Nature
I used to be afraid of snakes. Really, honestly and deadly afraid. A thought, an idea that there could be a snake somewhere in the house (if I read a story, or saw a movie with snakes in it) would be enough to scare me to death and keep my legs up and away from the floor for hours.
On the main street of the town I live in there are people with snakes sometimes. They bring the snakes in big plastic containers, take them out and let people touch and pet them. I would always keep an eye out for the snake people, making sure to cross the street as soon as I saw them. I couldn’t walk by them. Sometimes, when I’d forget to pay attention and walked to close to the snakes, I would freeze for a moment, then turn around and walk away as quickly as I could.
Few days ago I walked down the main street with my husband. The snake people were there. I noticed them and realized that I could walk by them, that the fear wasn’t coming, the paralyzing terror was not showing up. We walked towards the snake people, closer and closer, and still I felt that I didn’t need to run away.
I told my husband that I didn’t feel afraid, and he said: great, let’s go then, and walked straight to a lady who was holding a snake, rolled up in a little ball in hear hand. I followed, stopped few steps away from the woman. I felt that this was enough, that it was a huge achievement for me, just to be these close to a snake.
The woman came closer, she wanted me to hold the snake, I jumped away. She wanted me to put out my hand, but I wouldn’t. It was terrifying, I wasn’t ready to be this vulnerable with a snake. Instead I extended one finger and touched it a little, on it’s back and on it’s belly. The snake didn’t move, my husband was holding my hand. I was breathing fast, I felt like one does when walking into a cold lake, deeper and deeper into a cold water. The body is in shock at first, tense and ready to jump away, then, slowly, it relaxes, ready to take the plunge.
I was not relaxing yet, my body was in shock. Being this close to a snake, this intimate with it, was to much, too intense. I could not hold it, could not stand it, I could not stay present – so I started talking. I asked the woman about the snake, it’s breed, it’s age. As she talked, I relaxed. I felt safer somehow, the talking, mind stepping in and organizing the situation, made me feel safer, calmer. The connection with the snake, the presence of the animal, was not as intense, not as clear, not as immediate. I put my mind and the words between us, like a shield. I felt safer behind it.
When the woman asked me to put my hand, palm up, on her palm, I did. She promised me that she would not remove her palm until I was ready, then she put the snake into my hand.
I held it. It wasn’t moving. It was rolled into a little ball, looking at me with it’s black eyes, and the woman removed her hand. I held the snake and felt no fear, though my body would not relax. I was breathing too fast, hyperventilating, I begun to feel dizzy and handed the snake back to the woman. I felt faint, I didn’t want to drop it. My husband gave the snake people a donation and I walked away.
It took me a while to come dawn, it took my body a while to relax, to let go of the adrenalin, to come back to normal. It was a big deal for me, holding the snake. A big deal that the fear which was always there was now gone. I thought about it a lot, and my thoughts would come back, again and again, to the moment when I could not stay present with the snake, and I talked.
It was a big deal for me to hold a snake, and yet I felt I missed something. I missed the real, direct experience, the full experience of the presence of the snake – because I would not stay present, because I started talking.
Talking was a distraction, protection. It did not encourage relationship, rather it put a distance between me and the snake, it separated us. Because of fear, I talked.
I do feel sometimes that I could feel so much deeper, be so much more present, if I didn’t speak. And yet, it is not speaking itself that is getting in a way, I think. It’s not the language, words, that are distractions, that diminish the experience. It is how I use the language. It is how, and when, and why I speak.
I can talk to protect myself, to distract myself, to remove myself from an experience, to keep myself safe. Or I can find my own, unique voice – and then say something. I can speak words that create reality, that are who I am. Then there is no distinction, no separation between me and the words I speak. Then I can say the word – and the world will change.
Didn’t God create the world with a word?
“New world is here. Life opportunities are only how uniqueness opens a space for invitations for us to graduate from being good. Beyond uniqueness is the opportunity called originality in relationship, which redesigns what can be”. Said Brooks.
