Moon over Catskills

I once had a discussion with a scientific rationalist friend who told me a story of a woman dying and the clock near her bed ceasing to work at the moment she took her last breath. The family member at her side believed this was proof her spirit had left her body and caused the clock to stop. My friend would refuse to take such coincidence as proof of anything. The point I made was that ultimately it mattered less to us whether the spirit story was true, than the psychological effect of the clock stopping. I was thinking that was a perfectly respectable and wonderfully pragmatic response. That was many years ago. I don't really reject objective observation of surface reality and consider it important and useful. But I don't embrace it as whole truth either. Tonight driving home what I saw in front of me was dusk on a very early spring evening. The Catskills were a dark purple haze blending with the softening indigo of the sky and the moon a bright bare sliver pointed downward toward the earth. I now believe (and science heading this way too) that it does matter that my experience of that moon, large on the horizon, changed me and that the effect of my change is not "just" psychological, because when my interior experience changes, the arrangement of matter changes. We feed the Earth around us with our bodily experience of its beauty and splendor.

Early spring

Slush, snow, ice. Not much changes in February, except for an ever so slight stretching of the stalks a little straighter, a little stronger.

Relaxing in being

Approaching the Hudson River's Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge there are rock cliff faces with ice falls gushing from fissures in the rock. Over the days of melting and freezing, these solid cascades have grown impressively large. They are a fascinating mixture of opposites. Water usually flows - the form is of flowing water, but it stands still and translucently solid with that lovely mysterious glow of deep ice. When I look at them I always feel reassured and like they are having fun. I feel they are enjoying the sensation of arrest, momentarily hanging out and watching everything move around them for once. There is a sense of ease in the acceptance and enjoyment of yet another state of being and the new experience it brings.

Beginnings

I've thought a long time about starting this website. I want a container in the world for what has been forming inside me. I want to give it expression. I know from my studies of ecology and more importantly through my own felt and known sense (basically moments of grace, vision, and mysticism) that I am part of this vast network of life around me -- that it and I are not separate, but reflections and in fact embedded in each other. Most magnificently I am manifest as Earth, full of deep mysteries and moving beauty. Full of pain and suffering that comes from lack and separation in a land of fullness, at least in potential, at least in truth. This is true of my experience. I can sense from others and what they write (especially indigenous writers) that I have a ways to go on this journey. The journey that the sages say brings one back to the beginning. One of my teachers says all the time -- it's never one, it's always both/and. My practice of choice recently has been to enter an altered state and actually enter the landscape and get to know it. I'm starting with my most immediate neighbors, the beings inhabiting my property and the land around me. I have a responsibility to my immediate environment since I "own" this land. And a responsibility to myself as well, since it really owns me and will shape me. I'd rather be a good participant in this community.