Sun House, page 98
Lore let out a weak “NO!” as they strapped her to the stretcher. Grady handed Jake her wallet: “LORE’S I.D.!” “THANKS GRADY!” Jake bellowed. “GREAT JOB BRINGING HER SO FAR! TAKE CARE ON YOUR HIKE OUT!” “No!” Lore whimpered as they hoisted her and set out under the blades. Grady closed his eyes as the downwash blasted him, hoping she saw the blind kisses he kept blowing her. But as the chopper lifted off Lore wasn’t even on board: she was free-falling off the breast of her beloved Mother into a dark, doped oblivion.
WHEN THE LIFE Flight rounded the high ridge downstream, its slamming and roar vanished as fast as it had arrived. Alone in the silence after twelve days of extreme intimacy, Lore’s parting distress left Grady gutted. He lay down on the indentations left in the bedroll by their bodies, let himself sob to release his dismay, and like a stone tossed into the deep end of Jade, plummeted into fathomless sleep.
HE WOKE BY the Oxbow to early sunlight and a murmuring of slow water so like Lore’s half-whisper that he remained motionless, surrendering to the sound. Time ceased to pass, replaced by a conjuring. Long portions of the sentences Lore had as much kissed as whispered into his ear flowed past in a current so slow and easy to capture that he was unwilling to let them flow away.
He left the bedroll, dressed, dug out his mountain journal, made espresso, seated himself in Lore’s stream-side chair, and set down every word the waters made available. With Grady’s apologies for gopher-trapping Jade’s gift in American English, but in support of Lore’s belief that his rendering of her half-whispers do anchor a few profound Lûmi truths, here are:
The Queendom-Come Shards
Lore’s first two sentences are inscribed on my heart:
The Lûmi name for Earth is Sun House. To tell you of Jade’s gift is to tell you why this name comes as close as words can to truth.
PARAPHRASING, OR SOMETIMES QUOTING, Lore’s half-whisper:
Deep inside the Earth, but directly connected to Jade, is a gift inherent and overwhelming which an occasional rare human can glimpse, or even access. This gift, if received in full, makes the ensouled and embodied Earth the Enlightenment Planet.
LORE’S IMMERSION IN Jade revealed what she called “a male/female polarity inherent in the universe.” Lûmi mythology gets at this polarity by describing the relationship between Earth and Sun. In Lûmi Singings, Volkmann marvels that the Sun is burning four million tons of himself per second. Without Sun’s total self-immolation the endless life-forms Earth creates and sustains could not exist.
THE LÛMI SEE a tragic side to Sun’s sacrifice. Earth is the intimate mother of the countless life-forms she and Sun create out of his energy and her body, but the Sun must remain distanced from their co-creations, lest he incinerate them.
Rather than pity the Sun, Lûmi mythology sees Sun’s isolation as a limitation that can be overcome. They call Earth’s core her star-heart. In Lûmi Singings Volkmann says this heart is not molten liquid, as many imagine. It’s an unimaginably pressurized 9,800-degree Fahrenheit solid. Yet even so, say the Lûmi, this solid is a house. The ensouled and embodied Earth is the house’s famous resident, but it also houses a more mysterious resident whose Presence Lore experienced in Jade.
SHE INTRODUCED HER immersion experience to me with the Informant’s favorite Rumi lines: By which way did Earth become connected in the womb with the beauteous Sun? By the hidden way that is remote from sense-perception. For the Lûmi, this hidden way is the downward path the meteorite opened up beneath the Mosque, allowing Jade’s waters to travel so deep they made contact with what they describe as “the divine female present everywhere and in everything.” But inside Earth’s star-heart this deity existed in what the Lûmi call a Beyond State—“an uncreated state transcending all forms of consciousness and unconsciousness,” Volkmann writes, “untouched by Time and Space, impervious to the heat and pressure of Earth’s core.”
The meteorite’s arrival, say the Lûmi, coincided with the divine female leaving the Beyond State to enliven Jade’s waters. Their myth about this says that the divine female summoned the meteorite “to make a Way,” establishing a point of intense contact with Earth, ongoing to this day.
