Friday (the 13th's) poetry reading at Blue Crow Studio in the harbor took me to a place I'd been wanting to visit yet needed multiple reasons, apparently, finally to take me there. Thus, poetry was the impetus for me to get closer to a potter's wheel and my subsumed love of playing in mud, just as my love of nature and simultaneous itch to peel out of the person I'd felt compelled to become in order to survive while working too many years in a city took me to the remote riparian Anima sanctuary, where Wolf, Loba, Kiva, and Rhiannon live and welcome others to their holy home.
Words typically used by those who have visited the New Mexico sanctuary are those of the nebulously grateful, the spirit released yet tethered to the wonder and weight of rock, dirt, river, body. People who go there seem continually thankful for the awareness that pain provides (the same people who often come from a too-comfortable life) as they stub their toes and gingerly walk barefoot on those rocky paths, picking out the occasional thorn, finding the current moment, finally, more vivid than the fading busy-thoughts of the culture not long left behind.
How oddly contradictory to our true natures that we have become so alienated from the everyday magic of air, food, water, earth, temperature, simple pleasures of the body, that when we return to their awareness, our beings are filled with such wonder.
Drinking the cool water collected from rain barrels or dipped from the San Francisco River satisfied me like nothing else while I was there----and not just because of its purity, but it took my effort and I knew its origins, just as walking to the composting outhouse, climbing up those few ladder-steps and parting the curtain that blows in the breeze, to sit there with the coffee-tin ready to fill with sawdust to dump below, again connected me to the simple present.
And why are we so enamored of this present moment----needing continual reminders that it is ENOUGH? Look at the aspects of our culture we are trying to leave behind, at all of the proddings to live and hoard for the future: the wristwatches sold as jewelry and even as toys for children----attempts to convince us we can own and control time; the continual bombardment of television commercials for goods to make our lives more comfortable or long-lived; to make our bodies more "beautiful" (i.e., bodies that require the constant upkeep of those products being sold----razors, creams, diet aids, hair dyes, clothes and shoes to show off these Barbie-bodies)---all in a future that, we are told, is OURS. . . for a price.
Having paid a price, as many have and are----years of attempting to fit in, to work as I was told I needed to, to become more acclimated to the world I lived in (rather than to live as I knew I should)----I was suddenly faced with the need to forgive myself for having subjugated my own feelings and desires for too long. This does not make me selfish, as a Christian upbringing lead me to believe, it makes me whole, and it is only through my being whole and authentic, closer to what is true within me, that I can help others in their journey, too. My culture tried to convince me I could be an island. Now I am aware I never was nor could be separate----that instead I am an integral part of life and others and that what I do and think does matter, not just to me, but to others, too.
This is yet another "obvious" epiphany from the Anima sanctuary, played out in the drama of another life that had come to think of herself as separate and alien within an unnatural world. But how happy I am to see that I am not the alien----it is this culture that is. As a teenager still connected to the innocence of childhood, I knew this, yet somehow I became more and more convinced as an adult that I was the crazy one (and thus had to take antidepressants to deal with this disjuncture in my life), not the culture.
And so through my recent reading of other folks' trials in our culture, most notably Derrick Jensen----who interviewed Jesse Wolf Hardin and thus led me to Wolf's own writing and way of living----I, too, have rediscovered living as an adventure (rather than as something to be endured), am beginning to withdraw from antidepressants (with my doctor's support), and find myself making connections to other people who share my desire to become more authentic. . . as we all celebrate the beauty and fierceness of nature and our unique willful desires to be ourselves within this wonderful whole.
I plan to use this means of communication----this "blog" (a word I'm not fond of, as it sounds too much like smog, grog, plod----all heavy and ugly words)----to record my journey and, perhaps, to encourage others along their own.
