Weaver

What if we were less like birds – skating across the surface to escape this world – and more like trees: channeling the divine energy of infinity through our bodies and plunging deep into the earth?

Enjoy this 8-minute read, or let me read it to you via the recording at the top of the webpage!

What if it’s not about transcending? What if we aren’t here – as all the religions seem to say – to be liberated from suffering to enjoy paradise or enlightenment? What if all our efforts at perfection were in reality separating us from who we really are? That would explain how lost and unworthy we feel, how empty we remain despite all our efforts.

Many people I know are done – done with being here and done with being human. I hear them say: “beam me up”. “Someone hit the eject button.” One wants to resolve their karma so they never have to come back. I get it. Being human is hard. But it simply doesn’t make sense that we’re here just to get somewhere else. Or that we’re here to make things better when everything feels stacked against us and impossibly stuck in a crash course with struggle and conflict.

What if we were less like birds – destined to soar above the storms – and more like trees: channeling sunlight deep into the earth? What if our job isn’t to escape this world, but to infuse another world into this one: to bring energy into matter, thought into form, lightness into the heavy? To develop our bodies as conduits – not for spiritual forces that purify us, but for spiritual forces that transform everything we encounter?

If this were true, our job then is not to skate safely across the surface of things, to rise above bitterness and grief, anger and greed, but to penetrate into their depths and bring with us in our being and in our wake the consciousness and vibration of higher realms. We become like needles, thread in expansive silence, then plunged deep into constriction and chaos so that light and air collide with water and earth and alchemize something new. We become accidental magicians drawing mercury into sulfur to form a new material beyond our understanding, ability, or even intention.

Communing with the other worlds is vital. We must know them to know truth, to know comfort and courage, to receive the healing our gaping wounds demand that no other medicine can tend. This world has been losing its grip for centuries on how to nurture a true human being, and now those arts exist primarily in the other realms. If we’re lucky, we find practices that can open doors. But most of the real medicine is held by the ancestors, the spirit guides, the archtypes. I’ve never seen them. They seldom speak to me in words. But when I’m willing and lucky, I feel them moving through my body, loosening the tightness of fear, soothing the heat of anger, blanketing the raw loneliness. They restore me to my original shape. They root me in my home with them which is in the deep recesses of my body. They strengthen the synapses between those subtle inner movements that nudge me, all day: Go here. Say this. Turn toward.

Its never what I think it is: the idea of a spiritual life, the intention to serve. Those create a life of true meaning. I’m not above – observing from the outside, tossing a life line from a safe distance. I’m in it. I’m practically suffocating with life – the demands, diversions, doubts and difficulties. But there are always little ways I can do something, something that scares me but serves my purest longing. I can pot a patio tree. I can drive across town to an event. I can listen to a friend’s painful story. I can set-up a dating profile. I can write an article. I can sing a song. Anything that serves what matters to me and that something in me says I shouldn’t or couldn’t do.

In doing those things, I inhabit my body and my life more fully – not a dream or an idea, but my reality. I am no longer only in the difficulty, but holding a thread of what is possible – of the urgings of my true being in human form, of hope. And that opens a door – a door that allows my simple act of being to channel what’s needed around me: the exact word in the party game that no one else can guess, the catnip hit for the anxious neighbor tabby, the psychological concept phrased in precisely the way someone needed to hear it to finally understand, the exact way to reconfigure a team so everyone is doing their best, most effortless work.

Some call this intuition or being in flow. One might also think of it as “spiritualizing matter.” We come to know the place beyond us – the realm of eternal renewal, we bring it into our bodies, and our bodies carry it into the world. We become like trees that harness the emanations of the sun and impregnate the earth with nutrients, drawing energy from the cosmos to penetrate physical reality. We become like bees who gather packets of pollen and deliver them to ready flowers. We plunge the felt sense of spirit into bodies of matter – our flesh, our relationships, our stories that guide our actions.

The animals and plants know how to do this. They each puncture the world with their unique intelligence – creating and shaping myriad forms and flows. We alone have forgotten we are here to do the same. Each creature is matter animated by spirit. Our job is to inhabit our bodies and lives wakefully, conscious of where we come from and how that place guides us to be in this one. This requires us to make a home in the infinite and a home in the finite, to know ourselves as vast, timeless beings and as limited vulnerable mortals.

We bring the knowing of the cosmos into our little lives, we see ancient patterns playing out in our tiny worlds, we remember how the micro and macro fit together and a little piece of earth, a little piece of the inert and lifeless begins to dance.

May these words from the part of me that remembers speak to the part of you that has forgotten. May they drift like a gentle breeze past the clutches of your mind, right to the place where you first emerge out into the world and may they settle there as a sweetness, a lullaby. Soften, my dear. Let the energies of spirit and matter mix and morph. Listen to the whispers and believe them. Believe them even and especially when your tongue and your hands fail to do them justice. Let it all fill you. And then plunge deep. This is the thread you carry and the way we weave our world together.

Know that this requires a great forgetting: to plunge so deeply into the world. But you will be nudged awake, reach for that thread as your own lifeline, and pull it into places it would never have touched without your plummet. And there – right where you lay your hand – will sprout something of beauty that would never have existed without you.

Nancy

“Weaver you are goal-bent, but do your strings hold the strength of what was given when you flew in?” – Ayla Nereo