Doing-Not-Doing

Following the flow of our life-force

Instead of writing True Nature last week, I did other things.

With a wyse sister, I made sauerkraut, rolled beeswax candles, and added freshly dried mugwort leaves from another friend’s garden, to jars of sweet, golden honey from the garden of the woman I was crafting with.

Out in the forest, we invoked a wisdom mandala, grounding it into form through stones placed on the earth, summoning it into a medicine wheel. We called upon the the directions and the elements in their multidimensionality of meaning and wisdom.

Air for the mind, water for feeling, fire for the electric energy of inspiration, earth for the body and all of our physical life, and space - the true nature of who we really are beyond description.

We built a fire, blessed our candles in the smoke from the mugwort stems, sang songs, offered to the flames that which we chose to release before the crossing of the Samhain/All-Hallows threshold. The we offered to the fire that which we chose to take with us into these Dark Times.

The dark times of replenishment. The nourishing darkness. The fertile void. The liminal space within the wheel of the year.

The next morning, I sat in ceremony just with myself and nature; I also invited my entire lineage, those I remember and those I can only imagine - the long line of my ancestors stretching back into primordia. I am of the notion that the death-experience is a great clearinghouse, through which we leave behind anything that is not beautiful, pure part of our soulful becoming. To me, that means the consciousness’ of our ancestors are tuned-in completely to love and the essential wisdom of reality. They have shed whatever baggage might have been accumulated in their earthy lives, but they are not gone someplace far away from us. They are still present. If we know how to seek their connection, we hear their voices and feel their guidance.

A friend of mine whose eldest son died years ago, shares a beautiful message she received directly from him. Some time after he had made his transition, she had been wishing to hear from him, like the other members of her family were. One day while driving in the car, she all-out beseeched him to speak to her, and immediately she heard his voice: “Mom, the dead are here to facilitate the living.”

The dead are here to facilitate the living

My mother’s mother made her transition in the beginning of 2021. She was almost 101 years old. In the months after, I found myself able to hear her voice and receive extremely helpful guidance. One evening I was sitting on the couch knitting, and I sensed her presence merge with mine in the unseen dimension of my mind. The conversation started in the usual way, hearing her greet me with the most wonderful, loving words.

Hello sweetheart. I love you so much.

Hi Nani, I love you.

I asked her what it was like to be expanded beyond this five-senses experience. She told me it was wonderful - but then she explained to me why being in form was so special. Her explanation was not quite in words, but in the way she drew my attention within my body. Suddenly my skin became extremely sensitive to the feeling of the air on my skin, to the movement of the blood and energy within me.

The bliss of being.

She told me how these kinds of sensations - of being in the body, of feeling the elements, the flow of experience - is something special to our physical embodiment.

This moment of feeling and sensing the blissful simplicity of being in a body reminded me of how often I overlook the delicate and wonderful feeling of being alive.

The dead are here to facilitate the living.

The morning of Sahmain proper, I had to balance my time between a lecture I was supposed to attend with the woman who is teaching me how to be a birthkeeper, and the actual solar moment. I chose to focus on my personal ceremony time, knowing the lecture was going to be recorded, and that I could tune in later. It was an absolutely brilliant day - sunny, blue sky, and the hues of autumn were in full splendor. I relaxed into the portal, enjoying the sound of sand cranes calling from high up in the sky. They seemed to call out at the most auspicious moments - at the time when a vocal response from nature was the perfect adornment; a clear communication, given and received. When I finished with my own work, and went to tune in to the zoom call - I discovered that the lecture had been cancelled last minute due to something unexpected and urgent. Just the kind of affirmation I like.

I keep a mental list of all the things that encourage my trust in the flow. In the archives of my mind I have a bulging file cabinet with all the experiences I have had that show me how everything does truly work out.

It is nice to look back in those files. Reminders are always helpful.

Bringing the ancestor plate to the guardian oak, including slices of our favorite wine-crisp apples, goat milk from our friend’s goats, a long-life elixir, Victor’s homemade sourdough, cedar from Lost Lake, and a beautiful blue lotus flower

I took the plate of offerings for the ancestors to large oak tree at the corner of the woods and lawn. This tree stands out. It is a prominent guardian and I love having a reason to visit. When I first started to work with the land at my mother’s house, it was out of a necessity. I wanted a place to offer the spent herbs from tinctures and other medicines I was making in the midst of our nomadic ways. Scattering handfuls of herbs across the land feels regenerative. The plant’s life-force and sentient intelligence has been drawn into a menstruum and bottled as a remedy. I see a sanctity in that transformation; I feel a natural reverence for the gift. When I return the plants to the land, I see myself participating in a wild continuum of well-being. My steps into the forest become ritual steps in a dance of reciprocity, and I feel embodied in a purpose that merges action, thanksgiving, and blessing.

