Leaf By Vision, Seed By Dream

What the Bones Tell

noreply@blogger.com (Cynthia Froehlich) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 01:35:00 +0000

Years ago, in my incarnation as an English teacher, I had a colleague, a history teacher, with a passion for architecture. Whenever we had to carpool together to a workshop or function, he would spend the drive pointing out to me the architectural styles of various buildings: Federal, Greek Revival, Colonial, Georgian. I never thought I would be interested in such a thing, but a person’s true passion for the details of anything can be quite infectious. Even now, these many years later, I still find myself looking at buildings and trying to remember what he told me about particular architectural styles. I just wish I’d thought enough then to take notes.

One incident I especially remember from these impromptu ride-along lectures. On a road trip to Portland, my friend pulled the car over in front of some god-awful monstrosity of an apartment building with haphazard additions, cobbled-on porches and rickety stairs. That, he said sadly, is a crime. Yeah, it is, I agreed; it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. He looked at me like I was one of his less-attentive students. What? I said; I agree – it’s awful; the porches are sagging; the stairs are falling apart. Somebody’s going to get hurt. He rolled his eyes. Yes, yes – it’s a disaster. But what I meant was – the original building is a beautiful example of early 19^th-century Federal (?) architecture. It’s a crime that someone would do this to it. Oh, I said, embarrassed by my ignorance, and then asked: How can you tell? He went on to point out various details that, unfortunately, I can’t recall. (I do remember one point being the way the chimneys, now crumbling, were placed.) Then he said something that stuck: You can still see the “bones.” The bones of the original architecture are still there. You can always tell by the bones.

I have no knowledge of whether or not this is real “architecture” speak, or whether this was the personal expression of a passionate amateur. But that’s what made my colleague pull the car over that day: he saw the “bones” of that derelict building – and they told him a story, because he knew how to hear them.

This winter, I learned to listen to different “bones” – the living bones of trees in winter. I didn’t set out to make this my “winter project.” It just happened – the way my colleague pulled over to the side of the road all of a sudden that day. Because I finally heard loud and clear what the bare bones of trees in winter had to say.

In many ways, my exercise was an intuitive/imaginative one. However, the foundation was focused observation over a period of time and across many individuals. After that, interpretation and felt-sense took over. Observing trees – especially deciduous trees – in winter gives one the opportunity to see the pure structure of these beings – the bones, the skin, the posture, and patterning – before they are cloaked with all their beautiful distracting greenery.

Here are some of the things that the bones told me.

Oak (esp. Quercus rubra & Quercus alba)

Oak stands alone. Oak masts and saplings will group together, but as the oak grows, only one wins that area. Rarely do large oaks stand shoulder to shoulder like maples do. Oak stands alone.

The dark branches of oak appear to crack the sky into splintered shards. This is a Poe-tree, a tree of Gothic tales. This is a tree that calls down lightning and the screaming Valkyrie. A warrior tree, a Klingon tree. And the bark of the Red Oak – our most common Oak here in Maine – is striped in red, as though streaming with blood.

The strength so apparent in oak is an aggressive in-your-face strength. Closely packed clusters of short gnarled twigs grow from the branches and grip dead leaves throughout the winter. Oak holds firm in earthy vigilance. Persistent. Protective. Aware.

Ash (esp. Fraxinus americana)

The tree of Clarity. Straight clean open lines. A well-defined opposite branching pattern. The twigs on the branches are widely-spaced and sturdy, and a golden sheath sometimes seems to surround them, delineating each branch vividly against the sky. The bark of the bole has the fine even texture of a beautiful cable-knit pattern.

The light and the air mingle in the branches of Ash. Illumination and spirit. The open well-lit spaces needful for clear-sight and clear-thought. Proportion. Definition. Structure. After the dream, after the vision, the intention and manifestation.

Lucidity and comprehension after doubt and struggle.

Maple (esp. Acer saccharum & Acer rubrum)

Maple thrives in community. Maple is open-hearted, generous, and gentle. Like Ash, Maple also has an opposite branching pattern, but Maple’s twigs are closely spaced like the barbs of a feather. Thus, Maple lifts its long feathery branches gracefully skyward. To see a stand of young feathered maples lifts your heart. To see the still-graceful old maples makes your heart glow.
There is a singing quality to Maple; a happiness and joyousness more pronounced than in other trees. Their song is a hymn; an ongoing praise-song. There is a deep embracing calm to Maple.

Old and young, maples are like the Whos in Whoville singing “Christmas Day will always be, just as long as we have we. Welcome Christmas, while we stand, heart to heart and hand in hand.” (Substitute what you like for “Christmas.”) They make room for one another; they rejoice in togetherness. They feed us with the sweetness of happy open hearts.

Beech (Fagus grandifolia)

Fluid muscular grace. Sinewy strength. Mercury. Quicksilver. Powerful serpent or god-man. Cold hard metal. Pewter in the sun. Copper in the rain. The last to lose leaves. The constant whisper and chant of beech leaves in the winter wind.

