Drink first at your well.
Be still for once
and find out who you are.

Interrupt the lonely assertion
that insists on
a desperate reach for love.

Stop
and feel it all.

Be unafraid to descend
and know the deeper,
darker waters.

Welcome back
those abandoned sorrows.

Guide them with discipline
and tenderness
toward the molten core
where clarity is born
in dissolution.

Even as you find yourself
ground down
again and again
follow the thread
of undeniable truth
all the way through.

You already have the courage.
You’ve seen too much
by now
to return for long
to the dull drumbeat
the habitual comfort
of what you once
thought you knew.

Align with your strength,
the radiance
of your creative will,
the passion that can be counted on,
the choice for nothing less
than reality.

Throw it all on this fire
If you want to trust
your heart.

Discover that what you are
has enough space for this,
is being carved out by this,
blazed in the agony ecstasy
of this,
for love.



~~Luke Anderson

                                                                                                                                                            gratitude to this art 'Great Wave off Kanagawa' by Katsushika Hokusai

Sometimes I make a great effort to accomplish something, only to find my progress awkward, slow and filled with obstacles. At other times even the smallest willingness on my part propels an action forward with ease and potency, as though unseen currents carry it forward with unstoppable momentum.

I have often grieved the apparent slow pace of progress made by us humans, the raising of our consciousness to a truly integrative and generative world-view. Are we going to remain as a species so bogged down by ignorance, so fascinated by fear and lost in our frenzy of consumption that we lay waste much of the beauty in the world? No matter how righteous some of us may imagine ourselves to be, each day we get to take a sober look at ourselves in the mirror of our lives and see aspects of the same fragmented consciousness that reveals itself globally in such gross inequities, ecological ignorance and desperate violence.

Who can know whether the darkness we see now is evidence of our collective failure to evolve or whether we are in the deepest night before some grand dawn? Like an iceberg, our progress can be largely invisible to us but reaching deep under the surface is a form that may one day be revealed. We all reap the fruits of countless efforts by ancestors who strived for an accomplishment never to witness it in their own lives.

Whether or not we get to see obvious shifts for the good within our time on this earth, it seems like our task is still the same, to participate wholeheartedly in true and inspired lives, to build together a more loving reflection within and without, day by day

What do you do when you’re backed into a corner, when all around the walls seem to grow taller, the knot undoable, the maze inescapable?

We can become desperate when our struggles to escape just entangle us further like quicksand. In the no-man’s land of repeated failure, it’s easy to get addicted to distraction or denial, or stuck in depression. Our society excels in methods to distract attention from the crisis in consciousness, with the very few hours most have outside of work saturated with media and a variety of other tranquilizers.

What if instead of attempting to push away the discomfort we instead just open to it exactly as it is? If, instead of resisting its gravity, we allow our experience to be just as it is, surrender draws us into the hidden depths of our being. Here the walls, the knots, and the maze collapse. Right here in the darkness of our unknowing there is a path leading directly through our fear and pain to a natural intelligence that is unafraid of our bad dreams and therefore free to respond to them.

On the one hand I find a small comfort in the idea that our so often insane and dissociated human consciousness has evolved to the stage that we at least bring attention to the honoring of our planet one day a year. However, even well meaning conversations about environment usually betray a profound disconnection from reality. In the words of Wendell Berry, “The idea that we live in something called the environment is utterly preposterous… environment means that which surrounds or encircles us… a world separate from ourselves, outside us. The real state of things, of course, is far more complex and intimate and interesting than that. The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are also made of it; we eat, drink and breathe it; it is the bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.”

So what will it take for us as a species to behave as though we truly belong here? What does it take for each one of us to belong in our lives, in our communities, in our world?

Apparently we are welcome to engage in behaviors that solidify the fantasy of our disconnection, and free to entertain notions that keep us paralyzed in a sense of unworthiness – but no matter what we do or where we believe we go, we can never actually leave who we are. And the relief is that who we are in truth is exactly where we belong. How could it be any other way? We imagine that we make ourselves, make the best me that we can and find somewhere to fit, and yet the path of belonging is the path of surrendering that ‘me’, and all the craziness that comes from it, into the growing and humbling recognition of the one we belong to.

I remember about 20 years ago when I first learned how to talk with trees, waterfalls, springs, and other nature relatives. For many years I had envied those people who reported a genuine ability to communicate like this. I believed that they must be somehow more special or possess some kind of psychic ability that someone like me had lost in the distancing of my ancestors from the earthy belonging of indigenous ways. And my deep sorrow at the seemingly unstoppable drive to consume the planet for profit had me more often than not weeping with shame when I was in beautiful nature places, imagining myself as a human unwelcome, a kind of parasite, and yet desperate to communicate my sadness for what we are doing. And yet somewhere along the path, life’s merciful but ruthless grinding down of my sense of separation opened up a chink through which I could begin to hear a new stream.

And the first words nature had for me? Were they an admonishment for our poisonous human disrespect for the mother earth? No. The same theme came through time and again, whether from twisted old pines on the Mendocino coast, from a hawk family, or from a freshwater spring in the mountains: “in the center of your heart lies the umbilicus of the mother of all creation. Trust the one voice that abides here. That voice is yours, as it is ours, and it speaks with you now.”… “Do you not see that only ignorance is served through perpetuating a sense of humanity’s unworthiness here? You cling to the very sense of separation that gives rise to all the twisted toxic confusion that devours the earth, and call this humility? It is not arrogance to assume that you can talk with us your relatives, as one of us. It is not arrogance to recognize and acknowledge that true nature which is given to you through no special privilege, but as your birthright.”… “How do you embrace all that you are, all that you have been? It is impossible if you position yourself outside of the heart.”

And so my prayer this earth day, is that we drop deeply into the kind and essential truth of our belonging, that very source of beauty and creativity from which we may see and follow a way through into a world of human belonging.