[Thespiritexpress] (no subject)

[Jima]

John,....I will read your story tomorrow when I am not so tired.  For 
now I wanted to tell you how dear it is to have your presence in 
Friday's Shaking yoga. Sitting in the meditation group with you is a 
gift to us all.

With much love.......Carlie



On 5/9/24 9:25 AM, John Ivey via Thespiritexpress wrote:
>
> 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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