Into the West

Why do I feel an affinity for this song right now? Why do I feel that it speaks to the state of my soul?

(This version of O Elbereth Gilthoniel is not exactly the same as Tolkien's original, but pretty close in spirit. This is the movie version, which I like no less for that.) 

Tolkien's elves themselves are but a broken reflection of the elves of European mythology: the elves that got diffracted by pagans and Christians until they were only a shadow. The "original elves" weren't even elves, their elfhood was retroactively placed upon them in the process of their being wiped out. They were the Tuatha de Danann, the original folk of Ireland who were displaced by invaders from Continental Europe.

You may see a pattern here. Some millennia in the future, perhaps some retroactive elfhood will be placed upon the Native Americans as they existed before the blessings of Western Civilization were forced upon them. They went into the Earth too, not metaphorically. The Tuatha de Danann, the legendary people who were retroactively made elves, in myth were given the lands underneath the Earth as part of a crooked deal with the invading Milesians. The invaders got the land above the earth, the Tuatha de Danann were given the land underneath the barrows, the mounds that enshrine the remains of the dead. Which is probably just a nice way of saying they were betrayed and killed.

Tolkien's elves are immortal, but they are compelled to go into the West: to leave Middle Earth. The West has been the metaphorical direction of the Afterlife for many cultures - the Elysium of the Greeks was originally thought to be just a place in the real world that was so far west it was impossible to sail there, where heroes went when they died. Over time Elysium became a place in the Underworld. Tolkien's elves are compelled to leave Middle Earth because essentially an age of Darkness has descended on it (the Age of Man) and their time there has gone. They either have to go into the West or stop being elves. There was some intimation on Tolkien's part that if they did not leave, they would become shadows of sorts: barely visible, secretive, not unlike what some Icelanders think of elves today. The Hidden People.

I am about to say something contradictory:

that there never were any "historical elves" and that

paradoxically I feel a deep spiritual connection with them. 

Elves were never precisely some stray branch on the tree of Homo Sapiens that got wiped out in prehistory. They are, if you will, members of an archetype of Edenic humanity: of a humanity that has never severed its connection with the World. As such, they may instantiate to some degree in real people or real peoples but never completely. They exist in the Dreaming. The guys in Iceland who see elves or their effects, if they are truly seeing elves, are not seeing them with mundane eyes. They are seeing them in the Dreaming. Thus I can say I feel a spiritual lineage to the elves myself, and not say that they are historical in any normal sense. The story of the Tuatha de Danann may indeed be a story of a more "edenic" culture being wiped out by a more "advanced" culture - the Milesians were Greeks according to some interpretations, and so even then the "advanced" label would certainly apply. Theirs was the cradle of the scorpion which is now worldwide: Western Civilization. Western Civ has been putting "less advanced" people into the barrows ever since. 

All of this is roundabout to my main message really, but you have to understand it to understand what I say next. I too am going "into the West." I am going to Elysium, the Elysium of my visions, not the Greek one. That is why the song resonates with me.

No, don't worry, I am not going today probably. I am working on my health in fact, exercising more than probably ever, I even joined Nicotine Anonymous to quit smoking and hope to quit soon. But I am 56, will be 57 in a month. As I work on all this, I wonder, what is the point really? To live a bit longer in a world that makes me profoundly sad? To live a bit longer in a world that is going to continue to make me even more sad every day, as it spirals away from anything that could remotely be called sanity? This too was a peril that Tolkien's elves lived with: profound sadness. To live to see the destruction of everything I love? To live to witness yet more tragedies as greed devours the Earth? Why?

I cannot change this Age of Darkness, any more than Tolkien's elves could keep the Age of Man from coming. Am I only presiding over my own diminishment, like Tolkien's fading elves who resist the call to the West? Indeed I already diminish, despite my relative health, as does the Earth I love. Why ought I stick around for all that? I am looking for reasons.

