Intimations of Awe

Regarding Winds of Homecoming, my newly launched blog, I realized that I needed more than one blog so I could keep my subject matter sorted out. Adoption issues are part of the old pattern. Self-integration and healing is part of the new, both for me and for the entire world. I'm still far from where I need to be, still dwelling on the past and the scars and the rage aren't going to change the world. Never have, never will. But because I get glimpses every so often of breathtaking possibility, I have to follow it where it leads. I get the image of turning away from that which is killing us to build a new world from the roots up. This image is growing inside me every day. "Hope" doesn't begin to describe it. Language drips with "hope." Hope contains doubt. I can't use that word anymore. I don't know how else to explain it.

Read Rhonda's blog about her awesome efforts to save animals. Sometimes she's successful, sometimes she's not, but she's definitely one of my heroines for it. My heart aches from attic to basement whenever I read how any innocent creature--animal or plant--is so callously disregarded as if it has no sentience. I want to "save" all the creatures from humanity, like swooping down and carrying them off to safety on another planet. But Rebecca Solnit writes something very wise in her book Hope in the Dark:

"A game of checkers ends. The weather never does. That's why you can't save anything. Saving is the wrong word, one invoked over and over again, for almost every cause. Jesus saves and so do banks: they set things aside from the flux of earthly change. We never did save the whales, though we might have prevented them from becoming extinct. We will have to continue to prevent that as long as they continue not to be extinct, unless we become extinct first. That might indeed save the whales, until the sun supernovas or the species evolves into something other than whales. Saving suggests a laying up where neither moth nor rust dost corrupt; it imagines an extraction from the dangerous, unstable, ever-changing process called life on earth. But life is never so tidy and final. Only death is. Environmentalists like to say that defeats are permanent, victories temporary. Extinction, like death, is forever, but protection needs to be maintained. But now, in a world where restoration ecology is becoming increasingly important, it turns out that even defeats aren't always permanent. Across the United States, dams have been removed, wetlands and rivers restored, once-vanished native species reintroduced, endangered species regenerated."

Maybe we who have been so deeply scarred by the adoption industry could borrow this as a sort of metaphor for our own sort of self "re-introduction," no matter how scary and uneven.

Botanical (herbal) posts will now appear on Winds of Homecoming, along with creations and visions that have nothing to do with old patterns. For example, I've been bookmarking sites that have to do with "gift economies" and "cultural creatives." These are terms I never heard before this year, but they hold dynamic promise for those of us who are deeply scarred from rampant callous rigidity, fear, violence, wars, secrecy, manufactured lack, institutions (yes, that includes the institution of adoption), repression, reliance on "authority" and "professionals," private ownership, guilt, rage, blame, and so forth. Yesterday I read Peter's latest entry on how his vicious a-parents locked him in his room and subjected him to sensory deprivation when he was only nine. The psychopathology of so-called "civilization" is unbearable. What more can I say?

I chose the name of my new blog for two reasons. First because I love Rilke and second because all my life I've wanted to go home. If you're an adoptee you know exactly what I mean. I know I'll never "go home" to the people who I'm related to, but now seek to find my home within myself on a transcendent level. I realize that everyone on Earth actually seeks to "go home." By that I mean to find their way out of the labyrinth of misery generated and perpetuated by civilization. I won't get into that here.

I added a music feature to both blogs because certain music makes my heart soar as I seek re-integration with the Earth as my other mother. I mean, what other choices do I have? I'm particularly drawn to Ulrich Schnauss, a DJ who creates what's called "progressive" trance, a type of electronic music that I find mesmerizing and incredible. Take a listen to get some idea. His Far Away Trains Passing By album is stunningly beautiful. You can click on the Pandora link and create your own DJ station!