September 11, 2010

Remembering Mishka

Last weekend a spark ignited in my bodymind. I need to “speak my peace” more publicly. Now that is not a new decision. I’ve been making it and remaking it for at least the last twenty-five years. But this time it feels different. Not only did people, place, experience and written words all conspire to launch my voice, but I can broadcast with blogging.

Notice that I began this blog last winter. Fits and starts obviously. Now I’m committing to writing more regularly. Seems effortless at the moment.

What is the difference? As I wrote the date above, I realized with a start that it is 9/11 today. If ever there was motivator it is that shared cultural grief…our governmental response to that horror, horrified me. Narrow view, fear mongered, Americocentric, blah blah blah…

But it is the planet’s call for restoring the indigenous voice, the indigenous wisdom in ALL  people alive today that powers my passion to express.

Finding other risk-takers and wanting to join my voice with theirs, the imaginal cells in our urban, stewing-pot, northern-hemispheric culture, pull my pen to paper, my fingers to the keyboard.

It’s time to remember, or re-remember since we all used to know this, the planet is alive and our lives depend on her. We are embodied in an eairth, in it, not on it. We literally live on the bottom of an ocean of air, an air ocean bound to our planet in partnership with its watery twin. Imagine how carrying that truth in our bones would change our psychology.

As a creative person and mentor, I know unseen influences guide my behavior. All my decisions, feelings, expressions depend on the vastness guiding my body’s intelligence and imagination. I appreciate that my skin’s envelope is unsealed and love finding this affirming essay by Per Espen Stoknes’ “ Eairth’s Imagination: Rooting the Expressive Arts in the Elemental Creativity of the Biosphere.”

He writes: “. . .our brain, our whole bodies – from bones to balls- are wholly and fully inside the imagination of the world…No doubt that the brain – and my whole body – is highly active while participating in the image. But it is not alone in constructing it…We-literally- breathe the imagination. Images arise out of – not thin – but thick, pregnant air!…indeed, we are all swimming in a thick sea of images, continuously brought forth by the endless creativity of the air itself.”

Though I know written words, our abstract English alphabet especially, contribute to our modern disdain for more than human speech, written words also connect us, as in this very blog.

Reread Stoknes’ paragraph above and let it work its magic around your psyche. Come back soon to meet Mishka and see how his story illustrates this notion of reality.