IN LÛMI SINGINGS Volkmann introduces the divine female by saying that, just as every man, woman, and child is composed of a mortal body and an undying soul, and just as the Sun is composed of the mortal body blazing in the sky and an undying spiritual Sun—the Suraj, it’s called in India—so is Earth composed of a mortal planet body and an undying resident who is every earthly body’s spiritual Mother.
The Lûmi cosmos, Lore breathed into me in the half-whisper, was born of the arrival of this Mother from the Beyond. She is an Omnipresence named in languages the world over. She is the Gahan-ka’isht, the Lûmi holy of holies. She is the Greek’s Sophia, the embodiment of infinite creative power. She is Solomon’s divine wisdom, who because of her purity pervades and penetrates all things. She is Lao Tzu’s eternal Mother of All; the Mysterious Female; She who was before heaven and earth came to be. “And how I love Lao Tzu,” Lore said, “for humbly adding, I do not know her name.”
IN THE JADE rite Lore had memorized, the pilgrim is to enter Jade up to her clavicle, remaining receptive and free of thought as she immerses. She is then to open her hands to a Sun ray and bend it down into her heart, without a thought as to whether this is possible. What the Lûmi call “hidden properties of the heart” then shunt the ray down into Jade’s immeasurable depths. “But before the waters even reached my waist,” Lore told me in the half-whisper, “I had an overpowering sense that I’d entered the wound the meteorite left in the Earth, and that this wound is the activator, the awakener, of the Mother’s full creativity. And no wonder the feeling frightened you, Grady. Awake and active, the Mother makes our individual existence unnecessary the way a drop is unnecessary to the Ocean. But what becomes of the fragile individuality that allows a drop to be a drop? Joy! Fearlessly surrendering to all that She is, I felt Jade urging me to leave the marble slab and swim circles over the deeps created by her wound. I obeyed instantly.”
As soon as Lore set out swimming slow circles, “love and touch became inseparable, and it was the same loving touch, in the myth-language about Jade, that is the Mysterious Female’s great gift to the Sun. Without her touch Sun only experiences himself. Because of her touch, every least form that Earth and Sun co-create is now experienced by both of them as the fruit of Earth’s boundless creativity and Sun’s blazing self-sacrifice, blissfully fused.”
And the Mother of All is the infinite opposite of a being capable of performing just one act at a time. As Lore navigated the wound-water, her experience became intensely personal. “The lake’s temperature so perfectly matched my own that I felt no boundary between my body and Jade’s Mother-infused body, which gave me access to some of what’s hidden in her at the same time it gave Jade total access to what’s hidden in me. I sensed her experiencing me completely; felt her at-oneness with my cancer, my sacrificed breasts, my chemo and radiation; my every thought, feeling, fear, passions; my music, son Mu, Risa, all my friends, and the solace of being known in such compassionate completeness left me sobbing with gratitude.”
From that moment on, immersion in Earth/Sophia’s presence suffused Lore with shock after shock of wonder even when the Mother’s revelations were forbidding. Lore felt, graphically, how even as Earth is being decimated by humanity, she is giving birth. And these births are not like animal or human births. Earth’s child is not so much Earth’s infant as she is Earth herself, re-creating herself via innumerable nativities. Lore saw newborn creatures and objects unknown to her—things that perhaps didn’t exist till the moment Lore perceived them. The births were occurring in out-of-the-way places all over Earth’s body: extreme ocean deeps; extreme mountain heights; all the way down in Earth’s core; inside a far subtler world within our world. “Though Earth is the one giving birth to regenerative multitudes and Sun the one energizing them,” came the half-whisper, “the instigator of the births is the Earth/Sophia unity. The feeling was crystal clear: Earth/Sophia, being Creativity herself, can no more not create than can the Sun/Suraj unity not shine.”
SOPHIA OFFERED LORE a spirit-thread of Earth’s, Sun’s, and Sophia’s united love. The instant Lore took hold of it she experienced a gigantic circling movement shared by all life-forms, by the elements earth, fire, water, air, ether, and by forms that science considers lifeless such as gases and stone. Inside the great circling, what we call death is not a form’s end but its passage into a remaking. Innumerable living things born of Earth’s body, Sun’s energy, and Sophia’s creativity pass the departing form’s essence on to its next mortal vessel. In full surrender to this, Lore experienced the breakdowns and deaths of all created things and beings, herself included, as inseparable from the love in which she still stood immersed. “But as Volkmann insists, there is no understanding this. The great joy is beyond understanding.”
