The Dream of The World
Posted on 06. Jan, 2011 by admin in Blog
by Christiane Pelmas
My wild predator
Cat companion
Jet-black Artemis on four legs
Comes racing home
Up and over the patio fence
Coyote joy in yellow-green eyes
Fat-cat tail swirling like a propeller
on a high-strung speed boat
Five dive-bombing barn swallows
Hot on her trail
For minutes the swallows rush the patio
As she
Now settled safely next to me
Casually cleans all carnage
From her front paws and face
And I watch in wonder
At this swooping feathered fierceness
In such small packages
Feeling exhilaration
My heart pounding
As if it were my life
Wanting to make this something
‘us’ against ‘them’
Yet there is nothing personal here
Only a primal agreement
To protect borders
as much for the other as for themselves
While knowing
That the very nature of life
The unthinkable demand of it
Insists that all borders get breached
All sovereignty sacrificed
Each individual life devoured and reconstituted
In service of the one life
This one life
It is a great shape shifter
First it is a rabbit
Then it is a fat coyote
Dreaming rabbit
Then it is scat
Dreaming flowers
Dreaming of butterflies
It is a woman
Singing opera in the shower
Then it is water
Saturating ceiling panels
Then it a tender green leaf
Pushing itself up between driveway pebbles
Grief, Renewal, Love and Honoring
Posted on 04. Jan, 2011 by admin in Blog
This morning, January 1st, 2011, I sit in the warm and beautiful home of my husband and his two children. Actually, this home is now our home as well. But this will take some getting used to. Miraculously, this sweet dwelling is slowly accommodating our belongings and the bigness of our lives.
This has been a big year.
I met the Earthquake Man less than a year ago. By our third date I was deeply in awe of, and in love with, him. Our first date was January 21st 2010, our third date was 9 days later on the 30th. I believe is it still possible to find me on the internet in other people’s articles, quoted as saying it is neither advisable or possible for a full-blooded man and a full-blooded woman to live together alone in the same house. I still believe this. I’ve fallen off my own map on this one.
Shortly after all this, one morning (April 15th to be precise) my 75 year old mother walked into her shower and died.
The medical examiner, the state trooper and the coroner all said “She was gone before she hit the tile.” Our trusted family minister, also one of my mother’s closest and truest friends, told me, “She had a peaceful look on her face.” My mother died with water running over her entire body, perhaps washing her clean of whatever it was that had plagued her so deeply in this life.
I am grieving the loss of my mother like I could never have predicted. My mother was a dark woman. She lived with fierce demons who stoked the fires of her fundamental belief that she was worthless, unloved and unlovable. Her wounds made it damned difficult to be around her much of the time. Yet she was also one of the most vibrantly creative, intelligent, funny, innately compassionate and loving people I’ve ever had the honor to know. When my sister and I were young my mother kept us home from school because we had a pileated woodpecker hammering away at a tree in our backyard. Her fiercely devout connection with the animal world was a powerful model for me. When our cats had kittens (which seemed to happen all the time because we often had four cats in the house), the world would halt its rotations and our home would become a place of reverence and deep attention to the larger-than-human forces of life and death. Frequently she would take us on rambling road trips in our behemoth station wagon. We would visit old family friends, walk along the ocean, play it by ear much of the time. My sister and I were paying attention; none our friends ever took vacations like this.
I am lost in a sea of a process. Though it’s been 8 months now, I awake every day not knowing if I will spend most of my day sobbing or feeling deep joy and gratitude, or both, or neither. Some days I’m just simply lost, grasping and groping for meaning and direction. Forgetting who it was I was, before I was orphaned. The Earthquake Man has only known me like this; a woman who is so in the process of her grief he can’t predict what he will get from moment to moment. Sometimes I worry he will think he’s married a crazy woman – like Rochester’s wild woman in the attic – I imagine the Earthquake Man has fantasies about sending me away and starting over with a more predictable version of my gender. Yet, I have made a pact to stay in the vulnerable truth of this process since I live in a culture that cannot tolerate grief or grieving though they are perhaps the most beautiful of our human processes. Two weeks after my mother’s death a family friend said to me, “well, I expect you’ll be getting back to business now. It’s about time.” On some days I can’t remember my own name let alone the ‘business’ I am in, if in fact that construct ever applied to me.
