Rain.
No umbrella, getting soaked.
I’ll just use the rain as my raincoat
—Daito Kokushi

The heart too will grieve
Alone faraway;
The tears that gather
Are actually pearls.
—U Soso Tham, Khasi poet

I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that 30 years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don't know how to do that.
—Gus Speth, American Environmental Activist

Whatever we are working with in the vessel, we have to keep warm.
—Alchemical idea

Alchemy is this idea that lives on the edges of truth. How could there be an art of transfiguring what is dirt to gold? To create some panacea, an elixir of life, so that we can live eternally? The talk of some stone of a philosopher. Though there is alluring mythos and story in the work and art of alchemy, I will not explore this here. As to take alchemy as a bell in a dark room, I listen into what echoes back when I throw this term out in life.

In the practice of alchemy, what rings most true comes in the fashion of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and its own narrative of al-chemical. It is how we have the ability to transform how exactly we find meaning in our lives. As we used to be able to see nature as family, yet now all of life dribbles through the small interpretation that we live in this empty neighborhood. In this Earth where water no longer speaks except for forecasted rain on our digital lithographs. We can no longer feel the sacredness of temperature differences enough so that GPS replaced our ability to touch water, speak to stars, and appreciate rain. All of which so sustain our old, forsaken ways of traveling and kinship that only existed in close relationship and in deep bond to the community that all of life makes up. And we speak of desertification, deforestation, and drought yet track none of this in our own souls, as we diagnose and pacify our pains, treating the symptom rather than come to understand why we so deeply ache.

I speak of this ache, which is this feeling of inadequacy and hurt that throbs so dearly, as if we have lost some infinite thing. And how that pain continues to boomerang, manifesting as how our unfulfillment and emptiness now—that feeling we are not enough nor that we have enough—right now, will only metastasize furthermore. No matter how many layers of appearance, filters, and pixelated, shriveled selves we create, wholeness cannot find those filled with holes. And no matter how much one may gain, if one does not honor the losses in our longings, then skeletons will take the form of our heels and scavenge away all of that 'wealth' with that dire sense of fear of losing it.

And I see how this ache spills into most of the meaning-making today. With how our wishes, hopes, and dreams, thrives within the context of scarcity, un-realizing how our scarcity inside is starting to mirror this very Earth. So shriveled and destitute from the living-dead, on their knees and clawing at life as consumption has consumed them in this sandpit of suffering. And how muffled the voices of the time-less guardians, those creatures, flora, fauna, and other-kin (things we often speak of as 'resources') we so scientificize and speak to as Other that we forget them to be our relatives. And can we see how our meaning-making has cut off any form of communication to feel heart-felt the messages of the world beyond our human language, interpretation, and evaluation? I am unsure as the glasses we have inherited are myopic, passed down by those who have destroyed these connections in arrogance. Yet, in stillness juxtaposed with frenetic pace of life so out of rhythm, there are ways to see what is opaque to clear and un-stir our minds from the ingredients of disconnection. Yet not simply by going into the recipe but facing the elements of disconnection in full meal, going fully in to find one's way out

However, there is something even more peculiar about our meaning-making. And to venture to the kitchen, kilns, and smitheries of creation, I trace how we have this ferocious ability to transfigure, out of particles that express moments of quantum marriage and divorce, into objects of play, observation, and integration; a language and approximation accessible to us. As this ability allows us to string together connection in the face of separation through the dialect of stories, story-telling, and view finding. More simply put: how we come to see the world when we essentially come out of the womb with no language and learn to gauge and approximate this wild world—almost so beyond the commonspeak and worded by places of no words. And in our infancy, this world that was once imbued by a magical sense that everything could spill into anything and anything spilt from exactly everything.

