from
the sea (5) – merging and menopause, hunger for home part 1 by freda karpf
On the planetary
currents: “…the first thing that
impresses us about the currents is their permanence.” Rachel Carson
One can be convinced it is a hunger for
home, a longing that feels like nostalgia but is real and palpable, that rides
in your blood just as surely as any molecule. It is a sense of place that you
have found and resonate with. Home, family, relatives –all that is generational,
not solely from a human perspective but one that
lives in our being like the tide in the water. It moves with us as we move. It
fills us and we are nearly mute about it, not knowing what language it is or
how it speaks to us; or even if it does. Then there are days, in many cases
just moments, the land, the sky, the evening, the stars take any one of us by
surprise, moves us out of our daily busyness and quiets us, whispers to us and
we know that we are a part of this. Even the busiest of us has had a moment.
Even the most resolute human knows that in that still moment, we are not this
or that; we are something other and wholly owned by the present, by the land
and equally by the stars.
~
Mrs. Scattergood had a big dream. It was
about the full round of being. A mesh of every key element of her life and the
center of it was that the osprey caught a fish in the waiting river.
The river waited for early spring to
return. While waiting it seemed to be moving but really it was braiding its
waters and unbraiding them. It was like Penelope waiting for the O man while
needing to fend off her suitors. She was promised to a suitor as soon as her
weaving was completed. To keep faithful to her O man she wove during the day
and undid her work in the night. The osprey returns here to eat our fish and go
back to Brazil to escape the cold. This
place is not even that far north but osprey have their journey like the
monarchs have theirs; like the river has a journey through the tides. Mrs. Scattergood’s journey always seems to
end at the bulwarks waiting for the big birds to return or the eagles to begin
nesting again or the stealth hawk, not sure if it is a Cooper or a harrier that
has found its way to this part of the world, to sail around the bend looking
for a quick strike.
Today is the day that her mind, body and
spirit will merge and will be lifted toward the sun dogs in the warm skies. She
will sail with the breeze that only moves the leaves on the top of the trees,
she will see the lights shine on the water like forever and she will move
toward the home she has always known waited for her, belonging.
~
Your nature, your essence or what is real
about you, if it is climbing trees, has never left you. That is because your
inner compass is always your home. All
the directions are part of the one direction. All the points on the compass, as
disparate as they may seem, are your points.
Home is always directed by what is your essential core, your heart. The
vision that shamans know is directed by spirit through the heart. Four chambers
there might be, but one vision when you open to seeing through your essence.
~
Mrs. Scattergood can tell time by the
water. Tides tell the daily time and the sun reflections give you the minutes
of the skies reflected in the water. The shine burns your eyes midday and the
reflections shimmer like a moored boat moves during a soft wind. Standing there observing the flow of the
water leaves you out of time just like your period is time out of time. You are
there in a present that is real and enduring; with and without changes;
touching the season you’re in through to other seasons that have lived in your
bones. This is the part that catches
your breath because it is timeless and there is something about being out of
time that is both easy to feel and hard to comprehend.
~
It may be the time to bring the gifts from
the past, even Mrs. Scattergood’s younger self, into her home now. Memories
sometimes come from the magician’s hat; sometimes live as light bouncing on the
water.
~
Parts of us, our stories, squeeze out from
between the carefully crafted personalities.
Someone may unintentionally prompt this. The convention of being
conventional and the pressures it causes might either force it or repress the urge
to share. A friend was having a rough
ride and Mrs. Scattergood told her to get out of Siberia. Since then whenever either were having
difficulties, if life felt dull or things weren’t working and they were moaning
and groaning with each other as good friends can, one would remind the other
that they had to get out of Siberia. The
working metaphor was ruined once she knew Farley Mowat’s book about the peoples
of Siberia, which is alive and vibrant with multiple cultures; perhaps even her
shaman ancestors. But the idea of deliberately leaving a rough and barren world
under your own power and volition is a healing act that’s worth following. Now, she saw Siberia as a many cultured land
with lots of people speaking dozens of languages, reindeer and thriving
ecologies. Siberia became a rich and
ready metaphor for a place that seems like it should be barren but is a
fountain of renaissance. She would just
have to move a little further north in her imagination when she needed that
backdrop to motivate her to pull up and move on.
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