The concept of Gaia—the earth as a conscious entity—keeps strengthening in my mind.  This morning a most obvious thought hit me with renewed relevance, as if it were some novel insight.  That was that the land literally birthed us.  As earth, the young rock, began to awaken, she began birthing life, excreting lifeforms from her body.  Humanity was excreted like everything else.  In my mind I view the evolution of life at high speed and I can see the molecules of earth organizing themselves, forming cells and simple organisms, being excreted onto the surface of the earth to act (somewhat) autonomously, evolving into more and more complex and diverse forms—some rooting down, some moving freely.  We humans are walking, mobile globules of land.

All of those overused phrases come to mind again, those metaphors that aren’t metaphors—earth as our source, earth as Mother, being one with the land….

Interesting how the land wanted to make parts of herself mobile.  All of us creepy-crawly parts of the land increase the ways that the earth can dance with herself, experience manifestation.  We can interact with the rooted things, the stationary things, and the other creepy-crawlies.

But we are ultimately just cells of the land, not independent at all.  I can’t quite find the right metaphor, actually.  Are we cells of the land, neurons of the land, holograms of the land, blossoms of the land?

I intuit that to be fully human we can’t be cut off from the land.  I understand that knowledge and wisdom reside in the land, come from the land.  Where else could knowledge reside?  Without the land, if I were a disembodied spirit, floating in the ether, there would be literally nothing to know.

This gets back to Jung’s “Answer to Job”.  Before God created a physical world he could not know himself.  Only by physically manifesting could there be reference points and knowledge.  Everything physical is God referencing different parts and aspects of himself.

More and more I’m beginning to think we have to conceptualize the earth as our mind.  And beyond that we have to conceptualize her as our body too.  We can’t think or know or act without her.  And we’re not just travelers on spaceship earth—like astronauts.  The earth isn’t some hulking lifeless contraption we’re using.  Earth is a pulsing, living, conscious entity of which we are an organ (cell, neuron, blossom,…).

To be fully human we have to tap into our larger mind—the Earth.  It makes the Edith Cobb thesis all the more tantalizing—genius depends upon the Earth.

I built my compost sifter yesterday and got a year’s worth of compost sifted.  I probably should have waited a little while longer to let the pile dry out more.  I’m sure I could have sifted out quite a bit more if it had been drier.  But I got a really big pile of the most beautiful compost (although very puny in comparison with the pile of cow manure).  It smelled so delicious and it was so soothing to just stand there and rhythmically rub and shake and thump the compost through.  Ah, to have my hands in dirt again!

Last week I took The Spell of the Sensuous out of the library again.  There’s just so much food for thought in there, you can’t digest it all in one reading.  I want to revisit the whole section about how language and knowledge are inextricably woven into the landscape for many indigenous tribes.  There seems to be something very important in this.  Inner and outer worlds have always been unified—to indigenous tribes this is obvious, in the modern world it’s been forgotten.

…to members of a non-writing culture, places are never just passive settings.  Remember that in oral cultures the human eyes and ears have not yet shifted their synaesthetic participation from the animate surroundings to the written word.  Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder-strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the senses.  A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there.  It is an active participant in those occurrences.  Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.

John delivered a great big pile of poop to me yesterday.  Now I need to get busy and get the new garden beds dug.  I also bought seed potatoes yesterday and I need to cut them up and let them dry so I can get them in the ground.  The garlic has sprouted and I’ve got a bag of red onion sets I need to plant, and peas that need to go in.  Collin and I started the tomatoes and peppers on Sunday.  And I’ve been potting up Collin’s herbs into larger containers—chives, parsley, basil, and oregano.  I bought a small roll of hardware cloth so I can make a sifter for the compost—I’ll try to get to that today.  Spring’s finally here—hooray!  (Although it’s been cold and snowy for the past few weeks.  Today it’s supposed to get into the 60’s finally.)

Sorry about yesterday’s entry.  I thought I was going to have enough time to write, but it didn’t work out that way. But definitely—until the land begins to speak through you, you haven’t yet become naturalized to a place.

