(friends of the light …)
In his Mountains and Waters Discourse (Sansui Kyo), Dogen says: ‘Mountains and waters right now are the actualisation of the ancient way. Each, abiding in its phenomenal expression, realises completeness’. At the hour of the Rat on the eighteenth day of the tenth month in the first year of Ninji (1240), he taught to the assembly at Kannondori Kosho Horin Monastery as follows: ‘There are mountains hidden in treasures. There are mountains hidden in swamps. There are mountains hidden in the sky. There are mountains hidden in mountains. There are mountains hidden in hiddenness. This is complete understanding. An ancient Buddha said, “Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.”’
So it is, ever was, ever will be. In the essay, self-naughting, I describe my seven years a-wander in the wilderness of the Malakut. Halfway through this time Dogen’s mountains showed up, the dwelling place of his great sages: ‘However many great sages and wise men we suppose have assembled in the mountains, ever since they entered the mountains no one has met a single one of them. There is only the actualisation of the life of the mountains.’
He recounts how the mountains become their own chambers, their selfsame body and mind; and indeed I have experienced this vividly and directly in my own process of becoming (as described in this essay). ‘Twas not long, however, till Dogen’s waters also decided to make an oracular appearance as recounted in the following journal entry: "Lucid, powerful, very exciting. F and I were to make a hike to a thermal spring. There were two ways of getting there, from below or from above. I thought a map would be useful as he seemed unsure of the route … suddenly I was in a shaft or well, a vertical tunnel. I had come here to find the map to the actual place where I was. In my mind I kept calling it Acqua Termale (AT); no idea why, but that’s the name which presented constantly in my thoughts. I went down the shaft – very narrow, maybe only a metre and a half wide, square in shape, warmly lit. I was alone and once hit bottom, walked along a tunnel to a room (coincidentally no larger than a ten-foot-square hut) where I knew the map was kept.
"It was pinned to the wall behind a sheaf of glass but it seemed I could ‘buy’ one here too to take home. In fact, on my way to the room I passed other maps documenting different excursions to alternate locations, all plastered to walls, but I kept going to the AT map room. I looked at the map closely and yes, thought F would appreciate having a copy to help our journey, the AT clearly marked with a little hut symbol (like in regular hiking maps). As a thermal spring, it linked the elements of fire and water together within the belly of the mineral-rich earth – ‘source’ as well as place of healing. Interestingly, whilst in shaft, tunnel and room, it was wet like in a mine, the deep silence I experienced in this scape backdropped by the constant sound of running water, as if from the AT itself, that seepage from the spring made physical connection through the walls. But I still needed the map – I was close, but not in direct contact … yet. I saw two ways of getting here – from a village ‘above’ or one ‘below’. In geological-type imagery, with different bands of rock depicted, I understood the latter was built in a region that was ‘barren’ (Malakut ‘words formed’) and not connected to the waters of the AT. You could get here, but not experience what the waters offered as a block of impenetrable rock was in-between.
"As I surfaced from the space, Mr1300BC arrived with the message I needed to take back to F: One Life, he said, repeating it over and over. It fit with his message of the previous night (Life and Death share the same Breath), now expanded with the imagery that there was One Place where everything is connected, for which there is only One Name. In the moment, my realisation was immediate: The AT the source of the Sacred Waters of all Life. To have the opportunity to make the excursion, and to be gifted the map to its exact location? Extraordinary good fortune! Afterwards, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, open and connectable in all dimensions and directions, came up several times in fragmentary follow-ups to help me explain this to ‘me’, such that in/on a plane of consistency, the rhizome can change state between dimensions without losing the connection to itself, and that the number of dimensions or multiplicities emanating on said plane is endless, infinite – thus One Life or One Name has an infinity of names/lives shooting off from it (Universe-high and just as wide!) without losing or severing connection to its source, the AT ... I think ‘me’ got it in the end ..."
I have stacks, absolutely stacks of such journal records of Malakut wanders which are written-into-existence on a plane of intimate exteriority. Like storage tubers in a perpetually extending rhizome of interconnectable thought, each a potential contributor to the unveiling of personal myth, they sit and watch from their discrete (and discreet!) places of knowing – patiently (and sometimes not-so) waiting till I eventually intuit their inherent meaning. So do the stacks remain as seemingly random research piles until such time as further ventures into becoming landscapes (which resonate similarly) arise or other synchronistic events in material space-time (such as scholarly reading, dog-walking or even doing the ironing) begin the slow process of unveiling psychoid unity to itself from the fecund swamp of soul. Suffice it to say that I have learned, through all my long years a-wander in the wilderness, that even if, on first reckoning, the constellation of landscapes and encounters appear not to be relevant, linked or revelatory, over time ‘tis guaranteed they shall gradually disclose their interconnectivity – with each other, with me – to the full light of surface cognition. At which time the stacks reassemble themselves (like Deleuze and Guattari’s armies of ants) into plateaus ripe for interrogation and problematising, including eventual manifestation in the ‘physical’ material world (if I am fortunate!) according to a process kickstarted by the desire to create, to know.
All of which is a longwinded way of saying that the AT had made itself known to me, but it would need time and gestation before I could make myself known to it. At some level though I ‘knew’ this sacred source to be related (in ways as yet undisclosed) to the high wild landscape I call home in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, a valley where I meet Dogen’s mountains ‘walking’ on their own terms, having intimately heard der Ruf der Berge anchored in this space: ‘People outside the mountains do not realise or understand the mountains walking,’ he says. All mountains are eastern mountains, ‘and eastern mountains master travelling on water. Accordingly, these activities are a mountain’s practice … There is walking, there is flowing, and there is a moment when a mountain gives birth to a mountains child.’ Thus does he describe the Ancestors’ path of understanding.
