There are secrets that will not be revealed to you until you learn to crawl on your belly.
There are visions you will not be entrusted with until you lay your pride, your swords, and your life down.
There are things you cannot ever know, cannot ever understand, ever.
I am learning this the hard way, so that my friends don’t have to. But does anybody want to hear this? When I offer a glimpse of the feminine, people are naturally scared. Believe me, I throw my own childish tantrums every other Sunday. Who likes to hear that nothing is ever under control?
Middle Ages, they say, we don’t want to go back there. Yes, I know. It was still the patriarchy, those people killed witches. That’s not it. But the ancients were superstitious, primitive, brutal people. It was still the patriarchy, that’s not it. But we were in caves, painting animals in the dark. Yes, I know. That’s not it.
We don’t know what a world of balanced masculine and feminine principles is like. We’ve never tried it before. I told you I don’t have the answers. I am a child of the patriarchy too, just like you. A world without my discerning rational mind would not only be impossible, it would be downright chaos and suicide. We’ve come too far to go back now. But do I really need to convince you that a world of mind without heart, body and place is equally dangerous? For that we have the evidence, scientific reports and everything! You are looking at it, it’s called modern culture. It’s a nightmare narrative where progress is measured by the number of plastic bags in a dead whale’s stomach. It is nuclear weapons and the global economy, factory farms and opioid epidemics. For every incredible thing we have achieved as humanity, I can give you an utter horror. Every leap of knowledge we make plunges us deeper into ignorance. Every medical problem we solve creates another one. It is the nature of this paradigm, it is the nature of a mind split from the body, of sky separated from earth, of human without the divine, without context and without place.
I am learning this the hard way, so that my friends don’t have to. I am trying to face my own shadows, so that I don’t have to project them onto you, onto a world already reeling with too much insanity without me adding my own. I am not enlightened, a saint or anyone’s teacher, I’m an imperfect neurotic person, but at least I know it on most days. These lines of writing are mine and you are sailing your boat in their waters, so I don’t feel bad throwing a tempest and shaking you up. You’re always free to float your boat somewhere else less threatening and more comfortable. I usually write with gentle compassion and beauty, because I know their power. I try getting this message across using the language of the heart, of the poets, of lovers and of dreams, but human pride is difficult to cut through without a sharp tongue. Today I have worn a necklace of skulls and climbed on my tiger, my sword dripping with blood.
Listen: you show no remorse, no kindness, no humility, no understanding of the dangerous animal you have become. You are arrogant, judgmental and self-righteous. You are destroying yourself with addiction and power. You have a death-wish. Your shadow has filled the entire globe. You still question the gifts you should be basking in; you doubt the beauty you ought to be absorbing through your skin like sunshine, and you wish to control that which is wild and free and owes you no explanation.
Listen: there are things you cannot ever know, cannot ever understand. Ever. Call them mysteries, God or pumpkin-spice latte I don’t give a shit. All your language policing and theorizing can’t alter the fact that the human mind, severed from the body and the world, will always be too limited and too analytical to apprehend the whole of reality, the objective truth, the ‘out-there’ as is.
I can tell you exactly the moment this horror wholly gripped me and threw me into a cognitive dissonance so massive, I am still dealing with its repercussions: when they placed my mother’s casket in the ground and the village gravedigger smashed the glass panel covering her face, shards of glass and dirt replacing what once was her visage. I just stood there as they shoveled soil over the casket, burying her as I once buried potatoes in our back yard. Between my silent tears I looked at the massive cypress tree growing at the foot of the grave and knew, just knew for a fact her beautiful slender hands, her thick strong thighs and her wonderfully complex brain would be feeding its roots, like all the other ancestors in the graveyard before her.
The Earth. No one escapes her. Our bodies come from her, are made from her and return to her once they’ve become worn out, sick or deadly injured.
The Earth. No one escapes her. Yet modern culture did not teach us to respect or revere her, nor humble ourselves before her. Our schooling failed us. We learned little of value in terms of living life in harmony with nature. Where before human beings looked at the night sky and felt they were part of something bigger, when we got done with conquering this planet and its people, we looked at the stars and thought: one day I will get up there and I will make it mine.
***
I am not my ancestors, not completely. I am a new configuration of life, based on theirs. They’ve done their deeds and they’ve sown their seeds and here I am. But I have not forgotten them, either. I take what I need from them and thank them wholeheartedly.
What kind of ancestor am I to the generations that follow? What will they take from me? My hours spent discussing in forums on Facebook? The hours I logged at the office shuffling numbers? An extensive, well-written bibliography, a phylogenetic analysis of bacteria? Another technological triumph that brought lots of marvelous and lots of terrible things to the world? It is a privilege to be an ancestor. I fear that what I leave behind is more hypocritical, more pointless and darker than I would like to admit, but I must understand what that is. I must stay grounded in this present time.
