ISSUE 05 / APRIL 2021
This month has closed with curtains of rain! The way the wet earth sinks slowly inwards beneath each footfall feels to me like a series of relieved sighs. It is such a pleasure and a shock to witness the unbearably hasty rise and fall of beings in the forest, like eager waves cresting and overlapping: the rise and fall of the skunk cabbage! The rise of the horsetail! Of the bleeding hearts! The unfurling of the blackberry patch outside my window! -- all clamouring, clambering over one another. There was a bee that followed me for a long time along my regular trail, recently, which both delighted and unsettled me...what did the bee know that I didn't? So many thousands of things, of course.
Asking for help and receiving it is and remains the most remarkable thing in the world, to me, today, in this body that is always gathering experiences, harvesting from the world and leaving handfuls of birdseed on tree trunks. I buried a fallen pine siskin within a nest of woven branches that someone had left behind in the woods -- as if they had had time to prepare for that spirit's arrival, asking for and offering space. April carried in an extraordinary full moon and a tremendous act of forgiveness, and I am very grateful for the new shapes that I am tentatively, curiously, unfolding into.
Love is a kind of emptiness / Space is the body of God
“The sun is a negative space, and it is through that virtue by which it shines.”
(Rudolf Steiner)
Thinking about love, compassion, feelings of togetherness and connectedness as being characterized by allowing the self to be completely filled up by another: emptying ourselves of ourselves (and our biases, judgments, predispositions, narratives, assumptions ..) and containing, for a moment, the one we love in their entirety.
And this is not just person-specific love, this is Love of anything in perhaps its purest form...when we love something, we allow that thing to flow through us and transform us essentially, we become conduits for its energy and its force of being. So we are possessed, in a way, we allow the world to enter us, we become more porous and less certain of (certainly less adhered to) notions of separateness...and through this, I begin to understand more clearly how the Self is always in service to something.
Here, too, I think about the space that exists within ourselves, the essential space out of which all Things arise (and without which no Thing could exist) – the essence of a room is not the furniture inside of it, nor the walls, but the space it sits in that allows all to reside where it does...similarly, our thoughts arise and rest within the space offered by our interiority – and when we open up more space, more things rush to fill it. ~ Nature abhors a vacuum ~
– and Rilke wrote:
"these trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased...”
Hyrdogen electron density patterns – atoms are not empty, they are of a low density, and filled with electron “clouds” wherein particles act either like particles or like waves depending on context. These are some patterns they are predicted to form :o
"Who can put an end to this sadness?"
"The hours passing."
And, as always, something about birds
It is not an infrequent experience for chickadees to alight upon the fingers of an outstretched hand, if one is patient enough to stand still...! They're bright and sweet and small and their tiny feet on your tiny hand will perhaps inspire you to write a blog post of your own. If you live somewhere where they do, maybe you can go out to greet them. : )
To INVESTIGATE:
An article on what is going on at Fairy Creek Blockade, where folks have gathered to prevent old-growth logging on the land of the Pacheedaht Nation. This is a complex issue about land stewardship and the sovereignty of the Nation upon whose lands this group (primarily made up of settlers) has gathered in protest -- grateful for the way the details have been laid out here.
Episode 23 of Crackdown Pod: Cop-Free Future -- an investigation of the drug war and its roots in the city of "vancouver", among other things. This podcast always slams me back firmly into the earth in a way that is necessary and immediate.
I have really been appreciating Sharon Olds this month. Here is her poem "Enchantment".
This conversation between Conner Habib and Heather Berg on porn work.
In what ways are you making room for the merciful strangeness of this world? Are you stretching out? Are you creating space, tenderly, in between your words and your sentences, for the breath to arrive and to sustain you? What travels along your arterial pathways as you too walk through those of these surrounding woods ? What messages do they bring to you?
What tethers us to the world? What can we glean and heat, sweeten into syrup from that which this world offers us – how do we catch ourselves in its reflection? How are you honouring the life that surrounds you? To what do you love delivering the quality of your focused attention?
What does your intuition sound like?
Do you believe yourself when you speak?
Warmly,
