Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [78]
This awareness is not a state of achievement. It is like walking. I take a step and as one leg lifts off the ground I am close to falling. As I set my foot down again in the movement forward I find stability. My stability is measured by my orientation. With each breath I am on my way to falling into the whirlwind of human-created stimuli- messages, information, emotions, obligations. I can miss out on the moment with an amnesia that highlights my emotional response and obscures the wonder of the moment. I can also choose to breathe and create space to look beyond myself to my North Star and reorient myself to my aspiration—relationship and connection. Or I can choose to tentatively open my senses and my body. I can expand my moment to the landscape of which I am a detail and find inspiration in the trees, plants, minerals, bodies of water, and creatures of land, air, and water around me. I can be reminded by nature and become aware of my breath in the moment with my indigenous mind.
Our reality is held in place by agreements with time, space, and mind. Magic, medicine, and the creative impulse are the means by which we can renegotiate one or more of these agreements.
Through the automatic function of breathing, the work of the hands, words sent on the breath as sacred language, and the spaciousness of silence to engage the unknown we can transform both understanding of self, I-dentity, and the shifting web of relationship, We-dentity.
The breath is a coalescence point, geographic, metaphysical, and physiological with access to multiple dimensions of possibility. In the midst of inhale and exhale there is a point in space, time, and mind where we can meet the tension of intersecting perceptions with curiosity, wonder, and the willingness to let possibility overflow into the moment.
What generates hope and gratitude is the experience of each moment with a willingness to find possibility more invigorating than fear of the unknown. At each crucial point of intersection we can listen for the subtle ley lines where miracles are nourished.
The tension of intersecting perceptions is the generative energy that breaks open seed coats of consciousness and makes visible simultaneous multiple realities. Living right now with the earth as she changes with me and around me, intellectual-emotional turmoil and currents of possibility intersect. This intersection creates the tension to break open my indigenous mind.
What I am invoking by indigenous mind is the power of re-energizing our world with all of the hundreds of senses that open our awareness to the web of relationships that are the earth. The power of this consciousness to renew, adapt, and regenerate in new forms is without question more powerful than our single species. Accessing this means a commitment to slowing down, remembering, and re-conceiving on a smaller scale to reclaim intimacy with nature and its layers of species as an aspect of my own essential nature. In this way I remain aware of being uniquely indigenous to this planet through space, time, and mind. Indigenous mind is the innate ability to become aware of the earth at an intimate and dynamic level and respond to the messages and stimuli from the beings and life in the moment.
All humans are indigenous to planet Earth and every one of us has the ability to awaken indigenous mind. This is not a cultural lens but an individual awareness of our moment-to-moment presence as details of our locale. We can open ourselves to