Jan 2022 New Moon Wander: Heart's Anchor

̧© inder coppola 2022

I want to become part of the place that I live. 

I am not there right now. Right now, I am using chilled fingers to write and can feel equally chilly toes under foreign covers. The intense sound of the Wind is mixing with the sound  of machines tearing into ecosystems for the purposes of us people. It is the sound of a strange raging digestion. The roaring machine and the roaring winds. I feel very uncomfortable with it. I do not want to go outside when the wind is so intense, so cold, but I begin to feel crazy inside without the outside, and the sound of the machines eating the Earth, my mother, is the most chilling thing. I feel the Wheel of the Year turning, but it is grinding its cogs on the flesh of the Earth right now. We stuck it in there, hoping it might stop. That we might not be confronted with the consequences of our culture.

I want to become part of the place where I live because for most of my life, I have lived with one foot out of the door of each place I have lived. Each community. Each ecosystem I have inhabited. I have not been fully present to it, even when I wanted to be. Because also for most of my life, I have inhabited only a part of myself.  Part of my heart has been missing. Some circles call this dissociation; some call it soul loss. I have wondered recently if other beings dissociate. If the Earth herself dissociates when she is confronted with abusive experience, with the tension of paradox.

Everywhere I go this season, I am confronted by what tears at my heart, at my psyche, at the flesh of all of us, our Earth. To live in this society, I feel like I must constantly stab a hairpin into my eye to feed my belly. I must constantly smash my toenails to take care of my child. I must constantly cut my throat to exist here. It is exhausting. It is masochistic. We all have our ways so we don’t feel the pain so hard, so we can numb out a little, or a lot.

A loved one said this time of year is often a little unexpectedly dark for them. I feel the same. Why it is unexpected I know and I don’t know. It is the season of the holly jolly christmas. But it is also the season of darkness, of spareness, even though the light has been reborn. Winter asks us to be spare, and consumerism asks us to be gluttons. I am a child of consumerism and winter. Both exist in the material world. I feel my own polarization cracking the many identities that overlap. The identity that craves the perfection of fitting into the world of white American Society I was born into. The identity that craves the perfection of living as Nature does: waste free, raping no part of the Earth for my comfort, raping no one on the earth for my greed—for my text message, for my music, for this blog access. But I exist somewhere in between these two material identities. I feel it stretch my skin thin. To be in exile from the Earth, and also to be evicted from the mainstream of our culture. Each identity loss feels like an eviction. Where do I exist?

I want to become part of the place that I live.

I must become part of the place where I live.

Most mornings, I walk a few blocks to the creek where I live. In this new neighborhood where we live, it is my trysting place. I go there every morning because many mornings I wake up somewhere else, and I don’t come HERE until I walk outside and feel the outside air in my nose. Until I exchange a breath with the rest of Nature, it is likely that I do not exist in my body much that day. 

The creek, my trysting place is at the edge of two worlds. Tucked away off the bike path, this riparian place hangs onto a little wildness and a lot of life force: water. It is nestled in the concrete Mormon grid, nestled inside the red rocks of the Moab Valley.  I meet discarded things: bottles, clothing, a wheelbarrow. I meet Crow and the Cottonwood trees. I meet fellow humans who are homeless. When I greet my Higher Power in the morning—turning to each Direction and honoring Above and Below. I see the morning sun glinting through the Cottonwood trees, the red rock rim of the valley, the shadows on the building, the dilapidated shed under grandfather trees, the tumbling of the creek. 

These past ten days, when I have been elsewhere, even though what I see in each Direction is different, I feel the presence of the Medicine Wheel of my own trysting place, my own sacred circle, echoing in my imagination behind the Eastern Pine trees.

And I know I am becoming part of the place that I live because She comes with me now when I am somewhere else.

This Winter’s time asks us to nurture what is essential. Last year at this time, I asked you to choose a word as a Heart Anchor for 2021. This year, I ask you to choose a part of the Earth as your Heart Anchor. A ‘circle’ where you choose to anchor yourself—or maybe if you are a frequent traveler, it is an element, a mineral, a plant you anchor to: you follow Water, you follow Evergreens, you follow Rocks. A place or Aliveness that is close to home, easy to access. A place where the part of your heart that is missing can find you. Because it is looking for you too. 

You are going there to receive Yes, but also to give. We must stop just taking. This place will be a place that nurtures you and that you nurture—through your offerings, your prayers, your gratitude. This place is different from a cultivated garden. This is a place that you will listen deeply to and that will deeply listen to you. You don’t have to know it yet, you just have to feel something when you come to this place. It doesn’t need to be big. It might be better if you can cast yourself a circle and be still enough to stay in it. Do not doubt that you have something to give to this place, this Water, this Stone, this Evergreen that will see you. A place that you find when you are not there, exists within you, because you invited it there and gave yourself to Thee.

My heart anchor word for the past year has been “holy”.  Holy has led me to my word for 2022: innocence. The luminous presence that is implicit in the small children of all beings—that lights us also when we are connected into holy essence. For me, this trysting place is the portal where I can come home, come home to myself, come home to THIS land, or as Robin Wall Kimmerer says ‘become indigenous to place.’ 

We have much work to do. Much to amend. Much to repair. We can only do it if we are here. Where will you anchor? Who will be the partner for your Heart’s work?