2018/2019 Winter | Earth-Love Newsletter

December 2018

THE BARBER AND THE SAMI
 

Dear friends,

I’d like to share a couple of anecdotes with you.

I went to a barber’s shop this week and waited my turn. The guy in the barber’s chair already had short hair. Impatiently, I thought, that will take five or ten minutes at most. I waited and waited, busying myself with paperwork while overhearing the conversation between the barber and his client. I finished shuffling papers and began watching. I settled into observing the barber’s immaculate scissor work, how he cut each hair or group of hairs with great precision and concentration, as if that moment in time was all that mattered. I thought to myself, what if I (or we) put that amount of loving care into nurturing the Earth? What a difference that would make when practiced daily!

That same week I was sitting in a dentist’s chair in my hygienist’s tiny office. On the wall was a new picture, the photo of a Sami herder that Sarah Pondolfino had taken on her phone while on holiday traveling up and down some of Norway’s fjords. Her other vacations in recent years were spent in Cambodia, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Northern India volunteering for Global Dental Relief to work with children and their communities.

This reminded me that I am both fascinated and in awe that indigenous peoples on every continent experience the same reality. In Western terms, I summarize it as: they see everything as alive and imbued with spirit; they turn to spirit in all matters great and small for guidance including planting, harvesting, rain, new technologies etc.; they are bound in community to each other and to the web of all life forms, and giving to those communities is as necessary as breathing.

Indigenous peoples have such a deep sense of guardianship and protection of Mother Earth and the land that it can be very difficult for non-indigenous folks, like myself, to truly understand. Likewise, it seems to me, that we Westerners have never understood the depths of their spirituality and ways of life, which are inseparably intertwined. How amazing! Without their connection and guardianship of the land, we would surely be done for!

A friend whose work takes him into contact with indigenous peoples in many parts of the world recently commented on the complexity and very real challenges that modern first peoples face. “Within indigenous communities all over the world there is also confusion and conflict, desire and competition, longings for connection and relationship, but also often willingness to compromise for modern world comforts and potential for necessary money. So, in the end, yes, they are amazing role models and stewards and guardians of nature, but we don’t want to lose sight of their true humanity as well— so that our expectations do not commoditize “indigenous” into something that is beyond the actual people living as humans do, with all that is good and beautiful and magical and mysterious—but also confounding and raw and conflicting, too.”

At times, I do experience strong feelings of helplessness, sadness, and anger in relation to what we’re doing to Earth. I also find that there are many beacons of hope both outer and inner. It seems to me a question of which way I turn or am turned, as we all are key to life’s unfolding.

Sami Herder by Sarah Pondolfino

What I Don’t Understand

What I don’t understand about Love
is how it hides sometimes,
in the dark beneath the slats,
or in the flooded caves.  Behind
the eyes, or in the dust of collapse.

I do know that Love lives inside
this autumn pear, deep
in the unlit core, where seeds
reside, and I slice into it
before that first melting bite.

I don’t know, but tomorrow,
dear reader, we will see
the news, and shake our heads,
aghast at the rolling thunder
of choices laid upon the splayed
world by high-horsed greed.

And I hope we will both surmise,
somehow beyond understanding,
that Love hides there, awaiting
it’s reprise – to rise like a falcon
with grief-tinged wings
into the light of a new day.

Carol Griffin


January 2019

THE BEAUTY AND HEALING OF TREES

Dear friends,

New Year’s greetings! For renewal I turn to my Beloved, and to trees. This month, Michael Zieve shares his experiences of the healing power and beauty of trees that also inspire his paintings.

Please share your experiences in whatever ways come most naturally to you, be it photos, dance, song, gardening, mountain-bike riding, or?

Email raphaelblock@raphaelblock.com

Redwood Healing by Michael Zieve

For the last five years I have been blessed to live in Northern California near some ancient redwoods that hover over my house and tower over the little creek at their feet. It took me a while to discover what incredible magic they offer.

I arrived here brokenhearted from a failed relationship. It was a karmic balm to land in a beautiful spot surrounded by ancient trees and butterfly healers. I slowly realized when I gravitated to the old trees that I could experience notable shifts in my body/mind as I sat or leaned into them. One time, on returning home from an exhausting job, my chemical sensitivities inflamed, I got out of my truck and ran straight to the tree I call ‘The Bhagavan,’ melting into his unconditional field (this tree has a masculine aura). As I softened in his embrace the healing tears fell down and I heard a strong voice vibrate through my being.

“It’s a lie!… all lies!”

I did not have to think about what that meant, my whole body intuited or remembered the meaning. It’s the lie of separation, the lie of the individual having to do it all by himself, the isolation, the fear and the simultaneous recognition of oneness, the realization of love, our true nature.

It felt like a waterfall of wisdom shattering my exhausted, contracted self. This was not information that I was ignorant of, but to hear it so forcefully spoken to me, and viscerally transmitted was like a clarion call to awaken.

As time went on, living under the redwoods I experienced more physical discomfort from a lifetime of work as a decorative painter and clay plaster artisan. Finally my shoulders gave way to the cumulated stress, and over the past two years I sustained three rotator cuff surgeries.

After each surgery I went to the trees to convalesce. I would lie under them and gaze up into the canopy, sometimes falling asleep, and then upon waking feeling incredibly refreshed. That’s what inspired the painting “Redwood Healing.” In it, I show the wood devas sending me healing as a metaphor for the energetic transmission from these remarkable beings we call ‘Trees.’

I am now in active dialogue with several ancient redwoods and one teenager. All have their unique voice, body/mind and temperament.

My paintings grew in the redwood shadows in their own way, just like the trees. They are offerings to nature, and all that we intuit but cannot behold with our physical eyes. The earth heals us through her subtle songs and our creative response, always calling us home.

We are truly one. This is the message of the holy plant realm.

Wood Yogi by Michael Zieve

Under Redwood by Michael Zieve

You can see more of Michael’s work at this link.

Clear Silhouettes

Let go the torments of your mind
beside a tree
    your aches and pains
embrace it as a friend who gives
you ease

suddenly double wings flit
into the canopy
its silhouetted leaves
leap out
clear as your soul itself

with each breath the day
meets you afresh

Raphael Block

 


Whatever your ways of loving our Earth, your observations, experiences, insights, please share them through words, photos, artwork, poems, etc. That way we all grow!

Please send them to this link.

Read Fall 2018 <<

Stay in Touch

Receive the Earth-Love Newsletter, event invitations, and always a poem.