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.

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

By Pieter

The trip to California was an amazing experience of connection for me. I have never felt my intuition speaking so clearly, nor have I ever been so willing to follow it. Because my most memorable learnings and inner shifts were not happening in the rational part of me, but rather in other parts of my being, I’m going to employ poetry to share these impressions with you…I hope other, non-rational parts of you are listening too…

.

Growing Memory
Unspoken truth
Rests
Deeply
In lines and unlines
Silence
After midnight
Birds
Before dawn
Singing truth
.
Becoming who I am
Walking
My feet touch the earth
Seeking
My eyes stroke horizons
Reaching
My hands feel edges, spaces
Learning
Becoming what they are
.
Remembered as a whole
Dust between my toes
Heavy inbreaths climbing up up
Racing sunrise to the ridgeline
A perfect blue-gold day
Peace on the landscape like a down blanket
Hummingbirds sewing the seams
Bees composing sweetness in the treetops
Remembered, the world becomes whole
.
The land was written inside of me to stay.
My hands hold the shapes, feet lift the textures
My ears drink music, my voice receives songs
My eyes discover horizons on the inside and outside
Miles run by as conversation weaves me together
My mind works the land into healing food and shelter
My heart works healing into the land
I was written by the inside of the land
to stay
.
Coming away circled,
Memories hold hands in my heart:
Unspoken truth/Singing truth
Becoming who I am/Becoming what they are
Remembered as a whole/The world becomes whole
The land was written/I was written
inside of me
to stay
.

There is so much more I could say, but I won’t.  I believe that real traveling is finding my truth… I’ve gone quite a far distance, methinks.

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

The speaker was talking about listening to the landscape.  Our classroom was in the sand, yucca and juniper of Quail Springs.  While he talked my mind was drawn to a cottonwood tree, lowly growing and thickly limbed.  I didn’t think anything of it.  It was the only cottonwood and I felt naturally drawn to it as it’s a tree from the memory of my childhood.  Then I felt drawn to something over my shoulder.  I looked behind me and I saw a ridge covered in pinyon and  mile or so away and behind it another and another, nothing special but for that sense that says “pay attention.”  I returned to listen to the speaker and again like a phone call I turned my head and looked over my shoulder.  ”let it go.” I said to myself.  ”Too much to do… Talk to so and so… work on the adobe… gather some yucca…”  It called again.   I looked expecting to see something like an eagle or bear on the hill but it wasn’t so grand, just a small voice saying “come over here.”

“OK.  I will.”  I said.  And the prompting stopped and thus began an afternoon of desert voices…

The speaker asked us to go and find a spot that we felt drawn to and sing a song from our heart to the land.  No brainer. The cottonwood had been on my mind from the start…   I’d done this excersize before and Tom’s standard class.  At that time I found an arrow shaft.  This time… I had no doubt I’d find what ever I needed.

I came to the tree and was surprised. It wasn’t a short tree it was actually tall but growing out of a wash twenty feet deep.  A branch spanned the ten feet across the wash but you had to jump to the branch.  Such a thing seemed appropriate on a spirit errand so jumped the rift and ran across the branches to the trunk that led down to the stream.  I stripped off my shirt and bathed my head, arms and chest.  My mind was free.  My heart focused.  My body sang with the coolness of the water and the taste of salt off my face and on my tongue. I touched the water flowing by.  I petted it.  I sang my song.  A song that came easy in places like these.  It was the song of my childhood that I save for myself.  That is before I came to WAS I kept it to myself.  Here my childhood and daily events have mingled.  The promptings ceased and I felt I was done with this errand and left the tree and the water.

After the lecture I pursued the ridge.  I ran down the wash and up on the flats, feeling dog-like: tireless and agile.   The sun was too hard for my winter northwestern skin and I didnt bring sunscreen so I sought the wash again on the hunch that the mud Mirka had played in in the days before was down here.  Bingo. I found it and covered my chest, back and neck.  I took off my moccassin’s, put-on my palmetto hat and ran.  I can remember feeling this free.  Weekends running the sand roads half naked at Fort Bragg.   I felt so good I didnt mind when our hosts drove by and they just smiled and waved.  I love desert hippie’s.

I wandered the flats and ridges of the place I was called to.  I sang songs, mused, worried, ran and stalked.   It was all the things a wander initials.  Yet after a couple hours I began to feel the mud pull my body hair.  I dug for water but I was too low in the valley.  That meant I had to run back to the ranch.  So I wandered up there.

On my way I passed a stone.  I thought “cool stone.”  I stopped.  ”Why did I think that?”  I’ve seen thousands of stones even just today and none have made me feel like that.    I went back and picked it up.  It was the size of my palm, thickness of my little finger and sandstone.  Then something interesting happend.  As if acting on its own the hand holding the stone moved to my arm caked in mud and began to rub the stone across it.  Voila.  The mud fell off in a shower of sand without any hair being pulled.  I rubbed it all over my chest and with patience the mud fell off. Well in that process I got to smell my own armpits (they stank) and in a flash of inspration I rubbed my lucky rock on my pits.  Voila.  No stink.    Wow.  I had a need and a stone provided a solution.

