Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow 9-10am EST ~ Grounded Again (RIP SHB)

A tribute to Stephen Harrod Buhner; working with the root chakra again; remembering a trust deeper than human relating.

Dear Friends,

I made this mandala as I walked tonight at sunset. The old sunflowers grabbed my attention first. They stood in a clump in an overgrown meadow…in rows, like they’d been part of someone’s garden. I remembered these sunflowers from September when we moved to this part of the county. It was still hot then and they were in their last days. To see them black and frozen now felt both ominous and somehow reassuring (it doesn’t seem possible does it?). Like the inevitability of change, impermanence, death.

As if to stress the point, when I ventured into the high grass to pull these heads from their dried stalks, I stepped on something oddly oozy and squishy and … orange? It was an old carrot that had pushed up from the earth and had been decaying slowly for months. I looked and found another, and another. I felt sad that these beautiful foods had gone uneaten. I realized this old garden had been someone’s project once. I wondered about all the food we miss, all the gifts from the earth that go unnoticed.

The more I learn about plants, their healing powers, and uses, the more I feel the loss of this practical magical earth wisdom. Robin Wall Kimmerer says in the marvelous, Braiding Sweetgrass, something like, “There’s not a sickness in the world that can’t be cured with something from the land.” With the loss of our friendship and kinship with the natural world, we’ve lost a great teacher of trust and knowing beyond the mind.

This point was driven home in December when a personal hero of mine, the herbalist, Stephen Harrod Buhner passed over. He was a great friend to and student of the plants. A Facebook post announcing his death let us know:

There is a saying some places on the continent of Africa that says something like: When an old man dies, a library burns. It was a favorite among many of Stephen’s. An elder has died. Stephen died yesterday morning, December 8th around 9:30 am mountain time. He was in ceremony with friends and family. He was aware, conscious, present, open hearted and humorous. He was himself all the way through. And so very brave. Our hearts are heavy as they have ever been. We miss him terribly. He will be buried this morning in his beloved forest.

A library of plant wisdom may have burned when SHB died, but I think a lot of it lives on in his writings and work. I like to believe there is a collective consciousness (maybe Akashic) where all the effort of human beings to KNOW this place, our home, is stored in perpetuity and can be accessed when it is needed by those who care enough to ask the right questions and yearn for the answers with all their heart. It would be incredible to keep the continuity flowing, to NOT burn the library, but hand over the keys to the next generation. It’s time to reconsider death.

Those of us who followed him knew it was coming. He wrote this incredible essay about his experience of dying. I will excerpt it here to give you a taste, but I recommend reading the whole thing. It will give you a sense for the man, a unique human being who left his mark by being completely himself. He starts by talking about teaching from the heart—a subject I care very much about myself:

During the years that I taught workshops and classes, I found that for my work to be genuine I had to begin each time with what I called “the one true thing.” “The one true thing” is what is most true and real for me at this exact moment in time. And this is a constantly changing truth; we are not the same person today that we were yesterday, we will not be the same person tomorrow that we are today.

It took me a long time to learn how to teach, it’s a skill like any other but one I had to figure out as I went along. I never found much useful information on how to do it (despite all those books and videos about it). So, I learned by doing, failing mostly, but then examining my failures to figure out why. I spent a lot of time watching those who were very good at it (though, truthfully, there are not very many of them). The crucial first step, I finally figured out, is speaking from the heart rather than the head. But, importantly, it can’t be left at that, the next so very important step is learning how to do so with great elegance. That is when it becomes art. And it takes years to learn . . . and a huge amount of real life doing of it. This is something that very few people in our rationalist culture understand, for we have put our faith in mind and not in heart.

He goes on to speak eloquently for several paragraphs about the difference between speaking from the head and from the heart. It’s a visceral difference. I know this to be true myself. And then he drops this bomb:

So . . . the one true thing today is that I am dying.

All of us are dying of course but I don’t mean it the way people usually do, that one of these days death is inevitable. I mean that it is very close to me now, that not only is the notice in the mail, it has actually been delivered. That is what I am talking about when I say that I am dying. That my notice has arrived and there is nothing I can do about it.

