In the forest, the boundaries between self and other dissolve. You are invited to discover deep relational interconnectedness in this sensorial essay. Corina takes readers on a vivid journey through a hike in nature, where the boundaries between self and universe blur, revealing insights into the balance of light and darkness, and the transformative power of embracing life’s dualities.

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The sweet blue smoke of burning sage dissipates into the density of imbricate leaves. Cleansed, bare feet kiss the forest floor. Each intentional step casts a prayer along the contours of stone and fallen branches. It’s a remembering coaxed by the ugly delicious pop of musky disintegrating fruit pressed between soft skin and hard Earth. The path is continuously redirected around iridescent silken temples spun by the genius of eight nearly invisible arachnid arms. Dirt grinds beneath fingernails, sweat beads, stinking, and pooling in underarms. Senses ignited, blood pulsing in poetry, the layers of entrenched personas begin to crack and peel away. 

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A mystic current of intelligence flows through thoughts and dreams, in the breeze passing between leaves into the lungs of animals that soar and crawl, slither and prowl. Breath concentrates, steadies, and      e-l-o-n-g-a-t-e-s.

 

Upon this salty exhale of spirit and water swims the primordial depth of our ancestors, patiently they wait for our heads to turn, ears to the East. Listen, and it will be revealed that they are Thou, and you are them. Intermingling subjectivities reorients the cosmic geometry of human consciousness from a pointed anthropocentric being upon Earth into an intertwined spirit of the universe. Encompassed by the all-pervading theosphere, the totality of the self permeates into all facets of material manifestation.

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But what is that slinking and slipping through the partially lifted veil? The deepest depths of darkness, where shadows shift around obscured corners of the psyche, eternally threatening to destroy whatever purity and light we may cling to!

 

A taste of the brilliant enlightened mind creates a jarring clarity of rigid judgment of what is “good” and what is “evil.”  Within its ebony embrace, the darkness consumes all boundaries. The dissolution of form threatens the very existence of an “I,” generating the most profoundly harrowing existential fear. Penetrating stares under grizzled feathers, a savage raven caws. Guttural maniacal laughter is all-consuming, forcefully pressing in on all sides. Paralyzed in fear, we fall, swirling down into opaque blackness. Struggling against the powerful unknown, demons hiss, and desperate cries never escape parted lips. 

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Total annihilation is imminent, of the individual and of society as we are each faced with ourselves in the abyss. Within the realm of liminality, the shadows present the opportunity of numinous transformation. Can we possibly surrender to the unknown, to the laughing evil threatening to engulf our naked psyche? The light creates definitions, the darkness swallows division. Do we condemn the light for giving form to dark, or do we praise the night for giving life to the day?

 

When the light becomes darkness, and the darkness becomes the light, transcendence of duality has the propensity to ignite the state of being where all belong: the story of the unified. The path toward unity demands that the inner truth be known, accepted, and honored. How can the darkness be demonized when, without it, there is no light to take delight? Is not the Grand Canyon the shadow of a primordial ocean, and the towering Himalayas a sacred testament to the violence of tectonic plates? The severance of unity births both yin and yang, one is not ascendant over the other, they both belong. 

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In the face of complete and utter annihilation, laugh back! Allow the Divine Shadow to consume you! Look over your shoulder to meet your death’s noble unblinking gaze. When the consumer is consumed, extreme polarities complexify under the compressing weight of truth, and we are reborn.

 

Hey-ah! And the head falls back to the Earth, supported by pillows of soft chartreuse moss. Thoughts drawn by underground roots transpire through the verdant canopy whose discerning intelligence filters the trivial from the profound to be reabsorbed in the fertile awaiting human mind below. Speaking with the seen and the unseen, for the green ones and the unclean ones, souls sip from songbirds’ wingtip, linear time rips, torn asunder from interior mind trips. When the outer becomes the inner and the inner informs the outer, words of the trees flutter through parted lips, and ripple across our onyx depths. Cellular memory awakened, domesticated skin peels away, exposing a single tear of vulnerable self-discovery. Head in heart, hand on hand, the language of no words cradles a velvet sky upon soft brown land. 

 

The sensuality of mysticism lives here in the simultaneous collapse of the past and the future, the acceptance of death giving birth to the individual into the present ever-fluctuating moment. A tangible epiphany beyond the borders of linear thought, where what is being perceived out there is married to what is unfolding within. Through the sacred union of the masculine and feminine, dual and nondual, good and evil, conscious and unconscious, the fool becomes the sage, and the sage is but a fool. Supported in the vulnerability of falling in love with life, we fall love with all of our savage beauty. Our minds intertwine with Spirit, and our enchanted hearts intrinsically swell to consume all participants of the cosmological story: churning microflora excrete fertile humus under the wonder of an impregnated moon’s silver glow, the sacred polyester rug supports the vulnerable peace of a silent meditator. Our existential thirst is quenched in honoring every sacramental drop of sensual phenomenology. From a state of porous fulfillment, humankind develops the capacity to extend themselves as a diaphanous bridge into the multidimensional universe, a conduit of cosmological powers.