That was until we materialized edges. Boxes, catergories, and numbers. All those places of borders and boundaries that compress life into a separate me from you, a personal from the collective, and allow us to differentiate the inner and outer. Yet, is it not a fascinating occurrence how we have forgotten we are the own Gods of our bounds? That the in the watercourse ways of definition, we have created dissolution from any whole body or understanding of a self supported by other? As modernity has split ourselves into tight-neck, stiff-lipped categories of convenience: we are either selfish or selfless. As we forget the gifts of caring for oneself deeply and caring for others as we pathologize self-protective behaviors. So, what is the antidote to this sore of self? How we have split ourselves into individuality of which we no longer see the highest common denominator: all of which we are only whole when everyone is respected and cared as a need? What is the doctor and what appointment do we need to leave the bounds of deserving and to transition to how we all need love, rest, and affection no matter what we do and who we are? Beyond any measurement of quality and quantification.. what is the medicine to a trouble that only materializes in our attempts to make a problem out of it?

There may be a medicine but it is a pharmakon, something that can be both remedy and poison that only changes in how we orient towards its properties. This challenge of choice... maybe the answer lies in the steeped chapel of alchemy?

In my personal observation, I have seen alchemy to be comparable to this doctor without borders. Since the Greek khēmeía (χημεία) which roots sprout its meaning as "pouring" and "infusion" where alchemy could be likened to how things cast and pour together to allow or alloy something new to be birthed—perhaps a place without borders? As by breaking down the borders that we draw to our discomforts and fear, we find that truly meeting our pain is the relief we seek. And only in our disconnecting to pain we problematize its experience and muddy the waters of its sacredness. As that uncrusted wound, waiting to scar over is this plain of sacristy only when we lay fully exposed to its bleeding edges. So to be in this intimacy to what hurts there spawns the vernal grounds of alchemy. As a suture can only form in direct contact to what is hurt so close to what is healed and feeling the weight of its difference that we can converge to renewal. As we unshirvel to our greatest discomforts and fears by transforming them to be our greatest teachers. As well as an antiseptic to how there is this miasma from separating and disengaging from our own pains [1]. Because there is a wisdom in entertaining the breaking down of borders. Especially with how divided and isolating our cultures have become today. And alchemy lies at that horizon of possibility, the voice of the Earth, too, patiently waiting for us to emerge both Earthward and to expand to the infinite lengths of this whole cosmos.

Coelho put the art of alchemy succinctly:

The alchemists spent years in their laboratories, observing the fire that purified the metals. They spent so much time close to the fire that gradually they gave up the vanities of the world. They discovered that the purification of the metals had led to a purification of themselves.^[2]

For there is such a vain vanity in dishonoring the vertebral column passed down to us by many generations of Earth-divers and swimmers then to Earthwalkers and winders. And such a vanity in speaking to other species as if separate to our own health, body, and livelihood.[3]

And despite the more arcane practice of the metamorphic art of converting metals, rocks to minerals and gems, there is truth that Coelho exposes in how by learning the language of the world. Of which only those open to listen underneath the noise of nonsense-soriums and delightful distractions, there is a chrysalis always present that will heed our longing for growth. A diamond in the rough only found in those places of intense heat and pressure.

To distill this idea of alchemy further could more easily be explain through Coelho again, who is a master at simplification, the premise of the alchemical lies in a promised land: "to choose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have."^[4]

Parker J. Palmer spoke of this challenge in this sparklingly direct way:

Hope is holding in creative tension everything that is, with everything that could and should be… and each day taking some action to narrow the distance between the two.^[5]

And alchemy, under the context and umbrella of Parker J. Palmer distills this message of how only those deep attuned and intimate to the tension that lies resting in all our creation can learn the alphabet of alchemy and intimate the intimate inoculation. As he speaks to that boundary that we scandalously cross in birth, creation, and evolution. As at that crossing, there lies the emergence of the between of what is and what could be. Coelho put it that all of alchemy lies in-between what we are so accustomed to and what we want to have. In this challenge is the narrowing is where I find myself and where I would like to be. In this holding of the tension, and only in its holding, that I find myself most intimately woven with the cords of life. The strings of which it plays. As alchemy is a lot like jazz, needing both constant unbridled expression, output, and a tending towards that mirrors that of keeping flames alive only through discourse, exploration, and chattering. Yet, that most of this occurs during deep intimate solitude in our internal communities annd families, and that this unbridled expression is companioned to a relentless, fortuitous restraint and devotion to not let the materials be exposed to early.

As there is this alchemical idea that whatever we are working with in the vessel, we have to keep warm.

