A Letter to the World
To those who long to live aligned with Life - with her laws and her Truth, and who know in their hearts that the true way of life is love. I’m offering these words for those who long to live with love in their hearts, in their lives, and in the whole world. For those who long to engage with Life on her own terms and to live according to her inner laws. Mainly I’m writing for those disillusioned with the ways of the world – the empty, superficial, vacuity of living the unjust capitalist way of life. I want to name the poison seeping into us through so called culture and civilisation. I’m writing for those whose song cannot be heard amidst the din of the overculture and who long for a gentler way of walking on Mother Earth. For those who feel our belonging to mother nature in our bones, who hear the whispers of her wisdom between waking and sleeping. Who long to wake up from what passes for wakefulness in this deadening and deafening world in which to live with the culture is to let the soul in us die. For those whose soul is crying to truly live, to be set free from the given world so she can find her way back to nature, to oneness, to the Source, and to drink again from the Water of Life.
If our souls are to revive we must begin again by returning, remembering, and restoring ourselves once more to Great Life. The whole point of life is to remember who we truly are even as our culture denies it. Our souls demand that we remember that the whole point of life is:
To remember who we are
To remember where we came from
To remember where we are going and how to return.
To remember that life is ongoing emanation and return.
When the small life of culture blocks the remembering of Great Life we fall ill collectively. The water we drink is poison to our soul and we turn on each other in ever more vicious fighting and decreasing circles of individual concern, no longer able to see all of life as our family. We try at all costs to protect our own little corner of life but when we build walls around us we cut ourselves off from the flow of life, from the river of life, the fire of life, and from the light of life. We’ve come to think that it’s ok to construct self-contained units of ‘I’m ok and I don’t care about you.’ Yet these are nothing more than delusions because Great Life cannot be cut up into bite-sized pieces of sweet tasting candy for the few who can build walls of denial around their privileged lives. The very act of seeking to live for one’s own self causes that life to rot.
We are not designed to live alone and to ignore the plight of others. Yet, this fiction and delusion has been adopted at the collective level and given the patina of ‘truth.’ But no matter how big a lie grows, it remains a lie and will never be truth. Even when language itself is misused and abused to call lies truth and truth lies – a lie remains a lie and truth remains truth. The lie detector of our heart, our soul, and our inner knowing knows the lie and senses the rot.
Immersed in a culture that seems to offer no way out, the soul demands a way out. The soul is born to be free and to find her way home to the Source of Life, to drink again of the River of Life – to see again the true Light. The soul cannot rest in the untruth of this world and she rises up inside us saying,
‘If you do not remember the way home, if you do not know how to bring me home, I will bring us both home. I will find a way out of culture, out of these false walls that supposedly keep us safe, supposedly protect us from the underbelly of war, genocide, poverty, famine, injustice, inequality. I will find the way back to nature, to peace, to sharing life with all beings. I will divine with the hazel rod of my intuition where the fire of life still burns, where the river of life still flows, where the light of life still shines. I will not rest one more day in this make-believe world of artifice and deceit, of selfishness and delusion. I will go out into the woods, to the trees, and the stars, at dawn and at dusk, walking nights and days beneath the sun and the moon. I will go to where wisdom lives and I myself will find the way home.’
Our soul is born of wisdom, her mother is Sophia, her lineage is ancient. She will not suffocate any longer in this fiction we call privilege and the so-called ‘first world.’ She will cast it all off and roam the shorelines, the mountains, the woods, the riverbanks. And I will join her to roam at dusk and at dawn, in sadness and in joy until I recognise myself once more at home in the world. I will not rest until I find my true belonging in the world of the wild. This carapace of culture, I will it throw off and wait, cold if needs be, until Life weaves her shawl of wisdom around me so that I may begin to live the life my soul was born to live. My soul will guide me home because only the soul will recognise her true home.
We thought to build worlds within worlds, to carve up the world and divide it out unequally according to whims and wishes. But Life will not be carved up and divided out. All that we do she will undo to remind us that we are guests on this sacred earth, that our life is a gift, and that it is a privilege to be alive at all.
We are specks of stardust in a multiverse whose size defies our imagination, whose intelligence we cannot begin to understand, and whose nature is a love we still cannot fathom. Yet, we persist in the naïve belief that we are masters of life on earth. That we dictate the terms on which we will live and the terms on which others may live. That we decide who eats and who doesn’t. Who lives and who dies. Who goes to jail and who remains free. Who enjoys the beauty of the world and who doesn’t. We have gone mad. Mere guests who have taken the world hostage to our greed, our fictions, our delusions. We’ve built little citadels that are rotting before our eyes, walls of self-delusion crumbling as the Soul of the World is crying out to be exhumed from under the rubble of ‘civilisation’ and the overculture. She is crying out for Nature to be released from the stranglehold we put on mother earth as if she was a workhorse, demanding that she give us her riches and her gold, her jewels, her food and her water. Who of our species truly believes that we are masters of this majestic universe? Who among us truly believes that this is our kingdom to do with what we will? Who is naïve enough, stupid enough?
My soul is breaking free at last. She has emerged from under the rubble and is finding her way back to the woods of imagination and wisdom; to the waters of the wild and of life; to the Light that gives life to all. One day during a vision in the woods she brought herself back to the Source and reconnected with her true essence and being. And in doing so she has brought me home to my own truth and to the truth of Life which are One. She has shown me again who I am in my truth, freed me from the polite fictions of culture, shown me my reflection in the River of Life and allowed me to know myself again in my true and wild nature. She has helped me to remember myself once more as Fiadh na Fírinne – the Deer of Truth, whose duty it is to speak truth. She has given me back my song and the courage to sing. Has reminded me of the songlines that are mine to share. Has reunited me with other souls who are equally seeking to walk ar slí na fírinne, seeking to walk the path of truth in their own lives.
This type of truth cannot be found in toytown. It cannot breathe in the suffocating smog of capitalist culture. It will not drink the poisonous water of rivers cut off from the River of Life. Truth is Truth and those who long for truth must find a different way to live. We must let our souls lead us out of these gated and gilded cities to find again the wisdom of the wild – to leave behind the pretence, the artifice, and deceit of a world that lives without a soul. To return to the woods and the waters; to the poets and the visionaries; to the wise women and the medicine men. To gather again in community with nature and not against her; open to her wisdom and not ridiculing it. We must remember how to remember. We must learn again how to live with Life, according to her ways and her laws, not ours. We must re-learn gratitude for the gift of life; rediscover humble appreciation of all that is provided for us to live in peace with each other and in harmony with all of life. Until we let our soul lead us safely home we are only fooling ourselves that we are alive at all.
Blessed be Fiadh Bán den Ghrá, Fiadh Ruadh den Nádur, agus Fiadh Óir den Spioraid Naofa (the White Deer of Love, the Red Deer of Nature, the Golden Deer of the Holy Spirit) who have brought my soul safely home to the Source, to where the water of Life flows directly out of the Light, who have shown me my reflection in the water as Fiadh Bán as Tír na n-Óg, (the White Deer of the Otherworld), who have brought me to the mountain stream that is Nechtan’s Well – where the Otherworld enters this one and gives us the clear waters of Life to drink.
Beannacht ar an mbeatha naofa seo, in Eireann agus ar fud ár dhomhain naofa alainn.
(Blessing to this sacred Life, in Ireland and around the entire sacred and beautiful world.)
Image, Clew Bay, Mayo. Sunset.