brianburke.net

The Land

brian — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:00:57 +0000

The land is the one
Who invites me to breathe
My fragrance into her,
Without asking anything in return.

She carves for me a spot
At her infinite table
And serves me a taste of
My own freedom, for breakfast.

In her heat I learn of my passion.
In her wind I learn of my strength.
In her cold stillness, I learn of my patience.
In her transformations, I learn of my origin.

In all of her seasons I am revealed,
Like a reflection in an infinite pool.
To breathe of her is to live,
To live of her is to love.

Bringing Back the Vision

brian — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:51:30 +0000

Like the guy learned in Into The Wild, human experiences want to be shared, if they are to have any purpose or life in the world. It simply won’t do to only experience Spirit for yourself and never share the experience with others, though it is important to learn how to be ok with experiencing Spirit by yourself. This is because every time we overshare with others about it, especially without having been invited to do so by the intuitive feel of the moment or conversation, we butcher a little bit of Spirit with our mangle of words.
This all occurred to me at the Dr. Dog concert, when I was looking around and realizing that my favorite shows are the ones where the audience is all having a great time together, as one. It’s perfectly great to just dance and rock out within a bond that is mostly or even strictly between oneself and the band, but isn’t it always even better to share the experience with your neighbors? Like after a particularly righteous jam, you’re jumping up and down hollerin’ and shoutin’ “WOOOO!,” and you want to give your neighbor a fuckin high five and jump up and down with ‘em, not just by yourself. You want to turn to your friend that you came with and go, “wow these guys are killing it right now!” or even just give each other a look that implies that. Shake the head and roll the eyes like “oh my god are you kidding me this is amazing!” Same goes for appreciating anything magical: a heroic athletic feat, a great story, a great poem, a moment of divine synchronicity in the wilderness, a painting, a person who is in the zone, a breathtaking sunset. Same goes for participating in and creating something magical by allowing magic to come through oneself: telling a story, capturing a wondrous sunrise on canvas, portraying a story on stage, being part of a team, making music, singing, writing. And truly, it doesn’t even need to be things like those listed above, which we usually esteem so highly: the magic is within everything, mundane, profane, and tiny, if we choose to look deep enough for it. As the poet says, “The wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass; / And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.” So while there is a place for experiencing things by oneself, part of the nature of raw experience is to eventually want to be shared, whether or not that sharing is in words, for there are so many ways for it to be shared in feeling as well. Sometimes it wants us to quiet down in simple and deep reverence, other times it asks us to ham it up and give ourselves to bombast. Most of the time it is way too big to begin to understand, but it sure feels good to listen to.
I think this is one of the ways, on an intuitive level, that we almost always bring our vision back to our people, whether we do it consciously or not. And everyone has a vision (roughly, a deep feeling of what we know to be true, as revealed to us intuitively by the divine within us) that is living and growing all the time, whether or not one has gone and quested for it in a formal ceremony or some other conscious undertaking, and whether or not they are conscious of its presence. For each one of us, our life experience up until now is informing our vision, which is informing everything we say and do, even if we never inquire about its nature or its whereabouts within us; even if we don’t know it exists. Having this vision is a necessary condition of existing, perhaps unfortunately. Many of us first-time vision questers, and many people at large, especially those who experience Truth deeply but haven’t learned to transcend the arbitrary restrictions of our very limited society-at-large, feel the urge to share our vision with our people so strongly that we blab about it with reckless abandon and do injury to it, by sharing it in contexts that aren’t ready for it, by planting its seed in arid clay soil that is not ready to receive it and nourish it. Better to keep that seed within us where we know the soil conditions, where we consciously nourish and tend for it as it sprouts into what will become of us. And of course, we do even that within the context of our people, and within the context of the human race, and within the context of this absurd and mysterious existence, because we are always here, always embodied, until we finally get to just join with the Mystery at death. No matter how much it might ever feel like it, on this Earth we are never alone. Our lives matter absolutely.
