When I was a young man I was overwhelmed by the destruction of the planet. I cared so deeply that my heart was broken by the callous disregard for the environment that was everywhere in the 1970’s. I would spend many hours studying the night sky, and imagining my place within its vast expanse of stars.
One night in desperation I walked into our hay field and laid down in the tall grass there. Like walking into a tide in a sea of grass, I felt embraced by the welcoming stalks and leaves and ripening seeds. The grass was warm and comforting like a nest, pointing to the stars, the earth safe and familiar. The mist of its breath hung in the stalks like fireflies and a paean of night songs filled the air.
Above me was the panoply of stars. The summer parade of rapt silence that I longed for. Its seemingly timeless expanse was calling me home as I released my sadness into that space, into the warm earth and the hand of grass at my back.
I surrendered to the waves of star light that found me waiting there.
I didn’t realize it then, but the experience would change the course of my life.
. . . . .
Despite the dire appearances, the world today is healing. We are all swept up in a cycle of time and transition known to the Hindus, the Maya, and the Greeks. Today we know it as the Yuga cycle. We are all here to take part in a peak of transformation, each with our own gifts to bring. This dark age is rife with human ignorance, arrogance, and destruction. But great doorways are being opened to us to reconnect with our true selves as the dreamers of this world. The stars have changed, and I can feel their weight above me in that bright sky and that bed of stars.
We are here to turn the tide.
. . . . .
Today I am repeating that experience in another field, this time in daylight. The grass is ripe and drying yet cool in the sun, and swaying in a gentle breeze. Butterflies dip in and out of the blackberries and milkweed, and the first locust bears witness in the distance.
Beneath a flag of blue sky I lay down among the rising stalks. Somewhere near a raven calls and the breeze picks up. This time it is a homecoming. In that field’s embrace I relive the release into life’s moments completing a circle across forty years’ time.
I am right where I am meant to be, doing the work I set out to do, in a way I could never have imagined before now. I have only hope and faith in the work.
. . . . .
It is hard to know from the inside, from the storied paper of our lives being folded what form it will take.
A firefly, a butterfly, a raven, the locust.
They are all here with us, right on time,
adrift in that sea of grass and stars.
Turning, returning.