When I create an ancestor plate, with foodstuff and offerings of beauty - I am not thinking that my grandmother is going to come in the flesh or even the spirit and eat the bread or drink the goat milk. The act is my way of physically acknowledging that death is not an away place that we go. On an invisible level, each one of my offerings is an electromagnetic field of energy. To me it looks like apple, bread, milk, flowers. To other eyes, in other dimensions, it is a radiant field of information and meaning. I have added my intentions and aspirations to these offerings, and allowed them to transform to something more than just foodstuff within the context of my ritual. In leaving these offerings out for “the spirits” - which, as we all know are probably the squirrels, chipmunks, and raccoons - these prayers are integrated and metabolized into the living tapestry of life that surrounds me. When I go back to the tree to gather the plate and all the food is gone - I quite literally see the dispersal of my intentions into the matrix of life.

Later that night, Victor and I had a fire to formally close the Samhain circle we had opened - I rattled, since my drum has been sleeping these days, and thus we crossed fully into the Dreamtime, now flowing towards Winter Solstice and Yule.

A reminder that the next quarterly essence drop happens the week of Winter Solstice. If you would like to receive a vibrational essence from my personal collection, the deadline to upgrade your subscription is December 11th.

Victor at the closing fire, speaking with a squirrel in the yonder oak

Last Wednesday, we went to our storage unit and began a giant clear-out in preparation for moving from the unit to a shipping container. When we first moved out of the house we had been renting back in February of 2022, a friend of ours made a joke about how we should just burn everything instead of paying to store it. He pointed out the cost of storing everything would be the same as purchasing most things again. Basically he was right. When we first boxed everything up, there were so many things I could not dream of parting with, thinking them useful or essential. There are some irreplaceable and precious items…mostly rocks - like the heart-shaped green calcite our friend sent us one year all the way from Alaska, or the giant amethyst geode, whose paired halves form angel wings. For the most part though, I have found that a lot of what we thought to save ended up being either expendable or outdated. We have already purged a third, to half of what was originally in there. In this next round of examination and consolidation, I reckon it will diminish even further.

Each round of releasing has been not just a release of stuff, but a release of energy. I have noticed that most of the things I saved that I am now giving away, are objects that in some way were placeholders for energy. In asking myself why I saved books I haven’t cracked in over six years, I realized that it was the energy of what I felt they represented that was relevant to me. In spending almost two years with only my most essential possessions, I have discovered that many of the other objects I was saving no longer hold the same charge for me that they once did. I found ways of embodying the energies, rather than looking to an object outside of me to “hold” it.

Wednesday night I sat and wrote a bit of what I thought was going to be the True Nature article this week. I was bent on talking about the ancient Taoist concept of wei-wu-wei ( pronounced way-woo-way), which is often translated as “doing-not-doing.” This phrase is meant to convey a state of being where our lives flow effortlessly; where things seem to take care of themselves, problems resolve, and solutions arise of their own accord. Wei-wu-wei is a special devotion of ours - a constant Victor and I return to, and a frequent comment we make about something happening in our lives. I was over a page into the essay when I started to feel an underlying tension - which ironically, is my signal that I’m pushing against myself. Definitely not wei-wu-wei. I could tell that my focus was going against the flow of my energy. It was not lost on me that I was “trying” to eke out an essay about effortlessness. I took a step back, bowed to the indicators of my inner compass, and closed my computer.

I woke up the next morning with the same tension feeling when I sat to write. I made a deliberate attempt to “clear my mind” and access a new perspective out in the forest - but all that did for me was point me in a different direction: Clearing out our apothecary. Over the past almost two years - I have only been traveling with my black box of essences, and a few choice tinctures. The rest of our apothecary has been in storage boxes, in much the same state it was as when we moved out of the house two Februarys ago. I have gone into the boxes when someone has asked me for a remedy, when I needed the supplies to make our tooth powder, or to refill jars of dried tea herbs for travel. But short of that, I have only had thoughts like “gotta go through all that sometime,” and “why did I keep all this stuff?”

