Page 61 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

of her, I regarded her tail, imagining I might hold onto it like a young one, following wherever she

led. Before I could grab hold, she began walking ahead of me, turned back and looked at me for

a moment, then continued walking. In an instant, she disappeared into a smoky blue mist with

the words, “We are all becoming extinct.” I was bereft.

Whatever else may be required to bring healing, I have learned that I must know my grief: for

the animals, for the earth, for humanity, the future, and myself. Occasionally, the enormity of it

has overwhelmed me. But grief has brought me back into my body and my heart. It has been

the glue that has helped me begin to reassemble the lost and missing parts of myself that I

could not piece together even a few short years ago. I feel more human, more whole, for having

entered into relationship with it. Sometimes when it comes, whether unbidden and urgent, or

having simmered just below the surface before breaking through, I think, “Okay, thank you, I am

still real, I can still feel, I am here.”

Each of us has a gateway, or portal, to our grief; the animals are mine. They are suffering

greatly as a result of our ways of living. They are grieving, too. My dreams tell me that they want

us to grieve with them for all that we have lost, are losing, and still stand to lose.

During the meditation, another elephant told me to go to Stonehenge. He said, “There you will

know ancient. There you will know devotion. There you will know memory.” A Cree woman once

told me that the Stone people have borne witness to everything since the beginning of time. Like

the elephants, they are beings of long, long memory. Good teachers, both, for without memory,

there is no wisdom. The real world wants us to remember how to live in a way that furthers life.

It is willing to help us, if we listen for the ways in which we can ally with it and act accordingly. “I

wandered out of the woods and got lost.” “Go back to the woods, go back to the water.”

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