Remember when Adam spoke, and defiant, you let him name you: Woman. Defiant, you held out impatient hands to carry the burdens of his naming. You saw him name himself and voluntarily step into the laborious chains that he, himself, created. Within this ever-closing sphere, the simple act of beholding yourself in the abundant waters of Earth became a crime. For he was threatened when you saw the beauty and the immensity reflected there. Labeled vain, you became a creature to be broken.
-Annea’rah
Star at heart, and brow, and throat
She enters in the Earthen lair
Carried in a thin-hulled boat.
Stripling-woven, Starlight fair
What secrets does she carry there?
Abiding long,
Awaiting song,
Holding steady
Taut and ready,
Quivering,
Shivering,
Aching as
An unsung note.
It is no accident that Kin first arrived into Annea’rah’s presence in the deeps of winter. Guided by a pearl-feathered owl winging through the still, unlit forest, luminous as a fallen moon. Kin stepped off a crumbling, uncertain path and into a place of mystery.
It would not be the last time she followed the sudden rush, the instinct that guided both herself and these animal spirits to somewhere new and unknown that called. Breath forming ephemeral sigils in the crisp, cold air, she walked deep into a timeless, unmeasured place, and there she found Annea’rah waiting in a hut made of hide.
Despite perennially frozen fingers and toes, my body’s unlikely conformation (whip- thin, I carry very little of my own warmth) I am drawn to the winds, the falling snow of northern places. I was born in Minneapolis, a place that has lately and often become the center of unrest, uneasiness, immense courage, and unfathomable brutality.
I am not a pundit, and I cannot speak to or for the ones whom I love, who have been thrust into a situation that exceeds, as peaceful, good-hearted people, any sort of training or preparation they could have been given in this life. I cannot imagine what it is like to have every expression, every innocent movement, seized, co-opted, and politicized. What I can do is listen beneath the surface of tension, outrage, bewilderment, and obliterating rhetoric. I can create and allow a space for us to express true grief. When I am at a loss, I return to our inner place of shared humanity. The untainted, un-manipulatable place of connection, heart to aching heart. Not everyone will meet us here, but their choices are not our fault. This space of connection is one of profound non-judgment, a space of no-agenda, where we can authentically, and without fear, feel and express the loss, the grief that arises when ones we love are hurting and being hurt.
We have been told that LOVE is the most powerful force, most powerful presence in existence. We have been told that love will overcome, that love will heal all wounds, that love is an unconditionally redeeming force that knows no limits and recognizes no boundaries. The time has come, like it has never come before, to test the foundation, the strength, and the endurance of this truth.
What happens when we remain in a state of love? Can we trust it? Can we trust this love to guide us, to heal us, to strengthen us even when the world as we know it is being turned, when the ugliness of fear and greed is writ large and small, invading even the innocent rhythms and movements of our lives? Love can feel so featherlight. It is so often such a yielding, yin way of being, arising as surpassing tenderness. How can something so non-direct, so soft, take on the sharp, relentless cruelties and abominations that are being perpetrated against our fellow humans?
I would like to resurrect an old teaching from my very first book. Written in the deeps of winter, in a remote cabin in Vermont, I had just returned from my travels abroad. Brimming with light codes, with only a flickering, tenuous connection to this physical world, I woke each morning to the scattered, diamond-bright arcs of frost on the windows. Turkey and deer made tracks in the snow, and I would go days without seeing anyone. I was in, I realize now, that reindeer hut, the place where Annea’rah and I first met. This was one of the things she taught me. Alone, taken with the fever of the epidemic, my face pale and ghastly, I would wake up to write. The visions that crept in through unguarded gates playing havoc with reality. Exhausted, I would return to bed. Every day I would wake up and write, my whole being concentrated into that single act.
This is the Teaching of Presence that I received on the fifth day of my fever (strangely, it broke after the final teaching, the teaching of Devotion which arrived on the seventh day of my fever. On the eighth day I awoke, free of pain). The teachings of presence are so often the teachings of love, of which I speak.
Teachings of Presence
Water is the teaching of presence. To be at once still and flowing, to be a clear reflection of all that looks upon it and yet utterly, wholly itself, such is presence.
Whisper to water and watch its very molecules form temples to your words. Whisper love to water, and drink in love. Whisper your hopes and dreams and the water, with the infinite wisdom of the universe, forms your answer. And as you drink, you bring that answer into your body…
Water is the emotional body of the Earth, the sensitive communication of realms unable to be accessed by the sharp, probing spear of the mind. Plunge a spear into water and it emerges again, dripping, frustrated. The water has affected the spear, but the spear has not affected the water. Its depths remain unplumbed, unknown. The mind cannot fathom the emotions, cannot reveal their secrets. Presence is not of the mind. It is the riverbed; it is the ground beneath the ocean. It is the holding of emotions, the merging with them to know their shape, their form, their wisdom.
The body itself is water. It is yin, receptive. The molecules of the body are mutable. They believe every word you say. They form temples to your words. The frequency of your words, rippling from the center of your throat, change the nature of your body, change the shape of your cells, the atoms that are you.
What is water? It is a lake. It is snow. It is the ocean. It is the rain. It is at once the charging rapids and the still pond. It is the avalanche. It is melted crystal. It is the glittering teeth of icicles.
What is water? How can it be all of these things? Your mind wants to know, but it can only recite facts. You cannot use the spear of your mind to know water. You cannot use the mind to know the body, or your life. You must become it.
Presence is the teaching of water. In presence, you believe every word another says. You take on the shape of their words unresisting. Like the still pond you reflect their reality back to them. Such is love. You become water poured into a glass, a vessel, a pitcher. Sometimes the other will hate what they see. They plunge their spears into you, but they seek only to destroy their own reflection. You are the pond, the river; you remain unaltered by their attacks.
Presence is the deep listening of the ocean, an unfathomable listening. Presence is the reception of frequencies unseen and unheard by the eye, the ear, the mind. With presence your body vibrates with opening. It becomes a receiver for the truth that shivers beneath words, beneath appearances, beneath thought.
Whisper to water and drink in your truth. Look into water and see yourself as you were created. Become water and you will know presence.
From The New Eden: Paradise Retold,
Can we become this? The one arriving to the Earthen lair of secrets only communicated through the presence, the listening, the becoming of a yin, yielding, and un-resisting depth? The one arriving with heart, throat, and eye of vision intact? the one carrying a golden sun of truth, so precious, so immense, so untouchable by fear that we glow with anticipation at its revelation?
