Camped beneath a full moon by a remote coastline, I am alone again with the wind, the sound of the ocean, and a celestial mystery that reminds me that we are all children beneath the stars. I pitched my swag not long after dark, excited to be so alone out here, dive gear ready so that I can immerse myself as soon as possible after dawn in the roiling waters of our ancient birthplace, the ocean. I fell asleep early, exhausted by recent movements, as the full moon rose above the scrubby coastal trees of this place.
Then I awoke, a few hours later, dazed and confused by the moon, which was now only half visible. It took ages to refocus my mind around this mystery – the line down the middle of our lunar orb was distinct. This was no demarcation of heavy cloud cover, and neither was it a tree branch in the way. I kept watching, maybe only half awake, maybe having slipped into a sweet, harmless madness, or a liminal psychic cave of timeless mystery, or a crack in some sorcery set by the universe to capture those foolhardy enough to give themselves over to soul. My mind raced – what is happening? How can I fall asleep under a full moon and wake up mere hours later under a half a disc? Has time slipped, am I lost in its deep pools?
Then I noticed it slowly grow, towards three quarters full, waxing again now as if it were pregnant, bloating as it rolled around the sky, becoming full again before my very eyes.
A blood moon lunar eclipse. How could I not have known this was coming? How is this not front-page news? (I know, if I took more notice of media, I would have known this was coming yesterday too!) But if I lived in a traditional society, where we watched the natural world for its clues and signals every day, I would have known this was coming in a different way. It would have had more meaning. We might have been afraid of the lunar eclipse, as many cultures were, when the moon gets eaten by the night.
The ancient Mesopotamians, with whom I have an affinity since studying them in my full-time research days, would install a fake king for the night, in case the deadly juju of the eclipse infected the real regent with disease or death. For the Sumerians, the moon was a God, a masculine power in the night sky, as opposed to the Lady Luna we imagine drawing us into romance, mystery and the cycles of life. Nanna the Moon God was the bull of the night sky, the stars a herd of cows, all observed closely as they revolved around our planetary home. The Mesopotamians became renowned for the mathematical precision of their star gazing, another reason I loved them. Such patience, record keeping and meaning making under the celestial constellations. We don’t share this love or take this time anymore; we have created our own light in the night, artificial, reliable and easy (even though it is costing us the earth; but that’s another story).
Nowadays, it is up to us to wake up, to notice the world around us, to become aware of the cycles of life and death in ten thousand animate, intimate, real ways. I’m glad I didn’t know the eclipse was coming to swallow the full moon at night. The surprise was such a jolt, it gave me the opportunity to awaken anew to this mystery, to be confused by the cosmos all over again. In my scrambling for reality and understanding, I rediscovered a primal need, as the world as I knew it fell away beneath me, or rather above. Wherever we look for certainty, we’d better be ready for anything, it reminded me.
My Salute to the Moon, a brief version of the full yoga asana. This is included in my Nature Calling Online Course for those wanting to deepen their connection to nature. It’s freely available here.
Reassured, I got up and performed my salute to the moon, a regular ritual I like to do when I am under her pearly light. Tonight, I notice how her silver glows upon my hands and arms as I reach for the sky, as if I am imbued and glow with the power of deep connection to the cosmos. Safely full and unobscured again now, I can write my story in her light, unafflicted by the wyrdness of my lunar fascination, rebalanced by my salute to the sacred mysteries, by the circle of ancestors who deign to allow me to speak as a guest at their table.
She is behaving herself again, crossing the night sky towards the horizon, and I feel I have been given back my sanity, my faith in the rightness of things. Having lost it for a while there, I am brought back to life in the exact moment of the everpresent here and now, as ritual always does for me.
Perhaps, like me, you will join the rounds, hopefully waking up to the great mystery of consciousness coursing through our veins, hopefully breathing in and out with gratitude for this one wild opportunity at self-aware primate life in a body on earth, hopefully waking up …
*NB: If these words spoke to you, please Like, Share, join in the conversation (aka leave a Comment or question), and SUBSCRIBE to keep the juices flowing. (The blog Subscription box is in the top right of the Blog page.)
How can we learn to live in the light, more often, with better outcomes?
Let’s start with the physical reality of being lit from within, with a loving glow, and then work our way towards putting that into practice in everyday life. First of all, if you have had an experience like this, there is no reason to doubt its value or ‘truth’, because we are literally lit from within, just as all matter is aglow with life. Part of any modern concept of ‘enlightenment’ must include this physical reality: that all life radiates out from a cosmic conflagration in space, which is still happening everywhere, all the time. Light is associated with so many positive connotations because of this fundamental life-giving force. This is why an experience of inner light and its gnosis is so highly valued, whether it arrives spontaneously or is inspired by a particularly radiant sunrise or sunset, the romance of moonlight, the simple glint of a dewdrop on a leaf, sparkling in the breeze, or any other phenomenon.