This unwanted coronation – of being the last-standing generation in a family line at the tender age of 45 – is a paradox. I have experienced tremendous liberation and also a sense of pointlessness. I’m now free to be anyone, without the hindrance of a living ancestral tether. Yet this swings both ways. Some days I feel utterly abandoned and alone, even with my incredible community, my children, their father and my protective and attentive husband. I holler at the mountains, “how can this happen to me?!” forgetting that it happens to all of us all the time, everywhere. While it is surely ineffable it is also as perfunctory as it comes.
And now, since I have experienced the unthinkable – the sudden death of someone who was in perfect health – I imagine catastrophe awaits everywhere. If my son Henry – who is 16 and completely out in the world of his own making – doesn’t call me back within in half an hour I can become immobilized. If the Earthquake Man is late coming home, I imagine he is dead. Wild things, carjackings, mutilations…my mind is alive with possibilities. I never got to see my mother’s body after her death, so I am hungry for visceral reality. I concoct images of road-side carnage that bring me to sobbing no matter where I am – even if I am sitting with clients. I have learned to let this simply BE, to breath, to perhaps even love this process of vulnerability that seems to be so unspeakably beautifully human. I feel like tender flesh, like a young offering to this hungry creature, Death. But I feel that my full participation in this process of grieving is what allows me to remain so vitally alive. And certainly, my ‘yes’ to this process is, itself, my only way to honor the profound dance of life and death; the only possible way to honor a woman as profoundly important to me as my mother.
Even more than usual, I am paying attention to this story of life and love and death and renewal, of miracles and fertility, of endings and decay leading to never-imagined unfurling fronds of possibility. I am staring at the night skies beseeching my mother to speak to me, longing to feel her presence. I am staring into the Earthquake Man’s eyes when we make love, looking for certainty and feeling a thing as certain as ‘certain’ gets in this life: Love. I feel, all around me, wild, rich, precious Love. Some days I cannot even manage to take it in. Some days I fight against it and concoct stories of tragedy and betrayal. Other days I am awash with gratitude and grief, dancing intricately between the two.
I am grateful beyond what words can convey, for the opportunity to truly live this particular life. I am paying attention to the fecundity of my own landscape and the way in which it nourishes me to take great risks in service of what is mine to do – in service of tending to what is still vibrantly alive while honoring what is no longer. In this place of being loved so richly by so many – both living and dead – I continue to listen as I sort through gorgeous bones while singing songs to the bounty that continues to unfold each day.
This is a blessed time. This is a blessed time.
Filaments
Posted on 16. Nov, 2010 by admin in Blog
Christiane Pelmas
I favor the scorpions and the mid-depth fish
Those translucent, dark-loving creatures
Whose bodies leave nothing to the imagination
I think they would recognize my longing
For the dark dismembering moments when I am reduced
To nothing more than the most transparent of filaments
Subject to the subtlest of breezes
Breezes which cause me to twist and turn
The beautiful roots of me
Disconnected from everything known
Swirling in a seductive and inviting way
Over the great black abyss below
As if the dismantling that has just occurred
Isn’t quite enough and we
- those aspects of me still on board -
Are now calling for more
As if there were anything left to be given away
I remember
A few years back when
As a threshold into this life’s most ferocious of reductions
- the redefinition of a family
due to the necessity of a divorce -
I was compelled to rip apart the only full bathroom
In my family’s small one-story home
To rip it down to its studs and its joists
So that I could stand with my feet in the dark spidery crawl space
And my torso and head in what was left of the bathroom
And say, “Ah…so this is what you’re really made of!”