It is not that anyone reads or at least understands my words, I cannot hope to change hearts and even if I did, for what? That they may suffer as I do? That their eyes may open to the horror? Should I not indeed wish that their eyes remain closed and go like peaceful lambs to the slaughter? I suppose I write these blog posts not to open eyes that are closed but to comfort eyes that are open, but there seem few of those. Who am I leaving this testament, this my entire blog, for? God forbid that some as yet young or unborn should be "gifted" in the same way as I am, that they can be even more a creature out of place than I am. So that they can sorrow even more than I do. 

This is a question I will put to my "people", my fathers and mothers, over coming days because only they can answer it. I have a powerful resistance to the idea of self-slaughter, which is probably the only reason why I am still alive, but that's not the question. I am not questioning whether or not I should kill myself. The question is why should I be alive? 

Am I just going through the motions like dumb cattle because I don't know anything better to do? These things I know: that my mind and strength will diminish, that the destruction of the planet I love cannot be reversed, that the ignorance of the masses cannot be cured, that I will find few or no kindred spirits on this Earth to share my suffering at this point. Given these truths, why do I live?

I will be asking these questions to those who can tell me over coming days and months. Perhaps there is indeed an answer. 

Why Abstract Gods?

I revere the Sun, Sky, Earth and Water, and I don't think they need other names than that.

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”

-Hubert Reeves

It strikes me as very strange that throughout history, Man has shown a preference for gods that are at the same time both abstract (not strongly connected with the observable world) and personal (like human beings.) In almost every case where people start to approach the idea of "gods' as the real things that keep the world alive and keep them alive - the Sun, water, Earth, the atmosphere, plants - they seem to almost immediately distance themselves again. They put it behind a layer of abstraction. Actual grains become the goddess of the grains (Ceres in Roman mythology). The actual Sun becomes the sun god (Apollo for the Greeks, Sol for the Romans, Ra or Aten for the Egyptians), who is essentially a dude with a personal history and family rivalries and so on. This is not completely universal but certainly so prevalent that you could be excused for thinking of it as universal.

I would be tempted to think of this as a symptom of "advanced" religion. By advanced religion I actually mean decayed religion or religion properly speaking as opposed to a way of life in which spirituality cannot be separated from everyday existence. The idea is that as religions continue through time they become more and more abstract so as to remove their "gods" from the suspicion that they have failed or are otherwise imperfect. The iconoclastic (image-destroying, "idol" destroying) nature of later Protestant and Puritan religious innovations and of Islam very much connect with this: that God must be removed from any taint of the material. That God must be wholly abstract and removed from any possibility of human interaction.

However the temptation to think of this as entirely a function of historical development is probably inaccurate: it has probably been there in some form all along. Archaeologists are tempted to think of the figure of the Venus of Willendorf, a figure made 27,000 years ago, as a religious figure: if so, it is clearly the distorted image of a human being. If it truly represents a god in our sense of the word, it represents a personal god. A human-like god. Since it is an intangible human-like being, it would also be an abstract god. Again, supposing all this to be true, it would represent a god not utterly different from gods that were common 25,000 years later and even in some corners of the world today.

Venus of Willendorf, image by Matthias Kabel

Is it really so difficult to accept the idea that the actual things that actually allow life to exist at all physically are gods? That for instance the Sun is a god. Water is a god. Earth herself is a god. Of course for modern people, this would require a reinterpretation of what it means to be physical, the nature of stuff, because for modern people the physical is utterly deprecated and to say that your god is a ball of plasma undergoing fusion seems to degrade the holy to the extreme. We are infected with the Western philosophical conceit that self is wholly different from the world it exists in, that matter is base and unimportant and minds or souls are lofty and important. That mind is the master and body merely its humble and base carriage. This reached a low in the Christian era with Rene Descartes declaring that minds and bodies were totally dissimilar substances and that all things except human souls were mere machines. Descartes was clearly not a pet owner, as he held to the pernicious idea that animals have no feelings and no subjective experience. Afterwards this reached a new low in the "post-Christian" era with the scientific reductionist declaration that everything is a machine, that you too were a machine, thus continuing the denigration of the physical while now including everything in this degraded classification. Modern atheists and scientific materialists and reductionists are thus truly children of Descartes, but with the troublesome issue of soul removed.

I could digress on how convenient this worldview is for those who wish to exploit the world and other people - Western societies being the all-time champs on knowing how to exploit Nature, animals and other people. To clear-cut a forest, one must first of all not know it as it really is, but objectify it. You don't see the birds, you don't see the flowers, you don't even really see the trees. It is nothing, mere mass. To exploit workers in the Third World, or to go to war with them, one must of course view them as not quite like us. What one would destroy, one must first desecrate, de-sanctify, un-know. But I digress.

In between the pit of Descartes and the new pit of universal physical nihilism, there are some dissenting voices, though this is somewhat outside our discussion. In the early 1700's Bishop George Berkeley posited in contrast to Descartes that everything was in fact mind, that matter was in fact mind, that there isn't a hard and fast line between things thought of as mental and things thought of as physical, that even objective physical measurement of such things as dimension and motion were in fact neither objective nor physical. Modern philosophers who ponder on the fact that "physical" reality on a subatomic level starts looking distinctly non-physical; symbolic, that even "reality" as we know it is squishy and things can be in states in-between real and non-real. Delving deeper on this is a topic for books, not blog posts.

I will merely put it to you as something to mull over that our categories of physical, mental and spiritual do not exist, and nor do our categories of self and other have any objective reality. Rather than the scientific view that all things are "dead" (spiritless), I rather put it to you that all things are alive and that you are a part of a whole from which you cannot be extracted any more than you could live should I extract your liver or brain with a scalpel. That your sense of ego-self is an illusion and that you are inextricably connected to a whole, the whole universe and beyond perhaps. So for me, to say that the Sun or the Moon or water are some of my gods is not strange, not denigrating to the holy but in fact the real holy. Everything is either sacred or desecrated, and the ones that do the desecrating are us. The Sun, Water and the rest give me life and give Life to all of life, and despite all our attempts to close our eyes to Life, despite our attempts to dull our senses in order to better exploit the world and avoid the suffering of knowing how we actually are, Life is still there waiting for us and still as mysterious as it ever was.

This is not your granddad's spiritual world. It is not a comfortable spiritual world, it is in fact a strange, chaotic, violent yet beautiful world, the real world. I am on a journey to reconsecrate the real world, not that it needs my reconsecration but that we might need it. To see the world with new eyes, eyes so radical that at first what they see is nonsense to worldly eyes. I hope one day you may join me on this, the voyage to rediscover the real world. 

The Light Returns

 

 

 

 

After a time of decay comes the turning point.
The powerful light that has been banished returns.
There is movement, but it is not brought about by force.
The upper trigram K’un is characterized by devotion;

thus the movement is natural, arising spontaneously.
For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy.

The old is discarded and the new is introduced.

~I Ching, Hexagram 24 (The Turning Point), Wilhelm-Baynes translation.

 

 

 

I celebrated the Winter Solstice with a couple friends on the 21st, but since then I have been wondering about the meaning of the solstice beyond an excuse to drink adult beverages with old and new friends. At the same time I was wondering the same thing I am always wondering: how to contribute towards accomplishing a transition in this society towards wholeness, when I seem to be very much in the minority in my opinions, and the forces to be opposed are so powerful, implacable and relentless.

 

We had some sun for the first time in many days, and I was outside enjoying the garden. I even saw a bee of some sort, who had apparently poked his head above soil to go exploring for what limited sustenance my garden could provide in winter. I had decorated my garden with colorful ribbons for the solstice celebration, and as I gazed at one of these dancing in the breeze in the sunlight, I fell into a trance state.

Initially my thought was along the lines of, "I have fallen into a deep trance seemingly by accident. What is the purpose of this trance?" Very gradually that purpose became clear.

On one level, to see the world (and perhaps more than the world) as a stage of conflict between the powers of light and darkness seems an "un-animist" idea. After all, that was always seen in monotheistic terms in this culture, a conflict between God and the Devil. Animists often tend not to deal with things in such terms, as indeed much that seems bad can become good, and much that seems good can become very bad. Seeing things in different shades than merely black and white indeed makes sense, if one is tempted to oversimplify things. You need to be very perceptive to begin to make things out truly, and until then it is best not to jump to conclusions. This does not mean that Light and Darkness do not exist, but that their interplay is more complex than we generally like to believe.