In such spirit, Dogen asks that we also study the moment when water sees water, just as I had previously studied the moment when mountain realises mountain: ‘Water’s freedom depends only on water … But water as earth, water, fire, wind, and space realises itself.’ I thought: Mountain cradles water, water flows through mountain, and out into the world. Dogen says: ‘The path of water runs upward and downward and in all directions … Water is the true suchness of water. Water is water’s complete virtue.’ I thought:
All the way from source to sea, from
source to sea to source … Water –
sacred – through your eyes I see …
Self – font of being, font of flowing,
font of blessing, interconnection;
watersheds of passionate expression,
Universe-high and just as wide …
Incubating insights
I continued my engagement with the generative heart of mountain sentience, but never forgot the AT’s crystalline existence. And one day, a gestative nine months hence, all causes and conditions ripened to enact the following, as documented in my journal: "A very special journey last night to a landscape called The Tree of Infinite Knowing. An extraordinarily vast high wild space, glacier-smoothed, but not a tree in sight. Yet this its name. I understood there had once been an actual tree, a majestic specimen with widespread branches, but it had long since ‘died’ or (to put it a better way) changed form, metamorphosing to infuse the landscape with its (perennial) wisdom. I saw this transpire, its melting and merging, as if over an incredible length of time, aeons. By the time of my visit, it had fully decomposed, composted, had completed its cycle to fruit the earth with ‘infinite knowing’. Hence the entire space, everything, was now The Tree, not simply the tree itself. I glided about, energised and blessed to be granted this glimpse, but also intrigued to discover as much as I could about the space. Knowing that The Tree infused everything, I was amazed to find that parts of the landscape were like a high moor, the watertable very close to the surface in parts; grassy areas were spongy and damp underfoot. At one point I looked down a small crevasse, like a crack in the earth, far from deep but wide enough to be noticeable, and saw that the rocks therein were wet and glistening as if fed by an underground spring. I had a sudden tug of understanding that this was the site of the Acqua Termale, where it reached the ‘mantle’, here at The Tree of Infinite Knowing."
Later in the same space I had the unexpected good fortune to meet The Tree’s guardian. A time arrived during my explorations when the resonant hum, signature accompaniment to Malakut encounters, suddenly rose in pitch to become a tinkling bell ‘announcing’ another presence. A figure appeared from behind a boulder and took something I value into the ‘dark’ beyond. I felt a surge of vibrational energy and words formed: GreenMan. Given all the images in circulation of this being, it was quite a surprise that he constellated in my imaginal world as a kind of contemporary wood sprite – tall young adult male, curly blonde hair, cheeky grin, baggy trousers, hippy-style green shirt daubed with swirls of yellow. Oh, and no shoes. Yet although he had ‘stolen’ something of mine, I intuited it to be a game and, exhilarated by the touch of his vibration, felt no apprehension entering the dark and rugby-tackling him to retrieve said ‘treasure’. Instantly he disappeared and I understood our game simply represented a cue to describe his task – to collect ‘knowing’ to add to The Tree’s wisdom chalice, itself a dynamic living energy in constant communion with the sacred source as well as the worldly production of the ‘new’.
Throughout, I had a feeling I knew this place, although visiting for the first time. The landscape constellated as the ‘far hills’ I saw from my place at The Wall. A locale of longer-than Malakut task given me by Mr1300BC, this wall divided the entire landscape in two. As I hovered above, when first assigned duties here, I saw it stretched, unbroken, far toward a distant glacier-smoothed high wild mountain scape; now I knew this scape to be The Tree.
To describe the wall, however – it was wood-panelled and tall. My practice, in this designated ‘section’, was to plane it away, cut through, and reunite the two sides of the landscape as one whole. To perform the job I was given an old-fashioned woodworking tool, something ne’er before used by these writerly hands (human or subtle!). Of course my first attempts were pathetic, embarrassingly so – I cut deep into the wood, gouged about, not a shred of ply did I render uniform or smooth. I understood I needed to improve my skills in the first instance but, just as importantly, not to suddenly break through (i.e. no chopping through with an axe or whatever). My progress had to be steady, faithful, gradual; slowly thinning the density between the two was required to restore the landscape to an enduring expression of holism. Message clear from the start, The Wall consistently informed my approach; regardless of task assigned or collaborator met (inner and/or outer), all is underlain by a desire to connect inner and outer scapes as a single plane of consistency, to live a one-life-of-the-one-world reality here-now, ever-on. Nevertheless, to intuit that the single holism of The Tree (fed by the Acqua Termale) could be supported by my work at The Wall, that its scape was the envisioned horizon of my task, was energising. The storage tuber was growing …
Another period of gestation followed, till Mr1300BC returned with a real gem, symbolically titled (like everything else in my Huxleyian mode’s universe), The Way of the Knight: "Firstly he reminded that all that had gone before were prior stages to my need to now go through (what he called) the ‘volcano mountain’, his teaching therefore part of a coherent string of instruction (in his mind at least!). It described a quest, replete with ballad (tune, text) of a knight’s adventures, and was delivered in a series of child-like sketches of the stages involved, whereby the knight gradually drew closer to a line of mountains where it seemed the ‘grail’ (also called ‘light’ or ‘source’ at different junctures) would be found. The final sketch communicated that the next (and last) stage of the quest would take the knight ‘very far’, beyond; yet no drawing followed to suggest whereto or what, only that it would be the home of said grail. It was offered to the student (or squire) as a riddle: Do you know where that possibly could be? before flipping all the way back through the sketches to the beginning, to the first image of the questing knight himself. Here the ‘grail’ had been housed all along in his heart – the spark of love that is each’s inheritance manifesting now as a glowing ball of light. Recognising this, becoming conscious of his ‘self-light’, enacted its expansion; and it radiated out to become all-inclusive of his form, flooding him with (his own) life energy. The lesson was that only by undertaking the full quest (there and back again to core self) could he ‘release’ the grail from the cave of his heart, for it to explode into ‘viable’ life. Hmmm …"
When meditating on what I had been shown in the parable, I found myself, briefly, in an inner chamber. Here I stood within the walls of a tall earthern structure of rough brickwork and the occasional square of colour, domed like an egg, its floor dirt or stone-flagged. I understood it to be a chamber constellating within the so-called ‘volcano mountain’; fully rendered and reinforced, it reminded me of a vertical kiln, the brickwork like that of a cement kiln I had once stood inside upon decommissioning – cracked, heated, smoke-stained were its refractory bricks but always up to the fiery task at hand. Herein, the resonant hum was almost boomingly loud, underpinning and overlaying all (absence of) sound; in the space of meditation, I was drawn to deepen connection to the ‘kiln room’ and found myself instantly gone – into the ‘Full Dark’, so-named because it is impossible to describe.
