the all girl army forums: R.I.P. Paula Gunn Allen 1939-2008

"Healing in a World Gone Coyote" by Paula Gunn Allen

In the United States, where milk and honey cost little enough, where private serenity is prized above all things by the wealthy, privileged and well-washed, where tension, intensity, passion, and the concomitant loss of self-possession are detested, the idea that your attitudes and behaviors vis a vis your body are your politics and your spirituality, may seem strange. Moreover, when I suggest that passion — whether it be emotional, muscular, sexual or intellectual — IS spirituality, the idea might seem even stranger. In the United States of the privileged, going to ashrams and centers to meditate on how to be in one's immediate experience, on how to be successful at serenity when the entire planet is overwrought, tense, far indeed from serene, the idea that connected spirituality consists in accepting overwroughtness, tension, yes, and violence, may seem not only strange but downright dangerous. The patriarchs have long taught the Western peoples that violence is sin, that tension is the opposite of spiritual life, that the overwrought are denied enlightenment. But we must remember that those who preached and taught serenity and peacefulness were teaching the oppressed how to act — docile slaves who deeply accept their place and do not recognize that in their anguish lies also their redemption, their liberation, are not likely to disturb the tranquility of the ruling class. Members of the ruling class are, of course, utterly tranquil. Why not? As long as those upon whose labor and pain their serenity rests don't upset the apple cart, as long as they can make the rules for human behavior — in its inner as well as outer dimensions — they can be tranquil indeed ad can focus their attention on reaching nirvanic bliss, transcendence, or divine peace and love.

And yet, the time for tranquility, if there ever was a time for it, is not now. Now we have only to look, to listen, to our beloved planet to see that tranquility is not the best word to describe her condition. Her volcanic passions, her hurricance storms of temper, her tremblings and shakings, her thrashings and lashings indicate that something other than serenity is going on. And after careful consideration, it must occur to the sensitive observer that congruence with self, which must be congruence with spirit, which must therefore be congruence with the planet, requires something more active than serenity, tranquility or inner peace.

Our planet, my beloved, is in crisis; this, of course, we all know. We, many of us, think that her crisis is caused by men, or White people or capitalism or industrialism or loss of spiritual vision, or social turmoil, or war, or psychic disease. For the most part, we do not recognize that the reason for her state is that she is entering upon a great initiation — she is becoming someone else. Our planet, my darling, is gone coyote, heyoka, and it is our great honor to attend her passage rites. She is giving birth to her new consciousness of herself and her relatoinship to the other vast intelligences, other holy beings, in her universe.

…We are each and all a part of her, an expression of her essential being. We are each a small fragment that is not the whole but that, perforce, reflects in our inner self, our outer behavior, our expressions and relationships and institutions, her self, her behaviors, her expressions and relationships, her forms and structures. We humans and our relatives the other creatures are integral expressions of her thought and being. We are not her, but we take our being from her, and in her being we have being, as in her life we have life. As she is, so are we.

In this time of her emergence as one of the sacred planets in the Grandmother galaxy, we necessarily experience, each of us in our own specific way, our share or form of her experience, her form. As the initiation nears completion we are caught in the throes of her wailings and contractions, her muscular, circulatory and neurologic destabilization. We should recognize that her longing for the culmination of the initiatory process is at present nearly as intense as her longing to remain as she was before…and our longing for a new world that the completion of the great ceremony will bring, almost as great as our longing to remain in the systems familiar to us for a very long time, correspond. Her longing for completion is great, as is ours; our longing to remain as we have been, our fear that we will not survive the transition, that we will fail to enter the new age, our terror at ourselves becoming transformed, mutated, unrecognizable to ourselves and all we have known, correspond to her longing to remain as she has been, her fear that she will fail the tests as they arise for her, her terror at becoming new, unrecognizable to herself and to all she has known. What can we do in times such as these? We can rejoice that she will soon be counted among the blessed. That we, her feathers, talons, beak, eyes, have come crying and singing, lamenting and laughing, to this vast climacteric.

