Anake Outdoor School Blog

Where have I been? A year of questions. A year of gratitude. A year of growing love.

I come from a time of opposites. A time of this, not that. A time of I! (and you). I’ve been trained to see difference, to tell things apart. Critical Thinking. Discernment. Mind the Gap! They were everywhere, gaps of disconnect, of who I couldn’t be.

I’ve been told, “Don’t be selfish” – but that’s when I’m generous. “Don’t be fearful” – but that’s when I’m brave! “Don’t cry, here,haveahugandatissue,it’sallright” – but that’s where I dive into myself, bungee cords of connection that show me my depth, power, kindness, truth. “Oh, and please, please don’t be angry”. But that’s where I discover deep, fierce, generative love.

Slowly filling myself, the Kinglet’s voices weave health into my soul. Here, we’ve been trained to connect. To integrate. Each plant, animal, person, raindrop, tree is a new friend. Each friend connects to the edges of my soul, and in that connection, we are both touched by the Sacred. Love for all living beings pours out of me like a newly discovered spring, clear and gentle.

In seeking the unity of my soul so I can bring my gifts to the world, I’ve found that connections have healed me. And in healing myself, I’ve found that I, in turn, have healed others. My grief is a Trillium now. I see unity there, the healed and healer are one, are each other.

I hail the wisdom of the native peoples, who shared with us that unity is power, that power lies in unity. Unity of healed, who is healer, who is friend, who is mother, who is warrior, who is Anake. I am fighting for the world, because it’s myself I’m fighting for.

This post is about two weeks of the year that I don’t really want to tell you anything about. I want to give you the gift of discovering each minute, each hour, give you the freedom to just be present as the days unfold. At the same time, so much happened at Scout Camp and survival week that it would be strange for me not to tell you anything.

So – I ask the universe for some Coyote energy in attempting to walk the edge between telling something that would take away from the mystery, and telling so little that it makes no sense, has no connection to you. I’ll give you little hints, moments, snippets.

…Struggling for what felt like hours at my sitspot to get out of my busy mind and into my sense meditation…succeeding just in time to be told by the bird alarms that a classmate was moving over the landscape, and having the scout skills to find & follow him unseen & unheard…

…a moving meditation so slow that I feel a single thread strung across the trail and traverse it without breaking…

…Traveling across a moonlit mountainside, my socks silent on the pine needles. Feeling high on life and free as the Wolf must, her wild energy calling me to keep moving for miles and miles across the ridges, silent, a shadow in the night…

…Discovering that there are things in my life that I love so fiercely, things that are to me so vital and deserving of life and health, that my desire to tend, heal, and protect them overpowers all my fears and hesitations…

…being surrounded by edible plants to the extent of feeling the indecision about what to pick that I usually only experience in a supermarket…

…the fulfillment of bringing back food for my tribe…the security of seeing that everyone else is bringing back food too, and knowing that if my strength failed, I’d be cared for…

…feeling so much love for this group of people continuing to do their best to be a tribe under trying conditions…watching us try to reach consensus, provide food for each other, and care for each others ills, and choosing to care for the earth with our last ounces of strength…

Well, there’s much more, but I’ll stop here, because I’m feeling so much gratitude. Thanks for reading my latest musings, dear reader

I weave you a wool blanket
Hand over hand, heart passed
through
bundled around the shuttle,
passed through,           passed through,
and back again
The old frame of the loom
clacks and twists
as I bend design to my
skill, and my aims
I labor to make a gift
with my hands,
while the loom
makes a weaving
that appears on its own
This old loom is like God,
perhaps
and the rug I weave
now stretching, rolling underneath
is my own soul, stretched along,
etched into now
the way made things always are:
when yarn meets yarn,
a cinch is tied,
an agreement plied,
and new beauty is brought forth
from that world,
into this one

By Pieter

You darkness, that I come from,

I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!-
powers and people-

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

From Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly

“I have been one aquantied with the night…”

THE NIGHT.  My mentor these last 10 days was the night but this trip was different.  I was pulled from firelight to starlight every evening.    No mystery leaving the folks after a day in a van, but it was more than that, I was pulled.

At Sunol, I wondered the green hills and oaks.  The moon light scattered thru the oaks leaves was luminescent on the trail.  It didn’t illuminate it, it obscured but was so beautiful I didn’t care if I fell.  I walked slow, very slow.  At Quail Springs I drifted down the road towards the setting sun.  The stars individual fires as far away as I felt form myself.  I drifted in that sky. Visiting past, present and future.  Mingling with me and versions I could of me.  My mind changed.  My heart expanded.   I sang.  I sang heart songs and wandering songs.  After a while  I felt the tension to return, like a planet at aphelion, I drifted back to fire and friends.

This drifting happened every night.  Pushed away and pulled back.  The gifts f the night and the emotions born with them  sit with with me.   I still feel that dark and stars as I sit in the sun on this rare Seattle day.   If I forget, then Orion and Taurus will remind me. Don’t be fooled the stars remember.

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost