Here’s my newest SoulCollage(R) card, Reaching Toward a New World. I made it this morning to illustrate a poem, titled Risking Everything, that I wrote in 2008.
When I wrote that poem, I was at a dream retreat with Robert Moss at the beautiful Mosswood Hollow in the green forests of Washington state. The imagery evoked by the poem was drawn directly from the landscape, but the feelings expressed were those of the antevasin (border-dweller) in me. In those days I was living on the border between dream and waking, between the surface world and deeper realities.
I am still an antevasin today, but the border I straddle now is the one between the world as it is and the world that could be. It seems to me this current world is coming apart at the seams. The part of me that dwells in hope knows that as those seams are rent, a new and better world is being slowly revealed. The part of me that is all too familiar with grief fears the unstitching may take a very long time. That the new earth may be decades away.
While I’m not old, exactly, let’s just say I’m of an age where I put my pants on sitting down instead of standing (lest I fall and break a hip) and that I mark the passing of the weeks by filling my pill box (as I once did for my elderly parents). I recognize the very real possibility that I may not have enough years left to reach that fully realized new world. My mother lived to 92, so it’s possible, but not a given.
So, as I made this card this morning, that was the feeling I was leaning into. What it feels like to live in this age, this long dark night of the soul, this era of a crumbling world, and to be the midwives whose job it is to tend the long labor ahead, though we may never get to hold the child. To be the antevasins sentenced to live (maybe forever) in the liminal space between no-longer and not-yet.
And that’s why this poem has come back to me, now, after all of these years. Because its message is meant for this moment: that nothing is ever lost, but only transformed. That we are being called to risk everything, not to defend or protect, but to allow, with open hearts and hands, that which is striving to be born.
Risking Everything
What would you risk everything to defend, he asks?
An odd question to ponder in this land of the antevasin
In this sacred hollow where dreamers walk between the worlds
Where mortars turn to thunder and shrapnel turns to rain
Where pond skaters dance in perfect concentricity
Balanced on the tension between sunlight and water’s deep
Where abundant lilies hang heavy with seed
Their suckling roots digging deep into muddy mysteries at water’s edge
Where tadpoles lazily dream their tadpole dreams
Never imagining the wonder of the legs to come
Where bees rise, pollen laden, to carry their treasure
Across the green sea of meadow to foreign shores
Where blossoms morph into berries
Which will fatten Bear for winter
Where leaves, just now, are trying on their richest gowns
Anticipating their date with Autumn
When they will dance, giddily and freely, into the unknown
The Gatekeeper here, in this land of border dwellers,
Is an ancient Tree Spirit who,
Willingly,
Becomes the bulwark for that which will, one day soon,
Swallow her
Whole
Even now, her piney juices flow freely into alien veins
Ivy,
Fern,
Berry Vine
Their probing tendrils reach beneath her ancient bark
To harvest her deepest secrets and make them their own
She is Life swallowed by Life
Life becoming Life
Feeling no fear in her becomingness
Savoring the cool protective verdancy of her cocoon
Not knowing, or caring,
If wings are in the offing
It’s not the risk of everything that bothers me
It is the word DEFEND that feels so foreign here
From what is anything to be defended or protected
When nothing is ever lost, but only transformed?
I’d rather ask,
What am I willing to ALLOW at the cost of everything?
What am I willing to risk to dream at the edge of becoming?
An antevasin, a border dweller
Defending nothing, savoring everything
With heart and hands open and ready to release
As I continually wake from one marvelous dream
Into the next
~~~
SoulCollage® card images:
Glass ball surrounded by nature: Photo by Alin Andersen on Unsplash
Dead tree in a vast desert landscape: Photo by NIR HIMI on Unsplash
Sculptural figure reaching upward: Photo by Luis Enrique Rodriguez on Unsplash
~~~
Ivy wrapped pine photo: Photo by Anees Ur Rehman on Unsplash