Nostalgia for the sacred

Kentucky cabin

At February's end, we left the daffodils, the crocuses, the crowded air and wended our way back Westward. Stopping along the way in northern New Mexico to recalibrate, breathe deep, experience spaciousness, and ignite the fires that would light the lanterns leading us back to ourselves. 

On the evening of March 1, 2023, sitting in an adobe casita in Taos, NM, lit only by firelight, I wrote in my notebook, "Outside, snow falls light and quiet like angels and spiced woodsmoke scents the night; we burn palo santo and sleep with the window cracked while the fire dances in shadows across our bodies and Venus and Jupiter dance above. In this 400-year old earthen home, centuries of others have slept, ate, prayed, made love, and that history feels palpable like a hidden overlay we move through..."

Our own lives, even our own selves become almost like a dream or memory after months of being away, being apart, being in other people's homes. Amidst that, sometimes the only feeling of identification with oneself or remembrance of one's life, of one's own home, was through the Self, in minutes of meditation or on a walk when the sunlight and wind mingled just so allowing for some lucid euphoria and homecoming of the spirit. Or when I would finally settle in at night, alone in the quiet, with a book in the left hand and cacao in the right, for just a moment, there I was again. 

Garrulity scatters and leaves disorientation in its wake, but slowly we entered back into the still, wide landscape, slowly rejoining the holy chorus in scents of Palo Santo, in sips of desert sage tea, in tending a fire, and then in quiet hours along stretches of  I-15, the songs we love coaxing us back into what we know as life. 

In winter I wear a servant's heart, offering love, time, and care, to provide help and relief for my family. I'm sure any mother knows this- when you give of yourself and prioritize others needs, parts of you might dissolve. I think this is especially true in a situation like mine where I stay in another's home for months, and being so porous and sensitive myself, I take in their experience, sometimes more than my own. Having been back home in my life now for almost a month, I'm still not yet who I was when I left back in late Fall- that woman was so connected to herself and to the numinous, so intact. I feel bits of me are scattered around, yet to return to a whole.

In many parts of the civilized Western world, life is oriented around people and buildings. You might meet in a building to eat, or watch a movie in a building, then go shop in a building, or sit around a table with friends and drinks in a building, go to work in a building. But here, in our chosen home, days revolve more around the axis of landscape and thought.

Action masquerades as inaction.

"True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering. It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer." 

(Hermann Hesse, Zarathustra's Return)

I have chosen to live in a remote place in the mountains, because there I find the most purity. There is a natural order still intact and displaying itself all around you, and most of all I find it easier to connect to the sacred here. Back in the busier parts of the country, I enjoy getting to spend time with those I love and the marketplace provides a decent enough distraction for a while (bowling! rollerskating! sashimi!) but within a week or two, a quality of my own being starts to degrade. I don't mean that I go against my own convictions or behave differently, but the quality of my interior world changes. I don't feel as centered, meditation becomes more difficult, I find it harder to stay connected to the numinous.

This surely all comes back to my own novice spiritual level, of course. Transcendent wisdom tells us that we shouldn't be prey to external goings on, that we should carry the center inside ourselves. But I'm not all the way there yet. I am still significantly affected by my environment- busy populated areas with little natural environment to gaze upon or interact with, and excessive talkativeness seem to be the two main things that start to scatter me mentally. I love (crave!) good conversation, but continuous small talk is destructive to serenity and centeredness and connection. I wonder if anyone else feels this to such an extent? Surely so. I think it comes back to what we get used to- I spend most of my days alone and quiet, always adding mortar and stones and gold flakes to this inner world. By the end of the year, I feel I'm ready to join a monastery and fully commit to an ascetic path (!). Then, at once, I'm thrust back into a busy loud world, and those daily practices that bring me to that ascetic edge are diminished. Focus gets put on other things.

"If one is connected with the Self inwardly, then one can penetrate all life situations. Inasmuch as one is not caught in them, one walks through them; that means there is an innermost nucleus of the personality which remains detached, so that even if the most horrible things happen to one, the first reaction is not a thought or a physical reaction, but rather an interest in the meaning."

 (p 237, Alchemy, Von Franz)

All this said, I think I should clarify that I do enjoy being back in Kentucky, spending time with my family and friends. I get into a routine, and I feel effective and the social interactions often pull me out of my own head and help build other parts of my personality. I'm aware that echo chambers can be dangerous, and that relationships are key to personal development. Interacting daily with many different people helps me put into practice what I learn, such as being a better listener, giving full attention to another without feeling the need to interject, sincerely caring about anothers experience. Putting others before ourselves is good to be able to practice, and if I only lived remotely, and only focused on my spiritual connection, what measure is there of growth? Sure, I would be in my own bliss bubble much of the time, but that is no marker of resilience or spiritual sturdiness. What I have to learn is how to remain tethered to the primordial unity, despite outer circumstance. 

And all of this brings me back to a central theme I've realized in my life, that is: a nostalgia for the sacred. 

I understand now that the music I feel moved by, the places I feel drawn to, the people I feel attracted to, the books I read, even the way I decorate, my embroideries, the standards I maintain, all of this and more are longings to be interwoven with the sacred world. 

While reading Mircea Eliade's book "The Sacred and The Profane" I realized just how far removed our daily modern life is from real substance and meaning. Intuitively, I've known this and revolted against it in my ways, but this book really shone light on just how lacking we are now. We have hollowed out and made thin a world of such richness and depth. We have erased the numinous and replaced it with simulation and empty acts. Oh, it broke my heart as I read and realized to what extent! And to think of the colorless way so many of us live, constantly trying to fill that inner desolation with matter- shopping, drinking, eating, attention of others, all that we do, while the majority end up on some medication to help them feel better. It's heartbreaking, and for me, a little infuriating, because I do believe this empty world we've been trained to see (relative to what could be, and has been before) is a wicked construction of a few for the purposes of control. I think we are daily programmed into the mundanity. 

But the sacred world hasn't gone anywhere. It isn't back in some time that isn't now. The sacred world is available to us always. To get there doesn't require a change in space and time, it requires an ontological shift. Access to the sacred world depends on what we have inside ourselves. It is those incorporeal doorways that allow us to enter and engage.

"The divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters..." - Paul Kingsnorth, Cross and Machine

Northern lights over the Okanogan 3.1.23

.:*:.

Back in the Okanogan, we've slowly, very slowly, been settling. There have been many conversations about the future and how best to hone and direct our resources. One thing that's evident is that there will be a big change this year, but the details are still not entirely clear. And I'm not sure how much of that sort of thing I want to share here anyway.

On the trip back across the country, I finished the embroidery I've been working on. It's a depiction of Moses and Hermes, and it does contain esoteric meaning and pertains to what I've been learning about Christian Hermeticism, but I'll leave any further interpretation to each individual.

Until next time, here is a little video from a recent paddle around Palmer lake, my first time doing any "ice breaking" in a kayak.

Oh, and a film recommendation: we really enjoyed Where The Crawdads Sing. I expected to like The Banshees of Inisherin, but didn't really, aside from the obviously charming setting. And though it has terrible ratings, we've been enjoying Badlands, Texas, but we do have a soft spot for little isolated desert towns full of colorful characters.

Blessings to anyone who reads this.
Take care.