Matter is just a minor pollutant in a universe made of light. —Ilya Prigogine
I want to begin this New Year Message from the Mothership with a focus on belonging. 2017 has been both illuminating and galvanizing for many movements but the one that has struck me most profoundly in terms of social and political history is the #metoo phenomenon, which has grown into an extraordinary opportunity for people to give voice to horrific life experiences and call for right action and social justice, and to not be afraid of speaking up. The Earth also cries out #metoo, and there is no court to take on this rape case, harassment, and disregard for planetary life, one whose fate is intimately entwined with ours. And for me personally, the #metoo movement is also about all victims without voice, refugee populations, orphans, fostered children, abused animals, all sentient beings whose voices must be heard and seek belonging.
I view belonging in this context as an affinity for a place or situation, a feeling of inclusion, where you genuinely mesh with others, you fit in and feel accepted and secure in your relationships. Knowing that you are not alone, you are part of something far greater than yourself.
I would like to propose that with the same ferocity and energy that we responded to horrendous life events, misogynistic treatment of women, mass shootings, environmental degradation, and all types of social injustice that we also take time to respond to the awe of our very existence, to creation itself, and direct our energy toward gratitude, for the wonder, miracles and sacred gifts from the Universe.
When I look into the night sky spread out before me in the clear vantage of the mountains, I see the flesh of the universe, the fascia unfolding, the vessels of hope and connection. The Geminids coursing at dawn, the possibility of our souls being stretched, enlarged, elongated, of actually becoming and having the direct capacity to become the universal. This flesh is our flesh, the cosmic flesh, and this is what gives to us true healing and liberation—it is the home of the spirit, it’s where spirit holds out a torch to us prodding every cell to remember—a cosmic me too. I am part of this bounty and beauty and vastness. I am part of this flesh and fruit, this expanding space. I belong and am not a victim of matter, its frozen light. I am a moving thread in the tapestry of birth and creation, the union of the fibers of space, the fibers of Earth, all tuberosity’s with my own body.
It is Saturn’s time, the ruler of our flesh and bones, of our ears and skin. Think of your skin as an extension of the ear, we listen with our entire body and our entire body is stimulated by music, whether heard or unheard. Saturn also rules the second chakra, the sexual chakra, the yin and yang of the kidneys, which integrates the sexual energies of the sperm and ovum for creation. The Saturnian connection to essence also connects us to the essence of our own creation from the Big Bang we have our eternal connection with the essence of not just the Earth elementally but to the heavens and the non-duality of the heaven/Earth, male/female, secular/spiritual. In the theology of Creation Spirituality, the second chakra’s correspondent theme is feminist philosophy, a philosophy that is nature based, whose commitment is to overthrow duality and embrace interconnectivity, to heal the one-sided patriarchal philosophical, economic, physical, psycho-emotional and psycho-spiritual era that dominates policy-making, scientific thinking, and aesthetic philosophy. It evades and pervades everything as we have seen of late. It also seeks to overthrow sexuality gone wild, lust, power over, the misdirection of love, and the back-turning on any other sexual orientation. The #metoo movement finds solidarity in the theology of Creation Spirituality that would expose unbridled desires, greed that swallow up the Earth and its resources and health for private profit, and that would annihilate peoples and cultures for the same reasons. It spotlights the wasteful extravagance, sadomasochistic tendencies, and corporate violence, the social injustices, so that we have the strength to stand up to it all and sing for all the dispossessed.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about
Ideas, languages, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense…
Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance. — Rumi, A Great Wagon
And when does freedom come—by embodying human, earthly, and cosmic flesh, by understanding that we belong to and always have a bigger architectural and genomic plan. The fading manuscripts and archives we dissect and worship are nothing compared to our life on Earth. The groundedness and beauty of lava flows in our hands, the smells of jasmine blossoms and skunk migration, the colors and tastes of watermelon and avocado. The infinite sky filled with moons and meteors strange shapes and movements we may live to understand and accept. Yes, we are matter and that matter matters, and we are light and sound, and that matters too. It all belongs, we all belong.
One of the greatest discoveries in science in 2017 was LIGO’s detection of the collision of neutron stars, in what is known as a kilonova. This confirms that kilonovas are cosmic alchemical agents, and we now have proof of their existence. Neutron stars contain extremely densely packed matter. They are the densest form of stable matter known, and when these two collided, they created a sound and the loudest gravitational wave ever recorded. Nobody knows what happens with added mass—atoms in normal mass are mostly empty space—a tiny nucleus of protons and neutrons that float in a heaven of electrons. Now what happens when the pressure is on, like the supernova super pressure, electrons squeeze into the protons, and then what we get is more densely packed neutrons—and we do not know what limits neutrons are capable of—some get liberated and change and transmute surrounding atoms—but ultimately will it cause collapse into a black hole or a new undiscovered phenomenon. Maybe this is a true testament to non-dualism of the neutron, and its possibility to be limitless.
And if we understand that our material bodies, our flesh contains over 60% of the atoms that were once inside that cosmic fireball, we can get a sense as we gasp at the beauty that is metoo, and that this is what we share this cosmic connection with all living and non-living matter on this planet.
“In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul, and you are that… have ways within each other.” – Rumi, A Great Wagon
I know where I want to set my tent up—in the flesh of the cosmos, in the mammary glands of the milky way, the faint veins of infant galaxies, the muscles and magic and commitment of binary star systems, the wonder of exo-planetary tendons, the articulation points of eternity, the delicacy of an inception point where the multi-universes accept us and all our vulnerabilities. Then too our bones are South Pacific coral reefs, our muscles liquid crystals, and if the DNA in our body was uncoiled it could reach to other planets. I want to learn to read a vaster mind we cannot program, that doesn’t need us, but that surprises us and informs us through sound and light, bombarding us with the constant reminder that we belong. I want to be the African Bushman, who can see the moons of Jupiter with their naked eyes, or can hear the sound of an approaching aircraft from over 70 miles away. I want to be the song of the wandering angus who hooks berries on a thread and catches new galaxies, to be the weld that holds creative tensions and materials science’s minds and limits together. I want my millions of rods and cones to become zillions of rods and cones. I want my inner listening devises to hear the music of the spheres, and the shield shaped door of the throat to trumpet and explode new messages in the interstitial tissues of all of us. I want reception. I want all of our songs to belong.
Count me in the mix of secular and mundane, and far into the mystical.
Happy New Year and let Heaven and Nature and all of us sing, may our superheroes be reactivated and re-establish justice in the world and help all things belong and recreate. I leave you with some closing lines from my favorite poet W. B. Yeats from a Dialogue of Self and Soul.
. . . I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
Donna Carey and Ellen Franklin are teaching Acutonics Level I, March 2-4, 2018 at Golden Flower Chines Herbs in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For information or to register contact Lola Coca at edu@gfcherbs.com