The Power of the Earth: Shake/Rousing
by Deena Metzger
In a moment of despair, the augury speaks of the power of the earth. On this day, after incessant rains wore away the ground the way misery and fear erode the heart, the sweet waters, grim with debris, muddied, continued their way to the ocean, oily dark, unsafe, no longer the one we were traveling toward, no longer the water we dreamed as sanctuary to everything that lives.
We go where we have to go. Water flows down hill and cannot stop itself even if it can see from its snowy vantage that it will soon be at one with the dolphins beaching themselves and the hapless grebe sticky with tar. Pure, white, icy, it comes from afar, from the snowfields and the translucent glaciers shining with first light, and descending, helpless, bound to us, comrades in a chain gang, hits the damned hammer of itself into the hapless earth, again and again.
Knowing gloom as the great enemy of possibility, I clutch the tree we still call Hecate, an old one, that could have, like its companion, plummeted, but hasn’t plunged into the ravine as great rocks tumble from the escarpment. The tree’s gnarled root extends itself into the emptiness, a green figure, surprisingly a girl, a dryad on a tightrope, balancing against all odds.
I grasp the tree and beg for wisdom, imagining across the entire expanse of America, the dispirited dolphins singing a song the winds carry westward. Gaining hope from their own music that somehow we hear and learn and carry, they turn eastward to some new depths tsunamis open that will refresh them even so. A spirit shakes me, a wave breaking, dashing me to the grassy ocean floor before I can rise in a cetacean spin to the surface and breathe. I do not name what I do not understand; the song is halting and rough on these lungs filling with salt water.
Then I come home, righting the bluebird house that fell over in the wind, see the wolves gracefully lounging across the threshold, enter, throw the windows open, observe the first fly, spider, lizard, all so young, beginners at this life, carrying, who knows what wisdom age cannot imagine as they scamper delighted and oblivious through this sudden new day.
This is when the augury comes: The Power of the Earth and Shake/ Rousing. I do not know yet what it says, having paused to write what it is certain to address, perhaps to ease. Healing would be too much to ask.
An ancient tree roots in the underworld and branches in heaven.
Thunder is a great shock coming from beneath,
The rousing sun, green, wood, spring’s beginning,
Waking the sleeping insects.
The power of the earth is the voice of God.
Fear is inevitable before the hurricane and the tree of vision.
The omen speaks: Re-imagine and begin again,
The old ones have known this ten thousand years.*
The presence of God will not save us but it will save the world. The mountain rises out of the magma. The melting ice refreshes the sea. We do not know the future uses of the oils that spew upward through the cracks in the earth. Before the skies darken, a thousand new effulgent greens burnish in the Hiroshima light of the setting sun.
A long sleep is inevitable. A coma of time stretches before us. Then they will come again, the small ones, born of fathers and mothers we will never know. Shapes we do not recognize chattering in unknown languages in our dreams of an incomprehensible future. They are like the lizard, the fly and the tiniest spider that race in hermetic script across the surface of the mind. Despair disperses in the dust storm and the whirlwind. What more comfort is wanted than that the power of the earth is greater than we?
I fall, one falls down, before the earth trembler and the thunder beings, and even in such despair opens the heart. Then the fog comes in from the sea, a calming poultice for the burning light. The tree holds to its perch like an eagle to its aerie and those trees that fell root deeper into the saturated earth. Languages we have not yet learned come on the wind. Dolphin, far away, leap; we have to know the song is sung to us. Auguries, arrows from another world, strike us awake.
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*'Four of Stones, The Power of the Earth,' from The Haindl Tarot, The Minor Arcana, Rachel Pollack, New Page Books, Franklin Lakes, NJ, pages 135-138. '51 Shake/Rousing,' from Total I Ching: Myths for Change, Stephan Karcher, TimeWarner Books, London, UK, pages 362-364.
about the author
Deena Metzger is a novelist, poet, essayist, storyteller and healer. She is the author of Tree: Essays and Pieces; Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds, Intimate Nature: the Bond Between Women and Animals (co-editor with Brenda Peterson and Linda Hogan), the novels What Dinah Thought, The Other Hand, Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn, several books of poetry, and Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing. She lives in Topanga Canyon with her husband and the wolves Akasha and Blue.
