cradle of beauty

the altar of mystery & our yes to Earth

Hello dear mystical reader out there, thank you so much for being here with my meandering, nonlinear curiosities. My longing is to invite you into your own ever-deepening intimacy with mystery. There is no end product here, rather the opening to an endless conversation. I feel less interested in sharing curated, easily digestible bites — I’d rather have you open your email to find a strange table spread lavishly with a mystery feast. My deepest prayer is that you find nourishment here for the path forward. The future ones are counting on it. Thank you so much for listening to what is being dreamed through this wellspring. I will listen for your echoes back in your own tender resonances and dreaming.

The other morning at dawn, I went out to the forest with gifts clutched in my hand. Oats, homegrown rainbow corn, wild rose petals, and creosote from the Chihuahuan desert just south of here. A small offering for this immense mystery, so endless with pain and beauty. I sprinkled the herbs at the base of an old ponderosa. Thank you for my life were the only words that came out, followed by a gulp of tears.

Even through all of this heartache and genuine horror, even through the illusion and delusion of our systems of power and self-destructive human supremacy, through all of it, I am thankful to be here. Where else would I want to be? I belong to this beautiful mess, and I will not surrender my gratitude for anything. As Joanna Macy reminds us, gratitude is not about bypassing the reality of pain and suffering on Earth, rather, gratitude is a revolutionary and politically subversive act that honors the great gift of life. Gratitude is our foundational, instinctual yes to Earth. It is the universal starting place for all transformation.

Can you imagine the radical effect of the modernized human suddenly softening into our heart, and finally seeing the immensity of love and connection already surrounding us? True gratitude breaks the spell of late stage capitalism, allowing us to experience the precious interbeing that we already are. Gratitude makes us want to protect this place. This holy belonging.

if only they could seem themselves
as they really are,
if only we could see each other that way…

I suppose the big problem then would be
that we would fall down
and worship each other.

(Thomas Merton)

And yet there in the morning light, I cried as I sprinkled my small gifts, feeling the enormity of global pain as insurmountable. I belong to this heartache. The hatred and brutal vilification of wolves and coyotes, who are my family. Entire forests and mountains, wild homes to countless beings, being decimated and mined to fill the bottomless void of our human material desires. Multimillion dollar nuclear bombs being manufactured as we speak, the life-desecrating effects of which will outlast us by hundreds of thousands of years — reminding us that our current human predicament, and its associated extinctions of other species and their habitats, is not just one of our lifetime, or even that of our great, great grandchildren’s — Our current way of existing has entered into the realm of altering deep time. A future so far from us, we cannot possibly grasp our effects upon it. And yet we remain inextricably connected to those future ones, through the way we choose to walk here now.

I looked down again at the herbs I had sprinkled at the base of the tree. It seemed so inconsequential that I almost felt embarrassed, but some fierce voice inside me shouted that this small act mattered. That in the face of this magnitude of human harm to each other and the land, perhaps the smallest, gentlest acts of care are the most appropriate antidote. And that the power of my small gift was not in the physical offering, but in the force that drew me to the forest at dawn to say thank you.

My power is in my knowing that our hearts are intertwined with Earth’s, forever.

Still kneeling on the ground, I lifted my gaze to the horizon. The mountains rose up around me like a crystal bowl, and I felt so held in their container that I heard myself sigh. I know all about deep time, the mountains said.

I trust you, I spoke back. And then I heard myself spontaneously address the mountains as the noble guardians that they truly are. Without thinking, as though the words arose from elsewhere, I called out to them,

good morning
great cradle of beauty,
rising up strong
for the sake of all life
on Earth!

I sighed again, this time feeling an upwelling of joy. I knew I had made an incredibly valuable offering, by speaking the mountain’s hidden name: cradle of beauty.

Do you know how good it feels to call the wild ones by their true names? To adorn this world with your creative voice and song? To see to the heart of Earth’s true, mythopoetic, miraculous nature, and to name it back to her? This is one of the greatest gifts humans can give this planet, and it happens to be a gift that is particular to our species. I realized that my offering of herbs had only been the beginning of the conversation, a mysterious gateway into this moment of authentic, holy communion.

from “dear darkening ground” by rainer maria rilke, tr. anita barrows & joanna macy

I spoke the prayer again and landed on its final words: for the sake of all life on Earth. Built into the mountain’s mythopoetic name was her deepest purpose: to exist for the benefit of this world’s co-creative flourishing. To hold all of us. To be life-affirming. I had somehow experienced, in an embodied and vastly real sense, the mountain’s unique and precious way of supporting life on Earth.

I stood up and began to walk down the forest path, as though on a mission. Those words now echoed through me on repeat, life-affirming. Through my mind flashed news headlines, social media posts, everything that has us divided against one another and convinced us we are separate: Isn’t this the fundamental battle of the human moment, our collective disagreement over what is life-affirming and what is not?

