact that i have existed in place. 

so to behold michie leaving her body over the course of days was an incredible journey.  she was, as ever, completely graceful.  she was in so much pain, yet would rest her head wearily on her paws and look steadily into my eyes where i laid next to her, emanating that pain but through it a love so vast and pure it still and shall always lesson me as to the way of perfect being.  silence, stillness and grace.

oh, creation, it hurt so much.  i couldn't believe it.  i love so deeply the gift of that being in my reality, i so rest into her presence in the world as a nourishment and blessing, i so source her for the beautiful simplicity that i hold most dear in living this life.  i cried and cried, mourning the loss of so much, the loss of everything that she has always been there for as well as her.  i knew the day that she would truly go, and that morning i woke in dark morning to take her out into the grass and the sunrise, to be blessed and cleansed for her passing.  she laid down in the grass before me, a small cry leaving her lips as she searched creation for freedom, and rested her head softly into her steadily decreasing breath.  the sun rose over us and saturated her beautiful body with warmth and light, and she tenderly licked dew from the grass.  we laid next to each other there until the morning dogs and everyone else began to come.  i took her home and laid down with her, where we lay embracing each other for the rest of the day.  abruptly she stood up and walked over to lay down under my altar, and then i realized that she wouldn't die while i was with her, she wanted to be alone.  so i blessed her, stroked her fur that i have loved so deeply with it's last breaths still warming it, and walked out along the river path to stand in the river singing before i went to be with my friends for my best friend's last night in town.  

i felt it when she left.

when i returned to my house, she was in the same place, completely still.  she had laid down to rest on my ceremonial dress, and her claws were in it when i picked her up, so it lifted and then fell at my feet as i drew her to my chest.  i put it on and held her, blessing and thanking, wailing and rocking silently.  i shook the rattle over her form and prayed to, with and for her immortal spirit before wrapping her in a blanket and putting her in my bed where she had loved to lay with me.  i was so exhausted, so we laid down in sleep together.  

the next morning (was that just yesterday?) i woke up and began to clean the room, so that our final rituals would be in clear space, cleared of the energy of mourning and free for the transmission of energy and information that happens in life's movement from one form to another.  we had good ceremony all day long, and i learned much.  then in the evening, we went to the temple of the mountain for a ritual fire.  we went as the sun was leaving this day to make day in other places to the meadow where the quartz sits in a stone circle, and the aspen groves surround a small stand of pines, two ridges flowing down into each other with the bright pure stream running in the crevasse.  it is a holy place, so rich with juju and time's gifts of experience, and it has held me more than once to receive my prayers and to be my special place.  there are piles of fallen aspens below the meadow, ready made silver firewood that cracks with a deeply satisfying sharp sound when one is breaking logs with their feet.  i gathered a huge pile of wood as the light was disappearing, made the stone circle for the pyre, blessed it to contain the ritual, and as night came fully on and the stars emerged from behind the veil of daylight, the fire spirits came to assist me in the relinquishment of that beloved body to spirit and space.  the fire burned long through the night, steadily transforming that mode of flesh and bone into ash.  i had thought it would be more tears and difficulty, more releasing attachment, but the feeling of it was quite something else.  in being present for the whole journey, through the pain of separation to the peace of completion, i honored her, our kinnexion, myself and all of creation.  fifteen years ago i took responsibility for the life of another being, and at the end of that life, i took responsibility for her transition to the spirit world.  i looked into the fire as that body disappeared, marveling at the transformative nature of that most miraculous element while singing songs to honor her, to bless her spirit, to assure our kinnectedness, to thank creation for our time together, to honor my grandmother, whose spirit rolls with me still, to express the deep and awesome gratitude i have for the blessing of her in my life.  so many songs.  so much wood for the fire, so much heat and flame.  and when her body was finally completely transformed, i prayed four rounds of prayer with the last of the flames: one for me, one for my kin and friends, one for my world, and the last for celebration.

so i have completed that journey of ours, and in that completion, i do not feel bereaved.  i feel complete.  i feel that i have completely honored our journey, spirit, love and being.  i have completely honored creation by holding the whole process in my own hands, and making the journey our journey.  michie is the most beautiful spirit i have ever had the blessing of immersing into.  she shall guide and teach me always.  i feel her within me as i feel all of my animal guides, all of my spirit kin, all of my blessings.  

there is a great peace in my spirit in this moment, for having come to closure in a cycle that may now blossom into the next phase of this life's being.  it is a peace that i have earned through presence and right action, and i am grateful for it.  i am grateful to michie for this final lesson that she has given to me.

so grateful...

