https://ceseedproduction.wordpress.com/
This project is so important because what they are sharing is ultimately about our survival on planet Earth. There is a Kickstarter campaign for the documentary that is waiting for your support. Our seed diversity is in our hands.
https://ceseedproduction.wordpress.com/
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Today as Ubuntu and I started out into the damp and almost raining world for our walk, it wasn’t long before he came upon his favorite attractant…something white! Since he was very young, he was mysteriously drawn to things white that lay on the floor or ground. Today, it was a clump of deer fur still attached enough to the small piece of damp hide that it stayed intact and lay just below the sage brush. He pounced on it and …knowing me too well…he instantly had it fully in his mouth with his jaws clamped. My task was to open his mouth and take it away. “ahh Mom” I could almost hear him say.
Kleenexes accidentally dropped on the floor have long been an easy target…he loves to take them before I can get to them and go prancing off to a safe corner to devour them….the more used, the better! Yes, he eats them! Last spring, when Evening Primroses were in abundance here, I saw him repeatedly fooled by the track in his brain that had him think they were Kleenexes or toilet paper and then seem disappointed that there were only sweet smelling delicate white flowers that bloom close to the earth. We are trackers by heart….how many of us have seen something and then noticed that we see it’s shape again and again…or think we do. Yesterday while Ubuntu and I were out walking near Prescott, AZ with my dear friend Delisa and her dog Jaxon, we came upon a gorgeous snake in the creek…probably 4 feet long with an elegant profusion of brown and white chevrons on it’s back. I quickly looked for rattles and a diamond head and seeing that was not who it was, I felt safe to stand and watch it’s grace and sensuous ways. As we moved on from there…again and again, every stick and branch became snake! We are hard wired to see patterns….why? I have used this to my advantage in other ways, besides safety in the past too…when looking for something lost on the ground, I look at something else that might look similar on the earth, and magically, my eyes are more attuned to see the lost item. It works. As we walked today in the light Spring rain, Ubuntu again found white. Down the wash way near a hovering Pinyon tree, were the white bones of probably that same deer…a vacant rib cage still bearing the threads of it’s sinews and flesh, a part of the vertebrae and more. Then again…a larger piece of the hide with mostly it’s white underside and that white underfur from it’s belly. Tracking white we are led. Tracking and pattern-stalking is absolutely relevant to leading a soul-filled life…we must use all our senses and all our experiences to uncover the threads that carry our story…the resonances of our particular soul thread. Signs and symbols come again and again in the visible world, in our imagination, in dreams, in emotions, in the way we are drawn to things we don’t understand…always there is something invisible moving in our worlds and our task is to see it through some kind of soulful vision that understands even invisible patterns. Not unlike the stealthy big cats that move in the fringes of the human worlds and was likely the predator of the deer we found….they are rarely seen, but their presence is. They are solitary creatures…shy, with an incredible range….Soul-similar. I am finding myself very lucky to have this time to saturate myself in a kind of life of tracking. I don’t have too much to distract me, so I can pay attention. In the busy lives that most humans live, we rarely have the time and energy to become great intuitive trackers…. Our ability and choice to be present to what is here…to gain insight from saying yes to whatever our nose can sniff out through the twists and turns of our lives…is a part of our movement towards leading a conscious life. Today, what was Spring yesterday, awakened me with Winter’s way.
