Tag Archives: place

Praise to Thickets Amongst Us

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Thicket along the watercourse; San Cristobal, NM

Down by the thickets of willows making their place where waters sometimes run (as a trickle or more.) This wayside is where the heart has its home, the air naturally cooling in this weave on a very hot day.

I’ve been here “on the property” for a little over two weeks but clearly haven’t arrived until now. This is my first day here in the grasses, on their way to tall, the filtered light in nuances more than I can count, the old bowing willow branches remind me of the ever present inspiration to the eye of an artist, perhaps the other way around. To draw this place or just to be and see and be touched by this wild order? The kind of beauty that can go so easily unnoticed, much less the amazing feat of interspecies communing, even those without voices, but textures, color, integrity take me over. The air is not the only element that is renewed here.

I want to say “on the other hand…” as I contemplate the contrast of the places that have been denuded (a stone’s throw from here) or stripped of their natural dignity by the use or appropriation for something we call “living our lives.” What I love about this wilder place by the draw behind the house is that life is already living here fully and I simply join in. This grand beingness of it all!

It’s not that this place is any better than someplace else, it’s just that it is THIS place and can be no other place! And how so very different it feels here than just fifty or a hundred yards away. What a gift this place speaks of my own nature, which sometimes seems much less human than just Being alive, sentience itself, able to be touched, penetrated by the exquisite weave of interpenetrating life, of consciousness. The magpies have their squawk and the mourning doves their cooing calls. The breeze, now at my back, stirs the green life alive into motion and sound. Is it the motion of things that we hear or is it something just a bit more illusive than that?

This up close visitation to the green of the thicket next to the seeping wallow brings me right to the taste of my own heart. They are not like the wider vistas of mountains in the distance with fields of sagebrush laying out before them, not like the open, open skies with all matter of clouds and blue in their ever-changing atmosphere-scape. Here things crowd in without any feeling of density or overbearingness. Here is intimacy, did I say that already, of brush and bower, of grass and twig, of every kind of insect and butterfly with the light ever shifting amongst it all. I become part of a nourishment cycle; bathing in spirit of thicket and this very place.

At the Portal

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Best description I have here is that I’m at or aware of some kind of portal. I drew this portal today, which is what tells me it has some presence, some existence somewhere in my being, in the psyche that I resonate with energetically, something of that order.

At this opening, sometimes there is a force pulling me in, sometimes it is something pressing out or visceral pressure as if pushing against. It can change in a millisecond and that’s when it’s most felt, in that fluctuation. A whole other array of energies come into play in that second, as if there is an acute sensate awareness of what is both above and below simultaneously.

Yes, it’s as if the two distinct realities have gotten mixed and some alchemical reaction occurs in that instant. So much information floods through somatically. My brain triggers chemicals left and right, consciousness is in its feasting season, the Beloved has appeared and disappeared both, leaving a wave of breathlessness, insight, exhaustion, and longing all rolled into one.

What feels so appropriate in this drawing is that what is pointed to is the portal, not that which exists or is sensed or felt on either side of it, above or below or even through. It comes to me why some religions have approached the subject of depicting the image of the Beloved, of God and been unable to come up with anything but outright forbidding of such a practice. That which is felt here certainly feels sacred, pure beingness, that which remains unnamed.

And yet, the draw is so very real, the draw to see, to know, to behold, to understand, and to reemerge. For me, these actions are beautifully interwoven, such that one without the rest is essentially partial, not complete. The work of this place is work without working for or towards something. Things happen, but nothing can be done. Things come, the work is resting in What Is.

I had a dream on the evening of March 31st that throngs of people were moving toward me through a narrow passage and I was making my way in the opposite direction. If I were to continue on my way, I was literally having to walk on, climb over others or over their legs and shoulders, squeezing through with some kind of drive that seemed pure spirit. The intensity of this convergence has marked me in some way.

Where is the surrender? Surrender to the drive of spirit, to the nearly inhuman urge forward, to something that seems so single minded or certain that it can withstand such force? And may it be possible as I become one with it all, each element in its place is an aspect of this extraordinary confluence of energies as perceived by this consciousness.