I’m beginning to fear that I’m becoming naturalized here.  The reason I fear it is because I’ve so desperately needed to get back to my beloved Pennsylvania, but if I fall in love with the land here, I may never make it back.  It’s really weird what’s happening to me.  I know I sort of described it two entries ago, but I feel like I need to delve into it a bit more.  On Friday, Collin and I took a long way home, just to explore some territory we hadn’t explored before.  At Hudson, instead of continuing on I-76, we took highway 52 from there to Wiggins.  If I-76 is the hypotenuse of a right triangle, then highway 52 makes up the two legs—it travels east and then makes a 90 degree turn to the north.  Anyway, it was quite a pretty drive, and at one point this wild little hill appeared, with some old relic of farm machinery sitting on it and the remnants of a homestead on the flat ground below.  I don’t know what happened, but some switch seemed to flip inside of me and I was transported back in time to the 1800s.  It was like none of the modernized farms surrounding it existed—like everything modern had been completely blotted out.  I saw (and felt) through different eyes, a different reality.  It was a total immersion in the feeling-sense of a different era and lifetime.  Impossible to describe, but what a profound ache it left in my heart.  We’ve all but obliterated that way of life and deprived ourselves of that way of experiencing the land.

All weekend long that place had me in its grip.  I kept fantasizing about it—what it would be like to live there in a crude little house, to be intimately fused with the energy of that spot.  Lately, it’s been this cloying need to have my bare feet on the ground—so much so that I’ve been imagining these simple houses with dirt floors.  Dirt floors and just a small lip of stone at the doorway separating the inside dirt from the outside dirt.  Just a lip to keep the puddles outside if it rains.  I picture myself with my bare feet on that dirt, connected at all times to the earth.  I have such a desperate hunger for that kind of connectedness.

In one of my blog entries I began to explore how one becomes naturalized to a place.  I think I’ve come up with a way to measure that.  How do you know when you’ve finally become naturalized?  When the land begins to speak through you.

This land is starting to take hold of me.  As much as I long for the lushness of Pennsylvania, I think I’m starting to bond with this land too.  Lately I’ve been feeling an increasingly strong need to get out of this town, where nature has been too domesticated.  I see myself living in a little cabin amid the rolling wild prairie, with its sagebrush and yucca, coyotes and pronghorn, under the vast skies.

I want to be able to set my bare feet on the wildness and to feel it flow through me, and to learn from it.  And I need privacy that town life can’t give me.  It’s such a deep, aching need, much like what I felt in Longmont when suburbia was threatening to do me in.  I want to understand this ecosystem and participate in it.  I want to know the plants and the animals and bugs and to feel the energy of the land.

I feel like I’m turning a corner and entering some new phase of my life.  I’m about to enter (or have entered?) the second half of life, so it seems right that this is a time of transition.

Mentally and emotionally I’ve already moved into the next phase.  I understand that my life will only be meaningful if I pass on what I’ve learned.  It makes little sense to accrue knowledge if you aren’t going to share and apply it.  I’ll have to become a teacher as well as a learner.

Every night I dream about plants and herbs and preparing foods, it seems.  Last night I was making brown rice syrup, but in some beautiful, tribal, traditional setting.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it in real life because someone contacted me recently on the internet about a post I made two years ago where I was trying to figure out the process.  Last weekend I managed to create a syrup but it had a horrible bitter aftertaste.  I will try a new batch in a few days when I get more barley sprouted (barley sprouts provide the necessary enzymes to break the starches down into sugars).  The dream leaves me with the feeling that what I’m doing is important.  I’m trying to re-invent the wheel, basically—trying to rediscover traditional knowledge that, while it hasn’t actually been lost, is not readily available. It feels important, in this instance, not for cultural reasons but for personal reasons.  What I sense is that this process of discovery is teaching me things that are important to my development right now.

There have been a lot of interesting synchronicities in my life recently.  On Tuesday I was thinking about animal allies, and trying to figure out what my greatest animal ally would be, if I actually had one.  I know it would be one of these four: black bear, mountain lion, great horned owl, or eagle.  All four of those have figured into my life in various significant ways.