Again a period of gestation. Till a Malakut scape presented which seemed to pull all threads in the telling together, and out of which I had a sudden insight as to the specificity of my task: "The space constellated like our ‘home’ village in the Italian south, but as if in a time before time, a place before now. We had planned a trek to an alpine hut in the high wild which offered risotto for hungry hikers – the problem of poor patronage in such a remote region (a forgotten valley on the edge of time) meant we were keen to support local enterprise, to keep ‘life’ in the valley. I saw the hut from two perspectives – one by arriving instantly (dog in tow), the other by trekking in on foot (children in tow). At the hut we met around a communal table with others in the context of ‘work’. One described to me an assignment about which he was very excited; project manager on behalf of a ‘great master’, it centred on accessibility to a place called Mandalay (M). At this, he showed me a very fine pen-and-ink sketch headed by some lines of ancient script. Beneath the text was a picture of a cave on the shores of a small alpine lake fronted by a couple of Buddhist-style monks. An incredibly beautiful drawing, the perspective was from the far side of the lake looking across to the cave beyond.
"He then asked me about my own journey to M with the children which, it seems, had already taken place but in describing it, I trekked it again. I told him it took four hours from the trailhead (where we parked the car) to reach the alpine hut; to reach M itself, however, meant climbing further – the hut, therefore, a good staging post on the journey. We needed to carry everything with us to make our ‘risotto’ as well as anything else needed for overnighting in the space. I saw grassy meadows, forests, a smoothed area like an alpine pass. But once in the vicinity of the lake high above, the landscape grew more rocky, granite-outcropped, sparsely vegetated. Safely arrived, we had entered the cave – it constituted a permanent monastery for the monks, yet visitors always welcome. It felt very special, holy, to be invited there. We wandered a network of tunnels (flaming torch-lit); each now and then these widened into chambers for communal meeting or to reveal small niche shrines. The monks wore deep red robes; their heads were shaved. The silence was most profound; I saw glistening wetness on the tunnel walls, seepage from the source; the lake’s waters rose from somewhere in this inner space although I did not see whence it outflowed myself.
"Outside, a woman handed me a postcard as a memento of our visit – it showed a map, designed like a medieval itinerary, what de Certeau describes as ‘performative indications … a memorandum prescribing action’. I became excited, remembering how I had perused similar examples for my dissertation on pilgrimage. The postcard depicted a long trail from the lowlands which led into the heart of the Alps, where the cave would be found, and included a drawing of a small figure walking the path. The woman pointed to the figure and said: To this one is known the way in and the way out. In the moment I understood that walking to M not enough; one must re-trace the route out; the whole thread was the journey, a cycle needing completion before its import known and embedded in the soil of self. The postcard therefore symbolised what other seekers could discover if they followed the example of ‘this one’."
Returned from the space I wondered at the ‘naming’ of this sanctified space – was the phonetic nearness of M to mandala a coincidence? In research I discovered the name is the stuff of legend, as the site of a ‘great civilisation’, somewhere the Buddha supposedly visited. But were these red herrings or simply ways to alert me to the importance of what I had been shown? Regardless, another time I thought: Hmmm … But this ‘hmmm’ was backed by the thought that the time had arrived to assemble all puzzle pieces into a single plateau ...
What's in a name?
To be frank, it is difficult to know when the exact moment of conscious awareness of task arises in one’s cognition, when the uplift of soul-knowing pure decides to muscle its way out and through, past all other thoughts and tasks (ironing and ego-conditioning inclusive) to say: I am and: This is. To stand stubborn as robust plateau or desert-father’d mesa, perusing the surrounding landscape from the solidity of its knowing ‘above’, to fold intractable arms, fix self with penetrating stare, and finally say: You must.
Emerson holds that the soul already contains in itself the event, for the event is simply the actualisation of its thought. At some level, therefore, this ‘event’ presented itself and ‘I’ agreed to steward its ‘naming’ into existence. I decided I needed to discover the source of our waters, my homecome river flowing to the sea. Whatever its relationship to the universal Acqua Termale, font of the primal Ground of Being, it personalised such context to and for me with its (self-)naming. The particularity of this constellation as a Malakut landscape speaking to the physical high wild sentience I embrace as mirror of joyous self, seemed to imply the opportunity to actualise – in much the same way (I believe) as Ibn Arabi’s Creative Prayer between ‘Abd and Rabb – a divine marriage, one fundamentally based on the dialectic of love.
To trek its path in material time and space, sing up country each step of its glorious way, would therefore complete a circle of knowing, even if I had no idea what said ‘knowing’ would reveal. It would be a voyage of discovery in the spirit of all explorers past present and future sailing waters unknown – courage, trust, and love their (and my) only requisite foundation stones. ‘The secret of divinity is yourself,’ wrote the 9th century Sufi master Sahl Tostari whom Henri Corbin exuberantly quotes; a fact to which I append Thich Nhat Hanh’s perennial wisdom: ‘Drinking a cup of tea, the seeming distinction between the one who drinks and the tea being drunk evaporates. Drinking a cup of tea becomes a direct and wondrous experience in which the distinction between subject and object no longer exists’. Shakespeare could quite happily tag along on this mystic meander – a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So too Hesse’s Klingsor …
Hence, just as drinking a cup of tea or sharing breath with a smelly rose cannot be discounted as anything less than sacred ritual sensately engaged, the psychoid unity inherent in replicating an already existent Malakut journey in the material should not be underestimated for its own sake. The very living of life is satori after all. Time and again I have found that inner landscapes have their counterpart in the outer world of the senses, and that it is only when I make a commitment to manifesting some subtle learning in physical space that the final cathartic ‘a-ha’ resounds in the chamber of my heart. Readying me for the actualisation of this particular Emersonian event, perhaps, had been the long (physical) hours spent in reflection of our local creek before (figuratively) engaging its white-knuckled plunge hundreds of metres to gorge below, there to join the Isorno’s frothing foaming bruising bouncing passage onward, out to engage the (wider) world. Equally I had been overjoyed to learn the specific geography of this genius loci, how our valley chose to make pilgrimage to the Venetian Lagoon before spilling into the basin of Adriatic, there to merge and flow with all (Seven Seas), before (re-)entering a cycle on endless repeat. So too did I marvel at the synchronicity of saint honoured by our village church one-and-the-same with La Serenissima’s holy patron.
