That Equinox Imagination and the Mystery of Emergence

All of sudden it appears:

The blossom. The catkin. The unfurling fern.
The dawn.The evening star. The crescent moon.
The clarity. The lightning strike of Intuition.
The bubbling up of grief, of unexpected courage.
The pollination party. The unexpected crack in the old story. The vision beyond.

The surprising hatchlings in the nest of your heart.

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

I pause to smell the ceanothus and wild pink currant racemes, who weren’t here a couple days ago. I get giggly with the sudden three-leaved trillium treasure. My innocent child comes out to play when I see those first swamp lanterns emerge.

I also fall to my knees with gargantuan grief when I hear the news. What news? Any news they’ve been throwing at us lately. Later I’m going to make a natural soap out of the california lilac flowers. Maybe it’ll help pollinate me, wash away some sick and stuck.

We’re not only in a state of Emergency, we’re in a state of Emergence. We have to name it: Systems are Falling/Failing, the OverCulture has become a fallow Winter field, and yet—Spring arrives. And along with it, buried things are unveiled, secrets uncovered, new and needed imaginings birthed. In nature. In ourselves. In the collective.

If it’s true what the poets say, that we are in the battle of imagination, (“The war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” —Diane di Prima), I want to be on the (in)side of Earths Imagination, unfurling life’s unrelenting onwardness, pollinating with abandon, sharing, singing, shining,…

Because it’s also true what artist Xenia Marie Ross Viray says, “In nature, creativity is just existence, flowers bloom, and feathers shed. Life breathes and every bird sings. Stones glisten and light change color. Existence is art.”

What was absent or hidden from plain sight, now with the right conditions announces itself as if it were always there, a bold and necessary part of the whole world.

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

Of course, we suspect it never really disappeared, but had merely gone underground for a bit, nurtured by the fruitful darkness, by the necessary and fertile rest. It had perhaps been extending its hidden rhizomes through the body of the earth, through your body, in the caverns of your heart, awaiting the appropriate time.

We may find that some Emergences are so utterly new, so unlike what came before, they catch us by surprise–So we must be there, like a birth doula, to catch them.

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

So here we are. We slowly emerge (or leap!) from our winter skin and old forms. It had its harshness; it had its creature comforts. But Life and light beckons. Liberation is still calling, and we become hungry for expansion, for play, for words and worlds beyond the tired ones that a poverty of imagination bequethed to us. We hear the bees buzzing love where the dragons of fear lay.

Our dreams have been incubating—They, too, will not bare being covered forever. They clamor for fresh air scented with citrus and lavender. Take a moment, lend your nose.

Our role is to tend. To continue to cultivate them with intention. With the proper tending, these micro-blossomings may grow into their fullness, a balm to a hurting world, a confused world, and feeding the Grand Metabolism with beauty, calories, heat, imagination, and sweetness.

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

What seeds of deep imagination or embodied truth are sprouting in you, asking for tending?

Which ones help lead us all beyond the inherited scripts? Beyond Empire?

As adrienne maree brown expresses it in the context of deep time: “How can we, future ancestors, align ourselves with the most, resilient practices of emergence as a species? We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure because it’s all data. But first we imagine. What are the ideas that will liberate all of us?”

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

Wishing you an embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent Equinox!
~Ryan, Director of Creative Earthiness

(See below for an equinox poem and Beautiful Emergences)

Wishing you an embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent Equinox!
~Ryan, Director of Creative Earthiness

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EQUINOX

I’d misplaced a bit of my balance
in that long journey through
the winter underground

so on the first day of spring
I waded in with caution

but Earth wanted me to jump in
demanding my whole body

so I fell into her unkempt and full of kablam
an unplanned splash
as baptism singing spring

an open sun offering
in polyriverous praise

eager soul and skin again
finding equilibrium

(Included in Re-Membering)

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Beautiful Emergences

Sometimes the Beautiful Emergences can difficult to see amidst the clamor and the headline horrors, but visions and practices beyond Empire ARE emerging. I want to name a few that I have seen recently across our landscape:

• Movements for the rights of nature, including rivers and the first designated insect: Native stingless bees in the Peruvian Amazon have become the world’s first insects granted legal rights.
• Several #Landback successes, including a landmark Tribal Stewardship policy that just passed in California, with the goal of putting 7+million acres into stewardship of Indigenous
• The Klamath River is flowing freely with the four dams removed, with massive ecological restoration and the return of salmon spawning upstream further than they have in 100 years. Also in the Yuba and McCloud RIvers.
• Cultural and Regenerative fire practices are booming, healing both cutlure and the landscape.
• Condors are coming back, Bison herds are being restored from Alberta to Illinois to Mexico, and monarch butterfly populations are rebounding.
• People are experimenting with solidarity economies, regenerative conflict, and new/old ways of imagining community safety beyond policing and prisons
• People are increasingly engaging with ancestral recovery and healing; and deepening roots beyond nationalism and Whiteness.
• People are increasingly finding New/old ways to hold/flow our enormous subterranean streams of grief, together in small groups and rituals.

Imagine if these got half the airtime as what the ruling class has decided is normal.

We need to know what is happening to fuel hope and we need to see alternatives to feed our imagination for what is possible.