bless

phoenix

in my heart i draw together

all that has been rendered

with the graceful hands 

of self-compassion

i honor my wounds

in the warrior's way

exploring my altered vessel

as a new territory

allowing the cutting of my feet

to strengthen the soles

as i continue to walk

learning

i am a stranger here

 the ancestor, baby and bride

in my own land

in the land of my dreamtide

beckoned beyond the veil of has-been-known

into the sensual rhapsody

of yet-to-know

such colors never beheld by eyes such as these

flourish riotous

and cast me as innocent

where i had been weathered

born fresh through fire

that yet still burns

i revel in the sincerity

of my passions

in their severity

flames and freeze

in new time

i become

**************************************

etheric snow twists and flutters through the cool air of a confused season in flux.  it is the fluff of the cottonwoods, our ancient grandmothers and fathers, that looses into the whirling air and gathers softly into corners, to then be soaked by these intermittent rains.  in late june, the sky is heavy with the promise of water, the nights cool with the sharp chill of a summer not quite come,  the vibrant flora of the mountains spills lusciously over every contour of the land and settlement.  it "should" be hot, dry, bright days and warm nights, the river trickling (though this it still does, for she is endangered and never flows more than an inch over the ground), the black and red bugs crawling through every crevasse and the crows mating in the high branches of trees swaying in a hot wind.  but no.  this time not.  and it puts me to mind of a line in a poem that i love}

"it's 3:23 in the morning

and i can't sleep

because my great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams

'what did you do once you knew?

what did you do

when the animals all were dying?

did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen?

surely you did something 

when the seasons started failing?

what did you do

once you knew?'"

i ask myself that question often.  what do i do, with my knowing?  

i have worked to become the radiant divine essence that i lives within the crust of hard living that i have steadily melted over the last few years, since i stopped indulging it.  i have worked hard at that healing, that becoming.  these last weeks have been the opportunity to see how that work has progressed - where i have succeeded and what i have not worked with enough.  i see the still bleeding eye of my original wound and i see the vast and breathtaking beauty of my essential truth, laying as a wolf and a jaguar with crowns touching on the event horizon where this body and this soul commune.  i see the radical love with which i can finally embrace myself, and the brilliant light that shines through that love as a salve for this family of mine, this family of incarnate being.  i see the wrath, hatred and envy that still live within me, and the grace with which i can regard them and still negotiate their presence in my totality.  i see the tremendous brilliance of my being, the awesome scope of love and grace that is my self in this world.  i see the innocence of my soul, golden as the day i arrived here, and the silent ancient wombon that i am beyond time and incarnation, and how they hold each other in tender stillness, energetically calibrating the frequencies of their nature to be a beautiful music.  i see the beauty of being, i see my beauty in being, and i see the road laid long into the hills before me, full of love, beauty, magic and freedom.  there is a soft diamond knowing within that exists transcendent of terrestrial entanglement, and it is this place in which i now rest, not yet freed from process, but yet resting in the nature of what is this moment, acknowledging that the experience is only that - the experience.  the truth is yet greater, beyond words and bodies.  they say the truth shall set you free, but it goes beyond that.  freedom and truth are one.

i have delved deeply into the mystery of the dimensions, for i do not think that this world can be saved or salved through actions born of the mind.  there is a great sickness here on our earth, something that is not born of us or from within us, that needs healing for all of us to be free.  and it is not the mind that will heal it.  we have been corralled, like slave animals, into an experience of living through the mind.  but we are sensual beings, comprehensively intelligent and meant to live on the brilliance of sunlight and the love of earths breath.  we are not meant to think, think, think, and analyze, analyze, analyze.  we are meant to experience, be affected, affect and become through the entire sensory phenomenon of the body.  we are a comprehensive intelligence utilizing our most treacherous aspect as our primary modality.  the mind as it is used now is a dictator that runs amok with our spirits wisdom by being put into such a ludicrously improper position of power.  it could be the ally that guided the collection of experience and the cultivation of wisdom into the ascension through the material plane into embodied communion.  but there is not yet a system in place for that to be the way, for all of our systems are based in duality.  this present moment of incarnation is the development of that system, that system of transcendence through unification and expansive consciousness.  we are meant to integrate the divine knowing of source consciousness within the vessel of terrestrial experience.  this little world of coffee and computers and jobs and rent and what-fucking-ever is not the way to realize this - it is a game for entertaining slaves out of their own potential of self and collective realization.

i have been playing that game, with half of my self in and half of my self out because i have yet to find the allies that would truly journey the change with me, and i am afraid of being alone.   we are all in the system that we yearn away from, and my experience has yet to include communion on the path.  my experience thus far is of separate creatures on the same path, or on paths very close together, but not traveling together.  i have crafted my experience this way, so i know that i can craft it differently as my impulse shifts from self-cultivation to collective ascension.  one necessarily preceded the other.  the yearning in my heart is a genuine yearning for all of us to go together into the brilliance of being.  we are not meant to suffer this world in the ways that we do, but for the experience to change, there must be enough of us in resonance and we must hold the invitation open for everyone to come.  division is demise.