I was thinking about the eagle and how I hadn’t seen one this year.  The thought flashed that if this was my ally, I might see one in the next few days.

Driving home on Wednesday, Collin and I were crossing on the overpass just out of Brighton, about to get on the interstate.  Collin said, “Ooh look, Mom, a bald eagle!”  There it was, wheeling around on the currents created by the cars and trucks whooshing through the underpass.  It was practically at eye-level to us, just right off the north side of the overpass.

On the drive in I had seen two dead hawks along the side of the road and thought it was really odd—I don’t remember ever seeing hawk roadkill, let alone two.  It got my attention and made me think about the ally question again.  I guess it was a nudge to remain alert.  But actually, if Collin hadn’t been with me, I wouldn’t have spotted the eagle.  I had a splitting headache and was only focused on getting home.  So thankfully he was there and alert!

Birds seem important, symbolically, these days in the way in which they seem to bring earth and sky together.  And the weird way my hands morph into hawk or eagle wings and I see a hawk or eagle flash before my reflection in the mirror sometimes.  There definitely seems to be something I’m meant to learn from these birds.

My intuition tells me I’m transitioning into a new phase of learning. I can’t quite articulate it yet, but it feels like the things I’m being taught bear some resemblance to a shamanic path.  I think that as we try to uncover our full humanness it’s inevitable that we will be brought back to a connection with the land and with nature.  And when we have that connection we’re able to fuse with the matrix and become more than an individual ego, and when we’re more than ego, creation can flow through us and seemingly “miraculous” things can happen.  Shamans and healers are people who can shift into that higher form of being—they fuse with the matrix.  The teachings I’m receiving seem to be leading me along a similar path.

In January I had a dream which I wrote down elsewhere.  It keeps coming back to mind so I figure I should probably jot it down here.

I was with a group of people crossing a mountain.  We had been told by this wise, elder, shaman-type man before the start of our journey that we needed to find a particular pass through the mountain and only take that.  But as we searched for the pass (the shaman wasn’t with us) several of the men became frustrated and began suggesting alternate routes over the mountain. Eventually we found the pass and the shaman was there waiting for us.  He was rebuking the men and insisting that this was the only way we should go.  It was implied that it might be okay for others to take different routes, but for us—to achieve our mission, whatever that was—this was the only way.  The mountains were very tall, rocky, snow-covered and treacherous-looking anyway, under very ominous skies.  And the pass was more of a passage. I’m not sure if it was a deep, deep fissure in the mountain or an actual tunnel—it seemed like a tunnel.  It was a narrow, well-lit passage, about two feet wide with a sandy or dirt floor, sloping downhill.  It seemed extremely ancient.  Over time, logs had been brought in and placed as steps to make the descent easier.

We came out into a room in the rocks. There were all sorts of strange botanical items available.  I was intrigued by some exotic nut-type things that sort of resembled tiny pinecones.  They were about ½ inch to ¾ inch long and nubby all over.  I was told that if eaten in large quantities they would induce visions and hallucinations, but in small quantities they were just a highly nutritious and tasty snack.  I was going to take a small bag with me but I marveled that the US would allow them into the country given their mind-altering properties. (I got the sense that we were in another part of the world).  Then someone was displaying this green jelly—a big long glob was spread out on a table-like rock.  I was getting some of that too when they told me it was catnip jelly.  I thought, Oh no, I’ll be attracting every cat for miles around on my way back.  (As we had come down the passageway, we had passed a dog and two cats curled up together, shortly before we reached the room.)  The dream shifted then and Collin and I were moving back into the Longmont house.  I was working out front, which was very lush and abundant—everything was much, much nicer than in reality.  I realized that the energy there was actually exactly what I most needed to be immersed in at that time in order to accomplish what I needed to accomplish.

Parts of the meaning of this seem pretty obvious.  There is a particular path to knowledge, very ancient, and you must be willing to listen to the guidance you receive about the way.  It is actually a far less treacherous path to follow than the paths others take—it is well-protected.  Many have labored over the centuries to make the way easier for those who follow.

