The Earth Listens
Things that are Broken are Still Connected
My visit to Bartram Island in 2013 was a rich time of deep listening to the land. Six different themes emerged for me to explore with the landscape. This is Part One .
Every year on my annual visit to Georgian Bay, I walk Bartram Island and let my body guide me over the stones. I soften my gaze and let the amazing striped stones reveal their stories to me – some I’ve heard before, some with a new twist, and sometimes a whole new theme. Toward the end of my stay, I often narrow my gentle search and meditative dialogue to a single stone, asking it if it wants to travel home with me. Occasionally, these island conversations have been with snakes but this year it was again the stones that called me.
On my first solo venture out to the east end of the island, the most dramatic part of this landscape, it was the broken stones that captured my attention. Huge boulders split, perhaps by water over time or possibly through major upheavals in the earth ages ago.
I paid attention to what caught my eye because, over many summers, I’ve learned how wise and articulate this landscape is, so when I heard the phrase ‘The things that are broken apart are still connected,’ I knew the land was giving me my focus for this year’s conversations. Too tired to enter the dialogue that day (I was recovering from a nasty summer cold and a bladder infection) I wrote the phrase down and rested for the afternoon.
The next morning, after wild blueberry pancakes topped with maple syrup, mango and peaches, I slipped out to find the sitting rock that attract me, facing directly into the sunlight. What are the messages I’m to hear?
I feel the familiar, deep, slow, magnetic tug of the ancient stone drawing me down, down, into a different language, one more like warm, flowing lava than familiar words. Each summer, I cherish this visceral sense of returning. A tremor of excitement and joy flushed through me as I anticipated greeting this ancient energy again. Five days of letting go of my computer had relaxed my monkey-brain. I was finally ripe and ready for this conversation.
There are six things I am to witness…
Something that is ‘whole’ is undifferentiated:
Anything that is ‘whole’ operates or functions in a particular bandwidth of organized harmony. For example, a person born into relatively healthy and comfortable circumstances, or a tree, a river or a wild animal living in a healthy ecosystem has an innate resilience that allows it to self-adjust and maintain a gently fluctuating equilibrium. When challenged or temporarily stressed by internal or external factors, the human being, the creature and the earth element can find its way back to ‘normal health’ with relative ease. Wholeness, in this respect, operates like a phase of perpetual innocence. When left relatively undisturbed, no really dramatic transformation is required as the ‘natural’ evolutionary process gradually matures and eventually erodes the form. Eden, once idyllic, never calls us to return. That would be a dangerous, regressive fantasy, an avoidance of the challenging path of greater mystery.
Cracking/Breaking Open the Cosmic Egg:
The unconscious phase of ‘innocence’ like the experience in the garden of Eden, initiates an accelerated process of chaotic creativity. A vast range of possibilities are loosened into a state of flux that is highly suggestible to the prevailing force-field of high-frequency intentionality. As the earth evolved, each major cataclysmic event oriented to the current prevailing ‘thought-form’, the evolving will of the Creator, revealing new patterns of wholeness and new expressions of creation. The organizing impulse itself is not static; it continually evolves and invites engagement at difference frequencies within the loosened ‘matter.’
When fear or greed dominates, this energy tends to reorganize matter into the smallest packets of information/energy – ones with very limited or no radiant pulsations of its own. (This can be seen with most man-made products and in our social systems— education, health care, corporations, governments, and most religions.) However, when frequencies of love prevail, the organic organizational possibilities are far more complex, interrelated, dynamic and beautiful. They also have an inherent limit to them, for all matter serves within a semi-permeable yet discernible field. Nothing, other than Source itself, is meant to last forever.
The greatest role one can play during times of cracking open, loosening and creative chaos, is to strengthen one’s coherent experience of Love through self-love, love of Life, and trust in the working of the Great Mystery. It takes courage and vision to love what is being liberated from within old forms of matter. With Love, that which has been stolen and buried away can find its natural way of becoming a vital participant, an active agent within the dynamic field of change. What appears broken should not be fixed but allowed, through the power of Love, to realize its innate vitality and wholeness within the emerging paradigm
The Earth Listens:
Earth has always listened, and responded, with a purity of loving intent, to serve and evolve. Part of what is broken now is the field of reciprocal listening, the deep soul-witnessing that is a dance of love between human beings and the sacred pulse within all matter.
(I got up from my stone seat, drawn to a flat rock jutting out into the harbor. I began a gentle wild animal prayer, a low throaty chant: A… Oh… ah… my arms slowly moving out, like wings, slightly from my side, my knees softened, my hips moving back and forth in a very slow sensuous dance.
The phrase ‘the Earth listens’ rose immediately and my wild animal prayer took on another, deeper dimension than at when I do this work in my living room. As I sounded and let me body move, I felt like I was making love with the sun, the wind and waves, the beautiful stone beneath my feet, the gently waving green algae in the shallow waters….
How the Earth hears and what it hears is not the issue. My earth-song, my body-prayer, my wild animal voice, my surrendered heart… This was what mattered. In my entire body, I knew that my song nourished this place. The connection was palpable, not imaginary. My gift from the Earth – to be heard and remembered by this land…
A spider dangles itself over my left breast, hanging, from where? There is nothing above me as I write this. Earlier, a monarch butterfly directed me to this spot. Then a golden-winged wasp rested near my foot for many minutes. Ants carrying shad-fly carcasses and mosquitoes occasionally land on my right hand, while tiny spiders scurry over the rocks.
We have forgotten how to sing our love songs to and with the Earth. We need no affirmation or validation for this high-frequency communion – only our body’s ear, our heart-voice, and our wise animal presence is needed for this life-affirming communion. Sophistication is not a love-song. The Earth sings with and through us. This is how matter evolves. So simple, yet requiring our utmost respect and presence.
