An esteemed friend of mine shared a writing from the early 20th century of a man's reflection on his experience with the perils of "ownership"... that illusion that we can really own anything creates a need to defend what is "owned", to control what is "owned." I have always resonated with the understanding of the Native American's who when the European's arrived with plans of conquest in the "New World" who could not wrap heart, mind or soul around the idea that anyone could pretend to own the land. It is hard for my mouth the wrap around the words "my land" or "having bought land," much less about "owning land" as it seems an absurd joke. We are of the earth and sky and belong more to the land than the land could ever belong to us. The constellation of who we are and who we think we are is just passing through, changing form like the wind or the currents of the ocean. The most we could hope for in this relationship to earth, to place, to land is to learn to be a caretaker, a shepard, and to that degree, as long as we live and align ourselves with the life force, we too will be cared for as we learn and practice "walking in beauty".
The "Beauty way" is one of the highest medicines of Navajo people. I cannot and would not pretend to be an adept in their tradition and certainly do not pretend to culturally expropriate this Wisdom. But there is something interesting about Wisdom, wherever it arises, it is resonant and knows no boundaries. Those who are graced by the coherence and depth of its field will be touched in some lasting way. I was graced to have a mother who resonated deeply with Native American ways. She loved the poetry and songs of native peoples of the Southwest.
On the first day of first grade, she walked with me to school in Boulder Colorado. John Adam's grade school, ironically quite possiblity one of our ancestors. As we walked along the cement sidewalk, under trees, me skipping over cracks, she read to me from a collection of Native American poetry. She read to me the short form of the this blessing way "I walk in beauty, beauty before me, beauty beside me, beauty behind me, beauty above me, beauty below me, beauty all around me, I walk in beauty." This deceptively simple blessing, a self-blessing, opens and deepens with practice. In some way or form it has accompanied me all my life, at times more consciously than others.
One of my dearest teacher's of expressive arts, Pablo Knill, so I heard, during the last part of his life was in contemplation about which is more profound, beauty or love. This question is a great and worthy question to sit with and see where it leads you.
In the very last days of her life, my mother said to me, there are certain things you need to remember about your life. The most salient, the most crystallized of these things that she reminded me of, is how as a baby, I had been introduced to the earth and given a name. Jesus Mermejo, at the time the political and spiritual leader of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, had lifted me up in his arms and presented me to the the forces of nature and her creatures and named me.
This was more poignant and touching that this was the memory above all others that she valued, for she had felt that no one had welcomed her to the Earth, no one had received her, and in that deep felt way, she was an orphan all her life. In retrospect, I know now, I would have helped arrange for welcoming presentation blessing ceremony. Perhaps for someone who held this wound, unexpectedly she had a deep relationship with the creatures we share this earth with, the 4 leggeds, the wingeds, those that crawl on the earth, those that swim in the waters. After she died for more than a month, the whole neighborhood, especially around the house, was filled with crows from far and wide. The grace of belonging to the web of life was hers, even though some wounded part persisted with her hurt.
After she died, transitioned, there was the deepest most silent velvety sense of peace. I knew from previous deaths of loved ones, there are always gifts when someone you love passes from their body, yet this death was harder, harder than any other for me. She, her physical presence, had been the one place on the earth I had known since before I was born. As I child I had moved so much. There had been so many disruptions to relationship with place and people, that I shared in my own way the ancestral wound of orphaning that she had received in her own mother's womb, beyond my grandmother and greatgrand mother, I don't know the story, but I feel the long lineage of women with a similar wound.
So, why was her death so hard for me? I could tell many stories about that, even from certain psychological, developmental perspectives. Yet that somehow misses the point of where I want to go with this, the insight I want to share, that perhaps some will understand from a felt place of their own. I had one question I could not put to rest, "Why, why this human life? Why all this learning, all this gathering of insight, understanding about life on earth, if we are only to die?" She was a teacher, and maybe more importantly, a student. She had so much to offer, so many stories and insights. I felt grief that I felt that she had not shared all she had to offer. Even now there is some intensity remembering this grief. But, what I want to say is that today, after days of walking in the hills, communing with the beauty, walking in beauty, with the steepest of hills, the crystals in the earth, their texture, glisten in the sunlight, vibration, listening to what they have to teach, today, as I walked, insights form other walks came together... the day that I realized that we too are of crystal, crystalline forms inhabit us, are part of what we are, crystals hold memory. The quartz crystal of these hills hold such vast information. The quartz is in constant communication with the whole of what is and transmits that whole to other crystals. The wind brings it information, the sun brings it information, the water, the earth. And it has a very special realtionship with space (ether, consciousness).
