They  Make  Me  Almost  Look  Forward  To  Old  Age 

Gary  Snyder

from   A  Place  In  Space

We were walking in mid‑October down to Sailor Meadow (about 5,800 feet), to see an old stand on a broad bench above the north fork of the American River in the northern Sierra Nevada. Sitting beneath a cedar growing at the top of the rocks we ate lunch. Then we headed southwest over rolls of forested stony formations and eventually more gentle slopes into a world of greater and greater trees. For hours we were in the company of elders. Sugar Pines predominate. There are properly mature symmetrical trees a hundred and fifty feet high that hold themselves upright and keep their branches neatly arranged. But then beyond them, above them, loom the  ancient trees:  huge, loopy, trashy, and irregular. Their bark is redder and the plates more spread, they have fewer branches, and those surviving branches are great in girth and curve wildly. Each one is unique and goofy. Mature Incense Cedar. Some large Red Fir. An odd Douglas Fir. A few great Jeffrey Pine. And many snags, in all conditions: some just recently expired with red or brown dead needles still clinging, some deader yet with plates of bark hanging from the trunk (where bats nest), some pure white smooth dead ones with hardly any limbs left, but with an occasional neat woodpecker hole; and finally the ancient dead: all soft and rotten while yet standing.

Many have fallen. There are freshly fallen snags (which often take a few trees with them) and the older fallen snags. Firm down logs you must climb over, or sometimes you can walk their length, and logs that crumble as you climb them. Logs of still another age have gotten soft and begun to fade, leaving just the pitchy heartwood core and some pitchy rot-proof limbs as signs. And then there are some long subtle hummocks that are the last trace of an old gone log. The straight line of mushrooms sprouting along a smooth ground surface is the final sign, the last ghost, of a tree that “died” centuries ago.

A carpet of young trees coming in—from six inches tall to twenty feet, all sizes—waiting down here on the forest floor for the big snags standing up there dead to keel over and make more canopy space. Sunny, breezy, warm, open, light—but the great trees are all around us. Their trunks fill the sky and reflect a warm golden light. The whole canopy has that sinewy look of ancient trees. Their needles are distinctive tiny patterns against the sky—the Red Fir most strict and fine.

The Sierra forest is sunny-shady and dry for fully half the year. The loose litter, the crackliness, the dustiness of the duff, the curl of crisp Madrone leaves on the ground, the little coins of fallen manzanita leaves. The pine-needle floor is crunchy, the air is slightly resinous and aromatic, there is a delicate brushing of spiderwebs everywhere. Summer forest: intense play of sun and the vegetation in still steady presence—not giving up water, not wilting, not stressing, just quietly holding. Shrubs with small, aromatic, waxy, tough leaves. The shrub color is often blue-gray. At the south end of the small meadow the area is named for, beyond a thicket of aspen, standing within a grove of flourishing fir, is a remarkably advanced snag. It once was a pine over two hundred feet tall. Now around the base all the sapwood has peeled away, and what's holding the bulky trunk up is a thin column of heartwood which is itself all punky, shedding, and frazzled. The great rotten thing has a lean as well! Any moment it might go.

How curious it would be to die and then remain standing for another century or two. To enjoy "dead verticality." If humans could do it we would hear news like, “Henry David Thoreau finally toppled over.” The human community when healthy, is like an ancient forest. The little ones are in the shade and shelter of the big ones, even rooted in their lost old bodies. All ages, and all together growing and dying. “All-age-unmanaged”—that's a natural community, human or other. The industry prizes the younger and middle-aged trees that keep their symmetry, keep there branches even of length and angle. But let there also be really old trees who can give up all sense of propriety and begin throwing their limbs out in extravagant gestures, dancelike poses, displaying their insouciance in the face of mortality, holding themselves available to whatever the world and the weather might propose. I look up to them: they are like the Chinese Immortals, they are Han-shan and Shi-de sorts of characters—to have lived that long is to have permission to be eccentric, to be the poets and painters among trees, laughing, ragged, and fearless. They make me almost look forward to old age.