On a meta-level, the human urge to bring our vision forth on Earth exists so that we can bring a new, slightly more evolved version of ourselves to the world, and in so doing be of service by being ourselves. For me, if I live this way, it doesn’t so much guide the process of living my vision as much as it helps me recognize when I am in my own way, because I believe if I just listen to what is in my bones and my belly and my heart and follow what is revealed there in each moment, my vision will bring itself forward to my people, to my fellow humans, to this Mystery of an existence that we inhabit. This is at least partially contrary to having the mind direct the course of living the vision with plans and labels and boxes and images. True authenticity come through often looks like wildness, and certainly does not require predictability.
But the ability to live in this way more and more of the time takes cultivation and hard work, which seems to be getting more and more unpopular as people’s baser, and therefore easier, desires are more and more instantly gratified by technology, and consequently people’s frustration tolerance and resiliency decrease and decrease. However, I feel that there is a call to hard work inherent to our experience if our practice of listening is deep and consistent enough. Life will lead us to a new challenge and make it clear to us that it is the natural next step, either in the voices of mentors, elders, teachers, or neighbors, or in the strong voice inside our own mind, or the ache in our bones, or the gnawing in the pit of our belly, or the song in our heart, all of which refuse to die as long as the truth is ignored. We’ve all experienced this, and witnessed it in others, and we’ve all seen how easy it is for humans to try to shut these voices up, whether by fleeing from people who hold us accountable or fleeing from ourselves with all manner of distractions and numbing agents. We have become masters, especially in America, at inventing conventions, social habits, gluttonous behavior that mask and benumb the divine longings for growth that originate within the nature of our beings. Instead of getting rid of them we have only turned them into anxiety, a nagging sense of fear and heightened alert, paralyzing self-consciousness, and addiction to comfort, and then all the things that come from these persistent states of being, like violence, laziness, jealousy, depression, suicide, conditional love, comparison, etc.
That it is in our bones to be drawn by intuition toward the challenges that will grow us indicates that it is also in our bones to evolve, and violence and laziness and mindlessness are very devolved behaviors, on the lower end of what we are capable of as a species. Art, on the other hand, is on the higher end, unconditional love for all existence being at the highest. As we are naturally inclined toward evolution as a species, we as individuals are naturally inclined toward growing toward our own fruition, like the tree sending up its ever-expanding branches to catch the sun, in harmony with all the other different trees around it reaching for the same goal in different ways. How frequently we try to deny this inclination, even while thinking we are “doing something” that will make us grow! The tree doesn’t “think” about what it should “do,” it just is what it is, and it grows. Imagine what a tree would look like that refused to grow as it naturally was meant to: probably tangled, dense and confused. In one of my trainings I ran across the idea that humans are the only species on Earth capable of preventing their own blossoming.
Let us all pray to be ourselves enough that we answer the call when a fitting challenge is laid on our path for our growth. As the poet says, “the lute that brings forth beautiful music is of the same wood that was hollowed with knives”; there are times when we must be as the lute and let that Grandest of Luthiers hollow us with knives in his threshing hold, that we may bring forth even more beautiful music, for the furthered fruition of what we are capable of becoming as human, for our people, for the world, for this Existence. We may really just be here to propel the Melody forward, and who are we to get in its way?