Purely (literally) and simply (substantively), water defines this precipitously contoured shed as compellingly and dramatically as the majestic mountain scape overlighting her whole of the whole. There was a reason I desired, beyond measure, to write an epic love song to this Beatrice of true-natured high wild; desire that could be summed up in two extraordinarily breathtaking and ordinary (‘nothing special’) elemental phenomena – mountain and river, otherwise known as stone and water – uniting in a singular satori’d event: ‘In Song China there was a man who called himself Layman Dongpo … A literary genius, he studied the way of dragons and elephants in the ocean of awakening. He descended deep chasms and soared freely through clouds. One night when Dongpo visited Mount Lu he was enlightened upon hearing the sound of the valley stream. He composed the following verse for his master:
Valley sounds are the long broad tongue.
Mountain colours are no other than the unconditioned body.
Eighty-four thousand verses are heard throughout the night.
What can I say about this at a future time?’
In giving this dharma talk – appropriately titled Valley Sounds, Mountain Colours and delivered the same year as his Mountains and Rivers Sutra – Dogen says: ‘You may regret that mountains and waters conceal sounds and colours, but you may rejoice as well that the moment of enlightenment emerges through mountains and waters.’ In asking his students to open their minds to the possibility of hidden treasure, he asks: ‘Who can fathom this water? Is it a bucketful or does it fill whole oceans? In the end was it Dongpo who was awakened or the mountains and waters that were awakened? … Once a monk asked: How do you turn mountains, rivers, and the great earth into the self? The master said: How do you turn the self into mountains, rivers, and the great earth?’ Indeed. Here I sit on a lowly novice cushion set before the great master’s knee, his robe cascading to the floor like a russet waterfall caught in the misted light of a late autumn’s day; and, bounded by shadowed mountain ridges fore and aft, feign to hear myself murmur in reply: ‘Tis one and the same in the end for the one life we all share, is it not?
To wit: The venerable Dogen’s lesson and line of rhetorical questioning had reminded me of an encounter, in the full material light of day, that I had had with a roe deer buck in the forest years before. Reciprocal recognition pure, the Sacred had spoken through this gentle sinewed creature. As we stared into each other’s souls long, sharing space, sharing breath, words formed: Through your eyes I see myself. Each of us, in seeing the other, had become the other, become the true self. One. A moment for which a well-annotated hadith provides seamless translation, so too the immanent beauty of knowing that everywhere I turn is the face of God, I recited: I was a hidden treasure and longed to be known, so created the world that I might be known.
Its fundamental meaning is that only through our witness can the hidden (God) be revealed; only through the loving ‘eye’ of our heart can witness (of and for Him) be effected. The point being that the deer embraced such perception as a natural matter-of-course, perception which, in its innocence and purity of expression, it had gifted to me … Dogen’s mountains, rivers, great earth, me. My light their light, their light mine – all one and the same. One Life, I remembered, for which there is only One Name (yet giving rise to an infinity of same). My contemplations had returned me to the Acqua Termale. I devised a plan to gift ‘my light’ to the waters of our river, at its source; I would physically add my light to its shed, and let our shared river of ‘liquid light’ do what it will to effect blessings throughout the world, all the way from source to sea, from source to sea to source.
The moment when water sees water, says Dogen, manifests complete understanding: ‘You should go forward and backward and leap beyond the vital path where other fathoms other,’ he counsels. The bard yearned to get busy, the desire to create flooding mythopoiesic veins:
Dear Isorno flood, fedele d’amore,
entrusted grail. Through your eyes
I see true Self: water (acqua),
fire (termale) – my light your
light, your light mine. Behold:
Love’s light, everlasting flame! –
and our shared practice
a molten stream of same ...
Working the sounds and colours of light
The reader may wonder about the expressions ‘my light’ and ‘liquid light’ – to which I refer back to The Wall and The Way of the Knight. Concurrent with my musings about the Isorno’s watershed, I had developed practices based on the opportunity to gift one’s excess (if that’s the right word) self-light of love to the world. This centred on my observation of how the ball of light, emanating from the spark of love at the core of each expression of sentience, densifies as a result of its joyous desire to participate in the one-life-of-the-one-world.
We all do this unconsciously when we express our love for someone or thing, so too in uplifting a memory of same. That ‘warm glow’ radiates out and touches all proximate beings. Proclus’ heliotrope is an example, equally a child’s wide-eyed and open-mouthed wonder at discovering another facet of the beauty of the world for the first time. Yet to consciously harness this elemental fact of our being works to actualise the flow of our light into the world in more concentrated and sweeping form. Think of a lighthouse beacon emanating from our aptly-named solar plexus – a vertical (transcendent) structure spreading light out and across a horizontal (immanent) landscape, it effects outreach to all others ‘touched’ by its light. While standing in self-sovereignty as its own entity, at the same time it shares the primal purpose of its existence with all sentience as an act of solidarity, thus demonstrating the interconnectivity of being on a singular plane of consistency via a simultaneous horizontal and vertical execution of its loving flow of light.
As water sees water, as mountain realises mountain, so does light mirror light – through ‘its’ eyes we ‘see’ our self. My practice of mirroring joy is such a process of light gifted to light, its intent to fill/infill/backfill the subtle reservoirs of Gaia’s peace-sinks in the hope that bolstering these naturally-occurring sequestrations supports her continued unfoldment and evolution of consciousness in resonant harmony with the cosmos.