so when my great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams, "what did you do when you knew?" i sit in prayer and breathe into them with all of the love that flows through me and say, "i am still searching for my way in and for my way out.  and i am searching because we are one.  i am searching because this wandering is a wisdom that is my way, and ceremony is the way that i live this wisdom".  and this is true.  ceremony is the way, because ceremony transcends the divisionism of this field, transcends the tyranny and arrogance of the mind, transcends the duality dimension and brings us into the truth of our resonant selves.  would the dominating religions need to eradicate ceremony, ritual and exstasy if it were not the way to liberation?  would the dominating structures need to crush the bodies and spirits of womyn if the salvation of the whole did not rest in the natural transdimensional grace and potency of our beings, and in our awesome power to steward new life into this realm?  would the dominating structures need to cultivate men into emotionally castrated killing machines if the softness of their caring spirits were not an integral aspect of the peace of this world?  would the dominating structures need to slaughter the animals of the earth if communion with them were not a means of expanding the consciousness of humanity?  when the state is threatened, they outlaw gathering, because gathering in circles, singing, dancing and prayer, change the frequency of the field.  these seemingly simple actions alter the resonant nature of space-time and cause the unravelling of diseased systems as truth essence flowers from the center of creation through the vessels of being.  critical mass is important.  without a critical mass of people, we are each one in the night, unwoven, and our songs, though potent, disseminate into the night without their fullest potential realized in relation.  

so when my great-great-grandchildren ask me in dreams the question that i am always asking myself, i say "i searched for my people, and for a way to bring us out of the slavery of separation and into resonance with each other, because it was what i knew how to do.  i sat in ceremony with myself and with anyone who would sit with me, because it was what i knew how to do.  i held space and looked for elders, allies and wisdom teachers, internal and external, because it was what i knew how to do, and it was the way the path unfolded for me".  but i don't yet know how to make it all bigger than the moment.  i know how to look, and i know how to invite, and i know how to deal with the sticky slowness of the process of awakening when people come to ceremony with a watch on, wondering when they'll be done so that they can go back to their lives.  i have yet to know how to coalesce all of this energy and information into a cohesive offering, into a cohesive field for the expression of a greater pulse.  i have yet to know, but the knowing is coming.  i have awaited an ally, or allies, like to the kindred in warriors tales of other times, and this has not come.  it is an essential aspect of the sickness of this time that we isolate, fraction our time and busy ourselves with false idols.  i have almost been in community more than once, but it falls away just as i am to take the step in, so for now my journey is the solitary path and i walk into the rising sun alone to realize that there is no alone in this world.  for as soon as i sit to prayer, all of creation is there with me.  and when i sit down singing, the sound draws the resonant heart to my side.

someday, perhaps, my song will be clear and i will sit in community with a cadre of resonant souls, all of us singing the ascension song together.  perhaps someday soon.  after all to which i cling has been released, and the true needless nudity of being flows through me as a brilliant river of pure love water.  after all of my poison has been healed, and i can carry only love to the circle.  after i have journeyed to the mountain and have carried down the wisdom intact.

perhaps someday soon.

for my great-great-grandchildren who ask me in dreams, "what did you do once you knew?".

and for the animal kin, whose wisdom guides me, holds me, and reminds me when i get lost.

may it serve...

expansion, discomfort and revelation, part 3

these days, wild with wind and lightning, rain and thunder, have ravaged the spirits of myself and my kin in a way that is not just the working of our inner selves.  it is the working of the cosmos through us, as the sun heaves and writhes in its fiery mass, planets spin in wild disregard for our little lives, stars fly and space bears dispassionate witness.  

i thought i would tear my mind from my brain this week, railing as it did against my peace.  such obsessive transgression waged against me, and such a shield that it planted between my consciousness and my clarity.  i haven't felt that way since i was younger, much younger.  perhaps i am again in the sky of grand experience, and this process of becoming my truth is an omni-dimensional expansion that includes within its scope the naked vulnerability of the tiniest child and the indomitable potency of the mightiest warrior.  like to the universal model, of which each of us is holographic,  in consciousness i sit in the event horizon from which all expands and into which all contracts. 

it is a most phenomenal process that i behold flowering through me.  

i am being called upon by my community to serve in the ritual and ceremonial capacity, something calling almost every day.  i am being recognized by my contemporaries and my elders as the medicine woman that i have felt growing through me, and the harmonic that that recognition creates between my inner and outer realities is astounding.  it is a balancing and a fluency that i have awaited for many moons.  i am also growing in my ability to galvanize ritual experience in whatever context i am moving in, the energy of my being simply drawing my companions to the practice with me, so that we are existing in ritual space easily and consistently.  