Whenever I feel this anxiety, I go outside in the yard and weed the garden. I have not been sleeping well these past few days, the turbulence in the world is reaching and touching me in waves. To be honest, there is an ego-trigger in there too. It upsets me when someone misunderstands my form of expression and my way of being, when someone rejects the ideas I embody or bring to the table without at least considering them first, deeply and with the benefit of a doubt that love provides. I don’t offer a theory of everything, and my writing has no ‘practical’ advice for environmental destruction, climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ll be the first to admit that, to my parents’ disappointment, I have rendered myself utterly useless to the daily workings of society. While this still bothers me, I look to the deep introverts of the world, who have always considered the problems du jour from the inside out, offering new configurations of words, notes or brush strokes that unlock something deep inside the human psyche. Joana Macy calls this the work that deals with human values and shifts our perception of reality, and she includes it in her model of the three pillars for achieving what she calls ‘The Great Turning’. Mary Oliver wrote that artists aren’t helping the world go around but forward. My expression is about as necessary as a wild violet growing in my yard.
***
Today I feel angry, and I am stomping around plucking clumps of crabgrass and purple nutsedge. Yes, wild violets too. “You are overthinking things”, you might say to me. “Aha, just like you”, I might reply.
Now, reader, imagine you and I are plucking weeds together. We are both anxious, tired of this stupid quarantine and its uncertainty, depressed at the state of the world and angry at the system. Can you feel how desperate we are? Can you, like me, sense that we have run out of solutions for human greed, apathy and insanity? We are uprooting these damn weeds together, side by side, livid. But we are here, we are working away, we have formulated our questions, and we have not shied away from them. We turned off the TV and put the smartphone down. We showed up with determination, despite the fear, because deep down we know there’s no way out. And we are out here, plucking weeds. What are we to do?
Be quiet.
Let your body fall into a rhythm.
Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
There’s a rustle in the leaves / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
Can you feel it? / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
From the depths of the silence it rises / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
It is here / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
It’s like an intuition, trying to enter consciousness / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
It’s like a wordless something, at the edge of perception / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
“What kind of lover are you, trembling in your little man-made box?” / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
Can you feel the concrete cracking, the weeds growing taller and taller? / Walk, pluck, throw in the pile.
Knees buckling, we fall to the ground.
This is a portal into anger, and we are stepping through.
Can you feel the stones pressing against your kneecaps? I can smell the earth now, musky with rotten wood, like the air under the canopy of an old forest.
Suddenly I collapse. I hear you breathing heavily next to me. My body starts trembling, I feel a kind of energy flooding my body. I feel it hitting a wall in my chest but it wants to break through. I close my eyes and feel my hands ball up in fists that come pounding down, again and again.
Like a dam wall bursting, my chest is broken open and the up-welling tears are unstoppable. I hear a deep cry emerging from the depths of my body.
Now we are lying on the grown seething, our bodies convulsing in fits of rage.
I hear you wailing, and soon, I hear the suffering wails and pounding fists of our neighbours, the whole city, billions of people crying out in anger and grief. My mind flashes with all the people I have ever loved and hated, and I am angry at them all for betraying me, for defining me, for caging me in an animal crate. I am a tethered beast filled with lust and darkness, filled with so much repressed power I can feel the cells of my body breaking apart and releasing a poison-filled pain, thread by thread, knot by knot, lifetime by lifetime. In this blindness, my lovers become my enemies and my enemies become my lovers. I can’t see the difference anymore. Thwack! A bowl is knocked over, spilling freshly shelled black-eyed peas onto the floor. It is my grandmother’s porch in the village, beans scattering down the white-stone steps. There she is, standing in front of her house by the almond tree, behind the short fence. She picks up a stone and hurls it. I watch her empty hand fall at her side, and realise it is mine.
My mind races frantically, my thoughts tell me I am going crazy, but I let it rail in the background, I am so taken in by the heart pounding, the limbs thrashing and this power blasting clusters of frozen tears to pieces. I bury my face in the mud and bite a mouthful.
I feel the grains of sand between my teeth, and taste the ocean and river and rock and wind and cloud that for aeons birthed and held and dissolved and carried them.
I feel my tongue swirling in my mouth, my fingers wriggling and grabbing onto grass, my cheeks flushed and hot with tears. I open my eyes and look at the Earth in wonder. I see now, yes I see! This wild beauty will crush me and put me back together, again and again, until finally she engulfs and totally dissolves me, making me fertilizer for some new life form.
I blink dumbfounded for a few moments, the energy subsides. When I come to my senses, I am flooded with a stillness and a silence so immense. The streets are deserted. Not a leaf is stirring on this afternoon in our quarantined city. I feel like a baby, cradled in my mother’s loving arms. I glance over at you and you are rocking back and forth, smiling. We get up, full of gratitude and a deep-welling love, and dance together like feathers in the wind, giggling and falling into each other’s embrace. The sun falls so radiantly on your glowing skin.
“From the inside out”, you say. “Aha, I told you.”
***
Like a root I must gladly bury myself in the ground, for the ones who come after me. I will never know or taste the fruits their lives will bear, but it does not matter. From an earthly standpoint, this is what’s mine to do right now: stand witness to the death and wild grief that is here and growing all around me. Like this, only like this will life stand a chance.
There are secrets that will not be revealed to you until you learn to crawl on your belly.
There are visions you will not be entrusted with until you lay your pride, your swords, and your life down.
But there are things you cannot ever know, cannot ever understand, ever.
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