Extending this line of thought, I had an inkling that the way elementals constellate and coalesce in the physical plane contributed to such process – implicated was a balance between geology and spirit, the necessity to ensure our physical engagement with the Earth reflected our spiritual aspirations and vice versa. I grafted a teaching by Mr1300BC (that: Love in itself is Fire) onto Eastern philosophy (that: All Matter arises from Aether, i.e. how the unmanifest becomes manifest), and from some place in the back of my head, the words of Teilhard de Chardin (TdC) were fed into the alchemical mix – viz.: Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness, for God, the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Together these wisdom texts traversed the usual rhizomatic path in my mind till reaching a point where I (literally) saw Love in its molten form begin to circulate within my body from the ‘ball of light’ at its core. I saw how its passage of becoming and gradual densification was actualised through the chakra-‘tunnels’ of my ‘volcano mountain’ until my whole form became a font of liquid light – only thereafter, I realised, could any (laval) flow of TdC’s ‘energies of love’ into the world be envisaged from this ‘self-reservoir’. I understood that working my chi would be integral to the practice. Central to the equation, however, was the conscious ‘holding’ of divine Presence within. We each inherit the spark of love as a matter-of-course when we incarnate in the world, but unless we consciously honour and hold this divinity, acknowledging our incarnation as a unique and sacred expression of such divinity, we cannot release it back into the world with any clarity. The inner foundation must be sound before any outer practice commenced. Likewise are we challenged to honour and hold the divinity inherent in the elementals of our sacred sentient Earth for the practice of flow to ‘flow’.
The conscious sensing of Presence, of inner and outer divinity mirrored, begins the process; the ball of light thus ‘grows’ and densifies with our love. As a simple true-natured act, therefore, it cannot help but eventually expand beyond the boundaries of skin as joy shared with the world. Filling our self-reservoir seamlessly segues to gifting light to Gaia’s reservoir when we simultaneously mirror our joy of the world and the world’s joy of itself. Through your eyes I see myself: As simple as in-breath, out-breath, the practice ebbs and flows like waves on a sun-sparkled sea. No need of visualisation, or imagination; ‘tis real, physical, embodied – embedded in the soil of the sanctity of our existence, the practice of flowing light is as sensate an experience as the circulation of oxygen through an (inner) blood stream or (outer) river system.
Follow the leylines, Mr1300BC had instructed long years past, an insight extended to mean the leylines of self, not simply the ones inscribed within landscape. Thus did I see these inner lines ‘glow’, the chi of my own circuitry flowing – liquid light I could now gift, as loving mergence, into the Isorno’s, its watershed an (existent material) channel, a leyline in its own right, for sending subtle energies forth, out into the world. Replicating the Malakut journey I had made to Mandalay in material space and time was integral to task. In Aboriginal-speak, for whatever reason yet to unfold, it constituted my personal ‘stretch’ of Ancestral song, a stewardship of territory gifted into my care in, for, by and to Love (a prepositional party if ever there was one!). The connection between self and land, between spirit and geology, needed to be (re-)sung into physical existence for the living lines of energy and consciousness within the planet to be (re-)woken at this place, to flow on and out to the All:
‘In Aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land … if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die,’ writes Bruce Chatwin. I meditated on this wisdom in company of an aethereal prophecy I had once ‘heard’. Uplifted from the very heart of Gaia’s soul-self, I saw her torn, wrenched from her planetary home by humanity’s continued desecration of her mantle, by our unabated disrespect for elemental cohesion and energetic balance in our approach, as we (in Bateson’s rhetoric) ‘arrogate all mind’ to ourselves … seeing ‘the world around as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration.’ At this point the voice had spoken its wisdom: When the Spirit is once again at One with the Third … Gaian holism would be ripe for manifestation. I understood that my work – here, now – in support of actualising the profundity of this statement would involve re-singing the connection into being between her bruised and battered spirit and her (equally) exploited Earth. To heal, the World Soul desired nothing more than to re-unite in divine marriage with the sanctity of her ‘third rock from the sun’, the material fact of our beautiful world.
To sing up country, I saw my task as weaving ‘light’ threads between spirit and geology (vertically) and between material sentience and itself (horizontally) – yet the depth and breadth of engagement could only truly support the realisation of Gaian holism if my spiritual practice was enacted physically and my physical practice likewise spiritually; I literally needed to walk in the footsteps of the Ancestors across the land, to leave my trail of ‘song’ as a gift permanently inscribed in Gaia’s skin … Indeed, I felt called to replicate what I had learnt in the Malakut in the material world, to effect psychoid unity equally within self and planet, microcosm macrocosm and all in between, twinning my soul’s purpose with the world’s. Nevertheless, I worked to further understanding, and harness TdC’s ‘energy’ within the seclusion of retreat over years of evolving practice before considering any outreach to the specificities of valley sounds and mountain colours in our high wild watershed. Once prepping complete, however, I felt ready to outreach my (liquid) gift of light, of love, to the source, confident it would be accepted in the spirit of its offering – and decided to vest a blessing stone with the task to be the container for this gift in physical space and time.
