When the color in the trees changes, when my spirit wants to explain something about the sun – this is what I want to pierce me.  The breeze that rises when I pray, the small pool at the edge of the river, the wild bleeding hearts that are carpet in the trees – I want these to fill me with awe.  If the spirit decides to answer a question I asked last month, I want to take in the quirky response.  I want the flowering of this to become my breath.  

If you show up on my doorstep, I’ll understand that you were summoned.  Or sent.  No difference.  All the same.  I don’t need to decide whether to let you inside or not.  Something else will have already done this for me.
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I am not naive.  In fact, working in the territory of trauma as I did for so long, I believe little.  The people I trust can easily be counted on one hand.  This is the result of having met evil more than once, having learned something about those who deliberately choose this way of living.  As you’ve heard me say, early in my career I was shocked to learn the who and how of this.  And by evil I don’t mean ordinary meanness, or even deliberate destruction.  But, I’ve talked about this elsewhere.   

No, I am not innocent of what is, but I choose which world I inhabit.  I know what feeds my spirit.  The deer and the coyote, the forest and the desert.  And water - the way it wraps around stone, plays with light and color, and teaches me something about the nature of creation. 

The reason I avoid the drama of movies and television, is not only about image, but also about the foundational nature or language.  I want words to reverberate in their archaic meaning.  If I go to the mountain, I want the totality of my being to be permeated with the understanding of what I am doing, of where I am going. 

When I write, sometimes I don’t know what I mean, until the writing is finished.  I want words to work on me, and take me further than I thought I could go.   I have heard people say that English is a ‘trade language’ meant only for commerce, but this is not true.  Or it needn’t be.  

For these reasons, I avoid dramatic sources trying to imprint my spirit, to dominate my imagination and permeate my world.  I have no obligation to those sources, nor to their messages.  By this I don't mean listening to friends in need, helping in an emergency.  

If I belong somewhere I am not, the spirit is strong enough to put me there.  If there is something I need to tend that I am not, the spirit will send the message. 

In the meantime, I will care for my consciousness with the tenderness of a good mother.  Or father.   With the knowledge that I have been given the reality I asked for, and it is to this I owe my allegiance.     

But in this flood of seeking the right persuasive words, little is said about the power of not speaking.  Listening to elders or traditional people talking intimately to a small group, you can ‘hear’ the ‘not said,’ the avoided noun.  With a gesture of the chin, place or direction might be indicated, the ‘home’ of the unsaid.  Maybe a word in Indian, a few enigmatic references. 
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One can grow wildly frustrated listening to this sort of ‘nothing ever quite said’ speech, until, finally, years later, what was not said falls into place, into meaning far beyond the literal words that were not spoken.  When this happens to me, I am left blinking at the depth of what’s arrived.  I look around to verify that I am still in my little house.  I am, though I also am not. 

If someone had explained to me this mystery in simple and ordinary language, I would not have arrived in this new world, in part because the words would have been uprooted from their imbedded home in a broad spiritual complexity.  The reverberation, the song of it, would not have stretched across the galaxy.  I would have had a few new facts, but not much more. 

Ordinary words explained to my ordinary mind would not have opened a new dimension.  No matter how well intended the communication, how careful and complete the explanation, my mind would not have been blown, and my world would have essentially stayed the same.  All this is in what was not said.

In the indigenous communities where I live, this resonant and reverberating way of speaking is still alive.   There are also some refreshingly different concepts.  The river is not different each time I step into it, because the river is a spirit that is not the same as the water.  I like to think of this as applied to my life and death. 

So, when something magnificent breaks through to stun me, when understanding reaches into the unknown and unknowable, I might not tell anyone.  Or I might hold something back from the telling.  Or I might follow the example of an elder and, with language, dance around nouns and direct descriptors.  Somewhat I do this in my novels when I write about the plants.   If I am respectful in how I speak, the spirit summoned arrives alive and whole and beautifully entangled.  

When we were in school in order to learn to live in the world, we nailed our words to the substance of material chair and material table, house, car.  We drew a shape and called it a ‘square’; we drew another and called it ‘circle’.  We thought we knew what a mountain was. 

Now that we are older we can let go of this hard earned understanding, and let river be who she really is.  We can make room for the dizzying realities embedded in words we say.
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As well as those we don’t.