Our Alaskan Adventure, Part 2

PHOTOS: Our Alaska Bride Hannah’s Family, including Dad (my brother) John, Mom Jeannie, and younger sibs Claire and Daniel. All wonderful, and fun to be around! So thankful for the Alaska experience! (Photos from Jeannie’s fb page.)

After publishing  Our Alaskan Adventure yesterday, which included lots of the usual scary stuff at the end, last night I had a nagging feeling that I should not have left it there. That the contrast between the unusually loving wedding celebration below and the ghastly chemtrail-filled sky above was a poignant reminder of not just what we are “up against,” but of the life force that rises in us, nonetheless, insistent and ongoing. Indeed, that people are still getting married, still loving each other, still having children, is testament to the human spirit’s indomitable will to not just survive but to thrive. And while humanity is being tested, as possibly never before, in part due to the internet spreading everything — real, fake, alternative, fiction, fact, ideals, visions, values, algorithms, chaos, synchronicities, wars and rumors of wars, explosions of artistic, ideological and spiritual fervor — still we are HERE, we are connected, networked into a vast multidimensional web of togetherness, breathing the same air, drinking the same water, walking the same holy ground, needing both sleep and wakefulness, riding the same rollercoaster of roiling feelings while texting madly during an accelerating global crisis; and all the while, there is not one of us who is not also dreaming the Big Dream of a beautiful garden of abundance that holds us all in its embrace, not just beyond war, but beyond measure.

BE GONE! the comparative, combative, territorial silliness that has kept our entire species stuck and divided for thousands of years.

May we humans learn to breathe easy — in and out, expanding and contracting, absorbing and letting go, allowing the primal rhythmic harmony that moves through birds when they call in the dawn, animals when they rut and let go, water flowing downhill and around obstacles, trees leafing out and later dropping, flowers turning to follow the sun. May we learn to love one another, no matter what — or who, or how, or why, or any of those questions that beset the mind and disturb the heart. May we, as unique, precious individual souls, let go of rules and roles and guilt and shame; may we remember — re-member, put ourselves back together again — so that we may naturally express ourselves fully, birthing babies and tribes and projects and inventions, spiraling love’s forms into and out of creation, forever and ever.

And above all, may we allow in our natural communion, the way Earth, Sun and Moon do when they line up, briefly, with mysterious predictable majesty, in an exact straight line across the sky.

(Don’t you find the fact of eclipses astonishing? How could one cosmic body millions of miles further and much much larger than the other, appear, from Earth’s point of view, to cover each other, rim to rim, exactly? Oh but let’s not get into why that might be possible. (cf. David Icke). It’s another of those “conspiracy” theories that we either love or hate to think or talk about, depending on whether we’re willing to question our “world-view” — and that therefore, keep us divided!)

May the upcoming Solar Eclipse not only help us look up, and re-member our at-onement with the infinite cosmos, but show us the way forward as we, bowing in awe and gratitude, listen closely to wise Earth as she instructs us how to cultivate her vast and incomparable garden.

Amen!

This morning, I came across a quote on fb (thanks Darren) that sums it all up:

She has not forgotten the prophecy she heard when she was a child, and which she has read many times since with recognition and without much doubt: “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. . . .For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences​. . .woe unto them that give suck in those days!”. She understands that woe. She knows that she does not know what will have to be suffered by the child drowsing in her womb. She mourns for the future, as the past has taught her. And yet there is a rejoicing in her, persistent and unbidden as the beating of her heart. There is a deep imperative in her flesh, not her mind’s work but it’s strongest argument nevertheless, that tells her to step cheerful and quick.”

THE MEMORY OF OLD JACK, p. 97, by Wendell Berry