then there is the way that all of the work and gathering and seeding that i've done in these past few years has came to fruition on the...  hmmm, how would i call it?  the paradigmatic plane.  something like that.  this weekend, i gave a Pachamama Aliance "Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream" symposium to the Student Global Leadership Alliance.  what do they call those?  peak experiences, that's what.  it was incredible.  the SGLA is a program for teenagers and young adults designed to help them awaken more expediently into their passion and potential for leadership.  this was a group of 15 - 22 year old kids from all over new mexico who just blew me away.  they are so enthusiastic, so passionate, so wise and present and eager about their opportunities for affecting positive change in the world, it nourished my heart beyond measure to encounter them in a capacity of guidance.  they beheld within me something intangibly inspiring, and the conversessions we had throughout the symposium were awesome, our mutual nourishment deep and dynamic.  an amazing thing about these young people is that while they are fully aware of the state of our world, they are not hopeless or in bondage in the face of that awareness.  they see what's happening, are eager to learn more, and are eager to involve and onvest themselves in turning the tide towards beauty.  they have such fire for it.  it was so enjoyable and so deeply nourishing for me to be able to engage them as an elder guide, for them to look to me with that mixture of familiarity (because i feel like them) and respect (because i also feel experienced) and openness to what wisdom i have garnered in my journey.  it feels like deep service, the right kind of service to the physical plane.   there was a simultaneous scope and depth in it that feels that i Have Done the Good Work (for the weekend).  praise creation.  after the symposium we made music together, fleshed out the conversessional seeds we had planted in the gathering, shared laughter, food and tobacco smoke, prayers and blessings.  we immersed in each other as allies, and their absolute vitality continues to flow through me to this moment.  one of those precious moments when i meet, again, what it's really all about.

a good friend of mine, in receiving the review of my psychic journey this week, offered me a perspective that i am exploring, that i find interesting.  he said that whenever he is about to give a workshop (he does myriad different types of peace work), there is a burgeoning of all the ways that he creates self-violence, and all the ways that he creates violence in the world.  he said when he realized what the nature of that gift was, he was very grateful.  we talked for awhile about what it means to be a facilitator.  when we take up the mantle of our own powers, we must fully settle that which we are to be teaching within ourselves.  if it is peace, we must face our inner war, and the way we make war in the world, and put that into integrity.  for how could we presume to guide others into a place that we have not fully journeyed and balanced within ourselves?  the work is ongoing, of course.  but to be a guide, there must be a level of mastery, because if there's not, you cannot possibly hold space for all that will arise for the people whose journeys you invite into your care.

it says in the Emerald Tablet, the original treatise on alchemy, that "that which is essential is not destroyed in a fire.  it is purified".  life is an alchemical journey.  we arrive golden, become leaden, and liberate ourselves through trial and triumph back into gold.  we are solar wisdom, and as we grow into our truths, we re-learn the miraculous brilliance that is the innate resonance of our incarnate selves.  we are the communion of the eternal grace of creation and the organic dynamism of the terrestrial.  there is no simple journey through living if one chooses to be fully involved.  truly, regardless of the way one travels, the journey is as wild and unpredictable as any journey is - it is the nature of journeying.   

  

so, simultaneously, while i am being invoked as medicine woman on every level, i have experienced being absolutely ravaged by trivial obsession.  and i don't invoke this as a dismissal of the movements of my heart, but as a clarification of what the mind can do with circumstance.  it can so warp and savage the peace of the self by working overtime to poison, through trauma memory, the purity of the new moment.  i have met with my mind, the enemy this week, and had clearly illustrated the ways in which i can still be small and fearful, wrathful and spiteful.  i have not gained clarity about what answer those awarenesses invite, but the conversession is open, so the guns are no longer firing.  there is silence where there had been pandemonium, and in silence, peace may rise.   

i now feel about my "dark side" (for lack of a less new exhausted term) that it is not something to destroy or deny - it is a potential ally whose power needs to be understood and integrated so that it can serve the work of the whole.  i had thought that i should just be the light, and have no dark side, but, you know...  it just doesn't work like that.  and the whole idea is way too Doreen Virtue for me.  i was young, what to say?  anyway, i'm down with my dark side, and in this week i have learned that it still has a leverage over my transcendent consciousness that i wasn't aware of.

