To create a more benevolent human presence on earth paradoxically we might need a more fierce, bestial, feral and wild presence on earth. We might need to connect with our animal senses and the wild Gods and Goddesses and beasts which live around us and inside us. We may need to cry out voluptously in grief, to leap up in exquisite untamed celebration or to assert ourselves with renegade ferocity. We may need to express the strange mythical powers behind our body symptoms and social problems if we are to find wholeness.
There may be a deep need for many of us to feel the pain of the world at present. We may need to gather together and support each other to feel the agony of the earth as a sensation or emotion coursing through our body. The pain of the earth could be vital feedback for us. It could be that through us feeling the pain of the world we might discover that we connected to the trunk of all life; our very rage could be a sign of our passion to protect the earth or our community, our very despair could also be an opening to a new unforeseen or previously unknown way of viewing reality, our very grief and heartbreak could really be a sign of our vast love for all life.
We might need to touch into our difficult body symptoms, suppressed feelings and social problems and find the mythic powers, the feral Gods that lie behind them, the instinctive forces in the psyche that are trying to find some kind of expression, and to integrate them carefully and respectfully. Or we may need to express them uproariously in wild dionysian celebration, in eroticism or in art. Or we may need to express them in socially benefically business initiatives, in ritualized fighting arenas and martial arts, in social activism, in local community conflict resolution dojos and gatherings, and in ceremony on the land.
To resolve some of our conflicts it might be necessary for us to not avoid conflict but to go deeper into it; to learn to communicate with people we disagree with or even hate and despise and to fiercely stand up for our own position whilst also taking an interest in the other side’s grief and their painful history too. We may need to take an interest in the other side’s trauma and grief whilst also standing ferociously for ourselves and our values too. We may need to create space for conflicts in our communities to be expressed. We may need to bring consciousness to the impossible undreamt emergent future and to the past too; to the voices of the ancestors and the ghosts of history that lie behind our deepest social and personal problems waiting to be seen, heard and recognized.
We may need ceremony, council and mutual support to be able to fully express the entirety of our wild being. And yet at present in our mainstream culture, much of what is a vital expression of our being is shamed. Excessive grief, especially for the world, is shamed, ferocity is shamed, the body is shamed and the strange animal powers inside us are shamed.
Often these powers, emotions and ways of being are pathologized. From the perspective of consensus reality, grief doesn’t contain the power to help heal the culture, body symptoms are not meaningful and nature itself is not meaningful or alive. In a sense our entire experience and the entire world is shamed or denied in the reductionistic view of reality. We may want to express our rage, grief, love for life or uproarious joy and yet are shamed if we do so.
The world where we believe that the body and nature is not intelligent, where magic doesn’t exist is something like the world of disconnection, the shame world. This shame world may have a grip on some of us but really it is an illusion, it is the unreal doppelgänger of the world. The non-magical world is an illusion. We may need to move from the shame universe to the blessing universe.
We may need to bless our relationship with flying ants, elders trees, pike, phytoplankton, the dead, the cormorant, the shoals of silver bass, the star strewn sky and the sky and animals that live inside us. To bless our conscious aggression, to bless our sob of grief, to bless our ecstasy, to bless our wild magic, to bless our pain. To recognize that when we bring tender attention to these things and carefuly reintegrate them it may bring us as individuals and as a community back to wholeness.
We may need to say to those who have been shamed: “Yes your struggle is real, your playful joy is real, your connections are real, your body sensations are real, your hurt is real, your tears are real; your tears feed your community, your tears feed the earth, your tears feed the gods, your tears feed us all, your tears feed the whole of life and they will regenerate it. They are like the ocean goddess whose tears are salty because of her grief and who gives all life to the world.
We may need to say: “Yes, this pain, this love, has power and medicine behind it, it is holy. To say Yes, this dreaming earth is the real reality, it is blessed and this body is blessed to be upon it. Yes, believe it, your tears feed the earth and give it life, your ceremonies feeds the sky and the earth, your mythos is real, your mythic journey feeds us all”
