It Begins With Call (Part 21): The Journey

We go into silence, and the teacher takes us into a trance journey.  She says to begin somewhere sacred and safe.  I often begin trance journeys at Mt. Shasta, but this time Hawaii showed up.  Not such a safe place, especially right now with new eruptions spilling over the land!  But then I thought of Honaunau, City of Refuge.  The ultimate safe place.

I begin at nearby Two-Step, the most wonderful nearby snorkeling spot, and the Fire Priestess comes and puts her hands over me, like on my card. 

I plant a small tree in offering.  Entering the sacred ground of the refuge, I need to ask permission from the ali’i to be there, and to apologize.  Because the Fire Priestess is with me, they grant it, telling me not to take anything and that I have to give my heart.  I am to touch the water and cleanse myself.  I walk past the heiau, out towards the ocean.  Whale invites me to go in the water.  I might have anticipated Turtle, but it is Whale. 

Whale speaks of the radiation from Fukushima, that they, the whales, take it into their bodies and transform it, and that I need to as well (or any air pollution).  I ask, “Won’t that just make me sick, and then die quickly before I’m of much use?”  The answer is, “You’re already taking it in, but you’re doing it unconsciously.”

Whale shows me how what is spewed into the air falls into the water (or, I suppose, onto the earth), and needs to sink all the way down into the earth, and then down to the core fires, which can consume it.

Whale explains that my city is just like the ocean’s dying coral – pollution and overcrowding has bleached the life force out of them both.  But even dead, the coral – and my bit of earth – is still sacred.  My charge is to re-sacralize, restore, reinvigorate my home place.

I review my notes afterward and find that the teacher had said something similar -  “When you find what is true, keep reinvigorating and dedicating it as true.”

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?