Notes From the Cave

Words that orient my heart, from the depths of my heart...

The following is a piece I wrote at the completion of a week-long Healers’ Intensive with beloved elder Deena Metzger in 2022. This week Deena has evacuated her home and beloved land in Topanga Canyon as fires rage nearby in Southern California. I’m holding her, the land, and all the beings who live there in my heart with fierce care and prayers.

I revisit these words regularly to orient myself during these whitewater times. I’m sharing them here with you in case they might also serve your own heart’s calling. Thanks for reading, hearting, commenting, sharing, caring. It all matters.

Thank you.

To the spirits for giving so much. To Deena for gathering and guiding us. To each of you for your courage and your heart, for your willingness to be disturbed and reorganized by it.

Thank you to great Mother Earth, for beauty, for the water still flowing, for the flowers still blossoming, for the endless gifts of life, for the water still in the lake. Thank you for food and the capacity to feed. Thank you for beauty and the capacity to bless. Thank you for brokenheartedness as a guide. Thank you to the birds, bees, bear, whale, horse, shark, walrus, wolf, bison, rivers, cat, stars, primal ooze, moonlight reflected in micaceous stones, butterflies, Great Salt Lake, and all who have been with us. Thank you to the ancestors who support me and the future beings who bless me with their demands. Thank you to the wise teachers of all species. Thank you for the writers who touch me so deeply. Thank you for possibilities.

The I Ching hexagram that has repeatedly come to me about my calling, 38, Diverging, invites me to pay attention to learn what it is to be a Wu. To step outside the norm. To change conflict into creative tension. To know that small things are important now. To be open to strange occurrences, sudden visions, and non-normal ways of seeing things. To turn away. To mobilize my ability to accept and reject. To hold my heart fast and take the risk. I intend to do so.

I have found the courage to take my seat in the cave of my heart-mind. I have understood that it is a responsibility, not an indulgence, to honor what I’ve been called to by spirit. I am here to honor the vows that are inherent in my deep heart. I will continue to step out of the mind of consumption, of which continual ‘self-improvement’ is a part — and return instead to deepening connection. I aspire to be like the bees and to live at the pace at which I might leave blossoming in my wake. Like the mines, our modern lifestyle extracts much and leaves poison behind. I vow to stop living in this way. What can I live without? How much pleasure and beauty and joy can I find in the simple? In a life dedicated to the well-being of others?

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that windigo is a consciousness that has lost the capacity for satisfaction and so endlessly consumes. Slowing down to receive the satisfaction of a simple, sacred, ordinary, connected life is part of my task. Watching a goldfinch eating on the hollyhock, marveling at tiny grasshoppers on the iris leaves, witnessing bees in the mullein, observing bullfinches sipping at the birdbath, delighting in bees and wasps and squirrels at the fountain. There is so much beauty to take care of. I vow to do so.

Taking my seat in the cave of my heart means fully inhabiting the knowing of heartmind and unapologetically aligning myself with my adult devotion to a life simply and wholly dedicated to thriving life.

Taking my seat in the cave is a commitment to divesting daily from the harmful ways of the culture I was born into, in my body, mind state, lifeways, small choices, language, world view, and actions.

The cave is my alignment with Kristen’s letter from Covid 19 as I know in my bones the truth of the mandate stands even if the virus fades. We must stop. Where I cannot stop I must slow down. Speed is violence and breeds unconsciousness of impact.

Entering the cave is my commitment to simpler, sustainable, spirit and soul-led living. I honor my wish to reverently tend the garden, to teach, to learn from the bees, to make offerings, and to do ritual and ceremony from the cave. It is less a physical place than it is a state of being, deep in my heart.

I vow to notice what takes me out of the cave and to divest from that.

I have seen this week that a huge part of my tapestry of luminous threads has been the ways I’ve been profoundly changed by reading wise writers. I know it is my time to add to the stream and not only write, but share.

Mary Oliver suggested we pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. From the cave, I will pay attention and I will bear witness. I will be astonished by beauty, no doubt. I will no doubt be astonished by seeing ever more clearly the violent harm of modern culture. I shall tell about that without infantilizing adults by imagining they cannot handle it or cannot change. It is time to write and share more widely.

As I frequently say, my soul insists on bearing witness to the devastation and the worst-case scenario possibilities so I can meet them. And my soul also insists on celebrating and uplifting beauty and thriving where it exists, while fiercely protecting possibilities for life in the future. For my son, for his generation, and for future beings of all species on whom the consequences of our unconscious consumptive violent living are piling up in such dangerous ways. I vow to bear witness and to keep singing.

I carry a divining rod in my body; in my heart, guts, and bones. A bullshit detector and a truth and beauty resonator. They are aspects of the indigenous soul that guides me toward right relationship. I vow to inhabit and honor this knowing. Rilke wrote about being the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. That crossroads is also the divining rod and the cave.

I offer deep thanks to my teachers of walrus, witch wound, wu. What was shut down in the face of such violence must be reclaimed and made sacred again. I must listen to the angry ghosts. I understand that we must not make the witch wound personal but understand it as a tear in the web of life that must be stitched together again with the luminous threads of reverent connection and respect for life. It is one facet of the windigo’s damage that asks for healing.

Once years ago Deena came to me not with answers but with a begging bowl, asking for help in healing the Earth. I said yes to her request, though my voice trembled. I’ve never been the same. I’ve carried a begging bowl to my own communities, asking the same. I vow to continue carrying the begging bowl, honoring others with the request to courageously step into healing, into the great turning, and into becoming a place of sanctuary, a refugia. I hold the understanding that supporting the living is more important than making a living.

I commit to clearing space, to not filling it with the frittering distractions of modernity. The cave and my inner divining rod will keep me true to this. I commit to practicing intentional stillness and silence so I can listen well. I invoke the forgotten past — both to bear witness to the violence and to seek the wisdom found there. To heal the wounds and to pick up the broken threads of wise ways of being human, so I might live leaving blossoming like the bees. Gratefully, the ancestors are never far.

The story is inside me. I am inside the story.

The pathless path is found breath by breath, in widening circles of compassion, widening into We.