We are living through strange times. Worldviews and paradigms that had been stable for centuries - religions and cultures and national identities - are in flux or in free-fall. Polarized political parties each uphold one subset of freedoms while seeking to restrict others. Billionaires shift alliances and play at power and claw at the roots of entrenched bureaucracies, throwing out babies and bathwater alike. Artificial intelligence creates noise and amplifies discord and muddies the boundaries of truth, as photos and videos and documents are readily fabricated.
Amidst all of this I am sensing a deep fatigue: energy fading from protests and movements and ideologies. A weakening of beliefs and convictions, of faith in external authorities. A sort of collective flailing as hierarchies collapse, as long-hidden abuses come to light, as generational trauma plays out in fragmenting families and communities, as fundamental tenets of society are revealed to be arbitrary abstractions designed to extract wealth and maintain scarcity.
Something is dying, I feel, so that something else can be born.
I feel strongly that the answer to this crisis of truth does not lie in a higher truth, in combating “misinformation”, in establishing consensus by persuasion or coercion or violence. The answer, I feel, lies in leaning in to our individual and collective experience of aliveness, of embodiment. Feeling our breath in each moment. Feeling the motion of our blood, the life within our trillion cells, the everyday inner miracles by which cookies and casseroles become bone and skin and motion and thought. Noticing all around us the light-eaters that create wood and blossoms and nectar and sustenance from sunshine and water and soil. Immersing ourselves in wind and sun and water and scents and flavors and sounds and movement. Experiencing each other not as minds with ideas and worldviews but as fellow travelers, each with a hundred thousand memories of love and loss and longing and joy and pain and achievement.
And in all of this, letting go of the need to fit it into stories, to categorize, to judge, to control, to explain, to rationalize, to identify. Letting go of the need to look outside of ourselves for interpreters or experts. Relaxing our thinking minds and our rigid mind-identities. Opening within ourselves a reverent curiosity, extending this outward to each other, allowing ourselves to be informed by our senses, our experiences, our intuition, our dreams, our innate spiritual connection, while leaving room for mystery.
As I have been writing here for the past 3 1/2 years, I have discovered a budding community of resonant voices, and I would like to share some of them on this Equinox, so that we might begin to cross-pollinate, to weave together, to root ourselves into belonging and ground ourselves in community as old structures collapse around us.
kate gardiner clearlight - the heart of Gaia
In order to let my instinct guide me, my mind had to first surrender to the hidden part of me who, even after all these years, had refused to be domesticated, who was free and untamable, tidal and unstoppably phasing like the moon. It is there inside all of us, still alive and whispering incantations of our most feral dreams. It is soul.
And so there in the grassy meadow I found myself face down on the ground, studying exactly how each tuft of grass had risen from darkness and become bleached rays of light. I felt strangely at home down there, and in love with that warm, intricate world. Suddenly I felt a ravenous, inexplicable hunger to taste the sweet clay soil. Without thinking, I licked the ground. I smiled as though I had just been told the world’s best secret. It was delicious.
I learned something important about myself, about being alive. Something like, the part of me that is utterly curious and unpredictable is the part that brings me the most joy. An instinctual joy that reaches beyond any human definition of joy. It was the joy of belonging to Earth. In that moment in the tall grass, ripples upon ripples of tenderness flowed down into soil and out into the cosmos. A luminous new world was born from that simple embrace.
Kate’s writings are an invitation to re-enchantment, to wonder, to curiosity, to spontaneous joy, to seeing with the heart, to getting out of our minds and stories into immersion and sensual, sensory experience. Reading them may lead you to sleep under the stars in the nearest wild meadow and sip tea in the Venus-light before sunrise.
Hannah Elizabeth King - Field Notes
This is church—
Wandering outside in mid-morning sun, feet pressed to dry ground, feeling the warmth of compacted earth, brittle bits of tree needles. A hummingbird hovers over my head in vibrant vibration, while voices singing hymns carry through the small corridor of evergreen forest that separates my field from nearby Sunday morning summer gatherings.
…
It is the actual choir I hear through the trees that has me considering my church attendance and what worship feels like. I’d best say it is my body holding form yet dissolving into and absorbing the pleasures of sensory living in a myriad of ways. It is feeling the warm winds wrap my hot skin, it is the fragrance of hay and salt and jasmine, it is the chalky last light of evening after the sun has sunk its fire below the horizon and the sky paints pastels of peach to the west and dusted blue to the east. It is watching the moon glide between sequoia branches, hearing the last shriek bird calls before night. It is sound sleep and waking without measuring time, tasting slowly, savoring fully. Church is my feminine nature. Worship is reverence expressed by receiving this holiness. Temple body, holy fire, awake and humming with love, I am filled with rivers of life when I can come back to this place of presence, meeting each moment as ritual, devotion to the openness.