SOPHIA AIMED HER toward all the violence, unmaking, and strife of the Now and showed her hard things. She revealed that four humans are born per second in our time and only two die, an impossible imbalance Earth/Sophia must address for vibrant life to be restored. She revealed that the industries savaging Earth will not willingly cease, “so they will cease unwillingly, in disastrous ways they’ve brought down upon themselves.” She revealed that the exploiters of fossil fuels, especially, have weaponized Earth’s climate to a degree so extreme that the exploiters themselves have no more chance of escape than the species, ecosystems, and cultures they’ve sent into oblivion. “Yet, imperceptible to horror-struck reason, the love remains.”
SOPHIA REVEALED THAT the sixth Great Extinction will be terrible, yet no more permanent than the previous known five. She revealed that when gaping voids appear in the human-savaged Chain of Being, Earth/Sophia unleashes an evolutionary opportunism that fills these voids with creative speed, power, and variations beyond imagining. She revealed that it’s never too late to align with this creativity, for it lives wild in our breast through the centuries. She revealed that hope lies not just in the dwindling life-forms eking out an existence under the monstrous impacts of industry, but in new life-forms that will rise out of the industrial monster’s carcass. She revealed that what feels like apocalypse to those who savage the Earth is not a punishment meted out by a vengeful God, but a strict karmic equation balancing countless acts of violent human folly to restore fecundity and beauty to our ensouled planet’s body. She revealed that this restoration can only be done at nature’s regal, non-human pace, “yet no matter what sufferings befall humans because of that slow pace, the love remains.”
SHE REVEALED, IN the strangely piercing near-silence of Lore’s half-whisper, “that all created things and beings move unstoppably through death and rebirth because, just as Dogen has it, All the universe is one bright pearl that reaches to the eternal present, and in the eternal past never ceased to be. And just as Julian of Norwich has it, we shall be tempested, we shall be travailed, we shall be dis-eased, we shall pass through death, but we shall not be overcome, and all manner of wounded and vanished things shall be well.”
WITH THAT LORE’S lips left my ear, she rolled onto her back, we gazed up into blue morning sky, and when she spoke again she used her ordinary soft voice:
“To get to the heart of what Jade left me feeling, I’ll share an intuition of Risa’s. The night before I set out for Jade I called her to say I was going into the Inner Elkmoons alone to seek what Gladys called a being for whom, faced with the mortality of all that we love, we sooner or later burn. I feel my burning, I told her. I must do this while my body still can.
“Then take this with you,” she said, and in seconds she emailed a poem she felt might speak to what I’d experience. It’s by a thirteenth-century Marathi poet, Jnaneshwar, who Risa called great the way Sita/Ram are great. (Typical Risa!) I haven’t memorized it, it’s in my pack somewhere. But I remember the first and last couplets, and the gist.
“First couplet: Without the God, no Goddess. Without the Goddess, no God. How sweet is their love! Then come all these mind-stopping paradoxes: The universe is too small to contain them, yet they live joyously inside the most infinitesimal particle… The life of one is the life of the other and not a blade of grass can grow without them both… Two sarods making one music, two roses one fragrance, two lanterns one light. And the last couplet: Appearing separate, forever joined, mirrors each revealing the other, she is his pure partner and can’t live without her Lord, and He, the One who can do all things, without her cannot even appear!
She rolled into and against me, and again found the cave of my ear:
“The heart of a mountain is never its summit,” came the warm breath; the inner walls of mouth, lips, tongue breaking tiny bonds of saliva. “Like Jnaneshwar’s God and Goddess, the Elkmoon heart pulsing in Jade reveals a Sun/Suraj Earth/Sophia Twoness-in-One in which endless self-giving is creation’s purpose and its bliss. That’s why, in honor of Earth’s union with her mirrored beloved, the Lûmi gave our planet the self-giving name Earth/Sophia herself would choose: Sun House.
VIII. Holy Purchase the Great
(the impending Elkmoon Beguine & Cattle Company, autumn 2003 through 2016)
I am increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be
at least small pockets where life and character and beauty
and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those
from destruction, maybe that would be enough.