One Prayer of Seven Voices

brian — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:15:47 +0000

Give me something I don’t understand,
So raw it compels me to ride
My drums like a horse
Until the sun comes up
And shines its light on my purpose.

Give me, in this one,
All-total and only moment,
Holiness,
And lead me to healing as
The water rises into my appetites.

We have come here with but one desire,
to EAT!, then exclaim,
“Yes! We didn’t miss it!”

Tell me with silence,
The language of my ancestors,
That the trees downstairs
Have the same raw stuff
That I do in my blood,
And pump Interbeing through my veins,
With an explosive surge of
Flooding liquid granite.

And in this one and wholly
Necessary moment, reveal to our bones
That the grass is no greener over there,
That we may arrive at Love,
Complete and undivided,
Right here,
Only now.

Mid-October, 2011 Journal

brian — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:28:50 +0000

I recently re-discovered this journal entry, which I wrote in mid-October. This was the first entry in a brand new journal, and also the first journal entry I had written since consciously choosing to face the seemingly enormous implications of my new responsibility to the world as a man on my own, without using other people or relationships (specifically one relationship) as crutches to help me carry it, which I had done for most of the first three months after my initiation on a vision quest in the Inyo Mountains. It was written during the time between two very powerful trainings I took at the School of Lost Borders, the first being a training in The Nature of Council.

Big teachings are coming to me in the last two weeks. In ways I feel that as I start this new journal, I start a new chapter/stage in my life. I hesitated writing the second part of that last sentence, as an anxiety rose in my chest thinking about what it means to start a new life stage. There is fear there. ‘What am I leaving behind?’ Now it dawns on me that it’s not so much a leaving behind as a changing of relationship to what has been so far. Old contracts broken and changed. That’s scary to me, for as much as I understand how those old contracts may hold me back from service, I have derived a sort of sick comfort knowing they are there, believing that I’m not alone, though these contracts truly kept me, true ME, from being discovered, kept me lost in enmeshment.
And so this new movement is an uncovering, a continued un-shrouding of who I am, and a renewed faith in what is revealed. There are some big, important questions that I had lost touch with. One teaching that came during the Nature of Council training is how ego-driven I’ve become in my unconscious movement to claim my power after having been bullied and belittled for so long. In that ego-driven place I lose touch with my sense of innocence, sense of service, surrender, imagination, love, peace, wonderment, acceptance. It is a fear place, fear of the forever-nebulous “not being good enough,” fear of my shadow, fear of pain, fear of, ultimately, death. And so by fearing all of those things, I live in my shadow, live in pain, walk as a dead soul, become paralyzed.
There is a return to some old familiar teachings for me right now, ones that I knew as a more innocent being, just from listening all the time as I was. And the one that sticks out is that the starting place for world-acceptance is self-acceptance, and the starting place for world-love is self-love, and that the starting place for love of others is self-love. There will never be an answer to the question “Am I good enough?” because there is no answer to that question. That question is made up. The universe does not issue us a yard-stick, never has and never will. Society’s yard-sticks are made up too, and we’ve all at least felt by now that they are false and empty and dangerous and shadowy.
So this is a movement back to listening, innocence, openness, service, love (self-love and therefore other-love, and therefore one-ness), and acceptance, of self, of truth, of others, of world. It is a movement away from fear, ego, envy, greed, comparison of self and other, judgment of self and other, and paralysis. It is a re-establishing of boundaries, the distinctions between myself and others, so that I may trust when I hear truth, as an independent hollow bone, open heart and mind. It is an asking of the question “What serves?” and an open listening. It is a surrender, and a return to gratitude. It is integrity.
I realize I need anchors to grow my ability to serve and maintain integrity. The discovery of a practice, the development of discipline in my life, these are intentions of mine. As one anchor, I have physically drawn a map, with all the things I might learn and do in my life, that I may consult in a time of questioning, so that I may continue to move and to serve. A commitment to intention is crucial, this is something I had lost. Why am I doing what I am? Am I in integrity? With myself, and not for the approval of others? Am I in service? Am I in love? And sometimes I won’t know, but discipline and a clear decision-making process will help me do my best more often, despite not knowing for certain; discipline and a decision-making process will cultivate listening and FEELING where I ought to show up next, though my rational mind may not “know.”
In the end, right now, it is a listening and a softening to the wisdom of the circle, the Wisdom of The Circle. Gratitude, love, integrity and faith, these are the lights of guidance always.

Move Me, Part 1

brian — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:43:41 +0000

Move me.
I don’t much care how.
Just bring it on,
Like the red wine
Drips its slow molasses honeycoat
Over my windows of perception,
Resulting in a slow dance
With Time itself.
Or do it like
That girl across the room,
Who poured the magma
Through my eyes to light
The very flame
That licks my deepest recess.
Nudge me in the night
With the might of fifty steeds
Trampling through my dreams,
And play me like the grandest piano,
Tapping out your mystery
To an audience of everyone.
Or knock me down like Frazier,
But raise me up as the champ,
With nothing left in me but faith.

