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Dying Honorably, Living Well:
editorial musings
On a cold and foggy summer evening we turned off the highway and wound our way through the maze of dilapidated streets beside the long-closed military base until we reached the home of an old man from whom we were to get our hive of bees. We watched and listened as the stories of his life, loves, and career wound their way through the calming smoke and frames of bees being moved into our hive. Our hive -- a microcosm of the world in which we live, a tiny planet populated by a complete community. To say it is "our hive" is much as it is to say "our world." We own neither one but are, instead, custodial members of each.
For anyone who follows the news it is no surprise to hear that honeybees are in peril. Mites, fungi, pesticides, and a myriad of other ills plague these small beings upon whom so much of our food supply depends. Similarly, novel diseases, chemicals, and other t oxins threaten both the human and greater-than-human communities. Less well publicized is the rapidly growing community of those who tend bees. Every day new beekeepers enter the fold, drawn by some imperceptible need to tend a community.
I view Animas Valley Institute much like an apiary: Guides, like beekeepers, oversee processes that unfold naturally, ones that have been active in humans for perhaps a hundred millennia or more and in honeybees for perhaps a hundred million years. Also, the art of both guides and beekeepers has been dying for decades but is now regaining its rightful importance.
When we undertake a soul journey, when we step out into the wilderness to enact a vision fast, we are consciously choosing the act of dying honorably, in a psychospiritual sense, so that we may live well for our community. Similarly, when we daringly offer our soul gifts to our community (as many have done with their submissions to this issue of Westwords), in opposition to the voices of the old ego structure that protected us for years, we also further our honorable and necessary psychospiritual dying. So, too, does a honeybee set out from the hive to defend against the threats to her community, knowing that her life will end with the sting that preserves the community. At this time when the cycle of another year is dying and the light growing small, I offer a prayer of gratitude and breath of celebration to each one of the guides, questers, soul-gift sharers, and bees who have chosen to die honorably so that the larger community can be reborn and made more healthy. Sometimes we tend to forget that it is the small works of many coming together that creates the larger motion of the turning whole.
~ Pete Fonken ~
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Calling All
Homo Imaginens!
Your beautiful and creative input is needed for a new Animas Valley Institute logo. The current logo, seen below, has served Animas well for many years but is ready to retire and let a new image carry the torch for the work that lies ahead.
How does Earth want to imagine itself through the beautiful work that Animas offers to the world!? What words or images might convey that imagining to all who see them? Any and all, ideas, words, metaphors, dreams, or other suggestions for this logo creation are welcome.
Please send your ideas to:
doug@dougvanhouten.com
swiftlevel@earthlink.net
hilaryjl@telus.net
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Upcoming Animas Programs
www.animas.org
January 22-24, Journey to Wholeness: Navigating with the Nature-Based Map of the Psyche, in California
with Mary Marsden and Gene Dilworth
January 27-31, Soulcraft Intensive in Hawaii with Jade Sherer and Annie Bloom
February 7-12, Seduced by Earth: Deep Imagination, Soulcraft and the Dreaming of Nature, at the Esalen Institute in California
with Bill Plotkin and Geneen Haugen
Note: This will be one of only two programs with open enrollment that Bill is guiding while he is on his yearlong wandering sabbatical!
February 10-21, Animas Quest, in Death Valley with Jade Sherer and Jim Marsden
For more information or to register for these or any other programs, visit the Animas website or contact the Animas office at soulcraft@animas.org / 800-451-6327
The full 2010 program schedule is available on the Animas website.
www.animas.org
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Dog Meat
If only the kiss of a man,
his homemade fig and honey ice cream,
were enough -
or a child against my breast 
or plucking carrots from the garden.
Instead, I am a wild dog,
ravenous for soul meat.
I am wife to some other Mystery
arranged by ancestors who still
believed in abduction.
I was fashioned - soft voice,
voluptuous body, likable traits -
the way the iridescence of the
great anaconda was fashioned.
I no longer believe in choice.
I believe in packs of wild dogs
with meat-filled bellies
howling into the dark moon.
~ Cristin DeVine ~
Cristin DeVine is a teacher, guide and psychotherapist who wanders the beaches, forests and mountains in coastal northern California when she is not running with other wild dogs as a part of Animas Valley Institute's SAIP (Soulcraft Apprentice and Initiation Program) program.
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A Story of Forgetting
"The ecstasy is so short but the forgetting is so long." - Walt Whitman
I found a large, gray, stripe-backed beetle in my duffle bag at the hotel while repacking to return to Canada after The Way of Council and the Art of Mirroring Intensive on Antelope Island in September.