Like the powerful beings that Beech resembles, it is able to pull free of your imagination before you can pin it down. Beech is elusive. A grove of Beech in winter always appears to be filled with its own mist as one is surrounded by the trees’ pewter glow.

Beeches once walked the earth – or they will in future. They are filled with restless energy. They are filled with cold hungry fire. They are closer to human than any of the trees.

Poplar/Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides)

Poplar is a liminal tree. It lives on the edges of woodlands because it can’t compete in deep shade. It lives on the edge between this world and Faerie. It lives on the edge between life and death. It trembles and dances between worlds.

Though in its youthful stage, Poplar’s bark can be nearly as white as that of birch, it lacks birch’s “shine.” Young, it is a thin, gray ghost, muted and disappearing. Its slender, often contorted, branches create a rounded, conical canopy. The twigs cluster in frilly lace-cap poofs on the branches.

In maturity, Poplar appears in another liminal state: its lower bole dark and crevassed with age; it’s upper bole and branches still pale, smooth and youthful. It’s as if it is slowly being turned to stone, or as if it were being wrapped in a dark wrinkled cocoon. Poplar is a tree for elders. Poplar is a psychopomp.

Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia)

Black Locust is strong, tough, passionate, and crazy! (These are the trees I see from my kitchen window every morning. I included them because they are my particular friends, and I love them.)

These are the stories that the bones told me. I wonder what stories they will tell you.

(N.B. In the category of “Duh” – Here in the Northeast (I don’t know about elsewhere), we use the mnemonic “MAD Horse” to remember the few trees that have opposite rather than alternate branching patterns. It is an acronym for Maple, Ash, Dogwood, and Horse Chestnut. Viburnum lentago (Nannyberry) also has an opposite branching pattern, but that just wrecks the mnemonic!)

Magic Kingdom

noreply@blogger.com (Cynthia Froehlich) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 01:25:00 +0000

The other day, I met up with a Barred Owl in the woods behind my house. A whumpf of large soft wings, and it landed on a slender branch above the trail. We stared at each other for several moments until the owl gracefully pivoted its head and looked off to the north.

Such one-on-one, eye-to eye encounters with the Other always send a frisson of eeriness through my nerves: the outlandish, through-the-looking-glass sense of being the object of perception to a mind (or subjectivity) so unlike my own. But I also feel ecstatic joy – the feeling of having been handed a magic key to the magic kingdom. It cracks open the world and my heart. In moments like these, I viscerally understand that all of us distinct and very different expressions of Being are nevertheless integral parts of One Being, and also, more particularly and less unfathomably, integral parts of this one especial place. Here, I am not an outsider, an alien, or an intruder. My footprints and snowshoe tracks have made impressions on this ground for many years, and I have exchanged breath with these trees and green ones three-hundred-gazillion times. I drink water from the same aquifer that feeds the nearby wetlands and ponds, and I eat food grown in these soils. I have sipped gallons of teas, elixirs, and extracts made from these barks, roots, leaves, flowers, and fruits.

Little Ossipee River

Daily, over the last ten years, this landscape of river and mountain and woodland has added itself to my body, and if it’s true – as common wisdom has it – that every ten years all the cells in one’s body are replaced, then by now, I am fully a human manifestation of this Little Ossipee River landscape. As is my husband. As are our neighbors.

So I have decided to write the stories of my Self: this river-mountain being that I embody. If I place the boundaries of my Self at one-and-a-half square miles, I will contain a portion of the Little Ossipee River as well as the Branch Brook, Picket and Knox Mountains, some of the large forested spaces of the Vernon Walker Wildlife Management Area and the Bridge and Water Street neighborhoods. If I stretch my edges out to four-square miles, I will encompass Symmes Pond, Poverty Pond, Granny Kent Pond, and most of Rock Haven Lake, and I will take in Mann Mountain, Abbott Mountain, and the Waterboro Barrens. That's as big as I can be right now. (The whole universe will have to wait until I can expand my container!)

View from the Top of Picket Mountain

A few weeks ago, I listened to an interview with the spiritual teacher and futurist, Jean Houston. She spoke about the time she spent studying with aboriginal people in Australia. Jean asked one of her aboriginal teachers what the primary difference was between human beings and all the other beings, and her teacher answered: “We’re the only ones who can tell stories about all the others.” This felt like a call to me.

For years, I have collected notes and photographs, bits and pieces of my random explorations of these few square miles. I have files and notebooks crammed with haphazard jottings, and a head filled with incidents and revelations. Now I am challenging myself to order these stray bits and to more purposefully and deeply explore this sacred place to which I belong. I am hoping that through deeper acquaintance with the individuals here, I will begin to see an outline of the bigger picture, the larger context in which I live my life. And I will learn to understand and love my Self more completely.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

-T. S. Eliot (The Four Quartets – Little Gidding)

View of Picket Mountain from Water Street

Through the Woods and Down to the River

(Up Next: The Forest and the Trees)

Sandals and Perfume: Pink Lady's Slipper & The Vital Force

noreply@blogger.com (Cynthia Froehlich) — Sat, 15 May 2010 23:11:00 +0000

(This blog was written for Sean Donahue's Blog Party Herbs for Sexual Health and Vitality. Clicking the title of this post will take you to Sean's site.)

