...Becoming Home...

Shared grief. Commitment to Place. Intergenerational maturity.

I have heard in various ways from elders of numerous relatively intact places say that until a people have birthed their own children and buried their own kin within the soils that grow their food than they are not yet of a Place. As I wrestle with my conditioned response to life’s discomforts and attempt to fight or flight every battle instead of growing again recently atrophied capacities for learning, participating, asking permission, offering praises and following through, I risk never tasting the sweet fruit of what such a commitment can offer.

Modernity, forever in flight, separated from soil and incapable of grieving, has caused most of us to experience a tragic loss of most of the senses that make us truly human. As individuals, when suffering strikes we inwardly wrestle with the riddles teeming from within, longing for shared ceremony. Not finding a community fully capable of holding our insecurities and vulnerable states, the blessings turn into curses and oftentimes manifest as madness and rage.

We are not individuals. As the Zulu saying reminds us, I am because you are. We may think we are little universes unto ourselves, having our own private experience but as anyone who has ever lived intimately with others for an extended period of time can attest to, the experience of others is directly related to our own. When this is understood deeply and navigated skillfully, the beauty of humanity is fully known. How we show up for each other, for our fellow humans and our more-than-human kin will ultimately determine how we will grow (or not grow). We inter-are.

When my wife and I lost our unborn child recently, many dear friends from around the world reached out to share with us songs, poems, silence, tears, stories of similar grief, and wild wails of penetrating sadness. We received images of candles being lit in honor of those who have gone before us from every corner of the globe. We felt held in this net of tears and we offered it up to our wee traveling one as a map of sorts to help guide her across the Mysterious Between. Warm in this shared grief, it became clear to us, the ones still here, that when we suffer, we do not suffer alone. When we express our grief beautifully, openly, with raw, shaking, authentic vulnerability (not the trendy kind of theatrical trauma worship that is so popular these strange days, but honest, messy realness), others open too. And as we collectively grieve, new forms of life take root within the hummus of our shared vulnerability.

Yet too many no longer remember how to grieve. Individually or collectively. Just as we received hundreds of elegant, life/death-honoring words of sacred longing that served as warm blankets around the sadness of our loss, so too did many remain woefully distant, awkward and silent, unaware of what to say or what to do. Some, being a bit more courageous approached us on their behalf to say, “Don’t despair, they love you, they just don’t know what to say.”

I live in a community that places high value on hard work. And with good reason. For unlike what The Beetles would have us believe, love isn’t in fact all you need. We also need to plant the corn, harvest the potatoes, raise the children, build our homes and gather the water. Most modern people are busy as hell, but few know what real work is, having allowed empires’ curious aspirations to make them naïve and lazy, forgetting how to do much of anything beyond sit behind a computer. True living requires we touch the earth, literally. We need daily to work up an honorable sweat, use our bodies and actually do some genuine good old fashion work (as opposed to forcing immigrants to do it all for us while we sip lattes). Yet, just as important as it is to learn how to grow food, make compost, etc. it is equally important to learn how to show up for ourselves and each other emotionally. It is not enough to merely “send thoughts and prayers” as we all know, all too well. Our times require that we grow back a mature emotional capacity capable of collectively churning grief, rage, despair, stagnation, apathy, etc into potent fodder for artful living. Some would call this, ceremony.

I’m not sure at what point we lost our capacity for creating and orchestrating true ceremony. I’m not certain at what stage in our evolution we began feeling shy about dancing for the gods, singing aloud to Father sun at dawn, elegantly asking permission from Grandmother Corn before we steal her children and bury them in the Holy Earth for our benefit, but whatever arrogant view resulted in killing this most essential ingredient of our shared story has slithered its nasty head into virtually every corner of this precious world. Whether I sit in a Chiang Mai tea house or a hipster coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, where one will find the same blasé aesthetics that have been force fed us all through culture sucking algorithms, so too we find well intending souls sucked helplessly into their own hyper individualist world, incapable of “knowing what to say”. Thus, ceremony becomes little more than a subtle picture on the periphery, a pat on the back in passing, a distant memory of what life once was before we surrendered to comfort and business as usual.

Yet beyond the Great Wall of Selfies (as Martin Prechtel refers to our narcissistic modern state) still lies a cultural seed of real human memory. And in my experience, it is only wild emotional meltdowns that seem able to carry with them the power to access this sacred root. When life’s inevitable sufferings arise they swiftly bring to our awareness just how insignificant and not in control we are. It is within these sacred portals we finally see clearly again. It is within these magical doorways that it becomes disorientingly obvious that none of this is ultimately about us anyway. And, if we are lucky, in these most holy of moments, if only for a brief instant, we can actually catch a glimpse of Her.

If we do not feed those who give us life than eventually they will feed on us. Yet gone are the days where we feed much of anything anymore. We can barely agree nowadays that even feeding ourselves healthily is all that important. Harder and harder is it to find a genuinely organic farm, saving genuinely organic seeds. Instant noodles, fast food and convenience sing praises not to the Primordial Mother Power but to the anxious gods of corporate interest. We simply do not value the inefficient process of mature grief and praise that is required of real ceremony; the cornerstone of strong community. And nonetheless, She is still there. Still here. Hungry yes, a bit disappointed, but patient and present as ever. Waiting, watching, the Great Mother sits in the shadows, listening.

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Oṃ Tāre Tuttāre Ture Svāhā

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When what was to be no longer was, She fell from a little bloody sack from the inner sanctum of my beloved wife. We held Her in our hands. There She was. No longer breathing yet fully alive, in the magical eternal way of Old Story. And in that instant we knew exactly what to do. Spirit came in on winds like a wild horse and dictated to us long sense forgotten sacred instructions. The houses for feeding the Holy had all arrogantly been taken down years ago so we quickly made a new one. Gathering the necessary offerings, Her blood fed the soil of our small plot of land and made it home.

Finally, after years of there being no alter here, this land again holds a place for feeding, not us, but Her. Each day we rise at dawn and offer this flowering tree warm food, burning herbs, candles, sweet water and song. A Natural Mystic again now resides in this Place. Cold hearts and rolling eyes slowly melt and look inward. We are not here for ourselves, but for the benefit of each other. More so, we are here to prepare fertile soils for a time beyond now. And how can we know how to do this when we have no elders, when we have lost our ability to focus, to communicate well, to organize, to grieve, to pray, creatively participate, play?…. She knows how.

Just Listen…

…Slow down, and listen.

The Goddess came to us through her. Planting in us a seed of maturity that will one day rise. We were lazy and too distracted. Too shy to make a sacred space and because of this blood was drawn. It is like this. It has always been like this. And now that our blood has been buried on this land, home takes on a new depth of meaning. The flowers blooming in front of our house were fed by the flesh of our own. We see her now in everything, glimmering in the morning dew, rising in the steam of morning mist.

Now she will always be with us.

She has made this place home.

I prostrate to Tara, the liberator, mother of all the victorious ones.

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Thank you for your prayers.

#maypeaceprevailonearth