Where the Horses Sing
June 13, 2022 by Kathleen Mary Willis
. . . this moment is an opportunity to return to an essential awareness that belonged to our ancestors, which, although we have dismissed and forgotten it, is not so far away. . . the land and its spirits can welcome us awake, help us to fully see, hear, and inwardly sense the garden we never really left.
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Emergence Magazine, May 12, 2022
I like to walk early and am often alone on the beach, the ocean and the birds my only companions, the tiny sanderlings running back and forth chasing the waves.
Some days the sun rising over the headlands makes a pathway of golden light to the shore. Today the fog was dense and I could just see two figures walking in the distance until they vanished into the mist, leaving a pair of footprints in the sand until the incoming tide washed them away.
It made me wonder what will remain in a hundred years, when my grandchildren’s grandchildren are alive? Will the rising sea have covered the dunes? Climate crisis will by then be a constant partner, and so many of today’s dramas will be lost in a vaster landscape of primal change.
Sensing this reshaping of the seashore, where the waves roll in from across the Pacific, makes my mind stretch across horizons.
How this land and our own lives have evolved. One story of science says it was only seventy thousand years ago that humans left Africa on their long migrations across continents, arriving here on the Pacific coast just thirteen thousand years ago, when the Bering Strait was dry land and not ocean; or possibly they came earlier in boats down the coast.
But how was life then, long before the written word, when we traveled as small groups, communities of hunters and gatherers? What was the consciousness of our ancestors, before agriculture, long before cities or our industrial way of life? And what did we lose as we settled the land, and then forgot it was sacred?
They may have carried few possessions, but their consciousness contained a close relationship to the land, to its plants and animals, to the patterns of the weather and the seasons, which they needed for their survival.
Fully awake with all of their senses, they had a knowing, passed down through generations of living close to the ground, even as they migrated across the continent.
Today we are mostly far from the land and its diverse inhabitants. Cut off from these roots, we have become more stranded than we realize, and while our oncoming climate crisis may present us with many problems, we hardly know how to reconnect, to return our consciousness to the living Earth.
It is as if, having traveled to the far corners of our planet, we now find ourselves in an increasing wasteland without knowing how to return to where the rivers flow, to where the plants grow wild. And unlike our ancestors, we cannot just pack up and move on, because this wasteland surrounds us wherever we look, like the increasing mounds of plastic and other toxic material we leave in our wake.
Read & listen to more here. . .
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