Funny he should say that, I thought just now as I read it. I thought about this just last night. I stood in the kitchen last night, cooking. I thought about many things. I just finished going through lines and lines of code, adjusting and tweaking web pages. My mind was very busy, I realized, and so I begun to feel instead.
I felt myself, I felt my body, I felt my house and the mountains beyond it, and gradually I shifted. My mind was still there, chatting away, but I wasn’t it anymore. I let it go, I opened my head, I allowed it to leave.
“I need my mind though” a thought came. “I need mind to work, to function, to make money, to organize life”. I looked at this thought and recognized it. I thought it many times before, said it many times before, and believed it. Yesterday I looked at this thought and realized that I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t need the mind to function, I don’t need the mind to work, to organize my life.
I don’t need my mind to help me fit into reality, to function inside of reality, as it is – instead I can change reality to fit me.
“This is just how it is” I heard millions of times before, we all did. “This is how it works”, “this is how life is”, “yes, we are God, we are Buddha, we are all already enlightened but we also have mind, we are humans and this is just how humans are”, “this is just our human nature”.
All those statements might be true, might be correct, but I believe they are still incomplete. A complete statement would say: “this is just how it is, for now”. This is just how humans are, for now, at this moment.
This is just how it is, I thought yesterday, because this is just how we’ve chosen it to be, this is how we have chosen to relate. If we have reality organized by mind and for mind, it is because we have chosen to organize it in such a way. If we have a set, defined “human nature”, it is because we have chosen to organize it as such. We have chosen, we organized it, we chose how to relate, we chose how to be.
And so I can continue to choose how to relate, how to organize. I can say: this way of relating doesn’t work for me anymore, I am going to relate like this now. I don’t need my mind anymore, I am going to be my body now, be myself now, and this is how I am going to relate with the world.
I don’t have to shift, change, adjust to accommodate reality, because reality will shift, change and adjust to reflect me. Because it is by how we relate that we create reality.
I thought about “Avatar” last night as I walked my dog. I just saw the movie abut the beautiful paradise-planet and the wild, free people living on it, in it, with it, and I thought: if I could die now knowing that I’ll be reborn there, I would do it in an eye blink. I felt homesick. Happy because I got a glimpse of home and ready to cry, because I wasn’t there.
Then I looked around me and realized that I don’t have to go anywhere, that the paradise is right here and I don’t have to die to enter it. I have to do something infinitely harder – I have to choose to open my eyes, I have to choose to see, I have to choose to hear, I have to choose to be present. Right here.
It is so much easier to change that world than it is to change myself.
“It makes me sad for all that we’ve lost, for all that humans lost” a friend said yesterday about the movie, and I thought: we haven’t lost anything. We haven’t lost nature, we haven’t lost magic, we haven’t lost the ability to be, to connect, to feel. We are surrounded by trees, by animals, by plants, by mountains and seas ready to connect, ready to become allies, partners. Ready to share. We are surrounded by beautiful, free, wild nature full of wild beings and we can be as beautiful, free and wild, on this planet, right now. All we have to do is choose it, all we have to do is open to it.
And if we don’t?
The beautiful, magical forests of Pandora are hell full of danger and terror to those who will not look. The beautiful, wild creatures are vicious monsters to those who don’t listen. The wild, free existence of Pandora’s people is primitive and ignorant to those who will not be present.
We may make Earth into a garden equal to Pandora’s forests. We may replant our forests, we may replenish the wildlife, we may plant orchards and tend gardens. We may implement ecological solutions, we may reduce the emission of poisons into the air, into the water, into the soil. We may all drive electric cars powered by solar batteries. But what good will it do if we don’t look, if we don’t listen, if we are not present?
If we don’t look then the wild, beautiful forests will remain a dangerous place, alien place, fit only to be cut for timber, or kept only to provide us with atmosphere. If we don’t listen then the free, wonderful creatures will remain dumb animals, fit only for slaughter or careful birding in preservations. If we are not present then being in nature, being open, connected, will continue to be considered primitive and ignorant, and we will remain shut in our towers made of glass, where nature exists only for decoration or as a means of our survival.
