My animal body feels the storm coming. She has been electrified with fear, back arched, ready to bolt. But there’s nowhere to go. She wants to go to ground. Dig a hole and resurface when the season has changed, when winter is over and humans remember how the birds sing the songs of god to us. And if it doesn’t come, just leave me there to decompose and be eaten by fungus. This is a primal instinct- seek safety when the pressure drops. You won’t make it if you don’t. And- there is also a fearless feral creature inside me, more a ravenous cosmic ape-wolf who wants to run out into the storm, howl, beat my chest, and call in the cracks of thunder. One who has no fear of death, who froths wildly at its closeness, and pulls it closer still for the thrill and the agonizing pleasure of dying again, and again, and again. Burn me, flay me, electrify this body. I am the earth, and there is nothing done to me that has not also been done to her. And to you.
So what to do with this paradox of realities. Express, move, connect, create. Part of me rejects the practicality of all of that on a human level when what’s moving through the inner worlds feels so colossally profound, but it all eventually comes down to that, the mundane, the seemingly banal that reveals itself as the most extraordinary.
I’ve been trying to create from a place of soul, which is beautiful and needed and purposeful. And- my personality still gets its hooks in there. As soon as I created Harmonic Soul, I wanted to destroy it, so I did. It wasn’t pulsing with the truth of life I feel when I’m actually being moved and danced by this body of work that wants to explode out of me. Because I belong to it, not the other way around. And it hums to the tune of the pulse that’s behind everything. When I try to create from soul, there is still a covetous creature that likes to hide away my desires. And still, there is also a radiance in the depth of beauty that my soul stands for, a fierce embrace of the darkest parts of our humanity, a deep compassion for the horrible things that we are capable of. I can see and hear and feel the perfection in all the chaos. That part of me is willing to die a thousand deaths for the love of humanity. But none of this is enough, it never will be. I end up destroying what my soul creates because it doesn’t have enough power to anchor it. It needs the backing of life, the backing of death, the backing of spirit.
Because we are in a death march now. One in which the living are the dead, and those who have died are the ones who are truly living. I do not say this to be a harbinger of doom. My heart is filled with hope, and even more it is alight with the fire and the fight that is coming for us. We must enter into the training grounds, to learn not only to fight for love, but to fight AS love. That may sound idealistic to some but I assure you, it is far from that. To be willing to die for the life that is pulsing in every cell on this planet so that it may know itself is the most humbling reality one can face. It is a reality that requires every ounce of flesh, every drop of blood, every last tear that we hold inside us- it is grueling, messy work that will destroy your perception of existence. Only to open you to the infinite mystery of what it is to be human and to unlock you from a system that is separate and divisive. This has always been about death, and then more life.
We must find our place in this collective ceremony. We must heal for the purpose of evolution. To truly heal, we must die. And to die we must surrender our survival. And to surrender that instinct we must be willing to bring ourselves to that moment of crisis where the inner compass finally points toward true north and there is no other way to go but to our knees, back to ground.
This is beyond judgment of behavior or beliefs. What I feel here is what the future will demand of us, because there will be a point, that is much closer to us than we would like to feel or admit, where everything must be risked. All of our senses of security will be shattered, and the only safety will be to stand for truth, which could very well mean death. And we can prepare for it now, by listening to the drum of this death march, which is ultimately a freedom march, and turn toward this inevitability, to go from the hunted to the hunter of our own destruction.