Let yourself be woven into Earth’s beauty…..
Come into Earth
Into her Waters
Can you feel Earth’s body inside you?
Can you expand your smallness to hold her vastness?
Go down to the lake of your awakening.
Find the spot where she calls you inside her.
Her call is unmistakable. Her need palpable.
Slip into her waters, Your waters.
Feel the silkiness of her embrace.
Feel the slipperiness of her wisdom.
Pause to take in her wetness.
Let her water messengers change your beliefs.
About yourself, about her.
Be the creator and destroyer of your past oriented visions,
Of your worn-out belief systems.
As Earth renews herself every moment, season, eternity.
Let your stream flow into her rivers.
Let your river flow into her oceans.
Give into her embrace as you float on the surface
Of her ancient seas.
Become the love she expresses to her children.
Become the laughter she erupts from her blow holes.
Become the passion she pours over her waterfalls
Become the living source of Earth’s body.
As she lights up your path of awakening.
Into her Soil
Can you hear all the voices of Earth’s equalizers?
Can you enter her skin through the microbes that protect her?
Find the place on Earth where the remains of her actions
Are deep and rich and moist.
Hear the voices of mountain, pine tree, humus, and clay
In her composting covers.
You come from her soil, live by her soil, and return to her soil.
Here lies your past, present and future.
Find the memory of your ancestors
In her darker soils.
Sift through these memories
To find the threads to your future, her future.
Be the protector of her sacred grounds
Where she recycles her creations
Renewing her contract with life.
Enliven your soils with her hyphae threads.
Enriching your soils with fungi’s children.
Gather the elements that make up her seeds
As you plant a new pattern of seasons.
You belong to earth’s rhythms of growing and dying
By living her cycles of change.
Into her Soul
How deep can you reach inside the earth?
Do you stop at rock, water, crust or mantle?
Can you roam her inner chambers?
Walk down the hidden pathway into her soul.
See how boundaries are broken
As two souls, yours and hers, become one.
As soul sisters you are bonded
By your interweaving waves of time.
Patterns begetting patterns
That earth designs.
Is her soul with purpose?
Or just the thrust of evolution.
Is your soul with purpose?
Of just the earth’s reflection.
Join your soul with her living pulse.
Let your song sing in earth’s harmony.
As she sings you into being.
Hearing her soul’s voice
You come into earth’s awakening.
Poem by Libby Outlaw 2021
Essays and nonfiction prose by Libby Outlaw
Giving voice to the ways that we are woven into the fabric of the living organism of earth
Virus
Humans are deeply entangled with the microscopic world of virus, bacteria, archaea, fungi, parasites and protozoa. They live inside and outside of us, hold the living world together and break it down. Some are organisms surviving on their own, while others need a host to replicate. Virus is unique in that is just a string of RNA or DNA with a protein coat. It doesn’t have an energy source or nuclei. It comes alive in the relationship it creates with other cells of other organisms. So, what makes the virus turn on when in contact with another organism?
What draws a virus, a “submicroscopic infectious agent” to move into a host, penetrate the nucleus of a cell and begin to change the organism from the past into a new future? What evolutionary impulse drives a scrap of RNA or DNA to latch onto an organism that is complex and clever, demanding it adapt to the new design? Is it the virus whose information is pulled by time, or is it the host who has stayed in the past too long. Either way the relationship speaks from the space in between past and future, old ways and new potential, information and assimilation.
The space in between is where timing has yet to create a linear path, where the making and unmaking is not yet set upon its course. Here information is still being created. Virus counts on its host to put the information to use.
Virus is not quite a living organism, just strands of RNA or DNA floating, suspended in the air waiting to land on a surface where it can replicate. So it can send its message throughout the hyphae of cells. It is driven by the need to communicate, to join in the strands of information that make up this planetary world. We, on the other hand, are highly evolved living organisms with a coordinated integration of cells that creates are ability to have awareness, experience and create the future from our past. Our messages are sent through the threads of past prejudices, past fears and traumas, past striving for survival. Virus may be our only means to change the threads we weave into the future, as it breaks the bonds of cellular memory and opens the door to new possibilities.
Virus has no historic mapping. All of its existence is in the furthering of others. Scientists have no way of knowing the origin of virus. Virus leaves no trace, no fossils, no evolutionary tree. We on the other hand, are steeped in our historical mapping. We are bound by our ancestral traumas and fears, humanities cycles of hierarchy and control. To break these bonds of repeated cycles, we need the influence of virus who has no past.
Because all life begins in water, many believe virus began in water, evolving from green algae, one of the first life forms. Is this where genetic material escaped from and began to push and prod our evolutionary process? Or is virus the beginning of life, where genetic information grew out of the organizing of water into a complex territory of animal, vegetable and mineral? We contemplate the beginnings of humans as if there is a moment when all life turns in its adoration to a more conscious being. We separate ourselves from those behind us in the evolutionary process. We turn away from our genetic forefathers, thinking we exist for them instead of because of them. Our arrogance turns small organisms into enemies instead of allies.
Virus may be the beginning and the ending of an evolutionary current that circles around itself when the current is subjugated by the resistance to change. Without virus we would stay stuck in our separation and arrogance, giving no room for the living organism to grow and evolve. Be grateful for the beginning ones who hold the thread of our evolution, change and posterity.