 

And yet animists do have a model for the battle between Light and Darkness, and that indeed is the meaning of the Solstice. Yes, it signifies the literal turning point between night and day, when the days start to get longer again, but if that were all it was then we indeed might be justified in just having a few brews and leaving our recognition of the time at that. Instead, this has been the holiest time on the calendar, in many religions, for thousands and thousands of years. This holy day can teach us far more than that if we want to pay attention. The Solstice is not just about a very significant change in the seasons, it represents a very real spiritual battle between Light and Darkness. The I Ching, in Hexagram 24 (which can be seen as a symbol of the Winter Solstice in many ways), is not talking about visible electromagnetic radiation when it talks about "light." It is talking about spiritual light. Powers of wholeness, integration, love and compassion, coming into right relation to divinity and the universe, reverence, respect, truthfulness, courage, self-sacrifice.

 

For all of human history and beyond, we have been tracing an arc from the Summer Solstice (maximum light) to the Winter Solstice (maximum darkness). Each new progress in human history has been a progress towards the spiritual Darkness that we now experience at its full zenith today. However, the time when Darkness reaches it's greatest power is when it begins to diminish - Light Returns.

If the Human Race wants to survive the next few hundred years, it will have to turn towards the Light - it won't have a choice other than ultimate destruction. This means that the destructive ways of the last few centuries will have to be overturned. The environment will have to be healed. Humans have gone from mostly harmless parasites on the planet (hunter-gatherers, slightly dark) to very destructive parasites on the planet (modern agriculture, huge cities and development, extremely dark). The only way forward is to stop being parasites period. To make the evolutionary leap from agriculture to ecoculture, the management of ecosystems for the benefit of all their present and potential inhabitants, including but not limited to people, and the change in our values that will be necessary to do that. To make the spiritual leap from a money-centered species to a life-centered species.

I have over the last year been finding to my surprise that the world really is a stage for a battle between light and darkness. This was part of the teaching of my trance, and of dream-states I have been experiencing previously. This battle may not be confined to this world, or even this universe, it may be a feature of existence period, of everywhere and every time in existence.

What my old friend the I Ching is trying to tell me is that this transformation between darkness and light cannot be forced. We must act in accordance with the time and the limitations it imposes. So I actually need not worry about how to contribute to this change at this time when darkness is at it's fullest extent. I need only be myself, and whatever I can contribute will arise naturally, without forcing.

 

 

 

Thunder within the earth:
 The image of THE TURNING POINT.
 Thus the kings of antiquity closed the passes
 At the time of solstice.
 Merchants and strangers did not go about,
 And the ruler
 Did not travel through the provinces.

The winter solstice has always been celebrated in China as the resting time of the year—a custom that survives in the time of rest observed at the new year.  In winter the life energy, symbolized by thunder, the Arousing, is still underground.  Movement is just at its beginning; therefore it must be strengthened by rest so that it will not be dissipated by being used prematurely.  This principle, i.e., of allowing energy that is renewing itself to be reinforced by rest, applies to all similar situations.  The return of health after illness, the return of understanding after an estrangement: everything must be treated tenderly and with care at the beginning, so that the return may lead to a flowering. 

 

 ~I Ching, Hexagram 24 (The Turning Point), Wilhelm-Baynes translation.

 

 

 

 



"Attend to these only..."

 



 

 

 

"Why did you not come to us sooner, my child?

We could have put your mind at rest.

 

No others will understand

and you do not have the power to make yourself understood.

Cease to bother yourself about it.

 

You are to attend to the Old Things

And attend to your care of the Earth

Attend to these only.

 

The destiny of the world is not within your power to influence.

Cease to think of influencing the paths of Man.

They are not your paths to influence.

It's not your task, changeling of the aos sí.

Release this from your heart.

 

You are alone in the world or very close to it

Who will attend to the Old Things if you do not?

Who will love them if you do not?

How many centuries will it be before another like you

passes through this land again?

 

Should you be neglecting your care because you don't like

the way this world is going?

It was ever headed this way.