To my horror, I swiftly and unthinkingly took it to the sink and swished it away! I instantly realized my grave error and sat with my face at the drain, speaking soft words of encouragement and deep apology, urging this desert wanderer to please come back up. Thankfully, he did. Tentative black feelers appeared first, tapping insect morse code for "is it safe here?" Who wouldn't be nervous after such a rude swim in slimy pipe darkness? We hung out awhile - he exploring the sink, me sinking into my shame. I continued our conversation, speaking in soft, tender words of sincere apology for my blatant inconsideration: unwittingly hijacking him from his desert home and then flushing him away without even noticing the unique and miraculous himness of him. It was just then that I noticed the ironic name on the towels - Days Inn - and chuckled to myself at having indeed checked into the Daze Inn. How quickly I stumble headlong into this well-worn groove that is constantly reinforced by manufactured and hermetically sealed surroundings which suggest an apartness from nature rather than a communion with or part of nature!
We then took a stroll of small intentional steps (me walking, him perched on my hand) outside to a pink rock garden. I apologized aloud for this manicured landscape so far from his island home and wondered if he would find others like him here or wander alone in this foreign, pomegranate-colored terrain? Would he be able to fit in? Would he survive? He felt his way onto a big smooth rock just as it began to rain.
~ Hilary Leighton ~
Inspired by learning, devoted to staying awake to the supreme beauty and terror of her wild soul, and to listening deeply for eloquence everywhere, Hil's hope lies with the rekindling of lost connections and right relationship - a wider love - beyond the cultural notion of romance and need. She can be found falling more deeply in love with the world in Victoria, BC, when she is not out on the land participating in numerous Animas Valley Institute programs! |
Dancing Tree
~ Dianne Monroe ~
My photographic work is an expression of that meeting point between inner and outer worlds. I explore the place where something can emerge that is larger and more truthful than our surface vision is accustomed to seeing.
I've been deeply moved by Animas programs and hope the organization and its wisdom will continue to sink roots, grow and flower.
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Aria Del Rio/River Aria
Soul work comes in many forms, and this submission expands the realm of expression that Westwords explores. Almah LaVon Rice wanders the country with her creativity, sometimes finding herself at Animas' programs such as Seduced by Earth at the Esalen Institute.
"Give beauty back," sings Gerard Manley Hopkins, "to God/beauty's self and beauty's giver." Storyteller Martín Prechtel advises feeding beauty to the "other world" so that we may sustain the invisible that sustains us.
Thus Aria del Rio/River Aria, co-created with my soul sista María Firmino-Castillo, is where I avail myself to be eaten, consumed by Lioness Beauty (per writer Arundhati Roy's invitation to "to pursue beauty to its lair"). My soul's niche, I have discovered, is to give beauty back. I had been running from this knowing, fleeing from being too much, too lush, too indigo. But this is my birdsong in the forest of being. As a poet, I want to lay beauty at the feet of Mystery with my words, sparing no extravagance. Brocade the page.
I want to return beauty, too, in images. Aria del Rio/River Aria is an illustrated page torn from my soul workbook. The beauty is not mine and was never mine. I relinquish it to what waters me. Flowers float down the river. I surrender to the fanged chill of the water and float like those flowers.
The gift received is the gift that must be given away. A bloom drifts out of my hand to join the unseen bouquet of the Soul.
Aria Del Rio/River Aria was created in honor of Pippa Bacca, the slain performance artist, and makes tribute to Oshun, Yemaya and all the spirits of love and water.
Additional expressions by Almah LaVon Rice can be found on her web site at: http://www.owldanceandmoon.wordpress.com
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Invitation
The pen uncapped
and the mind set to listening
as the imagination comes alive,
set in motion by fairy tales
playing and bouncing around my shadow places.
A world much older
than my narrow, petty one
is now free to have its way with me,
triggering what is deeply human
in this collective inheritance of mine,
whispering like the softest breeze
on my naked flesh
a muted, subtle invitation
to once again explore and trust
that mysterious,
frightening,
magical landscape
that I've deemphasized and distrusted
for so long;
to once again sink into
the dark depths of the dream world.
~ Travis Gould ~
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Water Writing
~ Nirvan Hope ~
Nirvan Hope is a nature photographer living in Washington State, where she often wanders on the land tending to the sweet seeds of mystery and beauty that are gifted to her through the lens of the camera in an ongoing conversation with the world. Nirvan's rich and dark longing to lean into the evolution of her own soul-infused artistry called her to begin the Yearlong Soulcraft Immersion in November 2009. More of her work can be seen at www.earthrhythmsphotography.com.
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Call for Submissions to Westwords!
Look within! Westwords is seeking contributions of YOUR cutting-edge, soul-inspired expression to share within the Animas virtual community. Stories, poetry, photos, soul-inspired visual art, music, articles, and other expressions are welcomed. We are calling both the  bold and the shy to bring their offerings to create a feast that may inspire, sustain, and inform this community as we participate in the Great Turning.
Please send inquiries and submissions to the Westwords editor, Pete Fonken at pfonken@gmail.com.
Deadline for submissions to be included in the Winter issue is December 15, 2009. Submissions received after that date may be included in subsequent quarterly issues. |
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