The Emptiness That Is Also Filled
An excerpt from Make Your Body the Prayer
Make so much space around the silence that it is filled with song.
Creativity is also about feedback. It's about a kind of pulling apart of at least two things so that they can turn towards each other and create a field in between them…Creativity is a practice of learning to feel the material quality of your own relatedness, your own multiplicity. And the way that the part of you that is vessel, the part of you that is witness and holding and the walls of the container, can attune both to the support of the Long Body energy that is stretching behind you and around you and holding you and understanding you and giving you nourishment. And to the gestation of the Long Body that is inside of you and inside of the spaces between relationships, this interstitial Long Body that waits in the liminal, latent, germinating, in its own rhythm of emergence.
—Maitake Mushroom1
Was there an original question I was trying to ask?
For me, both the answer and the question have changed so much that I don't even really have words for it anymore, the question has become my body and the answer has become everything that is still shaping the question.
I am still grappling with the relational woundings that reverberate through the core of this culture, rippling through my own small life as well in my body’s struggles with chronic illness and relational complexity.
Several months after I recorded the first conversation with Maitake, I have the impulse to channel Maitake again, making another zoom recording in response to a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. At the time that I am recording Maitake’s part of this conversation, I am still living in the upstairs of my mom’s house, still struggling with the ways that the daily unpredictability of my embodied experience is disrupting my epistemology of “self.” Fungi are very literally inside of me, my system struggling with brain fog, fatigue, and many other symptoms from my body’s difficulty with detoxifying mycotoxins.2
My experiences with mold exposure have given me a different way to perceive what I'm learning about the nervous system and how my organism relates to the inter-tangled webbing of ancestors, earth beings, and cultural epistemologies that are threaded through my sense of "self." Sharing space with the mycotoxins in my body, I am reminded that so many of our ancestrally inherited ways of being in relationship are still snarled up with threat reactions of unmetabolized toxicity, playing on repeat within our systems long after their original sources have disappeared.
Three months after I record Maitake’s side of the as yet unfinished conversation, I move into an RV trailer to begin the process of detoxing from mold toxicity. At the time, I am feeling stuck about the next steps of my thesis and I feel like I need to ask the wider body for help with the next steps of my creative process.
I find the video of the second Maitake channeling on my computer, knowing that I had set it aside for a future time, but having no memory of what Maitake had said or done during the recording. I get on a zoom call to record my side of the conversation, asking my authentic questions and sharing about the difficulties I am feeling in my creative process. I am surprised by the resonance within Maitake’s responses, time folding over to meet me in this ecological synchronicity of asynchronous relationship.
SHANTE’
I came here to ask for counsel about this project that I'm working on, Long Body Prayers… My biggest question right now is just how to be really simple. I’m realizing how complicated I've made everything in my life. I feel like all of this writing, all of these intuitions have come from this wider body… In this revising process I really want to be in my integrity around retaining that felt sense, that thickness, that presence. And it feels like there's so much to communicate, so many different beings and pieces of this ecosystem that want to be heard. So if you have any—my dog is barking—if you have any wisdom for how to be in that simplicity and that listening…
MAITAKE
The story you are longing for cannot be grasped by your hands alone. Cannot be manipulated in a certain time frame. When met with urgency will only disappear.
SHANTE’
That's definitely the dance, is showing up to each piece of this and allowing it the time for whatever wants to be revealed in the moment. And also being at ease with it always being unfinished, it always being just a piece.
MAITAKE
The only medicine for the place of aching is to nestle your body into the shape of that absence. To make your body the prayer that resonates from a depth of soil. To become the portal back to home.
This whole project is following. I'm not leading it. The spirits of the Long Body are the ones who have been holding the container.
What have I been following? The aliveness. The beauty. Those moments of resonating truth, of touching into that place of primordial belonging. What it feels like to just be accepted for existing. Fully welcome.
This thesis has emerged out of such an iterative process of relationship. Channeling the voices of nature beings, of deep time ancestors, of my animal body, while deepening into intimacy with the experience of where I am, the bodies and ecosystems that enfold me. Distilling the oracular channellings into poems, transmuting the felt sense of the poetry into a painting, cutting the painting into 24 fragments and writing the poems on the back of each card. From unified whole to a uniqueness of beings, again and again, this oscillation.
In the writing process for this, it took me so long to realize that the oracle cards needed to be included within the essays.3
But then after a class with Bree Greenberg Benjamin in which she shared her insights into maturation as an initiatory process of embodying erotic life force, I finally realized that I had received similar channellings about maturation before I had the embodied practice to grow into them myself yet. Discovering Bree's immense body of work and specific knowledge she has from so many years of client work has been such a relief to the part of me that felt like I had to carry what I was receiving alone, with no one who had already walked the path.
This isolation was creating such a blockage in my practice because I was feeling paralyzed by the immensity of what was wanting to be shared through me. I realized that for so long I’ve felt like I have to be the precocious young one showing the older ones how to heal so that they would have capacity to hold me. After that class with Bree, I was finally able to ask myself the questions: “Out of all of this, what is mine to carry? Where is the pleasure for me?” I realized that I can put down the burden of trying to carry something for the collective that felt too big for me and that instead I can just exist in the specificity of my own creative expression and the knowings I am receiving from the wider body.
It was then that the oracle deck revealed itself as the 24 vertebrae of this project’s midline,4 the cards an oracular guide for each essay, vessels within which the alchemy was to occur.
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