Like there was no hiding how this all worked now
No more being in the dark about the nature of our home
With an aerobic vengeance I neither expected nor comprehended
Until later
I removed a toilet
I removed an egregious 70’s oak vanity
I removed four walls and one tub surround of cheap cracked tile
I removed three inches and seven layers of rotted flooring
Flooring that had, over the last ten years
Buckled from leaking sewage
Which had pooled in the crawl space
Under the concrete posts whose unsung job it was
To hold this very home up
There was something exquisite about that room
In its gutted form
Nothing but old wood bones
Neatly pocked with nail holes
A pink tub perched on 1×6’s
Some piping and wiring
Poking out of the walls expectantly
Like the tendrils of hungry sea anemone
Feeling around for their next meal
We cannot honestly love a thing
Until we have seen the truth at its foundation
No matter what it looks like
Whether it is shocking or exactly what we expected
The thing that lies at the very bottom
Is the very definition of beautiful
The one thing most worthy of our love
Our True Inheritance
Posted on 09. Nov, 2010 by admin in Blog
What does it mean to be educated? What is the purpose of education? When does it begin and are we ever done?
We imagine that our children are being educating when we send them off to an institution where they learn (first and foremost) how to behave, where they are told what is important to know (and by this, what is not relevant or worthy). In this process they are not asked what they think about what is important to know or what it is they already know; what they came into the world knowing. Of course there is a need for a common language, common practices and shared wisdom which allow culture to be a container within which we are held accountable for the vitality of all life. Education that has true relevance must be a process honoring and cultivating what we are each born knowing within a cultural context that allows this wisdom to weave with, but equally often transcend, what already is.
The first and most crucial step in the process of relevant education for our children is a deep understanding of the web of life, of their integral place within it and of their necessary care-taking of it. Not only (according to most indigenous cultures) is this our responsibility but it is our birth-rite; the largest possible story of how and why we are here. Within this inheritance, shared with us by our elders/adults, we are positioned in the lineage of our ancestry. Here in this lineage we both grow and are called into the fullest understanding of our individual and collective purpose as sextons and caretakers; warriors, fearless bell ringers and relentless grave diggers, protecting, celebrating, grieving and praising all this is beautiful and breathtaking, all that is inexplicable and wondrous. Without this lineage, thrashing loose outside the rich context of our human lives as inextricably connected to the largest possible story of life itself, we are doomed to make decisions as if nothing we do matters. We are doomed to believe the deadliest of modern fallacies – that our breath, our tears and our dreams have nothing to do with the Ruby Throated Hummingbird’s migration or the Bog Turtle’s hibernation or even, if you can imagine, the vibrancy of translucent life at the ocean’s floor.
I have recently spent a week with the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers and of all the pieces of wisdom, of all the tearful, heartfelt offerings they made, the most moving was their insistence that we MUST remember how to be the teachers of this critical body of wisdom. And we must prioritize this as if life depended upon it, because it does.
Listening to the grandmother’s say this however, despite the fact that I knew this to be true, I felt the deepest grief filling me.
The only way our children can inherit their true birth-rite, of course, is to see themselves as perfect, individual expressions of this miraculous web of life – to feel themselves as deeply valuable, relevant and whole. Just as they are. I became grief-stricken because I know that a culture cannot possibly teach its children this vital body of wisdom if the individuals within it do not feel this to be true about themselves. We, parents and adults, must see ourselves as deeply valuable, relevant and whole if we are to teach our children that they are.
These grandmothers did not stop here. They offered that it is the mother who, whether consciously or unconsciously, teaches this wisdom first, simply because it is the mother’s body through which the child enters this world. The first education a child receives is how to respect and honor the body that brought her here, to which she owes her life, upon which her survival now depends. From there, growing within a culture which practices this, she learns how to respect and honor Mother Earth’s body. Of course, men play a vital role in the education of our children that all life is sacred. But the Grandmothers believe the mothers must do the first, critical installment which begins even before birth. It begins when the soul of each child is called by the song of its mother’s soul. It is right here, in this immeasurable map-less place that the child has his first teaching of the sacredness of all life. If all life is unequivocally sacred then that means him too. He grows in the world without a language that would allow for anything other than his perfection.
So, while our beautiful men, our fathers, brothers and uncles have a place in this conversation, I want to ask you…WOMEN…to pay attention. The most important, the most prestigious education we can offer our children – the wisdom to love and dutifully tend the planet upon which we depend for our survival – must start with the critical re-education of ourselves. Our culture has taught us to prize the smallest possible story of our female-ness, a story that requires we fit into the smallest possible box. We have been trained out of our wildness and into a Size-4 domestication. We have been told only to love those bodies that nearly kill us to achieve, bodies that – in reality – only a fraction of us can attain, bodies that are so unhealthy we no longer bleed or orgasm. We have been told only to love the most neutered of our female expression, the one that insist we get along, get over, make love, make do, make up and make over but above all make sure that, through all this, we do not ever acknowledge the screaming truth inside us that questions the exorbitant cost of all of this.
