Years ago, I began writing a post-apocalyptic novel about a tribe of edge runners who worked with dreams and visionary states as seeds for new ways of being on earth. Life spun me away from the manuscript.
When I tried to go back and work on it again its life force was gone, as if the golden threads I’d been following in the fiction woven through my own life so deeply there was no need to return to the book. I’d already composted what it was meant to teach me. As I ask for a way to begin what I want to tell you, part of that old manuscript comes alive and circles into the present like a bird looking for a place to land.
In the dream, Odin walks through a stretch of desert without even a star to guide him. The night has gone opaque as if a thick blanket’s been pulled over the world. Stones move under his feet. In his nose is the familiar scent of sagebrush. The only illumination comes from the light of a fire that burns in the distance. That light is all that exists, and so he moves toward it. Swimming through the dark as if it were deep water.
On the other side of the fire, an old woman sits cross-legged on a tattered wool blanket. A smell scurries in the ceiling of his memory. A terror gone unnamed. Her eyes look through him and out into the desert as if they can see the world in its entirety: every joy, every famine, every wound. She moves her hands toward him, and in her palms are two large glass balls. The one in her left is blue, metallic. The one in her right a smoked vermilion.
He knows the glass balls represent two worlds, that he must make a choice. Inner or outer? Death or wild? The old woman’s are open, alive, looking through him into other worlds. The globes in her hands tremble from effort. Past or future? Her shaking hands ask him. Which do you choose?
He follows her gaze to the place her awareness has gone, travels with her into the darkness. With his eyes soft, he can see the images that pulse and shimmer inside the spheres the same as she can. Can see that one holds his life backward from this moment, the other his life looking forward. The old woman’s gaze surfaces in his eyes, and his whole nervous system starts like a wild thing at the sight of a predator. But instead of the terror or judgment he expects, a great loving presence passes into him. Her gaze SEES him right down to the stardust of his bones and beyond even that intimacy, to the light that flickers at the heart of his being.
This is how we create the future, her gaze tells his cells. We choose. Her eyes looking into his eyes, filled with love and compassion and the achingly ancient depth of her seeing.
When I wrote this the words shimmered up from a vault secreted deep in the heart of the earth. It took years for my understanding to catch up with what the writing knew. To understand it, I had to become my own version of the old woman, had to sit at the foot of myself, to let in the truths of my experience and work them through. As a species, we’ve reached the moment in the dream where those two shimmering spheres are offered to us. Will we choose the future? Or are we going to keep repeating the long-dead constructs our culture has told us will keep us safe? On the other side of the thin veneer of social conditioning and routine everything is moving and available to us: everything we’re scared to feel, every power we’ve given away, every grief, every freedom, every rage. It’s all flowing through our unconscious like a river, thick with the whistle of eagle feathers, riots of bear and elk, all swimming with pieces of the world held in their mouths. Pieces that we need.
We have the power to create the future at this moment. To birth the kind of freedom, community, and connection that supports the brilliant diversity of ALL life. This river of possibility flows through the maps of our DNA, through the blood that joins our hands with those of our ancestors. Here, where the holy leans in against the horrible. Where the quickening artificial lights of modernity make us yearn to marry our heartbeat back to the rhythms of the breathing world. How do we create new ways of being without falling into the lullaby of the past? How do we break bonds with the fear that welds our hands to control? How do we let the wild outside ourselves exist unmarred if we annihilate the wild within us at the slightest whisper of its existence?
We’ve been schooled to chase the light sides of our psyches and seek comfort in the self-righteousness that’s endemic in our species. When we’re forced to encounter the unlit depths of our innermost selves through grief, trauma, illness, or another initiatory experience, we try to move through the terrain as quickly as possible. We harvest the lessons and move on to the next destination, forced back into manufactured productivity. We miss the power protecting and making sacred the hurt places in ourselves could give us. All hurt wants to be seen: to be befriended, held in community, and then let go. If not, it turns on us and becomes violence. When we’re unable to look at our own pain at its point of its origin, we pass it on to others: lashing out at anything brilliant, sovereign, or intact enough to expose us. Of course, the first thing we white settlers did when we landed in North America was annihilate its wild peoples and decimate its forests. Of course we did. Inside we were already clear cuts, uranium mines, walking ghosts of Colonialism. Trailing the Morphic field of intergenerational trauma behind us like a blanket infected with smallpox. Destroy before you’re destroyed. Conquer before you’re exposed. The violence hidden in the bedrock of this culture, hidden like oil deposits, will continue to play itself out until we choose to bring it to consciousness. Until we’re willing to see it.
What is our task during this lifetime?
To end embedded trauma. To be the end of the genetic line for these terminator seeds that have been sown in us. To re-story ourselves back into the ground of the living planet. To be rooted in the truth of earthly cosmology, threaded us back through the weave of the tapestry of all of life.
If this is the work of our lifetime, how do we re-pattern our nervous systems into other ways of responding? How do we tolerate the vulnerability, discomfort, and cognitive dissonance that arises when otherly ways of being bump up against our own? And if we succeed in waking to the messages from our unconscious, how do we metabolize our knowing if our culture is hell-bent on making sure we stay asleep?
I think that if we can stop allying ourselves with what we’ve been told and risk a step off the path into the unknown, then we can start to access the immense generosity of the possibility that’s being offered to us. We can learn to thrive in complexity, not just tolerate it. We can learn to hold both pain and beauty, the new story and the old, and honor the multiple versions of reality that run like mycelium through the river of expression that the monoculture of linearity has denied.
