There is always loss and life. The difference is time.
Everything has accelerated our 2020 world view within ourselves. How long did we think we could move so fast with little relationship? How long did with think we could consume our world without a response from it? Life and Death have meaning. Without knowing this, humans will only deepen with loneliness.
Humans must grieve for life when it's lost.
In 2020 the losses have been great—human life, spiritual life, social life, animal life, forest life, mineral life, insect life, planetary life, and the slow sometimes fast and violent death of oxygen and clean water. We require time to grieve the inequities in shelter and economy, time to confront brutality on the innocents, time to right starvation of food, shelter and love and for the terror it creates.
With courage, together we turn, to see that we, humans, are the main problem. That we have created a disastrous world by our fear of nature, and by our contempt for it. If we rise up wiser, this year may show itself to be the apex of loss depending on how the general election in America turns out. The world is watching.
There is no way to run away from our human predicament without bringing these problems along. The people who think there will somehow be a new religion on Mars are deluded by their own grandiosity. The people who move to create dystopian or utopian futures are equally insane, sometimes in an unharmful way called entertainment. The people who cling to the distant or recent past of the way things were in their version of good old days long for a bubble that has disintegrated.
Our dis-integral beginnings are not with the murder of George Floyd, not by the calling in of US military 82nd airborne with their bayonets to be used on civilians, not with the rubber bullets and tear gas blasted onto peaceful multi-racial Black Lives Matter protesters. Our dis-integral relationship didn't begin with hate crimes against LGBTQ+ Americans or Muslim-Americans, Mexican-Americans or LatinX, or Asian-Americans, or Jewish-Americans or asylum seekers who have been sadistically and illegally separated and caged. It didn't begin with the 2020 deadly global pandemic allowed to pillage 220,000+ since recording in March 2020. After six months and counting, about 1000/COVID deaths/day, Americans of all ages are dying but especially seniors, all races are dying but especially people of color, markedly in African-American, LatinX, and Native American communities.
Maybe, dis-integral life began with man made disaster itself.
How do we grieve when all seems lost, when loss doesn't quit? Some humans forego their capacity with stagnation, little effort given with the justification that there's no more to learn. Or build a manmade threshold of expertise where requirements for fresh knowledge and or new experience is deemed unnecessary. And it is, precisely in this moment, the choice comes. To begin or not to begin. To begin requires the great effort of unlearning. Not to un-know. To unlearn. Not to leave unlearned.
The California wildfires effected us like the Australian bush fires effected us, like the fires set in the Amazon rain forest effected us. Anyone reading that line thinking otherwise is facing a moment of choice to begin or not. There is always the offering to to unlearn in order to learn.
Our ridge was burnt to the ground. All shelters of beautiful homes for humans and wildlife were burnt to the ground. It was all toxic ash and ancient trees standing dead. The oxygen was sucked dry from that place. We were fortunate though that all the humans were evacuated safely. But the forest, wildlife and its ecosystems were destroyed. For decades our ridge was a sanctuary giving birth to dance, painting, art making films, producing for the mpowerdance project. The fire changed all that. The sanctuary mother home is wounded, dying and changing.
Within this change an unexpected sorrow appeared. A specific grief not separated from the make up of 2020 thus far.
Star gazing. Star bathing.
Months had gone by without witnessing the night sky without feeling the flicker of starlight vibrate its resonance. In less than a week 13,000 lightening strikes and almost 600 wildfires started during an already severe heatwave. How do the firefighters survive this? The explosive fires created freakish "firenadoes" and after weeks, months, some have been extinguished, unbelievably. Post-inferno, nothing manmade remained in tact. Stones exploded. There was no moisture left in smoky charred sky, oxygen is scarce, carbon dioxide abundant. So how did one wooden star gazing adirondack chair survive when the others that sat next to it did not?
The first star to rise yesterday, in the California south sky was actually a planet. Jupiter. Bright, clear light in the fading blue sky. Jupiter brings joy to grief like the archangel Gabriel or the great works of the Tao. It's healing light moves throughout whether noticed or unnoticed. When humanity cries out Jupiter sends its message "We've been here before. We'll be here again."
You have been here before. You will be here again. Take nothing for granted. Action and inaction have consequences.
It is difficult the labor of love. It demands of us not without laughter and good company. May we continue to grow by an unusual effort, unlearning the nonsensical conditioned fears. So that, we can be alive through our many lessons in this lifetime, before death comes.
We've come so far and there's further on.
Below is a one minute clip called "Jupiter's Light" a song and a message arrived from grief.
For decades, with one compelling performance after another, Mary Power and her mpowerdance project have kept up a shamanic drum beat, summoning the forces of nature and the depths of the human soul. To bear witness to the exquisite beauty of Gaia and the utter interdependence of all life. Integrating dance, art, film, music and spoken word into a powerful somatic language, timeless, archetypal, universal, grieving and celebratory all at once. The liberating power of truth. The redeeming power of love. The creative power of forests, seas and psyches. This four minute film captures the essence of what mpowerdance project offers us in these perilous times, and provides a insightful glimpse into the richness of Mary Power's sustained vision.
The evolution of the wheel is excellent in the beginning, excellent in the middle and excellent in the end.
"Everything flows. Panta Rhei. Movement and the unchanging law governing it are one; they know neither kernel nor husk—heart and mind function together undivided."
The Concept of Change by Helmut Wilhelm (1960)
shadow in light
light in shadow
“No one told me it was like this. It’s only matter shot through pure imagination. [So] rise up little souls. Join the doomed army toward the meaning of change. Fight...fight...wage the unwinnable.”—a student of Toni Morrison, from page 32 The Source Of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison
