We’re told it’s “contained,” but what does that mean? It's erupting respectfully, mindfully, people-pleasingly?

No. This is not how nature works.

I wonder how long she can hold back before giving herself over to her sacral urge and creating from her native place of power. It’s only a matter of time, I think.

The last notable flow was in ’18; before that, ’83 — the year I was born. A seismic shift every 35 years or so, when something lurches from her soul and shoots up to the surface, shouting to the heavens, “I’M HERE! I’m ALIVE! I was only asleep, gaining strength enough to burst forth and birth a new creation.”

About 1 square mile of new land last time, where water used to be. Surfers whose fathers and their fathers had taken refuge in the sea at this particular point that’s now filled in like a graveyard plot after the family leaves behind sunglasses and tinted windows. It's that quick, that final.

We mourn the old, we curse the new. We cling to the comfort of a familiar past out of fear of an unknown future, never considering that it may be better, not worse. Not considering different does not always mean bad and new will one day be buried in the same fresh dirt and mourned in the same old ways.

But it’s hard to think like that when it’s coming at you in fits and starts, playing doggie or pickle with your house and your family and the places that mean something to you. It’s hard to imagine something beautiful and lasting forged from such violence, such chaos.

Especially since we’re a culture that sanitizes birth to an unnatural level of orderliness: scheduling dates for precise incisions to be made, ushering new life into an environment devoid of any trace of it.

Of course we’re surprised and repulsed and maybe even a bit excited by a spontaneous eruption. Secretly, momentarily, we are freed from our own false imprisonment under the notion that we can control nature. We’re released from the burdened belief that we know better and therefore we must do something.

Despite our best efforts to contain and tame it, life will — thank God — continue to thrive. And no amount of human reasoning is a strong enough force to contend with that impulse of creators to create for aye.

As long as there is life, there exists a seed for more of it, the potential for more than we could have previously conceived of. And in the seat of our desire, where nothing but emptiness once resided, an ocean of abundance now overflows.

P.S.sst…

I’m celebrating the birth of my book, Bowing to Light: A Mother’s Journey Through Grief, on October 24th at 1pm HST (4pm PDT/7pm EDT).

I’d love for you to be there! You can RSVP here and I’ll email you a Zoom link before that day. In the meantime, feel free to submit any questions you have for the Q&A.

Credits

Migration by Keith Kenniff, Goldmund. You can watch the stunning video, which is a study in perspective, here. Or listen to it on the Sportify playlist below.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rachaelmaier.substack.com