The reasoning? It has long been known that objects infused, suffused with sanctity, provide energetic transport for same. Icons provide a classic example in the Western lexicon – The Taste of Translation documents this fact in mythical voice. The tangibility of an object works to densify the immaterial, to bring it into our sense-making orbit. In an act of loving creation, any ‘thing’ has the ability to function similarly, to externalise sacred purpose; Mr1300BC described it to me in very simple language once, long ago: We all breathe life into what we love. And so it is. Just as we consciously ‘hold’ divine Presence within the very fact of our inner being, we may vest the same ‘holding’ function in an outer physical symbol. Purpose therefore twinned between self and symbol, the object (in Italo Calvino’s words) becomes the ‘real protagonist of the story … charged with a special force … like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships’. And, when said protagonist is tossed into a small alpine lake which is the spring of the Isorno’s entry to outer world? ‘Tis a network of ‘invisible’ relationships which exponentially grows. Liberally diffused into the shed, liquid light is free to flow through a world without end. Methinks message in a bottle by any other name would function just the same …
I may have worked through the proposition intellectually, and embedded a spiritual practice in my life involving the flow of liquid light experientially, but we still had to find the actual source of our river. Enter a (physical) map courtesy of one dear friend, a geographically-minded reading of same by another, and a joyous troupe of Gaian worldworkers known as the Amici della Montagna (a sum history of whom, describing our entry into their subtle (and not-so-subtle) orbit recounted in this essay). Following these treasured Amici-infused encounters, we were keen to continue trekking the high wild headwatered country within their stewardship across the border where the (Swiss) valley road ends; however without a decent map, had never ventured much farther than Bagni di Craveggia, the ruin of a thermal baths in use since the medieval until a pair of avalanches thundered down the slopes in the mid-20th century to halt the flow of its healing waters (in the minds of potential patrons, at least).
Now the gift of a detailed Club Alpino Italiano map would ensure we knew where we were going throughout the watershed upstream of this locale; meanwhile, tracing an intelligent finger along all lines of contoured flight from the main river valley eventually located the small alpine lake into which pooled the water from our sacred mountains’ heart before its (epic) journey out to join seven (and more) salty seas. These events set in train a desire to begin walking the paths consciously, to sing up country and Hello the House to all sentience as a way to make myself (and future intent) known in ‘new’ territory, a becoming landscape with which I was clearly already acquainted in the Malakut but had to learn to read in the material.
Here an example of one such outing: "Easter Sunday; Amici hike day and the whole way up and back my mantra was: Amici, Amici, Amici della Montagna – thank you for your work and your blessing of the paths! Such was my outreach to both partners in the alliance between humanity and faerie we are blessed to call friends on either side of the veil. I left a small white stone that has been by my bed-head these past years, fresh (still, I hope) with the energy of the mountains coupled with Marianna’s (and my) peaceful presence as well as D’s energy of ‘gifting’ in the first instance. I left it on a ‘standing stone’ near a small grove of Rottanne growing in the soft river sand of the valley. I spoke with them, asked for their intercession on my behalf. Then later at the Amici hut, I realised my spontaneous suggestion of leaving some Easter Eggs above the lintel for the next time they’re in residence with brushcutters and accordions likewise represented an offering of food to subtle companions of the way. It made sense; ‘twas a special human occasion we delighted in sharing after all ..."
Malakut wanders kept apace with these outer hikes during following months. In one, our family trekked up a narrow path, as if a side-valley, in single file, toward a place I didn’t recognise. Yet it seems we were heading to our new ‘home’, for along the way we were overtaken three times by different Amici who were ‘home-owners’ in the region. Each time they stopped to introduce themselves and welcome us to the ‘upper end of the valley’. As a valley narrows, it leads toward the source; this much I knew. But that it also represented home? That by undertaking this venture we would be symbolically walking home?
The next Malakut adventure confirmed as much: "Extraordinarily exhilarating lucid encounter … with a wolf. Again we were hiking the back of the valley (Amici territory) in single file – me, D, then F with dog – when a wolf suddenly appeared on the path directly in front of me. Intriguingly we communicated completely in thought after I had completed a ritual toward which I was surface-resistant but deep-knew to be ‘natural’ – I had to kneel before her, bow down to her as ‘keeper’ or spirit-guardian of this wild place. Hence my hesitancy; I thought this could go horribly wrong if I ended up getting mauled! Nevertheless I knelt down, we literally saw eye-to-eye as the ritual was conducted using the third eye (forehead-to-forehead) to enable our twinned communication thereafter.
"I called to D to come and greet her likewise but he (understandably) thought this was too ‘way out’ and weird to engage. I said: It’s OK, she’s a mother (i.e. kind and gentle with children). He asked: How do you know? But I couldn’t explain it – it was the same sort of knowing as intuiting her as a female presence, which, after effecting our link, I saw to include motherhood, like me. The interesting thing is that even though I bowed before her in this, her territory, once the ritual was complete, I understood us to be equals. We were both mothers, both keepers – guardians of our respective ‘homes’. A very natural knowing but also exhilarating after I’d left the space. I had met a true sister in spirit. Thanks be!
"Now, because D wouldn’t come forward, she moved past me on the path to greet him. No need for ritual (I had completed that for our whole group, it seems) so he patted her normally. As preface to this meeting, I had ‘mentally’ introduced D as my child and I felt her treat him as lovingly as she did her own children. Then she looked past D to where F was reining in Pabey who was carrying on with his usual madcap barking routine (intriguingly he did not growl at any perceived menace). She asked me who they were. I mentally introduced F, and with P said: It’s OK, he’s harmless. In thought-image, I saw her sigh of resignation, that he was like the aberrant child you ignore until he gives up through boredom. We shared a smile of parental recognition before she leapt away, off the path, back into the undergrowth, with a last message: You are welcome here ..."
Valley sounds, mountain colours – one day we sat by the river, near where WolfMother had welcomed us to her domain, to picnic, and I laughed to watch three boys attempt to dam an unstoppable flow. The Isorno’s liquid light in the noonday sun was literal – each photo I took painted a still life far from still. Her frothing torrent held pearls of sunlight in each droplet, a prism of rainbow colours therein. All the way there (and back again) I held conscious Presence for the water’s being, for the liquid light it flowed out into the world, and a mantra of blessing began to spontaneously script itself in my mind – to accompany me that day as well as all thereafter to sing up this beautiful country. In specifically remarking the cyclical nature of water’s ‘quest’ – all the way from source to sea, from source to sea to source, I was reminded of the migratory patterns of birds, or my own – crisscrossing the world between homes, each one both ‘source’ and ‘sea’ in terms of homecoming ritual. Was this the reason why in Malakut wanders we had been welcomed home to this place by the Amici themselves as well as their overlighting genius loci?
