Tag: Nature

Today is a good day

August 27th, 2022

I’m not Cherokee but I was reminded of the battle cry sentiment “today is a good day to die”/Yutta Hey. The words weren’t fatalistic but more the clear vision, the calm manner, and the open bravery with full honesty that if today is that day, we are ready. We have lived to be honorable, to help, to soothe, to protect, and if the wisdom is calling us home, we are too powerful not to accept her hand. It’s a reminder of how to live, and how to be.

In 1991–at the age of 23–I met my biological father’s family for the first time and they told me I/we have Micmac and Potowatomi ancestors. The fact of not knowing this wasn’t surprising—I didn’t know that the dad I’d actually grown up with wasn’t my birth dad until I was 13–and discovering this lineage made me proud.

For I’m not a religious person by either nature or nurture yet when I transferred to UC Davis in 1988 to complete my undergrad, I specifically chose Native American Studies classes because I resonated so deeply with their core values. The idea that a “faith” could coordinate the life of a human into the soul of their planet was so profound to me that even today I walk outside and am in the church of our earth. Where mountains rise like the walls of amphitheater’s, and trees— housing the chirp of winged creatures— sway in air that moves across the planet, touching human beings one after the other.

There’s 60,000 different species of trees on the planet. 400,000 different kinds of flowers. The other day near Alchemy Coffee I saw a tree at the northeast corner of 300 East and 1700 South that had peeling bark and I literally said “what the fuck is this?” It was so weird and pretty; kind of thick and reddish, and made me curious why it does the peeling. How is this stuff is out there managing itself, making its own little life, living out its DNA in the peace of managing within both life and death? What an icon. 🙂

The thing about nature and folks that abide Her is that it’s a way of life so much more advanced than any modern religion. For modern religion (etc) says things like “God is within you” or “peace is within you” or “love is within you”, or the “answers are within you”, etc. but those are just words and the barren landscape of thought. Those are stained glass windows and documentation, collating and clarifying, and correcting; they are “over there” and the implication of having to call them into awareness is that they’re separate from us and that it’s our intentional act of telling ourselves it’s not separate that’s what makes it not separate anymore. In other words, WE are the agent by which those ideas become real and important. But with nature, with the sun, with the rain, with the trees with the peeling bark,…it isn’t just words. Nature is what we are and how we live. It’s inside of us. We eat it. We exist from her water. It is “here”, and so close to us we assume a separation with her that doesn’t actually exist. Nature is that God, is that peace, is that love, and is that answer. If we are anything, Nature is that too. If God exists, Nature is its most loving creature.

And in pulling that deep inside, much can be healed and resolved, because in the end we are merely guests here being hosted by a greater wisdom. One in which we are so close, we hold her as separate and invent a God who manages her while she quietly and humbly shows us how to give, how to eat, how to help one another live and how to accept that we will die.
White Noise

March 25th, 2020

This morning I felt it. As I sometimes do. I woke up early before the world to see the quiet, and the cool stillness. Nature–the Great Mother–was baring herself to the unconditional acceptance of the sky and falling back into the wonder of itself. And I paused on my front porch while my soul connected to the place of it’s true home, devoid of the white noise of people and air conditioners and cars and flurry and chaos. And as the sun rested in self-assured imminence behind mountains which stand guard like new parents, felt called into remembrance, that at every turn, nature—The Earth—will impassively stand in non-judgment of our human drama and flaws until we either save ourselves or perish.

And the indifference of it didn’t make me feel small; it made me feel reverent.
(more…)
“Cat”

March 3rd, 2020

“I’m not what you think I am. You are what you think I am.”—Unknown.

I’ve been blessed and cursed with an overactive, curious mind, swaying from science towards philosophy then beyond to where Rumi lays in that grass and the world is too full to talk about, and always I come back to “I don’t really know.”

Because it’s the only place I’m truly comfortable.

