Bats in her belfry

These are images from the bat monitoring walk, but the text is two conversations with Kairos.

Kairos is in plain text, my comments and questions are in italics

The first conversation:

Our differences often matter for more than our similarities. The mistake humans make as individuals is assuming that another individual shares their interests, values, and experience. There would be no world without variety and the process of nature is more and more. The process of human seems to be to have more, but make all the same. Nature has this spreading. Humans have this grasping.

We like to separate out… taxonomy.

Only to say that all these things are equal things. You make them just…- all starlings the same as one starling, And with your taxonomy there is a failure to see that each has its unique role. It makes them a one of many. One countable type. Not seeing all the variety.

[I ask about the little statue of a Minoan Goddess that my friend gave me]

Snakes help you to think of roots and branches.

Why?

She holds them unconnected? You have to see them as connected. If you are to generate the power of the Goddess, you must see the root and branches as spreading out, not just grasped. She holds onto her connection to the earth and her link to the sky.

The cat?

A reminder that the mind can be predatory and that it is both good and bad. You must allow the vision of the cat and the playfulness, but beware of killing ideas. The symbol of the cat is a symbol that has to be contained.

Bare breasts?

This is about nurturing as well as sex. A freedom of expression and a willingness to attract. A shamelessness and an openness and always love.

I am confused by sex.

Sex is ultimately connection, sharing, and generation of more beings and simply of more variety. It has the sense of creativity and creativity that acknowledges that we make WITH, rather than alone. Creative thought is hybrid.

Is there water and fire or only Earth and sky?

There is above and below.

The second conversation.

In hardship, the needs of the self come to the fore. I will sacrifice a branch indeed and lessen what I need, but I will also be doing more taking- we are all here now trying to live. You like the idea of competition? But it's just survival. There's no malice in it, no antagonism.

When you call insects, is that what you're doing? [I am thinking about how plants seem to call the insects who eat the insects who are eating the plant.]

I have told you: I do. Consequences for others are consequences for others. It is convenient that the predators come when I turn myself distasteful. And I am relieved of more burdens than through my own efforts alone. But you are high on intention and will and planning. For me it is a doing, in alignment with the conversation I am having with the world. It is a dance- and that is less about meaning than about becoming.

I ask about meaning.

Meaning is the becoming. It is the is. There is no additional meaning. The becoming is deep- thick, perhaps, in the terms you read somewhere. Becoming is all the meaning it needs.

But we can become all sorts of things- like, I don't know, bird egg collectors or hedge fund managers.

That is because you have transitioned your becoming into a becoming in dialogue with only yourselves or with only some select groups, that may or may not involve non-humans. What we do is become in the context of all the other becomings with which we are associated. For a tick, that association is more limited than for a tree- but we never ignore or overlook what is there for us what is there, however limited we may be, is given. And what was given to you humans first was place. Now you take over the whole world, including air and water, but have conversations only with yourselves. You are blind mice.

Blind Mice?

I am divergent. The nursery rhyme, The Tristan albatross [They are being eaten alive by mice on some island.]. My use of images has to take account of your knowledge and I have to trust that you will understand.

OK, so I understand the mice. How to change?

Let yourself be in the mystery and the complexity. Don't second guess and try to think it all out. Let the deep layers of being take the initiative. Intuition and gut feeling and following your heart- which does not mean that the value of learning is lesser. Because you do not fully live in the world, because you live in a human world that has divorced itself from so much of the meaning-becoming of the whole world, you have to be always open to learning. And I am not so foolish as to think that there are not those among you who see the depth of some parts of the meaning-becoming. Were those among you actually living in the world most fully and given the position of gurus, they would indeed add to the meaning-becoming. Your kind would. So this learning matters- but the learning must always be open. Felt. Considered by the whole of you in conversation with as much of the world as you can embrace.

You are very serious today.

As are you. And the drought makes me so.

Does it hurt?

There is not hurt but there is damage.

I'm thinking about the deer. [About how to balance the rights of deer and the rights of a forest to regenerate.]

I know and all I can say is stay with the trouble. There is sense in your comments that the land letting go of the deer through starvation or disease is akin to the tree letting go of the limb. All things are different and the same, and the differences matter as much as the samenesses. In this case, of course, the deer suffer in a way that the limb does not. That is why it is an extreme response. And I can understand that you do not like to engage with or be the cause for extreme responses- and yet the only way sometimes is extreme. Going through, however hard.

It frustrates me. That your understanding- and I mean your species, not individual- has to become so rooted to a certain style of compassion- a compassion that seeks to alleviate suffering rather than walk the suffering path with the sufferer. Alleviation is the right response in some cases, but usually not. It is superficial. The deep response is healing or accompaniment to death.

You wish to give yourself to the earth, to me?

I wish to... I don't know... fuse? Belong? Commit?

You are committed. You just don't know how to express or live that truly.

Yes. And so?

I've told you repeatedly that I cannot direct you how to live or what to do.

But suggestions. Ideas.

I say try to fully understand that which intuitions lead you to explore. Become with thoughts that feed your soul and allow your canopy to expand, to grow, to transform more of the light of what you are reading into the building blocks of your own meaning-becoming.