Offerings at the foot of the guardian oak

Out in the woods, I realized that no matter what I aspired to with my publishing schedule, there was no way my system was pointed in the direction of writing. So I trooped inside, and began to load box after box into the kitchen and began a process of sorting. I went through every bottle, jar, and bag - and ended up with two pitchers full to the brim of old medicine I wanted to return to the land. Plants tinctured in 190 proof Everclear, before I knew brandy tinctures were so much nicer and just as effective. Tinctures I made that I never, ever once used in over seven years. And a whole bunch of tinctures in small amounts, whose qualities changed after I left them in a car when the temperatures were below freezing. Then I went through our big box of dried herbs, cases of mason jars filled with herbs - and filled a very large kitchen bowl with all sorts of plant material to go back to the earth - including a collection of bright pink flowers from our hibiscus tree, dried ocotillo flowers I gathered in Baja Mexico, and a jar of dandelion seeds I collected for an unfinished project (I saw an idea for giving people tiny jars of dandelion seeds for “making wishes.”)

Don’t do anything that isn’t play

- Joseph Campbell

I felt happy in returning all the herbs to the land - especially with a medicine wheel in form. Rather than just a “getting rid of,” it was a land offering in the spirit of deeper connection. While it might sound like this is serious business to me - and it is - it is also true play. When I sit at the fire, and one of the squirrels comes up close and comfortable, obviously chirping to me in a tone of chitter I have never heard before - I am a joyful child again, walking with eyes wide open through the living universe of my imagination.

Later that night, after I had done a constant flow of dishes (bottles, jars, and more bottles) for what felt like several hours, made my land offerings, had a fire to burn old medicinal oils and certain herbs, and reorganized the entire apothecary - I then got a bee in my bonnet to make chocolate, have a yoga-foam-rolling session, and take a bath. I relaxed in the chamomile, lavender, and oat straw infused waters (compliments of all the dried herbs I reclaimed from storage) - and thought about how everything I did were tasks I had wanted to accomplish for a very long time. Not only cleaning out the apothecary, which has been on my mind for over a year, but I had also been day-dreaming for weeks both about making chocolate and having an herb-infused bath. Suddenly the time was right and ripe, everything coming together neatly like puzzle pieces.

The main reason that I let myself slide on writing True Nature last week, is because I have learned over the years that pushing through tension to accomplish a task is counterproductive. When I use the word tension, I don’t mean the kind of positive stress we experience from the physical exertion of doing what we love. Rather, I mean mental, emotion, and physical tension that restricts the life-force from fully flowing. This kind of tension arises as thoughts, sensations, and feelings that relate to a diminished enjoyment of life.

I have learned to care deeply about my level of enjoyment, or satisfaction, because what I am feeling on a moment-to-moment basis is a cellular experience: A chemical-hormonal expression. An electrical pattern. A genetic signaling that becomes a manifested reality. From the mind, to the body, to the rest of my life.

When my sense of enjoyment in any moment fades into some level of discomfort or dissatisfaction, I know that my whole body system is no longer firing on all cylinders. If I push against myself to accomplish some task, it is never as satisfying as letting the pieces fall into place of their own accord. Not only is it less satisfying, this kind of tension indicates that my physiology is operating at a deficit, and I have less access to my clarity, inspiration, and passion. With greater degrees of tension, I have lost my positive expectations and life-giving beliefs; I am quite literally not as coordinated or alert - this deficit becomes is a gateway to options and outcomes I naturally avoid when I have access to the full breadth of my energy. Sometimes I can release the tension in a few breaths. Other times, I have to take a break, take a walk, take a nap, meditate. Sometimes it is much more challenging. Regardless of the subject, I am always reaching for the same thing: relief, relaxation, and a return to my natural state of ease. A return to wei-wu-wei.

The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.

Their wisdom was unfathomable.

There is now way to describe it;

all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful

as someone crossing an iced-over stream.

Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.

Courteous as a guest.

Fluid as melting ice.

Shapable as a block of wood.

Receptive as a valley.

Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment.

Not seeking, not expecting,

she is present, and can welcome all things.

-Chapter 15 of the Tao Te Ching, presented by Stephen Mitchell