Spiritual Intimacy

My first spirit-touched experience in the world was with trees. Trees that spoke in sensation and called me close. Shimmering. Trees congregated in a landscape cathedral inviting me to join them in prayer. It would be thousands of days before my mind would learn the story that my bones had stored.

A story about geomythic trees called Mugumo.

Casting green jewels of fruit when the heat dripped. Their sky roots hung on bent shoulders grasping toward the dark soil. A bark-skin body enfolding none other than the house of God. A wasp, its messenger. It was not the first time I had been called.

A generations old and long body was simply relocating its awareness. The many branches and roots of a lineage of interconnection are abundant. Simple gifts for when we have the eyes to witness them. Richer than widely understood and enough to end the famine of a starved seeker with the source of faith once more. And then again. This time for those unborn but on their way.

I have come to know because I have fed on the dreams of my ancestors. I have tasted prophecy through the bite of a fig. I have heard the morse code of the wasp’s tap. I trust the weight of a door hinged by a strange apparatus which bursts open with a broad embrace and other times is glued shut. A task presenting itself to uncover a key. There are more conditions for such a door, of course. It is filled with possibilities. It could be imagined, constructed, or even when necessary, demolished.

“It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.” - Clarice Lispector

Maybe you don’t need more boundaries. Maybe you don’t need to become impenetrable. Maybe a shield falling is not an error, but a provocation from mystery towards unanticipated freedom. What if your vulnerability was the lost promise of your longing? Will you recommit it to heart?

The devotional practice of listening to the original instructions awakens our capacities for spiritual intimacy. The spring that forgets its origin runs dry1. Ntu is the essence that flows through all things. The great estuary of existence and the totality of the One. The principles of Ntu are harmony, authenticity, interconnectedness, and balance. The ways of knowing living water.

“Ancient dissectionists spoke of the auditory nerve being divided into three or more pathways deep in the brain. They surmised that the ear was meant, therefore, to hear at all three different levels. One pathway is said to hear the mundane conversations of the world. A second pathway apprehended learning and art. And the third pathway existed so the soul itself might hear guidance and gain knowledge while here on earth.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The world that we are entangled within is an interwoven, intergenerational, cloth of more-than-human connectivity. To heed the hermit’s call is to travel far away into the throat of the cave and then return with what we have learnt, and realise the limitations of what we can do in hiding. Because our prolonged withdrawal from our wider self has proven the emptiness of disavowal, sustained the modes of abandonment that in debt us to this critical crossroads, and we must bear witness to the truth.

I am because you are.

The ongoing processes of colonisation, mass man-made extinction, ecocide and genocide cannot be assuaged by the myth of individualism. We are responsible for and to each other. Slyvia Wynter implores our memory “We are words made flesh” she states. There are other-than-human bodies afoot in our stories, entangling their orations into our speech, and interjecting our abstract notions of separatism. Pulling the thread loose in the ongoing catastrophes and crises of our times.

I have learnt to greet stories with direct eye contact. The aliveness of language imparts its spirit to those who listen. There is a spiritual reason why some stories are syrup, others are water and some dry your mouth of its voice. We can restory our role. We can ask ourselves, what are the narratives of what it means to be human breathing through me? What are their legacies? How are they worlding my understanding of existence and peoples?

We can become earth stewards in training.