Traversing the Wild Lands of Spirit: Calling Down the Rains
As I peer out through the shadowy in between time of early morning, a thick mist hangs above the ground where the sun is just becoming. Even though I’m nearing my elder years, I, too, feel as though I’m just becoming.
Moving outside to the garden, I reflect on the ways that humanity and all life on earth is being reshaped in these times. What we thought we knew is morphing before our very eyes and there is little to hold on to externally that feels solid and steady. As I pick arugula and lettuce for lunch, I notice the marigolds are shriveling. Signs and symptoms emerge in the world and in our bodies calling us to a deeper need. Through the ritual of listening and responding, we cultivate an inner ground of being from which we can orient through all manner of change.
How we live and what we believe about our place in existence is reflected in our internal and external environments. The garden, like the body, mirrors harmony and disharmony clearly—each symptom of health or dis-ease speaks in its own unique language about how its needs are being met or not. Our job is to be faithful students of this mysterious interchange. Signs live like poems, myths, living koans, drawing us into the living landscape of their ever-present potential. No diagnosis is final. Even when the plant or person’s form perishes, something of their essence continues to live and participate in the never-ending story of change.
Every aspect of mineral, soil, bacteria, virus, insect, animal, and weather pattern embodies an ever-evolving mythology that relates to the flourishing or demise of what we are trying to grow. In this great dance of inter-being, there lies the potential for life to be fully nourished. Or not.
Our participation matters in ways that we can only partially understand.
I remember how a year into the pandemic I walked the beach with a dear friend of twenty-six years to discover that we had each been sparing the other our most crippling existential fears, outrage, grief, confusion, and visions about what we are in the midst of living and dying through. In realizing that we are all going through a lot, we each didn’t want to add to the other’s proverbial plate.
Still in the garden, I cut away some aphid-infested peppermint and reflect on how this infestation came to be, I discover them in the marigolds as well. Aphids come when things are out of balance in some way. I think about the ways that life is violated or undernourished, and likewise nourished and enlivened.
There is a sacred site on the upper chest lateral to the midline and just above the heart in the intercostal space below the third rib, 靈墟 KI-24 Ling Xu Wild Lands of Spirit. The character ling 靈 is drawn as three shaman women dancing with their mouths open receiving rain from the heavens. They are sacred rain dancers showing us that by becoming empty of thoughts and conditioning, we are capable of mediating between heaven and earth. There are ways to create the conditions for effectively bringing the vitality of the heavens down to nourish life on earth. Ling means supernatural, mysterious, divine. It speaks to the spiritual power of ritual, capable of touching mystery and the possibilities available that exist outside of what we know. Xu 墟 represents earth, emptiness, burial ground, a place that is barren, a wild land. In times of spiritual emptiness, Ling Xu offers a threshold for uniting spirit and soul, heaven, and earth. By emptying ourselves of what we think we know, we make room for something more.
Ling Xu tells us that no matter our circumstance we are not powerless, and that there are ways to engage with mystery and dance with the Dao as it lives in us and all of existence, allowing life to emerge and take shape in new and unexpected ways.
We don’t know where all of this is leading us. We never have. There is so much at work not visible to the naked eye. My garden tells me this every day as I ask, “how might I serve?”
I reflect on the walk with my friend on the beach that day and how we began to talk openly about our feelings about the pandemic, climate chaos, never ending wars, the state of the world. We finally began to express the immense emotions coming up in relation to all we are experiencing internally and externally. We talked about the ways in which the more-than- human world and the earth herself is feeling through us. This day, at the altar of earth and sky, we each let the heart and soul speak through our lips and bodies the kind of deep truth-telling that surprises the mind and derails ego from its narrow agenda. We spoke, moved, danced, yelled, cried, carved our stories in the sand, made altars out of pebble, broken shell, seaweed, driftwood, rusty metal.
Constriction, numbness, and despair became wonder, possibility, even excitement.
Prayer.
When I think of Ling Xu, I think of how vital ritual is to our humanity. There are countless ways to create ritual by ourselves and with others. Ritual weaves us into the world around us and opens us to a larger wisdom.
When we begin to speak with our whole bodied self honestly and passionately from these barren, lonely internal places in the full presence of another (be it a person, a member of the other-than-human world, or both), the hold it has on us loosens and we create space for mystery to inform us.
We are becoming even as we are dying. By creating the conditions for spirit to imbue our life dance, it becomes possible for new life to emerge from the most barren parts of our inner world. What has lain dormant for months, days, years, or lifetimes is finally offered nourishment. We open to the wonder and miracle of life itself and the ways in which we can affect change though intention and active surrender. We make it possible for self and other, inner and outer, above and below to find one another and discover the ways in which they have never been apart.
