Good morning y’all,
I’m thrilled to greet you today after several weeks away.
Today and next week I have two vignettes that circle wide and then closer in on the theme of AI as I’ve been exploring it in the quietness of my interiority for the last few months, wondering what/if I want to share anything. I know the content about AI is proliferating almost in pace with the evolution of these technologies themselves, so I have been hesitant to write. It is a crowded field. But the pieces that emerged flowed so organically (finally!) this week, I can’t help but share.
I’m excited about both, and the way they complement one another.
Thank you as always for being here. It is a profound honor and my favorite activity to write to you as often as I can.
With love,
Rachel
(No) Spirit!
Gradually waning snowpack in the mountains encircling Santa Fe reveal hydration paths through the high desert with refreshing surprise. Familiar trails are suddenly marked by mid-hike dips for paws and palms, trickling waterfalls drip through tiny ravines, invigorated shocks of moss and lichen blanket rocks. And now, as the temperatures begin to linger above 60 degrees for longer, the desert is just beginning to burst into an extravagant bloom.
Two weeks ago I arrived for work at a 450 year old farm on the serendipitous day the acequias1 (a subject worthy of its own post one day) were opened for the first time after the long winter. Water gushed through generationally-stewarded, cooperatively-governed channels so loudly I could barely hear the other farmers just a few steps away. The wisdom of this ancient technology palpably vibrated through the Earth with extraordinary force, a deliciously cacophonous celebration reverberated in our ear drums.
This is the ecstasy of the high-pressure release valve from freeze to flow that feels good in all bodies.
The land sings its aliveness through an abundant fertility. When people purchase farm greens from this beautifully tended land at the Saturday market, we hear everything from "Wow! Your greens just feel so alive!" to "I swear this lettuce is calling my name!" to "I feel like this lettuce is singing!" And Santa Fe can be pretty trippy but we hear this from everyone -- a family of Minnesota-based tourists, road-tripping retirees, six year old children.
Last Sunday afternoon, I intended to publish a different Substack post but the words were stuck, strangled, and stiff. Instead, I willed my weighted body outside and lumbered along one of my frequent routes through the mountains, pushing through overwhelming fatigue. The late afternoon sun poured out generously, casting long shadows into the valley where my puppy pounced in a cascade of meltwater. An elder man stood on the other side of the creek. Shocks of white hair poked haphazardly out of his baseball cap. He stood wide on his thick tree trunk legs, reddened and bloated with age. We watched our dogs playing together in the creek.
"I wouldn't be here if not for her. I just don't have it in me," he said with strained speech.
"I know. I'm exhausted myself. She pushes me out every single day, even when I don't feel like it, and I'm grateful for that."
"It's not that I'm tired. I just... I just don't have any spirit...You know? No spirit!" he implored with a tone that felt desperate for understanding, to be witnessed through his surrender to the incompleteness of language.
Usually I'm quick to infuse my energy into this kind of crack into another's humanity -- to engage, explore, unpack -- but in that moment I felt the exact same way and struggled to speak out from this very place in myself, my mind stifled, my heart clouded.
Is it grief? Chronic pain? Allergies? Illness? The pressures mounting in the collective psychic field amidst intractable gun violence and widespread planetary extinction and the relentless assault on women's right to choose and trans people's right to life and migrants' (who should be called refugees) right to freedom, and...?
His words hung between us for a moment until he called for his dog and pressed up the trail. I turned around and lunged up the steep incline in the opposite direction. No spirit. I felt my throat clench and my eyes burn. But in mere moments of parting ways something ineffable shifted. My nose met the breeze fragrant with piñon and juniper and budding flowers, my ears traced the sound of the gushing spring behind me, my eyes gazed upon the bright green explosion all around me against bluebird sky and red clay.
Spirit is the sensorial conversation I'm enveloped in on the path at all times. Spirit is all around me. Spirit is never absent.
I am only asked to return my attention. I am only asked to remember that I am embraced in an ancient story, told by a billion spirits, thousands and millions of years old. This elder and I are both young out there in the family of beings and our quiet place of honor in the unfolding is a commitment to listen, to revere, to relate.
If I'm actually listening, the conversation amongst the spirits is loud enough to drown out the anguishing impact of the ruminative mind. When my spirit feels far, when dread creeps in, when an unshakeable despondence settles in my bones... the animacy of everything is the constant invitation. I find myself contained within this wholeness and I find my own wholeness. Depleted spirit may be the outcome of a vast array of symptoms, but ultimately as I move through life, I feel that "no spirit" is most entrenched by the distancing effect of the critical mind and an under-appreciation of the sheer magic that is life itself.