By Libby Outlaw, 2021
2019
Taking up the Elder’s Cloak
How many years have you lived this life? How many lifetimes? What have you learned? What have you forgotten? What wisdom have you retained to share with the ones coming behind you? I ask these questions to call you to the task of taking up the Elder's Cloak. It is the time to set down your desires to experience one more thing in life, to accomplish one more act, to finish one more thing on your list and instead, turn to those behind you and give them the threads you have woven in your cloak. Give them freely without thought of ownership, of pride, of grasping. Let them flow off your tongue like secrets ready to be told. Let them fall into the paths of the younger ones as building material for their own cloaks.
We were made to move through the seasons of our lives like the leaves on the trees. Once a season, or in a drought, the trees release their leaves back to the earth. We too can release our threads of wisdom, fertilizing the seasons that follow.
Can you hear the call to take up the Elder's Cloak? I was talking with some friends, 50 to 75 years old, about what the younger generation needs in terms of help and guidance. I said they needed elders. The conversation then went to the wisdom of living a long purposeful life and how the young people think they know things before they have had much experience. That what they need is to learn respect for true wisdom through time and learn through apprenticeships and classes and studies.
But I realized this is not the relationship to the elder I was speaking of. I was more interested in why the elders are not seeking the youth. I began looking at how we have been given the opportunity to live life to its fullest continuing to enjoy the abundance of experiences with no sense of completion, only a yearning for the next thing. And then, our body's aging process demands our full attention and we enter the realm of western medicine. We fight for more time, for one more experience, for one more chance. We don't have the good sense to feel when our life has filled its coffers and choose to release the goods and wisdom accumulated in our stash.
When we continue taking what is given, ever filling our bellies with more delights, we limit what is returned, upsetting the balance of sustainability. We do not hear or heed the call to return what we have transformed back into the living organism. Instead we continue to add new experiences, accumulating until death, abandoning the Elder's Cloak.
To take up the Elder's Cloak is not to go around and speak your wisdom and criticize and correct the young. It is not to teach and prepare the students for what is to come. To take up the Elder's Cloak is to be fully engaged in releasing the threads of truth you have accrued, sending them into the world to be picked up by the youth as they create their own tapestries.
Your Elder's Cloak carries the wisdom of your deepest experiences, not in words or facts, not in story or boasting, but through your threads of understanding that will cling to the new threads forming. The warp of your Elder's Cloak is hidden and the timeline it weaves need not burden the young ones. The weave of your cloak holds the textures and colors of your life, without preference or hierarchy, giving bright threads for the younger ones to attach to. Your soul is the weaver of these bright threads, mapping your evolution.
The Elder's Cloak is full of pockets of abundant wisdom. When you wear it you find yourself emptying the pockets during the passage of your days, not holding on to any of the contents, giving wisdom freely. As the load in the pockets is emptied, the lightness of being calms the heart and brings you full circle.
If you cling to your memories, the correctness of an event, the Elder's Cloak will loosen the weaving and a new design will appear. Your history and sequence of events in life are hidden in your Cloak, while your wisdom keeps them in place. So when you free the threads of your wisdom, the history in your Cloak is unmade.
Like a tapestry that reveals a whole picture, hiding the individual threads that form it, your Elder's Cloak shows the whole truth of your experience hiding the individual threads of drama and memory.
When you take up the Elders Cloak you turn the world around to face itself. You shine the light on what has been made and what needs to be unmade. You let your threads weave into the future releasing them to the next building of an Elder's cloak.
There are many folktales, rich in myth and magic that use the Cloak to protect and hide and store the miracles in life. Whether the wise woman's, the Miller's, the crone's or the maiden's, the cloak symbolizes freedom from a choice made for us by another and a place to hide. The Elder's Cloak chooses to give away all of the miracles stored in its fibers and come out from hiding, giving freely its sources of beauty. The Elder’s Cloak protects the future of the organism by assuring an unbroken thread.
The cloak of Airmid, the daughter of the healer of the Tuatha de Danaan tells of the unfinished cloak that she had made out of the flowers and plants that grew around her brother's grave. The plants grew in the shape of him showing their healing abilities for Airmid to use. Her jealous father shook out the cloak before it was dry, scattering the plant wisdom. Airmid is still looking for the healing herbs that were dispersed. As you gather your own healing potions to grow your cloak, you will complete Airmid's cloak, taking up the wisdom of the Tuatha de Danaan.
So when is it time to take up the Elder’s Cloak? You must first try on your Elder's cloak, when you want to remember the wisdom of your years. Feel how it fits and where it might need some mending. Find the threads loosened by time waiting to link to younger threads. Don't wait too long to spread those threads back into the big weaving of time. Don't wait until the threads dissolve into dust. That balance between giving and taking, seeking and returning is crucial to our world at this time.
If you are ready to take up the Elder's Cloak, you give up the past and let your wisdom weave into the future. You let your curiosity look toward the new energies arising, letting go of the old ways of thinking.
If you choose to take up the Elder's Cloak you call forth a future that is the seamless thread of a longer time. by Libby Outlaw 2019
2024
Let your flow through life be woven by Earth’s elements of water, mineral, fire and air. Let your inquiry be in service to Earth’s future.