The foods I figured were metaphors, at least the nutty things were.  A few days before I had this dream I had written on my blog that a full immersion in voluntary simplicity was necessary to experience its transformative power.  Individual, discrete changes were good, but nothing like the transformation made possible by a radical immersion in simplicity.  That’s what the pinecones represented—a few of them were nutritious, just as a few changes in your lifestyle would be good for you, but a full dose led to something transformative.

The green jelly I couldn’t figure out, except for a weird synchronicity that just happened in the past few days.  At the library on Friday I took out a few books on herbalism, a topic that has always interested me but that’s really reawakening with force now that I’ve gotten back into growing things.  One book was called The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook by James Green.  I’ll have to get my own copy at some point because it teaches you how to make tinctures and distillations and there’s a myriad of other techniques for preparing herbal remedies that I haven’t seen compiled in one place before.  In the middle of the book he described how he was trying to make a glycerin-based suppository but something went awry and he ended up with a quivering mass of jello.  Eventually he tasted it and discovered it was good—the jello quality helped to diffuse any unpleasant tastes in the herbs.  He had invented herb jello.  On the next page he included a recipe for herb jello that uses regular, store-bought lime Jell-O—just the very color of my catnip jelly in the dream!

Then today I was reading another library book called Tales from the Medicine Trail: Tracking Down the Health Secrets of Shamans, Healers, Mystics, Yogis, and Other Healers, by Chris Kilham.  In the first section of the book, where the author was in the Amazonian rainforests of Brazil, I came across this:

On another occasion she and Nonata made a drink of buriti (Mauritia fluxuosa).  The fruits of the buriti palm looked a bit like small pine cones and were hard when picked.  But after a day or two soaking in water, the scaly outsides of the fruit were easily scraped off, revealing a pumpkin-orange starch.  Maria and Nonata mashed the fruits, mixed them with sugar and water, and strained the whole concoction, producing a rich, sweet, creamy drink.

While it didn’t say anything about this fruit having hallucinogenic properties I just find it odd to have come across a reference to something edible and pinecone-shaped so soon after having this dream.  (I looked Mauritia flexuosa up on the Internet and it did not look like the nubby little things in my dream.) Still, I consider it a synchronicity of sorts and I feel that I’m supposed to be learning about herbal and botanical things at this point.

When gas prices were first starting to skyrocket a year or two ago, I learned to slow down. Instead of 75 mph and above on the interstate I incrementally kept slowing down until I reached 55. And now, even though prices have dropped, I still stay between 55 and 65, except when I’m in danger of creating a traffic jam—and that almost never happens. This slowing down has taught me many things.

One thing it taught me is that speed is not healthy, not for me at least. And an arbitrarily set speed limit is not necessarily going to be a speed that’s right for me. I’ve noticed now that I go slower, that driving is rarely stressful anymore, as long as the weather’s fine. Icy roads or whiteouts are a different story, but most trips are very peaceful. When I do have to speed up for some reason, I notice how quickly my stress level rises and I realized that, when I used to drive fast, that was how I always felt. It was such an ever-present state back then that I could hardly notice it. But its absence is very noticeable, and very much relished. Seventy-five or eight-five was just way too fast for me.

When we move from place to place we move through shifting energies. I’ve been learning for the past few years just how sensitive I am to those energies and how important it is for me to acclimate to the energy of a new place. The latest piece of the puzzle is that I can’t move too quickly from place to place or my body can’t keep up with the shifting energies. Even fifty-five I feel is too fast, but I think I would get pulled over by the cops if I went any slower. It’s the best I can do. My goal, once Collin’s grown, is not to need to travel fast or far very often. When I move, I want to move at a human pace. To be present, I need to arrive with each footfall. I need to have my feet on the ground, to be supported by the earth, and to breathe in the local atmosphere. Moving so fast, as we do in this age, feels like an act of sacrilege. It disregards the earth and the skies and ourselves and our place in creation.

