Sarah's Song
This time of loss and upheaval has also been a time of reflection, an opportunity to pause and reassess what matters to us, and figure out how we will move forward. I’ve talked a lot to my peers about this moment in history we are living through together, but it was particularly interesting to hear the perspective of a friend from a younger generation, in this case, the remarkable Sarah Rebstock. In her thirties, Sarah is a staff member at the Wilderness Youth Project, a massage therapist, an earthen builder, a gardener, an environmental activist, and a writer, among other things. When she shared this piece from her journal with our Gaviota Writing group, I was deeply moved by its power and its pain. It is an eloquent call for sanity and balance and connection to the natural world. But what starts out as a song of grief builds into a hymn of gratitude, acknowledging the procession of a shameful history, and culminating in a kind of prayer. Sarah’s is a voice worth hearing and taking to heart.
1.
What are we? Humans who don't know how to feed ourselves or spark an earth-made fire or how to oil our limbs into supple grace with work songs that belonged to our grandmothers. Nor do we know the songs that belong to the land we live on or the dances that jump the plants and animals, specific and unique, back into life every season.
We do not give each other gifts from the heart or treat guests as sacred or revere our elderly. We accumulate and think of shallow things and how we look and whether we are loved enough and what we can control to make whatever we want come true. Our dreams are starved and anemic ghosts, and I am sick in my soul, for I am a part of all of this. What has sprung up in these starving land orphans - myself included- is unbearably ugly.
Feel this- to smell the vanishing aroma of what once was. This afternoon I was listening to Eastern European folk songs, women singing, literally singing, the ridgelines of their mountain valleys-because the harmonies- the ups and downs of their voices are a map of their valley.
This one small, precious place where the women sing is the lap of their gods, and it was a work song and a praise song, and a song that had sisterhood and grandmother-hood and the growing of food and the history of the horses and nomadic peoples that they were hundreds of years before they ever came to their beloved valley, all folded into the beat and harmonies and highs and lows, and it brought me to my knees, to hear these ancient songs sung that they say are almost gone, and with the songs the people vanish, and their children are not the people anymore but another soul-starved crop of money grubbing land orphans bent on hoarding what they can.
And the beloved land, gods of water and reed and grass and sun are left robbed and destroyed to feed the insatiable maw of our prayerless, giftless lives. And then we take ancient medicines and twist them to feed our glut instead of offering, selling instead of dancing, instead of dreaming and bowing low. Where has our purpose fled? My heart is smote with ashes.
2.
This world is teeming, rife with beauty and significance. The fractal magnificence within the whorls of the tiniest of blooms send messages of scent scrolling into the air trailing moth and bee flight, the light glinting golden through the leaves shifts, shuffles, whispers secrets encrypted in shadows.
Where are the prayers i send up in sweet smoke, in dances beaten on taut skins, and the clay hammered to coppery smoothness under my thrumming heels? I have not been dancing, or praying, and so I feel my wings have been clipped, and the clouds race away without turning back to entrust their musings and prophecies.
I am parched, gasping for the depths I need to survive, to let the water sluice over my tight-knit silver scales... there is magic to be made, beauty to kneel to, thanks and blessings to be bestowed.
When my heart falters, it is to the wide world I turn, again and again, opening once more to mystery, complexity, the green and blue embrace of water, living and manifest in blood and leaf, tooth and fin.
Here I am, with all the luck and favor, to say thank you, awash in the beloved beauty of being alive.
3.
The ground beneath our feet is shifting, the world is burning away, the wild ones give us a last sorrowful look before vanishing in the smoke, regretful for us, that we have lived so blind, become so broken. The rabbit dies willingly, running just as fast as he can. We have forgotten our strength, lost our true beauty in the over polished mirrors.
But the ground shifts. Nothing can remain as it was. The oceans are rising, the heat rolls over us, the winds speak change. The world has stopped whispering with nuance, she is cracking us over the head with a rock. The people, ground down, are rising from roots as deep as the sea, making magic from the ashes of history, pulling down the knee on the neck.
Even those of us who believe we are white are reckoning with the stolen goods ladled into our wanting palms. We have been running for thousands of years, off the steppe and across Europe, our witches burned, our sacred groves razed under the tramp of Roman boots. Our footsteps are a river of blood. To slake our flight we took into ourselves all that we could. Glutted, soul bereft, we are still fearful, still restless.
But be still now. Become something else. There must be a way to live generously. The elders burned with the groves. The people who do not believe they are white are leading. What is of the land, of the sea, in us is waking to wrathful love. Survival might be beyond us, but love, pointed, keen as a blade, cuts out our quaking heart and makes of it an offering.
For the land, for the people, for the sea. Live with a new song on your lips. Let go. Give way. Work well and give thanks. Die with grace, bestowing a blessing.
