It Begins With a Call (Part 25): Old Redwood Mother

Last fall, I had the good fortune to go to a workshop in Pt. Reyes with Sharon Blackie.  I love her books, especially If Women Rose Rooted.  She speaks to our need to reconnect with the land, and also of the mythic imagination and story as a way to bridge to it.  Her teachings are  very much in agreement with Deena Metzger's, but she comes at her beliefs and approach from a different direction.  Like Deena, she believes that stories and dreams are not all for internal reference, and that psychology (as Hillman postulated) has failed us, by making it all about us.  Blackie says that the land requires us to be in relationship to it, to the place where our feet are planted.  Blackie also works from the imaginal world, the mundus imaginalis, which lies between the sensory world and the mental realm.  She agrees with Hillman about each of us having a calling.  

But Blackie is fortunate to not only live on wild land but also in a place where the old stories of her culture are still alive, and rooted.  Most of us are not so fortunate, and especially those of us who live in cities.  I have been thinking a lot about how to connect to the earth, right here, especially since the last healers’ intensive.  I have not found stories from my ancestry that inform my life, and I don’t know much about the stories of this land, the stories of the Ohlone people who were here before we invaded.  So how can I use story to help me root and connect into this patch of earth?

One of the exercises Blackie had us do was map all the places we have lived.  I also added to my map the places where I had meaningful experiences on the land – Shasta, Delphi, Phaestos, Malta, Kilauea Iki on the Big Island.  Really, connecting to the land of the places where I have lived has not, regrettably, been an important aspect of my life.  Most of the places I’ve lived did not necessarily give me the feeling of “Ah!  I’ve found my home!”  

But one thing that stood out on my map was the significance of gardens and trees.  I have felt connected to so many trees – the oak at our house in Menlo Park, the owl trees at the seminary when I lived in an apartment nearby, the redwoods here and at other places, the pepper tree and eucalyptus in Topanga, just to mention a few. And here I l also love feeding and watching the birds here.

I am reminded of Blackie’s story about living in a place where she found no geological feature or local tale about the Cailleach, her beloved Old Woman archetype.  And so, one day, seeing a heron and hearing it screech like an old hag, she found her own Old Crane Woman, an imagined version of the hag.  That set me to thinking; maybe there’s an Old Redwood Mother here that I could adopt.  Blackie encouraged us to make stories about the places we live and to bring ancestral stories to them.  So, suddenly an insight!  In my ancient ancestral lineage, the people worshipped Asherah.  She was Mother of the gods, the tree of life, and also the Lady of the Sea.  Asherim – carved or uncarved wooden poles - were placed in groves and on hilltops in Her honor.  Sometimes trees themselves were seen as Asherim.  Her priestesses and priests were prophets and interpreted dreams.  I have not seen stories about Her, but She is one I feel connected to in ways that I do not with much of my Jewish heritage.  Maybe Old Redwood Mother is my modern day Asherah.  Maybe She will help me connect to this land.  She does not dwell right in my yard, but She is within view, rooted at the house below us on the hill, and She has sisters a little further down the street and in the Rose Garden a few blocks away.  

I need to be outside to speak with Her, to breathe with Her, but I intend to do so.

Asherahs

It Begins With a Call: Enchantment (Part 17)

I have been in the underworld for quite a while.  Years, really.  The world itself feels underworldly and full of mortal demons.  

There have been two books that I’ve been profoundly affected by this last year or so – Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted and Toko-pa Turner’s Belonging.  Now Blackie has come out with another, The Enchanted Life, and it is the exact medicine I need at this moment.  It is what I’ve been lacking – enchantment.  Magic.  Spirit.  What Blackie is saying is no different from what the teacher has been saying: we are not separate from creation.  Her way of talking about it is very different, as she is a storyteller and mythologist.  But it is taking me to the same place.  It is an indigenous way of relating to life.

One of the things Blackie recommends is remembering experiences you’ve had of feeling unity with everything.  Suddenly, an image rises up of an experience I had years ago while visiting my in-laws in Marco Island, Florida.  Now, this is as unlikely a place as I could ever imagine for such a thing to occur - a man-made suburban development in an area that had probably formerly been semi-swamplands.   Nonetheless, it is on the gulf coast, and my in-laws’ condo was a short walk away from the beach.  One evening, my husband and I went for a walk and ended up by the water.  The full moon was rising over the gulf, the warm waves gently lapped the shore, and no one else was in sight.  I walked into the water, following the moon’s trail, and stopped thigh-deep.  The sounds of the water swishing over sand, the smell of the sea, the bright moon over dark sea and sky… I threw my arms up and felt at one with it all.  Joyful.  I don’t remember how long it lasted; probably only a few minutes.  But here is the memory, rising up now, reminding me that such a state is possible.  No matter what we do to her, the earth is always still here for us, and we are a part of her.  

I have been living in a time of obsessing over my health.

Whether or not any of my current issues resolves or gets cured, I want to connect with enchantment again, and not feel like my physical state is my whole reality.  And I know I need to stop thinking that one has to live in a more rural environment to do it.  I just sat outside, and I could feel my connection to the trees, the sky, the birds.  This is my work.  Or at least some of it.

My SoulCollage® card -  Enchantment

Rising Up Rooted

Some time back my friend Jane turned me on to Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted.  If you don’t know it (and especially if you’re of Celtic descent) you might want to get a hold of it.  It’s full of stories, both personal and mythic, all on the theme of the importance of place and of connection to the land.  It’s not surprising that I love this book – its theme is so similar to what I’ve been learning from Deena Metzger.  Indigenous cultures not only know this, they live it.  Think of those who have stood at and for Standing Rock.  As Blackie explains, though, most of us come out of and live in a modern wasteland.

The book led me to the poem by Rilke that inspired its title (here translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows):

How surely gravity's law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of even the smallest thing

and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing ---

each stone, blossom, child ---

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we each belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again

to learn from things,

because they are in God's heart;

they have never left him.

That is what the things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly.

It’s curious how you can read a poem and gloss over it, and then some time later encounter it as if for the first time.  I read The Book of Hours years ago, but this poem did not move me then.  I guess now is the time I need it!

I am, of course, learning the poem for our next salon and for Rumi’s Caravan (July 8^th here in Oakland).  Like the book, the poem points me in the direction of where I want to belong, and how.  Learning this poem is a gift I give myself; it works on me as I work on it.

The one area I felt Blackie short-changed a bit is how city dwellers can connect more deeply to the land.  She doesn’t ignore it, but her discussion on it is pretty brief and perfunctory.  We are not all so fortunate to live in the countryside.  Most of us who do not walk outside of our houses directly into wild nature have to work a lot harder to feel and sustain the connection.  We are certainly not supported by the wasteland culture to do so.

So here are some of the questions I am living with.  How do I root myself to this bit of hillside in Oakland where I have chosen to live?  How do we be faithful to the land?  What does the earth have to teach us?  How can we rise up rooted?

 View from our deck