Avatar and Mother Earth

After a long, seemingly endless time in the dark of my own soul, I am emerging again. And I am emerging with anger and ferocity that I have not felt within myself in a long time. It is an anger that guides me toward true north, and helps me to shed all that does not serve.
And now, my anger is in response to the movie "Avatar," which chronicles the destruction of a beautiful planet by the US military, in hope of raping and pillaging the land on that planet for their own greedy purposes. To me, this is the truth of the very story that has been happening right here on Mother Earth, and it is a story that I have been familiar with for a long time. And it is a story that has plunged me into the depths of despair and hopelessness, feeling that there is nothing that I, just one woman, can do to make a difference. But in spite of that hopelessness, this anger is rising within me again, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, pointing me in the direction of my own life's deeper purpose.
This morning an old friend of mine published a comment on his facebook wall about the movie, saying that it was far from a "life changer." He is from the south, a good Christian man, and while that has rarely felt like an intrusion into our friendship, the undercurrents of our vastly different beliefs have surfaced on occasion. And here, I can't help but wonder, do the vast majority of Christians really, truly believe that the Earth is here for our domination and taking, and that it doesn't really matter what happens here, that only what comes beyond this life is of any importance? Because if they do, there is truly no hope for the planet. We will collectively continue to rape and pillage Her until we become extinct ourselves. Do these people *truly* believe that Jesus wants it this way, that this is the will of God? Do they believe that honoring the Earth herself as holy and sacred is profane and dangerous, pagan, even evil? I can't even begin to comprehend that way of thinking and living.
There is no Daddy God in the Sky out there who is going to save our wretched asses from our own foolish actions!!
In order to really "save the environment/planet/Earth" we must move beyond the simple ideas we have implemented that are just not enough. Recycling is good, and should absolutely be required by law...and it's not enough. We must use less, change our attitudes, leave behind our disposable culture. Reusing is essential. We are lazy fucks, for the most part, and need to get over it. Reduction of our waste generation is absolutely required. Wealth does not equal the choice to manufacture endless crap, then cast it aside, and then manufacture more endless crap. That is childish and fickle at best, and is causing great destruction. Beyond this, energy use is changing, too. Hybrid electric vehicles, solar and wind power, and the like are really good steps in the right direction. But we still demand what we want when we want it. What will bring us to CHOOSE to use less, drive less, need less? We are slaves to our comfort, to our convenience, to our whims and desires, and they are costing a great deal more than money.
Ultimately, there is no true solution possible unless we step down from our high pedestal as humans, the dominant species, and become a part of the family of Mother Earth, along with the plants, minerals, waters, and animals. We must drop our human-centric nature, and learn to love the whole Earth as our brothers and sisters, ancestors and children. AHO.

Feeling Lost

I don't like spending time with the dark parts of myself. I am a being who is usually very much drawn to the light. I'm not talking about day and night here, but inner realms and experience. I am not drawn to negativity, pessimism, depression, or hopelessness. Not that I don't experience them in my life, because surely I do. But I am naturally drawn to joy, optimism, love, and effervescence. Angela "Blueskies" is hugely fitting to the state of being that is most natural to me. But it's been quite a while since I inhabited those states of being on a regular basis. My name right now may as well be Angela "Thundercloud."

Anger has been barging its way into the hopelessness and sadness these last few days. At first, I thought it was coming along with my cycle, the usual anger and aggression that often accompany it. But this has lingered and intensified. There is a track in my mind that feels like a tiger, waiting silently, patiently to strike to kill anyone who crosses me in the slightest way. This part imagines confrontations, and imagines scenarios and outcomes that involve tremendous violence in words and actions. Now, I haven't been acting upon any of these scenarios, but I have been watching them, especially these last couple days. I haven't even seen any point in leaving the house. It seems that when I do, unbelievably frustrating things happen.

The question that has been a recurrent mantra in my mind has been "what is the fucking point of any of this?!" I feel like a hamster stuck on a wheel, or at least in a little shitty cage. But I KNOw that I'm that hamster, stuck on a pointless fucking wheel, inside a prison of a shitty cage, and I KNOW that there's more outside of it, and yet I can't seem to find the way.

