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| Poppies, Mid-February, Big Creek |
In mid-February in the foothills
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, poppies blanketed the hillsides even
though winter was still imprisoning the rest of the nation. At Big
Creek near Pine Flat Reservoir last weekend, I parked on a dirt road
and immersed myself in the poppies igniting the hillside, sensing
that my personality is like a perishable shell around the wild core
of my soul. Throughout my life, whatever is wild in me has connected
with the wildness in nature, allowing a hidden dimension of my self
to surface and experience the righteousness of beauty, what the
Qabalists refer to as Netzach, or Victory. Almost every time I have
experienced nature, I have realized that set beliefs about myself and
my status in the world obstruct direct experience with wildness. In
my early forties I was not surprised when, during meditation, after
my mind had dropped into the void, I unexpectedly began having
visions of a primal aspect of my psyche, the chakras within my subtle
body, which eventually led to an understanding of the astral, mental,and spiritual dimensions of the self. Perhaps because my father died
when I was a teenager and my world at that time fell apart, I am
still willing to let go of beliefs about myself, trusting that my
soul takes over, experiencing connection with the quiet grasses,
flowers, trees, rocks.
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| Native American Village Site: Pounding Stone Lower Left, House Pits on Ridge |
When my father died, I was
seventeen, no longer a boy but not yet a man, and I drove alone
without anyone else's knowledge several times into the foothills, and
once, I ended up at Big Creek. I slowly cruised across the bridge and
parked, strolling over a ridge to a small creek where I discovered a
pounding stone. I did not realize then that there were house pits on
a ridge on the other side of the stream, but I was amazed by the
poppies on the hillsides all around me. I found a barely discernible
trail and climbed ever higher into a peaceful fire. My grief and
misery vanished. Truth be told, my personality vanished, and amazed
that I didn't miss it, I felt part of a vast stillness, at the heart
of which is a peace beyond understanding.
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| Poppies and Blue Dick, Big Creek |
How or why my poor heart ever
became separated from this peace I have never understood. Since that
day when I was seventeen, I have worked one job after another and
have striven to improve the community, but as a human being I
continue to experience a sense of separation most of the time. It is
perhaps the source of humanity's perpetual search for an Eden. I know
that the peace of paradise exists here in this world, but so often I have looked
for it in the wrong places. I have never found it in fame, or wealth,
or status, or power, only deep inside myself when I am not in nature.
Occasionally I feel it with my wife or children or hear it in music or experience
it in writing or see it in a painting. The yearning for it is not
some neurotic need for a parent's love or some laughable
sentimentality. It is a need to experience the core of who I am all
the time, not just once or twice a year or a few times over the course of a lifetime.
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| Oak Trees in Poppies, Big Creek |
So I returned to Big Creek. And
the poppies were there again and so was the sense of peace, and I felt
like I had been gone for so long, forty years in fact, but that I had
never left, and I was afraid that I would never forgive myself if I
left again, but I knew I had to leave because my life was an hour and
a half away in a city boiling with trouble. I climbed once again up
to the poppies, knowing that pounding stones were next to all the
streams even high in the mountains, that we had abandoned another
order, our life in nature, just over a century ago, for some great
struggle, and would probably never return, at least not without some
great crisis or some collective gestalt. In stillness and peace I had
found sanity, but I am afraid that I would be considered by most now
to be insane.
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| Mining Road above Big Creek |
Freshness in nature dissolves all time
and all thoughts. When I was with the poppies, who or what I am
didn't matter, only my connection with the peace that permeates the
earth. We need to be fed on all levels of the psyche: Wildness feeds
the soul. It gets us in touch with the sun, the source of all life,
and with the Sun behind the sun. It gets us in touch with the moon,
and the mysterious light that holds the symbols and archetypes behind
creation. At the heart of all is mystery. What are these poppies
anyway? Soft, fiery flesh? Peaceful, timeless fire?
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