At this point I began wondering when an appropriate container for my ‘light’ would cross the (physical) path, for at some level I realised it would reference the practice by which I share blessings between home territories. In the wake of all musings, that summer I carried a stone from the glacier-smoothed Cold Mountain framed by Marianna’s window down under with me, to be carried aloft ‘home-peak’ there, deposited on its summit cairn. A greeting from one genius loci to another, ‘twas a leyline of connectivity I intuited from Aboriginal Dreaming, the songlines they had sung into spiritual and geological being over aeons. Yet I didn’t know where, when or how the right stone of blessing for the Isorno task would intersect this particular trajectory.
But, of course, it did – as ever in a most unexpected way: "In far western Queensland, our fifteen hundred kilometre road trip back in time nearing its end in this baking red and dusty scape, this inland sea of drought-ravaged plains, no hill within coo-ee, I feel the primal tug of land and sky, and know we will soon be gone from this place, on a plane back to coastal lushness, back to ‘home-turf’, gone. It fulfills itself, this tug, in finding a place of pilgrimage to visit in the dry-cracked earth – to a 19th century cattle-duffing lookout. It takes us along a heavily corrugated track, past roos and emus and the occasional steer, all curious, we the only humanity it seems this day. I had felt the tug, the pull, to reach beyond the ‘known’ outback to its hidden repositories and wisdom scripts. I heeded, and this is where I find the stones. Out here, the silence deep, heavy. We climb the lookout, rock outcrop fifty or so metres max above the surrounding plain, sit, absorbed by landscape. It slows time for us all. On the return to town, therefore, I drive slowly; F hops out each now and then to check for new species of birds. At one almost-sucked-dry waterhole, the billabong of a creek long since driven underground by causes and conditions (unripened), he heads over for a look-see. A big coolibah on the banks and I look down, just there between car and waterhole .... The whole place is littered with red pebbles, the whole inland of Australia it seems represented in this solitary catchment, a watershed no longer manifest, a potentiality in time and space. All these red rocks, holding the red of the red centre intact, and I think to take one as a keepsake of this part of the world, return to the north with a single simple stone of blessing, just like the one that waits in my bag to be carried atop Wollumbin next week.
"But then I notice something. These stones are smooth, water-smoothed and -sanded by millennia spent being washed by the vast seas that flooded this landscape, over, over, over – how long since these rocks last tasted water? Yet here they all are, smoothed by the past, banished from the present. In the end I choose two, two at random amongst the millions lying here like acorns or beech nuts fallen from The Tree of Infinite Knowing, waiting for those never-arising causes and conditions, waiting in perpetual pause to sprout a vast russet forest … I choose two, swirled with the reds of now-landscape, threaded with the pale waters-of-memory, and return home with them to the north, to the ice and the snow and the perennial flow. Now here, returned, to the ten-foot-square hut. And I know your shared fate, red river rocks (R3s). One shall remain in the wicker sacred pool, keepsake of promise, the other returned to bless the waters of life, chalice of liquid light since the molten birth of our Gaian home – you, R3, you with the face of an innocent child, sweet-expressioned, a-wonder, you it shall be to carry the light of my love into the Acqua Termale …"
Intent confirmed in a small ritual, purpose clear – my love, my deep, deep love for our beautiful, beautiful world, for dear Gaia and all her inhabitants (animal, vegetable, mineral – physical and non-) – all building, building, building toward the performance of pilgrimage, my own Way of the Knight to fulfill. WolfMother, the Amici, my own family (and madcap dog) – everything would need to be in alignment, all causes and conditions fused in solidarity for this undertaking: Weather, terrain, fitness, motivation, path … the all of it ...
Final prepping complete, a brief fortnight’s window (autumn school vacation) loomed. I hoped and prayed the quest could proceed as planned; in the end though it would be in the lap of the (mountain and river) gods, and for nine solid days the rain pelted down. Had the river decided to come directly to us from out of the sky, no mediation required? The creek roared, the waterfalls howled, villagers feared the mountain itself would come down. What message should I derive from this convergence of spiritual intent and material watershed? All the way from source to sea, from source to sea to source? I sat with R3 in meditation, felt his weight in my hand, communed with his spirit until we had fused to one being, one life, one simplicity of Bateson’s ecology of mind. I communed until I felt his weight no more, till our body temps had met and melded. Till he was flooded with liquid light, my light his light, his light re-woken, and, holding this light as preciously as if it had always been part of his own, reclaimed a birthright immemorial …
Emerson's event
Weds. Late afternoon. A break in the clouds. A sniff to the west. The last possible day for the trek before called back to the north would be Friday, a slim 36 hours hence. That night, a Malakut scape: "A small supermarket in the outback town whence R3 hailed. We are stocking up on provisions for a journey. Out in the car park, I meet the Amici. I hear a brushcutter loud in my ear and turn to find them busy at work. What on earth are they doing here? I recognise the energy signature of the fellow who spoke a little English but the rest are younger. He is leading them on a work detail – ‘guerrilla-gardening’, he grins. It is today (Thursday) in the Malakut as well and I tell them joyously of our plan (if the weather holds) to try to make the trek up to the source. We’re going tomorrow, I say. Oh, he replies, we’ve already come in today but we’ll still be in the neighbourhood then. Maybe we’ll see each other?"
