Courting the Dark

Santa Barbara backcountry, Los Padres National Forest

PC: Alexis Slutzky

Greetings !! ~ 

It has been a while, I know, and what a time it has been. Thank you to those of you who have written to let me know you have missed the newsletters in your inbox - that touches me. I am inspired to start writing again and engaging this extended and beloved community. I am grateful for that and for you. Much to reflect on and share, which I intend to do in a longer newsletter perhaps at the end of the year. How to give voice to what has transpired and is transpiring in this time of collective initiation?

For now, to acknowledge we are just on the other side of the Celtic New Year, Sawain, Day of the Dead, the time of the thin veil between the worlds, where the invisible realms and mystery are perhaps more accessible to us. A time of completions, endings, holy rage, heartbreak, approaching the last days of 2021... and simultaneously new beginnings, beauty, fresh perspectives, seeds, gestation ... as the cycles of change continue... same as it ever was, and in no way the same too. We are moving into the dark in the northern hemisphere, in the midst of what a mentor of mine, Francis Weller, calls the Long Dark, referring to these times. We must be prepared for the dark, and learn how to court it. There are practices that help us befriend the dark so we are not afraid, or if we are afraid, to have accompaniment. With hands to hold, songs to sing, stillness to surrender to, attentive listening and heightened senses, dreams, growing our comfort with silence and solitude, feeling the presence of presence/god/spirit/love, slowing way down, honoring what has come before and allowing what is while visioning what will be.

Last night, I gathered online with a group of folks to share together with the energy of the dark moon, as we have been doing each month since the beginning of the year. We reveled in silence, poetry- ours and others (one shared below), shared tears and laughter, and steeped in the felt sense of the seeds we are individually and collectively sowing. This morning, I woke early to swim in the ocean under a cloudy sky. It was marvelously cold, and lo and behold, it began to rain!! Oh water blessing beyond. It was pure divinity to be held within that expanse of water, above and below, behind and before, in all directions, wet. The blessing of that in these dry times and land was extraordinary. The seeds have been watered. And of course, as we remain in dire and beautiful times, we must remember to water the seeds of "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible"*, every day.

There are a few upcoming and time sensitive online offerings to share below.

If you are called to deepen your capacity to be with grief, as well as accompany others in their grief, please come join this dynamic 4-week online training, Grief Accompaniment.

Additionally, I will be co-facilitating a 6-month virtual journey of exploration and connection for ages 18-28 starting in January 2022- June 2022, ReGeneration Rising.

Podcast interview series coming soon. I am very excited and honored to be having recorded conversations with dear mentors and friends who have made a profound difference in my life, in order that I can share their insights and messages with you (as well as keep myself out of the familiar stance of isolation - stacking functions, the permaculture principle, as a best practice!!) I plan to release the first few episodes at the beginning of the year or shortly thereafter.

Also, as the monthly new moon calls come to completion --- the last one is December 6 from 6-8pm pt, which you are welcome to join, for registration and information, see below --- I am envisioning a new online community forum to continue to gather, share, seek shelter, find belonging, inspiration and rewilding. I will update as it comes into form, which I imagine will co-arise with an updated website. Stay tuned!

Thank you for taking the time to read. Please reach out if you are inspired. I would love to hear what is moving in you. May my gratitude for you be a drop of rain on the dark earth of your soul soil and may you find unexpected blessings in the dark.

in grace and wild peace, 

Alexis

*Charles Eisenstein

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Inspiration

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Veterans Journey Home

12 Veterans participate in a wilderness fast ceremony....Alone for four days and four nights with no contact with the outside world and minimal shelter. Their journey, rigorous and challenging, leads them to a clearer sense of who they are and where they belong in the world as civilians.

You are Your Own Best Thing - book by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Joanna Macy

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Gestation of Unformed Possibilities

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” 

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Postcard Artist: Sage C.F., age 14

Greetings dear people,

Those of us in the northern hemisphere are crossing the threshold from fall into winter, a time to honor our ancestors and what has come before, as we shed what must go, in order to live a more fresh, true, brave, and expanded life. In the Celtic tradition, this is the new year - a time of new beginnings catalyzed by entering the dark, winter, the gestation of unformed possibilities. What with the pandemic, continued and intensified climate disasters, social unrest, racial injustices and reckoning, the imminent historical election in the USA marking this moment, we are in the long dark, as a mentor of mine would say of this time. There have always been dark times, and there will be again. There will also be light. We are the fruit of our ancestors toils and delights. They sang and weeped, made love and fought, got petty over who did or did not do what, and longed and prayed and visioned and dreamed and labored us into existence.

There is an old fable shared in the Zen Buddhist tradition, about a woman who is being chased by tigers. There are many renditions, but the gist is... she runs for her life, as fast as she can. As the tigers quickly approach, she finds herself at the edge of a cliff. A vine winds down over the edge, so she climbs down and hangs onto the vine high above the ground. She looks down and sees there are also tigers below (what?!?) waiting for her to fall, ready to devour her. She notices a tiny mouse nibbling at the vine to which she is clinging. She looks around and sees a beautiful bunch of wild red strawberries growing nearby. She looks up and down, at the mouse and at the last thin fiber of the vine, then reaches out and picks a perfect strawberry and puts it in her mouth. The strawberry tastes delicious.