However, despite learning from physics that everything is made from starlight, including our minds and bodies, the origin of consciousness still remains a sacred mystery. Being self-aware allows us to live a life filled with meaning and spiritual growth. Understanding how and why light has been used as the preeminent metaphor for consciousness – for our ability to think, to read these words, to consider them, weigh them up and decide where we stand in relation to them – can deepen our capacity to become more awake to the miracle of our lives as conscious beings.
I have also learnt, mainly from my experience of meditation practices, but also from neuroscience, that this realisation can improve with practice, just like everything else. As self-aware primates, we truly are the universe becoming aware of itself. Both our bodies and our minds are lit from within, in a way that overcomes the seeming separation of mind and matter. In fact, we are better off thinking of ourselves as a ‘bodymind’ that glows with life and consciousness, something the shamanic arts have always known. Experiencing this realisation can dissolve doubt and confusion, leaving spiritual generosity, forgiveness, understanding and gratitude in its wake.
Now, we need to rekindle the light within more than ever. In a ‘post-truth’ world riven with fake news and political corruption, media propaganda and data mining, we need trustworthy guidance. This will become increasingly important as climate chaos, resource wars and other forms of societal breakdown threaten us with correspondingly fierce internal storms of anxiety, depression and grief.
Such guidance is available to us, both as we grow in faith in our own personal abilities to discern right from wrong and in great stories filled with the power and authority of collective wisdom. These kinds of stories are traditionally called myths. Mythic lore is not merely the fanciful narratives we have been taught to mistrust, as if they were the childlike explanations of a universe that hadn’t yet been explained away by science. Myths are multidimensional universes of information, designed to enable us to manoeuvre through chaos and evolve beyond dangerous new circumstances. The mythic symbol of light is especially capable at conveying such information, when it is interpreted with respect, appreciation and familiarity.
‘That Inner Glow’ Retreat is now SOLD OUT. However, the book is forthcoming, so keep your eyes open for that later in the year!
It was really refreshing to have a conversation with my mate, Dr Thomas Bristow, an expert in ecopoetics, and Senior Editor of the journal i am also an editor for, PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature. Tom wanted to chat about what the Romantic poets – Blake, Yeats, Wordsworth, Byron and co – saw in nature, and in particular what they learnt from listening for the spiritual aspects of the earth. It was a fun yarn and we touched on many aspects of the subject matter, following a handful of questions, or prompts, in a free range flow. Tom called this chat ‘Romantic Vision’ and you can access the video of it here (no pressure, but Tom tells me this may only be posted for a limited amount of time).
But first, i must wonder aloud about the value of literary explorations, poetic conversations, appreciating the Romantics and attuning ourselves to our local ecosystem in an age of planetary destruction. There’s a point in the interview where i admit that Thich Nhat Hanh might be right: perhaps what we most need to do is to hear the earth crying. This is not a very good sales pitch. And it’s probably only true to a certain extent: we are also a miraculous incarnation of consciousness in a primate body, embodying the spirit of life in a fantastically rich way, a celebration waiting to be had. My point is that opening our minds to the Deep Listening that i suggest at the culmination of this chat is not necessarily going to make you happier, but it may very well help you to be liberated from some of the more innocuous yet pervasive limits of your mind. Worth a shot?
To get there, Tom and i talked over the resurgence of European myth in the 18th century, which inspired Romantic poets to personify or anthropomorphise the environment, as a means to address ‘nature’, to represent vast fields of energy, beyond the human scale, and to create textual events that trigger legacies of ecocentric writing and orality. If you’re interested in the historical development of Western consciousness, you might enjoy our riff on how Romanticism worked as a response to Enlightenment. My key term for this was the ‘suprarational,’ which i saw as an attempt to develop consciousness beyond the human, to include our ancient predilection for pantheism, or notion that intelligence is a quality of the universe, or another dimension, which arises with this one (or even as its prerequisite).
This reminded me of the intelligence we find in nature, which is revealed in the way plants reach for the sun, or animals know instinctively how to hunt prey or follow seasons or find their way back across entire oceans to their birthplace. I can’t help but feel that for all of our technological development, the modernised psyche is a truncated version of something that could be far greater, in scope, depth and alacrity. We need to incorporate reason into our toolbox but be ready for so much more, when we open our minds to a conversation beyond the merely human, with plants and animals and places.
“We are leaning our for love and we will lean that way forever” Leonard Cohen
This more open-minded consciousness could also perceive more beauty in the world and thereby require less stuff from human society and production. There’s more to say about how recognising spirit of place can help protect the natural world, but i’m writing that for the next issue of PAN, so i’ll keep the water nymphs and satyrs for then.
When we are alive to the ecomythic dimension of life, human consciousness opens up to what actually is arising in nature, which is other forms of intelligence. This can also be called animism, which indigenous people have always said is real, not metaphorical: spirit beings, spirits of place, and spiritual entities are all other types of intelligent beings, which exist but do not take physical bodies in this dimension with us. They represent life force, sometimes of that place, sometimes from beyond. If we want to learn from them, we have to put aside our historical, socialised self, and enter into a trance of timelessness, beyond our personal foibles and concerns. Even as we are thoroughly enmeshed in capitalism and colonisation, simply by being alive in the world today, we can turn our backs on the worst of it, the most obvious effects it has on our minds, and find ourselves as we also always were and are: trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth wrote in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality.
