I can still remember the exact moment I spotted Lilikoi’s tendriled, amethyst body in a sea of lush green forest… her celestial scent co-mingled with the heady humus of the jungle floor.
It was a time of deep confusion, turmoil and dis-empowerment for me… I was questioning the integrity of my human teachers in the studies and work I was involved in and so, as a result, I was filled with doubt about my chosen path.
After many months lost in a dark disillusionment, this serpentine being broke through the trance of my abstract neurosis with her wild, clear voice and invited me into her sensual floral world.
She guided me onto different path, one that felt direct. One that felt true.
She revolutionized my practice and revitalized my being… she led me back into connection with myself, helped me to build trust in my own inner knowing and continues to guide me in the reclamation of my felt sense relationship with my living, breathing Earth body.
She follows me, calling me back into the larger conversation whenever I lose touch… reaching out to me whenever the shutters of separation fall back over my awareness.
When my senses interweave with her world, I feel drawn into a wider , deeper story of my Self…
A self that implicates the rhythm of my own breath…
The rivers of water in my ancestors tears and veins…
The bodies of ancient forests that once covered this world…
And the spectacular, violent and fiery deaths of the stars that seeded it…
Following that path back
I discover that nothing I touch is excluded from her flowering body…
That held within it, is a vast net of relationships…
From lichen to whales, from oaks to algae, from nebulae to that very 1st moment of the great flaring forth…
Somewhere along the line of my becoming, my people forgot how to call out the true names of their kin…
To trace the myriad intersections of mutuality that emanate from a single flower such as her…
to see the many ways we are tugged by those same threads…
The ways in which our bodies are woven into a larger pattern of becoming with all other bodies…
A pattern whose shape our individual eyes will never behold… in the same way a thread will never know the tapestry… or a single cell, the body…
Lilikoi is helping me to remember…
That nothing resides in a fixed and finite form…
neatly bound and packaged… belonging only to itself and responsible only to itself.
That instead we are altered and transformed as we move through our world… just as each of us alters the world in turn… My shape taking on and taken in by each encounter… made and remade by every interaction…
Try as we might to forge our independence, permanence and then rule what we see from a distance…
In truth, we are inextricably connected and hopelessly vulnerable to a dazzling array of circumstances to take even One. More. Breath…
Our life is sustained by these gifts pouring forth with such constancy that we can no longer see… a gift our ancestors made sure to acknowledge and taught strong the laws of reciprocity…
Yet the wound in our minds has built a wall against this recognition and forged deeply the habits of separation…
And this fictional boundary that stops at the edge of the flesh I call ‘me’ has led me to forget the true impact of each act…
But slowly, Lilikoi reveals to me, what was always there but I could not see.
That I am of the Earth’s body, and the Earth’s body is me…
Deep Earth Dreaming 