A Way of Being

As I was lighting dhoop and incense for my daily practice, I was thinking about all that fire teaches us. How it teaches us about warmth and clarity and transformation and vision and control/being out of control. 

I was thinking about the smoke in Sao Paulo. The smoke, last year, during the wildfire season in California. Skin pricking, thirsty, unable to breathe. Eyes. Masks. 

I was thinking about the deep medicine in the Amazonian forests - so ancient that modern man cannot hope to get it even by force. To get it, the modern man will need to change - into some other kind of being - someone who has deeply sensed their own part in the ever-emergent medicine of the world, in the wheel of reciprocity. The many emotions this will ask the modern man to get in touch with. 

Instead, the modern man burns the medicine, the trees, and the forest. The modern man thinks AI will get them there, into the heart of the mysteries. 

But the mysteries scare them, really. So they burn them down. They think they can come up with their own definition of man, nature, intelligence, interaction. Cut off from where they find themselves - on Earth. 

I was thinking about philosopher V.F. Cordova, who wrote that even when languages are lost, the concepts they embody survive as pattern systems of “forms and categories.” No, the mysteries will never really be lost. The medicine will never really be lost. It is here, it is here on Earth, it is here in our bones, and our bones know how to shift the spark of life running through our bodies into new pattern systems that the modern man may or may not recognize. Life always remembers. 

What is being lost is something irretrievable - modern man's ability to return unto an alliance with life. The rust taints all of us. It is in me. The selfishness. The pettiness. The greed. The inability to open our palms and claim our own largesse, so full, intricately connected with the finest weave of dark and light. 

I've had a rock of misery inside my heart. No more. I will choose to remember and feel, I will ask to right my relationship with fire, I will go to the waters and grieve. 

Our species learnt how to tend fires. How to quench fires. We are made of the balance of elements. Balance is always ours to learn/relearn. Our ancestors are in us. The quicksilver of spiral is within us. The phoenix is an ally of human spirit. Our very nervous systems encode the secret. 

If we say, then, that love and healing and renewal are ours to make possible, we are not far from what is right and true.