There is nothing that we have to do to turn Earth into paradise. There is nothing that we have to do to become free and wild, fearless, supported, connected, present, like the people of Pandora. The paradise is already here, right now.
We can enter it whenever we choose to … and if we don’t choose to, we will never find it. If we don’t look, if we don’t listen, if we are not present, then we will never find it. No mater what we do, no matter where we go, no matter how we change the world.
“Imagine that a mountain is not a mountain. Not what we see as a mountain, what we call a mountain. Imagine that a mountain is a spirit being, without physical form. Imagine that this being is bigger than the mountain you see, bigger than the Earth, bigger than the Universe. Imagine that this being is boundless, endless. Now imagine that this endless being chose to manifest itself as a mountain here, on Earth.
The being is not a mountain, it simply chooses to manifest a shape of the mountain as a way of relating, as a way of being present here, on Earth. This is how mountains are, this is how we are” , I said to my husband yesterday, as I was trying to explain to him how mountains teach me about being human.
“The mountain relates to me the way it relates to itself, as who I really am. It holds space for me to be the being that I am, manifesting itself as a human woman. The mountain shows me how to be present this way, just like Brooks does.”
I’ve needed the mountain’s teachings lately. After my family’s visit, which was long, heavy and intense, all the stress and reaction begun to surface and I found it hard to be here, to be in relationship with my husband, as stressed out as I was, to hold space for someone when I needed someone to hold space for me. I wanted to leave. I wanted to go deep into the mountains and stay there, I wanted to be alone.
There is such peace when I wander up and down the mountain trails, there is such space and such presence when I sit on boulders, looking over the distant ocean. Late in the evening, after the sun sets and there is only enough light to see the trail, there is silence in the mountains. Human minds withdraw into homes, into brightly lit spaces, and the mountains become wild. It never takes long for my mind to choke on it’s own rapid thoughts and become silent. It never takes long for me to come back to myself, to be myself. It never takes long for me to see that all the problems, all the drama, all the feelings, emotions, pain, confusion, frustration, are only trauma. Trauma from my childhood, from when I was growing up, from where I wasn’t present, from where I got lost.
It all comes up and my mind grabs onto it and starts spinning, and twirling, and twisting, faster and faster, to create more pain, more fear, more confusion. Spinning stories, constructing solutions and explanations, moving this pain here, explaining this fear there as this or that, taking an old story to create a whole new one … my mind calls it “solving the problem”.
In the mountains there is no space for “solving problems”. There is no space for mind’s antics. There is only me, who I am, what I am. My mind is only a story. It has nothing to do with me.
But then I have to go back. Back to where the darkness is chased away by lights.
Back at home, late at night, Christopher and I sat in bed, talking. We haven’t said much to each other for the last few days … I didn’t say much. I didn’t see any point in having a conversation. We could have talked about what happened, analyze it, spin stories, construct solutions and come up with explanations. Move this pain here, explain this fear as this or that, take an old story to create a whole new one … it seemed pointless to me. “What will change?” I asked myself. ” I can take the pieces of my life and rearrange them, I can move somewhere else, do something else, with someone else, but what will change? Will I change? Will I be any different?”.
There was nothing I could think of doing that would change anything, nothing that would make any difference at all, and yet something had to be done. We were tense, angry, resentful, and something had to be done.
As I sat on the bed, saying little, looking inside, it came to me. It took me a moment to acknowledge what I saw because it was not the answer I would prefer, and yet I could not deny it. It came to me that there is nothing to do, to solve, to fix or to change. I don’t need to move, divorce, change my profession, read relationship books, attend workshops. All I need to do is relax and step into the situation. I need to come back to myself, be myself right in the middle of the anger, the frustration, right in a center of the trauma. And it will heal, open, transform, by itself, spontaneously.
Right there, in my bedroom, it came to me that I can become as wild and present as I am in the mountains, and there will be no space for my mind’s antics.
