Sun’s Rays Light the Wisdom of the Mountains and the Woods Out Back
Every knot was once straight rope. The Mysterious Man in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods
The Muse pivots our approach this day. This morning, I found myself waking to deep questioning and recalled this line that I first heard from Gregge Tiffen, a mystic whose work, wisdom, and advice I followed from 1980 until his death in 2008, wisdom that I continue to call upon some 45 years later. In questioning a recent decision I made, a tale from the past and yet another challenge to pivot emerged…
Once upon a time there was a straight rope whose strands connected all Beings of the earth. These Beings knew that the rope was the flow of Life directly from Life’s Source. Each looked and listened to the Rope of Life in their own ways. Tree and Plant Beings after all don’t look and listen in the same ways as the winged ones, the rock Beings, the waters, the four-legged Beings, the gilled Beings, the human Beings, or, indeed, the unseen Ones. From their listening each discovered their contribution, thus co-creating harmony with one another and their beloved planet home.
In that abundant world there was plenty for all and each Being, again in their unique way, naturally received what they needed – just enough (like the bowl of porridge that was just right). And each returned their gifts in reciprocity to the earth. Life was sacred.
I’m told that the ancestors of the Pinon Pine Beings in the Woods Out Back passed along this knowledge and that the land and the elements also remember this time before knots began to be tied in the Rope of Life. In that ancient time all Life was celebrated and lived as sacred. It was a time before knots were tied. Before words and deeds began to restrict Life’s flow. A time before Beings began to see themselves as separate from one another and Mother Earth. A time before the great forgetting of Oneness and the sacredness of all Life.
In that great forgetting words became beliefs, or perhaps beliefs became words both tying knots of separation in the Rope of Life. Knotty words and beliefs that today we easily embrace as our culture, our civilization, as just ‘the way life is’ have become our prison, a prison that separates us from one another, from the sacred Beings of our planet home and from Mother Earth herself. Simple words that we use daily engage us in continuing to extract from rather than contribute to one another and Gaia – right/wrong, profit, competition, success, progress, goals, winning, achieving, civilization – to name a few have become targets to achieve in the service not of Life but of having more and of having it our way (for of course, my way is superior to yours). Words of control and power over ultimately lead us to violence and war, for some believe that rather than untying the knots, parts of the Rope should simply be destroyed. That is the way of our systems. From toxic control of ‘pests’ to the horrors of war, knots of separation run rampant in our world.
But destroying one knot breaks the Rope of Life, and WE have the power to untie these knots. And to reweave the Rope of Life. Mother Earth remembers this time before knots, and she is quaking, rumbling, burning, and flooding us to re-member. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear she speaks the forgotten story, inviting us to untie the embedded knots of separation before we destroy ourselves and more of the sacred Beings of her world/our world as She lives on in the infinity of Life – restoring, regenerating, re-creating the harmony that is Her Nature. Nature that is ours as well, if we dare to choose Life’s path and to look beyond how life seems to be in our knotted world, to untie the knots that bind us to that world and weave a new Rope of Life.
Can we dare to imagine a world beyond our current defining of these knotty words? Can we recast them in the sacred light of connection? Can we dare to imagine what is possible beyond ‘civilization’ and our quite questionable record of civility? Can we dare to imagine a world beyond fences and borders where we are citizens of Mother Earth?
Are we willing to choose that path? Am I?
Ancient Beings - What Wisdom Do YOU Carry?