I need to take The Spell of the Sensuous back out of the library again because there was a place where Abrams talked about how various tribes placed knowledge in the landscape—what we would today call a mnemonic device, but which I feel is far more significant. It gets back to my idea that the land is our brain (more than brain, really--soul?). There was one story he told--I can’t remember it well--but the gist was he was traveling with an indigenous man who was telling stories connected with the landscape. He was behaving oddly it seemed, because he was talking unnaturally fast. Eventually they realized the stories were meant to be told at a walking pace as they passed the particular landmarks, but they were traveling in a truck going over 25. Once they realized this, they slowed down to a crawl and the man was able to slow down his storytelling.

There is knowledge held in the land that we will never have access to as long as we’re just quickly skimming over the surface.

I never set out to learn about weather, or the confluence of earth and sky. The subject matter seems weird, frankly. Which makes it so undeniable to me that I’m being taught, that guidance is always available to me, that the universe is alive and wise. It has knowledge it wants me to awaken to.

What I feel like I’m approaching is a metaphysics that has practical applications. You have your sky god religions, you have your earth based religions both old and new, but what’s most urgently needed is a stitching together of both parts of the matrix--a reintegration.

What do I know about earth and sky? Sky is about time, earth is about place. Sky is cerebral, rational and innovative in a technological way. Earth is grounded, creative in a generative way, nourishing. What kind of humans result from a balanced meeting of earth and sky influences? How would we live differently if the meeting of earth and sky in our hearts and our blood was balanced?

And how do we balance earth and sky? As individuals there’s little we can do about such imbalanced sky issues as pollution, but at the least we can make sure we take in enough sun energy. As for earth influences, there’s a lot we can do—everything we eat should have been allowed to express its true and full nature and only ingested when in its fullest glory of self expression. That means organic foods grown in living, mineralized soils. That means no caged or confined animals. It means eating animals who have been able to live natural lives, doing what is natural for its species to do. It may mean a return to more hunting and gathering, for only in truly wild foods can earth and sky be fully mingled. It means honoring the bird kingdom for its role in stitching together the matrix.

The foods we grow should be as close to ancestral form as possible. Plants that have been bred to mature much faster than nature intended or yield their fruits much more prolifically than nature intended will not be as nutritious and will not bring in enough earth.

I was awakened in the middle of the night a few nights ago by a dream that seemed important to remember. Even as I lay there, recalling it, I felt like I might not be recalling it accurately or remembering all of it. In fact all I really remember was seeing this small rectangular patch of wheat under a blue sky, accompanied by the knowledge that in order for earth and sky to meet, a plant must be able to express its true and full nature.

It sounds bizarre, I know. I’m not even sure what to make of it. Was the wheat field healthy (it sure looked healthy)? Was it stitching together earth and sky? Or was it so hybridized and weakened that it couldn’t participate fully? Can only ancestral wheat stitch together earth and sky or are there human-influenced wheats that are still able to express themselves healthily?

Beyond wheat, what are the implications of this? Does it go beyond plants to encompass all living things? If a human being is expressing his fullest potential, does he stitch together the matrix? A shaman who calls up the weather is doing just such a thing.

It’s such a weird concept. Why would earth and sky need to connect through living things? It does connect of course, in our blood and in the sap of plants. I suppose if our blood is deficient in one part of the matrix, like I suggested in my last entry, then earth and sky can’t fully meet.

In Secrets of the Soil, one guy said that our intestines are simply roots turned inside out. I had never looked at it that way, but it’s true. Just like microbial life attaches to the root hairs and makes nutrients more available to plant, so the beneficial microbes in our guts make nutrients more available to us.

And our lungs are like branches and leaves turned inside out, taking in the sky. And I read somewhere (probably in Secrets of the Soil) that blood and sap are almost identical substances. [Edited to say it’s actually hemoglobin (C₅₅H₇₂FeN₄O₅) and chlorophyll (C₅₅H₇₂MgN₄O₅) that are nearly identical.] We’re really nothing but mobile plants, and plants are stationary animals. Earth and sky meet in blood and sap.