Friday dawns … A bank of low cloud still settled in the east, but Sun doing his buggy-best to peek through. We drive the valley road west, to where it ends, and begin to walk. If the path is still OK after all this rain, and the river crossings intact, it will take circa four hours just to reach a disused alpine hut marked on the map before the serious climb to lake thereafter. If not? We agree this to be simply a reconnaissance trip to the hut; for making the trek to the source this would be our initial scouting excursion given the prevailing conditions. Nevertheless I carry R3 in my pocket. It’s a good opportunity for him to get to know future home territory …
We make it to the hut; we rest, picnic. We discover the hut is not disused after all, part of an abandoned summer farm (as the map indicated), but had been refurbished as a simple bivouac by – guess who – the Amici several months earlier. We wander inside (such rifugios are never locked) and find a diary on the dresser documenting the renovation and when the merry troupe had last been in residence to prepare things ahead of the winter – yesterday, Thursday. Today they had moved on to the next hut within their stewardship … I shake my head at the beauty of synchronicity, Malakut and material twinned, laugh and dip my lid to their knowing presence, subtle and equally not-so. In such joyous spirit, I look to the map, to the day which has unfolded in our sight, and cannot contain my desire to press on to the AT. Now. Right now. It would take another solid hour or so of climb up to where the lake lay in the lee of the ridge but I was more than game …
Imagine. It did happen, it did all happen, everything that my loving intent had proscribed on my heart came to pass that day; energy completely sapped but oh! In the face of weather and other commitments, to think this day would even dawn as it did, and that it would all work out OK? Thank you to the Amici, thank you to the House, thank you to WolfMother and my blessed family – all companions of the way, on this our homecome way! And imagine: At each step, a new revelation, all mirroring that which had been presented to psyche in the Malakut over three years since I had first been tasked this work to perform. Climbing the final slope to the lake and here revealed – the landscape of The Tree of Infinite Knowing. Intact! Right here, as I had seen it, as I knew it, here the spongey mossy ground, where rock and stone glistened with wetness, where small openings in the earth revealed the sacred waters within. And I looked out, round and about, to all chains of mountains smiling in witness of this moment. Joy! Shared!
Ah, but I worked hard to still the joy, to keep mountain calm over lake as the I Ching counsels, to conserve energy for the final push up the slope (challenging, no path) to reach the first and then second (upper) lake. Here the Acqua Termale rose, entered the world from its hidden source shafted deep in the mountain, here it pooled and here it sent itself off, rushing over a lip of land down, down, down from an unpeopled into a peopled watershed. I kissed R3, ancient repository of light-blessing, tossed him into the pool – russet-red against all the green-grey-blues, he settled comfortably into the silt basin of Being, sat there to wink his diversity in glee at a crystal-water’d heritage revisited, Nietzsche’s eterno ritorno in looking-glass miniature.
Postscript
I often look back and marvel that this act completed my seven years in the wilderness, that following its completion I gained in confidence and spirit that I am not alone on the path, this Way of Love, and that my companions – a diverse troupe of beings in various dimensions – manifest such joy to support my practice of living a one-life-in-the-one-world reality. One day, as winter’s dark approached, after our extraordinarily cathartic autumn trek ‘home’, I sat in meditation to again work at The Wall. Only to find it gone – each time I had been in, till this specific moment, I had found my skills improved, becoming more fluid and effective at each turn of the ‘planing’ tool, but still I worked diligently in the spirit of the I Ching wisdom of Gradual Progress, delightfully expressed with such gems as:
Geese gradually proceed on boulders; they eat and drink happily. Good fortune … Geese gradually proceed in the trees, and may reach a level roost. No fault … Geese gradually proceed onto a mountaintop. The wife does not conceive for three years, but in the end nothing defeats her. Good fortune.
This day in meditation, however, I looked about. No ‘wall’ anywhere on the horizon could I spy (with my little eye). Three years – the wisdom of geese a-waddle up a mountain – and yes, it had been exactly three years since the Acqua Termale had entered this (wife’s) imaginal world. The Wall had vanished, the landscape broad, clear, glacier-smoothed – calm, peaceful, Hemingway’s clean well-lighted place. The only thing which could be seen was my memory of The Wall, and my work thereat, now past …
Earlier in this story I recounted my Malakut meeting at the hut four hours from the trailhead, the cave set behind the lake high above the hut, the place Mandalay, in which the monks lived and worked, the postcard I received while there with the pilgrimage route inscribed thereon. The summer following R3’s submersion in the pool, our family, in toto, all three children and dog unterwegs in the high wild, engaged the selfsame trek as a multi-day wilderness adventure – sleeping on the floor of dusty attic in the Amici bivouac, making our own ‘risotto’ for tea. Its purpose? To fully bind the postcard’s message to our shared familial soul-knowing, for me to introduce the children in the material to the lake they had visited in the Malakut (even if unconsciously, cossetted in my care like a mother roo’s brood in her pouch). For my part I was free to simply listen – to the long broad tongue of valley sounds, to the unconditioned body of mountain colours, to the roar of resonant hum within and beyond each pore of skin, to the sublime fact of mergent life ever-lived afresh.
At the entry to WolfMother’s domain, at the stone ‘gate’ on the path just past the place where she had originally leapt out of the underbrush to greet us, I spontaneously lifted a stone and placed it atop, as a holder of blessing and presence, as a prayer for our safe return. And three days hence, found it there waiting – for my lift, and kiss, and whisper of thanks. Brought home to Marianna’s fireside it has been, another tale added to the Book of Voyage, the shy motif embossed on its skin for all the world like a marmot in profile or some other Amici spirit, cleaved to, embedded within.
The night of return to my bed (and pillow – such a godsend!), a lucid Malakut scape: Somehow I had received a naming of ‘Sir’, and I couldn’t figure out why. Was this common in the Amici’s neck of the woods for women to be so-named? No, it seems not, but I was shown an official document and told this is what I would now be called: Sir Anne. It sounds ridiculous! I said. A word-image presented: The Way of the Knight. Alright, I shrugged.
But before the reader thinks this anything grand (indeed, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable in the space), it transpired to only define forthcoming task, my next assignment as ‘assistant’ to a group leader at a roundtable with others all focused on a specific undertaking. At the time I had no idea what this would involve; our discussions were project management-oriented. Nevertheless, if the reader is interested in the extraordinary partnership to follow, it is the subject of its own text – a much longer one which goes by the name of Awakening to Home. Meanwhile, in honour of Gaia’s blessed high wild, the first Canticle (Song of the Seasons) of the epic Onsernone Long Poem, has this bardic pen gambolling through meadows Malakut and material alike, on the way to the source, the sacred Acqua Termale – its One Life for which there is only ever One Name.
On that note, I bid all readers a fond adieu and bonne nuit from our merry band of Amici della Luce, singing up country with a perennial song of sanctity – of peace love and the light of grace, being and flowing the world with blessing … On. Ever on. From source to sea to source ...