I am speaking of all womankind, of all mankind. And of more. I am speaking of all our relatives, the four-leggeds, the wingeds, the crawlers; of the plants and seasons, the winds, thunders, and rains, the rivers, lakes and streams, the pebbles, rocks and mountains, the spirits, the holy people, and the Gods and Goddesses — of all the intelligences, all the beings. I am speaking even of the tiniest, those no one can see; and of the vastest, the planets and stars. Together you and I and they and she are moving with increasing rapidity and under ever increasing pressure towards transformation.

Now, now is the time when mother becomes grandmother, when daughter becomes mother, when the dead live again and walk once again in her ways. …I have said this is the time of her initiation, of her new birth. I could also say it is the time of her mutation, for transformation means to change form; I could also say it is the climacteric, when the beloved planet goes through menopause and takes her place among the wise women planets that dance among the stars.

…What can we do, rejoicing and honoring, to show our respect? We can heal. We can cherish our being– our petulances and rages, our anguishes and griefs, our disabilities and strengths, our desires and passions, our pleasures and delights. We can, willingly and recognizing the fullness of her abundance, which includes scarcity and muchness, enter inside ourselves to seek and find her, who is our own dear body, our own dear flesh. For the body is not the dwelling place of the spirit — it is the spirit. It is not a tomb, it is life itself. And even as it withers and dies, it is born; even as it is renewed and reborn, it dies.

...How often do you interpret disease as wrong, suffering as abnormal, physical imperatives as troublesome, cravings as failures, deprivation and denial of appetite as the right thing to do? In how many ways do you refuse to experience your vulnerability, your frailty, your mortality? How often do you refuse these expressions of the life force of the Mother in your lovers, your friends, your society? How often do you find yourself interpreting sickness, weakness, aging, fatness, physical differences as pitiful, contemptible, avoidable, a violation of social norm or spiritual accomplishment? How much of your life is devoted to avoiding any and/or all of these?

The mortal body is a tree; it is holy in whatever condition; it is truth and myth because it has so many potential conditions; because of its possibilities, it is sacred and profane; most of all, it is your most precious talisman, your own connection to her. Healing the self means honoring and recognizing the body, accepting rather than denying all the turmoil its existence brings, welcoming the woes and anguish flesh is subject to, cherishing its multitudinous forms and seasons, its unfailing ability to known and be, to grow and wither, to live and die, to mutate, to change. Healing the self means committing ourselves to a wholehearted willingness to be what and how we are — beings frail and fragile, strong and passionate, neurotic and balanced, diseased and whole, partial and complete, stingy and generous, safe and dangerous, twisted and straight, storm-tossed and quiescent, bound and free.

What can we do to be politically useful, spiritually mature attendants in this transformation we are privileged to participate in? Find out by asking as many trees as you meet how to be a tree. Our Mother, in her form known as Sophia, was long ago said to be a tree, the great tree of life. Listen to what they wrote down from the song she gave them.

I have grown tall as a cedar on Lebanon as a cypress on Mount Hermon I have grown tall as a palm in Engedi as the rose bushes of Jericho; as a fine olive on the plain, as a plain tree I have grown tall. I have exhaled perfume like cinnamon and acacia; I have breathed out a scent like choice myrrh, like galbanum, onzcha and stacte, like the smoke of incenes in the tabernacle. I have spread my branches like a terebinth, and my branches are glorious and graceful. I am like a vine putting out graceful shoots, my blossoms bear the fruit of glory and wealth. Approach me, you who desire me, and take your fill of my fruits.

–Paula Gunn Allen, from The Woman I Love Is A Planet; The Planet I Love Is A Tree, in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Eds., 1990
R.I.P. Paula Allen Gunn, Oct. 24, 1939--May 29, 2008.

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"Scratch any woman deeply enough and you find a feminist." -Christina McCall