So, how is a plant or animal supposed to express its fullest nature? My dream almost feels backwards—shouldn’t it have said that in order to express our fullest nature, earth and sky must meet within us? But it was the other way around.

I woke up this morning thinking about the way that people fight against their own natural way of manifesting. They’re always trying to be something they’re not. Changing straight hair to curly and curly to straight, red hair to blonde hair to brown hair to black. Getting facelifts and Botox and tummy tucks. Modulating personality with alcohol and drugs—both legal and illegal. Adopting false and shallow personas in their work and social lives.

What if everyone would just be who they are? There would still be just as much diversity and uniqueness, only it would be genuine. And somehow, according to my dream, that means that earth and sky could meet in all of us.

I’m tired and my thinking is muddy today, but there are a number of ideas I want to explore. I’ve been jotting down notes lately when I haven’t had time to write—just getting the general ideas down—and I’m struck by how nutty it sounds. If someone stumbled upon these notes they would surely look as nutty to them as some of Steiner’s writings look to me.

In his first lecture Steiner talks about the way in which breath is related to metabolism:

…Of all the relationships humans have to the physical world, the most important is breathing. Breathing begins the moment we enter the physical world. Breathing in the mother’s body is a preparatory breathing; it does not bring people into complete relationship with the physical world. What we properly call breathing begins only when the human being leaves the mother’s body. This breathing is extremely important for the human essence, since the entire three-part system of the physical human is connected to it.

We include the metabolic system as one of the members of the three-part physical human being. However, the metabolism is intimately connected with breathing—the breathing process is connected metabolically with blood circulation. In the human body, the blood circulation absorbs the material of the external world that has been brought in through other means, so that, on the one hand, breathing is, in a sense, connected with the metabolism. Breathing has its own functions, but in this way it is also connected with the metabolism.

And it occurs to me that blood is the sacred substance within us where earth and sky influences mingle. We breathe in sky and eat the earth. Our lungs and intestines feed the blood with these elements. Our blood carries our environment to every cell in our bodies. I need to study the emerging field of epigenetics (as yet the library carries nothing on this subject) because I feel like there’s something important there. We bring our environment inside, but then somehow through enzymatic interactions with that environment, genes can express themselves differently. I understand so little about the subject, but I really sense there’s something significant to it. As I’ve said somewhere before, I believe genetics to be environment that has been internalized and codified. We are continuously internalizing our environment, fluidly shaping genetic expression based on the part of the matrix we consume and digest. When conditions remain the same for generations it makes sense for the body to codify the particular genetic expressions which are a response to those conditions.

Nowadays the mix of earth and sky in our blood is not a healthy one. We’re not eating our own soil—our own patch of the matrix—food comes from somewhere else and is starved for the soil. The plants can only uptake a few doctored nutrients—mostly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium unnaturally introduced—and the most beneficial elements of the earth remain unavailable. We can’t fully internalize the earth and that leads to an imbalance. We always have the local sky influences in us, but not the local earth. Maybe that’s why we are too cerebral and rational—we’re able to innovate, yet our innovations are disconnected from the earth. Therefore we act destructively towards the earth.

Here are the ways we internalize our place in the matrix—through eating the earth and drinking the water, breathing in the sky, absorbingly the sun through our skin and eyes, and using our senses to absorb nature via metaphor. There’s probably more, too. I don’t yet understand the electrical and magnetic properties of life, but maybe we are absorbing both earthly and cosmic energies through those forces, I don’t know.

Another interesting tidbit from the Secrets of the Soil book. One chapter was about the amazing effects of sound. One guy discovered that the frequencies of birdsong causes a plants pores or stomata to open. He developed a nutrient-rich foliar spray and used it in conjunction with recordings at birdsong frequency to allow the plants to absorb the food well, leading to spectacular yields. It brings home to me the sacredness of sound. How beautiful to imagine the birds singing the plant kingdom awake every morning. And how sad and scary to think about our dwindling bird populations.