So, I want to share something that I have stoking the flames towards. And I can draw the flames most high with this small yet mighty question: how could I both tread lightly and ground deeply? This question of how could I walk this Earth, seeing the ways in which we parasitically leech off of Earth with our petrochemical products in no reciprocation or relationship to the land. The families of land that are habitats to us. And knowing how we habitually act in direct opposition to its cyclical nature—polluting the same waters in which we drink and creating waste that cannot be cycled through the cradling nets of decomposition and impermanence. In our plastic distaste for things for things that do not last. And the traumas of systems built upon supply and demand. Of which we supply 'goods' that are not only not 'good' or regenerative and cradle life at every step but of which create these nets of scarcity, through 'eco'-nomics, that obscure the abundance of life when we live in relationship to systems. As this question draws us to this flame of how we tread so deeply and ground so lightly... how we are travelers on this Earth, floating off upon it like Icarus in our attempts to manufacture a heaven that we fail to realize is already here. As we treat this Earth home and womb as its tourists, disconnected to place and not even understanding the language of which Earth expresses itself. As Coelho has observed himself: "... people become fascinated with pictures and words, and wind up forgetting the language of the world." How are we forgetting the world in our fantasy of economics? Of utility and resource rather than relative and kin?

What is the opposite to following abstract 'demands' of ever-increasing GDPs, ever-developing countries, and by no means fulfill our belonging, connection, and communion with what is life? In these systems of consumption, where on its opposite pole is this magnetic attractive force of this emptiness—this black hole—in a world so entangled with capitalism. As we live out scarcity wondering why scarcity is being reflected in our outer-worlds.[6]

As Andrew Holecek was so perturbed to observed, is how there is an obesity to our culture, as he identifies the woundedness and thus emptiness in our culture to a wrong view:

This wrong view spawns all the pathologies of materialism, including its byproduct of consumerism, which never satisfies because we're eating the menu instead of the meal. We get lost in all manner of eateries, which results in all manner of obesities. Physical, intellectual, psychological, and even spiritual portliness (that is, spiritual materialism) starts right here. Bloated bellies and bookshelves, overstuffed attics and garages, overweight intellects and ideologies—the "obesity" epidemic, in its infinite forms, is creating a host of personal, collective, and environmental eating disorders that are devouring this planet.^[7]

I would say devouring this planet by starving ourselves in this malnutrition of the fast-food served up from the traditional forms of consciousness. The traditional form of our base being this state of mind of consumerism that buffets ourselves into feeling that profound sense that we are not enough and so reflect this nebulous feeling of emptiness within ourselves. So that we may fill ourselves up our gadgets, gizmos, and doodads as if we can fulfill a scarce system by searching as if we are missing something. Forgetting that if we are not fulfilled or come from abundance now, then we will never feel 'whole' or heal.

As Francis Weller quoting Laurens van der Post, apparently speaking of Carl Jung, was said to have said:

Healing without a quickening of religion, as he put it to me, was "just not on." He was back at the moment far in time when the world "heal" formed itself first on the lips of living men, and to heal meant to "make whole," and the word whole and the word holy are both derived from "heal" to describe an invisible concept of life, so that in the beginning, as this hour, so much later than we think, the condition of wholeness and holieness are synonymous.^[8]

Not to say that there are innumerable traps within religion. As they, too, have the tendency to multiply our emptiness as much as any other substance, ideology or fantasy. And how it can ring the phones of abuses of others and this Earth body in our attempts to fill bottomless holes, as Holecek also identifies. Nevertheless, Holecek brings us to how this emptiness and feeling of lack can expand turtles all the way down. How we cling to causal chains, attempting to rat out what is unwanted yet not seeing how each chain links us up in the chains of blame as we separate ourselves from deeper understanding of situations. And that to rat out and shut down is similar to how trauma only strengthens in that premise that it can be shut down. As Kazu Haga once remarked, "We cannot shut down injustice any more than we can shut down trauma."

And Haga makes the comparison to how we shut down trauma to this alchemical idea of what could happen when we open up injustice, unravel the functions and DNA of harm, rather than re-embody the same DNA that created the injustice. As in this same golden vein, all experiences, situations, and conflicts can be then opened as if a present. As in alchemy, all of life in its magical moments are to be considered points of initiation, where we can open up to transforming and participating in the sacredness of death and creation or we can contract and embody the same death we face.

