It is a strange feeling
Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life - Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth
Your best thoughts don’t come when you demand them - Bill Duggan, on intuition
There is an intensity in the present moment. So much to process. So many deep emotions. But also there is no sense of time. I am locked out of ALL my digital accounts. I don’t know if I had a meeting on my calendar right now that I am a total no show too. I am in a country I was not expecting to be 34 hours ago. All my beloved books, things, my home, its nooks of comfort are far far away.
The present moment is so potentiated with possibility and nothingness. Emptiness and Fullness. There is no routine, no schedule, no sameness, no structure that creates the tapestry of calendars and time. There is just this moment, so pregnant and yet barren from all previousness. I feel lost and found. Free and bound. Death, I reckon must feel like this.
There came a moment, when I just needed to feel the air on my face. I put on my shoes with borrowed socks and walk on Rochester Drive, the stress in my body keeping my pace quick. I try to slow down, but it is hard. And then my attention falls on a fox right ahead. She stops. We both look at each other. One creature to another wild thing. There is a rawness to meeting eyes with wild creatures and babies alike. Something primal in both of us acknowledges itself without permission. "Fox medicine" I say to myself as it runs away with its bushy tail blurring behind it, bookmarking in my mind to look up the symbolism later.
I am moving, but have no place to go to, no direction, just the unfamiliar scenery changing step by step, birthing a desire, a knowing ‘this way’ that navigates second by second. This realtime creating of the path and walking it is the art of being a primordial sapien. Every moment is fresh. Every choice the first. Desire, a divine wink to co-create.
I find myself at The Warren, a suburban park, the orange sky of England reveals puppies playing catch, wildflowers covering the green floor. I walk a path until I see three young women take a trail away from the expanse. I like it. “This way”, guides desire. I follow obediently.
“If he does not reply after 5 days, he does not care”. I overhear this sisterly advise given among the young women ahead on the trail. I laugh painfully, for my own heart had been wondering this question for months about a man, the same one who had a few days ago called the cops when I sought his help. “I guess his 5 days are up” my dark humor makes me gufaw at my own pain and naive patience. But then I remember, why I was being patient. He is my Shiva, my divinely ordained true love corrobroated by my own body’s instinctive KNOWING. I organically choose turns to leave behind the women attempting to decode the wounded masculine.
I am walking deeper towards the forest. I notice how much more at ease I am in the forest, I choose paths that seem more scary, more uncertain, more treacherous. The forest is a scary place for those of us who have not yet learnt to be with our own wildness. Once our own wildness becomes not just acceptable but delightful to ourselves, the forest, the wild becomes a canvas to paint our presence with. To meet the underlying process, the numinous presence that pervades all things. Some of us call that God. Some of us call it Goddess. Before I know it, I have found myself in a forest grove surrounded by trees with a young tree log lying on the floor as an invitation to make myself comfortable. I sit. I see a black bird chirp and fly a few feet away. Then silence. Oh it is so nourishingly loud, the silence.
“I found a place to just be” I say to myself quietly. And then I breathe. Fuller. Deeper. I feel more of the pain. I cry. I let out a self conscious howl while looking around for peeping toms. Secure in my solitude, I look up/within at the Goddess and weep with her without restraint. A song comes to my lips, “Kali Maheswari, Parvati Shankari” and I sing to Her, as loudly as my tired lungs can.
After the grief flows through me for several minutes, I transform naturally and become child-like. I desire to and allow myself to climb the trees, jump and skip around. I find a little tree cut and the hollow of its bark making a kind of secret receptacle. Pebbles have been offered so far. I run to the beautiful purple wildflowers, bring one and place something soft into the receptacle. And as I dance about in innocent glee, a feather I see and joyfully add to the receptacle. Flowers and feathers, softness and beauty. Even with grief pumping through my veins, the fatigue of pain in my muscles, there is room. Room for softness and beauty. In the hardness of Reality, in the denseness of degenerative human relationships, there is room, always room for beauty, softness and play.
As I ended my forest grief swamp and frolic, bookending my walk came another fox. Again, She looked at me. I am integrating a deep experience, I hear myself think. The fox medicine marking the thresholds of this underlying numinous process. I come home and look up the shamanistic meaning of the Fox.
Fox medicine involves adaptability, agility, misdirection, unpredictability, and the ability to see through deception. (Sources). This rings true. I had just outwitted the very carefully placed snares and traps of a big organisation and come out a winner, all alone guided by nothing else but my wildness. I had seen through the deception and misdirected them enough to make them face all their dirty traps set for me, albeit with messiness. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. I had become a fugitive overnight and brought myself to safety even. I grin lustfully at the wildness in me fully alive and leading victoriously. I bow to its numinous origin.
Fox medicine I learn is about becoming directly interdependent with the underlying numinous process we call life. I love this, it brings me back to how I felt when I started walking earlier today.
“This realtime creating of the path and walking it is the art of being a primordial sapien. Every moment is fresh. Every choice the first. Desire, a divine wink to co-create.”
Each moment has within itself the possibility of sacredness. The primordial opportunity given to us anew in every moment is to become interdependent with everything in it. Today the underlying numinous process is interdependent with the forest, young English women decoding dating and mating signals, pebbles, foxes, wildflowers, feathers, a howling sapien feeling fully her pain until it transforms itself into innocent joyful play.
It is a strange and solemn feeling today.