so here i am with the next phase of my deep work.  how do i manage the expansion of my soul with the contraction of my little self?  it was interesting to see, on saturday, my process unfolding.  i woke up feeling like hell, my eyes burning from tears and weariness, wrathful and exhausted.  but i had a mission, and it was the most important thing on my radar.  so i went running.  i went to the park and martially kicked the fuck out of my struggle.  i yuked (a gift from rahmanen - the practice of unabashedly purging negative tension.  wonderful thing, yuking.  praise old wild, mystic, hippy sihks) loudly and ferociously, i laid in the grass and rained into the earth.  i breathed and ohm-ed.  and i still felt like hell.  but i couldn't go to the symposium that way.  i had to be in my center, and i only had an hour and a half to get there.  so i took my corn mala (a gift from my departed neighbor, corn kernels from all the native corns strung together), got in the car, and plumbed the depths of my brain for a mantra that would feel good.  i sing a lot of somber, minor key mantras and spirit songs that were not appropriate for drawing me out of the well of my challenges.  rack, rack, rack...  AH-HA!  my friend sita sings "om mani padme hum" in the most jubilant, beautiful, uplifting and healing way i have ever heard, and to that mantra i humbly leapt in reverent joy.  i sang and sang and sang.  all the way to se'as house, picked her up, filled her in, and then we sang all the way to the east mountains (no easy journey for her these weeks, either).  and when i got there, i felt better.  i could show up.  i could smile.  and as the symposium progressed, and i sat in that room full of beautiful, activated, caring, passionate people, the earth within me shifted, and my fire turned from pain to purification, and in that purification was pure, satisfied joy.  in service.  

then the madrid gypsy fest after that, well...  good music, good dancing, good beer, wild people, wild dust storm, rain and magical sunset.  moon rise over the galisteo basin, golden yellow and silently massive.  earth embrace, community embrace, kinship and reverent irreverence.  all the good medicine, flowing freely from sky to earth, heart to heart, moon to sun.  and that guy with the dreads, oh my goodness...  trouble. 

thank you, all creation, for so richly rewarding me for every moment that i show up for my struggles on this planet (and thank you for my struggles being so small).  i love you, i love this home, i love this journey.

thank you, all kin, for the challenges and blessings that we bring to each other in this life.  i would grow so much more slowly without them.  

may it serve

rapturous excommunication

these winds, white and raging, rip across the plains and tumble over the mountains excitedly, rolling great and terrifying storms in their currents.  a bright light of morning will steadily give way to the encroaching darkness of afternoon whose breezes become sharp and wet, ferocious and sensual with the life promised within those gathering clouds.  it seems these are the moments that artists dream of, where so many layers of light dance through so many layers of cloud, golden dawn and steely night mingling in a bachanalian weather dance in shamelessly entrancing hues.  that blue!  where did it come from?  that golden pink!  the color of the lips of the goddess!  i stretch into the sky to suckle, lifted from gravity by sheer devotional madness.  my senses are verily enraptured from my body and i am rendered socially unacceptable as i run naked in the storm through the grassy field behind my house or along the mountain path.  

such taboos i destroy in my rapture!  they are only taboo because my freedom to love the earth so voraciously is unabashed by the idea that i should be clothed and sit in the warm shelter of a picture window, watching the glory of creation unfold like a tv show for sensual retards.  fuck that.  i'm exstatic.  if not, i am missing the point.  you can't deny the sexual healing of a torrential storm.  if you've never been there, go spread yourself open to the thunder - it changes everything.  

the deities are rumbling over head, every sharp word a brilliant flash of lightning as they tensely sculpt the fate of this earthly moment, every gravitational exchange a glorious bass of thunder permeating my little being with all of the energy of the universe.  resting into the orgasmically satiated body of the wet mother beneath me, i feel their explosive conversation in my hips, my lungs, my open mouth.  drinking deep the brilliant waters of becoming, i know i am one of a million creatures in this raging river, wholly unique and utterly invisible.  only i can be the cell that i am, and only the whole body can validate my existence.  

while there is much to do to "save the world" this act of sensual communion with creation is of the utmost importance in a very simple way.

journey with me} creation is satisfied in communion with itself.  so why delineate?  because there is yet more rapture to experience in the phenomenon of relationship.  a beautiful lilac bush spread two bundles of bloom from a single stem just as the legs of a luscious lover would spread for the tongue of the beloved.  they were wet and fragrant, tender and tremendous purple in the grey wind of the rainstorm.  so i buried my face between the blooms and suckled the water from within their beautiful contours.  the mother laughed and swept wind across our kiss to move them around my face, soaking me in scent and water.  the lilac kissed me back, and remembered me when next i passed her.  her blooms, so short lived and so ravaged by these storms as they flow through, were short lived, and now they are gone, brown and shriveled and falling from the branched of the bush.  a fleeting moment that creation arranged just for us to immerse in the radical eros of each other, of the whole moment.  in that moment, we were the fruition of a well planned gifting of love to love.  the brilliance of creation satisfied in experiencing itself.

