I have dreams fairly often of strange fungi growing out of different parts of my body.
One might describe them as nightmares… but it isn’t so much a feeling of terror as much as a sensation of life being so impersonally bizarre that it overwhelms my ego to the point of panic. How is it possible for nature to just use my body for growth I didn’t consciously choose?
I wake up with a heightened sense of strangeness around my body - all the tiny organisms on and within it, growing in myriad ways I did not consciously choose.
I’d like to shout out all the experiences that have expanded my capacity to hold High Weirdness: psychedelics, burns, and those wild Uranian types who pushed my buttons and set me on edge… thank you for your service.
Staying present with the strangeness might just be a most vital skill in living this life with less fear and more curiosity.
"The more you become Earth speaking on behalf of herself, the less human oriented you become. Over time every belief is stripped away, including much of what we think of as our self identity. This work, if you follow it all the way to the end, will cost you everything that you are. You become, as Emerson said, a transparent eyeball, the truth passes through you, living and intact." ~Stephen Buhner
It has been a recurring theme in my life lately that I move somewhere, fall in love with that little ecosystem, only to watch it become slowly (or not so slowly) desecrated by human interference.
It seems to me that as a matter of survival, it will become essential for us to become less human-oriented… or as David Abram calls it “more-than-human.”
We know intellectually how interconnected and dependent we are upon our environment, but that doesn’t seem to translate into the level of empathy and understanding necessary to transform of our way of being in this world.
How can we practice expanding our sense of self to include the entire ecosystem that sustains us?
Maybe it begins with fascination…
followed by empathy…
and finally, embodiment.
It has been a recurring theme in my life lately that I move somewhere, fall in love with that little ecosystem, only to watch it become slowly (or not so slowly) desecrated by human interference.
It seems to me that as a matter of survival, it will become essential for us to become less human-oriented… or as David Abram calls it “more-than-human.”
We know intellectually how interconnected and dependent we are upon our environment, but that doesn’t seem to translate into the level of empathy and understanding necessary to transform of our way of being in this world.
How can we practice expanding our sense of self to include the entire ecosystem that sustains us?
Maybe it begins with fascination…
followed by empathy…
and finally, embodiment.