The quiet creeps through us and leaves its gift inside us. The sea roughens. The fire withdraws with a hush. The moon tangles in the trees. Its light can always find us. Where we go, it goes. The song children and I walk back to the group. We still hold hands. When we hold hands we drift in our friendship. The happiness makes me fold my lips inside my mouth, an inward smile. I get giddy. I feel my tummy spin. Have you looked at a leaf in the color time, maybe the last leaf on the wind-stripped branch? Something very small attaches it, something you can see it try to break by its movements, or the wind is trying, and maybe the branch. We have to be a little careful about understanding things. We aren’t supposed to. This is something we are learning. I heard someone say the word “cusp.” I had heard this word from deep inside me once when I was not even receiving song. Just the word. Cusp. I did not do anything with it because we are not the knowers. We’re the children. We bring the song to the fire and let the others move inside it. We bring our own wisdom, our openness, each of us.
Much of the time, a single word gets friends in a little bit of time later. It is like inviting one white bird to join me for a little piece of bread then all the white birds come to me. This was like when I sit on the rocks at the sea. A seal I am friends with comes swimming to me. He swims fast as he gets closer then leaps out of the water to join me. He stretches out next to me then rolls back so I can see his belly. He is asking me to scratch so I do. I do that all day or until somebody human comes. The seal tries to get who comes along to join in the scratch. The other seals don’t come up because they are happy feeling what the seal feels. It makes all of us happy.
I stayed in the listening for as long as I could. That’s when a new song arrived like a loud baby. It was so loud and clear I thought a bear was singing! I searched for the bear in the darkness. I could see everything but no bear so I went back to sleep. One thing I remember from my bear hunt was how clear the night was. The stars were so close I could have worn them as skin made of the ice stones. I felt like one of them, solid and firm but also air-thin. The night lifted me from the ground for a closer look, I thought. But it wasn’t. It was a closer listen. Cusp, it said then nothing, only stillness. The distance of the word from all other words was too great. That was what the quiet was telling. This and only this, it was saying. Cusp.
My heaven is everywhere. Some of it I can touch like the seal and the white bird who come to me when I sit and think to them. Some of it I can only touch with my mind which is just as good. The hands of my mind go all over everything like I am holding the world. I can hold so much. I feel this animal earth because I am of it. I am paw and eyelash. I am haunch and run.
Now we join in with the singing of the song we have delivered. It moves upon the air training all our throats, opening our eyes. Visions have come with this song. Not all songs bring vision. It would be too much if they all did. Much of the time, the songs are love coming to us from the Earth-God, its paws all muddy and rough. Like the seal, it just wants to be touched by us the same way we want to be touched by it. Holding this much love binds us. We help one another in the exchange. No one can carry love all alone. No one can carry love all the time without sharing it. That is what the songs are. A bit of the light shining between us. A way of saying I am with you.
Once I received a song entirely on my own. It was a little song, and it was just for me. I smiled inside myself where the song came from. I patted the head of the earth like I do the seal when the seal has shrugged and stretched and let me know what it wanted to, if there’s something to know. I pat it on the head and it dives back into the sea. The earth doesn’t dive back into the sea, though. It stays here with me, its great body breathing, its heart forever beating inside all that tree fur.