We must reclaim the older story of our gender and we must love our real bodies and our authentic truth-telling expression; our round bodies, our tall and short bodies. We must love our large-nippled pendulous breasted bodies as much as our small-nippled round-bellied bodies. We must love our big bones and our small bones, our sharp noses and our flat noses. The round blue, almond-shaped, brown eyed, high cheek-boned, long-knecked, short-legged, crooked-toothed, dimpled, flat-buttocked, wide-footed, well-muscled calf, open-hearted, lone-wolvish, loud shrill laugh, quiet full-moon sobbing, gutteral moaning, ecstatic head thrown back, shy impish, claiming, stomping dancing sweating, raging perfection offered up through each and every physical manifestation of the female form. Yours included.
We must do this and we must do this NOW. Years ago I began being visited by a liminal council of elder-women. these women came to me as I was leaving South Africa after a pivotal, life-changing experience in the grief-stricken and beautiful red dirt of that place. This council often came to me in the middle of the night and gave me explicit instructions as to how to mobilize and empower women. Now, seven years later, they come to me in the waking day and they tell me, without any drama or hyperbole, “We are running out of time. We are wasting time. Risk everything. Risk it all. Do not stop risking it all.” To love ourselves, to imagine we matter, to believe we were each born perfect, equipped to do a glorious task without which the world cannot be whole, is to become the most important teachers of our children. Simply in our acceptance of our own importance and endowment, we are this. Please know this now.
Please.
The Dangerous & Important Wildness of Our Young Men
Posted on 21. Sep, 2010 by admin in Blog
Being a teen age boy must be a whole lot like being the universe as it was creating itself, one galaxy, one beautiful planet, one scary, sucking, deep black hole, one brilliantly exploding super nova at a time. Cataclysmic implodings, neural rewiring, oceans of chemical-flooding, pulsing and ebbing, the somatic, non-verbal knowing that everything is possible, beyond imagination, within this one body. And of course, the natural assumption then, that the world is colluding with this process making everything outside the body possible as well; an hypothesis he is eager to (and must) test, over and over and over again.
I am raising two young men – one 13 and one 15 – and I have watched as they discover, sometimes painfully, that the culture around them does not welcome the power coming online within them. They are confronted, in ways both subtle and assaultive, with the fact that the culture is becoming increasingly terrified of, and hostile toward, them. They are beginning to discern a culture whose attention must go not to the miracle in them and of them, but to the containment of them – the neutering of them. As we have created it, the Western World cannot afford to allow them to make it to their adulthood, cannot allow them to reach their full height and weight, with their wild masculine wisdom and drive intact. It is a culture which survives only through obedience – offering shame, isolation and adversity as its three main initiatory experiences into a fraught pseudo-adulthood. A wild young man for whom True North is the biddings of the larger world and of his own soul, is enemy of the state No. 1 in our culture.
Depending on who we believe or where we stand, we can imagine the culture is doing our young men a favor. It’s in their best interest to make themselves smaller. As it is defined in this country, being an adult man has nothing to do with truth and individuality and everything to do with bearing the weight of externally imposed responsibility (a requirement in a culture that survives solely based on the number of individuals who are willing to subordinate their own lives in service of it). In order for our men to be recognized by the culture as respectable adults, they must learn how to find a reliable job, make a decent living, procure a wife and kids, buy a mortgage, settle down. Knowing their sense of belonging and acknowledgment requires all that, perhaps it is in their best interests to learn how to wear the cloak of a gelding (and pay the price as time goes on with, among many other things, alienation, substance abuse, depression, explosive rage, [what we call] ‘erectile dysfunction’ and more).