Service

brian — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:05:38 +0000

It has become apparent to me in the last year, as my life has realigned with a dedication to service, that it’s important to define for myself what I mean by service. The reason this is important is that I have spent so much of my life talking about service and what serves without actually doing it, because my ego has been hard to move out of the way. When I do this, it usually looks like a “holier than thou” attitude toward my fellow human, in which I’m chastising, judging or trying to control because I “know better” and I’m just going to shed the light for everyone else from my soapbox.

So one thing I’ve learned, in my practice, is that true service involves the dissolution of ego and honoring of the mysteries of my soul. I used to think that letting go of ego concerns would mean that I never spoke about myself or that I was always concerned with helping others and not being “needy” myself. However, what I’ve found is a little bit the opposite; when I feel my ego is truly out of the way, I can simply own my own experience without being attached to it, and allow others to have their own experience of the world, without judging or seeking to control. So it looks like, “X is just my experience, what is yours?” And once we have both shared that, it’s ok to just let it sit there and breathe! Like, “ok, here is your experience and here is mine, shared with integrity, and then… (big drum roll)… OK! Now to do the dishes,” instead of, “ok, here is your experience and here is mine, but wait, they’re different! We believe in different things! We have different preferences! Oh no!” I played that game for long enough, going around the world seeking only those people who have “things in common” with me; and actually, “things in common” with what my ego had decided it wanted to look like to the world, which is where the holier than thou originates from.

And I have compassion for myself around having done that and still doing it from time to time, because it comes from deep wounding. And at times it has felt like all my little wounded self wants is to feel connection with people, to feel seen and heard, to feel love and belonging. And I used to think that receiving love and belonging meant being around people with similar “goals” and “interests” and “values,” and being around people that agreed with me all the time. O how much suffering this brought me, and relational confusion when I tried to shape everyone into what I wanted them to be, which was like me!

I find the world very boring when everyone agrees all the time; it’s like the equivalent of the crops for which we have ruined the diversity of the gene pool through genetic modification. We are all incredibly diverse, within our own individual souls! but we often walk around like we could just reduce ourselves to some very limited, efficient, predictable set of labels. And then we actually pretend to “get to know each other” that way! “Ooh, you like sustainability? Me too! Let’s be friends.” And I say yes to that as a starting point, but yes even more so to starting points of disagreement and respect, and I say an absolute no to that as an endpoint instead of going deeper. I want to feel what is behind someone’s eyes when I look into them, and I want to know how clear and present those eyes are. You can see in someone’s eyes and hear in someone’s tone of voice if they have an ego agenda, and ego agenda is the anti-service. Let’s start the movement to stop genetically modifying our souls to be boring and understandable! Heirloom humans, those are the kind I like.

What I’ve come to discover is that the people who end up being closest to me, the people that make me feel the most seen and heard, the people who heal me, are the ones who simply see what I am and love it anyway. And I say “anyway” because I make mistakes, and I’m not perfect, and sometimes I hurt people, or do something irresponsible, and I’m not Buddha, and yet I am worthy of love because I exist, just like everything else. Kahlil Gibran says, “Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you.” Who am I to deny food to the hungry, even if I am the hungry, if I have some to give? And we all have some to give, always.

In this vein, I know that to the degree I show myself to the world, to that same degree I can accept love back from it. So I’ve decided, as a practice, to avoid limiting the expression of my truest self with dogmatic buzzwords masquerading as “values” and “beliefs.” Rather, I know that in order to truly serve, I must listen deeply, and listen deeply within the moment, which is all that exists. When I do that, my “values” show up in my eyes, in my voice, in my actions, in my body, in my words. And the Spirit guides them, and the wisdom of my ancestors deep within my bones guides them, and they don’t need or want buzzwords. At the end of the day, when we lay our individual heads on the pillow, the voice of our conscience is the way we answer to the gods and the universe, not to each other’s opinions.

