[Thespiritexpress] (no subject)

[John Ivey]

5-9-24.

I have shown up on the periphery of a group of people who have roots in the
soil of Coastal California. A small online gathering occurs via electronic
airwaves and I have been invited to participate.

I am not even sure what this group of souls is. Who am I here? How do I fit?

 And even as I arrived, I approached knowing that disease is draining my
life force. The doctors all say I will be dead soon.

I approached and first met Ron in a ceremonial setting in the Kiva that he
has created.

 Sense that moment communication with Ron and this group which he anchors
has become important and significant in my life.

 As I watch the dissipation of this body and the life force sustaining it I
want to offer something back to this community that I do not fully
comprehend but which has fully embraced me. On that note I offer this story
of a trip I once took.


I experience a very different kind of community and awareness when I cross
the international border into Canada from Alaska and am able to spend time
with my friends in Whitehorse YT. This is partly due to the fact that these
associations originated from my 11 years as a staff member at a Buddhist
community in Trinity County Ca. These are people who traveled there for
retreat and/or Buddhist teachings. My function there was one of caretaker;
for the physical plant, the land, the animals and the subtle energies which
inhabit the land. I also cared for the human beings who traveled through or
lived on the land.



As a group of committed people, we had certain deeply developed
relationships with the land we were on, each other and spiritual practice.
We grew food. We grew home. We milled lumber from the forest.  We built
buildings. We created irrigation. My granddaughter was born on that land.



We all believed that together we were nurturing sustainable relationship
with the wholeness of all, rooted in soil, place and earth. The end came
suddenly. Unexpectedly.



Perhaps the greatest lesson for me is yet to find peace accepting that end.
This is a work I have still to embrace. Some form of ignorance clouds my
view.





That sudden end has left me with a confused and unresolved grief.  I turn
to Wildness for healing and to remember the wholeness of all.





In many ways I am still that misplaced Irish potato farmer running across
North America to escape the famine and poverty, charging the “Frontier”,
conquering, subduing all in my rush to find security and “New Home”. I have
crossed the frontier. I have been to the end of land. There is a road there
now.





The road ends at the Arctic Ocean in a moonscape of ice, frozen earth, neon
vapor lighting, steel frame buildings, monster machines crawling, and oil
derricks blowing flame into an endless Arctic night, as far as the eye can
see.



The magic of the Aurora Borealis and the vast Universe from which it
originates are still accessible. But you must travel backward to find them.





Thinking again of the international boarder. It was a powerful spiritually
healing experience to arrive in the United States of America from another
country and culture alone in a 16-foot canoe surrounded by boreal forest
and tundra; well north of the Arctic Circle.





The River!



You could place five Californias in the drainage basin of the Yukon River,
and still have room for Reno. I traveled for two weeks alone from another
country and had yet to reach Alaska when 190,000 thousand caribou began to
cross my river.



Bulls! Antlers broad and branched, in tattered shreds of bloody velvet
plunged, swimming with head high dignity as if water and land knew no
separation. They are the land come alive.



Calves! Splayed legged, gangling, necks stretched forward, eager snouts and
faces trained on their mothers bounding white rumps found themselves
immersed. Hooves paddling with natural instinct in the rivers wild and
strong pull. They are life becoming.



Five hundred animals at the sweep of an eye on one rivers bend. Float among
them. Embrace. The Porcupine heard on the Porcupine River and still 300
river miles from the Yukon. The drainage of this tributary alone would hold
one California.



The image of a man called Billy John arises in my mind. I met him at his
fish camp above Old Crow.  A man of the Vuntut Gwitchin people he is one
who hallooed me from the river bank and insisted with waving arms that I
paddle to his take out. These camps are all of a most rustic nature with
hand built cabins and drying racks for fish and game meat. I was hallooed
into several of them over a couple of days as I approached Old Crow.
Everybody had hot coffee on and insisted that I be fed.



I beached that canoe and we climbed the bank. Billy John turned out to be
an 84-year-old man. He had fresh caribou hanging and salmon in the smoker.
His rifle lay on a table within easy reach of the cabin door. I can't
remember his wife's name but she was sitting in a wheel chair wrapped from
head to toe in the afternoon sun on the bluff above the river. I reached
out as if to shake her hand at introduction. This old woman took my hand in
both of her's and I found myself captured. The capture moved from hands
through toothless smile to eyes that seemed to hold the shimmering magic of
a full on aroural display.  She never spoke a word.



I am reminded of a term that I learned from another culture entirely.
Dharshan, is Sanskrit in origin and the meaning I came to understand was to
find oneself in the presence of a spiritually accomplished person and
receiving blessing on a plane beyond ordinary mind. I felt that I came to
know the meaning of that word in a deeper way in that woman's grasp.



Billy John paused for that moment. Inside the cabin we shared food and
coffee. He spoke of just returning from his older brother’s funeral. "All
the Elders are dying." I heard those words, yet I am sure I do not have the
depth to grasp the real meaning of his gaze as he spoke. I did hear myself
say, "Perhaps now, you are the Elder." He shifted his eyes from a distant
horizon I could not see, found my own and responded. "Yes. Now I must be
the Elder."



I filled myself on the generosity of people I may never be able to
understand. Soon, strong water bore me on.





Three days later, I paddled away from the warm embrace of a people who
spoke directly saying “We don’t just eat the Caribou. We are the Caribou”.
I traveled alone from such a simple yet profound grasp of the
interdependence of all that lives, toward my own confusion in the
techno/modern world.





Some days after leaving the village of Old Crow, on a blustery stormy
afternoon as white caps on the widening Porcupine River threatened to swamp
my canoe; I lined it along a muddy and swampy river bank. Across the mouth
of a side slough on a high spruce covered bluff a small trappers cabin
appeared out of the wind driven mist. As afternoon moved toward evening I
found myself comfortable from the storm drying wet socks beside a wood
stove. I cooked food.





Bursting open suddenly the cabin door was filled with the silhouette of a
man! “This my cousins cabin!”  The words rolled out like warm honey on the
wood stoves radiance. He filled the small cabin with his voice, in that
broad, full, slow way that is the interior native’s adaptation of the
English language. He stepped into the dim light, surveyed the situation. I
could see other men gathering behind him in the fading twilight. He leaned
over me, a slight trace of alcohol on his breath, “This is my cousins
cabin”. Glancing at the others over his shoulder he looked back, he beamed
a bit, “It’s OK if you stay here. we’re from Fort Yukon and we’re going to
Old Crow for a wedding”







I felt the hair on the back of my neck and the tension in my belly relax.
We had a bit of a visit before the two-boat party blasted off up river into
the night with powerful outboard motors and lights.





As I relaxed into my sleeping bag I thought of that boarder, that straight
surveyed line, which we of European descent find so significant. That
international boarder I had crossed two days before. I thought of all
the separations created by human mind and rigid belief.  I realized that
all of it had little meaning for those whose ancestors had made this river
land home since “the beginning of time.” The village of Fort Yukon is in
Alaska USA. The village of Old Crow is in Yukon Territory, Canada. The
marriage of river, river people and the unspoiled wholeness of Wild Earth
know of no straight-line separation.
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