Given this, I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a teenage boy. Literally overflowing with the most powerful surges and desires on the planet. Driven by unseen forces stronger than anything he has experienced so far, to push himself to his edges, to see what he is truly made of, to actually see his own flesh, blood and bones so he can determine where he ends and death begins, to find out how useful he is when his people really need him to solve a problem, to protect, to stand strong, to hold firm. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have the magnitude of this BEAUTY pulsing and exploding within me, in fact exploding out of me…..and then to witness the current reality all around me, of acculturated masculine and eviscerated wildness. I can’t imagine what it must feel like in a young masculine wild body, in desperate need of role models that will help him navigate this extraordinary terrain, only to find men who, without their own role models, long-ago gave in to the culture’s sinister but alluring demand for their own castration. I can’t imagine how a young man – newly filled with the urgency of life itself – navigates and integrates the emotional ocean that would be his natural response to the realization of his gender’s fate.
When I was 11 or so I discovered Lewis Thomas’ “Late Night Thoughts On Listening to Mahler’s 9th Symphony”. It, like the 
Margaret Atwood quote, made it impossible for me to go back to sleep. Made my young suburban life extremely messy. But now, when I read Thomas’ essay, I don’t necessarily imagine nuclear devastation as much as I imagine the littered battlefield of the once-vibrant young masculine. I mourn the devastation of our young ones, girls and boys alike. I mourn their inheritance, one that is growing with compound interest, of despair and longing, rage and hopelessness and worst of all a story that they are not part of the wildness from which they’ve come. I grieve that their initiation into adulthood requires them to scorn their wildest parts, domesticating themselves to a much smaller story of fear and isolation. As a woman in love with The World I mourn the evisceration of their wildest and most potent dreams. Were we to live in a culture which honored Life, we would be sitting in circle as elders witnessing and reflecting the glorious dance of the universe story swirling within them. We would be reverently honoring the wise and primal energy of our young adults, feeding the fire of their wild dreams knowing these visions are the seedlings from which naturally sprouts the wisdom for a vibrant, benevolent, breathtaking human presence on the planet.
Growing Wild
Posted on 20. Aug, 2010 by admin in Blog
By Jim Wayne Miller
Writing you this, I can feel a dewclaw
pushing through the skin an inch above my thumb.
I’ll sign this letter with a muddy paw.
Since you’ve been gone
I’ve grown a little wilder every day,
like a dog on one of those abandoned farms
out in the scrub-pine country between the rivers.
I’m living in just one room of the house,
I’ve turned it into a lair.
I wake there by the bones of my last meal.
I’m eating rare steaks, loving the taste of blood.
Yesterday, grabbling in the creek,
I caught six red horse with my hands
and ate them for supper.
Late in the afternoon I sit out back
and watch the woods creep closer to the house.
Rabbits come up into the grass. They watch
me warily, know I can’t be trusted.
Tomorrow or the next day I may pounce
and bolt one squealing, beating heart and all,
snapping his bones between my teeth.
I walk in the woods at night and strange scents
curling from folds of wind
stir whines and whimperings in my throat.
If you don’t come home soon
I know I’ll range farther and farther off
into my woodsy dreams.
When you do return, you’ll find the grass
knee-high around the house, the doors all open,
chewed bits of fur and feathers in the bedroom,
bones buried in your bedroom slippers.
I will have taken up
with some skinny, yellow-eyed bitch from the woods.
By late summer, lovers parked by cattle bars
will swear they saw me running with wild dogs
that drag down sheep and cattle between the rivers.
Going Wodwo*
Posted on 20. Aug, 2010 by admin in Blog
By Neil Gaiman
Shedding my shirt, my book, my coat, my life
Leaving them, empty husks and fallen leaves
Going in search of food and for a spring
Of sweet water.
I’ll find a tree as wide as ten fat men 
Clear water rilling over its gray roots
Berries I’ll find, and crab apples and nuts,
And call it home.
I’ll tell the wind my name, and no one else.
True madness takes or leaves us in the wood
halfway through all our lives. My skin will be
my face now.
I must be nuts. Sense left with shoes and house,
my guts are cramped. I’ll stumble through the green
back to my roots, and leaves and thorns and buds,
and shiver.
I’ll leave the way of words to walk the wood
I’ll be the forest’s man, and greet the sun,
And feel the silence blossom on my tongue
like language.