And I find that in the profane, in that ordinary of in the traffic jams on fear-inducing highways, gas stations that so embody the petro-chemical yet allow us to travel, and even business interactions dried out with professionalism. These places (or rather palaces) still express our need for contribution, connection, and community. And there are cracks to sprout out of and cracks to embody within these concretized spaces so drained of life (as life re-embodied as this Great Death. Yet, there is a pain to this crack, as all cracks are seminal and jagged. For the crack only emerges when something diverges. Something is released and its edges show. Edges we once deemed unpleasant and ugly to the point of a repulsive agony. Though, in this exchange, of which we are gifted the choice of choosing to do otherwise, to say "no!" yet still respect another's dignity and humanity, there comes something so transfigured. This openness and spaciousness when we fiercely forgive and come with understanding. And this comes when we stop and sit, stop and sit to attune to the pace that plate tectonics move and glacier melt, and stop and sit in places candlelit and devoid of any distraction. Stop and sit to simply enjoy the company of our outer lungs and respiratory systems of forests, oceans, and plants as we are so integrally connected with the atmosphere through deep breathing. And to diverge from abruptly moving on, business-as-usual, on the high ways of shepherding algorithms, default modes networks, and the life we inherit which has been so distorted. And to stop and sit to bear full witness and tend to our pains when things do not quite sit in alignment to our needs. And instead seeing conflict involves some sacrifice, we can start to alchemize into the idea that conflict and challenge invite us towards life. As places to learn. Places to cultivate forgiveness and expand ourselves to this invitation to walk fully with another in this both collapsing yet expanding universe.

And I am becoming more attuned to the ways in which I have left my own heart with my own heightened sensitivity to the discomfort of others. That to tune into myself would somehow disturb the peace of others in a way that my needs, feelings, and longing did no belong. That I needed to shrink myself to make space for the life so lively outside of me, forgetting that by abandoning myself and my heart-body, I diminished both inner and outer worlds. As I lost my own gifts, enchantments, and strengths in my disenchantment to attuning to life in balance.

In that making space away from myself to make way for others, I now realize that to create space for myself, only then and there can I start balance that space so that I can breathe myself whole and then contracting my diaphragm, allowing others to enter yet still being fully available to myself.

That in that experience of my self-neglect, I can see my reluctance to give myself the love that I need. The love I am so not used to receiving that I even am unfamiliar with giving and sharing it especially from and to myself. As there is peculiarness of how my love could fracture out in my sensitivity to others and my perceived expectations of them.

And what is most enchanting now is how those emotions of unsettlement—those inklings of gut feeling and sensorium of mourning and loss where I see how disconnect we have become with so used to saran-wrapped, convenient groceries so unattached to our own homes in the place of any intimate, gentle relationship to the determined action of tending of the Earth. And how normalized it is to watch and decentralize our attention away from our food, as if the act of eating was not this sacred act of connecting ourselves with all of life—things we typically consider 'other' to ourselves yet nourish ourselves so that our heart can beat. And how though we have high-speed forms of transportation, speaking to deeply to another (as we typically label these others as strange-rs) is a silent taboo considering how most of the engagements on these systems of transportation have become all digitalized. In these pixelated, shriveled selves that we hunch over as we become captured by these shiny rectangles. And how we have lost the magic quality of journeying and traveling to places with how we can only communicate to others through honks, glass-protected glances, and invented sign language.

And can we change distracting, desensitizing, and anesthesizing that to mourn and feel the loss of what once in what used to be slow processes, processes? Processes in alignment to geological and tectonic time, not in that intense, stimulating speed that leaves no time for our cells to be renewed in presence and relaxation. Unless in those places of "first-class" that only bring an illusion of salvation and comfort to a system out of wack to our body's natural rhythms. To turn towards the time that is so expansive that we lost ourselves into the starry night skies, only to find that the stars are our map home. As we chart constellation only in that deep intimacy and noticing of their scintillating positions.

