by Geneen Marie Haugen
Geneen Marie Haugen, PhD, grew up as a free-range wildish kid with a run amok imagination. She is a guide to the experiential, intertwined mysteries of nature and psyche with Animas Valley Institute, and is on the faculty of Esalen Institute, Schumacher College, and Fox Institute for Creation Spirituality. Her writing has appeared in many publications including
Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth; Thomas Berry: Dreamer of the Earth; Parabola,
and others.
Friday, March 27, 2020
This is the first part of a multi-part Musing (one per week).
Rain has filled the potholes in the slickrock wash, but it’s still too cold for toads to unearth themselves from their buried winter chambers for frenzied spring mating. I crouch down to sing a strange tune to the water that flows from one slickrock pool to another; I sing for the creatures who share this water, air, and land — which is still mostly winter-brown. This is not where I had intended to be right now; I’d intended, and briefly was, on the Big Sur coast in the luscious green amazement of spring. Then suddenly I was on the road for home in southern Utah, ejected from California by the virus changing the world. Now in self-quarantine, I’m still free — and privileged — to wander solo in the slickrock desert near my home. My singing is not comforting even to me; my voice is responding to what I “heard” from the land, and it is more dirge than celebration.
Out of caution and respect for the small rural communities like mine whose healthcare systems could easily be overwhelmed, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, and Friends of Cedar Mesa (Bears Ears) are now advising prospective visitors to stay home in the time of coronavirus. In other states, tourist areas that are adjacent to wild land have shut down too, or are trying to dissuade travelers.
In the absence of so many human bodies, the canyons and mountains rest. Perhaps they do not mind, for a spell, some social distance from crowds of us. But cultivating our human relationship with the dreaming Earth is still possible, even for those now sheltered-in-place in cities. The miracle of water flowing through pipes — water wild at its origin — or the ever-present embrace of gravity (as our colleague David Abram reminds us), or the breath that connects us to all of life are worthy of our praise and honoring attentions.
Offering reverence to the old magic of wild elementals is a way of practicing reciprocity with the mystery of life. It is also a way of disrupting psychic habits and tuning our inner ears to listen for Earth’s ancient wisdom, and to the subterranean currents of the planetary imagination in which we are embedded. Even in isolation, depth is available — deep time, deep imagination, the deep river of soul. In solitude now — perhaps like a long vision fast — we might be more porous or receptive to dreams, waking images, or felt-sense of what is now being asked of us as individuals, and as a human family.
***
We’ve known for a long while that a great unraveling is necessary. We’ve known that something world-changing, something perhaps mythic in size, was breathing at the edges of planetary civilization. We have not been blind to the many unstable systems, clattering into one another, destabilizing each other even further.
We’ve been readying ourselves for this long moment — gathering our tools, tuning our psycho-spiritual compasses, maturing our communities and our willingness to be with unknowing. We don’t know the schedule of the great unraveling; we don’t know if the current intertwined crises of global plague and the imploding economy hint at further uncertainties just ahead, including the tempestuous inclinations of climate. We don’t know if two systems or more might come apart at the same time. We didn’t foresee how clearly this moment of unraveling would reveal immense faults in the systems that some semblance of social order has depended upon.
While many of our own kind perish, many others expect a quick return to “normal” — unable or unwilling to see that the complex trauma we’re amidst has opened up a chthonic rabbit hole, where nothing is what it superficially seems. Perhaps for the first time, we viscerally feel the nearness of extinction: our own kind — our beloveds — suffering or dying from a new presence to which we ourselves are vulnerable.
***
But we’ve felt the trembling in the Earth as it approached, and have known we would someday be called to respond to shifting ground and strange winds. The journey of the universe reveals many occasions of crisis where the unfolding cosmos might have imploded, but a never-before-seen capacity emerged instead.
Homo sapien sapien
may be in the kind of dissolution or chaos or cataclysm that often precedes and catalyzes creative emergence; we may be, as many have foreseen, entering a collective initiatory journey, perhaps an evolution of human consciousness.