It Begins With a Call (Part 22): Intensive's End

We've just returned from Hawaii (more to say on that later), and I see how that journey actually began six months ago with my time at the Healers' Intensive in Topanga.  Here are my reflections from then:

The quiet and the wind today are balms to my soul.  Sitting looking out over the canyon, another poem came:

This Earth Was Given

This earth was given.

Not to us.

It was not given to us,

It was just given,

Life arising out of itself,

Blazing forth,

Blossoming forth,

Birthed into being

For its own sake.

We are such fools

To think we own it,

Control it,

Master it,

As if it were here

For us and us alone.

No, it is here

Because it is here.

It is glorious because

It can be,

Generous because

That is its nature,

Beautiful because there is

No other way for it to be.

This earth was given,

As we were given.

And the only way

to be together

Is for us

To bow down.

We are reaching the end of our time together, and today are to spend some time integrating what we have learned about our mandate.  There are so many pieces, so many thoughts, insights, instructions and possibilities that it’s all a jumble.  What we clearly have, all of us, is devastating grief.

The teacher says she hears me speaking with more authority.  I consider her impressions of me from previous times here, and find them interesting.  She has seen me as hesitant, quiet, holding back.  Not how I see myself, except for the quiet piece.  I like to speak with an economy of words.  I grow impatient, as the teacher does not seem to, with those who speak endlessly.  I don’t like my judgmentalism, but there it is.  

I say, “Maybe I’m stepping more into the elder role.”  I think I have been hesitant because I’ve gotten the feedback that I have too strong a voice.  I’m one of those in Eve Ensler’s poem “who go too far and feel too much.”  Certainly, my mother tried to tone me down, calm me down, socialize me into acceptability.  I thought I’d gotten out from under that program, but perhaps it has snagged me again.  Maybe it’s time I stop worrying about how I come off and just say and do what I need to say and do.  I’d like to do it with a full and open heart, though.  Full of the fire of life and Spirit.

So, what are the threads? Elder. Grandmother. Grief.  Hawaii. Turtles. Whales. Plastic. (See Part 21).  Metabolizing or transforming energy.  Revitalizing the sacredness of the earth in my city, bleached dead like the coral in the sea.  Speak to the trees.  Plant a tree.  Carry fire.

I am one who wears the mantle of Elder.  I am one who carries and receives the blessings of fire.  I am one who is of the earth and who waters it with my tears.  I am one who is honored by and listens to the voice of Whale, who will not place Turtle between myself and danger.  I am one who will question my beliefs.  I am one who is blessed and who can bless (to quote Yeats) and I am one who will gratefully receive that blessing and inhabit the calling brought forth from it.  I am one who will use my voice and my words to be with Earth, Tree, Whale, Turtle, grandchildren, people in my path and on my path.

Whale asked me to say this poem of mine:

We need each other now.

We need each other now.

In truth, we always have.

But as things disintegrate,

as chaos and disorder reign,

we become like bones,

scattered and

stripped clean of all

that is inessential.

Let’s reassemble ourselves,

the way Isis did with Osiris,

or La Loba with her wolf bones.

Let’s find a new configuration,

this part mine, that part yours –

Perhaps something original

will emerge, or

something ancient.

Let’s light a candle now, friends,

so together we might see

how to begin.

So, if I walk out of here and out of this sacred canyon as Elder, what does that look like?  Carrying grief and the knowledge of demise that is unbearable.  Carrying fire and the tears that water the parched earth.  Carrying the charge of metabolizing the poisonous fires and vapors and of resacralizing the land.  Not putting Turtle between me and danger.  Trying to eliminate plastic as much as is feasible. 

And healing?  There is no healing in hospice, other than the healing of Spirit.  It is not about my healing, that is clear.

I began the week with a card reading.  It was profound.  The card for the past was Hygeia, healing.  The card for the present was Persephone.  She is always my present.  The future was one I call Bone Crone, looking towards very old age and mortality.  So, I decided to end the week with another reading.  The past card was Fatigue and Illness, the present was the Green Man, the living vital presence of the green world.  The future was Holding Hecate’s Torch.  In it, I stand with my partner as we look out to take the next step.  Hermes is above us, Hecate below, and I carry one of Hecate’s torches.  To me, that speaks of validation of my elderhood.  My blog is Hanging Out with Hecate.  I will hang with her still, She who witnesses, who is the companion.  I hold the flame.