Mother  God  Principle

from  Cycles of the Creative Forces

Uranda   August 6, 1953

This is the period when Mother God must come into her own or man is lost. If he continues to cling to the old concepts with respect to God he is going to fail. We must recognize the proper relationship of the Father principle and the Mother principle in the God idea, or the God concept, if we are going to begin to have a sense of relatedness to what we should mean when we say God—the One Who Dwells. But people do not mean that. The word has been brought into disrepute and caused to mean a million things that it really does not. So the development of the Mother God principle is the important thing in this step. How are you going to have the Child without the Mother? Can you tell me? No, it will not work. The Father principle has already been revealed; the Mother principle has been very badly distorted in concept. But we have to see the Mother principle of God—and see the Father principle of God and the Mother principle of God in reality—before we can begin to see the Child principle. Unless the Child principle is manifesting in reality we are not going to have on earth what we ought to have in the creative expression of God on earth through man, man being restored to the point where he can share God's creative work, which is the important thing. But you are not going to have the Child restoration of the pattern work out until you have the Mother restoration of the principle work out.

In essence, in principle, the Father restoration, the restoration of the Father principle, has been taken care of, as far as the Master was concerned, and it is there. There is more we have to do about it, that is true, but we must come to the point of letting the Mother principle have meaning, before the Child principle can truly manifest. So we see that the Old Testament concept with respect to Jehovah was a distortion, but nevertheless it was the reality of the Mother principle, and not, in the sense of absolute Being, the Almighty. What I am speaking of here, using the crude term Jehovah, is Mother God, not Father God, and we need to realize that and begin to recognize that the manifestation of God and the body of God must be in relationship to Mother God. Father God principle will function in relationship to Mother God principle without being evident in form in an outer sense, because in the inner and the outer vibrational factors at work in relationship to the world in the creative processes, we have Father God invisible, Mother God visible.

But we have not let Mother God have a body, so Father God could not do anything about it. We begin to see, then, that until we let Mother God have a body, Father God, in the invisible cycle, cannot have any real meaning on earth to bring forth the Child, or the reality of the creative fulfilment. So once we begin to let the Mother God principle have meaning—the Master came and revealed the reality of the Father God principle—we begin to be in position where heaven and earth can be one; in other words union between Father God and Mother God in the sense of the whole world, the whole pattern. And then we begin to have the restoration from the standpoint of the life factor, or the Child factor, in relationship to individual living or the living in the kingdoms of this world—the mineral kingdom, vegetable kingdom, animal kingdom, etc.

You begin to see how you are actually functioning in relationship to Father God as an aspect of Mother God to the degree that you have become centered and cleared through so that through you the Child factor, the creative force factor, can begin to manifest. And there is absolutely no other way that any human being can come to know the reality of heavenly magic, or creative magic, or true fulfilment, individually and collectively speaking.

from  Letters To You

Uranda   1937

As the God Beings of each Plane are Focalized in the Lord of that Plane, and the Seven Lords of the Seven Planes are the Elohim, with the Focal Lords of the six lower Planes all focalized in full response in and to the LORD of Lords Who is the LORD OUR GOD Who manifested in and as Jesus; it becomes evident that the Three Inner Planes are Positive to the Three Outer Planes, and that these Six Planes are contained within, and infused with, the Seventh Plane which is the One Plane that blends all the other Planes.

The Three Inner Planes are, for this world, the rightful Expression of Father-God, and the Three Outer Planes are the rightful spheres of Mother-God-Being. All God-Beings functioning in the Three Outer Planes, or Worlds, are all contained within Mother-God, and are Focalized in the Lord of the Sacred Three, Who, as High Priest of the Three Negative Worlds, is fully responsive to, and focalized in, the LORD of Lords, Who is the LORD of the Sacred Seven. So it is that the LORD of the Sacred Seven is the Focal Point of Father-God in the Whole, Holy World and the Lord of the Sacred Three, as the Focal Point of Mother-God, is centered in Negative Response to the LORD of Lords.