There is a "wild force" which animates the living world and gives it vitality and presence. It is a rhythmic vital force that penetrates and integrates the entire natural world. It is the great initiatory of vision and magical potency for the magic worker and healer who is called to move from the contrived supremacy of human consciousness to the living and actual potency of the natural world. -- Orion Foxwood

Last spring, I had my first meeting with Pink Lady's Slipper in the "dreamtime." She was much different than I had expected, and the circumstances of the "journey" itself were different from anything I had previously experienced. Although I have had training and experience in traditional forms of journey work, the most powerful intuitions or inner visions seem to come for me when I'm weeding the garden or doing the dishes or taking a walk. Times when my thinking mind quiets down for a change, leaving open silent spaces. When I met Pink Lady's Slipper, I was taking a walk up the little mountain behind my house. I saw a large patch of Lady's Slippers and sat with them for a few minutes. Then I got up and continued walking. She came with me. I had opened my heart, but it was she who initiated the contact. We dreamed together while I walked.

She was larger than I had expected with large breasts and wide hips. Her skin was dusky and she wore heavy sweet perfume and purple lipstick and eye shadow. Her dark hair was coiled on top of her head; her clothes were bright and jewel-toned. We were in her steamy kitchen where she was cooking a spicy stew. Billie Holiday or Peggy Lee or both were playing on the radio. I could feel my hips start to swing as I walked. I sang along with Billie. I felt grounded and earthy, and I wanted to spoil myself with rich food and pretty things. And I wanted to spoil others with them too.

"You can't give what you ain't got!" she told me in her wonderful throaty voice. And of course, I knew this already. Knew it, I mean, in my head; but now I felt the truth of it in my heart and in my body. I felt what it was to be nourished and nurtured and to nourish and nurture in turn. I felt big and round and joyful. And it made me laugh.

She gave me permission to taste her root, and it tasted like thick sweet syrup and honey.

Two very different strains of women run through my ancestral line. On the one side, Swedish-Yankee farm women, fair-haired and fair-skinned, tough-minded and plain and practical. On the other side, Irish-Cajun women, dark-haired and dramatic, emotional and high-maintenance. I have stayed here in the cold Yankee north, and though I am fair-skinned and plain, I am neither tough-minded nor practical. And I have always felt the guilt of not living up to the strong, competent Swedes who are the matriarchs of my extended family.

Guilt (and it's co-conspirator Shame) are the demons & killers of Second Chakra vitality. How can a person form intimate nourishing life-sharing relationships with another person when all the nourishing energy is siphoned off into the emotional sink-hole of guilt and self-deprecation? The answer is, of course, one cannot.

To me, the Pink Lady Slipper "appeared" as what I could not see in myself, and she literally dreamed those qualities awake in my soul. She would likely not appear exactly this way to anyone else, but the energy would be similar. An energy that coaxes you - never forces you - to look at all you've suppressed in yourself. All the things that you think would embarrass you, would be too silly, too outrageous. The things that would call too much attention to you. An energy that allows you to laugh at yourself and loosen up and enjoy being this Being with your feet on the ground and deserving of love -- and very capable of giving love.

In the very early years of this wandering, convoluted spiritual path of mine, I had the good fortune to train with wonderful teachers, both here and in England, in the modern version of the Western Mystery Tradition - following the teachings and practices of the turn-of-the-century Golden Dawn and its offshoots. Since my knowing of Eastern Vedic teachings regarding chakras is very limited to recent "new age" popular formulations, I'm going to diverge here and instead of speaking about "second chakra" energy, speak instead about the parallel (but not identical!) concept of the Sephiroth Yesod (in Golden Dawn tradition) with which I am more familiar.

The Sephiroth Yesod, to any unfamiliar with Qabalistic formulation, when visualized on the body, is placed above the Sephiroth Malkuth (or what corresponds to the root chakra.) So for the purposes of this tiny blog - let's call it the same as the second chakra. However, instead of visualizing energy flowing up from the root, instead visualize it as coming down from Yesod. As Dion Fortune so beautifully images it: " If we liken the kingdom of earth (Malkuth or Root) to a great ship, then Yesod would be the engine room."

In other words, in this Sephiroth of Yesod, when the engine malfunctions, the ship is set adrift!

Regardless of what tradition - or no tradition at all -- one is working with, when the vital flow of energy from that ONE all important space - the one space -- this sephiroth Yesod, or second chakra -- that is the space of our connection to the "divine" -- the vital force --- the energy of Pan and the hot spicy stew of the nurturing world -- somehow is cut off, blocked, or siphoned away -- intentions, dreams, desires are blocked from becoming in the manifest world. You can wish and dream and intend all you like, but if this one all important portal from the Universe to You is clogged like a rusty backwashed drain-pipe -- dreams and intentions cannot manifest. And you as an individual have stopped up your own pipes with this backwash of guilt and shame and self-loathing.