*”wodwo” is a medieval man of the wood
The Soul of The World, An Oak Tree, A Core Wound and a Little Girl
Posted on 18. Aug, 2010 by admin in Blog
The last 10 years of my almost 20-year journey as a therapist have found me slowly peeling away the jargon and rules, looking carefully at what serves the process of our human ReWilding and what most certainly does not. I’ve looked at who I am to be doing this work and how my unique vision necessitates that I claim an individual form and style. I’ve done this while prioritizing my clients’ optimum health and wholeness, all while honoring what Jung called the Soul of The World, which remains my ultimate devotion.
So, in offering more of my process while continuing to speak about the work we are each called to, I want to talk about core wound and sacred wound, of claiming what is each our individual gift to the world, our unique way of being in the world. I want to speak about the particular – and beautifully original – way each of us sees and honors the world. I will do this by offering a personal example of how a core wound can become a sacred wound.
By the time I was 8 I had already realized I was a sexual, sensual very-much-alive being. We are born sensual beings, fluid in our erotic connection with the world and ourselves. Most often, in this culture, we make it to about 3 before the full-on assault on our eroticism and sensuality begins. We receive shaming from parents and other family members, from neighbors, from community and from the culture-at-large. It is one of the primary processes of acculturation into Western Society to shame us out of our wild and instinctual sexuality; to shame us right out of our bodies and the wisdom that lives in them.
For me, as a little girl (and still, as a woman), I connected the world, the earth, nature, the woods, trees, bees, the blue sky and all 
things wild with this force within me that I would later learn to label my ‘sexuality’. There was, and is, no separation. My pleasure was the bridge between me as an individual and these Others who I knew to be my family and my home. Even at the innocent age of 8, I was certain that my pleasure was a way to honor all that felt Holy. My pleasure felt like my religious expression, the only thing that could reflect the love I had for The World itself. I longed to connect with these wild places and things, and spent a great deal of time in the rich wet leaves of the New England woods behind our home, bringing myself to orgasm and the listening…orgasm then listening… (not knowing this activity had been given a name – it was simply what I did with the earth and the woods).
But one day, rather than take myself out into the woods, I chose a spot on the lawn behind our house. Out I went to a secluded (I thought) spot beneath the beautiful tall Oak tree in our backyard, slightly obscured by a full Douglas Fir. I laid out my blanket and perched my confidante, a pink stuffed hippopotamus, in the corner. Face down on the blanket, I pressed my ear to the earth. Immediately I was met with the buzz and hum of life itself, with the fullness of a dark hidden process I was desperate to understand more intimately, desperate to become part of. I began moving my hips the way I had discovered was most pleasurable and before long I was in the ecstasy of deep connection to the All, the Wild, to Earth, to the Great Mother Herself.
When, from out of the clear sky (to my 8 year old mind – the Heavens), a deep booming ANGRY masculine voice said, “Go…….to……..your…….room!!!!”
I was beyond flustered. I was incredulous. I felt under attack. I looked up, expecting to see a bearded old man in robes floating in the cloud-scape, scowling angrily at me and pointing his finger. But there was no one there, which angered me even more. ‘Coward!’ I 
thought to myself. But, despite it being disembodied, the voice was alive in the air, ringing…penetrating. I quickly picked up my hippo and my blanket and raced to my room. I slammed my door and threw myself in my chair. Staring out into the thick pines, but clearly addressing the pink hippo, “if that is what God the Father thinks then we will have to search for God the Mother!” While my response was strong and protective, there was a core shattering for me, a betrayal by the masculine, a clear message that who and what I was was not acceptable in the eyes of Man/God.
The search for a benevolent Father/Mother God has directed much of my life. In the last ten years I have worked to reclaim this core wounding, understanding that it is part of who I am to see the world in a way which includes a distinctly terrestrial, fierce and primal spirituality. I stopped running from this traumatic experience I had when I was 8 and instead, have turned to face it, reclaim it and use it as a source of sacred identity. As I turned to face it, inviting it to become part of how I am identified, I began to see how this experience empowers me to attend to the archetypal female wounding and to the masculine wound as well. It continues to inform and nourish the direction, power and success of my work, my mothering, my intimate partnership and all else that I hold dear.
