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After an intense three month immersion in Tamera, I departed from Portugal yesterday. Like anything that changes your life and moves through you and you, onward, it takes a while to really know what happened… and what to say when so much was felt and experienced in such a short time?
As the part of the world I inhabit shifts towards winter, I am with this Rilke poem now more than ever…
You are not surprised at the force of the storm -
You have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
He whom they flee is the one you move toward.
All your senses sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees blood rose.
Now you feel it wants to sing back into the source of everything.
You thought you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.
Summer was like your house:
you know where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain.
Now the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb,
the wind sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty braces the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be Earth now and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until its real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
-Rainer Marie Rilke -
The fall has emptied the branches, and I am gestating something. Just like a child in the womb, there is the shape they take and the orientation you give them. And you can never ever know what will become of their lives. You can only hope and point joyfully in the direction of your longings for them. And Summer is over, a ripe and full season this year, a potent and juicy one at that. And all that arrived into my system is digesting, a tiredness and confusion arise now that I without home, and now everything that had a place is in a bag I drag alongside me. There is an emptiness ahead of me. A place to feel alone in the best way, a clearing, a quite, the possibility of perceiving even more now that the trees are clearing their withered and tired leaves. And I am the ground, resting, still - waiting for the frost to come.
In a dream I awoke from this morning, I was with those in the three-month education in a cabin, in the middle of the mountains. Many were watching a movie, La Verte Belle, and I wandered outside to a swing that overlooked a frozen pond. The land coated with deep snow and soft, gentle, flurries were falling. It was silent except the sound of my breathing, of my steps, and my movement climbing and spinning on the swing. I felt complete, nourished, belonging, and connected still to those I exposed my soul to while I was taking it all in in solitude.
We are cosmonauts, we are spirits wandering around this world that come together in the Dreamworld, in portals to the Otherworld reminding each other that we aren't alone even though we are apart. I am sad to be apart from them and have a prayer that we come together again to do all the things our creative collective imagination believe is possible. But I feel it with me in my dreams, in bardo - the in between places, where the transitions take place. Like ancient temples constructed over 2000 years ago and 8000 year old menhirs that still stand in Portugal, our souls are resilient - always seeking redemption and the adventure of the mystery waiting for us to notice that we have the power to leave something standing for Millenia to come. And I look forward to the integration of all the beautiful information that I received in these short three months, honoring the beauty of feeling my timelessness and wholeness in solitude for the time being.
And here I am in the United Kingdom, a place of my ancestors and I will meet my mother in Ireland in a few weeks following a call that I received during my vision time to go there... I arrived with an adventurous energy, open to discoveries, and curiosity about this place where my mother's mother's mother's inhabited, the motherland, "Mamwlad".