The symbols of Yesod are "perfumes and sandals". Both to make any place where you find yourself a holy divine space. Perfumes, because scent moves your consciousness - your always-talking mind -- away from itself into a place of beauty. And putting perfumes on yourself makes you Beautiful!! And sandals - because in ritual magic and in any kind of mindfulness practice at all - the idea that when you're feet are placed so very mindfully or when you have donned special shoes for your work -- anywhere you stand is "holy" ground.

All orchids - including our native lady's slippers - are biologically beings of symbiosis and connection. They are not self-pollinating and require and actively pursue bees for their pollination. Some tropical orchids have been dubbed "the Inflatable Love-Dolls of the Plant World" (Michael Pollan) for their wonderful ability to simulate female bees and thus attract male bees to pollinate them. Lady's Slipper traps bees in her voluminous skirts, and the bees must then crawl out through the opening at the top of the flower, coated with pollen as they go on to the next. Lady's Slippers also require a fungus (Rhizoctonia) in the soil to break open their seed pods in the soil and to feed the emerging seedlings. They have no nutrients of their own at the start. Later, when the roots have developed, the fungus extracts nutrients from the plant's roots. Also, the gorgeous Lady's Slipper flowers that we see as so many individual beings actually are not at all. They are mostly "sibling" groups growing off the same underground stem, sharing all nourishment and wisdom.

Lady's Slipper knows how to be in relationship; how to give and how to receive.

There is an Ojibwe legend of the yellow Lady's slipper. It is a story of self-sacrifice about a young woman, variously daughter or young wife, who braved the cold and ice and traveled across a frozen lake and many miles through the frozen Canadian or Minnesotan woodlands to bring the needed medicine for her tribe. She died in the bringing of it, but saved her tribe from the sickness that had befallen them. The yellow lady's slipper grew in her honor - the yellow moccasin flower with red traces as of her blood.

Our northern pink lady's slipper is also named "moccasin flower." This story tells in a different way of the energy and gift of Lady's Slipper. Anodea Judith, in her book Wheels of Life, tells us that the opening of the second chakra - our connection to vitality --- also is the key to the opening of clairsentience - or in regular folk terms - empathy. So this Ojibwe story tells us. The story of this young woman's complete empathy with her tribe; so much empathy that she sacrificed her life to heal them. A true heroine.

And this is the gift of Lady's Slipper. When you stop being embarrassed by all that you are - and freely give your gifts, you will connect, you will laugh, you will find joy in doing whatever it is to spoil and nurture those who come into your world. Because you will have already spoiled and nurtured yourself - and allowed others to nurture you. Then giving is no sacrifice at all. It just makes you laugh.

A big deep throaty laugh. And it makes you sing.

Trillum Spider Heart Notes

noreply@blogger.com (Cynthia Froehlich) — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:47:00 +0000

Oh, the barriers we put up around our hearts! This morning, I went down to the river to see who was blooming and who was waking up. Jacks-in-pulpits, red Trillium, anemones, horsetail. The Little Ossipee River itself, freed from the last of ice and now tumbling away.

A most spectacular pair of red Trillium called my attention, so I sat with them for awhile. I breathed with them. I quieted my mind. I opened my heart. The one facing east wanted to have this encounter; the other was shy.

A tiny spider crept along the edge of a red petal, swung an invisible line and was on the leaf. She moved along the edge of the leaf down towards the stalk, then swung herself back up again to a petal. I stopped paying attention to the spider and focused on the gorgeous dark spiky heart of the east-facing Trillium. It's heart to my heart -- it's breath to my breath -- connecting. Just being there with that one plant right there -- in that one time -- right now. I could feel us breathing together, that one Trillium and me. So very comfortable - a happy greeting moment. Heart to heart.

Then the tiny spider (perhaps sent from the heart of the Trillium) launched a fine filament and was swinging her way straight to my heart. Literally - actually. I couldn't see the line, but the tiny person was making her way on an invisible line right straight toward the center of my chest. I saw her, and moved my hand up and cut the line and she dropped down to the ground.

Because before I went out to the woods this morning, I had sprayed my jacket with a pesticide to keep the ticks off of me. Because, days before, I had gone out and had come back with seven ticks already attached to my legs and back, through my jeans and long-sleeved sweatshirt. So many of them. And it made me afraid.

Afraid enough to spray pesticide on my jacket. So I had to cut the cord of the beautiful emissary that the Trillium sent out to me. Because if the spider had landed on my jacket - on my so very barricaded heart - the spider would have died.

So I couldn't receive that gift because of the barricades I put up. But I waited there after I cut the spider's filament to see if she would return to the trillium. And she did. Minutes later, the tiny being was swinging herself up from the leaf mould into which I had dropped her, and was again, creeping along the edge of Trillium leaf and blossom.

I do regret that I couldn't fully receive this gift of spider that I was offered. But I am so grateful that the gift was offered, and in my inner heart I did receive it. I am happy that I saved her life. I am less happy that I coated myself in poison because of my fear.