Hannah’s short essays and poems are a journey of surrender, of self-love, of grounding into connection, of releasing patterns of mind and control, of rebirthing and embodiment, of finding inner truth, power, strength. Read enough of her words, and her deep longing for immersion into experience, into sensory and intuitive reality will call out to a part of you that has perhaps been long asleep, buried beneath layers of identities and expectations. You might find yourself pulled inexorably into your own process of awakening.
I have shared Hannah’s poetry in this space, and I highly recommend her book, We Are Wanderers.
Marija Petkovska - Tales of the Hedgewise
What does it feel like to be crowned by mushrooms and wreathed with fern
Does the forest take pleasure in the timber of logs that crash upon the bushy earth
What does it feel like to be undone, tree by tree,
And rewoven by the fungal networks beneath the soil
Laid to rest in compost and made a garland of stardust
Replanted as seeds upon the fertile earth
Does the earth enjoy the sensation of water caressing bare rock
Of being slowly rounded out into finite curves
Is the land aroused by the rain falling upon her parched soils
Oh how exotic those droplets are
How deliciously they are absorbed into her cracked skin
What is the sensation of snow falling upon soil
Does it resemble the feeling of bare skin embracing
Does the land relish in being taken so fully by the sky
That she is covered completely in his luminous body
Not to be seen again for months, Is there pleasure in her entombment
What does it feel like to be a crystalline flake of snow
Slipping out of a cloud and floating down to earth
Is there thrill there, cascading down an endless sky
What is held in a branch of a tree that grows heavy with snow
Bending down in prayer to touch the earth
Finally able to kiss the soil from which it came
What songs are sung when a crystal is formed deep in the empty spaces of the earth
What does it feel like to be molded together, atom by atom, over millions of years
Is it the same sensation as the first breath of life, of coming more and more alive
…
marijapetkovska.substack.com/p/when-the-earth-sings-and-i-howl
This awakening into a shared reality based on immersion and experience and wildness and wonder rather than abstraction and identity and order and information is, in many ways, a long-overdue restoration of balance, a rising of yin or feminine currents after centuries or millennia of yang or masculine dominance. Kate, Hannah, and Marija are the most resonant voices I have found that give voice to this current, that entirely avoid the yang tendency to explain, to say “this is the way”, to categorize and judge and delineate.
Marija is an herbalist, a wild gardener, a storyteller, and a curious explorer. Her essays might inspire you to question your straight, well-weeded rows, to go skinny-dipping in mountain streams, to release your ingrained inhibitions and howl freely to the Moon.
Bill Davison - Easy By Nature
As I studied the bank where the mink had disappeared, I realized that the mink and muskrat dens were just six feet apart. I wondered if they could hear each other through the tangled tree roots. I also wondered about all the things I believe that are not true or are only partly true—like the notion that we possess consciousness and animals run on instinct. What if consciousness is an inherent property of the universe? That is what the latest science and indigenous wisdom point to. What if the stories we tell ourselves are only half-truths? What if we believed we could exercise restraint, like a mink living peacefully alongside muskrats?
So much depends on our willingness to be transformed by what we experience. If we approach the world with openness, we can find connections in the most unexpected places—a glance from a wood duck, the ripple of a mink's liquid spine.
…
I sat watching from the bank, my own instincts humming beneath my skin— to move, to speak, to break the spell. Instead, I breathed. I witnessed. This is the prayer I've been trying to learn: to be still enough to see the world as it truly unfolds without stories clouding my vision.
The mink and the muskrat danced their water ballet, unaware of how they'd opened something in me. That night I would dream of moving like water, of knowing exactly what I am, of passing by what I could destroy and choosing, without knowing I chose, to let it live.
Bill is a devoted observer and photographer of birds and wildlife, and he immerses into each encounter with an open and curious mind, finding within marshes and forests the seeds of a deeper understanding, one that we have largely obfuscated and forgotten in our obsession with science and religion and “progress”.
Emma Liles - True Nature
This moment.
This moment is the reason I am alive.
If not for this moment, then why?
I want to live this moment as I want to live all of my moments. Relaxing into my body, grounding home into the soil of my flesh, blood, and bones. Tasting the reason for feeding myself. Seeing with the whole of my eyes. Not rushing ahead to some future experience I think might be better than this one. In rushing there is tension. In presence there is bliss. Let me hurry ahead so I can relax?
If I cannot open to this moment, then when?
My regard is for the totality of presence available now. Now is Crow calling, the ocean of traffic, the waning light on the ferns, the burning fire of the stove. Now is my body, now is my breath. Now is the textures, the patterns, the colors. Now is Blue Heron landing on the shore across from where I write. Now, like artist Robert Olds said, is the vision that is this life.
Emma and I are usually on the same wavelength, even if we sometimes use different language and even if she can sometimes drift closer to this is the way things are than I am comfortable with. She offers a continuous reminder that we can choose, in each moment, where we direct our attention, our focus. We can choose to follow habits, unconscious patterns, old stories, or we can immerse in the present moment, hold space for intuition and communion and imagination and growth. We can choose to shift the paradigm that we inhabit.
