Thoughts of Thomas Berry and This Dream.

The spring has been slow in coming. Many of us having been restless as the ebb of snow lingered on and on, brown on brown, the colour holding itself hidden in that other place of becoming-but-not-yet.  These slowed-down arrivings always make me pay attention.  Finally, I can no longer take it for granted, this plethora of slow, painstakingly slow, oh-my-god-will-it-ever-get-here change.  And when my impatience has reached a crescendo,  I am invited again into watching the miracle, brand new….. the grand entrance of the most notorious prima dona….

It happened again this weekend, this miracle watching.  Perhaps it was also coloured by the recent passing of my beautiful elder, Thomas Berry.  He saw the world like this, I know he did, as an emerging /emergent moment.  The Dream of the Earth, he called it.  Last year he said to me from his dwindling state of decrepitude, “It is hard to imagine these later stages, when everything becomes so limited….still what took care of bringing us here, will take care of us after.  There is just no problem.  It is no problem.”

No problem. Wait a minute! This late cold spring, with the greenery hiding in that ‘other place’ away refusing to budge, refusing to be enthralled  or enticed by the cold and slow chi of the earth stew….. I was feeling a problem to be honest, well, until Saturday afternoon, when my friends came to help in the garden, and I shovelled my year of compost into the wheelbarrow and hauled it over for tilling into the back vegetable garden.  And it struck me again, oh, and not for the first time, but just as if it was the first time, what is really going on.

Energy is flowing around.  It has been since forever, well, since 13.7 billion years. It is flowing here and there up and down, attracted and repelled, bouncing hither and thither…organizing itself into patterns, patterns of energy playing and defining and sculpting and shaping other patterns of energy.  Patterns are playing with each other. Patterns are replicating themselves.  Patterns are stomping and eating and crushing and growing and loving and mulching other patterns…..And all the while, the energy is flowing in and out of these patterns in a continuous endless flow. All the patterns, themselves, like a tango waiting on the dance floor for some bodies to fill it up and inhabit it, to dance it, and let it go again to wait.  All of these patterns, what ever mode they are,  come and go arriving and dancing their dance,  releasing their particular manifestation of the dance back into the frothy energetic stew. 

The compost bin is a wonderful molecular stew.  It speaks so clearly of this molecular moment of being.  It is easier to recognize this chunky putrid porridge as part of the life stew, than it is to recognize myself as that too, or you….  Or Rosie.  There is the grapefruit that gets caught on the pitch fork, and gives off that grapefruit essence, there is the egg shells, the coconut shells, the rotting apples…and other smells and slimes some revolting, some delightfully hinting at an exotic past like a smell fossil…. But regardless,  all of slated for reconstruction, all of it steep in on the change and transformation curve.….Off to the garden with it, and into the summer vegetables and so on.  What is harder to see, is that this is also exactly what is happening with each one of us, not just when we die, but even more amazingly right now, while we are living.  

This entity that is me—I am a node in the energy flow.  This is not a theory, or a metaphor, or an hypothesis. It is what I really look like stripped of the meaning-making mind, stripped of all of the signifiers with which we paint each other.   I am a moment of becoming and dissolving. 

There is that notion that if you want to know what is really happening , follow the money… Well, I say, Follow the molecules.  Where did I come from, where am I going to?  Follow the molecules.  Resist being too attached to the perspective locked behind your eyes and in your body, just follow the molecules.  Give yourself over to seeing the real history from where you have been arriving from, and where you are dispersing to!

The first time I was struck by this, I was out on the ice fishing in Double Mer, a inlet north of Lake Melville.  It was a beautiful day, blue and warm and tingling in early spring.  The man I was with hunted partridges and brought them back to my perch out on the ice.  White feathers, a drop of red blood where the shot went in, blue sky, white snow and ice, green trees.  I opened one partridge up.  Its crop, just above its breast was filled with spruce needles and a red berries.   This little white partridge was reconstituted spruce needles and red berries, and soon was going to flow into me and my friend.  Reconstituted red berries and spruce bows…..how amazing!