I have experienced firsthand - in ceremony and in meditation and in community - the most incredible beauty in this world, in this life. I have felt the sublime power of love. I have felt held in the womb of Mother Earth. I have seen things I couldn't have ever believed, and felt things that called into question everything that I have ever known. And in spite of all of that, the death of Familiar kitty has marked life with a heavy darkness. And part of that darkness has disconnected me from those truths that come from living in the Light. I remember them as a novel right now...characters and scenes from a life that are bound to the page, yet not my own.

I posted a question on Facebook the other day: "What gets you out of bed in the morning?" The answers that I received were depressing beyond my imaginings. I also had included an aside to that question, "besides the alarm clock or coffee," hoping to suggest I was looking for the *meaning* of getting out of bed in the morning. Not once person who answered went there. The answers? The dog, the cat, the kid, hunger, needing to pee. And honestly, these are the things that I have been feeling in my life, lately, too. Never before have I felt like I got out of bed for food or a piss. I got out of bed because the light of day pulled my spirit into the world to LIVE. But right now, I am feeling that I, too, get up to eat, poop, and sleep again. And after living my life from a place of intense meaning and connection, living with these things as my drives is the most devastating thing I have ever known.

I cannot wake up in the morning and get out of bed if all there is to my life is eating, pooping, making money, and sleeping again. If that's all there is, then let me die right fucking now.

I already know, somewhere deep inside of me, that there is way, way more to life. But when I try to go there, it's as if I'm dumb or something. Like the part of me that knows that has been blocked off somehow. And yet the question, the longing remains. I know that a new pair of fuzzy boots is a great thing, but it doesn't give meaning to my day. Stuff doesn't give meaning to my day. Material things don't give meaning to my day. Their absence can be a pain in the ass, for sure - as it was tonight, when I discovered that the tape deck in my car no longer works, and that is what I use to play my Ipod - but that's not living and dying. It's a fucking tape deck. And the boots are fucking boots. I also know that getting rich and buying a fancy car and house won't give meaning to my life. It's just more stuff that might make me "comfortable" and make me feel "abundant" but it's essentially just more garbage.

What about finding a partner and having a family? While these things certainly do add some sense of meaning to life, undoubtedly, and provide some sense of structure to daily living that is rooted in living communally, when it comes down to it, unless the deeper meaning of life is clear first, these things just become another path toward material living. Getting the right stuff for the couple, getting the right stuff for the kid. And good god, raising a kid in a material paradigm? That makes me want to die, too...

Anything external, really, is guaranteed NOT to add meaning to life. Those things are just distractions. It's the inner stuff that really gives meaning to my day. And it's relationships, too, the ways that these inner worlds of people (and animals) come together and create the world together. And right now, I am feeling betrayed by that. All those years of loving, and one day it's all gone. It's as if it never happened - except in my heart, that is. How is that fair??? When I go down this track of thinking, then I feel like there's no point to life at all, we're just waiting around to die. And it's no fucking wonder that all the religions have made up things like "heaven." That's the greatest comfort ever, believing that at the end of the line, we'll be reunited all together in one big angelic party, with harps and clouds and that crap. I don't buy it for a minute.

The Buddhists really do lay it all out with no bullshit. Change happens constantly, and there is no external God to believe in. All we can do is accept that everything is going to fall apart, and love in spite of that, with as much compassion as possible. Life is going to pull the rug out from under us again and again. And eventually, it will be our very own body that has the rug pulled out from under it. As much as I try, I can't find anything in that that encourages me to embrace a spiritual path even more fully than before. If anything, I feel inclined to come back to my original question: "what's the point anyway?" I don't buy into any of that heaven and angels crap, and haven't since I was a child. The coddling of religion offers me no solace at all. But I have been spiritually motivated for years - right now, I can't even feel connected to that.

Well, at least I am walking in circles with the question...

