Sirens

On Hearing the Sacred in Everything

I am so blessed to live in a valley where when police sirens start to wail, the coyotes join in. For a moment, I get to hear the similarities between these disparate sounds—the wild and the manufactured, the ancient and the modern, both wailing their particular song into the night air.

Martín Prechtel tells a story in his book Stealing Benefasio’s Roses called “The Toe Bone and the Tooth.” Nothing I say here will capture the enormity of that story or book—I recommend reading it. But one essential teaching has stayed with me: the body of the holy earth is all things, and her body is dismembered by all that humans do. That is just what it is.

Prechtel teaches us to see “things” not as inanimate chunks of stuff that serve our needs, but as orphaned pieces of the body of the great holy goddess who is the earth. That cement wall in my backyard? Those are members of the mountains, hundreds of miles from here, who have been cut into, mined for their precious chunks of granite or basalt, carried to a holding yard, auctioned off, and are now required to stand erect in this new form.

This understanding isn’t meant to make me feel guilty or to swear off modern technologies like cement. It brings me into a more fundamental truth of what is. At least I’m not ignoring the reality that a sacred mountain has been relocated into my yard to serve as a retaining wall. My job now is to grieve appropriately, to remember that mountain as it looks back at me from its new wall-form, and to make offerings—gifts of words, objects I make with my hands. Above all, to relate to this mountain-wall with the reverence due a goddess.

If I regard all orphaned and displaced, dismembered parts of the great body like this, I move through the world differently. If I knew I was in a temple all the time—that even the dirty and broken pieces of civilization are part of Her, the Holy Earth Goddess—how would I regard it all?

I think one of the reasons I can feel disconnected and uptight in a city is that it’s so much easier to forget where I am. When I’m surrounded by cement sidewalks and artistically-unimaginative office buildings, it’s easy to understand why I feel separate from “nature.” Yet all of this is nature. And nature needs us to remember her. The Spirit in nature needs us to recognize her despite how she’s been chopped up and reshaped.

So what might this look like in practice? When I’m in San Francisco, the closest city to my home, I look for the obvious places nature is wagging her tail in beauty—the trees bravely growing next to busy traffic, the pigeons surviving amidst their new habitat of concrete ledges and gargoyles. I keep an eye out for unexpected insects and cheer them on. Hawks and coyotes are especially exciting to me.

But I also try to practice what Prechtel teaches. I look at the iron streetlamps and remember the melted ore, the ancient compressed fire of the earth. I listen to the hum of a motor and hear an oscillating, vibratory OM. The sand and stone, the petroleum—all ancient, all sacred, all Her. When the sound first hits me as grinding, as abrasive to what we could be hearing upon this magical planet, I pause and try to remember what’s really here. I can hear the sacred tones in everything if I let go of my judgment. The world is singing all the time. We just need to hear it.

This isn’t denial. There are sounds that are violent and hurtful, forms of matter that have been mutilated into something harmful. When we can, we need to protect the gates of our bodies. Let us keep moving towards more beautiful, renewable, and low-impact decisions in all the things we do and create with earth-matter. Let us restore the dark skies and quiet nights everywhere possible.

But in the meantime, it only pollutes my own mind and soul to keep bad-mouthing matter in her modern forms. When I treat matter as mother, as Gaia, as the sacred miracle that she is, she feels seen. And I feel more at peace, even if my heart is breaking. When we turn our curses into blessings, we move one step closer to living in an intact way that recognizes the animate nature of all life.

Including the shopping malls. Including the police sirens. Including the coyotes who howl alongside them, reminding us that She is alive and well no matter what.