The circle of life and the line of progress

She leant against her Grandmothers soft folded tunic. Faded out rich blood red, smelling faintly of woodsmoke, tobacco and her familiar sharp scent, sweat and love folded together somehow.

“Oma, when where you born?”

She laughed, a deep chuckle that shook her sides and warm belly and made Sophia’s head wobble.

“That, my darling, is the biggest question you could possibly ask. Close your eyes and let’s ask together. For there is a mystery that holds us and it knows. Let’s ask her”.

Sophia loved it…….. she loved when Oma opened up the portals in time and space and they slipped between the gaps. When Oma awoke in her the memory of her belonging.

Her whole life in school and with her mum and dad was lines. Beginnings and endings and logic and reasonableness. But Oma was a circle. A spiral. She was Life.

She made the trackways between the seen and the unseen visible.

Oma knew things. She knew all real questions are like pathways to more questions and all true answers open up even more questions.But that somewhere down the line, they get answered. Oma was impish in her joy of discovery, of curiosity. She knew how to travel in ways her granddaughter was excited to learn. She knew Oma would keep showing her how to find her own answers and listen to everything she lives within.

She settled into her grandmothers tunic…… and a heartbeat pulsed. Sophia remembered a time when she was a tiny tiny being, a mere egg, burrowing into womb lining, taking hold. Claiming life and being claimed and received. Rich nutrients flowing in. Explosion of life force entering her body and a rapid growth of cells. Dividing. A current carrying her and a heart beat all around her then within her.

She throbbed with life.

Her one cell becoming many. Yet in each of those cells a whole world - structures within structures within structures. Until there was no more space and time. Just vibration. A note, a song. Her grandmothers love for her.

She moved between the unseen to the seen, never leaving that music but embracing another way of moving…. like water rushing, back out from the atomic structures into the tissues and into a world so teaming with life and complexity she almost sobbed with the beauty of it. Her grandmothers low hum filled her ears, her heart, her body. She ran through the landscapes, wild with tendrils, ropes cast out to connections with every other thing.

Identity meant something different here. So many ways of being, diffuse and concentrated all at the same time. Different expressions of the same Life, wild with beauty and diversity and patterns of itself. She danced, she swirled. She flew. She swam, she melted and she broke into seeds. She sweated, she bled and ate and rotted. She saw things from so many different points of view. In and out she moved from the piercing light of a star to the single celled creature in the deepest sea.

Her grandmother met her. An old woman in an old time. They were living as people on the lands. They took pleasure in each others company. Real pleasure. Walking, telling stories, eating and moving. They moved like the elk and the buffalo. They understood things they had not been taught by humans… for they could understand things from the many points of view. The plants and the animals where their teachers. For many years they travelled in orbits that mapped and understood, fed from and celebrated the rich complexity they lived within. Guided by their stories and connections to their friends and always listening to that heartbeat that never stopped. A pitch perfect gratitude in every exchange.

Grandmother never, ever took without saying thank you and the plants and creatures swelled with life to offer, constantly, splendidly in ways that regenerated. Enjoying each movement and change of form. Fine limbed trees, glistening leaves rich with chlorophylls and iron, minerals and movement, cell walls, intelligence, strong sinew, hair and nails. Different patterns but a strength through all. Slow moving stones and fast swallows. Each to its own rhythm and pace.

It was really, really beautiful. And it went on for a long time.

The wild foods and waters nourished them deeply.

Sometimes things got stagnant and stale. Then wild beings of thunder and of rain would come to wash away the debris, start again.

Gently, in a process so immeasurably slow, they came to settle more, by rich fertile swaths of water where the bio diversity gave nourishment. Some continued to travel, some stayed more in one place.

Grandmother stopped a while and her breath got a little ragged, shaky.

“There’s cycles in all things my love. Things move from nothing to pin prick to everything and back to nothing. Where space and time no longer exist. Creation will never ever end my love. It’s a mystery too big, too vast for our minds to take. Remember that our mind was not meant to be able to hold this wonder. It’s too vast, too multi layered. Too magnificent. So it’s so important, that we remember we are not just our minds. I think somewhere in that is where is all went south.

Once we lived a time where we could tap into that vast power of all of LIfe. We where active players in that great dance a way that’s unusual and special. We could tend and hunt, select and gather.

The gates of our understanding where open, we knew how to keep balance with things because we could just feel it and hurting it would be like hurting ourselves. Hurting our kin would be unthinkable. We where never separate from it and we rode the waves and the wild winds like horses. And caressed the earth and knew her as our mother and our home.

Our minds and hearts our bodies and our ropes to the unseen, our spirits where strong. Those inside parts of us danced with as much ease and connection as the creatures of all kinds we lived amongst. For a time, they lived in balance.

Then Something happened and we lost our footing. It took a long time and we lived in one place a long time before agriculture and taxes, slavery and dominion took hold. Illness, overcrowding, epidemics. But those things took hold.

Some traditions called it leaving the garden of eden. However you name it, we went from abundance and diversity into restrictions and control. And oh, how power became abused.

Maybe it went like this. That the power we lived in was so great, that heartbeat that we feel so incredible that some people started to become confused. They believed they where the source of it, not a part of it. The boss of it not the partner able to be in service to it. That flip into owning that power not partnering with it made some part of our minds get really wonky.

Grandmother sighed.

