Hello sweet peas ~ in lieu of a long meandering conglomeration of thoughts and feelings, I am just dropping in to share with you one of my favorite memes.
…..April Fools! You know I’m more long-winded than that…. 😬😉
I intended to share this the week of the Spring Equinox, but alas, I was not ready. Now this is an April 1st / Full Moon / Passover greeting. Here is my long meandering conglomeration of thoughts and feelings after all. Or, you can just look at the pictures and probably get the idea :) Without further ado…
A Weather Report
In the interest of bearing witness I went to the ski resort to see it with my own eyes. I saw the 5 gallon buckets of snow being sent from the bottom of the lift to the top, to fill in the thin patches. From the air I watched the rivers of muddy water forming channels and wandering grooves in the ground, my attention caught by the glittering and shimmering of the sunlight playing along its surface. My eyes widened as the bottom stretch of a familiar run deteriorated into brown grass and I steered myself onto a path that had almost become impassable.
In my opinion, spring snowboarding is better in the afternoon, when the consistency is more slush than ice, more surfing than ice skating. There weren’t many people out that day but the ones that were seemed to be enjoying themselves. Embracing the novelty, taking what was offered, even if the helpings were meager. Myself included, as I shifted my balance from front to back, gliding and sometimes soaring, partnering with gravity. Feeling the tension between the weight of my body, the speed and the edges of this vehicle, the solidness of the earth. Testing my confidence and trust, testing my fear. A push pull between the two as they dance back and forth — following the curves and creating my own. I haven’t experienced anything else quite like it.
Through the sludge of a mild to moderate depression —
Through the dread, panic and doom that reaches for me through the atmosphere —
I accessed the exhilaration, the pure joy and freedom of my mind and body in sync, fully immersed in the moment.
A feeling that can only be experienced right now. As “right now” continues its swirling path into eternity.
“Normally” (whatever that used to mean), I would slip sideways into the edge of the woods and wind my way deeper into the pine and aspen groves until I found a secret nook to conduct my private business. I’d lay back in the snow and gaze up at the communion of branches and trunks swaying together. The sky exalted in wisps of white clouds, or a clear piercing blue, or a sleepy, nap-inducing grey. This has become my wintertime church. Listening. Breathing. Being quiet. Not zooming up and down the mountain, but sitting and resting, sometimes praying or asking questions, trying to settle my ping-pong mind. Usually a solitary activity, but if a friend was with me we’d sometimes unstrap our boards and romp around in the snow, playing and laughing ourselves silly until eventually we were ready to snake our way through the trees, whooping and elated by the beauty we encountered.
This year, the lack of snow makes this journey into the trees too treacherous to consider. Not worth being gouged by branches, caught on a rock or stuck in the mud. Instead, I sat on the crest of the mountain and let my eyes follow the roads far in the distance, squiggling paths leading outwards in all directions.
An article the other day pointed out that winter seems to have “skipped” most of the western /southwestern portion of the country. It’s felt to me that the weather here is about 2 months ahead of schedule — though the local newspaper reports that spring has arrived 4 weeks early, so perhaps I’m being a tad dramatic. Driving home past my old high school I think about the teenagers growing up today, not knowing what it was like “back in the day” when I was a kid. Mine is only one layer of memory — cold and bitter winds lingering into June, and that one classmate who would always be the first to brave wearing shorts to school out of protest. It’s the beginning of spring but feels like summer, with temps in the 80s. The plants are responding to this hasty summoning, pushing out blossoms that we are used to pining for until late April or May. We’ve been experiencing days of record-breaking heat, and an historically low snow year, roughly 1/4-1/3 of average snowpack, increasing the already present risk of wild fires. There was a story the other day on the radio about FEMA, the conversation peppered with comments that these days weather-related disasters are happening everywhere — nowhere is exempt.
I try to welcome the heat into my skin as best I can, though some part of me feels burnt out already, the dryness in the air making me wonder about the wild berries, and whether they will fruit. I think about fires, drought, water and food supply. I wonder about the bears and the deer and the fish in the slow river and the people building new houses.
But I digress. As Lyla June said in this interview on the Collective Voice, “We are reaping what we’ve sown”. Things are out of balance because we’ve been living out of balance. Though the fact that these conditions have been predicted doesn’t make it any less disorienting. As extremes become more extreme, we have to learn to ride bigger waves. The learning curve can be steep, especially if we haven’t yet learned to surf.
Given the implications of all of this, I’m reminded of a line from the poet CA Conrad1 — something about making the choice to love the world as it is, not as it was, or as we hoped or imagined it would be. Falling in love with the world as it is now.