Gratitude to my Plant Teachers

I can hardly believe how chilly these mornings are becoming! I am sitting here on my porch, wrapped in a blanket as I write. Puffy white clouds are floating by, and there are four graceful birds soaring on the highest wind currents. Turkey vultures. Such wicked, gnarly looking creatures! And yet, as they fly far above, they seem to be one of the few species of birds that are floating for pleasure, riding the waves of the wind without hurry or imminent purpose. Of course, they are scouting for dinner, but with what abandon and ease!

The sun is bolder today, and I am yearning to feel it on my body...not much sun on the porch until mid-afternoon, unfortunately. The pink cones on the Magnolia are looking fuzzy, and turning a duller shade of pinkish-brown...oh, how this evolution thrills me, day after day, to watch the world changing in front of my very eyes! It's so easy to believe that things are the same, day after day...but when major change comes, it feels epic, catastrophic, or completely unheralded. But sitting here on my little spot on the porch, I am grateful to watch the world around me changing every day, little by little.

And as I contemplate the neverending flow of change, I, too, am remembering the space of Mushroom Medicine. It, like the other plant medicines I have worked with, takes me into a space of timelessness. When the intensity of the Mushrooms comes into me, I am tuned into a sound that I call, "the sound of eternity," a symphony of perfectly orchestrated birdsong, rushing water, and wind in the trees. This sound calls to me to leave behind the time-bound world that I inhabit in my normal waking life, and to sink deeply into the space of eternity...a place where change occurs on the microcosmic level, but where the constant is livingness, aliveness that persists beyond any brokenness, decay, or semblance of death. Aliveness that, too, transcends the apparent differences of trees and animals and rocks and earth and being human.

In my last ceremony with this medicine, nearly three months ago, I faced this truth - that Life - God - Universe - is indifferent to my little life and place in the cosmos. And it came to me in a vision that showed me the world as a two-dimensional grid of existence that was NOT beautiful or connected or alive at all. This, followed by an intense encounter with Death, sent me into a time of existential crisis. Everything that I felt connected to became distant. My spiritual path made no sense. I was filled with fear and meaninglessness, and felt lost, completely lost. Now, looking back on that encounter, I am grateful beyond words.

I grew up in the South, in the Bible Belt, in a culture that was infused with fear-based views of God and Jesus, and a lot of unquestioned attachment to the mythology that accompanies that way of life. I never felt comfortable within those circles of religion, but knew no alternative. As soon as I moved away to college -
Baltimore - I met people who held different views on life, on what was holy, on the nature of reality. What a blessing it was! I walked away from the Christianity of my childhood without thinking twice, and was grateful to shed such a limiting view of the world. Leaping forward to the ceremony above, what I have come to understand is that while I walked away from the religion and culture of my childhood, and changed my mind about so many fearful, dogmatic beliefs, those things still existed within my body. My entire way of being for the first 18 years of my life had not only created my mind, but had become part of the very structure of my body, too. And up until this past summer, I had only walked away from beliefs and feelings that didn't fit. I had never gone deeply into the way these old ideas lived on inside of my very cells.

In that Mushroom ceremony, I was shaken and unravelled beyond anything I had previously experienced. I now see that the worldview of my childhood was being shaken and unravelled out of my body. My cosmology was being brought into deep alignment. And all those old beliefs - that God exists outside of me, the nature of life and death, the meaning of prayer, and my connection to the divine - were being vigorously uprooted. What a blessing, but what a difficult process! And now, as I sit here on my porch, I am not unconsciously ruled by those old beliefs that color my experience.

I am endlessly grateful for the powerful plant teachers that have changed my life. I don't think anyone ever suggested that living a deep path of spiritual awakening could be like this! A process of meeting God by truly meeting myself. Of letting go of beliefs instead of adopting new ones. Of embracing my true nature instead of breaking that nature into something more manageable, less sinful, or whatever. Of relaxing into myself, of resisting nothing, of allowing my heart to lead me. Of being who I am, instead of creating a better version of myself. Of abandoning any path of seeking outside of myself, and allowing the revelations to come from within, and trusting that with all of my heart. No, no one ever told me that if I wanted to meet God, that I would find that presence within every cell in my body, and within every living thing upon the Earth. And truly, no one ever told me that knowing these things would bring me more humility and compassion than anything I could imagine those words to mean.