Any true Romantic knows how to love a storm
Tom asked how we get there. I can only humbly suggest we meditate in sand dunes, or under trees, or by a babbling brook (or, if you’re in urban lockdown, on a pot plant and its own mysterious urge to live). A great place to start is with Miriam Rose Ungunmerr, who made the practice of Deep Listening more accessible to the public, especially helpful for non-Aboriginal Australians living on this ancient land.
Then maybe, if we can quieten the voices of our humanity for long enough, we might be able to hear the muses still, as they sing the song of the earth, for those who will listen.
*NB: Please Subscribe, Share, Comment … anything! It’s much more satisfying to write these posts when there is a conversation going on, believe me.*
It’s 2020 and Covid-19 has sucked the life out of so much.
We can’t go out and play together.
Everything has become a challenge worthy of a strategic planning meeting: work, school, shopping, home.
But let’s not forget that this is just the start, as far as climate science has been telling us for decades.
This is the carbon we released in the 90s. Spiking towards the sky, swirling up the stormclouds, breeding new diseases, creating the conditions for the worst bushfires in Australian history. Even the original peoples, here for tens of thousands of years, don’t have a story for that kind of damage. And if they don’t have a story for it – the people that were here when you could walk across Bass Strait from the mainland to what we now call Tasmania, who hunted across the plains of what is now Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne before the last great deluge – then it is truly unprecedented.
Now that we’re beginning to see what anthropogenic climate change looks like, we might as well get used to it, as we have to prepare to be lashed by the 30 years’ worth of carbon that has been discharged since this greenhouse began getting pumped full of hot gas.
The storms that lashed the Buddha, as he faced his final spiritual battle before the complete and irreversible awakening that would be the apotheosis of a lifetime of meditative practice, can be seen as metaphorical. Whether they were psychic entities tormenting him towards his great overcoming, or real elements of malevolence, the earth continued to live and breathe beyond the scene. Our reality is the ecological version – real storms and the breakdown of the physical world – but maybe it’s time to treat them as a spiritual challenge too.
To prepare best for the worst, stop thinking things are going to get better. That optimism will leave you victim to reality, shocked with every new assault upon your vision of the good life, unprepared for the horrors to come. 2019 was the best year you are ever going to remember – at least on a planetary scale. You may have better ones personally, but we’re on the downward slide now kids. Get used to it. Breathe deeply and find calm in the midst of the storm. Lean into it. Awaken the Warrior of Peace and Spirit.
While it’s also not enough to find solace in being protected by a great serpent, like the Buddha was, when the storms become truly threatening, it’s certainly one of the things we could be doing with our time, while we still have it. Keep agitating for change but balance that out with some concentration on spiritual liberation. This is your one wild life.
*NB: PleaseSubscribe for more posts – it really does inspire me to write and publish! If you like this riff, Share it. If you felt something in response, add a Comment. If you want to do ceremony, just ask.*
When you’re in there, with those strong feelings, of confusion and angst, thrown about by waves of emotion or distracted by random thoughts, plagued by doubts about your lack of an effective game plan for life or just plain down … it feels like chaos. Imagine yourself in one of the darker corners of this image, or being tossed by one of the waves as it crashes off a spiralling wing of energy, or crushed as one finger of force presses down upon your local environment or mind/body. Your experience is all-encompassing, complete, true to the life and death of this existence, right now …
But there’s always another side. There’s always another dimension, an aspect of the experience that forces you to evolve, or asks you to be patient, or simply washes over and leaves you feeling … OK. Refreshed perhaps, or even just relieved. At their best, such experiences inspire us to reaffirm our faith in the goodness of the universe. Very often, they leave us feeling that on the other side of chaos there exists an underlying order, a way that life unfolds that we could not possibly have imagined would turn out for the best. Or, at least, could leave us feeling enlightened, awakened, deeper or stronger or just … more fortunate.
When you come out the other side, what seemed like a chaotic jumble may turn out to look like a beautiful piece of art. Or an infuriating waste of time. It might seem like a period of testing, followed by an experience of thankfulness, which goes beyond rational comprehension. No matter how we interpret events, fractals remind us that the beauty of life and the world, the earth and the stars and the subatomic dimensions and all of life in its unfolding, is there at the end … because it is always there within: within each twist and turn of life, each crushing defeat or seemingly cruel turn of fate.
So if you find this post feeling anxious or confused, angry or ignorant, sad or lost, have faith. Some kind of order follows; some kind of pattern appears; something will always return to make you feel thankful for your life. Faith isn’t just for the religious – in fact, it’s another case where religions have stamped their authority over something that is innate, natural to each of us. It is an archetypal experience, to use a Jungian term, which arises spontaneously in anyone who survives something they can see the brighter side of afterwards.
Link up to a fractal doing just that and boom! There you are too.