I hope to become less fearful.

The Very Thickness of the Present

noreply@blogger.com (Cynthia Froehlich) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:21:00 +0000

From my notes - March 9, 2010:

I am sitting in this thicket of alders, dogwoods, young pines and poplars at the edge of this swamp. Right now, because the branches are bare and the undergrowth is tamped down by months of snow, I am actually able to get in here. In another month or two, it will be virtually impassable; I know because I've tried. I'm sitting on a hummock of moss and mud and rotting wood. There are chickadees hopping from bare branch to bare branch over my head making their chipping sound. I can hear crows speaking but I can't see them from my spot in the thicket. I can hear a chittering squirrel and, intermittently, a woodpecker thunking at a tree. In the breeze, which barely reaches my hummock, the last brown leaves of a small pin oak are shivering off and above to my left. I'm not far from my house and I can hear my dog barking in my backyard. I'm also not far from the river, and I can hear it's steady rushing. I smell mud and wet humus and rotten wood. A blue jay speaks loudly several times, and my neighbor over there starts up the motor on one of his vehicles - probably his big yellow plow. Now I can feel a tingle of breeze on my face, but on my hand, which is resting on the soft green moss right here, I feel the warmth of the sun coming down through this opening of branches above me. And looking up, I see blue sky with high wisps of clouds and the contrail of a plane passing so high that I can't hear it. In the bit of snow over there, I see a few leftover tridents of turkey tracks and some scat that I don't recognize. Right here, right now - all this where I'm sitting in this thicket by this swamp.

The title of this post - "the very thickness of the present" - is a phrase I lifted from David Abram's astonishing book The Spell of the Sensuous. It came singing back to me when I was sitting on that mossy hummock, and I realized that this time around the Vernal Equinox is an especially good time, here in the North, to really experience in my mammal body what Abram had given me a glimpse of through his work. I had the good fortune to spend a four-day weekend at David Abram's workshop at Rowe Conference Center in Massachusetts late in February, and I discovered that his insights, which had impacted me so enormously when I read them in his book, had even more power and resonance when I heard him speak them aloud in his fluid storyteller style.

In the luminous passage that contains my title phrase, Abram writes:

[P]henomena can be hidden not just within the past or the future, but also within the very thickness of the present, itself -- ... there is an enigmatic, hidden dimension at the very heart of the sensible present, into which phenomena may withdraw and out of which they continually emerge. Thus in "Time and Being," Heidegger writes that "even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. (Spell, p.222 italics mine)

Now I step out of the house after this long sleeping of winter, and these words are no longer just printed on a page, they are spoken aloud by this place. From moment to moment, the snowline recedes, fiddleheads push up through the mud - where I swear they weren't a minute ago. Birds appear and disappear and reappear through and among the trees. The shadows shift with the movement of clouds, so that the glint on that rock that appeared like diamonds just then is now dark wet gray. The present - seen not as a static noun, but as a very active verb - presencing.

Abram sets forth a re-conceptualization of time and space so fresh and freeing that it tingles on your skin like this spring day. He spends a large portion of his book deconstructing and unraveling our stuck notions of time and space as "dimensions" operating by mathematical laws, pure unchanging and separate from the landscape and lifeworld. By contrast to our modern constructs of "metaphysical" space/time, Abram offers a discussion of the worldviews of various indigenous peoples, some of whom he was privileged to live amongst.

For example, among the traditional Hopi, past, present,and future are brought together into just two modalities: the manifested and the manifesting. The manifested comprises "all that is or has been accessible to the senses . . . with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything we call future." The manifesting, on the other hand, comprises that which we call future, but also that which exists or appears in the heart of all beings - human, plant, animal, all of nature - that which is "gathering itself towards manifestation within the depths of all sensible phenomena." (p.192) Human intention and participation contribute directly to this becoming-manifest.

Abram compares this Hopi notion of time to the Aboriginal Australian idea of the Dreamtime, and makes explicit how in these worldviews time and space are intricately, sensibly intertwined.

The Dreamtime . . . is integral to the spatial surroundings. It is not a set of accomplished events located in some finished past, but is the very depth of the experiential present -- the earthly sleep, or dream, out of which the visible landscape continuously comes to presence. And once again, human dreaming, human intention, human action and chanting participate vividly in this coming-to-presence. (p.193)

Right now, at this turning of the seasons, we can feel the "coming to presence" awakening inside us, and the active presencing all around us is so apparent to our senses. What a brilliant reminder of how we can fully participate in the emergence of this always giving growing world. And how lovely and joyful these ways of perceiving are in this time of turmoil and transition that often seems anything but lovely and joyful!

Also, I want to reiterate a point that David Abram, along with so many other fine teachers, continues to make, and that is - such a simple thing! - that we human people are as much a part of this place as any of the plant, animal, rock, water people are. Their life is our life and the world is presencing for them as it presences for us. We are presencing for them as they presence for us. There is no human world and natural world. There is only the one world in which we are all embedded like seeds about to sprout. And the becoming-manifest curls as a seed-germ inside us all.

