Category: Main blog

This profound video was given to us at the beginning of today’s session of the Bioneers conference and it brought me to tears.

https://bioneers.org/the-promise-of-women-and-girls-bioneers/

“Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.”

~Mary Oliver, “Mysteries, Yes”

Octavia E. Butler was an amazing writer of science fiction, a poet, and a seer. Her work is phenomenal both in its skill and its prescience. As far as I know, she coined the phrase: “God is Change” that I first read in one of her excellent books and that is the end of this profound poetry.

Earthseed
by Octavia Butler

Here we are–
Energy,
Mass,
Life,
Shaping life,
Mind,
Shaping Mind
God,
Shaping God.
Consider—
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

His work is always profound. I love the line, “And happiness might just be a single step away…”

THE EDGE YOU CARRY WITH YOU

You know
so very well
the edge
of darkness
you have
always
carried with you.

You know
so very well,
your childhood legacy:

that particular,
inherited
sense of hurt,
given to you
so freely
by the world
you entered.

And you know
too well
by now

the body’s
hesitation
at the invitation
to undo
everything
others seemed
to want to
make you learn.

But your edge
of darkness
has always
made
its own definition
secretly
as an edge of light

and the door
you closed
might,
by its very nature
be
one just waiting
to be leant against
and opened.

And happiness
might just
be a single step away,
on the other side
of that next
unhelpful
and undeserving
thought.

Your way home,
understood now,
not as an achievement,
but as a giving up,
a blessed undoing,
an arrival
in the body
and a full rest
in the give
and take
of the breath.

This living
breathing body
always waiting
to greet you
at the door,
always prepared
to give you
the rest you need,
always,
no matter
the long
years away,
still
wanting you,
to come home.

…

From ‘The Edge You Carry With You’
in ‘Still Possible’ David Whyte
Many Rivers Press Dec 1st 2021
Available on Pre-order
https://davidwhyte.com/collections/books-cards-and-audio/products/still-possible
…

Standing at The Edge.
Photo © David Whyte
Land’s End. Golden Gate
San Francisco. November 1st 2021

I found this article very moving and timely as we all look for ways to maintain resistance and hope in these horrific times. It was posted on our Kinship Ray Facebook group by Basheera, and originally posted by Sophie Strand who responded in the comments and asked that as the author we include this info on how to find her work and her books at  www.sophiepstrand.com or @cosmogyny

Kaleidoscopic Empathy

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn,” writes T.H. White on the education of the young King Arthur. Arthur, like the sixth century Bard Taliesin, learns not by book, but by becoming. The sixth century poem attributed to Taliesin, reads, “I have been a blue salmon,I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain… A stallion, a bull, a buck, I was reaped and placed in an oven”. In order to become a storyteller, an advisor to kings, and a spiritual intermediary, Taliesin has had to live other lives, other stories. But the most important overlap between the young Arthur and Taliesin is that they learn not by becoming other human beings. They learn by entering into badgers and fish and insects: the minds of the more-than-human world.

The best thing for being sad is interrupting your individuality. Imagine lengthening, feeling your skin polish into sheerness, crystal into glass, your mind fluid, placid. You are a cup of water. And then slowly, purposely, pour yourself into another mode of consciousness. Take on what biologist Jakob von Uexküll called a creature’s “umwelt”: their particular somatic body map, their situated sensory experience of world. Western materialism warns against anthropomorphism. And I agree that the exercise will necessarily fail. Unlike an octopus, my nervous system is not concentrated in my arms. Unlike the mistletoe, I do not know what it is like to parasitically, intimately, invade the body of a cactus. But that does not mean using our imaginative muscle for greater empathy is unimportant. I think, in fact, it is the most important skill for us to be developing as storytellers, artists, scientists, activists, and anyone anguished by escalating extinctions and ecological collapse. The best thing for being sad is practicing being more-than-human.

The injunction against anthropomorphism seems like a misdirection to me. Believing that the world is mindless, mute matter might be more dangerous than believing that a housecat has a personality, and that a mountain could possess its own lithic eroticism. In fact, it could be argued that the fictional “objectivity” of material reductionism is a grander type of anthropomorphism. Everything belongs to the human. Everything is blanketed by capitalism, our predetermined expectations, our teleology. Everything isn’t necessarily made human, but seen as made “for” humans. Everything is our standing reserve. This is not a universal belief. Indigenous cultures the world over had known that animals, insects, fungi, landscapes, and weather are other “people”. They don’t behave like us. They don’t even live on the same timescales. But it is deeply important that we tell stories about their experiences. That we actively try to inhabit their wants and needs, so we are not always making decisions from a singular, human perspective.

Everything we do is entangled with our ecosystem. Every breath we take loops us into relationship with the trees and grasses and soil around us. It only makes sense that we should try and understand how our decisions might feel and live inside another species’ body.

What if every time a logging company proposes to cut down a forest, they had to log an intimate story of the experience of every animal, fungi, insect, plant, and stone in that area? Each “chapter” would take into consideration the sensory apparatus, the scientific studies, the indigenous lore, the behavior of each being and then attempt to inhabit it and to experience what the clearcutting would feel like to that situated perspective. Then every logger, every investor, every person involved in the logging operation would have to attend a many weeks long conference where the report was read aloud.