Another chapter in the Secrets of the Soil book was about antennae of various sorts, and it got me seeing every tree, plant, and blade of grass as some form of antenna—and wondering if the human dome-shaped skull isn’t an antenna of sorts (it mentioned that horns and antlers seem to have some properties of antennae).

I finished Secrets of the Soil and now I’ve started The Foundations of Human Experience, the only Steiner book the library had. It consists of a series of lectures Steiner gave when he was forming his first Waldorf school and was intended largely for the prospective teachers.

It’s quite fascinating, although a lot of it seems a little off base and still substantial amounts of it seem wacky. But other parts really jive with my recent ideas and it just gives me goosebumps. I definitely need to delve into his writings more because I suspect a lot of the remaining wackiness will wear off as I learn more. I do believe he was intuiting truths, but he had a quaint way of expressing them that gives his whole body of work an aura of quackery. The challenge is to uncover the nuggets of truth.

There was something he said in his first lecture that really struck me. He was talking about how teachers need to bring into the classroom the totality of who they are—who they’ve become in the entire course of their existence. It’s not enough to simply bring their knowledge. By bringing their totality they bring more than mere personality and ego and they can reach the children through the spiritual. The next part was what was really interesting to me:

When you enter the classroom in this unpretentious state, then through inner powers a relationship is created between you and the students. In the beginning, it is possible that superficial occurrences contradict this. You go into the school, and you may have rascals before you who laugh at you. Through thoughts like those we wish to cultivate here, you must so strengthen yourself that you pay no attention to this laughing and accept it simply as a superficial occurrence in the same way you would regard being out without an umbrella when it suddenly begins to rain. This is certainly an unpleasant surprise. Normally, people differentiate between being laughed at and being surprised by rain when they have no umbrella. However, no difference may be made. We must develop such strong thoughts that we will not differentiate between being laughed at and an unexpected rain shower.

That paragraph was tailor-made to grab my attention because it compared human activity with—what else—the weather! You walk into a new classroom and the children laugh—what is this? It is a manifestation of the local influences—the children are expressing their environment. Everything they’ve become until then, all that has influenced them—their environment internalized—sits there and greets the teacher on her first day. If all of that precipitates out as laughter, so be it—that is what wants to manifest here now, given all the preceding conditions. Just like a rain shower.

The gift of that paragraph is that it deepens a little more my explorations of the question, what wants to manifest here? I hadn’t so much looked at human behavior yet as a manifestation of place. Most human behavior is off balance—what is causing that to manifest? What are the local conditions that have caused a particular behavior to precipitate out? How can the local conditions be improved so that balanced, harmonious actions and attitudes will precipitate?

If people have lost their connection with the natural world what wants to manifest will not be good. What can precipitate out of the matrix in an inner city?

I’ve been learning about soil in the past year or two. There’s so little I know and so much I want to understand. The ecosystem that comprises the first few inches of soil is so much more complex than any ecosystem that exists above it, out here.

The symbiotic relationships that exist make it hard to discern discrete individuals—isn’t it all just one big organism?

I read a book by Lynn Margulis recently, Symbiotic Planet: A New View of Evolution, that was really interesting. She believes that all higher life forms were created by incorporating lower forms. More complex structures or cells formed when simpler organisms fused together (mitochondria being one example). These simpler living structures were assured a greater chance of survival by incorporating into something larger—creating a cooperative, mutually beneficial arrangement. The mitochondria in every cell in my body give me energy, allow me to have life and to move and act in the world. The bacteria in my gut allow me to bring the outside in, to bring nourishment to my cells. So, this consciousness that I have—while it feels like the consciousness of a single entity—is really the sum total of all the life that comprises me. And the fact that I bring in and absorb other life, for nourishment, means that I am constantly cycling the consciousness of my environment.