So to remind myself of these things, needing as I am of a practice, by virtue of my human fallibilities, this little motto came to me the other day:
Attend your own existence as if every moment you spend with the truth of the present is as precious clean water you feed to the ever-new growth that is forever becoming your life’s masterpiece, without your planning. The gift is in the watering, which we do every time we soulfully accept Truth’s invitation, and show up fully to its eternal dance, with no expectations but to listen, and no agenda but to dance according to what we hear. The masterpiece that is yourself grows like a tree, which you will notice does not grow in a straight line towards a goal, an endpoint. Rather, its growth only involves exposing more and more of itself to the sun and the moon, and drinking in more and more of the ever-abundant Spirit in the ether. Be as the tall tree and do not act from hollow duty, but rather, as the poet says, “give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space.”

The Shadow

brian — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:50:28 +0000

I think the shadow only becomes “shadow” if parts of the soul are suppressed and un-expressed. For whatever reason, historical or other, there are certain qualities of human nature that have gotten negative connotations, i.e. anger, sexual urges, childishness, selfishness, etc. The curious thing to me is that the same exact attributes can and often do have completely different connotations in different contexts. For example, someone may consistently get taken advantage of by other people, and in that case it would be wise for that person to cultivate some more selfishness, because it only does harm to be taken advantage of. On the other hand, someone who is always thinking of themselves and how they can personally benefit, at the expense of the group, would probably be chastised for being too selfish. Therefore, we cannot simply state that selfishness, or any other quality for that matter, is inherently good or bad and leave it at that; it depends on the context.
However, we have this tendency to somehow decide which qualities are good and which qualities are bad, and then identify ourselves with labels accordingly, using blanket statements such as, “I am not a selfish person.” We convince ourselves that the qualities in the “bad” category have the capacity to do harm, so we lock them up out of fear, but in that locking we may very well foster ignorance, more fear, lack of connection, lack of intimacy, underachievement, emotional confusion and pain, etc., and all of these can be just as harmful, if only not as immediately or as discernibly.
Take for example the common practice, as mentioned above, of applying blanket labels to ourselves such as “introvert” or “extrovert,” or “street smart” or “book smart,” etc. The reality is that we all have extroversion and introversion, book smarts and street smarts, etc., living within us all the time, even though one or the other may or may not have been predominantly expressed up until this point in our lives. The question that keeps recurring to me is: why is it necessary to pick and choose what we are among these arbitrary and, frankly, very loosely defined polar opposites? What good does it do to identify oneself as an introvert rather than an extrovert? I realize how often in my life I have been self-enslaved by these conceptual notions of what or who I am, and I don’t think it has done me any good at all. Rather, it has limited me from honoring and nurturing parts of myself that have the potential to flourish and give to the world, and I’m tired of limiting my own potential for the false security of an identity made of arbitrary labels (which also, by way of their loose colloquial definitions, lead to all kinds of painful and frustrating miscommunications on a regular basis).
It is the soul’s very nature to seek expression, often magical and unpredictable expression, and this need of the soul is so strong that it will happen whether we want it to or not. Every part of the soul will see itself expressed; the choice we all have is whether or not we will be conscious of that expression, in all the multitudinous ways it can occur. When we lock away all the qualities of ourselves that we think are bad or harmful we create the shadow, and the more we try to suppress the potential that we have those qualities, the more they control us unconsciously, the more they cause us to judge and hurt others, and the more they make us suffer. I believe this locking up happens every time we deny a part of ourselves the mere possibility of being expressed.