this earth is as sensual a lover as one could ever hope to encounter, wild in her diversity of pleasures.  this earth is a brilliantly crafted gift to the sensing body, a sensual masterpiece designed to entice, saturate and satiate every single aspect of every element of the physical incarnation.  we have flowers of astonishing variety whose scents, textures, colors and tastes are designed to so enrapture and enrich us, it is certain that they are the clever contrivance of a beloved only interested in pleasing the beloved.  we have foods whose tastes nourish, please and disgust us, and each of which create a different experience in the body by stimulating and interacting with different chemicals and processes within us.  the whole planet (and no, i'm not talking about monkey settlements) is a phenomenal act of architectural brilliance, inviting exploration and discovery to enliven and expand the scope of being, for each hike, trek, walkabout and wander bring untold revelations to the psyche, provided one gets out of the head long enough to take it in.

all of creation is a gift for us to dive into naked and wild, and it is one of the most primal and perfect ways that we can honor the gift to do so.  we must worship the earth to understand what we are fighting for if we choose to fight.

i'll never forget when i went to uluru, also know as ayers rock, in australia.  it's in the middle of the outback, hell and gone from everywhere except for alice springs, which exists solely as a tourist transfer station for it.  the rock is a single massive red monolith in the desert and was the place of female initiation rites for the aboriginal tribes that lived in the area before the regular story of white fuckery played out.  i had waited years for the opportunity, spent something like a week getting there, and it was a pilgrimage for me for which i was wholly prepared with offerings and a dance and specific prayers.  i walked around the base of the rock looking for my spot, walking slowly so i could drink in the miraculous resonance of her long and full journey as a sacred site on the planet.  when i found my spot, i returned to nudity, planted a crystal in a grid in the sand, and danced a prayer with her for things that are not to be written.  she flowed through the sand into my body, filled my with her wisdom and her light, graced and nourished me with her power and all of the rites of passage that she had nourished in her being.  i fell, famished and elated, to the ground, after many hours of this worship.  i had honored her, the women of the story, and myself by arriving fully into her embrace with reverent humility.

one thing that i noticed, as i was walking to and from my ritual, was that the people who had come from so far to this extremely holy place were not even looking at her.  most of the people were doggedly walking the two mile track around the rock with their heads down, talking about mundane shit from wherever they had come from like they weren't even there.  then, when they would look up, it would be with a camera between them and the rock as some kind of shield between them and the transformation inherent in a real communion with her.  that fascinated (and, at the time, profoundly angered) me.  one had to travel so far to be there.  one had to want to be there, really want it, to go the distance to be there.  so why go and not have the experience?  why go to the naked clitoris of initiation and not drink it in?

theory} people are drawn to ancient sacred sites, to mountaintops and waterfalls and canyons and caves, because what is ancient and wise in them knows that the healing and nourishment available in these places is absolutely crucial to the wellness and the fulfillment of the being that they are underneath all of the life that has transpired over their truth.  but because we are starved for ritual, ceremony and exstasy in this way of being that is working to strangle the life out of life, we don't know how to allow it in to affect us.  it is dangerous, because subconsciously we know that to be affected by the sacred nature of the earth means a disconnection from the lie of living that we all live in, even when we are awakening.  to be a rapturous lover of the natural world means that we will no longer be able to participate unquestioningly in the animal holocaust, the environmental holocaust, the spiritual holocaust of our times.  we will have to be active participants in the liberation of life which is no easy or tiny task.  it doesn't reside in changing light bulbs or buying a hybrid or any of the other ways that are consumer band-aids for the conscious complacent.  it means conflict with "the way things are" and possible excommunication from the masses for being "a freak".

i'm a freak.  praise everything.  and i'm not fully awake yet.

before the death of a few years ago, i was a fighting-with-everyone-and-everything self-righteous vegan anarchist capoeirista who thought and expressed that everyone had their heads in their fucking asses and fuck you for being asleep, you lazy ignorant bastard.  oh, yeah.  it was intense.  i would go off on any and everyone about any and everything from the new world order and how drinking coke was paying for the slaughter of south american villagers (which is true) to how eating meat was destroying the environment (also true) to how spiritual starvation was being perpetuated by public schools, churches and television (all true).  the issue being that i was so angry and judgmental that my approach inspired defensive positions more than awakening, because my approach was an attack.  i was just angry.  in that anger, i couldn't share the volumes of very useful information that i had gathered with anyone, because i was so spiritually diseased by what i knew and completely lacking guidance about how to be other than angry.

i had to go live in concert with life and creation before i could do anything to encourage other people to do the same.  and i had to realize how hard it is to wake up before i could realize that everyone, even if they seem to be a lazy bastard to me, is doing their best with their own tools to wake up in a situation that almost completely prohibits integral living.  i had to have my own awakening through love before i could understand that you can't beat people awake, and that everyone only comes to it in their own time and in their own way.  before i had the humiliating realization that just because i knew about didn't make me conscious.  ooooh, that smarts.  i'm so much better than everyone else!