It was a day of voices. I don’t recall a day with so many curious things to listen to.  So believe what you can but I know that the hills, trees, and rocks speak.

Winded I sat below the crest and I watched the others wander the valley below.  They took their time.  I could feel the personalities of those I knew by the tempo of their gate and by what held their attention.   I felt happy and love for each one I saw they seemed more like deer and jackrabbits than urbanites.  I had more fun watching them then mule deer or coyotes.

Then I felt the rush again and I ran.  I ran up the next ridge and bolted down the hill sides my feet shuffling, hopping, sliding like an eight year old.  I was livid with the forgotten sense of this land.  This is the land that sculpted my character, its values are my own… It amazes me how the feet enliven the heart!

We lived  a lot the next few days.  By day we worked on turning earth to houses, evening we sang and listened to music.  At night I began my orbit out to the lone voices in the periphery of the ranch and returned to hugs and laughter.

I was told that this place was a place of consolation to the first peoples here. I planted tears in the sand here and I know the earth remembers.  The miracle seed of self discovery.  sow it and the earth will hold it for that day.  Maybe when I return I will find a tree of knowledge where my knees pressed and hair washed the sand.   Perhaps I will hear the echo of my laughter.

While other groups learned about primitive fishing gear, arrows, and bows, I mostly wove. I got to know cedar bark, willow, cattail, cedar root, and wool – each one has it’s own soul and preferred way of being handled. Cedar bark is very clear about its abilities and limits, a great first basketry teacher for me. Willow is stubborn but strong, and likes a gentle, slow hand. Cattail is a scatterbrains that says yes to anything, but needs to be controlled and held in place to be useful. Picking the right cedar roots is an art in itself, and these are a material suitable for the very persistent basket-maker. Wool smells like a cozy home to me, and can be transformed and used in so many different ways that I can’t help falling in love with it.

When Swil Kanim visited us, I heard him talking about the Sacred residing not in an single being or entity, but rather in the relationships between beings. Weaving makes me aware of the many relationships present within the weave of my clothes, baskets, bags, cordage… I love the idea of taking a single, long, straight strand of natural material – a plant reaching up to the sun, a strand of an animal’s fur – and interlacing it with itself and with other fibers until the relationships between them are so plentiful and complex that a new being emerges.

As the days flowed by and we sat in cedar lodge, our rodent-like busy hands constructing the sacred weave of our baskets, another sacred weave was being made. It happened somewhere in between the stories and the laughter, in between the cries of frustration and the joy of success. Our community’s weave gained new connections of sharing during these weeks, and now I feel that our Anake village is woven together a lot more tightly than before.

I like weaving.  I like how over time you can see what was only a thought before.  The two-dimensional realm mirrors the possibility that is always present.  I feel the tension of the rug every now and then, I push on it like it’s mine, and it feels warm and supple, rich and pregnant, the animal life still breathing through the weave through each rope, hugging a whole together, all retaining their lovely, naked character, but clothed in the tightness of belonging together.  A sense of coming together, of the world smiling when right materials are lain and paired with right materials with care, effort and love.  The attention that is paid allows me to feel a connection to this blanket of crystallized sunlight, this gift we will offer from our hearts, this web of animal fiber breathing with the breath of intention.

By Pieter

When Swil Kanim played Ascension and the clear cry lifted from the string and saturated the room my thoughts failed and I became a feeling, a feeling without memory or future.

It took me home to the southwest.  It was the same feeling I have after traveling the mesas to arrive at water.  In this case I remembered Upper Calf Creek Falls a place the haunts me.  That waterfall is an 80 foot fall into a 20 foot emerald green pool.  To reach it you cross trackless slick rock slopes and arroyos.  Some of the most beautiful and footsore terrain in the US.  the music saturated me like a high plunge into clear and cold after hours of heat sand and flies.  This school has its wastelands too; grotesquely beautiful landscapes we bring within ourselves.  So like a desert hike and like the brazen loneliness one faces in the bold reality of nature I found in his music a vehicle to access emotional memories like few things can.

As well as music I was impressed with his stories of humor and hope. More the hope.  Funny is common but hope for the future is becoming rare.  I was also impressed with his ability to go from the big picture to the personal and he got personal.  It was great to see such diversity, boldness and sincerity in an entertainer.  Now I didn’t agree with his view on women and creation. I thought it deified women and vilified men.  But how enjoyable is a conversation where everything is agreed on?  And thats how it felt with him a conversation in a living room late at night with friends.

thanks Swil Kanim.