Here is something else amazing: Rosie eats Purina Dog Chow and drinks water that I put in her bowl from the tap.  She was out helping me with the compost on Saturday, bringing her ball for me throw, barking encouragement….and  as I dug away, I was thinking about where Rosie’s molecules were a year ago, or even two.  They have been mostly at an Alberta Beef farm, in cows, flowing through calves, through cow milk, heading by transport truck to a slaughter house, through a processing plant, off to the Purina Dog Chow production plant, into a few bags, up the Labrador Highway in another transport truck, doing pit stop at the Coop shelf, been plopped into my shopping cart, and hauled back to my house.   Rosie’s molecules have then been mixed with water that has been in the clouds, fallen into the Grand Lake, been filtered through the depths of the wet lands, spouted up through the Artisian Well through the pump house and into the pipes that come to my house.  All of these molecules have been mixed with Oxygen, that has been breathed in and out by all us, probably everyone here reading has shared some of Rosie’s oxygen at one time or another, you know those chance non-meeting at some airport, when we walked by each other, and breathed each other in, without any conscious recognition of our shared adventure. 

Just as this is the recent history of Rosie’s molecules, this history of mine is more complicated…… you would see me smeared all over the earth in avocado  and pineapple trees, deep in the Atlantic ocean in the Salmon, you would see some of me coming through the dread and sadness of the abattoirs, you would see me rising out of the compost bin I was so happily installing into my garden the year before….You would be able to see me coming together like a movie ofa cake being baked, only played in reverse.   Really this is what I would look like--- a smear of energy moving towards “me”, concentrating,  thickening, focusing, refining, bringing acuity and clarity to this MOMENT, a ha! A moment of me in the NOW and then smearing and smudging and disintegrating again to what comes next.  Ha!  This is really what we look like void of our importance and claims to autonomy.  This is how intricately we are woven into and out of this place.   We are articulation stardust.  Ahh, and we are so often confused by our self importance…not that we aren’t important….but you know what I mean.

The H1N1 Swine Flu, as well as being ‘a threat’, is really an amazing opportunity to follow the molecular flow of energy.  It shows us how we are all connected in this beautiful, sometimes horrible, display of Being/Becoming.   Swine flu is a tracer that makes it completely apparent how all of us are connected, not only in this cyber land where we flap around in a silly autonomous display of hide and seek nearly void of a molecular imprint, but, more amazingly, in this dense and emergent  molecular dream of the earth.

This notion we call LIFE is about these self-organizing perpetuating nodes of flow.   It is kind of amazing when I think about it, that one eruption of molecules (me) can wave and signal to another eruption of molecules (Rosie) and she will come over to me, and sit and lie down, do the high five….ha, that one pile of molecules has learned to boss another pile around! Ha! What a trick!…..  Imagine that! Imagine that we all have the ability in our nodal form to direct the traffic of this energy flow!  It is our intention….INTENSION….. Some of us can direct a lot of energy traffic with our intention, some of us less so….. but beyond the discrepancies, imagine that we can do this AND be conscious of all of this at the same time! 

Thomas Berry said, “We are carbon thinking!  We are thinking carbon!”  He named my two children in a ceremony on a lake side in 1991. Daniel Wolf, David Fire…. “Get water from the lake,” he said before the ceremony. “This is not water as a symbol of anything.  Water, as itself is not a symbol of something sacred.  Water is sacred.  Water as water.  What could be more sacred than that!”  

This dream of the earth, this dream of me, this dream of you….this invisible scaffolding that holds my ears and eyes and heart, and my own ability to perceive my self…. this dream!   How simple and silly and splendid and sacred…..

So now the impetuous Beauty Queen of spring has hesitated long enough, my breath is bated, I am paying rapt attention….. I am watching… oh please, please show me, show me, show me again, how you do that dance!

Erotic Writing #2.

