I can’t tell you about the world of co-becoming. You have to come with me. We have to go there together.
I mean, I try. I try to tell, but to write about it always feels wanting. Because ‘about it’ is the problem. In the experience of co-becoming, there is no writing about, there is only writing with. We are writing with the world. That sounds strange, I know, but perhap the following will open a door onto this way of being.
What we call co-becoming is a ritual, co-created by all in the group, to together encounter the imaginal world. First, we turn wholeheartedly towards this living world via somatic, meditative encounter, a deep and restful turning in that prepares us for a richer seeing. To meet something imaginally draws upon our capacity to visualise, to call up an image, and to place oneself humbly before it, porous, all pores open. In this work we cultivate somatic attunement, as the more we can feel the inside of our body, the deeper and more pleasurable this experience becomes. I think this might be because there is more space and aliveness for the image to presence within. That phrase, ‘we see the world not as it is, but as we are’ is understood as a truism. It is only with a felt awareness of our own aliveness can world’s aliveness be revealed.
There is an astonishing intimacy with all things suddenly seen as persons, as intelligences: all things alive, agential and wise. This intimacy is a gift given to the humbled. This humbling flowers naturally when we appreciate how tiny we are in the face of this magnificent, mysterious universe. Being humbled is the start of something far more interesting and insightful. It fires the desire to listen deeply and sincerely. Intimacy arises in the trust forged from listening.
This is a phenomenal experience. That’s more than mere metaphor. For it is the phenomena itself, met imaginally, that makes it outstanding – an experience that stands outside the dominant paradigm of inert, unintelligent matter. When seen deeply, all phenomena is, just like us, ancient, intelligent, and made. Made by life and made over time, all things co-created alongside each other, thus innately made by relationship.
In co-becoming, we experience that this is an ongoing process. Life is not a finished product. Evolution is known as this very moment: curious and endlessly creative. And the most thrilling thing we discover is that we’re involved, as our intelligence and the phenomena’s intelligence meet and mingle. We discover that we were never not together. We too, we two, are evolution, refracting both backwards and forwards in time.
The intensity of this was strongly felt in a co-becoming session last Friday, where we listened with bone, first dead bone, and then living bone, our own bones, inside of us. It is the story of the first listening that I’d like to share with you.
Entering the meditation, I felt mute before bone. Struck into an ancient silence, a sense of dropping into the aeons of evolutionary time before words, when I was primate, and bone was that left behind when friend and flesh were gone, when food, animal, was gone. Never before had I or my fellow writers truly met the accumulated imprint of bone upon soul. To feel the weight of this feel impossible to describe. All we can do, in the face of this, is to hand the pen to bone, and scribe this ancient voice. In our sessions, our ritual is to thus write, and then read aloud, utterly unedited, beautifully and with care, the words of a more-than-human other. Following are the words of bone:
Bone, we bear witness
Before speech I am. And when speech falls, I will become stone.
I am the shape of silence. I make you grave. Curve your body down in wonder. In your seriousness you will become beautiful.
I can be sharpened to blade. Needles of me, held in a skinny hand, skin-covered, yet I shine through. My whiteness gleams. I am future’s memory of death. Of all death. Sharpness honed in the whistling of this wind. Bear me, your sacred death, at the centre of your life. Grow to be as holy as stone.
*
Bone of old, bone of once was, fill me with word, with semblance, with knowing. Not knowing in the sense of certainty, for words will be a transient moment, gone in the next one. Bone, let me bear you on my fleshy tongue that sings to you, whistles through you, a luminous pearl on the forest floor. As this song decays, like the flesh that surrounded you, once, animated you, once, moved you through forest, and dwelt you by campfire, collecting stories of even older bones.
Bone, where does your colour go once you start leaving? Where does gleaming whiteness go in the face of impermanence.
I once responded to gravity with levity, says bone, laying down columns of trabeculae and mineral as the conversation unfolded around us. Tangential forces formed me, and I lay here now, as the bones of everyone you ever loved, and ever will come to, glistening and catching the wind.
I make a hollow flute for those who wish to listen. I tell a story lost to the world, now here, now singing.
*
I am not me, I am we, and we are not holding anything up, but we are holding. Old holding. Not structure, but devotion.
We are leaning towards flesh, and earth, like a wave leans into the shore. We are shaped by a thousand years of yes and no’s. Vessels of stories, a reef of memory, a listening held, not fixed, returning always back to the source. To earth, to earth, to earth. To ground, to ground, to ground. May we be eaten again back to her.
Ground down to small white teeth hungry for a new beginning. Ancient remnant singing. Singing all we know from heart’s hummings.
The teachings of the cells, the throat spell, the well from which tears are birthed. The body. The mortal, talking, walking, dancing, animal earth.
Sage of your being, if flesh is your flowering fruit, your blood is ancient rivulets of memory. Bone is your earthly frame, mighty trunk of tree-being. Bone deep, storehouse of memory, felt in bone structure.
The marrow of you. The marrow of your being. Every dream, story, teardrop saved hidden in the trove of bone. Earth, with the spiralling arrow of time, will be the bone carver.
She will suck out with her lips the life that you danced and sang and raged and loved to death. The brittle of your folly will be eaten away and she will devour all of you, and turn you over in her mouth. And swallow all the grace and beauty of your life into the being of earthly everything.
Nothing will be lost.
She will sculpt these bony remnants, slowly, with love, carefully. And your life will sing for thousands of years inside this picked white form. And you are returned home. All that you offer will forever mean something.
*
(With great thanks to Sophie Fitzpatrick, GeorGina Kelly, Lisa Hodgson and Liv Chung for permission to quote their exquisite encounters with bone alongside my own.)
I am dedicated to this work for its capacity to humble us before the mystery. When times feel dire and human behaviour ever more unhinged, I believe we must pivot to the wisdom of the living world. To practice listening deeply to life. And to play the long game, the lovely game, where pain and birth are intimate to each other. May we join this sharp and shining joy.