i find now that i don't come forth with as much as i know about the dominant paradigm in the third dimension for a number of reasons.  one is that i know i'm not quite equanimous enough to represent my position without fighting with someone if they won't take it up when i give them my information.  i just know that, and i don't want to fight with anyone anymore.  another is that i also recognize the limitations of my perspectives, because they are so fluid and impressionable within myself.  another is that i recognize that i don't know what people have been through to be in the value systems that they are, and i should learn about that first so that i can approach something respectfully if i decide that i need to approach it at all.

but the most wonderful thing to learn is that my radiant being is what opens doors for transformational experience.  if i live well, feel good and am radiant in love, people want to know what i'm doing to be there, and will come to me to learn.  it is more of a direct service to be the way that i am and to be an invitation to any and everyone to find that same radiance within themselves.  and in this way, i respect creation and everyones experience by being open to questions instead of aggressive with answers.  if someone wants to wake up and they like the way that they feel i am awake, then they can come to me and i will offer everything of my experience for them to play with.  

guatam buddha said to his disciples, "i can not bring you to enlightenment.  i can tell you what i did that brought me to enlightenment.  it may or may not work for you.  you must try it, challenge it, modify it, to reach your own enlightenment.  there is no one way".  so while i really want to smack people around for the way we're all living on the earth, i remain humble because i am not yet perfected, and i do believe that everyone is doing their best.   i have a lot to offer.  but it is only what i have to offer and there is yet so much in the world to taste and love.

but i unreservedly offer this - go make love with the storm.  lay into the body of the mother in naked rapture, spread open and shameless, to be ravaged and healed by creation.  it begins an alchemical process in the event horizon between the universe and the body that utterly and beautifully transforms the incarnate consciousness.  it brings us into resonance with this natural world so that we are one with creation instead of polarized against it, or alienated from it.  that unity is our birthright.  it is one of the reasons that we are here.  don't bereave yourself of that.

en lakesh, may it serve.

expansion, discomfort and revelation, part 2

i have had the most wonderful experience, these last few years, of having and being a neighbor.  my favorite neighbor is a womon named jackie who has lived across the street from me for as long as i've been here.  she's been here for 20 years, i've been here for two.  when i first came to live in the house that has been my sanctuary, i looked over at her yard, full of veggies and flowers in a beautiful, santa fe style tiered garden and thought, "i wonder who lives there.  i want to know".  so when i first saw her out in the garden with her powerful arms, her brilliantly wide green eyes and her awesomely earthly presence, i went to engage her.  from that engagement blossomed a wonderfully enriching and totally unique relationship for which i am eternally grateful.  today it changes, as she has pulled a moving truck our of her driveway and is on her way to oregon with her daughter.  as i was walking by the house today (when she was supposed to already be gone), i saw her moving the truck, and she called to me.  she came so we could hold each other once more and give thanks for the blessing this communion has been for both of us.  there was a beautiful stone in my pocket that i had carried for a few years and that she had seen before and loved.  i love it too, but it called clearly in that moment to go with her and hold her in love for her journey and beyond, so i pressed it into her palm with all blessings before flowing back out into the river on my own journey.  i am so proud of her.  it is so huge for her to leave this hermits nest of hers and go out into the world to start new stories in new places.  and she does so in service, so that her pregnant daughter has her support in the journey of inviting life into the third dimension.  they go in honor of the indigenous family model, conjoined in support for one another.  it is so very, very inspiring.

it brings me into contemplation of movement, change, loss and invitation.  there is so much of all of this right now, as people graduate from various places and move into new eras of being, as people move, as people kinverge in love or separate in love, as things die and are born...  there is so much that i've been thinking of as i am on the cusp of my own change, on the precipice of my own cliff, spreading my wings before flight through the canyon.  where there was a lover and an engagement there is space that i have no drive to fill with another body.  i am relishing the subtle and dynamic unfolding of the energies of loss and liberation as i relish the transparency of cactus-flower petals saturated with rain.  it is their fleeting saturation that so enriches their color, and only stillness allows me to experience it.  i can only suckle the water from their contours if i lower my lips to the bloom with utmost care and awareness, for there are thorns to stab me all around that luscious tenderness.  and so soon, so soon, will it all change, and i do not want to miss the earth under my feet by only looking ahead and up because i think that's what i should do.  now is the time to look down and in, to see all that is tiny and magical and changed by time and circumstance.  it is time to learn from all that has been in these weeks and innerstand the ways that i have been affected and the new ways that i will arrive to reality because of those effects.  precious moments, these.  i could not have scripted them better.