I am running out of time. My writers’ group meets in an hour.  I am suppose to have this assignment finished.  Erotic writing.  I started up making a story(erotic writing #1) about a Tantric master who lived around the corner and visited our writing group turning the event into an erotic gala, but, alas, I lost my heart for it.  So now, in a pinch, all day I ‘ve been considering alternatives. Unfortunately, the hard, large members, and the thrusting tongues of Harlequin Romances have been spilling out of the corners of my imagination.  This is disdainful really, when I am capable of so much more.  I tell my mother over the phone about my conundrum.  She quotes T.S. Elliott: “And we will not cease from exploring, and  after all our exploring we will return to where we started and know the place for the first time.”  This may not seem erotic, but really it captures the amazing intimacy of this journey we travel on together.  It is something else to be together, like we are, born out of the fireball 13.7 billion years ago, and coalescing in this moment to witness each other and our erotic yearnings. 

 My favourite piece of erotic writing is from Michael Ondaajte.  He writes:  "We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. "

I feel some chagrin when I read these words from Michael.  I glance over my solitary, careful life.  Oh, I have not had much heart for rejection.  And this has been a problem. Alas, to move into the erotic life, to inhabit it, to experience it, to bring it back to the board for reflection and writing, I must toughen myself up in this regard. 

One of the most erotic moments I have experienced was in a taxi traveling to Otovalo from Quito. I had my arm draped around the back of the seat and Antonio was sitting on the far side with another passenger in between us.  Perhaps my hand touch his hair, but suddenly I could feel the burning energy coming out of his head like a hot laser beam.  “The touch of your hand was like drugs being poured into me,” he said later.  We had experienced the same thing. 

To be honest, I have experienced this same thing at dances on occasion.  Sometime with the oddest partners.  I used to go to the dances at the community center, all ready to be pissed off at the lack of fancy steps my partners would have.  One day, I decided to be a follower.  A devoted follower.  To be a receiver.  I decided consciously to abnegate my agentic aspect and just breathe in whatever energy came in my direction.  I have to admit, the dancing did not improve, but my experience of it did!  Suddenly I became aware of the, hitherto unsuspected, gentle, desiring nature of these men. 

Walter was one of them. (Of course, I have changed his name.)  He is about the same height as me, and quite thin.  He is missing several teeth, and had a scruffy, gaunt, direct look.  Remembering my agenda to follow, I followed.  First I followed to the crowded dance floor, then I followed the way he put his arms around me. I could hear him clear his voice slightly, and I bit my tongue.  This is the place I might nervously start chattering away, or begin giving some dancing instructions.  I held back, and remained open. His arms went around me snuggly.  I could feel his hands placed over my back as if I was the most precious being he had ever encountered.  I put my arms around his neck, and held him too, just so:  preciously.  That was it: being present with this energy, out in the public, with our clothes fully on, and Gordie Montague of the Northernaire’s singing “Put your head on my shoulder.”  It was erotic. I was so surprised by it.  Every moment careened off into its own little postcard. Energy flowed, unacknowledged except in a mutual, unspoken agreement not to ever talk about it.  The slightest movement of my little finger would correspond to a slight pressure from his palm, and an easing or a tightening of his arms. My cheek so close to his, then touching, just the hairs, the soft barely touching hairs.   The tension and the heat conjuring the spell of the sensuous.

I had to hold back finally. After all, mouths seek each other like magnets, and, I would not go that far, not here or now or ever, except in my imagination. Oh, imagine if I did: my god, his wife would break out my windows and scratch out my eyes, and so she should, I guess.  So it was all contained in this invisible, never to be named river out on the dance floor at the community center.

Sometimes I think what I am looking for is to shine a light on this whole erotic adventure.  I want to look at it closely, and mutually.  I want transparency, as if two people who really trusted each other could finally break the bubbles of their autonomy and break into each other’s heart-minds. I want to be one of those two people. It would be a new kind of adventure, probably one where the only requirements are to be fearless and shameless, and to have the deepest mutual respect and love and to smell good. I wonder about this. I suspect, like my mother said, ‘we would return to where we started and know the place for the first time.’