Every journey is a myth.
A walk across the land can be a journey into the heart and every journey into the heart is a walk across the land.
I found myself on the Lost Coast of California earlier this year. It seemed like the right place to go when feeling disoriented, when feeling like the circumstances had blown out the flame in my heart. I had a desperate yearning to touch and be touched by the land. I spent an evening camping by a river feeling a pull to cross it, the scent of the open buckeye flowers spilling down the hill beckoning me from the other side. The next day I followed the pull, and as I returned and continued my way over the hills these words emerged. Every detail of reality turned mythology. Nature has endless teachings.Sometimes to find the heart you have to let go of things. Its not always as easy as unburdening your back. Sometimes what keeps you from your heart is too quick and persistent and full of bitter whispers, salty too. It knows you too well, the path you follow every day. It knows how to turn your eyes from your beauty. For that sort, you need to drive somewhere far, you have never been, absent mindedly pick up a shell. And when you arrive at a river rushing enough, before the Whisperer can discern what is happening, pinch it from behind your shoulder, pop it into the shell, spit in it for good measure and toss it into the rushing water to be carried to the ocean. Back to where all is one. Back to the mysterious depths from which all dreams emerge.
Anyways, its best to walk into the heart unarmored and barefoot. Barefoot on wet stones, over dark soft wiggling spirits. Wind and rushing water, taking the last of your mind. You can follow the doe tracks along the gentlest path, until your feet lift over the rocks as hooves and your eyes go soft.
Sometimes you’ll find the heart a jewel clear pool, tucked in the trees. You can string prayers here, like life is strung. Each prayer planted in the material fabric and bound by an unending thread of time. Let them dangle where the fish turn the heart.
And what of the fire in the heart? Follow the beckoning sweetness. The closer you get the more it is guarded. Even as you pluck the red sweetness, the thorns find your skin. You have to be crazy to traverse the nettle thicket, your legs bare. But they are down every path and avenue. Shaking with pain, but the songs fly around you, yellow and brown-winged. Somehow you make it and climb into its branches, a canopy of fragrance surrounds you. Here is a truly safe place. You are grateful for the ring of protective plants even as your legs burn and tingle. From here you can hear the world going on, but it cannot reach you. Not here in the grove of your heart, where your branches grow strong and winding, and your roots run deep.
You’ll want to build shrines to the spirits of your beauty with your beauty, only to find its already done, in each sprig of growth and crease of bark and flower felled by the passing wind. It is here that you can harvest the wood to relight your fire. Not just any wood, but the wood you can spin to create a tiny coal of life, to be welcomed with a nest of soft fibre, blow breath into, and feed little sticks, until in is bright and warm and alive again. Carry such a wood back over the soft black wiggling spirits, feet bare, skin still tingling, your story in tow.
Tell it to someone. Not just anyone. A bird would do. One that views from high enough to see the trees turn to grass and the land turn to sea.
Days later I made a bow drill with that wood. A coal was born. A whole circle of people blew the flame to life with me to start a fire for a solstice ritual. Sometimes it takes a whole community to relight the heart, and every time you relight the heart its for the whole community.
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