as the storm of my emotions subsides and the stillness of the nourished earth resides in the present, i am able to be clear with what calls forth to be honored in this moment.  i still yearn towards the magical valley of tree, mountain and water that i did when i had a lover to go to there as well.  the land still calls me, and to that call i give due heed.  i still revel in the miracle of synchronicity that continues to be my experience, and that reveling continues to push me towards a kind of deeply settled nomadism that will lead, i feel, towards a home that is actually mine to rest in, sometime in the future now.  there is much to offer through this vessel of myself, and its gifts are requested in many places.  my dear friend the musician offered me to tour with her for the summer as a guest.  my colorado family invokes me for ceremony and art.  my northern family invokes me for re-integration.  there is much to learn, to do, to give and receive in these coming moons.  and there are great and immediate changes looming overhead, the magnitude of which cannot be predicted by little human minds, because they are the type that shatter all limitations by being beyond the scope of imagination.  curiously, i feel that an unrooted groundation is the way that i am meant to serve creation in these moments.  interesting.  i have allies everywhere i go, love and family everywhere i go, and infinite potential for more.  i love towards the valley community, but have no attachment to immersion if now is not the time and work is not the way.  perhaps because the akashic wisdom of my eternal self knows of a trajectory far more complex and unusual than the one that i think of casting for myself.  that would seem appropriate given my story so far.

it's funny because i don't have this perspective on myself, but when i struggle and wonder, everyone who knows me says "you've always got it together, so relax and let your together come".  i laugh and wonder at the stories i tell about myself.

part of this expansion is in the patience required to let the whole wave flow through me.  we are, as a collective, very good at starting things, carrying them through and receiving the benefit of our dedication up to that point of investment.  we are, collectively, very inept at completion and closure.  in our little society working to become a culture we are very enamored with the positive arc of the journey, and very allergic to the negative arc of the journey (value neutral, this concept of pos/neg).  we love to start things and feel the rush of inception (falling in love).  we love to sink in and feel the rush of expansion (the beauty of deep immersion).  we start to squirm and look outward in difficulty (turbulence and boredom after the high of the new has passed and you are just there with each other as you each are and no dopamine to make each other sparkly pretty).  we really struggle when the shit-or-get-off-the-pot choice comes along where you have to decide if your invested or bored, then we usually totally dissociate from completion and closure, because we have no working models for that aspect of the journey - most of us don't even realize that it's there to attend to.  people also resist the completion and closure aspect of an engagement because in our society, being done with something is usually imbued with all sorts of negative connotations, like abandonment or rejection.  in business deals it's different, in projects it's different, but in relationships this plays out over and over again.  people jump ship when the going gets rough because we are afraid of being hurt and not being able to heal, and we are afraid that attending to the end will be too hard for us to arrive to, or we just don't want to show up because by the time we admit that we're done, we've already been done for awhile and resent needing to give more energy to the process.  or perhaps we are afraid that we will miss the next beginning by being present for the present end.  so many different things to consider, yes?  every situation is it's own reality.

but i grow.  i make closure with my lover, bless him, and then sit with myself for as long as i need to to truly understand what's happening within me.  i don't reach for the next body to "scratch my itch" or to "experience divine communion".  now is not the time for that, and i would miss something really valuable if i did.  i reach into myself and my work and my community to nourish what in me is wounded and needs support, and i rest into ceremony to light up the learning that i am gifted with in this journey.  i celebrate what work i have done well, i celebrate the love that has continued to be free-flowing in the journey, i celebrate the way that i have triumphed over old demons in this process.  

i celebrate that i am not a slave anymore.  this is what i see more than everything else.  i am not a slave anymore.  i am not a slave to men, to attention, to sex, to fear.  i am not a slave to my insecurities.  i am not a slave to circumstance.  i am not a slave to my wounded past.

that's fucking HUGE.  that's the fruition of years of work.  that's no minor thing for me, and the whole journey is beyond worth it to have that truth revealed.  this whole journey is the completion stage of those years of work.  the invitation to arrive to the challenge to all of the work that i've done.  it is the saturn that says "how far did you go, really?".  i have gone very, very far to be as deeply within as i am, and i cannot lose that center anymore.  

i see a cycle in my life that is fascinating and beautiful.  i pass through a period of external experience that affects me and fills me with information through challenge and nourishment.  then i go into an internal phase where i reflect on all that has passed and work with myself to integrate, heal, empower and prepare for re-emergence.  then i go to the external again in a series of new endeavors and engagements wherein the work that i had done is called up and reviewed through challenge and nourishment, and the next phase of the work is introduced through the same means.  in this process, i am constantly forged by life and experience.  as i grow in linear time i realize that all of my experience colludes to sculpt me in a cohesive vision that i can now begin to own as My Path.  in this process i realize, as well, that there is no past and no future, there is only the expansive and contractive movement of omni-dimensional time proffering circumstance for personal and transpersonal development.  the communion of the transcendent and the terrestrial.

i accept.  and thank you, universe, for being present with me, for nurturing and supporting me in all if my challenges, and for being there so fully for me to worship and adore as i do.

so good...

may it serve