This morning, just after sunrise, I noticed a magpie flying across my field of view out the picture window. There is a pattern of wing movement unique to magpies. Finding pattern in nature (and in traditional stories) produces a sense of comfort in me. I could feel my body relaxing as I watched the magpie.

Our breathing also has a pattern.  In most traditions, watching the breath is recommended to silence the mind and bring us into the present moment. Pattern and mindfulness are linked. The pattern of the breath becomes an anchor for mindfulness.

Thank you to Magpie for reminding me to return to breath awareness today.

Our own awakened consciousness is what can heal the Earth.

— Thich Nhat Hahn

View book on Amazon– Love Letter to the Earth

As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside… when a community loses its memory, its members no longer know each other. How can they know each other if they have forgotten or have never learned each other’s stories?
— Wendell Berry

http://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/wendell-berry-the-work-of-local-culture/

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament.
The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

– Wendell Berry

The earth is a living being, and many who have been “civilized” out of having that understanding are relearning it. As in the human body, each place on the earth is connected to every other place, and there is a higher intelligence holding everything together.

Is it so surprising, then, that I, along with many others,  am gaining a better sense of the nature of this interconnectedness?

This understanding  is coming to me through my morning nature meditations and through the drawing process. I am a “work in progress.” But certain things are becoming more clear.

I am increasingly able to sense the lines of energy that connect where I am standing with another specific place on the earth, a place known for being magnetic and “high voltage.”  The drawing process amplifies this, as unanticipated forms come onto the page. The pen is guided by the connection that I am “tuned in to,” not by the thinking mind. I feel revivified by this process, and I hope that it is having a positive impact upon a particular place and its inhabitants.

It dawned on me today that Spider (weaving) and Butterfly (transformation) are intimately aligned in this work. I have recently have had vivid, colorful dreams of both– and I just saw a spring spider last night. Thanks to the Native Americans, who have kept the connection with the medicine animals alive.

A Thousand Years of Healing

With this turning we put a broken age to rest.
We who are alive at such a cusp
now usher in
a thousand years of healing.
From whence my hope, I cannot say,
But it grows in the cells of my skin,
my envelope of mysteries.
In this sheath so akin to the surface of earth
I sense the faint song.
Beneath the wail and dissonance
this singing rises. Winged ones
and four-leggeds,
grasses and mountains and each tree,
all swimming creatures.
Even we, wary two-leggeds,
hum, and call, and create
the changes. We remake our relations, mend
our minds, convert our minds to the earth.
We practice blending our voice,
living with the vision
of the Great Magic we move within.
We begin
the new habit, getting up glad
for a thousand years of healing.

–Susa Slivermarie

This morning it dawned on me (no pun intended) that, within the given boundaries, the painting process is about a relationship between myself, the landscape, and time. Each of these aspects is more malleable than I might have supposed.

As this relationship becomes more and more the focus, I feel released from prescribed notions of what I am doing. I feel freer and more in the moment. Which is the wonder of relationship– it has the capacity to free us from set ideas. Whether it is with other people or with the landscape and time. We must allow ourselves to come into reciprocal relationship if we wish to become more Conscious and live from the fullness of our own being.

This makes me think of the hardening quality of strict adherence to ideology– an idea or set of ideas that, when adopted strictly, hardens the heart and other sensibilities of being in the living, breathing world.

It also makes me think of the potential power of storytelling, which is, above all, a living reciprocal relationship (thanks, Laura Simms). It opens us to the malleable living space of the heart, where we are free to have an individual experience while also being part of a group of people with whom we are at one with at that particular place and time.

Not long after I did the painting, I happened to see a bird soaring in the distance– perhaps a raven. I was seeing the bird with the eyes of the heart. This is a very good sign. It means that the process of doing the paintings is moving me in the direction I want to go– to see with the eyes of the heart, to hear with the ears of the heart, and so imbue all of the senses with the quality of the heart.

When I paint or draw I try to enter the flow, and the success of it all depends on how well I merge with the flow of things. I don’t really freeze a moment in time like a photographer. I register the flow through the tip of the pen or brush. Entering the flow is my own prescription for myself to be more and more in the moment.

This is perhaps why drawing can connect me with energies that wish to enter a given place at a given time in order to uplift the space. More and more I am trusting the pen to make me part of the dance of evolution of Consciousness for the land and the beings that live upon it.

Our cultural emphasis on the triumphant part of the story, where one powers through adversity to rise heroically in short course does us all a great disservice. It misses the long and painful part of the story where we’re being cooked by the flames and, while the things we love are being burned down to ashes, we are all the way left behind by the world.

In the old way, you’d be expected to listen to your elders telling of such epic odysseys that you’d never get anywhere fast and your food would always go cold for the long prayers that are owed to your ancestors’ endurance.

And eventually you’d come to know the stories by heart because they’d wiggle down into your bones and take life in the landscape; in the fire and the lakes, and the mountains your people have named because they’ve earned the right by crossing them.

And when your time comes, as it does for all of us – to be cooked – you’d know that you aren’t the first to be chosen by the fire and it will hurt for as long as it takes, and the only way through is with your heroics humbled.

– by Dreamwork with Toko-pa