We are all wounded and our core wounds are precious resources. Each of us has been blessedly cracked open by the world. Our culture tells us to learn to survive and keep a stiff upper lip ‘despite’ these wounds. Yet the sacred cracks we all contain are the very way in which the world has imprinted us and the very way through which we have the opportunity to be called into deep service. The reclamation of our core wound makes us simultaneously and paradoxically powerful, instinctively wise and utterly vulnerable. I have witnessed, over and over, that buried within our wounding hides the unique gift we are here to offer the world.
This Morning….
Posted on 18. Aug, 2010 by admin in Blog
It is 8 am and I’ve found my way to the place I sit with clients; a small carriage house nestled along an alley in downtown Boulder. 
The distant hum of traffic, delivery trucks, school buses and somber children walking along the sidewalk to their first day of school surf the thin cool morning air without obstruction. Everything is pristine today. Razor sharp.
My older son Henry and I left the house just moments before this one, also somber but somewhat hopeful as we both anticipated his first day of a new school, the big high school in town. He chose to transfer from a smaller less conventional one to this one with 3000 kids and a reputation for drugs and sex. It is where his friends are. Adolescence is about the pack, the tribe, moving as an organism and finding your own individuality within a crowd to whom you belong. It is about being witnessed and mirrored, noticed for who you are in the world, acknowledged for why you’re here. This, of course, is not what is happening in our culture for our adolescents. But it is what they long for, need and attempt to find despite what we have created for them. I watch Henry, tall and independent, as he walks into a crowd as if he is an offering, and disappears.
Moments later I pull up here, in front of my office. On the ground underneath the beautiful tall pine that shades the main house, just feet from me, is a fat red tailed hawk perched atop a freshly killed morning dove. The dove’s head is thrown back in a dramatic pose of sacrifice, like she has died proudly. I hear the ‘ca-coo-coo ca-coo-coo’ of the other doves as they stay hidden high in the branches above, watching this carnage. The hawk is sharp and wary, turning to me with a puffed up chest, flapping his wings as if to say, “you’ll need to find your own….I’m not sharing.” I watch him for minutes as he plucks the downy breast feathers from his breakfast-of-champions and then, perhaps feeling too scrutinized, he gracefully lifts himself and his warm meal into the air and out across the rooftops into a nearby tree, trailing feathers as he goes, like gently falling snow.
I arrive at the door of my carriage house, unlock it, walk in and say “hello” to the place, which by now is a partner of mine in this process of sitting in witness and as guide for all the people with courage enough to come speak their truth. I head straight for the doors that lead out onto the patio, open the voile curtains and slide the door open to let this pristine air come wash the room of its night time dreaming. My eyes are met by the brown deep eyes of the doe who sometimes comes to eat the apples and ferns in this private courtyard. She has been sleeping here all night – at least she has the look of one who is just waking up after being tucked down. She watches me as I watch her, silently offering my gratitude. I feel my breath move deeper into my torso, my ribcage expand, my heart loosen and my eyes soften with tears.
As I sit and write this and continue to watch her, the weekly garbage truck comes roaring down the alley and I feel my breath catch in my chest. The sun has just made its blazing copper way through the trees and her big dark eyes are now illuminated a brilliant amber. Feeling such a devotion to her and the fact of her continued company over the last many months I ask out loud, “will you leave now?” But she continues to lie quietly in her nest, chewing her breakfast carefully and contemplatively as if nothing has changed. I keep my eyes glued to her, watching for cues as to how to cope with a thing like a roaring garbage truck on a quiet morning, how to cope with the fact of garbage trucks at all. Still, through the clattering, crashing of metal and shifting of gears she is unruffled. As if she knows not to fear the creations, just the creator. I am reminded that I am the creator as I watch her shift uncomfortably each time I change my position on the couch (a sound that is imperceptible to my ears compared to the cacophony of the garbage truck).
Slowly she rises on her golden stilt legs, nuzzles the ground for one last morsel, gracefully navigates her way down the buff stone steps and across the patch of blossoming thyme, too early in the morning to be alive with honey bees. I watch as she makes her long-legged way down the alley and toward the mountains.
This morning…..
“I forgot what things were called and saw instead what they are….”