I now see my mournings, grief, and general discomfort and unsettlement as sigils of a blessed unrest (wink wink Paul Hawken). And that rubbing my eyes by honoring the clarity that only emerges in witnessing our blindness and then rubbing vigorously the filters away may seem to act as the shades to clarity itself. Yet, when pull my hands away, my unsatisfaction turns satisfying as I realize that bearing full witness to life may hurt yet there is a joy. A joy in then seeing clear the things so obscured by avoidance, distraction, and running away only cleared in determined forbearance and fortitude.

And, in that teary-eyed endeavor of scrubbing my own eyes and eyelids, I rub that itch of mine—that small yet sacred voice—and kindle the flames of the parts of myself waiting to be restored, honored, and remembered as the key to the doors of a life in full vitality. Of the salient breadcrumbs I must follow—this trail of tears that lead exactly where my treasure lie. Not in some foreign place but exactly where I weep and exactly where I find myself.

So is this the rite of the alchemist-..? That I am not too sure, though I am wonderstruck when I find that my perilous path is bejeweled with rags that are their own riches. So, I smirk, maybe this rituals act of remaining where I so dearly want to run is this fugitive act of fleeing pyrite to discover gold. That staying put is a journey worth traveling to.

Of all the people I once have considered alchemists, none surprise me most as the very first president of the United States of America who once was recorded to express in a letter to George William Fairfax in June 1785 this decomposition of the profane into the sacred:

A knowing farmer, who, Midas like, can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation towards gold. —George Washington^[9]

[1]: As so much of culture creates this adolescent illusion that our main meanings to live is to pursue happiness, joy, and fulfillment. Yet, this attachment to positivity is amiss to how the shadows only grow in our blindness to them. (Could it be an act of playful coincidence that many of the viruses that has so devasted us humans have been transmitted from the creatures who only see through echolocation- perhaps a metaphor to our own blindness to how out of touch we are to life despite having eyes?) Byung Chul-Han, author of Burnout Society, has done an extensive contemplation on how excess positivity of our world today (that sickening cry about how everything possible - whether that bfpe through efforted, persistent hard work or through increasing wages added with compounding passive income) has so crippled our own sense of being alive. For when what is possible is vitally spoken about in such hope, our lived potentials become so diminished in the face of possibility and release. It is only in our efforted struggle to make things positive that things seem to only grow in their negativity—the anguish only arises when one desires to escape. And we can see this so expressed with how much of modern medicine, whether that even be the technologies and softwares that appeal to our senses that they will satisfy us, only pacifies our pain and acts a narcotic rather than attempting to address how in our aversion to pain disconnects us from all of life. As we cling to monarchy of pleasure, claiming pain to be the grim reaper yet not realizing that our pain can bring rise to compassion and that sometimes releasing hopes and dreams brings rise to reclaiming of despair as divine. For many have spoken about the divinity right within the dirt and the sacredness of truly honoring our pain. (Back to text)
[2]: Page 84
Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. HarperCollins, 1993. (Back to text)
[3]: And to speak to vertebrae, there is such a backbreaking understanding and piercing pain when it comes to the understanding of how we are betraying the very backs of which support us so dearly. And to take a gander into this understanding is this fantastical illusion and argument that somehow expressing how nature's biodiversity and preserving and sustaining its teeming possibility could provide the antidote to cancers, diseases, and viruses. As a tragic expression of a strategy to save nature (opposed to loving nature into a saving of nature as itself- loving itself). With this enshrouded sense of that nature and diversity simply waiting to be discovered. And how this expression spawned from the womb of economics (how we live in a system of which our medical systems are primarily based upon profiteering and restricting who receives medicine) and how by loving nature and seeing nature as relative, we can possibly save ourselves (yet also fully LOVE ourselves outside of the language of the salvationary). As, too often than not, so much in mainstream culture fails to realize how seeing Nature only in its utility to our longings and deepest desires that we re-embody the same cancer we seek to destroy. Failing to realize that we need de-story an us separate from Nature. As we are nature itself hurting itself only viewing itself through self-judgment and evaluation rather than gratitude and appreciation. (Back to text)
[4]]: Page 30
Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. HarperCollins, 1993. (Back to text)
[5]: 4:57
Parker J. Palmer in conversation with Carrie Newcomer. (Back to text)

The Rite of Alchemy