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Here is a Blog I just posted:
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!
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