purification of memory

in the space of aquatic suggestibility

First of all, thank you all so much for reading this mama's musings on life, spirit, love and interconnectedness. This will be my first winter “online”, so to speak, from the land. I appreciate the continued invitation and challenge to create meaningful words in this world.

I feel there is so much wording and information in the world today I sometimes hesitate to add more to the mix. What more can be said?… But we are the living manifestations of the evolution of consciousness today, so maybe it does matter, life from the perspective of one woman living in the wilderness with her family and goats.

The longer I live up here, the more I find the best and most potent teachings come from the land herself. It is in this light of universality, that I intend to share these words with you.

“There is the body and there is the Self. Between them is the mind, in which the Self is reflected as ‘I am’. Because of the imperfections of the mind, its crudity and restlessness, lack of discernment and insight, it takes itself to be the body, not the Self. All that is needed it to purify the mind so that it can realize its identity with the Self. When the mind merges in the Self, the body presents no problems. It remains what it is, an instrument of cognition and action, the tool and expression of the creative fire within. The ultimate value of the body is the it serves to discover the cosmic body, which is the universe in its entirety. As you realize yourself in manifestation, you keep on discovering that you are ever more than what you have imagined.”

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, pg. 74

I was laying on the floor this morning, not feeling so well. A mixture of sleeplessness and a bit of a cold had effectively sucked the energy out of me, and after a breakfast of chicken soup, spicy jalapeño squash and rice, I laid down on the rug in front of the fire.

Amara (just about two years old) came over to me, and loomed quietly and inquisitively over me, her face and hands still sticky with remnants of squash soup and who knows what else. I felt a bit apprehensive of her next move, but she then went to the couch and gathered up all her stuffed animals and put them on top of me, one by one. Then she sat down near my head, kissed each of the stuffed animals (two bears and an otter), then kissed me, on the arm and the chest, and then kissed her own knee. Then she put her hand on my cheek and kissed my forehead.

She got up and found a little cloth and brought it to my head, placed it over my head and eyes and was pleased with this, but then slowly she slid the cloth down over my nose. Once it was fully covering my nose, she pinched my nose through the cloth and made a nose-blowing sound, like I do when I am trying to get her to blow her nose. She was trying to help me blow my nose. I started cracking up. So did she, which ignited her desire to pinch my nose again and again and make the nose-blowing sound.

When she was thus content that her work was complete, at least for the moment, she went over to the kitty water bowl, dipped some toilet paper in it and brought it to her high chair and started wiping it down, getting all the little pieces of rice and squash off the chair. My heart just overflowed with the awe and wonder (and slight concern) one comes to know in the presence of young children.

Yesterday, I pulled a tarot card that encouraged me to slow down, go within, listen. So, in trusting that guidance, I put all the hundred million things aside, and while Scotty was out with Amara, I laid down, slowed down, watched my breath and looked within. When you are out of this practice for some time, it can take a while to remember how and why we do this, and then to have compassion for the millionfold memory-mind accumulations one has gathered and grown over the past few months or years or decades.

It took some time to slow it all down. I kept watching the breath and allowing the mind, watching the breath, and when some remembrance of the sacred arose and I felt a great elation, I slowed that down too, and just kept watching the breath, watching the breath.

Up on our land, near the tipi, we have a pond. It was dug out some years back and has been collecting and holding water ever since we have been here. Last summer the population of cattails at least doubled in the pond, and we felt proud about that. The cattails are now golden and bent over under the weight of the snow and wind.

Yesterday during that meditation, I was shown an image of where those golden cattail stalks come out of the water. Something about manifestation. Something about stillness, living stillness and the rippling effects of our minds. I was shown the golden stalk in liquid water, moved by wind and creature alike, and I was shown the stalk frozen there in the ice of winter, how the ripples froze under crispy snow crystals, holding their shape until the Sun comes out and melts it all back.

And I was feeling into my body, deeply from within my inner mind, feeling into the sensations of it all, the waters of it all, how Creation herself is so much like Water, so subtly moving and shifting to accommodate the heaves of various actions, beliefs and karmas — like how a juniper growing on the edge of a mesa grows her roots and branches in a way that shows you how the wind blows there, where the water holds and where the deer have been. Where the Sun shines… How the entire universe is kind of like a body of water, rippling to the splashing inputs of this and that.

And the deeper I felt into my body, the more apparent it became that there was more space than matter. So, so much space. Just trickling memories of form and physiology, woven into the landscape of space, and I wondered…

How much of our body is a memory?

and

How much memory does the body hold?

and

Where is the ice and who is the stalk?

I was reading in a book about Zen meditation recently, the significance of bamboo in the Zen tradition, how the secret is in the hollow space between the rings. That’s what makes bamboo so resilient; its “empty heart”, so to speak, the heart of openness and calm, spaciousness, a heart without memory.

How does clinging to the past, shape the future? How do the memories of the heart ripple out into today and tomorrow's aquatically suggestible reality? What would it feel like to have a perfectly present heart? Is there anything we can do about this?

Maybe tomorrow, when I am feeling better, after we have made the fire and food and fed the goats, I will walk up to those cattails and have a look.