Posted on 08. Aug, 2010 by admin in Blog
When I was 14 I found this quote by fearless truth-teller Margaret Atwood.
This quote, “I forgot what things were called and saw instead what they are” worked its disastrous mysterious magic for the next twenty-five years, popping up here and there, only enough to cause me to feel constantly unsettled, relentlessly restless, but never entirely disrupted.
Then, as if it were part of some larger plan (because perhaps it is), seven years ago my life as it had been so neatly defined, fell apart. In our culture we tend to only imagine this as a catastrophe, like something we’d all want to avoid. In fact, it was a blessing of a catastrophe. It was a gift from somewhere that continues to move me to tears. I do not romanticize this time of my life. I wonder how I survived it.
My life fell apart because for the last time (I imagine for the last time but perhaps it’s not a finite process) the veil of these short centuries of our human naming – of what things are called and of what I was called – fell away. I forgot everything in my field, everything I and others had constructed, everything that everything used to be. I just stood staring at myself and everything else as if I should know. Like an amnesia victim I stood for hours, days, weeks on end trying desperately to remember these familiars, remember what to call them, as if they were objects.
But in fact we are surrounded by and infused with Subjects. We are surrounded by Life, by Others with their own unfolding stories. Clouds over head, damsel flies in the breeze, (the horror of) cultivated lawns, that person next to you waiting at the red light, your mother, your son, your own beating heart. The single words necessary to label all these profound beings were no longer there for me. All that was left was to describe them.
I realized this naming is simply a way to make it acceptable that we have built a culture upon the enslavement of matter, including our own souls. We cannot turn back from moments like this. David Whyte cautions; this “revelation must be terrible.” Adyashanti warns this is only the beginning of an impossible (and ecstatic) journey. It’s the process of Enlightenment or Awakening. Hardly ephemeral or ‘light’. It is the mother of all ‘ah-hah!’ moments…like a 4000 watt light bulb has been turned on and what is now visible is so beautiful, so unbearably beautiful, life as you knew it has no alternative but to fall to pieces and demand a re-write from the glorious ground of itself on up. Bill Plotkin cautions us, “not everyone makes it.” It’s a gritty sweaty process that does not come with any guarantees.
For, in the void created by the exodus of names, there were descriptions, adjectives, emotions, relationships, intimacy, and (YES!) even eroticism. And in this describing there lies a great honoring. When we have the courage to describe Subjects rather than simply call them randomly by their names, we are forced to be in relationship with them. They are no longer ‘out there’ but rather, in here. So of course, in addition to the honoring that occurs with this new way of seeing, there is tremendous grief for having participated in this egregious naming. But, in this grief there is also praise and for me, there was a shift of tectonic plates under my feet as if the entire world were changing her shape beneath and around me. As I tumbled around in this new life, I bumped into Others and realized they had been with me throughout my entire life. Yet, they had never been named, because it might be true that the most glorious of all subjects can’t possibly be named. And because they had never been named, and we are trained to see only what is nameable, I had never seen them.
I have just returned from the Adirondack Mountains. This particular place is my soul’s home. Here, the landscape is old and rounded, female in its disposition. The mountains are smooth and gray, the tops made compelling with the bedrock of the earth’s skeleton lined with mosses and diminutive alpine beauty at tree-line. Words cannot honor these creatures fully. So far, I have found my tears are the only thing that come close to speaking my awe and gratitude. The tallest of these beings is now called ‘Marcy’ for the first white man who made his way to the top. And yet, the indigenous two-leggeds named this great one Tehawus, which means ‘cloud splitter’ because on a typical Adirondack day, with a high ceiling of light cumulus, Tehawus is often fraternizing with the atmosphere in a way that surely the other mountains around her envy.
What would it mean to call things as they are, to describe things rather than name them? What would it mean to imagine we have no right to label things? How would it change your life and all life around you if you awoke tomorrow morning, rolled over to look into the eyes of your partner (or the fiery copper orb that greets us each day) and said, “I see one who is alive with the electricity of his ancestors’ rage” or “I am staring into pools made by the tears of the moon, having cried herself to sleep last night and all nights before, and I am now swimming in the waters of a broken-heart made possible only by Love.”
What if poetry became the only way possible to convey our experience of all living things, including our own soul?