“It’s the most vulnerable part of us my love. So sensitive to illusion and to thinking itself, ourself rather grand. I think it started to create strange stories. Stories that forgot we fit. And other stories got laid over that, and what a skiddy mess that made”.

Soon in this misunderstanding people began to be hurt. And hurt badly in a way that made them afraid. And like frightened children reacting they tried to stop the hurt happening again.

“Remember there are parts inside you my dear granddaughter. And all of them are trying to help you, even if the way they do it is odd.  So just as an ocean of beings live outside of you, that is the same inside too. You have places in you that rise up to protect the small and hurting parts. They rise up in the face of pain. They say, that hurt too much, I cannot let that happen to you again. I will shame and belittle you, make others small, control you and them. Tell you if you own things you will be safer. Tell you if you take things you won t fear lack. Tell you you are better and different to the others and you must tame them or own them. Or maybe that part of you makes you feel small so you don t risk shouting the truth that your heart knows and being shamed by others. There are so many ways they act, these fierce protectors, born of hurting.

Once active they don’t want to give up easily. That is way, way too risky for them and so we live from those mis shaped places….. and once rolling, a story that can last so many lifetimes can be born.

Child, your life long I have reminded you to ask good questions, so you can get good answers. We need to keep asking, how did we forget, so we can understand how we can remember.

Grandmother moved, adjusted her cloak, felt the young one shift weight, muscles twitch.

One thing I want to say, and its important so please remember, is that the time of the great dance is not gone. There is nowhere it can go.  It happened. We can still listen to the songs from then. Your ancestors live so very close, in the folds outside of time and space. Never separated. Please remember that as you look to find your way.

“Is that why you won’t answer my question, she said, When where you born?”

“Something like that”

Grandma laughed. “Time is not quite as straight as we have been led to believe.

But I know its is special to be here with you love, in a body. In this time and place. From here we can affect some changes. Come with me. There’s someone I want you to meet”.

She took her granddaughters hand. Softly but with a strength. Inside her heart the grandmother called to the places beyond the times of now. She asked for help, for guidance and for the powers of balance and of love. She looked to traditions she knew of and invited those she didn’t but loved life to lend a hand. And slowly, the pair of them walked towards a being, and that being was the very story itself of the hurting mind that made the oil tanker and the concrete, the slavery and the pesticide, the critical mother and the violent man.

“Hey you” she said…. “Can you speak with us. We have come to talk to you”.

“Fuck off”.

“No please. Please, we would like to be with you a while. We are all here together. Let’s share a meal. Lets simply be together for a while. Will you come”.

Slowly the story turned.

“You want to be with me?

Really”….

“Yes.

We know you re hurting badly”.

“How can you know that? No one usually thinks of me as anything but terrible. I m longed for and hated in equal measure”.

“ But you re part of this creation too?” Grandmother gently asked. “Energy like all other energy”.

“Yes but I have done things. Terrible things. I ve taken so much. Look at the barren lands, the scorched earth, the mono cultures and the broken hearts and bodies”.

Grandmother breathed so gently now. There was such love in her voice.

“So tell me. What were you trying to do?”

“I was trying to keep things safe. Way way back, I came about to try and stop things hurting. I thought, if I can control things I can make it better

It went wrong. So badly wrong. I tried to stop the overwhelm and uncertainty. I got hard. I defended. I stopped the natural flow in any way I could. Religion, war, forced servitude. Domination, domestication. I was trying to keep things safe. I thought I was strong enough to protect. I didn’t understand the movement was already doing that”

“Dear story…. do you think its working? Honestly? Does control over make things safer? Does ownership give you security? Does acquisition bring happiness”.

“No.

It doesn’t t work. But now I m stuck, stuck in this way. It’s terrifying to let go. I wanted to protect so much. I didn’t t mean to cause such hurt and destruction”

She opened her tunic, wide arms, space filled with woodsmoke and tobacco scent, acceptance.

“Sweetheart, come to me. Thanks for trying. Thanks for trying to keep things safe. I know you did your best”.

Story shuddered. A great, violent shudder. And tears started to flow. Tears the size of elephants. Tears of all the holding and the fear.

Grandmother held him. Wrapped him in her cloak. Invited it. And her granddaughter sang. A simple song. Over and over.

Story rocked. Shook some more. And many generations passed as he grieved. It had hurt so much to be so disconnected. It had hurt to hurt, but in the absence of a better way it was all he knew how to do. He felt so much grief for what had been lost and what he had done.

The two bore witness. Tending what was coming. And finally the tears ended. And a kind of peace not known since the times of true nutrition and communion settled in. A deep, vibrating peace.

Grandmother spoke for the first time in a long time.

Dear Story. It can be different. That same energy you used so long for control over can be for Life.…..your energy, your desire to protect, can be a great fertiliser for so much. Would you be willing to lend your power, your love and your vigilance to the people, for making a new story. For remembering our connection and our unity? To make wise choices and write new stories that spread resilience and regeneration across our lands?

Now something beautiful happened before their eyes. Story turned. Face rinsed with tears, with that openness of release he was shimmering like grasslands on a prairie. Moving with the power of a buffalo and the delicacy of a dragonfly. Alive. Mycelial, connected.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

They rested together. The ancient and the unborn and the story, healed and tended. A new cycle of life, poised in the gaps. Ready to take form.