Hello friends, it's been awhile since I last sent you some words. I have been deep in healing old wounds, deep in feeling grief and terror- old, ancient, past, present and for the future. I have been swimming and running and growing beans and corn. I have been singing with the cranes and for the stone people, that they might resonate with my songs, echoing through deep time and into the undreamed future.
I have been listening to what my muse has to make of all of this, to what is important now. To what I am up to and down for and what the point, the heart of the matter, is.
I have been asking myself the question, what is it that I am feeding, which dream am I being dreamed as by Earth? If my life were of use, in the deepest sense of that phrase, what would the usefulness of my life be? What would the echo be that my life leaves to the future ones, like the songs I sing now to stones? What can I do now, today, to give back and not only take, from Earth?
In the last months, I came to the understanding that all of my work is to be 'always coming home’ in the way that Ursula K. LeGuin points to in her novel of the same name. That I long for the hardship that Wendell Berry speaks of in his poem, The Vision (see below). That I might be a force fo re-member-ing humans into Earth Community in a sacred way full of story and song. That I stand for a transition, part of which is the collapse, that is a transformation; life giving, even in its dying, rather than increasing the individualistic violence for the sake of Supremacy, that is told in the Hero story of White/Might is Right.
How might I contribute, one human person with most likely less life ahead of me than behind? How can my way of reciprocity with the powers that uphold life and my participation with Earth be an offering to feed life, the way life feeds me? (Literally, Earth gives me everything I need to live. You too.) And so, I choose first of all little things; lighting a candle to the ancestors in the morning while I make tea; greeting the wild ones and Earth out loud when I go with the dogs for a walk; offering my first bite of food before I eat, to feed that which feeds me. And this feels right to do. When I can, I go to a sacred place, an ancent dolmen or neolithic grave, and make offerings there to the ancestors of this place, both human and other than human. But there are no communities of ritual, no gatherings to mark the holy days of the year, no traditions of my people that have been passed down since before conversion when my people were indigenous to place. So, I listen, what is it you want of me, Earth? What is mine to do that you have carried on, my ancestors?
I have said this before, and it is more true than ever, that beauty making is about the only thing that makes sense to me right now, that singing is what my ancestors want from me, that stories are poetry and map enough, and that my heart longs for community of heartbroken and loving humans and wild ones held within the great web of the more than human, who might be fed by the beauty, song, tears and laughter that we create together.
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