how many meditations have a zipline?
As we go through this destiny-laden time, I am currently extremely interested in uplifting us, healing us and connecting our souls with the soul of the world. To that end, I give you Vision 89 - The Green Temple - a meditation that, yes, features a zipline.
Until next time,
Jess
“In film production, “back to one” means returning to the starting position for another take. Same scene, same setup, but this time you get to choose: same performance, or try something completely different?
Life operates on this exact principle, except most people don’t realize they’re in a movie.
Pattern recognition at the level of soul curriculum. The ability to see when the universe is offering you the same test in a different costume.
The secret is recognizing that these cycles aren’t punishments. They’re upgrades disguised as chaos. Every time life calls “back to one,” you get to choose a new character to play. Same soul, different costume. Same lesson, different backdrop.
Right now, the energy is so thick you could cut it with a butter knife. People are feeling the end of cycles everywhere. Old patterns dying. New frequencies coming online. The tower card energy that makes everyone nervous but makes my nervous system feel like it’s a psychic with a wait-list.
Your weirdness isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. The same brain wiring that makes you impossible to pin down, impossible to categorize, impossible to keep in one lane is exactly what makes you a natural cycle-breaker. You were built for this kind of navigation.
Today is a day we are going back to one. The summer is gone, and the real work begins. The question isn’t whether you’ll survive the reshuffling. The question is who you’ll choose to become when the director calls action on the next scene.
The cosmic casting call is open. Your move.”
“AI is made of people.”
- Jaron Lanier
“Our culture is one of ever-increasing nowness. We see an endless slew of information, but the vast majority of that information is about our current moment—even if it is good or smart or true information, it is about what currently exists, what is currently being thought of, what is currently controversial or deemed worthy of discourse or of praise. News.
We are living in a dehistoricized society.
And this dehistoricization creates depression and desperation.
When everything feels unprecedented—wars and economic malaise and rising fascism—then it also feels inescapable. We cannot logically or methodically or successfully react to these things, whether emotionally or materially, because we cannot see their patterns, and thus cannot enact the counter-patterns generations before us did to escape or survive or solve them. The world was bad before too. But we are uniquely convinced it is now uniquely bad, and thus unresolvably so.
This is much like a depressed person thinks. One of the main features of depression is a seeming never-endingness. When you are in a mental health crisis, you often cannot see forward or backward into the past or future. You feel the now is how it has always been and how it always was. If you do think about the future, all you can do is project the present onto it, foreclosing on the possibility of something better by painting over it with the crushingness if your current mental state. And thus depression becomes a self-perpetuating system of stasis. You make your own future worse by assuming it will be as it is now.
Our society works similarly: we are paralyzed into inaction because we can only see what is directly in front of us, and thus cannot understand what action means, because action requires temporality—it requires a movement of and change over time. And if we do not understand a time beyond the now, there is now way to have hope. All we can do is project the present onto the future, creating that self-perpetuating system of stasis. The genocides will get worse. Global warming will kill us all. What’s the point of working when the world outside is burning, as the pandemic-era meme went.
Well, because, it’s not necessarily true that the world outside is burning. Or, though it may be partially burning, that doesn’t mean our current lives are pointless; that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about the fires. We simply must figure out what we can do.
You are what you repeat. And you repeat what you know. If you do not know something, you cannot repeat it.”
- P.E. Moskowitz, Mental Health
I Am Vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
--Sylvia Plath
(I CARRY YOUR HEART WITH ME)
by E.E. Cummings
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
- e.e. cummings
INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.
- Ada Limón
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts… Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
- Herman Hesse
“We’re all — trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria — pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship.
Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.
We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.
Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationship.”
- David George Haskell
LOST
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
David Wagner
MY NAME
One night when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become—and where I would find myself—
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.
- Mark Strand
"In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful."
- Alice Walker