The Anguish of Perceived Separation
I spent most of my twenties living outside on rivers and in caves, scrambling on granite, cooking on fires in dutch ovens, running barefoot. There was so much magic to it, a kind of magic I perceive more now in its absence.
My practice in this season of my life is finding that experience of touching in, being a part of / unified with land, while I live in a city and spend most of my time in my house. This perceived separation has been a source of anguish to me. Because I know the quiet of sleeping on decomposed granite where there is no electricity, what that does to a (my) nervous system over months. I know what it feels like to make fire out of sotol and cottonwood duff, and then cook food on that fire.
These are some of the most immense privileges my life is built on. I long for these sensations, this connectedness.
Recently a friend helped remind me that the separation is just perceived, there is no such thing as separating from earth, from land. Another friend I haven’t met yet Alexis J. Cunningfolk reminds me with their remembering: “All is land, there is no other.”
Suddenly my home has opened up as a renewed practice site for dissolving the delusion of this separation. RUNNING WATER YALL! I mean there’s the level of perceiving it as a gargantuan privilege, and yes to that! But there is this other level of perceiving it as water that is finding a way. Water is alive. Water is willing to run through these pipes, and water is life and it is in very many places flowing through my house! Can you even believe it?! It’s a miracle and I’m not joking one bit. But I’m laughing because it’s truly delusional to forget that it is a miracle. I am in contact with a fundamental force of life on our planet, in communion even, or can be, when I remember, while doing my dishes! WHAT?!
Another place this remembering is coming alive for me is cooking. Sweating onions is contacting wilderness! It’s participating in such an ancient human alchemy with other species on earth. This human, plus this wooden spoon (tree) plus this fire, plus this dutch oven, plus this onion. Wilderness! Aliveness! It’s everywhere. It’s right here in this breath, it’s right here in and of this box of sheet rock I’m nestled within right now.
Opening a can of beans is contact with life. It’s wilderness. Chopping cilantro, avocado, breaking up ground turkey in the pot my parents got as a wedding present.
This is one of those things that I go in and out of being able to remember, to contact. But I share it here to remember it myself, and maybe to remind you too.
Food is wilderness. Cooking is ancient magic. It’s sacred and there’s nothing more important I could be doing with my time when that is happening in my day. It’s a way I can remember myself as being among and of the life of this planet.