River, Mountain, Breeze, Sun. The palpable presences, the beingness of the elements in place; water, earth, air and fire in forms we can turn towards, and open to.
Over the past year I’ve run many co-becoming day workshops at my home by Birrarung, below Donna Buang, and this is how it goes. We walk to the water, we turn to the greatness of earth as she rises in peaks around us, we encounter the air swirling around us, and we look towards the fire that powers and enables every moment of our lives, the sun. We scribe what the elements seek to say via our pens, and we read aloud the words in one long praise song.
I call these days writing workshops, but that’s not really true. The focus is not about you becoming a better writer. Instead it’s about all of us together discovering how we are able to give beauty back to the beautiful world.
Each time I do this I am astonished anew, along with the participants, at how natural and nourishing and powerful and surprising it is to simply listen and to let words flow.
Powerful and surprising to realise that the world has been there, so close, waiting for us to listen, generous and garrulous, ready to teach.
Yet natural and nourishing to discover this, the beauty of deep belonging, our irrevocable connections, body and soul. Somehow we’ve always known it was meant to feel like this.
But after two full years of co-becoming workshop, running seven of these days at my home, as well dozens of other co-becoming sessions in the half-year course and in other contexts, something went strange. The elements were getting cranky with me – writing fierce things when I gave them the pen. It was clear that I wasn’t uphold my side of the bargain. I was neglecting spiritual practice – I was not daily honouring them. I hadn’t accepted the gift offered – you can have this connection all the time, not just in these workshops!
I grew up in contexts condemning of spiritual things. I’m still quite allergic to the god-word, despite my understanding now that spirituality and nature connection are the one thing, the experience of the aliveness and intelligence of all things. So I’ve been very slow to take seriously the need to practice. My old self thought it was self-indulgent, but it’s quite the opposite. It’s letting go of the self, and allowing the more-than-human space in one’s psyche. And to then move forward, together with all things.
So I’ve been stepping up my practice. I’m presencing with the sun. It is deeply rewarding.
Warm, radiant, centred. Be these. Be like me, says Sun.
Dwell with me. Dwell as me, the stillness at the centre, and watch the wondrous spinning of all things.
Yesterday I found this in a book of Rudolf Steiner’s:
This is not thinking as “having thoughts,” but actual non-dual being, beyond subject and object, inside and outside, concept and percept. It is not the conceptual husk by which we habitually know the world, but the living tip, or outer fringe, of the universal flow itself. To experience this is to experience the impossible: that we are co-creators, resurrectors, of the world.
I know something like this. It is the experience of co-becoming.