A Deeper Movement : Calling You Home

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. — By MARY OLIVER

There is a common phrase, used to call people to action: Nothing Changes if Nobody Changes. It does not work for me like that.

Everything is constantly changing all the time. There is a dragging, moving
undulating happening which you are either aware of or you are not.

There is a line beneath which things are constantly in motion. It is like the slow drag of an out going tide from the estuary. I am either sourcing, dancing, drawing from that or I am not. To resist that is futile, to pretend other wise is self deception.

The tides are on the turn and if I woodenly refuse to go into intimate collaboration with that. I hold my life force at arm’s reach never fully knowing it, insidiously turning my life force into dust.

Alchemy is the way of turning one thing into another. I was sat speaking with a friend yesterday and I was reminded again of the ways in which conversation is an act of alchemy. A co creation of sorts between both. For me to move into intimate contact with what is I only have to drop the pretence of “I could be doing something else”. The pain of resistance happens when I am thinking I should be elsewhere doing something else.

There is a darkening in our societal waters. A murkiness. Slow and constant it laps seductively about my shores. Set in motion over generations of a slowly eroding societal fabric. Left unchecked by broken-souled-people. Spurred on by the inability to encounter what is right now.

A society raised and populated in a conceptual world, where facts, knowledge and intellect is the way that things are handled and known. An uninitiated culture that knows only the crisp edges of well thought out plan. The true landscape of now is left unmet. That landscape that is alive with layers upon layers of song, magic and aliveness found at the edge of the not yet created, is left un touched, unfelt. The people uninitiated to the aliveness of reality.

There is a town in New Zealand, called Dunedin. It is an example of how conceptual maps that do not match reality, create messes that disrupt the natural flow of life through a system. At worst these maps are ecocidal, killing life.

The town of Dunedin was built from a map of Edinburgh, superimposed over the natural topography of the Dunedin harbour. You do not need to spend much time in Dunedin today to start asking your self questions like “What the heck were the town planners thinking?”.

Roads go straight up as if trying to tip you off, then some cut diagonally back to the centre, houses stand sideways to the sun and many dark corners never breath, clogged silly with tarmac and the bent boards of cramped weather board house into the corner. Roads cling tilted to
the hillside. And in winter the chaotic streets become the icy rinks, periodically depositing, cars, students, bicycles wheel bins into the gutters at the bottom of the hillsides.

That is exactly the point. The surveyors arrived on those shores, with fondness in their hearts of their home called Edinburgh. With tidy maps of the place rolled up under their arms. And a pressure to build a city to make economic profit for the traders and homes for the settlers.

So they sat together, all men, all unwilling to budge from their mental concepts and took those maps and spread them out over the hilly, landscape. Blind to the icy slick in winter, the rains and winds blowing in high from the waters. Their maps do not fit reality, their concepts lay airily distant from what is and the fallout of this mistake is real. The implications are long lived, the mess is real.

That is the call that is happening right now, that is the job on the bench of my generation and those coming next. To come into deeper connection with what is real. To sit with what is, throw out the out dated maps and start fresh.

There is now, a call to come into closer contact with what is right now. There are many sorts of ways to do that and it does not mean every body chooses the same, in fact the diversity, vibrancy, wisdom and resilience that rises when each occupies and stands true to what is their unique peice to the tapestry now, is what will weave the foundations for a future of evolution, adventure and thriving interconnected communities.

I stood out watching the garden yesterday. I watched the way in which the seeding silver beet arched its bendy stem. Top heavy with seed, its leaves shading, the young coriander coming up beneath it. While bulbs of onions tipped into the bunched borders of calendula flowers and the floral
scents of the jasmine wafted unperturbed through the air. Each item just so, dancing in their own realness. Each occupying a certain flavour. The whole painted by the integrity of each plant being true to its self at that exact moment. So much honesty. So much celebration, so much life.

That is the necessity for now. To call once more to life the garden of being. The vital thread that holds the whole network together. Each playing full the tune that they sing most clear.

To create that mental maps superimposed over a terrain is an act of pure
violence and left unchecked they leave massive wounds that disrupt the flow of life force through any relationship. Be that human to self, human to human or to land, beast, spirit.

What ever you choose. It is time to find new maps that incorporate the fullness of all that is, lay yourself closer and closer to the terrain of now.

Healing is an act of love. It is a commitment to creating, it is evolution in action. Healing speaks in honesty to all that is right now. There is a healing, a growing a composting going on. From healing comes space for the new to emerge.

Yesterday I went through one such emotional healing process. Yesterday the healing was on fear. As a child I learnt that there are certain things that I absolutely had to let go of in order to stay alive and functioning as a human here. One of my deepest terrors was having to silence myself to my true ability to be in the world. I had to cut myself away from what I saw and new to be true. Such as the innate sentience in each life form. And the terror I felt when that was ignored by the adults in my world.

The way that animals where less than humans, tied up, hit, ignored. Their dead bodies left on road sides, to dry into husks. The way they were hunted, farmed and methodically shipped off to be killed, for profit. The way the music on the river was silenced and portioned off. My terror was that I had no language to speak about that into the world. So I was alone.

Alone in a terror of a silence I embodied and had forgotten that I had chosen. It just became my reality. It became part of the lie I learnt to tell, in a society who could super impose conceptual maps of the terrain of the real and pretend it was a great, noble idea. That there would be no consequences.

In feeling all that the healing appears. It is available to every one. At any time. There is medicine in the trees, in the repetitive swirl of pine cones, in the bouncing of light over water. There is healing balm available in the human touch of another’s hand on your skin. A hand that wants for nothing except to soothe the puckered skin of another harsh silencing. There is healing to be found in the water that rolls un checkered down your cheek.

As weird as it may sound, I learnt to leave my body as a young child and watch the world, from a few meters away. I put part of my life force outside of me. That way I could look with their maps and survive. That way I did not have to feel my own terrain. My bounding heart and fullness of being. My childish simplicity and earnest love.

I called in a darkness that specifically stopped me from seeing, from hearing what the adults did not speak about. In doing so I cast away my authentic voice for real.

The voice that could dance with what was right now and speak into that with out censoring. It is scary to reclaim that. To start over with a fresh map of what authentic adulthood is. And still it is necessary. That is the work of my generation. To call back those parts of ourselves, cut away to survive a world based on hierarchy. To call back the song to the waters and the roar to our lungs. Doing so brings us closer to the earth, sends the roots deeper into the soil of now, shows options not yet seen. Gives rise to possibilities of healing, evolution and calls for the potential born upon a world that can hold integral the tender fabric of the human soul.

With out that I am left, hanging in mid air as the maps dissolve and the ground rises to meet me like a smack in the face. Reality the cold hard bottom, uncharted terrain, mapless I stumble. There is always the chance for me to start, start walking home into my own skin. Start learning what it means to be human right now, and start falling even though there is no map through my awkward adolescence and into an adult hood. Initiation by necessity. Into the folds of the world. There my innate power to source and create resides and that is where it begins. At the bottom, beneith the maps, my feelings are my compass and my guide. The impulse to love and life my companion, and the breath of possibility the heat that drives me, onward, deeper, truer.

For my own life,

for you,

for tomorrow,

for the yet to be born,

for now.

Love,

Millicent

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The Context : Deepening Into Initiation Midwifery