.

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times.
Come, yet again, come, come.

-Rumi

I have broken my vows, again.

So jagged and restless I go to her, laying my head in her lap. I notice how the fibres of her garment feel along my skin, how the light falls in streaks and shimmers. I feel broken and sick, undeserving of Love. Yet she listens with endless patience, soothing my wildness, her voice an ancient murmur, a heartbeat…

I am – of course –  alone by the riverbank, curled like a fox on a carpet of pine needles. For in my community we have no shining­-eyes grandmother, no peaceful grandfather. Only soil and rock.  Here, our elders have forgotten the original Oneness, their eyes dull, their tongues sharp. They do not seem to recognize love.

Is this their gift to us ­- that we may be blessed with its discovery?

Though the primary archetypal elder rests on bone and flesh, I say we can find echoes,­ octaves­ of this energy in the natural world. It matters little whether you find grandpa in the forest and grandma in the lake, or one in the vast open skyness of being and the other gathering towards the ocean. What seems more important to me is remembering that the natural world holds a field where we can more easily access our fuller selves­ and the archetypal wisdom within.

This loss of elder guidance ­- like all form, all language -­ has two aspects.  On one hand, it leaves me longing for the steady presence of one who has gone before. When I lose myself in doing, left ragged and crazed by a culture in active denial of the Great Mystery; when I refuse grace and destroy beauty; when I neglect the vision which tugs at my heart like a perfect, lost child… that still, somewhere a being is at rest -­ perhaps in the corner, perhaps in an equally old chair… a being who knows the unspeakable loss of human life, yet still glimmers with joy; who listens and speaks with the tenderness of a broken heart; a being who will embrace me till my eyes relax in Love and our laughter fills every room in the house.

Alone (and with no ideal grandpa or mountains nearby) I have hurt myself. How is it no­-one spoke to me about consciousness, soul or heart until I was well into adulthood?  Why was I not initiated as a man, as a custodian of this wild, gentle land?

Our fathers too, have suffered this loss. They were once children themselves.

Yet on the other hand: how beautiful! How beautiful life is, whatever story we weave around it. Perhaps the absence of elder wisdom in my community is what calls me over mountains to discover it for myself.

Only from the ashes of our forgotten wholeness may I have the experience of reclaiming it.

So go out, brothers and sisters, spill out across forests and oceans, inhale our meadows, taste our lakes and hear the wind. For there is a holding pattern of Love there, always.

Perhaps the earth loves to receive your outbreath as much as you love to breathe her in.

And whatever you may ask of a grandfather, ask of the mountains, of the storied rocks and cliffs; ask of the dragonfly and the kingdom of stars.

And whatever you may seek from a grandmother, find in the river­-clay, in moss and in moonlight; in wild flowers and honeybees, and deep within water’s sound.

One day, a Māori elder related to me this story:

“When I was a little girl, the old people would say: ‘If your heart aches; if pain smothers you; if only trouble fills your mind… don’t tell me…. tell it to a tree!’”

Some years later, I was walking through the forest in a knot of torment when this story returned to me. Spotting an approachable looking tree, I sat beside it and began speaking my troubles: exasperation at this constant pain and anxiety; the catastrophic cycles of binge-eating and fasting; the grinding poverty; the tearing ­apart sensation ripping at my whole life.

Then I entered the holy moment of my own presence.

I could cry; deeply, fearlessly, a great gushing wail slung out across the land. And the forest listened.  Or rather, it continued as it had always been.

I brushed the pine from my knees and bowed. “For you Love, more. For you, anything.”