The Arachne Project
Historically, conservation has assumed a dichotomy between land presumably untouched by human hands (which is to be protected) and land that is exploited, trammeled and trampled (which is to be ignored or sacrificed). This has justified conservation by exclusion, protecting selected places by keeping people out — the so-called "fortress conservation." Most often the people excluded have been the original inhabitants who have long cared for the land.
The emerging Earth ethos recognizes that humans and other beings are not only metaphorically, but biologically, kin. We share the same progenitors, we share the same places, and we will share the same fate. The question then becomes how human presence — as relatives, not as managers or owners — can enhance the fecundity and beauty of the land, and how fecund and beautiful land can increase human thriving.
…
Earth is a master improvisor, building on disturbance and surprise. Some changes can be reliably predicted, but many cannot. This variability calls for improvisational conservation, the creativity of those who work without scripts or scores or predicted outcomes, to encourage the growth of something wonderful and new. Conservationist improvisations will succeed to the extent that they re-examine the language of control or management, reinforcing and enriching life-enhancing patterns and relationships.
A primary skill of improvisation is listening. There are many voices to be heard in the land, and they tell instructive stories. In addition to listening to the land, conservation should listen to and learn from multiple human voices — scientific, Indigenous, emotional, spiritual, aesthetic, and especially those that are silenced or grieving.
I have been aware of the Spring Creek Project at my local Oregon State University for some time. While the more poetic side has felt resonant, in general I have not felt an alignment with the academic, management-based consensus regarding conservation and restoration since I left that work behind 17 years ago.
I am glad to see the conversation beginning to shift and open, to dissolve the separation between humans and nature, to move toward improvisation and participation rather than control and management.
Most of my readers are probably familiar with Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and leading advocate of reciprocity and relational reverence in our interactions with human and more-than-human communities. I look forward to her voice as part of this project, and to following the evolution of this work.
Emergence Magazine
This participation is a form of communion with the living Earth. Once one moves from observer to participant, and you’re engaging as a participant in this space of relationship, there is a process of communion that deepens and unfolds. I think there’s a big distinction between connection and communion. It’s like, connection’s a kiss; communion, you’re going all the way—to be crude. Why not be crude? Abstraction leads to questions. Be direct. That was the hint. And communion—now let’s return to its broader definition—is an act of healing and transformation, a way of being that is needed to reweave the worlds of spirit and matter, to resacralize the living Earth. This is a practice of spiritual ecology. Because to me that is the practice—reweaving the world of spirit and matter through the act of communion in all the various forms that that takes. And that is very individual in nature, right? Because every single person will stand before a tree, a river, a mountain, a meadow, and engage with it differently, because each of us is different.
I would describe Emergence Magazine as an almost-in-resonance project. Arising from the science of ecology, some of their contributions express a sort of spirituality-without-spirit, a metaphorical emergence of spirit and consciousness from a mechanistic or material universe. And underlying many of their articles and interviews is a sort of eco-grief, an “everything-is-broken-because-of-us” perspective that I find to still be a bit anthropocentric, that does not fully grasp the strength and resilience of our living Earth, her own capacity to weave our disruptions into a broader story, what I feel to be her open and non-judgmental invitation into participation and co-creation.
Here too, though, I sense a shifting and a softening. Editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, quoted above, speaks of communion, relationship, and participation, recognizing consciousness and spirit as ever-present in Earth, each of us finding our own path to reweave the world of the spirit and matter. And that resonates completely in my heart and being.
I discovered this ribbon of intentions tied to a tree along the Marys River a few days ago, and I found it to be a timely reminder, in this season of awakening and buds opening.
What do we, each of us, wish to be fertile and grow, in this time?
Can we begin to interweave, to awaken, to move beyond resistance and rigidity to resilience and community?
Can we become rooted, grounded in our own present experience rather than looking outward for truth or guidance?
Let us see what we might create, amidst the outward chaos.
Have a blessed Equinox!
Such a Full Body Yes to this Markael “The answer, I feel, lies in leaning in to our individual and collective experience of aliveness, of embodiment. Feeling our breath in each moment. Feeling the motion of our blood, the life within our trillion cells, the everyday inner miracles by which cookies and casseroles become bone and skin and motion and thought. Noticing all around us the light-eaters that create wood and blossoms and nectar and sustenance from sunshine and water and soil. Immersing ourselves in wind and sun and water and scents and flavors and sounds and movement. Experiencing each other not as minds with ideas and worldviews but as fellow travelers, each with a hundred thousand memories of love and loss and longing and joy and pain and achievement”
Thank you for including me in your web of resonance 💗🙏🏼 I deeply appreciate being a part of such a beautiful expanding network
I LOVE THIS MARK!!!! OF COURSE....SAME PAGE