Not grasping, but receiving

As I was walking to Kairos I was thinking about Marion Zimmer Bradley's books which I have been listening to for the second time. Thinking about that it came to me that the old rites understood blood and sacrifice, danger and death. I went past the Goddess Oak and she said, “You need to go down.”

When I got to Kairos that was effectively what I did. I lay down with my legs up the tree's trunk. My arms were spread out and my fingers, I released my hair so that that spread out too and I was imagining that my fingers and my hair were roots and that my head, my brain was down there with the brain of the mycorrhizal network. As I was lying there I was thinking about how the water and the minerals seep into the roots of trees through a process that I suppose is similar to osmosis and these words came to me, “What would it be like to stretch out your hands and absorb into yourself that which you are lacking?” Letting in rather than grasping. Hands becoming porous, recipients, not the claws that clasp and grab. I lay beneath the tree and let the wildness in.

And then the tree asked, “What if what you need is no longer there?” Call as much as you like and it will not come.

At that point I sat up again against the tree and I realised that once more––this seems to happen every time I visit Kairos––the red kite was circling above me and looking down and that led to me thinking again… it wasn't so much thinking more as if the tree acted as a conduit and the thoughts that came where the thoughts of the kite.

I call to you, carrion, says the kite. I seek out what is dead and dying. My sharp eyes cast like blades into the bodies below. My children cry for flesh and my blood beats to the screams of life ending. There is nothing callous in this. Is is is. When I whistle above, I'm whistling for the reaper and seeking the blessing of those whose lives are ending that that I may take them into myself, meat and tendon and bone. I am intimate with death. I am the grave into which bodies are sown; I am the plant that bursts from those seeds; I am the life that feeds on death.

Your wars and your slaughter are no good to me now. You blaspheme against death as you blaspheme against life. For both become the same in me.

The image is a baby oak that I saw on the way back to the car––not in the Reserve and certainly not in the woods, where they cannot grow.