Bliss and Heartache: Evolutionary Drivers

Well!

That’s the only word that sits on the open page for the longest time, as a state of relaxation pulls me into stillness.

It has been a 35 ½ hour journey from Williamsburg Virginia to Pakawau Golden Bay: four planes and a drive over the mountain. It was worth every minute. I know now how the migrating birds must feel. You just keep going because your inner magnet is calling you home and you have no choice, you have to go. It’s only when you arrive and let go, you realize how very tired you are. Now I can rest.

I have driven over Takaka hill many times in my imagination, and every time it was a glorious day, and when I topped the ridge and saw the green valley beneath me and the sparkling waters of the Bay in the distance, I was always filled with immense joy. Today it is raining and I felt I was descending into the mists of Avalon.

The excitement started at the last lap, when I turned left at Takaka and headed North West. My whole being came alive, alert, zingy. How is landscape so exciting to the spirit? This land today, sodden with rain and shrouded in cloud, sings to my soul, welcome back, welcome back, as I fly into the arms of my Beloved, Golden Bay.

It’s something about the vegetation, the pointed stems of the harakeke with their lofty red flower stalks, the lone cabbage tree trembling in the breeze, so exotic, so alive. The harakeke are bent over like the graceful necks of cranes, moving this way and that, looking around, communicating. And the cabbage tree is gently waving, reaching out pointed fingers to touch my heart.

Flax, palm, heart, breeze, rain, eyes, consciousness.

All One.

This is how they said it would be; this state of Oneness is a constant celebration, a love affair with Life.

Count me in.

The rain has stopped. Quietude is palpable. The top of the low lying hill in front of Thelma’s cottage has emerged from its shrouds of cloud and trees dance, higgledy piggledy along its crest. Here’s that feeling of fullness and aliveness again. The landscape is full of itself; brimming with life force, frolicking along.

I have never been so aware of the consciousness of nature; the living, breathing spirit nature is. The Life-Love Force. And yes, it is loving; not neutral nor hostile, but loving, curious, communicative, friendly and welcoming.

I am filled with gratitude. How fortunate I am to have this experience. I’ve always felt like one of the luckiest people in the world in Golden Bay, to be here in this peace and beauty. For others this would seem like nothing; emptiness, just a rainy day. Yet I am so full of glee I can’t bear to go outside and experience more, I would burst trying to contain so much. With sudden insight I see why so many of us work so hard and make do with so little, why we feel we don’t deserve: it’s overwhelming to take in the extraordinary beauty of life, it blows the little self into oblivion. We defend against this too muchness of it all to conserve our egoic sense of who we are, to have something to hold onto.

Heartache

On the other side of bliss is the heartbreak of Paradise Lost. I open up a book I chose at the library yesterday, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and read:

“This is what is wrong with us, we are bleeding at the roots.” And

“Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise we will find ourselves trapped in the centre of our paved-over souls with no way out.”  And

“We are all complicit.”

Yes we are. I have just returned from a walk on the beach here in Nelson and I noticed with sadness that Nelson is going up-market. The back road that led to the far end of the beach had a wild and unkempt feel, now everything has been tidied up. Consequently there are many more people at the far end of the beach, where it was always possible in the past to find solitude. This is where I loved to swim in summer, beyond all the crowds where the bush came right down to the water and the overhanging branches made little private coves and I felt I was swimming off an exotic desert island. Now the sandy bank where the giant macrocarpas grow has eroded, significantly so in the three years I’ve been away, the bank has flattened out, many of the trees have gone and the whole character of the beach has changed.

I notice how I resist these changes. The only thing we can depend on in the world is change, right?   Yet there are certain forms of change that make my heart sink. And yes, I know I sound like a spoiled brat wanting the whole beach to myself and I should be glad so many people and their dogs are enjoying the beautiful sunshine and fresh air. Yet I feel like a hounded spirit when I can’t find empty spaces, and I’m sure I speak for many disappearing species.

There is a continual battle being waged between the driving force of “development” and the integrity of the land and its ecological balance. I generally tend to blame the greedy capitalist developers who come in with their bulldozers and build hideous townships and shopping malls which nobody can afford to inhabit now. Yet of course there are other factors at play: the burgeoning world population for instance, rapidly growing to 7 billion, and the drive in people everywhere for material comfort, toys and leisure, which causes us to spread our tentacles further and further into nature’s bounteous web, depleting these essential riches and tearing the web, just as the blood-oil is being sucked from the core of the Earth.

Having just spent a soul renewing few days submerged in the comforting arms of Golden Bay, my being is open and sensitive to everything, including my heartache in response to the world’s suffering and heedless destruction. My heartmind goes to those 20 millions affected by flooding in Pakistan, to the devastation of culture and life in Iran and Afghanistan, to the undermining of the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico. And of course always the extinction of species, my beloved four legged and winged friends.

I can’t join those who say that this is all OK. For me it is essential to feel the heartache from time to time, because this is part of our global reality, and this is what drives my passion and motivates me to work for positive change, as much as my love of humanity and human potential. Finding a way to respond appropriately to the devastation of our world is an evolutionary driver. For me, an appropriate response is to feel my grief and outrage as well as my gratitude and awe; to feel it all, to know it is all part of having a human experience. To remember that whatever small inconveniences are appearing in my life, I am one of the fortunate ones. And then to transmute the heartache into a motivating force for heart connection, community building, and service to evolving a Whole New World, a new way of living together that honours life. And this has to start with honouring all our feelings and all our experience, and allowing our own inner diverse eco-system to grow into an abundant garden.

Namaste.

Bliss, is from a new e-book by Rose Diamond and Woods Eliott,  Moments of Magnificent Being, which will be available soon from A Whole New World.

Finding Beauty in a Broken World is by Terry Tempest Williams, publ. Pantheon Books. It tells the story of how the prairie dogs are being driven to extinction in the American Southwest, and how these small creatures hold the key to the health ecology of the region.