In a quick internet search I find the line I was looking for:
“to
desire
the world
as it is
not as
it was”
How to love, how to desire a world in so much pain? A world changing so drastically, the whiplash of one horror upended by another. And still, the songs of birds in the morning. The tiny purple desert flowers. The stumbling of baby cows. The deer gathered in rest at the edge of the parking lot. The sweet humbling of a spring rain. The relentlessness of the earth turning towards and away from the sun.
The fullness of it all threatens to burst its container —
but as Joanna Macy has said,
“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe”
If I can let the rising wave within myself crash
If I can let the breath I’m holding be released
If I can let the momentum of the feeling run its course
I can receive more space. I can give more space.
I can perceive the beauty of the crescent moon, stars sparkling through the clouds.
I can sing a song in return.
I can feel that freedom is in the body
and beyond it,
in a collective body that’s bigger than my imagination can unspool.
To love in sickness and in health. How to love ourselves when we are sick, crippled, weak, volatile, lashing out? How to love others? To love it all. With eyes wide open. A radical broken openness. Without loving all of it, is it really love? Sometimes I am afraid of the sickness, the brokenness, the dying parts, and so I avoid looking at them in an attempt to render them nonexistent (like a fool would). And I am reminded again of the opportunity to bear witness. That this is an act of love, and healing. To be with the trees, be with each other, be with the changing conditions, and to notice how I am changing, revolting, molting, within them.
Is it. . .time?
There’s something too about the sense of time, and an impending sense of future doom that can be paralyzing. I don’t know that I believe in destiny or the inevitability of certain futures but I get swept up in this type of thinking.
I’m slowly making my way through Space, Time & Medicine (thx Pam), written in 1982 by an MD, Larry Dossey, who is exploring the idea that our orientation towards linear time might be detrimental to our health. Conversely, he proposes that returning to an understanding of time as circular, cyclical, swirling around an eternal present, (as experienced by many ancient and indigenous cultures) can be healing in itself.
I experiment with this idea one evening as I watch myself spiraling into a sense of scarcity about the future and regret about the past. “When will I ever be able to get X done? Am I too late, have I missed the opportunity to experience X? I can’t believe I’ve been squandering my time not doing X.” I notice that all my attention is being projected into a hypothetical distance and try to return to Now. What is here, where am I, what is happening Here? I find my breath, my location in the world and in the day, and an obviousness re: what is within my immediate control. I feel my energy drawn back into my body, and a sense of calm and relief2.
Dossey makes the point that in our modern industrialized society “the premium is on linear time — the time of history, the time of getting things done, the time of goals and accomplishment and rewards. In linear time we produce, caught in a culture in which the only sin exceeding that of allowing capital to lie idle is that of allowing time to go unused3.”
Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone speak to similar ideas in their book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy:
“Life has become a race in a way that is historically unprecedented. The sense of hurry is spurred on by an economic system that sets its goals and measures its success in terms of how fast it is growing. For an economy to grow from one year to the next, more needs to be accomplished in the same amount of time. If we want growth every year, then our speed of activity has to constantly increase.
(…)
Chronic hurry exacts a heavy toll. Straining against time affects our bodies, with release of adrenaline, tightening of muscles, and acceleration of the heart. While short bursts of pressure can be good for us, chronic stress wears us down.”
And clearly, this approach also takes its toll on the forests, oceans, land, & communities that are exploited in order to maintain the speed of constant economic growth, throwing us further out of the balance of giving / receiving, taking / replenishing, resting / working, grieving / celebrating, living / dying and landing us in a situation ripe with loneliness & depression, extinction & habitat loss, health crises, poisons in the water supply, and losses of culture, purpose and identity.
In his book, Dossey continues on to discuss how cultures around the world4 have measured their lives by the movements of the sun and moon and stars and seasons, regarding “time as a cyclic phenomenon”. For example, “the Hopi Indian language contains no words to refer to time in a linear fashion. Their verbs have no tenses. They live in a kind of continual present that contains everything that has ever happened.”
I appreciate the suggestion that the authors of Active Hope give to expand our perception of time, to build a relationship with Deep Time. To sense beyond our own lifespan in all directions, and access the power of what & who has come before us and what & who will come after. Orienting to a wider understanding of time doesn’t diminish the potency or intensity of Now — rather it can give us the footing to face it with more grace, clarity, and thoughtfulness.
“Learning to live in a larger timescale opens us to new allies and sources of strength. Our ancestors can be our allies, and we ourselves, as the ancestors of future generations, can play the role of ally to them as well. Perhaps these future generations have something to say to us.”