It Begins With a Call (Part 20): Grief Rituals

Our annual grief ritual is over.  Such challenging and important work! Having lost a dear friend four days earlier, I was primed.  It also rekindled the last grief work I did in June.

With some trepidation (given my experiences two years ago when I returned from heat and fire with a headache that became chronic), I headed back to Topanga for more work with the teacher.  From the get-go it was clear that this would be an entirely different experience.  No fires.  No 113° heat.  The first morning dawned foggy and misty.  Water dripped from the eucalyptus trees.  The first two days stayed cool and windy.  Even when it cleared up, the temperature stayed below 80°.  The group was a little smaller this time, and a tight community feeling developed quickly.

It did not take long for us to plunge into the grief and despair for the state of the planet.  One man, a known journalist and author, spoke at length about his research and subsequent inescapable awareness that the planet is already on hospice, that it is already too late.  How does one deal with that?  By grieving.  We all went into grief.  This week would basically be a week-long grief ritual.

This intensive is significantly different –at least for me – than previous ones.  The teacher has always focused on the need to change our thinking, to rid ourselves of “colonized mind.”  But this time, the work has gone to another level: what to do, how to be, if it is already too late.

Here was the question posed for us all:  What is the mandate for each of us at this time?  The teacher was adamant that we cannot be here only for ourselves and that none of us is innocent.  We must learn to think in terms of “we” rather than “I.”

As we deepened, a few things made themselves clear to me.  The headache, and bringing it back to the place of its origin, would not be the focus for me this week.  Something I said before but not I truly gotten – this headache is my connection to Spirit.  I came here two years ago asking for a more enduring connection, and it came, but it wasn’t in a way that I wanted or even recognized until now. 

I showed the teacher my card with Kali dancing on my neck and she agreed that this headache is the connection.  She said that it came to me for reasons I don’t understand, that I didn’t specifically ask for this, but it is the manifestation I didn’t see.

My preoccupation with my illness is the illness, she said.  It is colonized mind.  I’m no different from the earth.

I asked her what it means to carry fire.  It is the element I feel least comfortable with.  It scares me.  She advised me to truly get to know it.

We are all being challenged to live in indigenous ways 24/7.  They are not techniques.  We must change. 

As the one black woman in the circle said, she has no choice but to live 24/7 with her black skin in a racist culture. 

I dreamed that I am at a bay watching a group of boys challenging each other to go in the water.  They know or see that a shark is out there.  But there is a sea turtle not far out, and two boys jump into the water, apparently thinking that if they keep the turtle is between them and the shark, it will go for the turtle first.  Suddenly, the shark springs out of the water in the form of an eel or snake and in a flash, it flies over the small strip of beach and up the large cliff behind it, disappearing from sight.

The teacher asks what I get from this, from the shark.  I answer, “Wake up!”  Later, I think it is also a message about not buying your own beliefs about how and what things are.  I also realized that those boys were already trained to be willing to sacrifice the turtle to save themselves.

This poem came:

The Earth Is Dying

The earth is dying.

We sit in hospice, we few

who are willing

to bear witness.

People say –

My life is fine,

difficult at times,

but fine.

The rent gets paid.

There is food in the refrigerator.

The sun rose this morning.

But in my lifetime

half the creatures of the sea

have died.

The plankton is full of plastic.

Turtles eat it and are full

of plastic as well, and sometimes

they are trapped in the plastic islands

filling our heating oceans.

The glaciers are disappearing,

almost before our eyes.

You don’t want to hear this.

I don’t want to hear this.

But how will the children breathe

when the oxygen producers are gone?

How will they live

when there is no clean water to drink?

Oh, I will be gone by then,

dead and beyond caring.

But I have children,

and my children have children,

still wide-eyed and excited

by life and possibility.

We are called to bear the unbearable.

She is dying, and so

we are dying.

Will you be with Her?

Will you give Her

your tears?

The Earth Was Given

Just back from an intensive with Deena Metzger in Topanga Canyon.  It was a most extraordinary, heart-wrenching week with a wonderful group of people. 

Several poems came while I was there.  Here's one of them:

This earth was given.

Not to us.

It was not given to us,

It was just given,

Life arising out of itself,

Blazing forth,

Blossoming forth,

Birthed into being

For its own sake.

We are such fools

To think we own it,

Control it,

Master it,

As if it were here

For us and us alone.

No, it is here

Because it is here.

It is glorious because

It can be,

Generous because

That is its nature,

Beautiful because there is

No other way for it to be.

This earth was given,

As we were given.

And the only way

to be together

Is for us

To bow down.