from
the sea (5) – merging and menopause, cathedrals part 2 of 3, by freda karpf
Our souls and the
spirit that sails towards it rise with the tide to reach the higher lands. While the Gulf Stream falls down the cliff
under the sea, the spirit rises and rises, trying to fly like the birds;
finding a way to work the wind; grasses fly by and the spirit reaches out to them
with song. They come into the nest and the circle begins to form as the winds
move round and weaves the grass just because that is what wind knows; though so
few tell this.
~
Like many of us, when Mrs. Scattergood
felt at a loss she came back to what she knew best, the ocean. In the background, way, far deep in the
background of her days, she also has known the longing to have wilderness left
unharmed. Nothing is worse than the tame
death consumers create. That is her
concern on the outside. On the inside,
she’s riding the waves. She feels
connected to every landscape, cool canyon, even the wild onions and the prairie
dog when she catches a wave. We know the
wolves belong in Yellowstone. They were
recently brought back there to reenter the cycle. We pluck lives out and place them back into
the chain of being. We knit, we
sow. We don’t really know. Aldo Leopold wrote about tinkering. He said we need to save all the parts. What
are all the parts? That is what we are learning. Guardians now, tillers and weavers too.
~
Our bones, our stones, our baskets of
shells and every place a place for feathers.
The wild has come inside.
~
The first meeting of different peoples
must have begun with, “Don’t worry, I won’t eat you.” This was the first agreement among
people. Long before spices and
silks. Everything else was for the table
or not. Language began with the need to
designate what was food and what wasn’t.
First rules of etiquette. We
think in terms of devouring. If we
cannot satisfy our hunger for the wild how can the wild survive?
~
She is not a wild salmon but she loves
jumping the waves. The sweet sense of
being that is forgetting is the only thing she knows for sure. There are no boundaries. It is not about territory, only the
incandescent filament that lights her soul.
~
Who first taught us beauty? What would it be like to give to the public
lands, to protect a parcel of land that is connected to another, broadening the
base of the wild? What would it be like
if we connected the East to a large portion of the West by an unbroken chain of
islands?
~
Baubo wondered if the freedom of wandering
was the same as schmoozing. Whether it’s stone or gourds, or sea glass that she
carried back home, Mrs. Scattergood often wandered in local parks and places
next to waterways. She wasn’t a hiker.
Had no determination to be that. But she
felt the need to be in nature as many hikers might. Mrs. Scattergood’s neighbor called the scrub
pines dirty trees. Said they left a mess. Ever walk on pine needles that were
growing over moss? Mrs. Scattergood
thought they felt like a bed and often walked on them just to feel their sweet
softness. That was her kind of hike. Wandering
is also nature. Life seen as a system isn’t going to say much about the life
we’re living or the nature in us, which includes the need to wander. How do you communicate that? She once found a
five-dollar bill and a dried seahorse on the beach. Ever since she cleaned the seaweed off the
nose of a seahorse she found on the beach, she wondered if seahorses ride the
Gulf Stream. You cannot separate your
life from the life we are given.
~
Demeter lost her daughter to the
underworld. Mrs. Scattergood fears we our losing our earth to the unconscious
unnamed fears of our primitive brain which we have hidden so well now that all
motivations are simply justifications. We deny our sensuality, even our range
of sexuality and our need to explore; and rely on rigid formalities and
structures of being. Our lifestyles are
consuming all that can be consumed and doing it so quickly that the ground
literally is disappearing. So many acres
of rainforest gone, so many inches of topsoil lost to our avarice.
~
It’s really the strangest thing, Baubo
thought. The beginning of something is
always at the end of something else. You
can mix up the middle. That is what
menopause is at times, the middle of everything with uncertain shores and
rudimentary beginnings. Or is wisdom sneaking through the cracks of
consciousness like morning light through the blinds? Is menopause like a new
dawn?
~
Baubo thought about the crowds she used to
run with back in the islands. Those were the days. Of course, they were. They were the old days.
These days are complex and downright mysterious. ‘I could just plotz,’ she thought. And then
she did. She plotzed. During deep
mourning she comes to those she’s linked to. She comes with pots and pans
banging on the wagon, with parts that need to be reclaimed. Like Barry, she had a warehouse someplace.
Doesn’t everyone?
~
If only we could grow a communal
conscience that shows how we belong to and all the ways we are connected to the
earth. This is no Earth Mother
ding-a-ling hippie homespun homily. It could be our path to preserve the
planet. People are moved by disasters.
We've had more disasters than a world should be able to survive. Is it possible to find a positive, genuine
ecological vision to move toward instead of reacting to what is needed?
~
Mrs. Scattergood met a man on the
boardwalk and as both were looking at the ocean he asked her, “Do you have the
sense that something bad is going on? That we're really in trouble?" They were looking at a mud red slick in the
ocean just past the breakers. He said,
“I'm really sorry for the place I'm leaving for my grandkids." They parted their ways on the boardwalk. This uncovered another layer closer to dread.
Does anyone else have the sense that something is going on? Do you feel it in your bones?
No comments:
Post a Comment