This question is made of heated existential complexities, many of which center around the human refusal to regard other life forms as equally intelligent and valuable (including the untamable wisdom of the female body). But this is a question we each must sit with, stormy as it may be, and I want to invite the possibility that there might even be great joy in the unraveling of this fundamental inquiry.

the altar of Mystery

I recently met with one of my mentors, and I told her about a passageway I have been traveling through: Just a couple of months ago, I deleted my instagram account with what felt like a large following, an account that had basically served as a gallery of my life’s work. The identity formerly known as @plantfolk has been offered back to the dark mystery, where it came from to begin with. It had been ten years of wandering that path, of being fused to that highly visible persona.

I supposed I could have just left the account sitting there untouched forever, or deleted all the posts and started over, but I knew this calling was bigger than that. This is not the time for halfway offerings. After the past several years of slowly backing away from a platform that felt increasingly lifeless, I finally let go. I was disturbed by the relentless growth of the social media persona. It no longer felt life-affirming to me. In fact, I had gradually begun to suspect that it was holding me back from my true ecological belonging to Earth, my right to participate in the cycles of transformation, waxing as I please and then disappearing entirely like the moon. And so I placed that offering on the altar to Mystery, and in doing so said, I am listening for what’s next.

I am not going to pretend it was easy, or that my poor ego wasn’t horrified by this unruly agenda of soul. In the hours after my account was gone, I felt so irrelevant to the world that I thought I might dissolve entirely. It was viciously uncomfortable. Even though I had carefully chosen this path toward the abyss, approaching the edge was wretched. The amount of value I had invested into a mechanized representation of my gifts was shocking, and treacherous to confront.

If you, too, have walked away from a previous identity that you knew was far too small, I hope you know the magnitude of this offering. And I want to acknowledge tenderness of the loss. It takes profound courage to relinquish the building of a name, and instead agree to grow bravely downward, toward the silent starry sinews of Earth. Our longing for that mystery is what guides us forth.

teacher of dissolving, the arroyo

I went for a walk at dusk after my account was offered back, still in a groundless whirlpool state. Who even was I, without that piece of my identity? I felt significant existential distress. And yet there was some movement there, something stirring from the depths. Suddenly that familiar fierce voice rang through me, the same one who brings gifts to the trees at dawn, and I heard myself speak clear, grounded words:

I don’t have to be that person anymore.

I stopped in my tracks and stared at the sand, frozen, hearing the most important declaration of my life. I screamed out loud in the arroyo, as Venus gleamed on the horizon. I had set myself free. Free to be vast and undefinable, mysterious even unto myself.

In a sudden whoosh like a flock of birds swooping close overhead, I felt those 140,000 loving hearts unlock themselves from the confines of a screen, and wash over me and the whole world like a waterfall of light. All the beauty I had shared there, that living digital art gallery I had created over a decade, all of it dissolved and became an invisible force of love that is no longer outside of me. And I vowed myself fully to this trusting of the love I cannot see.

My muse came and found me in that moment, flickering in the beloved faces of earthstar, moon, wild iris, gray wolf, viola, sandhill crane, and every single cloud. Oh, the immensity and the realness of this love.

beloved earthstar, my forever muse

When I explained all of this to my mentor, she got very serious. She nodded her head slowly, acknowledging the gravity of this offering. This is big, and here is the even bigger question, now that you’ve opened up this space, she said with a piercing glint in her eyes:

What are you saying Yes to?

The simplest question, when posed at just the right moment, becomes the perfect key. When she asked me this question, my heart reeled with equal parts not-knowing and exhilarated longing. Suddenly I felt ravenous, and spacious enough for everything. Brave enough for nothing. I am living with this open question, to which my response is ever-changing. What am I saying yes to, now? How do I want to affirm life, with the way I choose to move next?

a sprig of mugwort on the pillow, for dreaming new worlds

Our Yes is a moment-to-moment birthing of new worlds, to move toward what nourishes us, to ask for what is needed now. This is particularly mandatory in a reality where the daily news brings tears of grief, rage, and streams of feral embodied No’s. I am tracking the currents of the Yes beneath the Yes, the river beneath the river, and the series of small life-affirming choices I can make that give way to the grand vision of collective flourishing I hold in my heart.

This is my Yes to Positive Disintegration, to letting go in order to feed the world soul. I am saying yes to curiously tracking the ways in which my own actions inadvertently feed the mechanization of the Self that is, without question, desecrating life on Earth. My yes is in the way I dissolve with the dark moon, and dedicate myself to the starry firmament of living soil. May my yes move me deeper toward that ungraspable mystery at the center of our common heart.

Here is a stream of questions to dream with, to scribe into the night sky: What are you saying yes to? What is your full-bodied way of saying yes to life on Earth? What is in the process of emerging?

What do you know is standing in the way of your heart’s larger conversation with the world? What is one thing, small or large, that you can place on the altar to mystery, in order to make space for the deeper yes within you?

I will leave you with a poem I wrote the other day, my yes to the deeper heart’s emergence. I am saying yes to poetry, and kindness, and moving toward what I love. Because I know that our love is the most life-affirming force on this planet.

only a few simple things

may we keep clearing the space
to allow us to find
our greater, wilder and truer
Yes
to life on planet Earth.

love from the dissolving dark soil
to the ancestor stars,
kate