People get scared because they think that once they open the door to the expression of what has been shadow, there is no telling what craziness will ensue. For example, someone who has suppressed the sexual part of themselves may be scared to let it be expressed because they would do something against their value system. But in order to make a true choice about something, I think permission has to be given to the possibility of both options. In other words, someone with a formerly suppressed sexual urge could do a lot of self-liberating just by granting permission to the idea of doing something sexual, without necessarily fulfilling the urge in actions. Having given permission to that possibility, they have allowed that part of themselves, of their soul, the part that is sexual, a voice and a seat at the table, even if it wasn’t acted upon. And it’s such a more gentle choice at that point to not act upon it, rather than white-knuckling on a just-say-no mentality when the urge is chomping at the bit. If we can do that on a regular basis, then we can start to really feel ownership over our lives, because we are making true choices in every moment. When we don’t do this, and instead deny and deny and deny certain parts of our soul, that is when we get addictions and various other behaviors that appear “deviant,” such as the very conservative senator who has long opposed gay marriage and considered homosexuality a sin, only to be caught having homosexual sex outside of marriage while trying to keep it a secret. All the soul wants is expression, even if that means simple acknowledgment in the theater of your own mind.
In my own experience of the world, I think that human growth is possible to the extent that we can give the entirety of our soul a voice, and I believe this is what is meant by “integrating the shadow.” This is what makes the greatest artists the greatest. The greatest artists, poets, athletes, people do not accept self-imposed limits of what they are “supposed” to be like or look like or act like. They only respond to the call of the moment and the truth and let it take them where it will, without fear or worry about what people will think or how they will be judged. No one became one of the greatest by being afraid to do something that no one had done before; it is precisely because they are willing to open and offer their own uniqueness to the Muse and let it guide them into truly new territory that they are great. And the reason they can do this is that they have transcended the arbitrary and obeyed the call of the infinite.
So in a way, when I say “God” or “The Infinite,” I refer to that which simply is, despite the fact that we may or may not want it to be so. And I say YES it is a mystery, but that doesn’t mean we can’t know it, it just means we can’t speak it in literal English. We can speak it in metaphor and in feeling, and we can express it in our art and our poetry and our movements and in so many other avenues besides the literal one.
To attach our understanding of life to the literal and the arbitrary is to attach ourselves to suffering. Inevitably the magic of the moment will always call our arbitrary rigid expectations into question, and we can always feel it, no matter how numb we’ve become or how unconscious we are of it. That we can always feel it is why we can still suffer at all, for just as the soul seeks expression, so does the truth, and when it is denied confusion and pain will ensue, because the truth is still there in the room, despite the denial. So just as the enlightenment of the gurus and the legends involves transcendence of the arbitrary and alignment with the infinite, so it involves a movement from the literal to the metaphorical realm. Prayer and Myth. These are the master talents of the soul, and the soul has known how to do these things since before we were born, when it still lived unencumbered in the land of pure is, never having known the concept of should. If only we can move our rigid egos out of the way, the soul will always know what to do, and will always be at home in the truth.

