invisible mountains

Almost didn't go (how many great stories start -- and almost end -- with that line!). Even after a week of anticipation. And after a month outside of the circle, apart from the dance. Almost lapsed into friendly talk, inertia, intellect, and late breakfast. But the bright stroke of noon said O YOU MUST DO IT and I could see that it was true. A most brilliant blue is playing outside. Enough to go around. Enough for everybody to have some. It's held up by a breeze full of bright selfconfidence, also with abundance for all. La danza will welcome me back, just as unconditionally as does this day. Sun in the eyes and green underfoot, I finally shed shoes - remembering (re-membering, let us not neglect our debt to etymology)...this is the whole hope here, of wholeness, connecting, and making some little offering to Life (all this time of no offers and no making)...and hope - dare I say it - of sort of belonging somewhere. I'm as ready to dance as I'm able to be, which is not really enough of either. But I'm here, and I'm willing, and that right there - as at any moment - is my offer.

Tying on a borrowed headband again - it's red, like all the others. Red's not a color I wear (not often strong enough to contend with its energy) but this red shows the lineage honored here. And so I am honored to wear it. It has of course a lovely name in Nahuatl -- ix- ix- ix- already I have let the word fly, with its whirring insect sound, up into the spiralling breezes. Gratitude for this graceful encircling spirit-breath-air is all I can carry for the moment.

But just as the circle forms: another surrounds me. From the outside, without premonition or thought. Invisible mountains gather, immense, silent, benevolent. On every side, all around, at my back. They are massive, oversize, not to the scale of this dimension. Except they are also remote, except so very close, and it all evens out. They are so like the mountains of North (and maybe they are!): the vast, wasted country I often visit in Dreamtime journeys. Which appears to be the home or the exile (or both?) of all those who wander, and yearn, and get lost and seek more. But these mountains are also not as grand or somber as North mountains. They raise the same gravity-defying quicksilver crags, snagging sunlight on their edges. But also they hold soft greenblue indentations where nurturing forests might live...deep comforting spots like the hollow between shoulder and collarbone...can somebody remind me of that lovely word for a natural in-curve, a glacier-made sheltering bowl on the side of an alpine slope?

This invisible ring carries all of the strength and the mystery of half of the mountains I've met in my journeys: Idaho's ramparts, unmet-as-yet challenge to three-quarters of that impassable state...always calling out, WHO GOES THERE? as I drive on past...The serene, inexorable northern Cascades, rearing their blue heads out of sea-plains, impossible, hovering horizon just before the Canadian border...And jagged southwest Colorado, neglected run wild and untouristed, whose ranges a woman one time told me stood apart from New Mexico's because "these are young mountains". Her words pulling me at once into the unearthly no most earthly sound of a hundred joyful peaks, maybe centuries into their youth and still full of their future, lofting their children-voice songs to the clouds. These mountains today are all of these mountains, and also mirage-like: they waver, then strengthen, and I can see them better with my eyes closed.

They're here to watch, to listen, and offer their presence. To stand strong at my back like they've always been there. They help me to hear in their luminous collected silence that the steps of my feet, in the dance, at their feet, are a language. Not words, but the very communication I'm seeking, trying to re/re/remember all of this long long time. This is the voice I can speak to the Earth, of love gratitude praise question deep need and ever-dependence. Voice spoken with feet, like the ground is my own drum and I am the rhythm and who knows who is playing us. Like morse code tapped out with my toes on the surface of the mystery for whatever ears are listening. Like a secret code known only to the two of us. Learning the dance so much like learning a language. Humble and stumbling in honest bare feet. It will take tries on more tries to be clear in my message. Who knows what I am saying even now, besides I am, and YOU are...But the Mother will listen, patient good-humored forgiving, and teach me to listen while I'm still learning to speak. While these invisible mountains encircle, teach patience and place, and speak silent welcome themselves: remember yourself. Remember us. Re-member.