—Paul Kingsnorth
You have to have this sense of faith that what you’re
moving toward is already done. That it’s already
happened. And you live as if you’re already there.
—Congressman John Lewis
THE EVENT THAT banished NorBanCo from the Elkmoon Valley for good occurred six weeks after the Grand Lodge burned, when Tex Schiller and NorBanCo CEO Cecil Danforth were deposed by the insurance company investigating the fire. Danforth had phoned Tex beforehand to be sure their stories aligned, then wrote this deposition statement:
From my home in Dallas at 3:58 a.m. Central on the night of the fire, I spoke by phone with our excellent man in Montana, Charles Keynes Schiller, and was anguished to learn that our magnificent lodge and grounds had lost power, that countless burning brands driven by raging winds had overwhelmed Schiller’s efforts to protect the lodge, and that even as we spoke it was burning to the ground. Knowing all was lost, I prioritized Mr. Schiller’s safety and ordered him to evacuate while he still could.
Tex, meanwhile, had been scapegoated for a pine beetle plague that NorBanCo’s entire board had completely ignored, insulted by Danforth with a massive pay cut and demotion that reduced him to a security guard/janitor, and rewarded for a decade of service with an order to burn down the lodge he considered his greatest achievement. Tex’s rage over those betrayals are why, when he peeked out of the lodge on the night of the fire and saw that TJ had recorded him firing Kale’s crew at Danforth’s order, it occurred to Tex to emulate TJ, deploy the mini-cassette recorder in his office, capture his and Danforth’s last phone conversation and present his boss with a deposition surprise:
From the Grand Lodge veranda on the night of the fire I spoke by phone to CEO Cecil Danforth twice. During the first call Danforth had threatened me with career-ending slander if I refused to douse the lodge with diesel and burn it down. The diesel was meant to run generators to power the lodge’s and grounds’ sprinkler systems in case of a public utilities power outage. When that outage occurred, my crew arrived promptly to start the generators and protect the lodge, but Danforth ordered me to fire the crew, arrest them for trespass if they tried to save the lodge, lie that burning brands driven by high winds overwhelmed me, leave all my personal possessions in the lodge to make his lie more convincing, and burn it to the ground. His previous threats overwhelmed my better judgment and I poured the diesel as ordered. But before lighting it I called Danforth a second time, said I couldn’t obey his orders, and recorded the attached tape of his screams and threats as proof that I was acting upon his brutal demands. I have also attached two August 31 Western Montana weather reports proving the wind Danforth describes as “raging” had died down to 2 to 3 mph and reversed direction, as I tried to tell him, causing the fires to turn back on themselves and burn out. I have filed suit against NorBanCo collectively and Danforth personally for the trauma it has caused me to be forced to this reprehensible act.
When the nickname “NorBanCo CEO arsonist Diesel Danforth” proceeded to make business news headlines and talk-show punch lines, NorBanCo hastily put their Elkmoon Valley holdings up for sale, and opportunity tilted so entirely in the Elkmoon dreamers’ direction that schedules were cleared and travel plans made.
On November 4th, 2003, at 10 a.m., the firmly committed gathered at Testament Creek School to rough out a purchase offer for the land they’d given their all to protect. The group consisted of TJ, Risa, Jamey, Kale, Lou Roy, Ida Craig, Regina Cloud, Buford Raines, Ona Kutar, Max and Kira Bowler, Doty Nolan, Hub Punker, Eddie and Rosalia Dominguez, and two newcomers, Gret Greeley, who’d become indispensable to Eddie getting the cottage business going, and Gret’s partner, Luann Coats, an ace accountant helping us negotiate the financial mysteries of being an unintentional menagerie. Having stayed in close contact for the past six years, the group had established a thriving Highland beef consortium, the Craftsman cottage kit business, and put Kale in charge of a purchasing team consisting of Risa, TJ, Ona, Risa’s Seattle lawyer friend Bart Simonsen, and Regina Cloud, and Regina’s emailed summaries of the team’s meetings had kept everyone else so well informed that, at the schoolhouse gathering, Kale had only to take the floor and launch the proceedings.