I’m reading another fascinating book right now. It’s called Secrets of the Soil: New Solutions for Restoring Our Planet and it’s about Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic methods of agriculture. I’ve always been grateful for some of the more mainstream applications that have come out of his work, but mostly his ideas were too far out there for me. But, now this book falls into my hands at a time when I feel primed to hear it. And I start to realize—there’s something here. Steiner may have been intuiting the forces of nature that science can barely begin to discern, if at all. How can I dismiss any of his techniques when for the past few years I’ve been learning by intuition, too? I just finished the chapter that showed there is now some scientific support for his bizarre practice of stirring preparations for an hour—repeatedly changing directions so as to creative a vortex, then chaos, then a vortex, then chaos. The studies are showing that this process charges the water electrically and creates stable colloidal particles which plants are able to uptake. It’s very interesting stuff.

I’m having trouble pulling everything I’ve learned together into something cohesive. I can sense that it all fits together and I have dreams filled with insight in the middle of the night that seem to be grappling with these issues, but I wake up with only the vaguest memories.

Everything I’ve been learning about in the past few years seems to be converging. It feels like I’m so close to seeing a bigger picture.

I really need to explore Edith Cobb’s ideas, especially in conjunction with Barry Lopez’s ideas about children and metaphor. But I also need to take it all a step further and pull in some of my own ideas about place and the living matrix we’re immersed in, as well as John Livingston’s ideas about levels of consciousness—how we downshift into the egoic self.

I believe that the developmental stages of an individual mirror the stages humanity has passed through over the ages. A child’s blissful fusion with place and the natural world is like humanity’s earliest days of pre-egoic fusion with nature. You can also see it in John Livingston’s way as a shifting up and out of the personality into a larger identity, but he leaves out the distinction between unconscious and conscious fusion. I suspect that children spend much more time unconsciously fused with a larger identity than we realize. What we note are the instances when children become aware of the fusion and can articulate it.

It wasn’t until I was eleven that I first was able to clumsily grasp hold of and articulate what I had felt my whole life. I wrote that I sometimes felt I was a million years old—that I had already experienced everything that could be experienced and that life (my individual egoic life) would never truly contain any surprises.

What I said was clumsy, but what I knew was something quite profound. It’s only when children approach or enter adolescence that they can reach or begin to have experiences of conscious fusion. Without a fully developed egoic mind they probably wouldn’t be able to name these experiences or to be conscious of them. Consciousness relies on persona. We have to downshift into persona in order to share our experiences of fusion.

If our next phase of evolution is to consciously fuse back into nature, how do we then upshift that awareness? This is where it gets confusing, but also where I feel that I’m getting very close to something.

How do you keep the best aspects of the individual egoic self—awareness—while discarding all the nonsense that comes from isolated dotness?

Little by little over my lifetime I’ve been shedding ego. Is it possible maybe that we could slough off all of ego except for a core of pure awareness? How would that be possible? It all gets so confusing.

I don’t understand the how of it, but I’m excited about the possibilities. When you shift consciously to the higher levels of the matrix—out of the persona—so much becomes possible. I can understand how weather could be shifted, how healing could be accomplished, how thoughts could be transmitted telepathically, how the land could be “read” and human endeavors harmonized with it.

I know I’ve said it many times before that one of my greatest gifts in this lifetime is to have such a huge store of past life memories. Whether they are ultimately real or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that they feel real. Their gift is that they give me the long view. I see this moment in history for what it is—a moment. I see my life for what it is—a brief flickering. I understand that I am much more than this life and this persona and I understand that humanity is much more than what is expressing itself here in our current civilization. I can grasp the brief flickering of Gaia’s life and recognize that’s not all there is. I can grasp the concept of eternity.

I can fully engage with the here and now—my individual circumstances and earth’s predicament—and yet not so fully identify with them that I despair. This is not all there is and this doesn’t ultimately matter. I wear my life loosely—not clinging to it as others do. I will easily shed this life when that moment comes because I know I go on. And when humanity dies, I will shed that identity too, and when earth dies I will release that body with grace.

The gift of these past life memories is not only that I see the long view, but also that it’s impossible to identify too much with the ego. I’ve been so many egos it’s easy to see I’m not ego. This persona is a cloak I will shed—the thing I drape around me to give me form temporarily, so I can play here. But I will shed it and go on to wear other cloaks. As I evolve awareness, I expect the cloaks will get larger and larger until eventually I outgrow all of them.