A String of Beads

Pearls on the path of shifting perception

Hello You who are so Dear to me ♡ It has been a while since I have put out a longer piece. A couple of weeks ago, my mother’s friend asked me to share the top two salient memories from my childhood - the ones that have informed the person I am unfolding into. What a deep question. I slept on the answer, just to be sure. In the process of reflection, I have realized how much of my childhood I spent both in Nature, and in my inner worlds of consciousness and perception. Not much has changed.

Each pearl below is a seed, a bead on the rosary of experience - bringing me deeper into aisthesis with life, the sharing of soul-essence.

---

◌ I am three years old, alone in my bedroom under the pretext of taking a nap. Rather than sleeping I am staring at the ceiling, enjoying the sensation of my body rising up all the way to the globe light in the center of the room. My stomach brushes the ceiling, and I slowly sink back down towards my bed.

As I get older, I become aware that the adults think humans cannot fly. Obviously, they have all forgotten, or never learned how.

Third Quarter Moon

Lilac night fall moon rise
I’m talking to myself out here!
This world is so precious,

I just want to shake people,
	Wake Up!  Wake Up!  Can’t you see? 

Photographs are pale reflections
	distant memories calling us back
	to the somatic embodiment of life
the direct experience.

…

I need what is wild,
the raspberries and thistle

We need what is wild,
	our true Self
dancing free in the wind with our sisters, ocean of wildflowers
rising from the ashes
our bodies rooted in the soils of knowing
quickened to fertility by fire’s
total consummation

… 
	 
I will share this secret:  the birds, 
I saw them glide in flock formation of Cassiopeia.
For half a breath, my blood moved
	with the dark mass of feathers
and the swirling galaxies

◌ I am four years old, with a mind grounded enough in this reality to speak and understand what certain words mean. Such as banana. I am alone, repeating the word over and over again, until a strange sensation comes over me.

Banana banana banana banana?

I have forgotten the meaning of the word.

All I hear are the syllables spilling out of my mouth: banana banana banana banana banana banana

I feel my mouth shape the sound with my lips, teeth, tongue, and palate. Ba-na-na.

All sense has left the sound; vibration laid bare, like birdsong before you understand the singing.

Banana? Banana? Banana? Banana?

The sound becomes, once again, as if I am an infant in the arms of the world. This sensation of unknowing lasts just a few moments.

BA-NA-NA!

Meaning snaps back into place like a rubber band. It’s not the remembering that delights me so much as the sensation of forgetting. My body likes how it feels to bypass the intellect. This becomes a game I play often. Over time I discover there are many variations.

Waxing Gibbous II

Nothing can surpass the beauty of the moon
rising pure in a dusky sky.

And it occurred to me: 
what is sacred is wild.
It cannot be made. By definition the wild is beyond
all fabrication, arising only of itself.  
Dissolving into itself.

And then I tried to find something that isn’t wild.
	
I’m still looking, just to be sure my eyes aren’t playing tricks on me.  

◌ I am a teenager, lying on my back in the gargantuan high-school gymnasium. Staring up at the ceiling, I will myself to believe that the ceiling is the floor, that I am looking down on the floor from a great height. I will myself to believe and feel that my back is actually stuck to the ceiling. Over and over again I reorient my sense of space, my body, and gravity - until a strange sensation comes over me.

I am weightless, dangling eighty feet above the ground. My stomach flips.

The feeling lasts a few seconds. I do it again.

…

Working Thesis

The journey:  A series of locks and doors
to understand fully that there are no doors
and no locks

◌ I am in Bodh Gaya, India for the first time; it is a few months before my twenty-first birthday. The day is a holy day, and there is a blessing for all the vehicles. The men of the vihar have parked their cars in the central courtyard - the hoods are adorned with floral wreaths and strings of golden marigolds; there are candles, and red scarves with sequins draped over the frames. It is the first time I have ever strongly considered human intention and care affecting the functioning of a machine.

The next summer, my cousin tells me a story about being out of fuel, lost in the middle the desert near the Grand Canyon. She puts clusters of quartz crystals on the dash, freshly dug out of the Arkansas ground with her own hands. Between the crystals and her willpower, she made it miles on empty to the gas station.

…

Paradox

I am not the teacher
Life is the teacher
Yet, to receive the teaching
I become Life
         my experience the teaching

◌ I am in my mid-thirties, trying to do laundry in the Airbnb we have rented. The dryer is different from others I have used, and I don’t understand why the clothes are still damp. A light is blinking, telling me to clean the filter, which I have done more than once. I feel exasperated, and I start to talk to the dryer. “I don’t understand you…what do you need?” As I speak, my mode of relating shifts. My concept of “machine” loses its rigidity.