Einstein with his insight about matter not being created or destroyed, but rather only transmuted... As I walkd I felt my how crystal nature, the crystals in the glandular system, in the bones... I then felt such certainty that all that my mother knew and had learned was now in vibrant communication with the whole. Her own abilities and her practice of walking in beauty, her knowledge of the intelligence of the web of life and all its creatures was stored in the crystalline matrix of her bones and being and continues to be held in shared in the resonance of in the crystaline matrix of existence.
The first English book of Common Prayer contains the words "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust"—referencing Genesis from the Bible, in which we are created from dust (earth)— which has become so familiar in funeral services. But what is more memorable to me are the words of the Spanish Barroque poet, Quevedo “Alma a quien todo un Dios prisión ha sido/, venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado/, médulas que han gloriosamente ardido/, su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado/; serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido/; polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado/. The last line of which roughly translates to "I will be dust, but dust in love". In Spanish the "I" pronoun is not used (a semantical question of translation). So, here we are, back to earth, back to dust, back to the crystalline component of all we are are, have been, will be, and that ultimately we are stardust, in some dance so much larger than "ourselves" and yet most intimately, ourself.
Just as water holds memory, crystal also holds memory, just as you can charge water with thought/intention/love/gratitude, crystal charged in this way. We are walking, talking keepers of water (70%) & crystal, and so the wisdom, love and beauty and gratitude we seed vibrantly into our walk through this life, feeds all of creation. It is as though God or "the divine" or Ether, Space or consiousness (all synonyms) desired an experience of him&her&their—pronouns can be so awkward and as physicist David Bohm points out the structures of language itself conditions our perception—self moving through the dream of space and time smelling, touching, seeing, sensing, tasting, gathering more information from more perspectives to resonate or feed back into the unified field. I am reminded here of the a book "Body of Life" by the person who coined the term "somatics", Thomas Hanna, where he speaks to the tendency of life systems toward's complexity, and that function precedes form; it is as though function is a kind of magnifying force, a seduction towards form. This most certainly says something about evolution and the function and importance of developing our capacities-function in the unfolding kaleidoscopic blossoming dance of creation... the importance and precious nature of embodying and living into our capacities, expanding out "range of play."
For me what changed this morning was the intimacy and felt knowing in "my own bones" that nothing is lost. I may have tried to accept that or wanted to believe it before, but there is an emergent insight gaining ground, the knowlege now that comes from my bones, that comes from the crystals shining in the wind, under the bright blue morning sky. [Day, día, dios, deva, divine all coming from the proto-indoeuropean root, most sources on the internet will show that it goes back to the root "deiwo-" which goes the idea of light, brightness, glow, yet, I clearly remember investigating the etymology of this work in my university days, and finding that it went further, it went back to a root that was something like "di-aw", clearly reflected in our current day English word "dawn" and meaning "clear blue open sky"—and let's not forget the phonetic sibling, "awe". The "clear blue open sky" etymology clicks for me as it goes more deeply into what I intuitively understand "in my bones," it brings us back to ether, space (in the Vedic tradtion) or consciousness itself that holds it all... God, Deus.] So too it is that James Hillman writes of the color blue associated with divinity, the blue skin of Krishna, whose name in sanscrit means "dark blue" or "seductor" or "attractive". And so too it is that blue became intricately woven into the color of poetry, as the groundbreaking modernist poet Rubén Darío would make evident with his book "Azul."
The earth my body is made of is part of this grand weaving of creation, as it is made of dust, so it will return, but to dust in love. And so one day we will return in beauty one day to finish our sojourn on this part of the spiral, waves released from their form to once again become the quiet water, reflecting the clear open sky by night or by day.
That of us that is left as dust in love, is well done, "in beauty it is finished". We come back full circle to love or beauty. Which is deeper? More profound? Resonating with the stardust that we are, with the crystalline nature that holds all knowledge, and from what I glean in my communion with the elements, seems to be in continuous flow, we are part of one the most unimaginably beautiful dances, the intelligent dance of creation, much of the time, most of us, imagining or dreaming that we are separate. Nothing is lost, yet we dreamed along the way that we owned something, and that there was an "I" who could or would even want to own something. So what or who are we now?
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