 

Who knows when your Mother will provision
for another one to come

and when and where will that be?

Your Mother labored hard to bring you forth here.

Reward her care with your own.

 

Therefore, always act as if you are the last of your kind here

and that if you do not reverence the Old Things and the Earth

then they will not be reverenced, ever."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All or Nothing

Image by Rowena Ford

If this is a blog about animism, why do I talk about everything from food to environmental policy to energy to politics to agriculture? If this blog is at least half spiritually directed, the other half is pointed in many other directions. Why?

There is to me no difference. A phrase that has become a mantra of sorts for me is "All Or Nothing." Either everything is sacred, or nothing is. Either everything is spiritual, or nothing is. Either everything is religion, or nothing is. It is ONE LIFE, and what we are talking about is oneness IN that life. To see all the world as a whole. The whole universe is my body.

If your religion stops in the bedroom or in the bathroom, or in the corporate board room, it isn't a religion that can be taken seriously as pertaining to the whole of existence, because obviously by your actions you show your truth. You believe it does not pertain in those places. Pardon the language, but when I go to the bathroom and take a dump, either that is part of my spiritual practice or I don't really have one. Not one that pertains to everything. And if it does not pertain to everything but only what you WANT it to pertain to, how should we take that seriously? We shouldn't.

Nothing to me shows our schizophrenic spiritual state like our attitude towards food and the growing of it. Of course, there are unfortunate people in the world who think that food is a product of factories and technology, and who have no idea of the bodies of the plants or animals that actually produce and store that food so that our factories can have their way with them. Even people who know where food comes from usually will not find any particular spiritual significance to the way that their bodies gain the wherewithal to continue existing. Does nobody besides me find that peculiar? The very fundaments of our existence, THAT we consider profane and worthy of no consideration, beneath our consideration, but the philosophies and dogmas in our heads or the gods in the sky we pay our attention to, we consider those important??

And of course, what we are doing to the planet reflects our conceits, that the down-to-earth and real is of no consequence, but the vain ideas in our heads are all that are important. Our religions and philosophies we entrust to priests and other experts who are genuinely supposed to be working for our benefit, whereas the life of the planet and the sources of our food we entrust to capitalists who patently have no motive but profit? What madness is this? Is it not completely clear that corporate agriculture and the corporate food industry have no financial motivation to make our food actually better for us or better for the planet, and every motive to make food cheaper, more addictive, and to make it with fewer extraneous concerns like the condition of the soil or the waterways or the air? After all, they aren't in the life business, they are in the money business. Pollution costs them nothing to make. The soil, to them, is just a preferably sterile medium in which petrochemicals of various sorts are inputs and "food" is the output. Water is simply the medium which exports their wastes to the rivers and ocean so that they don't drown in their own filth. Air is simply the medium which whisks their sprayed poisons away so that they don't become a Superfund cleanup site. Which otherwise they assuredly would become. Our system oppresses the lives of animals in the most despicable kind of slavery so that their costs to produce cows or chickens or pigs are lower. This indeed is the religion that many subscribe to, whatever words come out of their mouths. Oppression of the living in service to the dead. Oppression of the living in service to that which never lived and never could. Oppression of the living in the name of Capital and Progress and "Jobs". 

Most of my ancestors for the last 700 years or so were almost certainly oppressors of one sort or another, and they followed the Cross and abstract religion. Some may have run slave ships while reading the Bible to tell them how to be free. I know of some who were thieves and brigands and warriors. Some participated in the Civil War, on the losing side, that the practice of keeping some people as property for other people might continue.

I follow closer to the ways of other ancestors however, the ones who were here in this place for as long as anyone was here on this continent at all. Turtle Island, my home. North America. 

The ones who called the land sacred, the waters sacred, who asked forgiveness for the slaying of an animal for food. I am sure that they could be as bloodthirsty and as thoughtless as my European ancestors in their own ways, these are common human traits, but if they didn't do better at least they should have known better. The land is sacred. The land is everything, we are merely passing through it, we are not higher or better than it. It is higher than us. More important. Eating is sacred, the corn is sacred, water is sacred, air is sacred, just as much as dreaming or thinking or the ingenious inventions of our brains are. All are, or none are. It is only our blind arrogance that we think we can lift ourselves above the network of living things. 