A friend shared a dream they had recently of their home, years and years after their own life had ended. The house was crumbling and no longer habitable, but the grape vines they had planted were thriving, still providing food and beauty and sustenance generations later.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” – Greek Proverb
I took this to heart as a reminder that the choices we make now have an impact beyond our own lifespan, threads that connect us to the before and after. We won’t get to see all the results of our actions, and that doesn’t make them any less meaningful. We are living in the result of the stories, experiments, tragedies, joys, fumblings, breakthroughs and relationships of all those that came before us. Our kinship and ancestral lineage extends beyond human, into animal, plant, bacteria, mineral, impulse, heat, gravity, momentum, mystery.
On daylight savings weekend I heard a story from a journalist, Lynne Peeples, who decided to spend 10 days in a bunker (it was an Airbnb??) 50 feet underground, only lit by red LED light, to study how her body and its circadian rhythms would react to sunlight deprivation. Eventually things started to go a bit haywire — she reported brain fog, disorientation, clumsiness, depression, and digestive issues. Her biometric data, analyzed later by scientists, showed that her heart rate and temperature regulation rhythms had gone out of sync with each other. All of this illuminated (…pun intended) the extent to which the patterns of the sun and earth are essential to maintaining the operating systems of our bodies. Even as we may flail about, stressed about “running out of time”, our cells are designed to stay on beat with the universe.
She points out that clocks are also operating in circles — life is moving cyclically even if we aren’t always seeing it that way5.
A Shoutout to Beauty, Grief, and Mystery
Regardless of the temperature, the earth still rotates in space and spins around the sun, arriving at the equinox, and balancing for a moment in the halfway point between the shortest day of the year and the longest. As the trees push their blossoms outward, something in me is opening as well.
A friend introduced me to the idea of a “grief chrysalis” — a protective shell constructed out of necessity, to allow for a restructuring to take place. Sometimes a container is required to allow ourselves to be remade by sorrow in some fundamental way.
I can feel the edges of my own chrysalis, and can start to reach my fingers through the fissures forming along its seams, fresh light and air beginning to waft its way in.
I was grateful to be able to see Dyani White Hawk’s amazing paintings, sculptures, & beadwork at the Walker Art Center a few months ago. In a statement about the show, she wrote that she believes that “beauty is medicinal”.
I couldn’t agree more… and I wonder, if beauty is medicinal, and if beauty is in the eye of the beholder as the saying goes, is our ability to heal dependent on our willingness to behold? (…Though it can be true sometimes we are shaken awake by beauty whether or not we are willing...) Beauty can be the chrysalis itself, and the heartbreak / loss that provoked it. Beauty can also be embodied in the forces that crack the chrysalis, like a song that reaches me at the perfect moment. A film that reminds me of the power of art. A hand reaching for mine and cradling it in warmth. Every cell shocked awake by the cold water of the lake. Forgotten muscles learning to fire. A cactus I’d assumed to be dormant pushing forth a baby bud. Breakthroughs that cannot be rushed, only received when the time is ripe.
In his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, psychotherapist and grief-worker Francis Weller describes meeting his mentor:
”When we sat down, Clarke reached to his left, placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, ‘This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves.’ “
I love this for many reasons and will be on the lookout for my own rock clock to keep on my desk. Surely returning to the soul as a guide, to geologic speed, has many implications and cascading affects that would unfold, as described, at their own intuitive pace. What would happen if we moved through our days at the rhythm of the soul?
Within these and other wisdoms, I’ve been counseled in this time to6:
• stay focused on creative (soul) work
• release attachment to the outcome
• find a way to rest in the mystery
• be confident in not knowing
Meanwhile, I know I can choose again to be in love with the world as it is now. Bearing witness to the melt, the howling wind, the gentle rain, the green buds, the roar, the collapse, the excitement, the cruelty, the disgust, the despair, the worms, the moths, the magic, the repair, the panic, the disorientation, the drought, the flooding, the tenderness, the storm clouds, the rupture, the heat, the defiance, the wonder, the bunnies, the generosity, the flourishing, the awkwardness, the absurdity, the laughter, the rot, the new life. Letting my feet be bare on the warming earth.
Here’s to this moment — and loving the world as it is, yesterday, tomorrow and today.
Love,
your fool and fellow earthling
Rachel
Thanks emmi for introducing me to this poet :)
See also: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell (I have not read it yet but dig the concept)
Makes me wonder what happens in “unused” time? Rest? Atrophy? Recovery? Delight?
Another interesting idea courtesy of the internet:
Reminds me of this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
While scrolling through old screenshots on my phone, I found this one from Quarantine 2020:
Your writing (and art) is incredible rachel! Bringing together such beautiful and sustaining ideas. I have also been looking for a rock clock ;)
Beautiful, Rachel. Thank you for continuing to share with us.