Although this is always the predicament we are in as humans - the tenuousness of life, the inevitability of death, with only our experience of the present moment - the particular now we find ourselves in feels even more acute with so much at stake; tigers above and tigers below. As the other side of despair, grief and outrage, our capacity for joy, pleasure and wonder when we are present in an animated world, gives fuel to our work of reimagining, restoring and recreating the world we want to live in. And as Robin Wall Kimmerer says, is the 'return of the gift'.

How much more present can we be today when we have death and endings in our awareness? How much more courage can we muster? How much more willing can we be to let go of what other people think, what is too small for us, the stories that keep us away from love?

I loved playing soccer as a kid. I most often played forward and halfback, and sometimes coach had me on defense. At the end of a game, if we were behind, my coach would yell at me to go for it, no matter my position. One game I left my post as goal keeper, and scored the final goal for our team. It was a rush.... I long to play that full out and give my all for this world. We are in the endgame (Check out Derrick Jensen's book Endgame). Time to unleash our dynamic potential, welcome the wild cards and stay awake.

On the eve of the official election day, our vote, our prayer, we can also choose how we inhabit the present moment - sowing seeds of love and justice for the future in our now. The vulnerable territory of unknown mystery and the ground of creative and abundant possibility in the present moment is calling us home. It is where I want to meet and collaborate with you and others for the rest of my life.

We are made for these times. We all really want the same things. All of us, really. Or at least, the very most of us human beings. No matter who we want in office, and all that. It is so easy to wage war, harder and more enduring to live peace. I hope this brings a breath of peace on this threshold, if even for a breath.

I have a new essay up on my website, Listening to the Land, inspired by a recent trip to Southern Utah; the first in what I hope to be a series of writings. I would love to hear your thoughts if you care to share!

With wild blessings, big love, and mercy for ourselves and each other,

Alexis

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Mundane Miracles, Holy Wonders & Other Tidbits

October 2020

"Caste away charm

Nobody is myself

Sweet, sweet afraid"

~ These words came through the silence while fasting in the desert sandstone of Southern Utah twenty five years ago. I returned to this place last month.

A Map to the Next World

By Joy Harjo 

for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the

map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

FILMS

Follow Me Home

Brilliant film directed by Peter Bratt in 1996, re-released this month: "Four Los Angeles street artists hatch a plan to cover the White House with vibrantly painted murals in Follow Me Home, a rebellious fable infused with the traditions of Native, African and Latino culture. Joined by a woman with a haunting secret, they set off on an impetuous joyride across a desert landscape steeped in magic, mystery and danger. A powerful celebration of art, history, music and community, Follow Me Home challenges long-held beliefs about race and identity in America, adding an important voice to today’s racial reckoning."

The Cost of Silence

Powerful and disturbing film by friend and documentary filmmaker Mark Manning: "Secretly filmed over nine years, an oil industry insider exposes the devastating consequences of the Deepwater Horizon oil-spill and uncovers a public health disaster and the coordination between government and industry to silence the victims. The stakes could not be higher as the Trump administration races to open the entire US coastline to offshore drilling."

The Love - Black Eyed Peas and Jennifer Hudson

Chumash Territory: poster curtesy of Dawnland.

Poem: (Obscurity)

Walking this morning to the wishing well,

Now that the rains have come,

Amal Amal is flowing.

The ducks have returned,

As have I,

Though I was there too

When it was dry as stone, dirt and bone.

Running dry.

A man on the corner,

talks to himself, keeping his own company.

Do you have a place to stay? Food?

Me in my pajamas, though you might not know,

slippers wet with dew,

Empty pockets

Heart full of prayers.

He under the bridge,

with others camped along the stream.

The bees have once again occupied the old sycamore trees.

A woman runs to her car, “I forgot my badge,” she says,

I imagine she works at the hospital around the corner.

Running, running.

Two men in masks, one of floral fabric, made by hands,

exit their construction vehicle.

We greet each other with our eyes.

I walk home,

On empty and quiet streets,

Full of our shared predicament -

picking flowers along the way, from the overgrown yards of my neighbors.

Just as I have always done.

Though as a small child,

my parents had me return each blossom, one by one,

to teach me, I presume,

about not taking without asking.

Who owns the flowers?

I wonder.

And the street corner,

and under the bridge,

and the sycamore trees - leaves soft like the tiny hands of some distant relative, whispered on the wind?

Your Eyes To See Myself

There are too many dark places

which in their darkness

provide the fertile wisdom which gives birth to and contains,

dances with the light of clear seeing.

Needing each other, like the ocean needs the shore,

the day needs night, space needs form.

This love feeds the invisibles.

And the darkness pulls me towards it, to devour me in ecstasy.

I resist, yet know it is what offers me the remembering I have sought for so long.

It is toward this dark remembering I turn and face and dance.

My dark dance of remembering.

Will you watch me? How the edges of my mouth curve, how my feet caress the earth, how the fury in my gut sends flames through my hands?

I need your eyes to see myself.

Please don’t turn away.

Help me defeat the forgetting by dancing with it, embracing it, embodying it…

(be)Longing

To drape the longing casually

over the back of the kitchen chair

or leave it hanging on the hook (a little off center) on my bedroom door,

perhaps tuck it in the pocket of an unsuspecting stranger

or stuff it under my grandmother's Persian rug.

but to make of it a holy offering

adorned with wildflowers and honey,

turquoise and tobacco

delicious in its beauty.

This is the code of the stars

and the task to which I am committed.

and you (I have put a sprig behind your ear)

drenching me,

quenching my thirst

with the sweet rain of tender

love.