Remembered Imagination- the Gift

I had been anticipating and preparing for this trip for some time. Eleven days alone in the remote wilderness of northern Minnesota. I’d done solo trips in the region before but this one was different. I went with a desire and a need to find a new way of seeing the world. I had come to see its brokenness and decrepitude- an important and even grievously beautiful type of sight, but I could no longer live with that sight alone. It was simply too exhausting. I wished to see differently though I couldn’t imbibe or fashion for myself anything of the sort.

That first night, sitting by the forest lake, not a whisper of a breeze, a perfect stillness and quiet underneath the watchful stars, I wrote:

“I went out searching for the world but I could not find it. So now, I will let the world find me.”

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 In this space of no distraction and natural rawness, I could see more clearly who I’d been being and the nature of my relationship to the world. These trips for me had always been a way of pausing life as I knew it and stepping out into a larger frame to look back at the skin I’d been inhabiting. These trips had a way of freezing my life in time such that I could walk around it, below it, above it, really see it from all the angles and vantage points.

I could see clearly that the old skin couldn’t go on. It had had its time and something new was wanting to come forth. I had for a while been wondering about what it really meant to live in and as gift. I could see the ways in which I was living an extractive life, taking more thought for myself and my own growth than I was giving.

What makes this place we call the world, home? I could no longer see how this broken inhumane world could be home. It was a place inhospitable to my soul and if that were the case, it was true also for the human soul. And furthermore, it wasn’t simply a passive inhospitability but an active one.

The wild, and for me the forest in particular, has an unparalleled ability to teach what I only know to call remembrance. It is such a deep teacher of this because it lives in and as the Gift. Reciprocity is the very fabric of its existence.

I wrote in my journal:

“It is this giving that in two sense makes the world home. Firstly, the gift itself that is given creates home. Secondly and more importantly it is the spirit of giving, the motion of the gift, which makes home.”

What then am I to give? My natural next question. I pondered and asked this for days and many things came to mind. But then I began to see the shadowy contours and crevasses of this question. I could imagine the story lines of lives lived where I spent their entirety in an attempt to discover what my gift to give was. These lives were tinged with an ironic self-centeredness that somehow seemed to miss the mark.

How then, am I to give? With this question, something was different. Every moment was now free to be something other than a transaction. That small shift from what to how had a way of illuminating the what through first making space for the giving. Every moment now was one of movement. It wasn’t about getting the right movements but about observing how the body and the spirit naturally moved, without my direction.

These movements are the movements of the Gift itself, its ebbs and flows. To live the Gift is to follow the spirit of the motion, to not so much move as to be moved. It’s seeing something primal, something that comes before I. It’s a remembrance.

This remembrance is a way of belonging through the imagining of that remembrance into the present moment. It’s an enactment of creation, creation creating itself in and as me, as you, as us.

This remembrance of a soul home is our way of being grounded not to a fixed unmovable reality, but to an emergent one of becomingness.

I’ve heard it said that ceremony is how we remember to remember. It’s how we step out of the stream of familiarity and open to a larger story. It’s how we allow our mind and body to imagine and be imagined. It’s a way of seeing the outer as the inner and the inner as the outer.

The wonderer in us is our truest part. When imagining, we are inhabited fully by that deepest self. Only then does reality become real.

Though I didn’t fully realize it beforehand, this trip for me was a ceremony, an elaborate way of asking for a different way of seeing, a search for remembrance.

I am coming to understand that this type of vision is the Gift. It is not for myself and my own spiritual attainments and liberation that this vision serves. It is seeing with the eyes of a relational identity, one that knows self only as ecology, as relationship. This is the world of our belonging.

Speak the world to which you belong into being.