Last night I met a 64-year old man who stepped outside his front door one afternoon and was frozen in shock as a 30 foot wall of water pummeled toward him. These biblical monsoon-season flash floods are only getting more extreme in climate crisis. The home he built by hand was swept off its foundation and carried down the river. It’s an understatement to say he was lucky to survive.
We spoke at length about our near-death experiences, and about being artists, and about how it can take nearly losing your life to appreciate that the very fact that your limbs move, that your fingers grasp an instrument, that your mind conjures creation is supremely miraculous. How easy it is to forget this and grow weary with impatience and embittered with harshness.
I'm spending more of my days with an old friend I knew from the Bay Area who moved to Santa Fe a few years ago. She is only 35 and very recently in remission from an intense battle with breast cancer that she persisted through with no familial support and sparse financial resources. She is a bright burst of radiance and effusive laughter. She has been a valuable instructor on these themes.
"I have no time for people whose problems are entirely self-created," she said a few nights ago, and I know this statement can feel cruel, reductive, overly-generalized... but I also know by knowing her that she has immense compassion for people, and what she means by this is not judgmental but healthily boundaried after enduring a near-death catastrophe. This perspective earned from riding that dangerously thin edge between life and death is the sharp blade of discipline that slices through distortion and distraction at the heart of every spiritual practice.
It is to say: we can become destructively self-obsessed in countless compulsive ways when the story runs away from us in a thousand directions and then lands us in a foundational lie buried inside us too young: I'll never get out of this, I'll always be suffering, I'm not enough, I'm wrong, I'm bad, I'm broken...
We are invited by life to nourish a spiritual wellspring within ourselves and community that can offer pragmatic wisdom and collaborative skillfulness to come back. To come back.
Increasingly my attention is attuned to the must humble aspects of life as a portal to contributing to the most pressing issues of our time. Amidst countless converging crises, my heart is drawn to transformation as a relational act not solely intellectual, philosophical, cerebral.
When I walk through the forest or traverse a rocky cliff, I see myself more clearly through the presence of an enduring witness, through the absence of relentless distraction. When I approach sincerely, the fundamental issues of my life are revealed and when I meet what's unprocessed within me in this context, I am called into accountability. The necessary values to successfully negotiate these issues as a responsibility to tending to the relational field all around me are fortified by this supreme intelligence of the Earth and the universe.
It is an act of honoring the dignity and the boundaries of communion with other sentiences and intelligences, to let ourselves be changed and grown through this companionship, and to integrate as humankin more consciously, intentionally, and lovingly into the broader web of all creation.
Thank you, I said, with the plunge of my palm into the icy rush, feeling my own animacy return within this ecology of aliveness, this ecosystem of intelligences.
Thank you, I said, as I apprentice to tree roots cracking through rock to reach that trickle of water to share it equitably with their kin and bloom a sprawling forest.
Thank you, I said, as I study the watershed that sustains this high desert oasis and humbles us in appreciation for transforming spindly branch and cracked dirt into swelling fruit and fertile soil.
Thank you.
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“The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees – to learn something by being nothing.”
— Mary Oliver
“Acequias stem from a blend of civilizations whose communal culture still thrives in the region. The ditches evolved over thousands of years in the Middle East. They spread to Spain during the North African Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century. When the Spanish arrived in the Southwest, they used these irrigation techniques to build on similar canals that Pueblo Indians relied on to grow corn, beans, and squash.
The old irrigation systems still function in much the same way as centuries ago, under principles of equity and cooperation. The word acequia, of Arabic origin, embodies not just the network of canals, but also a complex system of inherited cultural norms, shared responsibilities, and democratic decision-making. ‘It’s a privilege to use water communally,’ Lamadrid says. ‘The acequia is physical and spiritual and communal values.’ ” - read more here.
Thanks for a lovely reflection, Rachel!
I appreciate you giving voice to the journey from exhausted and frazzled by world events/energies to experiencing the spirit ecology of the mountain: the rapture of blossoming spring!
Today, Honey, sat outside for hours under two trees watching for squirrels. I felt compelled to join her and admire the swaying green leaves.. blissful and spacious.