“letter to earth

I’ve done the best I could

with thy sweet heritage of blood,

one creature like all the rest

born from your power and benevolence

graced to share in what you are

for your love’s multiplication

knows no prejudice,

so let me humbly state my thanks.”

Jane Roberts

“I know about love the way the fields know about light,

the way the forest shelters,

the way an animal’s divine raw desire seeks to unite with

whatever might please its soul—without a single strange

thought of remorse.

There is a powerful delegation in us that lobbies every moment for contentment.

How will you ever find peace unless you yield to love the way the gracious earth does to our hand’s impulse?”

Rabia of Basra

“Delight, for Life Giver adorns us. All the flower bracelets, your flowers are dancing….You have transformed into a flower tree, you have emerged, you bend and scatter. You have appeared before God’s face as multicolored flowers. Live here on Earth, blossom! As you move and shake, flowers fall. My flowers are eternal, my songs are forever: I raise them, I a singer, I scatter them, I spill them, the flowers become gold……We will pass away. I, Hungry Coyote say, enjoy! Do we really live on earth? Not forever on earth: only a brief time here.”

Hungry Coyote

“I was born naked.

My beloved parents

kindly gave me a name.

When I reached twenty

I thought “a name is a chain,’

I want to abandon it.”

Whoever I question

No one answers me.

When I hear the wind in the pines

I get an answer.”

Chogyam Trungpa

“Every creature has a religion. Every

foot is a shrine where a secret candle burns.

Every cell in us worships God.

Every arrow in the bow of desire has rushed out in the hope

of nearing the Divine.”

Thomas Aquinas

1000Oceans

These tears I’ve cried

I’ve cried 1000 oceans

And if it seems

I’m floating in the darkness

Well, I can’t believe that I would keep

Keep you from flying

And I would cry 1000 more

It that’s what it takes

To sail you home

Sail you home

Sail you home.

I’m aware what the rules are

But you know that I will run

You know that I will follow you

Over Silbury Hill

Through the solar field

You know that I will follow you

And if I find you

Will you still remember

Playing at trains

Or does this little blue ball

Just fade away

Over Silbury Hill

Through the solar field

You know that I will follow you

I’m aware what the rules are

But you know that I will run

You know that I will follow you.

These tears I’ve cried

I’ve cried 1000 oceans

And if it seems

I’m floating in the darkness

Well I can’t believe that I would keep

Keep you from flying

So I will cry 1000 more

If that’s what it takes

To sail you home

Sail you home

Sail

Sail you home

Tori Amos

My “scriptures” for this meditation have been drawn from various mystical poets, past and present. Although there are many beautiful meditations on earth and bodies in our “revealed” texts, these are also the same texts from which many of our most profound egoistic projections against bodies/flesh/the earth also derive. Sometimes, artists, poets, mystics and dreamers dare something a little different, a little truer.

My principle inspiration for this came from viewing the Tori Amo’s version of 1000 Oceans, which she made not long after the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The video shows Amos closed within a glass box, observing, responding to, but not being able to affect activities on the Los Angeles streets around her, including a reenactment of the riots. In her commentary, Amos said that she wasn’t aware until she made the video that the song was about the Earth itself, as our birth mother, our caretaker and protector, but ultimately the parent that must let us go our own way, even if that means harming and abandoning her. All kinds of people pass by the glass box, fearing, hating, hurting, curious, oblivious, sometimes noticing.

When I saw the video I experienced the extraordinary deep, compassionate, immediate and yet very non human (in the sense of being compulsive, masochistic or overly attached) love of the Planet for every creature. She simply is and holds the center, allowing us our tempests and wars and depredations, and their consequences….until we remember. She mourns in her own way, but there is always more life within her to express. The Earth doesn’t mind our technology, it’s one of the games we play…and we are not supposed to “return to the Pleistocene”…we were born to evolve…that’s what all the mistakes are about….that’s part of the rules for consciousness training.

We just forget constantly how much we are loved (and not in a mushy way) and how much we are to love. The disaster of Katrina was not Katrina: it was the refusal to care for people enough that levees would be built to protect them, that’s where the disaster started. It was years in the making. It is the most difficult lesson of all. I wept for at least an hour and I cannot play that video without bursting into tears every single time. The love of God is not remote, it’s in the air we breathe, the storms and earthquakes that express discomfort and seek balance, the blood and the bone, even when, sometimes especially when, it hurts.

Jane Robert wrote this little poem when the physical symptoms that finally stilled her voice took their final turn for the worse. It took her several more years to die, but she never blamed her body for its expression of her Sinful Self (her reference to what Sufis would call nafs).

Rabia of Basra’s poem is so extraordinary coming from a woman orphaned as a young girl and forced for many years into a life of prostitution. She would be one of the first in a long distinguished line of Iraqi mystical poets.

Thomas Aquinas’ poem should remind us that the great theologian developed his “view” of the world from a combination of mystical states coupled with rational contemplation. A careful perusal of his writing indicates that he was far less doctrinaire in application than the Roman Catholic Church would have us believe by his Summa, a text that he didn’t even regard as his most important contribution.

Chogyam Trungpa has always remained my favorite controversial lama, a tribute to how enlightenment and human limitation often ride each other’s coat tails.

And finally, Hungry Coyote, one of the last rulers of the “Triple Alliance” the three city states that were dominated by the Mexica (Aztecs). In the century before the conquest by Cortes, Hungry Coyote kept his city relatively protected from the sacrificial excesses of his neighbors in Tenochtitlan (across the lake). He was known for his generous nature and his abilities as a warrior, a superior statesman and a poet of the Nahuatl tradition.

Toward the end of his life his personal worship turned toward an important, but lesser revered deity in the MesoAmerican pantheon, that of the Life Giver who required no sacrifice. It seems Hungry Coyote began to call into question the ideology of required blood letting, decrying the way it seemed to keep his people afraid and in perpetual warfare. While life on earth was difficult, he began to doubt that humans needed to purchase their happiness from the planet with their blood and that of their neighbors and children. He died, with his city still free from immediate Mexican domination. His songs were preserved by oral tradition and later written down for the Spanish conquerors.

None of these individuals were naïve about the reality of suffering, nor were they “nostalgic” about “N”ature. They came to understand the intimate relationship of their bodies to the whole, and the blessings of the flesh, focused here, in specific moments, that infinite beauty and meaning might be achieved thereby.