Culture . NatureOn March 30, 2020 by admin

2019 was a critical point in our collective acknowledgement that we have poisoned our Earth. Perhaps 2020 is the year we reach critical mass in acknowledging that we have poisoned ourselves. This is something I have experience with.

The poison tree is easy to plant. Too often the poison tree is what we throw over our shoulders, in the trash, to the side of the road, into the ocean, because—for whatever reason—we want to be done with it. I’ve done that. I’ve planted the poison tree.

From the time I was about 14, I wrote every day. From my first poem, all I wanted to be was a poet. Through college, out of college. Then the loneliness of the writer’s life, my life, became too much. I didn’t choose to throw my purpose to the roadside. I just stopped taking my voice seriously. Without a glance, like tossing an apple core driving through Utah, no one noticed.

Except my body. When I stopped taking my words, my magic, seriously, they started talking back to me. The cancer started about then, says my surgeon, and it grew. It metastasized. It was the week of my 32nd birthday that I decided to start a blog—and learned that my thyroid was overtaken by cancer that reached up into my neck. My 5th chakra, my voice, begging me for attention. The block grew because I had grown it. I had stopped heeding my purpose in the world. I had stopped hearing the voice of my own soul. I had lost my creative force—I had thrown soil and leaves on it, and vines had grown up over it, choking my voice further. My body was speaking to me. The soil and leaves were my own, the vines were my own—my cancer, trying to draw my attention back to the place of illness, asking to be seen, be healed.

When I got my cancer diagnosis, I immediately found myself rejecting the language of the fight. The “war on drugs,” the “war on illiteracy,” the “war on cancer.” Cancer was me. Cancer was my own body speaking to me: wake up! Return to yourself! Heal yourself because you have a purpose to live out. I’ve received a couple diagnoses since that first, and my choice has been to stop fighting, and instead to love. To love myself better, to care for myself better, to find the place of imbalance, and right it. It was fighting myself that brought me illness, only love would bring me health.

Our bodies are speaking to us now. Whether each of us is sick or not right now, I cannot lose this moment of being asked—begged—to face our illness.

There are so many ways we have planted the poison tree. There are so many ways we are ill. I too often gather them all up into my arms and into a piece of writing. I can hardly keep myself from it—because they’re all connected. They feed each other, feed on each other.

I don’t want to make that mistake today.

So, I reach back to the Medicine Tree. I reach back to what I wrote this past week: the Medicine Tree is love. And one thing we can do to start healing, is to listen to ourselves. When we learn to hear our intuition, we are learning to hear our deepest voices. The clearest vibrations of who we are made to be and trying to become. This alone, making the choice to hear ourselves and know ourselves, sends out a vibration of love and healing that pervades every other choice.

The decision to hear our own voices is also to hear and speak and feel and act from the acknowledgement of our interconnectedness and individual places in the world. The two are intertwined. When we are doing what we are here to do, we are in our right place in the ecosystem of the tree. Folks around us respond to our light and intention. They are encouraged—find heart—to hear their own voices. They want to feel how we feel when we are doing what we are made to do. And we more readily find where we belong, where we can live out who we are, and those who need our unique gifts.

When we listen to our intuition, we are becoming our deepest selves, finding our places in the world, and our gifts are feeding others as they feed us. This is the symbiosis of interconnectedness. This is a cypher of movement and balance. The medical communities of the States may not be able to agree on a definition of “health,” but many Eastern cultures have. The simplicity of it resonates in the intuition: a balanced state. Balanced states allow us to life meaningful lives. Movement is inherent in balance; balance requires constant shifts, give and take. This is love.

I’ve heard that the coronavirus is an overabundance of both moisture and cold. Some folks are dying from it. Others barely feel the symptoms, in some cases passing it on. I wonder if those who suffer greatly have naturally cold/ wet systems. I wonder if those who weather it with less struggle have warm/ dry systems where the virus cannot thrive. Balance.

In the circle of any community where each person is able to live out who they are, giving their gifts and receiving the gifts of others also supported in living out their born purposes, there is balance and there is movement. There is giving and receiving. There is love.

The great Medicine Tree grows with each choice we make to hear our intuition. The seed starts small, like all seeds. It may begin with opening one’s mouth to speak and suddenly pausing. There was a hesitation, an urge from just below the solar plexus, asking pause. And then a word, or a color or lyrics from a song that beg our attention, pull us toward something. It probably comes while we are driving, listening to music on the train, or—now—sitting with our breath in the morning, taking warm showers before bed. A moment of insight, an inspiration. And the more attention we give our intuition, the more it speaks to us.

I know too many in the world have tried to take these voices from us. Histories of torture and oppression have done this. We live in a society now sick with ego. Sick with decisions that choke our skies and our lungs. That choke whole neighborhoods, forcing slums and children’s prisons at the border. We live in a world that has for centuries tried to silence who we are because our purposes are bigger than they can imagine. The poison tree may be high on the hill, but we can see it, and we can plant the Medicine Tree that is love in its ashes.

Mitakuye Oyasin,
Mariah