This is what not to forget. Especially not by those of us deeply committed to the continued prospering of all beings. In our sorrow, and sometimes very understandable despair, over the many bad (what other word?) things happening to our home, it is seems fitting to think of most things human as destructive. For the last several thousand years of human history, western civilization, at least, has taken the view that human beings are the chosen of God's creation or the pinnacle of evolution who have the right to use and plunder "nature" as we will. Now many of us see the awfulness of this worldview, and, in my opinion, rightly so. But I want to caution against letting the pendulum swing too far in the other direction.

Let me give an illustration. A while back, I was at a gathering of us tree-hugging, dirt-worshiping kind, and in the course of conversation, one young woman expressed how wonderful she felt "being out here in nature" because where she lived, she only had a small backyard and felt it nearly impossible to "connect to the natural world" there. She tried meditating but could constantly hear cars going by, and that disrupted her meditation. When asked, she admitted to having several trees in her backyard and to having let the lawn grow wild so that various wildflowers grew there throughout summer. Many different species of birds came to her yard along with snakes, mice, woodchucks and the occasional deer. She grew animated speaking of the "wildlife" that visited her yard, but ..... the sound of cars! Knowing that there were people living and doing around her, she found it impossible to experience pure nature.

This is what I mean about not letting the pendulum swing too far. Human beings and the sounds of our living are a part of this lifeworld and will continue to be as long as we here. We are not an "alien race" invading the purity of this world. We are as enmeshed and intertwined in the cycles of birthing and growing, breathing and feeding, drinking and defecating, building and making, living and dying as any being here. The river rushes, a jay caws, a car goes by, the wind picks up. We, along with everyone else, are presencing here.

We could - and we just might - kill ourselves off and let the world go back to "pure nature." But I sincerely hope not. I hope that instead of either "taking dominion over the earth" or collapsing into self-hatred, our species will gather with the hearts of all species and balance it out. This is vitally important, and of course, you already knew that!

(If you haven't already, take a moment to click on the "YouTube" video I embedded at the top right side of the blog - the one with the baby Harp Seal face. It's a reminder of how many beautiful people share this world with us - and what we all stand to lose if we don't get it right. Clicking on the title of this post will take you to David Abram's gorgeous article "Waking Our Animal Senses." Also, buy or borrow, but just read The Spell of the Sensuous!)

Dieting Datura; or A Glimpse of Cthulhu

noreply@blogger.com (Cynthia Froehlich) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:49:00 +0000

From H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I spent the month of January dieting Datura stramonium in the form of a flower essence I'd made last summer from one of the plants then blooming in my garden. January, in one part of Hindu tradition, is the month in which Datura, sacred to Shiva, should be offered to that god of fire and storm and destruction - the Red One - the Pure One.

January is also my least favorite month of the year, with February coming in a close second. It is the time of year in which, here in the cold white North, I feel cramped and caged and in which my ability to muster enthusiasm for any projects or even to dream up any projects to be enthusiastic about is at very low ebb. I walk in the woods and that's a little satisfying and helps with the caged feeling, but I've never made close friends with the winter wind that steals away my breath or with the bitter cold still air that seems to freeze the breath before it leaves my lungs. So I don't go out as often as I'd like. Reading, meditation, ordering seeds and planning the garden - oh, and of course - going to work all help to ease some of the January edginess, but never for long and never quite enough.

Datura, although used medicinally in some cultures for it's narcotic and anesthetic properties in cases of acute physical trauma, is nevertheless more widely known and used for its most potent gift of inducing vision and dream. And since, in my personal year wheel, January is the month in which sleeping and dreaming are far and away my favorite activities, I decided that the time was right to study with this sacred teacher.

As anyone who has dieted plant essences might know, this is often a deep and subtle process. In the first week of my dieting, though I kept close watch on my emotions, mental states and physical sensations, I could discern nothing out of the ordinary - nothing that hadn't been there in the weeks before. In the second week, though still dutifully taking my essence, I paid less attention because I was pre-occupied with what I then thought was a really severe case of the "Januaries." Edginess, frustration with every little thing, even - one afternoon - becoming so wildly frustrated with the loss of a roll of tape, that I nearly trashed a room full of packing boxes in search of it.

And then the dreams started, and I knew I was in Datura's territory. Strange wild dreams of violence and escape, filled with characters from whatever DVD or television show I'd watched that evening. (Never with people, places or situations from my own waking life.) And I was always "not me" - someone else, a character from film or television. One more thing - there was usually, and more often as the weeks continued, a "presence" in the dreams. Something that gave strange commands to the character I was.

In one of the most vivid dreams, I was a young woman named "Sam." I/She and a young man were in some ugly little dive of a hotel room packing, getting ready to run. Someone I never saw burst into the room and shot me/her. I fell down beside the bed and died. I didn't feel myself die; I was just dead inside "Sam's" body. Then the presence said (not in words) "You don't have time for this. Get into the other body. Do it fast. Don't think about it." And I saw another "Sam" standing at the door with the young man, both of them still as stone, and I knew that that"other Sam" was the other body I needed to get to. I pulled and hauled and struggled to get out of the dead body, like pulling out of thick mud, and slammed into the other Sam - and then we ran.