I have been gardening seriously this year for the first time in my life, and there is nothing that has taught me the connections between all living things better. I love my plants, sincerely, and they and I are really part of one extended body. They produce some of the food I eat, and then I pee some of those nutrients out, and I save that pee and use it to fertilize them again (diluted fermented urine is a superior fertilizer) so they grow bigger and produce more food in a mutually reinforcing cycle that lifts up all the life which the plants and myself are entwined with. So my peeing is sacred too in its own way, just as my eating is, just as their lives are and my life is. As the land is, which we are both a part of. Not abstractly, not as an intellectual idea. Physically, chemically, emotionally, electrically even, really, we are connected. We are connected through the Sun, which powers all life; through the air, which they and I both breathe; through the soil, which I feed through my labors and which then feeds the plants and then me. We are connected through the waters, which make up most of their bodies and mine. We are one extended body, and I am part of the extended body of all that exists, the Universe, the stars now shining and the ones that exploded aeons ago to build the carbon and the oxygen and calcium that the plants and I both need to live.

All or nothing. You must include everything. You show by your actions whether your religion is a conceit in your head or your connection to the Cosmos. I see this connection in what people think of as the most mundane things. A drink of water. A bite of a tomato. All or nothing. You care about the whole world, or about nothing, and isn't care, love, what we really mean when we say we revere what is holy? To say that something is holy is to say that you love it. You can either love the world or not. In actual reality, you don't get to pick and choose. You cannot love yourself and hate the means by which you are sustained. Hatred of nature is hatred of self.

All is spiritual, or nothing is. 

The Ocean

A Fool went to the seashore and scooped up a bucket of seawater and proclaimed proudly, "I have caught the ocean!"

The Ocean said, "You have not caught the ocean, you have only caught a bucket of seawater, and only for the moment. Eventually the water will evaporate or the bucket will decay and the water will return to the Sea. No matter how many buckets you fill, you will not put the Ocean in them."

The Fool said, "How then can I ever know the Ocean if I cannot catch it?"

The Ocean looked at the bucket of seawater. "Your catching is always finite, but what you seek to catch is infinite. In the same way, no matter how wise you become, your wisdom will always be finite, but your foolishness will always be infinite."

The Fool dropped the bucket and the seawater sloshed back out to sea. "How then can I know anything?" he cried. 

"Look at the wave washing in at your feet," the Ocean said, and the Fool did so. The wave washed in and around his feet and back out again. 

"That wave is part of Me, and every wave is part of the whole Ocean," the Ocean said. 

"So?" the Fool replied.

"And you are part of Mankind and every man is, and Mankind is part of the world and everything else is," the Ocean said.

"So?" the Fool replied.

"So you start by looking at what is at your own feet, like that wave, and in that way you can come to know better what the whole is. You can travel the whole world to vainly try to understand the whole world, or you can start by looking at what your feet are standing on. It's the same world. You can understand much of the world without leaving your own garden, and you can understand much of the ocean by seeing the waves at your feet. Do not seek to understand everything, it is beyond you. It is also all around you, right now, and you yourself in fact are part of it. So attend to what you see and hear and feel, attend to what is under your own feet, and let the Ocean be the Ocean. You are immersed in it, you are part of it, but you will never conquer it."

"I do not understand," the Fool said.

"Now you are getting it," The Ocean said.

Changing Focus

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 

but when completeness comes, what is in

part disappears. When I was a child, I talked

like a child, I thought like a child. When I became

a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror;

then we shall see face to face.

-1 Corinthians 13:9-12

Before one really knows their "God" one knows the symbols for God, and they take those symbols as the reality. And really, people don't often take it much further than that, because going any further would require them to give certain things up that they don't want to give up. It is like someone who lives in a shed. He paints flowers on the dark wooden walls of his shed and uses broken mirrors to shed light on his false flowers from the shafts of light that filter down from the broken-down roof, but there is a whole real garden right outside the shed door. He doesn't want to go out there though, he doesn't really want to give up the darkness and mustiness of his shed. And he genuinely would have to give some things up. 

