There’s a whale spouting at 12 o’clock out my window.
The neighbors dogs bark at the trio of turkeys who’ve ventured too close to their house
The lovebirds who nest in the roof above my office squawk at each other, one of their many thousands of conversations that carry on throughout each day.
It’s a dark and stormy day in Kohala- a treat for this sunny pocket of the island.
I can blissfully sit at my desk this afternoon without the room heating up from the western sun.
I am craving darkness and cozy cold winter stillness.
I’ve been staring at my endless notes on healing and initiation, trying to pull on the thread that is the through line of this thesis that keeps on propagating itself, and subtly threatening to consume me.
I think about how consumption used to be a medical diagnosis for TB, but was also associated with spiritual intensity. The lungs, heart, and endocrine system failing to keep up with inner spiritual fire.
They referred to it as holy wasting, a slow burning off of sin and purification of the soul through prolonged illness. I wonder about disembodiment in the 1800s, and how a slowly wasting body was associated with moral purity.
Loss of life force creating a perpetual threshold state, neither fully alive nor dying. How small the world becomes when health declines. But also how the inner world can expand in these states, taking on a richness that wouldn’t have otherwise been available.
There is wisdom and delusion in how it was dealt with.
They treated consumption with good nutrition, rest, fresh air, and isolation.
I smirk because these are all things I’m self prescribing these days.
For a while I chew on disembodiment today, and the punishing-adrenaline fueled-see me-do more-be more social media culture drain we get sucked into all while our global systems fall apart.
Containment would be a good collective skill to learn. I huff at that knowing we are entering the year of the fire horse and it will be anything but contained as we shed these last layers off the tail end of the snake.
So much death this year. Was it enough? Did we let it pass all the way through? I fear that fallow fertile state will never get its proper replenishment.
I go back to my notes. I touch the place that forgets everything I’ve learned about healing. Creative amnesia brought on by sneaky little thought gremlins with their saboteur tricks.
Does writing about writing do anything? It helps to organize neuroses perhaps.
I pull a book off my shelf and open to a random page, hoping for some writing inspiration.
It’s a drawing of a scorpion.
The artwork description: “Scorpion’s are nature’s ultimate survivors, deified by ancient Egyptians in the form of Selket, a scorpion goddess who reigns over fertility, nature, medicine, magic, and healing.”
I laugh and roll my eyes and say out loud to whoever is listening out there, in here, “a little too on the nose?”
I dreamt of Egypt this week- of a group of women hiding from police because they uncovered a subterranean spring that held a key to more ancient wisdom still buried there, yet to be uncovered by modern civilization. But they hadn’t actually uncovered it, they had simply been there to witness when the earth had moved itself and revealed it before them.
And I remember I’ve been thinking a lot about bearing witness to life as participation in life. The difference between passive watching and being so fully with what is unfolding before us. And how intimacy with surrender informs our right relationship with action. How Mary knew she needed to be outside the tomb waiting for resurrection.
My god, do we even know what collective right action would look like right now?
I am exhausted these days, in a way that in the past might have scared me. But I know my body better now and the ways she communicates.
It is still winter, after all, and my current aversion to action and productivity is simply pointing me toward dream spaces that can show me more right now than waking life.
And I’m savoring the liminality of winter’s gestation, even while I’m in Hawaii and it’s warm and nature is still humming with activity.
The whales are here mating, birthing, feeding their newborns.
Singing their winter song.
And I’m happy to be wherever they and we are.
Writing about writing and watching them out my window.