lighting a candle

and offering seeds

Sometimes we walk through such unprecedented territory, that we have to germinate ingenuity in order to continue on our path forward.

Motherhood is one of these territories. The earth’s quickening is another.

If we are lucky and really living, our life might so thoroughly dismantle our idea of “what is-was-will be”, that we have to rebuild, from the ashes, an entirely new vision of what it means to be alive.

I feel that is partly why we come here, to earth, incarnated in flesh and bone: to hear the resounding harmonics of transformation and to, sometimes, completely, crumble. Transform and dissipate the conditioning of our past, our ancestors’ pasts, humanity’s past, the earth’s past, the universal ticking of “business as usual”, in order to really really bring alive something new.

In the forest, where we are pulling and pooling water through the land, where new seeds are sprouting and new species are unfurling from the earth, the junipers are dying. They don’t like their feet wet, and where the cattails and cottonwood saplings are sprouting up, the junipers are turning golden in their transition from one form to the next.

Some life, it seems, must transform in order for new life to emerge. That is what the earth showed me today, among the sparkling snow mist and wild silence of winter. The goats were happily nibbling on the seed pods of autumn and I watched in awe as the sun appeared and disappeared from behind the clouds, rhythmically illuminating various trees and places amidst the snow.

The junipers are dissipating and transforming, while a meadow slowly emerges from within the earth.

This past week, a small group of us completed our commitment to the land by making “pagamentos” to eight different sites around our watershed, three months after the Wiwa Elders from Columbia had initiated this process. The Elders asked us to return every three months to continue giving back to the land, the water, the trees, the animals, the gold, to these sites they divined as important and well connected to the whole ecological web of life in this region. I hope they come back this summer and continue to uplift our watershed, and in that way, the whole of the earth.

They gave us specific instructions for how to continue this process, and I found myself wondering at the importance they place on seeds. Offer seeds, create a fire circle with stones and seeds, know the relationship between seeds and rocks and gold, they told us. As I held some wild dock seeds in my hands to bring to the offering site higher up on the mountain, I began to feel into the deeper meaning of seeds.

Infinite. Mysterious. Materially “illogical” in that from one infinitesimally tiny seed, millions and millions of seeds may emerge. Sustenance. Survival. Beauty. Abundance. The Universe. Totality. Potential. Life.

“The seeds have a whole culture inside them. Approach them well in a way that makes you worth knowing and they will teach you all you need to know.” -Martin Prechtel

This morning, I sat in front of the fire and remembered some friends who recently lost their unborn child. They asked their community to light a candle for this child and for all the children and for all the people of the earth making their transition at this time, to help illuminate their way from this world into the next.

I closed my eyes and began playing my drone instrument, beside the crackling fire and my wildly spinning daughter, and from within my own mind, I lit a candle. It was spontaneously superimposed with a dragonfly. They glowed together in the dark space of my imagination.

I offered the candle, up and up, way way up, for this unborn child and for all the children transitioning from one world to the next. I used my voice to sing that candle higher and higher, into the lotus hands of some divine being, and left it there with the light surrender of a cloud.

And so it seems, in unprecedented times, we must germinate our seeds of ingenuity. We must acknowledge the requirement to get inventive, responsive in ways that are wildly different from the ways of the past. We must effectively step out of the matrix of the past and light a candle in our minds to illuminate the mysterious path forward, from one world to the next. From the forest to the meadow. From flesh to spirit. Offering seeds. Watering the earth.

☆ Thank you for reading ~ your subscriptions inspire in me the initiative to carve out time in my life to write down what I observe and how I continue to connect the dots. ☆