There is much talk, these days, about neural plasticity and neurogenesis. We are concerned with keeping our brains limber and adaptive by challenging them with new tasks and by creating new neural pathways with the aid of psychedelics. Why not also practice empathic plasticity? I tend to like the metaphor and the visual play of the kaleidoscope. Invented by the Scotsman David Brewster in 1817, the optical instrument has been remarkably good at avoiding inclusion in usefulness. It is still, to this day, seen as a marvel and a child’s toy. I have a strong intuition that it is these tools of marvel and beauty, that as John O’Donohue writes, remain “immune to our strategies”, will be of the most help going forward. Kaleidoscope derives from the Greek word kalos for beauty, eidos for form, and skopéō meaning to consider. Kaleidoscopes tilt mirrors towards each other at an angle, situated within a tube that often contains loose colored cells. Every rotation of the tube provides a stochastic arrangement of the cells, repeating the reflection to create a visually disorienting and stunning display. The view through the kaleidoscope is unpredictable and ever-shifting. Kaleidoscopes ask us to consider the mutable forms of beauty. And they ask us to do this without expectation and without aim. The kaleidoscope is a plaything, a child’s toy. It cannot be easily coopted by dominant paradigms.

I want to offer Kaleidoscopic Empathy as an important exercise for an age of ecological collapse and extinction. The aim is not to “perfect” or “correctly” inhabit another being’s experience. The aim is to play. And to strengthen the muscle of empathy. Practice, whenever you enter into a forest, or go on a walk, or sit by a river, pouring yourself into the mind of every bird, fly, bumble bee, bindweed, grub you see. Center yourself in the wind-buoyed swiftness of the kestrel and then rotate the kaleidoscope, slip into the shadow of the sturgeon below the river surface, beginning to feel the chemical prickle that will lead the fish upstream to spawn. Then again, faster, condense into a Wolbachia bacteria riding inside a mosquito.

Get comfortable with being other beings. With considering their experience not just intellectually, but somatically. Go outside and lie down on a patch of grass and melt into a thousand hyphal strands, weaving embodied appetite into the soil. Imagine what it would be like to hear with your whole body, to eat with your whole face.

The aim is not to accomplish anything. The kaleidoscope teaches us agility and play. The aim is to expand our scope for empathy. If, like the boy Arthur, we want to care for the kingdom, we must know what it is like to “be” the kingdom. We must pour ourselves, empathically, curiously, into the world.

This is from Father Richard Rohr’s blog. We are so blessed to inhabit these miraculous bodies that carry us through our lives. As I grow older I remember that this body can’t be taken for granted, and so this poetry is particularly poignant.

Blessing the Body

Because of the way most Christians have understood the doctrine of original sin, the physical body has borne the brunt of our guilt and shame. Its needs, desires, and frailties were often labeled “sinful,” and therefore were repressed instead of affirmed and channeled in healthy and life-giving ways. In honor of the Original Goodness of our bodies, we invite you to spend time with this blessing by Jan Richardson, a writer, poet, artist, and ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.

BLESSING THE BODY

This blessing takes
one look at you
and all it can say is
holy.

Holy hands.
Holy face.
Holy feet.
Holy everything
in between.

Holy even in pain.
Holy even when weary.
In brokenness, holy.
In shame, holy still.

Holy in delight.
Holy in distress.
Holy when being born.
Holy when we lay it down
at the hour of our death.

So, friend,
open your eyes
(holy eyes).
For one moment
see what this blessing sees,
this blessing that knows
how you have been formed
and knit together
in wonder and
in love.

Welcome this blessing
that folds its hands
in prayer
when it meets you;
receive this blessing
that wants to kneel
in reverence
before you—
you who are
temple,
sanctuary,
home for God
in this world.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

“Blessing the Body” © Jan Richardson from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. Used by permission. janrichardson.com.

Once again with gratitude to FB and specifically dear Emma who posted this today.

“Don’t pretend that earth is not one family.
Don’t pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don’t pretend we don’t ripen on each other’s breath.
Don’t pretend we didn’t come here to forgive.”

************

My Ancestry DNA results came in.
Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.

Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone.
I am part larva, but part hummingbird too.

There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow.

My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine.

Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn’t get his dimples.

My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka,
but I descended from Ravanna, not Ram.

My uncle is a mastodon.

There are traces of white people in my saliva.

3.7 billion years ago I swirled in golden dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis.

More recently, say 60,000 B.C.
I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.

I am the bastard of the sun and moon.

I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops and cougar scat.

I am made of your grandmother’s tears.

You conquered rival tribesmen of your own color,
chained them together, marched them naked to the coast,
and sold them to colonials from Savannah.

I was that brother you sold, I was the slave trader,
I was the chain.

Admit it, you have wings, vast and golden,
like mine, like mine.

You have sweat, black and salty,
like mine, like mine.