The kitty above—one I sit for, and love—is part of the social experiment known as “humanity,” an experiment in which everything has been labeled—“cat”, “dog”, “love” etc.—by the subjects of the experiment themselves in a process of proving what exactly the experiment is even while we’re in the middle of living it. Meanwhile, 90% of the known universe is matter (“dark matter”; they posit now it’s a “fluid” of negative mass to where if we pushed on it, it would move towards us) that we can’t even experience with senses or instruments, and in the last 100 years, philosophy became science and just last month, an actual visible mini-moon was discovered that had been in earth’s orbit for three years completely undetected.

And for someone not prone to taking herself seriously anyways, to walk around like the big human expert on what anything is feels ridiculous and counterproductive.

For when even the most basic physical properties are 90% unknown, tossing labels and theories like darts are akin to hitting a “target” we can’t aim for or see and only designate as such after it exposes itself.

If humanity was the one that labeled this experiment, and there’s no objective template or guide outside of ourselves then “I don’t know” shouldn’t be shameful or fearful; it should be natural and lovely. Like accepting the complexity of the universe isn’t ours to maintain, rather it’s ours to experience as the joy of a connection. Where “I don’t know” comes to mean we breathe in a continuously-evolving state of unknowingness, and moments of leaning down to a “cat” becomes “Olivia” looking into our eyes with what looks like magic, and maybe even could be.
Buds

February 28th, 2020

3:20 p.m.: I was just carded at Harmons in the self check out while buying two bottles of black cherry Redd’s, and when I looked at her all elated for wanting me to produce my ID—asking, “are you required to ask people for IDs, or Did you just feel you had to in this specific case?” and then fangirling at her response—I didn’t even worry she might think I was insane because that’s just where we are in America.

Of course I’m insane. This nation is going to batshit and I’m a fucking patriot.

6:06 p.m.: And later, when the high of getting carded wears off and it’s just me and the chill of a bare-faced reality, I’ll remember that today it was still light at 5:45 p.m., that the day began with seeing new buds on the trees, Mr. Baby doing his thang, and dame Miss Hiss hoarding the good bed while the Staff Cats she’s forced to share the residence with scurried around like maggots (her words).

For its soothing to remember that humans are flawed, vain, shortsighted, and filled with nationalized ego (at the expense of our planet) but that Mother Earth is powerful and giving and those of us who love her don’t have to worry for she’ll persevere even if buds now come in early February.

And to Love something this much means to join them on the path to their healing, willingly following into unknown realms, where you help her keep her promises to herself while wordlessly making our uncertain way together into the silence of sunsets so beautiful you can’t help but cry.
Fluttering

February 27th, 2020

*This video is me yesterday, in one of the events that made the day so weird. I’m talking in my best Disney princess voice and yes, it’s embarrassing but this is what I am: an embarrassing mess who talks to birds in sing song through the open screen of her bedroom window. Coincidentally, a month before, another hummingbird had flown right up to me as I was on the porch of a sit house—no h. feeder nearby—and hovered, looking at me. I wasn’t sure what it was going to do and said something like “be careful” not wanting it to fly into my face or anything but then it just fluttered for another second and flew off.

Yesterday was a weird day.

One of those days when animals look you in the face, hold your gaze and you tingle because some “thing” speaks between you. The kind of day when as part of the wordless world of Nature, you become bonded to realms of the unspoken, handfasting to life givers that exhale our sustenance as a light that seems to freeze Time.

Because in silence there is love and acceptance; in silence there is Ginger the senior cat asking to be petted after a year of avoiding you; in silence, there is Delilah the dog staring at you with a joy that grabs your cells after you made time to rehab her wading pool. And that is a “thing”.

And it’s hard to understand from a human mind for we are taken with words and certainty. But in the zone of wordless experience these moments are like the universe is speaking to you.

For in the gift of silence, every “thing” is a voice, and in the quiet wondering during magic moments its as if we’re telling the universe “I’m awake, and I can hear everything” and the universe is responding with “I know.”

[8/2018]