EarthWays Fall 2023 Newsletter

This was painted by William Haskell

What Falls Away?

Greetings!


Again we are in the midst of autumn. How quickly we've arrived here. Nights grow longer and darkness abounds. Autumn has a particular beauty with its gentle light, falling leaves and crisp air. At this time of year, we are more aware of endings. And with autumn's display of impermanence, it is natural to feel our grief. We don't get to choose what slips away from us. We only get to choose how we show up for natural cycle of arrivals and departures.


Our great mother Earth provides and she takes away. She has the capacity to hold both our joy and our grief. She holds our dance of gratitude and she receives our tears of sadness.


In this season of Fall, we are humbled by the weight of loss. And, we are inspired by of what has touched our hearts. Grief and gratitude... this is how we show up even as what we hold dear slips away. 


We honor the direction of the west, who holds our longings, our grief, our deep divingng into soul and the necessary darkness for new life to eventually reveal itself.


Thank you for being part of our community. 

The Guides of EarthWays LLC

Our friend the Acorn Woodpecker, busy stashing food! Read about, and listen to, this very social bird here, so you get to know one of your neighbors better:



https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Acorn_Woodpecker/overview#

Tadaima!

(Japanese for “I’m home now!”)


By Cynthia "Eisho" Morrow


It’s April 24th, and I am nervously sitting in a chair at a barber shop just south of Kyoto Station in Japan. An adorable, young Japanese woman takes the electric razor up against the side of my head… bzzzzz…. bzzzzz…. I watch as thick, long clumps of curly tresses fall to the floor. Gazing in the mirror, I start to dissociate. “Be here for this!!” I tell myself, drawing my attention back to my midline. My breath deepens as I observe in the mirror this radical act. After about 10 minutes, she beams at my newly bald head and proclaims, “Kawaii!” which means, “Cute!” The next day, I arrive at the monastery gates high on a mountain for my 60-day initiation to become a Tendai priest.


A prerequisite for all who enter the Hieizan Gyoin for “shugyo” (spiritual training), the shaving of the hair is an act of relinquishing attachment to ego. It is said that our attachment to ego or self—clinging to fixed ideas of who we are based on our conditioned patterns of what we like and don’t like—keeps us from being able to see and understand things and beings as they really are. Keeps us from being truly free and limits our capacity to help others....


Read More


The Down: Depression, Integration or Purification?


“This ceremony won’t make your life easier,

but it will help to make it more authentic.”


by Scott Eberle


(This passage is an excerpt from an early draft of Scott's new book, The Soul's Red Thread: Emerging, Transforming, Dissolving. Publication is anticipated in 2024.)



I don’t recall where I first heard this line, or from whom, but over the years I’ve repeated it to countless groups. After a visit to the High Country, returning to the of the lowlands of everyday life is seldom easy. 


But as Ram Dass has said: “The down is part of the high.”


I’ve heard Meredith Little, co-founder of the School of Lost Borders, often refer to this post-fast challenge as “the predictable depression:” the down that often hits weeks to months after a program has ended. A rush of feelings may come and, with that, a torrent of self-doubt: Was that all just a dream? Have I really changed? What do I do now? Meredith’s advice: “Commit to moving through the next year as if what happened were real, especially when you doubt it most.”


For many, the root of this time of feeling down, this predictable depression, is a clash between a true self and a false self. Having dropped down into a much deeper telling of a soul story—a finding and naming of that life thread—each person must return home to family, friends and acquaintances who weren’t part of the desert ceremony. These others may want that person, post-fast, to keep giving the same old answers, to keep behaving in the same old ways. But what if a deeper, more authentic self would have it be otherwise—even if the emerging self is just the first intimation of a true self? What if, instead of giving the expected answer, this person speaks truthfully? What if, instead of acting in the usual way, this person behaves authentically?


Do I disappoint myself? Or do I disappoint someone else? There’s no easy resolution to find here, whether that other person is a spouse, a lover, a friend, or a boss. 


Read More


Listen here to Music for our Community


"Long Road Home" by our friend Al Haas




Tumbling

 

When everything’s falling,

when everything’s broken,

when all is ravel and rubble

and ransacked and ruin

and the world is a stuttering,

guttering blunder,

a plundered and ravaged thing,

that is when wonder arrives on the wings

of forgiving, and living arrives

on the wings of the dead, and

devotion arrives in the wreckage

of loss. And if to love

is to risk being tumbled

and fumbled and wrung out

and sprawled, to love

is also to trust there are hands

that will raise us,

amaze us with kindness,

calm hands that will lift up

our hurt-heavy hearts

as if it they’re as light 

as red leaves in the fall.


Rosemerry Trommer



We hope to see you in 2024 for new programs.

EarthWaysLLC