Experience has taught me there’s a floor that exists under each person’s life that’s the farthest they can fall inside themselves. It shows up as vertigo, a fear of falling we defend ourselves against. It’s the place where the ground under your feet disappears and there’s nothing to do but fall into the unknown. We’re at this place now as a culture. If we can listen to the experiences of people who’ve tended to their own unravellings, we can begin to understand the territory and envision collective ways forward that contains the compassion, tenderness, diversity, trickster wisdom, and the power of evolutionary life force that we need to survive the journey.
When we fall as far as we can inside ourselves, we are caught by the ground of our being. Some call these depths depression but that word’s not right. It’s more a lack of buoyancy. Gravity, time, and matter behave differently, and because we can’t force our way back up to the surface layer of reality again, the rational mind becomes silent and eventually falls away. Our listening becomes a form of prayer. Our frequency realigns with that of LIFE, in all its ingenious complexity.
What is it, this ground catches us and holds as we journey through the unknowable depths of the unconscious? What intelligence waits in the deepest parts of ourselves longing for the touch of our awareness to call it alive? I call it the bones of the world; the living intelligence of life itself that informs our human imagination. Some call this territory the Mundis Imaginalis, the collective unconscious; the animate architecture from which reality emerges. It’s the territory of myth and dream, wound through the hallways of DNA codes that make up the framework and patterning of our expression. If we sit for long enough in the immersive depths of our interior ecology, our prayer matches up with the intelligence and timing of something greater, and we can put our intention through the ground of our being and touch the bones of the world. When we do, we find they’re responsive to our touch upon them, as our outward expression is responsive to their shifts. Layers of reality have danced in this way for as long as there have been life forms on this planet. It’s the bedrock of evolution.
Once you’ve opened the lines of communication, you may find that some bones ask you to move them the same way you’d move furniture around a house. (See, with the sofa over there, how different the room feels?) Each time we move a bone in the ground of our being, our deep interior ecology, the resonance of the shift changes the patterning of our physical expression. When we emerge, we find that everything is different, because the architecture of our experience- our neural and habitual maps, the cellular expression of our DNA- has been rearranged.
If we become skilled in working with the bones that lie under the reality of our expression, alive to our touch upon them as we are alive to their touch upon us, then we become powerful beyond measure. We are able to change our personal story and the way it plays out in our exterior lives. This is how we create a new blueprint. How we begin to sing a love song to a new world.
We’ve come as far as we can with the morphic field of trauma lodged inside us. We’ve built a global culture with it: a massive global blueprint that’s allowed the stories and violence of our ancestors’ experiences to come to consciousness. Now the weave of that blueprint is coming undone. Through it shoot the mycelial threads of a new world, fed by the death of the old, where we remember we can heal as well as destroy. This alchemy is our birthright. To remember it, we’re being asked to fall into our own wilderness. To make friends with the unconscious and marry its energy to be in service to life, not violence. If enough of us can do this work, the effect will ripple through the entirety of our culture, and a revolution will happen from the inside out.
“The wound itself is the remedy,” an old lover told me in a dream. Over and over as if it were an incantation. If this is so, then letting the descent into darkness, the work of letting ourselves be planted in the ground of our being where we gain access to the architecture of our experience is essential. It gives time for our prayer to call a remedy into being. A remedy that, like an invasive plant, is precisely designed to remediate the devastated landscapes that exist in our personal internal ecosystems. If we can offer our listening to the wild heart of the world, then the experiences that have undone us become the very thing that seasons us with soul, that allows us to grow into our gifts and flower our healing into the larger world that surrounds us.
There isn’t anyone to whom this story doesn’t belong. We’ve all been touched by violence, betrayal, or intergenerational wounding. It’s built into the scaffolding of the old world that’s dying all around us. We’re at the transmutation point now. How are we going to act amidst the suffering of our world? The two orbs pulse in the old woman’s trembling hands. Which do we choose, past or future? The violence that will result in continued sublimation of life, or the reckoning of alchemical transformation that will marry us back to the evolutionary power of the wild?
I had a dream where I stood with friends at the edge of the ocean, our faces made old by the effort it took to meet at this place. When there was no more ground to carry us, we stood facing the water and began to sing. The song was ancient, a language I don’t know. It began deep in our bellies and rose, like the breath of whales coming up for air. We sang with the utmost concentration looking out over the water, until down in the depths something huge and ancient, heavy as a world, began to move. The voices of singers I couldn’t see joined in from the other side of the water, and I felt the strength of their commitment pulsing against the boundaries of my skin the way light moves across water. As we sang, land rose out of the depths like a boulder or an island, cascading water like a whale breaching, shimmering already with watersheds and forests, eagles and elk, a world brought to the surface by the sustained frequency of our song.
We all had homelands, once. At one time we were all indigenous to an earth-based ancestry, had intact cultures, and traditions before we were torn from our belonging and cast out across the earth. If we’re going to mature past the violence and assault of the adolescent culture that’s raised us, we need to learn to hold our own experiences as sacred. To let the numinous nature of reality reach deeper than our skin. We’re the medicine of this moment, just as this moment is the medicine of us.
If we can let ourselves descend into the dark-eyed medicine of our stories, we can alchemize the trauma that lopes through our bloodlines. We can burn the myth of separation that’s kept us safe, high above the wild pulse of incarnate life on this living planet. If we can do this, the emergence we dream into being will be joined with that of the land and with our more than human community where everything is made sacred and everyone is welcome. There’s not one of us that doesn’t keen with longing to live our way forward to this kind of home.