And that is what I will talk about today – but not just my dying and what I am learning as I do, but what happens to each of us as those around us are dying and after they are dead. For we are in the territory of grief now. It is a territory that all of us will live in now, no matter how long it is that we do, because the way Earth has been for so many thousands of years is ending. A way of being that our species has known for so very long is dying. And it is not going to come back.

The rest of the essay is about grief, dying and grief of surviving the death of our beloveds. It’s a stunning and beautiful reflection from a man who is IN IT as he writes. I will come back to this essay again and again.

SHB’s gift to the world of healing and ecology was great. For me, he represented a clarity of purpose and commitment that I admire so much. He was also a Kentucky native, like myself, and I could feel in him that shared homeland, a kinship in his way of thinking and storytelling and being with the earth. It might be a Scots-Irish heritage or it might be something born from the soil and water of Kentucky, the place. A few days before his death in his last FB post he wrote an entry that was practical and reassuring to fans. Here is an excerpt:

I am lucky enough to be buried deep in the Gila Forest in a place few people are aware of. luckily, New Mexico is still supportive of home and green burial. So it is just me and my beloved forest, right adjacent to the Aldo Leopold wilderness area which makes a lot of sense to me given my life work. The truth is that as I have grown older and more tired, I feel my connection to the land more deeply. I have been lucky enough to be buried in a handmade woolen shroud. One made with care and love, the deer buttons are quite lovely.

I return to the report from his family that at the time of crossing over he was “in ceremony with friends and family” and also “conscious, present, open-hearted, humorous…himself all the way through.”

What an example. What a blessing. What a legacy.

All of this is part of the reflections arising as I work with the root chakra and remember the ground of being, remember The Mother, and come back into relationship with Her. It’s been an ongoing process for me and one of the greatest gifts of my life; a gift that keeps giving EVERY DAY.

I long for more people to remember what it is like to release into the earth, to feel the ground holding us, to TRUST the fundamental goodness that is right here in her bounty. To be in right relationship to the brevity of our time here and the preciousness of this birth. Not trying to escape it through every available exit. That’s the irony isn’t it…all the time we spend trying to escape the pain of living and dying only to be faced with the regret at the end of not having lived enough, not having related enough, not having been present, not aware enough and grateful enough for the gift of this life.

Recently I was feeling a lot (as usual) and processing some difficult emotions. I took a walk and could not help but notice the exquisite beauty of the day. So, I walked with my confusion and anxiety and pain and noticed the wonder of the world. When I got home my partner wanted to care for me. He sat patiently on the edge of the bed as I searched for words to convey to him what I was feeling. I came up with this and we both laughed because it pretty much sums up my whole experience of life. I can see it on my tombstone, actually:

“It’s all so beautiful but it also hurts a lot.”

I think one of the things that makes this process of coming into the body and down into the earth challenging is having to accept some of her conditions…like decay and death. We are mortal—ay, there’s the rub! There is also grief in the lost time, the loss of intimacy, the recognition of the false sense of isolation and entitlement we humans have been walking around with—and the pain of facing how we have extracted from Earth and hurt Her other children/other species. There’s a lot of grief and there’s some remorse to reckon with when we return to the Garden—prodigal children. But, it is a small price to pay—our tears a tiny (but not insignificant) offering—for the restoration of our place in the natural order of things as natural beings.

Join me tomorrow for the second week of root chakra meditation and discussion. Last week we practiced sitting like a mountain. Tomorrow, we’ll do some earth breathing and let the sweet soil envelop us and take us into her warm embrace. We’ll root and receive the nourishment we have been unconsciously rejecting (like those lost carrots!). We’ll ground and work with whatever comes up as we return to the Mother and see where we are with a sense of trust. And we’ll see what we can dig up from the lost libraries of all the great beings who held knowledge of this place and died with it.

Coming Home meditation is from 9-10am EST tomorrow, Tuesday.