You have secrets silently singing in your blood,
like mine, like mine.

Don’t pretend that earth is not one family.
Don’t pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don’t pretend we don’t ripen on each other’s breath.
Don’t pretend we didn’t come here to forgive.

• Fred lamotte

Saw this in my FB feed today. For all of the suffering and confusion and misinformation that FB is culpable in, if used well there is much to be grateful for. I guess it’s up to us to use it well! This poetry truly opened my heart today.

“The worst thing we ever did
was put God in the sky
out of reach
pulling the divinity
from the leaf,
sifting out the holy from our bones,
insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement
through everything we’ve made
a hard commitment to see as ordinary,
stripping the sacred from everywhere
to put in a cloud man elsewhere,
prying closeness from your heart.
The worst thing we ever did
was take the dance and the song
out of prayer
made it sit up straight
and cross its legs
removed it of rejoicing
wiped clean its hip sway,
its questions,
its ecstatic yowl,
its tears.
The worst thing we ever did is pretend
God isn’t the easiest thing
in this Universe
available to every soul
in every breath”
~ Chelan Harkin, in poetry book ‘Susceptible to Light’

My dear friend Salim sent this and I found the story very timely and germane to conversations I’ve had recently about recognizing our place as stewards on this earth and the best teachers (as well as the worst!). With permission, it is copied below.

This story is by George Price – here is more information about him:

George Price (descendant of the Assonet band of the Wampanoag tribal nation of Massachusetts) has been living on his five-acre organic, polyculture farm on the Flathead Indian Reservation since the summer of 1985. He retired from a 33-year teaching career in May of 2018: 10 years at Two Eagle River School, 3 years at Salish Kootenai College, and 20 years at the University of Montana, teaching Native American Studies, American History, and African American Studies. Dr. Price has also served on several boards and committees from the 1990s to the present, including the Flathead Reservation Human Rights Coalition, Indian People’s Action, the Missoula Martin Luther King Jr. Day Committee, AVOICE, the CSKT Climate Change Advisory Committee, and the Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative. Now that he is retired, he is devoting the remainder of his life to Earth/Water protecting, organic farming, food sovereignty, writing, and replacing industrial capitalism with local, eco-harmonious, life-supporting, cooperative, alternative societal and economic structures

.

*****************************************************************************

Drop That Fish!!

 This morning, while I was working in the garden, I was given the opportunity to witness some inter-species interaction that I had never seen before. Right up above my head and not very high in the sky, a bald eagle was chasing an osprey that had a fish in his talons, circling, zig-zagging and reversing directions. The two birds showed incredible flying skills and were moving very fast. Several times the eagle got within inches of the osprey but never tried to attack him, with talons, beak or wings. I don’t remember hearing them vocalize at all during the whole time I watched them, but a few times I heard the sounds of their wings. 

I watched this for about five minutes and my neck was sore when it was over from looking almost straight up in the air for so long. It was clear to me, early on, that what I was watching was not some sort of alleged “vicious struggle for survival.” It was a friendly contest. It was clearly a game. I think they call it, “Drop the Fish!” After about five minutes (I do not know how long the game had already been going before I looked up from my work and first saw them) the eagle stopped the chase, as if to say, “OK, you win this time, my friend.” The osprey went towards the trees on the hills and the eagle went the opposite way, back towards the Jocko river. 

Many of the old, first stories (a.k.a., “oral traditions” in academic speak) of Indigenous peoples revolve around games and contests between the people of different species. These stories often explain how certain phenomena came to be, and instill many important moral and ethical lessons in the children as they listen to them every year, throughout their lives. The playful spirit and comradery between the different peoples (or “species,” as westerners are taught to call them) stands in sharp contrast to the preferred myths of colonialist western industrial technophile anthropocentric society. The colonialists prefer to project their own values, norms and perceptions onto other species of the natural world, thereby portraying the natural world as a place in constant, vicious, predatory “struggle to survive,” in an attempt to normalize their own behavior and justify their alienation from nature. 

So, a good question to ask ourselves is why do we give credence to the stories told by a culture that has done more harm to the natural world than any other human culture in all of history and obviously has no clue as to how to live in harmony with our local, inter-connected ecosystems, does not understand the languages or hear the messages of the natural world, or know what humans were meant to be or how we fit within inter-connected Life? 

(Note: I did not take the photo below. Just found it on Google images. My cameras were in the house at the time of this wonderful sighting.) 

 — George Price  

I heard this song last night and was just blown away and thrilled by the lyrics, especially “pull and rest, rest and pull…” – this is such a great and important reminder about how we stay resilient and do the work. It’s called “Like Molly Brown” and an article about it said,

“The most lyrically distinctive and upbeat track on the album is Like Molly Brown. The lyrics celebrate strong, resilient women. There is a verse each about Molly Brown. Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Lucretia Mott that summarise some of the activities that made them famous.  The central image and refrain is of Molly Brown rowing a boat at the scene of the Titanic’s sinking. The fast pick and strum on the mandolin blends with the violin’s melody to give the song a forward moving dynamic.”

Enjoy!