The Roaring

brian — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:23:26 +0000

It came to me

from inside my bones.

A package sent from the past,

The future urging me to open it.

So I light the sage,

Bring the package out,

And set my body upon the land.

The Earth, she reveals it all to me, every time.

With gratitude,

I return.

Having gone empty,

I’ve been filled again.

I cross back over

while my heart shakes hands

with the Infinite,

then greets the world anew with a smile.

At the core is only love,

Founded on humility so honest

it requires me to shine,

and call the others out from their hiding.

Initiation

brian — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:17:39 +0000

Reflecting on a very enthusiastic conversation about vision quest from last night, a thought occurred to me about the vision quest process, and how it has worked through me. One of the things I love most about vision quest, and especially rites of passage, is an idea I heard from one of my guides, Will Scott at the School of Lost Borders. It goes something like this: when we go to the land and make a claim we are courageously opening a big new crack in ourselves that the universe will do its best to fill in during incorporation. In essence, the universe wants to “test its new toy,” kick the tires and see if the person will literally in-corp-orate what they went to claim on the land, out in the world at large.
I am realizing now that before I quested for manhood this summer, it was as though I had been living inside a self-created cage. This cage was very complex, and mostly built from all kinds of different limiting beliefs and expectations I had about myself and my life, like that I wanted to “reach” a certain level of enlightenment as if it was a pot of gold I could attain, or that I wanted to meet a completely perfect woman and have a completely perfect relationship with no problems at all, or that I believed life could just be either good or bad, et cetera. And every time life reminded me, by way of the present moment, that those rigid expectations would never actually come true, because life and the soul is rich and deep and intricate and filled with paradox and mystery, NOT certainty (the only certainty being that I will die); every time those reminders came I would become afraid and anxious, because my little cage was built from this utopian vision of what my life SHOULD be. These reminders came often (thank god) and I spent most of my time being anxious and afraid to be who I actually was, instead trying to be the image of the “good” person I had invented. The cage held me back from embodying myself in the present moment almost everywhere I went. And I think it was easy for the people around me to notice when this was happening, because I would appear to be somewhere far off. And it was true, my mind was far off, haplessly daydreaming of all the ways that someday my life would be perfect, the telltale condition of an over-seeker. And the whole time I was missing the incredible wonderment of the moment that was right in front of me the whole time, an opportunity for freedom that was mine if only I could open myself enough to fall in love with it.
Well, somehow, before I realized all these things, even while all of this self-caging was still happening below my consciousness, something deep in my soul in the most ancient part of my bones knew I wasn’t ok with that kind of life anymore. That frankly I would die if I didn’t do something about it. That the rampant fear and anxiety was making a mockery of my own divinity, slowly squeezing all the life out of my potential, my gifts, the possibility of what my life could become, directing me to hopelessly fixate on what it SHOULD become. And so, even amidst the cacophonous din of the ten thousand voices in my head, I somehow heard the roaring of the sacred river in the distance, and it was too loud and too strong for me to say anything but yes in response. I think it was ultimately the seeker in me that led me there, fitting that the same part of me that put me in prison would eventually be the only one that could lead me out.
The quest taught me that there is no should, there is only is. Joseph Campbell said “We have to be willing to give up the lives we’ve planned for ourselves in order to experience the lives that are waiting for us.” This has been the story of my quest. So I have a new image now of how this story worked and is still working itself, and it looks like this: my rite of passage, my initiation in front of the council of all beings, opened the door of that cage and invited me to step outside. Invited me to step out of the frail “certainties” of my ego cage and into the sonorous chambers of my cavernous soul. It has felt scary at times, for despite the cage’s limitations, it was at least familiar, and at least at first, the outside of the cage was not. Nevertheless, the quest has given me permission and freedom to live in the not knowing, and feel alive and in love being myself in the world. And frankly, the felt experience of divinity that is available in the soul space is as familiar to the most ancient dusty reaches of me as anything.
It is as if I poured myself a new mold on the quest, and the task of my incorporation has been and continues to be to fill in that mold with as much of myself as I can in every moment, for myself for my people. I have thus, in this initiation, learned a new definition of the very north shield concept of “showing up”: Being Myself. And I can only ever call anyone else out to do the same. This is one of the great works of our generation and our times: to reject that which has told us to be afraid of being ourselves, and retake our love for ourselves and for one another, and for all of creation. This is liberation, and…
This is a CELEBRATION!

Let this be a theme song for our courageous march into the present, individuals united as one for the love of life.

Sing To Me

brian — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:48:43 +0000

Sing to me of your soul’s magic,

That I may give mine forth in dance.

Please, be like the river,

And let your rhythm flow downhill to me as it must.

Sing to me of the heavens inside your mind,

The way the night sky winks at me while I brush my teeth.

Place the trappings of society inside parentheses,

And I will, and together we will ascend in purity and truth.

Sing to me of the earth inside your pleasures,

And sing of it with impulse, informing great detail,

For you will be an artist then,

And I will view all of creation inside your hands.

Sing to me of the passion winds inside your heart,

Of your most brutal wounds and of your biggest courage,

So that I may wander your peaks and valleys,

And here or there fall down in grief or fill my belly with laughter.

Please, sing of your soul’s magic like the river goes downhill;

Let me hear how that Eternal Drummer beats his steady rhythm through you.

Truly, we will be together then,

As we dance in harmony with the golden-robed Spirit of the Infinite.