Suddenly there is a wild animal staring me in the face with its smooth, gaping maw and flashing eyes.

Oh excuse me! I thought I was interacting with something inanimate. Something not alive.

[Tell me: where in the world can we find form without the bonds of energy? Tell me, is there any form born outside of the fluid, electro-ecstatic, field of life?]

I am unable to find a true dividing line between life and what we ideate to be its opposite. This is one of my favorite questions to bring to Nature’s Mind. The answers always draw me into that space of forgetting. Forgetting the meaning we have culturally cultivated. My body likes how the answer feels - sweet release from the net of intellectual assumptions about things we cannot see with our eyes. Pure relief from the gravity of limiting assumptions.

Stephen Harrod Buhner writes:

“We feel the touch of life, of a nonhuman awareness, upon us…An intelligence, just as subtle and sophisticated as our own, but very nonhuman, reaches out and communicates with us…And a new world opens up. When that happens we take a long floating leap, land someplace else, and look around with new eyes. We experience in that moment what the ancient Greeks - the Athenians - called aisthesis, the touch of a nonhuman soul upon the deeps of us - know that ours touches them in turn…And when that happens, we abandon the view of life that does not allow us to extend interiority to dolphins or trees or stones.”¹

It can be hard to see beyond concepts ossified by collective agreement. The gravitational pull is strong.

Nevertheless, we are all capable of it. We are capable of finding ways of seeing that open our hearts more widely. We are capable of waking up to the livingness of this world, and reorienting our sense of self and other in this time-space reality.

Imagine waking up to a world that is so much more alive than you ever have known. Imagine waking up to a world completely aware and in love with the forms of its own arising, including you. Imagine how we can bless everything we see; not with some special prayer, but with our eyes seeing clearly through the lens of our wisdom heart.

Regarding the presence of the essence is more than enough

Dividing Line

I watched the body fall from the sky
out of Hawk’s talon-grip
	into the breast of the earth, soft and yielding

Startled into presence, my senses opened wide to receive
	the vision of the afterlife:
After fur and warm blood
After kicking up grass and soil
After burrow and deep winter sleep

My slow tentative steps drew me closer to the pyre,
	the green grassy flame of death and no coming back

Over the corpse I crouched, elbows on knees, chin in hands
looking to see
	Who 
had become Hawk in body and cell 

My brain, thicket of habits
	blindly turning round itself grasping for 
a framework
	to understand
the movement I saw
the life
writhing and lit 
	vital force animation of consciousness 

Not singular,	
	Not rabbit.

But multiple, manifold, uncountable 
	Life
Digesting, absorbing, becoming

And the question came to me, 
	Is there ever a rabbit? Or is this vision the true sight of what life
really is? 

Completely other, one form flowing
	Into another
	Into the immeasurable
Ocean of Infinity. 

◌ June 30th, 2024: We are on the road, heading west on I-90 across South Dakota towards Oregon. I am driving; it is day two, and I am sinking deep into the sacred road-trance. For what feels like endless miles we are passing towering high-tension wires, or wait, no - we are passing towering metal giants, benevolently holding miles and miles of cable flowing our precious electrical current. They are magnificent. Almost alien, yet still familiar, with elegance, edges, and angles - like the green teasel plants (Dipsacus fullonum) pushing up en masse along the same highways. I bow to these great mineral beings, steadfast in their promise to be that which we have asked of them. I bow to the day their service is no longer needed, our energy flowing from a deeper, infinitely renewable source. In my mind’s eye I imagine offering them essences, one drop at time to the metal stanchions; I’m so curious which essence from my black box Nature would choose. I imagine the conductive elements of their metallic bodies radiating the coherent signal of their true wild nature. Across the plains, across the space within which we are remembering ourselves whole again.

Coming to Terms

The other day, the forest captured the whole of my attention.  
I listened closely and took notes 
not wanting to forget this most important of lectures.

The trees spoke first. They said, “In order to understand
what it means to be human
Look beyond the confines 
of society
the narrow standards
of your time.”

Then the rocks and moss chimed in, 
“All things can
were 
and will be.”

I chewed on that for a while,
but the mushrooms really blew my mind. They said, 
“What it means to be alive,
goes beyond
anything defined.”

I departed in silence, the kind of quiet 
that shows the deepest
respect.    

The six featured poems Third-Quarter Moon, Waxing Gibbous II, Working Thesis, Paradox, Dividing Line, and Coming to Terms are from my unpublished manuscript The Unwavering Harmony of Being.

1. Buhner, Stephen Harrod. Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. Bear and Company 2014. Kindle ed