2002 Fall

water is love, yes, water is love
it carries the content of life
taste is only possible in the presence of water
taste love flowing through you
it carries you away with the tide

water is love, oh yes, water is love
listen to her song--

"i flow in you...
i glide and slither through your furry forests and sink down into your flesh
only to pool in secret subterranean pockets--
touching the core of your innermost desire
dark, hot, moisture seething up to surface in sacred springs of delight
i tickle the toes of nymphs and toads alike
let me bathe you in my warm wetness and bubble up against your skin
drink me into your soul and let me nourish your seeds
cry me a river of salty tears and let me gush from your well"

Do you ever feel as if you just want to go home? Sometimes in the midst of everyday drudgery and the storms created in my mind, I find myself longing for home. "I just wanna go home," I say in a three-year-old voice. It can happen no matter where a person is, even while home. We want to feel protected, nurtured, and relaxed. Perhaps we long for the introspective and undistracted fetal position we peacefully maintained in the womb. Or maybe it's more than what we have experienced on Earth. Maybe we long for that somewhere out there in the cosmos from which we came and/or to which we are going. We want the ultimate in comfort and ease. We want to be sheltered.

Despite the far-out path we may be on, right now we are having an Earthly experience. The Earth is our source of food, clothing, delight, pain, and shelter. No matter what you eat or what you live in or what you wear, no matter where it is grown or processed, and no matter how much humans may disguise or molest its original ingredients, it came from the Earth. We once thrived from our connection to our mothers through the umbilicus. Now we completely derive our sustenance from the Earth. There is an obvious but often ignored cord from us to Mother Earth. Building with earth reinforces our life on and relationship to this planet.

From the rocker on the front porch of my little cabin nestled in the trees, I see the flag of the world as viewed from far above the planet, and I am reminded of Jesse Wolf Hardin's article on ecopsychology in the Summer issue of Talking Leaves, in which he encourages "zooming in on a particular section...get[ting] down on our hands and knees...the exact place where our bodies touch the giving body of the Earth." I think about the symbolism of this flag for Lost Valley Educational Center as a community, its vision of coming together with the whole of the earth, in unity with spirit--and I am pulled back to the microcosm of reality in which this vision is being created: Myriad natural grasses bend in the breeze in a sunlit, lazy meadow. The grandfather evergreens and oaks tower overhead, providing a never-ending source of comforting wisdom. Westerly winds comb in from the surrounding hillsides, permeating acres of new forest growth to join the downstream motion of Anthony Creek, which flows gently through the northern portion of the land.

Jesse Wolf Hardin points out the importance of the experiences we have through the sacred presence of a place. Ecopsychologist Michael J. Cohen, in his book Reconnecting with Nature, describes these experiences as our natural 53 senses. He suggests that anything in nature, be it "a park, a back yard, an aquarium, or a potted plant," can help us reconnect with the inherent knowledge with which we came into this life. As a student of ecopsychology, I am finding that the more I open my conscious attention to that which is around me in nature, the more I see about myself. If I stay in the same place to focus that conscious attention, then that place becomes increasingly enmeshed within me, within my essence. Life at Lost Valley aids in both spending more time in nature and doing so in a particular place.

There's a place
Where tape recorders don't work
Cameras turn out blank film
Digital information is all zeros
Computers freeze and crash
Magic is afoot

This place eludes all efforts to capture it
Well-protected by spirits,
It's where everything real resides
It's why dreaming can't be photographed
And loving can't be quantified
And truth can only be seen in pale representations
once it leaves the immediacy of experience

It's where newborn babies see visions
Musicians hear songs
Old farmers hang out and share stories
It's where the conversations happen that shape one's life
And connections are affirmed that give it substance
It's off the radar screen of all established media
It's the mad dreaming that is wiser and more real by far
than anything that can be purchased in a store, on the street, or over the internet

Midway through college, a friend of mine said to himself, "If I surround myself with all the trappings of modern civilization, I am never going to find out what it's like to live as an indigenous person on this continent. If I structure my life around a house, a car, a computer, and material things--and if I indenture myself to a job or career in order to pay for them--I will never develop a more direct, basic relationship with the land. I don't want a house. I don't want a car. I don't want a computer. I don't want a "career." I'm not ready to start a family and add to the human population of this planet. I don't want to become part of the juggernaut, the system that is destroying natural ecosystems and human habitats and cultures all over the world. And I don't want to be distracted by all these twentieth-century things that are not ultimately what matter to me.

"I want to engage my senses with the natural world, not with artificial constructed environments and advanced technologies. I want the ability to be sheltered from a rainstorm, but I suspect that a small tent would do that for me just as well as a big house. And I want to hear the rain falling--I don't want to be insulated from it in a sterile cubicle. I don't want to trade in the sounds of nature for the hum of a refrigerator or the drone of a housemate's television set. I'd like my shelter to be modest, a barely noticeable part of the landscape--something that allows me to live closer to the world outside, not further away. And, for now, I don't want to be tied indefinitely to one shelter, in one location. I want to be able to move occasionally as I need to; I wouldn't want to stay in one place or one situation just because I 'owned' a shelter there. If I made decisions on that basis, my shelter would own me.