My secret garden was both surprised and yet, in it’s deepest deep, was not surprised at all. It knows how the world turns and wakes us with ways that challenge and delight. I knew it was bound to be cold this night, so I carefully laid a cover of warmth over the small seedling bed of greens. Only yesterday I was digging the trenches for the potatoes to nestle in, and I cut and lay out the seed potatoes for drying so that today they could go in the ground. I imagined a different day today somehow…on this day of our first community market where seeds and plants were to be sold. This cold and snow may kill some of these young sprouting ones, or halt the permission given to others to break through into shape and form and push for the light. There are so many things that get in our way on the path of the new. And yet for others…for the seed shapes that still wait in some kind of misunderstood hesitation in earth, perhaps this late snow fall and thick grey sky, may be providing exactly what that one needs. We are all ground for possibility and yet the mystery of what comes through into visibility and what stays in the invisible realm is some alchemical equation of magic that we will never understand. Our personal will undeniably plays a part, but it is certainly not the all of it. We dwell in a world of relationality with all things…we all affect each other…each event…each being…each shift in the cosmological unfolding effects us, whether we know it or not. SO when our mind has a particular plan with time modules and exact start and end dates, it is often triggered by the fact that there is another far greater plan that is actually directing…or perhaps allowing the way of the world to show us it’s way. I see this in my world of “release/sabbatical” with my mind’s idea that this would last 7 months and then suddenly I’d be swept up again in the world of work and have a beautiful new ambition and task and an income would be again flowing in. Well, from this perspective of 5+ months in, it’s not really looking that way. I feel myself to be, as Joseph Campbell puts it, in the belly of the whale….a kind of world womb…or cocoon. So much of who I’ve known myself to be has dissolved and gone into question. I find no shape that I know as me…I am in a place I’ve not known before and there is not yet even a dreamed of form that tells me when or how I might emerge. I am, like those tiny seeds just under ground, feeling the snow’s weight and again darkness laying over me, in question as to when or whether I will emerge from this place of darkness. Our culture has evolved to a place that has a very difficult time accepting this approach to life for humans….the approach that allows mystery a place and cycles their time. It is not only my own inner judgements and fears that surround me, but the world’s as well. Our minds want a schedule and our bookkeeping wants income. But as my sister, Susanna is now asking as a “world view” CPA….what really IS of value? what puts a black mark on the page that will carry us forward? And what causes a red mark that could sink the whole darn ship?? We have placed our trust in dollars and yet, it is precisely that that seems to have put us into a place of undoing in the world. And so I bring myself back to the heart of my secret garden and look there to trust this excursion into ‘becoming seed.’ I can only echo earth and lay my trust in it’s illimitable cyclic wisdom. How can I be separate from that? Let the snow fall and let me trust it’s purposeful place. "As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines.
Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder. Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension. The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is." ~Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel "Living in the moment,
however, is the most dangerous situation anybody ever faces in life, because everything you have ever avoided is revealed to you when you live in the moment. You get to face all the denied contents of your subconscious as they reappear again and again through the events of your life." ~Amrit Desai Last week I hit a hard wall…a wall of fear. I danced between my simple and grounded awareness of the events and my experiential emotional response to it, and being completely captured by the fear of it all. It was not an easy week. And truth be told…much of this time of stepping back and away and spending so much time alone, has challenged me to my deepest core. It has asked me to question most all of the way I have lived my life and what it is all about. It is the threshold phase of a vision quest, times one hundred...other-worldly and disorienting! And I am seeing that it is only in this sustained reflective space of no-thingness, that some of my most core wounds and incessant and rampant “protector”/critic voices are being seen now by me…and tended.
I am grateful and phew!!! some days I sense I am being taken down. I have felt elated and I have felt stamped out…devoid of any knowing of who I am. Well, that’s the work, right?…isn’t that the prayer of so many seekers? of so many traditions…to shed all the manufactured skins we have cloaked ourselves in, in order to fit in or even survive, in the hope of finding out something of who we really are? Of what is real and unreal? One day last week while wrestling with the demons of the empty space of my life…the missing of loving mirrors of who I am…of arms to hold me, I sent myself to my wee “blow-sand” garden that somehow, miraculously turns into a jungle of nourishment every summer. I went to turn the compost…which has long been a tradition in moments of despair and confusion. I dug and dug…not unlike Ubuntu’s response to when he hears some silent sound underground. I was aware of my ego’s response to the fear that was welling up in me…the judgments of my inner assessor… she was going wild with urgent plans to fill this space in my life….”I MUST get a job…get working…that will help!!” or “I’ll make plans to do another road trip…that’ll show me a way through” or there must be something I could do that will be valuable, or or or. She was terrified…and there were plenty of moments when I was hard pressed to find my Adult Soother Self. But with time…and a lot of breath…I could see the play. It didn’t particularly make it alot easier in that moment…but I am trusting a much bigger scheme than this week or month, is at play. Last night I dreamt an apocalyptic dream….a catastrophic event was happening…a great flaming something was falling from the sky and bound to impact Earth in a devastating way. What I was adamant about….dedicated to…the ONLY thing there WAS to do according to my dream self, was to plant the garden…to plant seeds. Over and over I was telling everyone that we MUST plant a garden so that we could feed ourselves. PLANT SEEDS! This message strikes me personally in my dedication during this time to “becoming seed” but also on a very practical level. I wondered as I brushed my teeth and walked in the greening field with Ubuntu, am I simply to devote myself to growing food at this moment? Or am I to be planting seeds on multitudes of levels now? Including continuing to plant myself in the dark soils of transformation? Or both and all of it? I love that Dream-Maker. |
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February 2019
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Chapters1. Becoming Seed
2. Blooming Forth |