Last summer, during a six-month apprenticeship in Plant Spirit Healing with Pam Montgomery, one of our primary practices when approaching a plant was to discover and know what Pam called "the felt sense" of that plant. That felt sense would give us the "handle" - the way to contact and connect with that plant spirit for our healing work. Now, as I am writing this, I am very aware of the felt sense of Datura in my body. It's not a "good" feeling at all - not like, say, the felt sense of Rose. But it's not "bad" either. (Though at 3 am on some of those nights, I would certainly have labeled it so!!) For me, the felt sense of Datura is intensity and chaos.

For the several weeks of dieting Datura, I woke often in the night filled with what I can only call terror. I know that some of this terror was a primal elemental terror of violence - of being prey, but also that some of it was an egoic fear of chaos, of dissolution, of letting go of control. My mind would race with sudden fears of losing everything - home, health, finances - and the weird but very real terror of being "meaningless." Of having no idea of anything I could possibly do or be that would have any kind of ultimate purpose. (Yes - I see the big ego tantrum there! "I want to be recognized!!!")

The quotation at the top of this blog from Lovecraft's 1920s weird tale is, I believe, a clear image of the kind of havoc the "chaotic" intensity of powerful teacher plants such as Datura can wreak on a very solid hidebound individualized modern Western ego such as mine. (Don't get me wrong - I'm not suggesting that Lovecraft ingested Datura.) The "Matrix" movies are a more recent example of this same fear, as is Neil Gaiman's bizarre novel American Gods (in which the narrator gets a horrifying peek "behind the curtain" of what we take for granted to be reality.) These reiterate that fear of "meaningless" chaos behind/below the surface of things and the fear that the seeing of it will drive us mad or , at least, fleeing back to ignorance.

But although that fear felt very real to me during those nights, and that chaos felt unspeakably horrifying, I kept taking my drops. (On some mornings, after a particularly intense night, I would get out of bed, completely committed to only seeking out love and light, healing and goodness, daisies and kittens for the rest of my life, so help me Goddess!) So why did I keep after it?

The French philosopher, Georges Bataille, in his ugly, paranoid writings, argued that only violence has enough intensity to "break everything that stifles." I am not a violent person, nor do I believe are the many other, more intrepid, westerners who have worked with teacher plants such as Datura, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca. But I do believe that Bataille was on the right track when he asserted that something of enough intensity was needed to break that which stifles. And right now there is way way too much that stifles in this culture, and by trickle-down, in our individual lives. I think that this intensity is what I kept coming back for - and what I kept resisting.

Now that I've had a few weeks to process my Datura diet, I recognize that the greater part of my fear was rooted in my hardened modern ego. One need only read accounts of indigenous shamans, or those who have had the good fortune to study with them, to understand the very sacred teaching Datura can impart. The nature writer Annie Dillard wrote of an incident when she was in grade school of a careless teacher who had placed a butterfly cocoon in a jar and then left it unattended. The butterfly emerged, but in the confines of the jar, was unable to stretch its new wet wings out fully so that they could dry and harden into useful shape. When the teacher realized the butterfly had emerged, she released it from the jar out into the schoolyard where the crippled creature with its malformed wings staggered off unable to fly. My point being, I guess, that powerful spirits such as Datura, in order to fully effect their teachings, must have more expansive containers than my hardened, tightly contained individual ego. Or else these beautiful winged teachings stagger off crippled, trying to teach me how to shape-shift inside the limits of my imagination using the body of a television character.

That, of course, says more about me - and about the culture in which I am embedded - than about gifts that Datura has to offer. And tried to offer me.

Datura is a powerful spirit being, and in its physical form, is like a gorgeously crafted, carefully-honed blade, a sharp-edged cutting tool. If It's your friend, it's the kind of friend you'd ask how your hair looks if you're really willing to hear that it looks like shit. Otherwise, don't ask. The gorgeous blossom of the Datura is pleated in sharp knife edges, and it's tight bell-shape images the kind of hard crystalline bell that, once struck, rings clear and cold. With leaves like arrowheads and seed pods like spiny grenades, Datura is willing to cut you to the bone, pierce you to the heart and blast apart all your happy self-talk. Take It seriously. Because. It means it.

I respect and honor the sacred being that is Datura. And It expects no less from any who approach It. (Please excuse my use of the non-gendered pronoun. Different cultures have gendered It differently throughout the ages of contact, but It remains what It is.) And respect is due all of these powerful teachers- plant, animal, spirit. They have been both gracious and cruel in our modern haphazard, laissez-faire dealings with them. But, of course, we must certainly be aware that the seeking out of "intensity" for its own sake, to alleviate boredom, to give a momentary high, can be tremendously costly. Falling in love, giving birth to a child, skiing that mountain and writing that poem are moments of breathtaking intensity. As also is a heart attack. Experiencing the death of one you love. The moment you strike that car in a head-on collision. Intensity is what it is, and if one does not approach it with respect, just wanting it to break you open, it will.