There is a great deal of pain you have to open yourself up to, to open that shed door. So he stays inside and paint flowers instead. Symbols of the real thing.

As anyone who has read some of my other blogs from the past would know, I used to be a Christian, and one of the most valuable insights I ever had as a Christian was when I fully understood that I was far too selfish to ever live out a tenth of the love that I felt the New Testament was calling me to. I felt I was physiologically incapable of doing that. It is like asking a stone to become a bird, there is no pathway for the one to become the other. I did not understand any way for that to become possible. I was firmly in the shed, and did not even see the door.

Of course I am not a Christian now. I am an "animist," but that is only a word. It is a metaphor, for a non-metaphoric reality that I am not sure I can ever adequately explain. 

What is communication, and what is love? Is it not a sort of going-outside-oneself to the other? Our society takes the Self as the ironclad bedrock of each of our realities, a reality that you can never truly get outside of. Even the things we see and hear and touch, these are representations of reality in our minds according to conventional understanding. We never get outside the black box of our heads. But is that really true? Are we not connected always with that which is outside? 

The very substance of our bodies comes to us from outside and goes outside. We do not contain the same atoms we did when we were born, we are not like a piece of granite retaining the same crystalline structure over centuries. Our bodies are a river constantly taking things in and removing things. As an organic vegetable gardener I take in food from the plants, but nutrients also leave my body and go to the plants since I recycle my pee into plant food. We are a circle, the plants and I. We are part of one body. Atoms come into my body, leave, go into their bodies, leave, and come into my body again, and into the bodies of the other living things around here. Whatever might be going on inside my mind, that is the actual reality. 

This is what I am fumbling to explain: that this solipsistic black-box-in-your-head worldview is a choice, not an inviolate fact of your nature. That you can and really must find that shed door and start living as part of LIFE, not as only YOUR life. That you can and really should start thinking not as just a person, but.. and this sounds a little weird... you should start thinking as all the life around you. 

In other words, get out of the black box. Think and experience as one node in a whole network of living things. The lines of communication are not perfect, any more than love or communication are free from possible misunderstandings. You will assume things that aren't true, you will try to help and hurt instead sometimes. There is a learning curve. What I am saying is that the lines of communication are there, neglected and half-forgotten, but they are there, like an extended nervous system. You can open the shed door. You can get outside the shed. 

I sometimes talk of some things as gods or goddesses, Mother Water for instance. Mother Water is a goddess, but saying that gets you no closer to her. She also isn't a goddess, that is just one way of explaining my living connection to her, my respect and awe and love. Goddess is only a word. I call them my mothers and my fathers, my brothers and sisters, this says nothing except that I am connected to them in a fundamental way and there is no way I can explain that connection for you. Explaining does not connect you, it may just get you on the road to being connected, but it doesn't connect you. You and only you can do that, but you do not do it alone. You truly cannot reason your way from the solipsistic black-box self to this other connected self, you must simply reach out from the heart.

There is no substitute for this, and the lack of this and the lack of people who live this connection on a daily basis is responsible for so many troubles in our world. We live hate and isolation, not connection, and this hate and isolation poisons the whole planet. Poisons us, poisons the plant and animal life, poisons the seas. Our seas are poisoned with trash and chemicals, sure, but because we were poisoned with hate and isolation first. Our ground is poisoned with lead and mercury because our hearts were poisoned first. Our air is poisoned with carbon and acids and sulfur dioxide because our hearts and minds were poisoned first. Because we forgot that connection, we cut ourselves off from it. We are part of a living body, and we decided to go our own way. What happens in the body when some of your cells decide to secede from the rest? It's called cancer, and we have it. We are it. 

I don't know if I can make any of this make sense to you. I am trying the best I can. You just have to reach out in love to every living thing, no matter how apparently humble. Think an ecosystem's thoughts. You can change focus from only yourself to everything around you, live and think as both yourself and everything around you, and by extension live and think as part of the whole planet and the whole universe. You aren't just an isolated self in the black box of your mind. You are part of the cosmos, and that cosmos is inside you and outside you.