I'm not really asking for a life of kittens and daises. Nor am I asking for a life such as my "pre-historic" ancestors might have lived in which I take for granted that something large with many teeth will prey upon me. We have come far, but perhaps we took a wrong turn somewhere. We crave the intensity of the ancestral life while striving for the purposefulness of the new.

I personally don't believe that Lovecraft's two choices (in the quotation at the start of this blog) - going mad or fleeing into dark ages of ignorance - are the only choices. I believe that we can look straight and clear-eyed (though with tightening of breath) at the Old Beginning Chaos, and still, with chastened egos and real partnership with the others of this earth move into a Meaningful Purposeful evolution.

News from the Grassroots

noreply@blogger.com (Cynthia Froehlich) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 03:37:00 +0000

In the December 2009 issue of Green Nation News, my sparkling brilliant friend and teacher Pam Montgomery included an article about the great changes that will continue to occur into 2010, and cautioned us regarding the need for flexibility "to ride the wave of change as gracefully as possible." She advised the use of Willow essence for "flexibility and growth; Orchis spectabulis for evolving into the fifth dimension; Heal All for healing people, plants and animals during Earth changes, and Echinacea for protection from environmental pollution and electromagnetic overload."

Wise advice. And one could add a list of plant allies that any of us might turn to: Oak for strength; Rose for keeping our hearts open to the highest good; and Elder for helping us to always see the bigger picture. And I'm sure that many other practitioners of the plant-spirit path could add more.

But take a breath -- I have to remind myself. All these large and small catastrophes that have become our almost daily news diet! (The earthquake in Haiti now. It hadn't happened when I started writing the draft of this blog.) The destruction of habitats. The extinction of species. The huge damage done by our species to this earth. The knowing of all this that makes me sit up in the middle of the night in panic and think what more can I do? Reduce my carbon footprint? Buy only locally grown food? Grow more of my own food? Never support factory farms? Don't buy in to the big pharmaceutical lies? What can I do about the bees and the polar bears?!

All this. The best changes happen at the grassroots, right?

Ah, the grassroots! Literally - very, very literally! - changes are happening at the essential grassroots (so to speak!) How busy I get searching through my essences and trying to call upon this plant and that plant and the other! - and forgetting that I was not truly listening in all my panicked attempts to heal everything. Thus I show myself as very much the "sorcerer's apprentice" (picture here Mickey Mouse in Fantasia having called up way too many brooms to mop up the spilled water and now unable to direct all those wayward brooms!)

Just stop!! - I must say to myself. Now hear the earth and the real grassroots speak of real flexibility and transformation without me at all. And know that all these limits and boundaries that we humans set and fear are much more flexible and open-ended than we realize.

This from LiveScience on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 -- Surprising Sea Slug is Half-plant, Half-animal. (Yes, but only in our human-limited conceptualization of what is plant and what is animal!!) These sea slugs, seeming to know that much of the sea plant life upon which they fed is polluted and dying off, have taken chloroplasts into their own bodies and are photosynthesizing by themselves.

Or maybe take a look at this - again from LiveScience - that the orchid Angraecum cadetii in the Reunion Islands, whose main pollinator is a moth, doesn't have the moth it needs on those islands; so instead it has called a cricket to pollinate it. A cricket who is genetically geared to eat plants, not pollinate them. And yet now it does. Because the plant has called it.

And what about the Sardinian "Tongue" orchids in Michael Pollan's breathtaking NPR report that send messages back to the wasps who pollinate them saying "you must give us more males" -- and the wasp hive dutifully births more males to pollinate the orchids. (Orchids: Inflatable Love Dolls of the Floral Kingdom).

We speak and think of our "grassroots activism" as if it were the only grassroots activism that will save us all (us humans and the other beings with whom we share this earth.) And we sometimes forget that apart from us, with nothing to do with us at all, they are as flexible, as awake, and as evolving as we intend our own selves to be. Or more so.

Of course, those of us practicing shamanic techniques, plant spirit healing, and other earth-centered spiritualities must certainly continue to work, to listen and to partner with the beings of this planet as we strive to "gracefully ride this wave of change" (as Pam Montgomery so eloquently reminded us.) But we must also take many moments to stop ourselves in our tracks and remind ourselves that we are not the only ones working at the "grassroots." The grassroots are also working themselves - and more gracefully and brilliantly than we can even imagine. And, now and again they give us glimpses of magic beyond any magic or alchemy that any human has ever thought. They continue to teach us - and it is our task to become as adaptable as they are teaching us to be - and to surprise ourselves as much as they continue to surprise us.

[This is a photograph of one of my most sacred plant teachers: the Painted Trillium. I call him the "Sir Galahad" of the plants, who taught me about keeping my heart pure so that I might be able to see the "Grail" in front of me. He opened my "other" eyes.]