No Room on The Ark

Ama'u: An Encounter with Divine Emotional Ego

This was one of those weeks you dread as a writer. Feeling the pressure of knowing you have something to say that feels vital, but unable to find the words. I’ve edited this letter a few times by this point, and can say the block has passed, but just yesterday I was still feeling the failure of trying to wrestle words onto this screen that were worthy of my subject.

I was trying to write a profile of pua’aehuehu and my mentor Ke’oni Hanalei to submit to the upcoming issue of The Dark Mountain Project, a publication I have long admired. In my mind getting published there would bring my work to the attention of the wider community of writers focused on ecological and civilization collapse and the art that can be created as we go through this transition. Being a writer is a lonely business. I long for community and peers and was hoping I could find it here if they accepted my article. Note, just the language the publishing world uses-submission and acceptance are clues as to why I was unable to write this article. I was trying to fit myself in a box, which has worked for me sometimes, but pua’aehuehu was not having it. The teachings of the ferns are the most subtle and potent I have ever encountered. When you commit to working with them they permeate every aspect of your life. No shortcuts on the path to aloha mā are allowed. If you take one, the ferns will only send you back to the ground you need to cover again. It’s generally not going to be comfortable.

In my desire to be published in Dark Mountain, not only did I want to advance my career, I am also emotionally invested. I truly want to share this ike with the world.

Let me go back and explain the topic of this call to submission, since it definitely plays into the dynamics of this story. The call was for writing about people, places, practices, crafts, etc., that the writer thought should be saved on a metaphorical ark in the form of a book, like the one Noah built we hear of in the Old Testament. The idea is, like Noah’s, the book will preserve what is good and beautiful about our civilization so that it could be rediscovered by any surviving future humans once the waters of the next flood, happening right now as Earth heats us, subside.

Pua’aehuehu, a body of knowledge from the Mū culture that existed before the actual physical cataclysm documented in the Biblical and found in the mythology of cultures around the world, was a perfect subject. However, when I went to write the article, I found I could not wrestle the subject into the format of how I had interpreted the submission guidelines-a profile of someone preserving or cultivating something that needed to be saved on this ark, the upcoming Dark Mountain book.

As depression whispered in my ear I had zero talent and was worthless, I stepped away from the keyboard and settled into a lounge chair with a notebook and began to write by hand about significant encounters I’d had with ferns, beginning with a moment in the 1970s when I was mesmerized by a hill of maidenhairs, straying behind my fellow Girl Scout campers as we hiked to the mess hall.

I can still feel the presence of those ferns forty years on, how they seemed to tremble with their own beauty, vibrating to a song that came from within them that I couldn’t hear with my physical ears, yet somehow sensed resonating deep in the interior of my body’s cells, not that I knew I was made of cells at age eight. On the contrary, at that age I didn’t think about my body at all. I was just in it, walking through the woods, running through trees in twilight, riding a black horse named Amsted who reminded me of Black Beauty without any fear I would fall.

Black Beauty was the horse in one of my favorite books and films, the 1940s version starring the stunning pre-teen Elizabeth Taylor who had no idea at that age that her beauty would engender such wreckage, someone still at one with her “animal body” as Mary Oliver calls it and who yearned, like me, to move through the world with nobility and grace like an animal, who still believed in herself and still trusted beauty was a force for good.

This moment of beholding the ferns may have been the first moment I experienced longing, though again, longing was not a word I thought about, even if I’d heard it. I, like Elizabeth Taylor with her face pressed to Black Beauty’s shining neck, yearned to hear and be one with that song. I lingered by the hill until the girls were almost out of sight. I don't recall anyone missing me or turning to shout keep up. Not even the councilors noticed I wasn’t with the group.

I probably could have stayed there all through dinner and rejoined the troup on their way back to our camp, but I didn’t. Instead, I did what most of us did in childhood, I betrayed myself, turned against what I truly wanted-to sit with the ferns long enough until I heard their song and scrambled after the girls to line up in the mess hall for American chop suey and tin cups of bug juice.

And so began a pattern that has continued to this day.

After an enjoyable hour or so of jotting down fern encounters-it’s amazing how often they’ve appeared in significant moments in my poems, almost like supporting characters, I had discharged a little of the self-judgment and was able to check in about why I was writing this article.

Pua’aehuehu is a fascinating subject and Ke’oni an incredibly dynamic carrier of its lineage. Why couldn’t I write this article? The answer came in the evening when I stilled myself and checked in with why I was writing it. Ego. My primary motivation was not love for fern medicine or wanting to share Ke’oni’s light with the world, it was how I could profit from them by getting the attention I craved from The Dark Mountain Collective and its readers.

This depressed me even more. To be so grasping felt pathetic. But then again, so many writers are. Then I thought it’s not just writers who are grasping, it’s pretty much everyone. We have to be. In order to get by in the world, one has to be noticed, the tape in my head played. Why not do what most other successful writers did and just power through and write something that would get me noticed? I knew if I did power through I had the skills to write something engaging that had a good chance of getting published.

Then the tape switched to cutting down successful writers as sell outs, until it spun around to the part where I acknowledge that the writers I most admire are not sell outs, they are people who write from their hearts and souls and other body parts like guts and wombs, artists of the visceral who surrendered themselves to such an extent to a higher power that could be anything from cojones to Aphrodite, from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalen to oak groves and ice-capped mountains.

Water started to trickle through my desiccated thought-streams, gently enough so I wasn’t overwhelmed and could hear the message I next received from Ama’u, the fern of Divine Emotional Ego.

Ama'ū is a fern I am currently working with as I explore my energetic masculine in my mentorship with Ke’oni. This is what he told me: I was not “successful” because I was being called to move beyond what the masculine deems as success-achievement. In a patriarchal capitalist society this is not just hard to deal with emotionally, it is scary because it puts me at physical risk of survival. Ama’u was calling on me (is calling) to ground my creations in Divine Ego, what those raised in the Christian tradition call the Will of God. If I can do that I will be successful even if no one ever reads a word I write.

What is the Will of God? It’s different for everyone. That’s what Ama’u is telling us. If you are creating or acting from a heart-centered space of truly wanting to serve life, that is God’s Will. That is being in alignment with Divine Ego.

And you know what that feels like? It feels good. Easy. Like sitting down with a pen and letting it wander over a piece of white paper sketching out a moment when something outside yourself invited you into its world. Maybe it will feel different for you. Of course it will. Only you can know how your heart (or womb or guts or cojones) wants you to be of service.

Another thing I realized from my failed attempt at trying to explicate pua’aehuehu to the world so that it could get a ticket to ride on the metaphorical Ark, was that an expository article was not the way to do that. Maybe it was the ferns themselves who blocked my words, for as Ke’oni says, the wisdom of the ferns isn't truly transmitted through concepts like I’ve done here, though its a fun and fascinating practice, the transmission happens more like shaktipat or osmosis, moving directly into the cellular or energy body so that the student learns from the inside out, experiencing the divine as something that already exists within her.

This wisdom exists within you, too. We just need to remember it. And that is why, if I had the opportunity, I would gather the ferns themselves, all 103 discovered emotions in the Mū apothecary, including space for those who have not yet revealed themselves, and place them reverently on that Ark. I would adorn the ship with ferns, leis on masts and spars, so that when the white dove came back to let the people on board know the waters had subsided she could nest in the rigging, transmitting the ferns wisdom in her cooing lullaby as humans once again planted themselves on solid ground.

I’ll finish with a poem I wrote with a little poem I wrote long ago before I knew I was a student of pua’aehuehu, when I was simply so enchanted and spellbound the images arose from my womb and traveled through my nerves to my hands that traced them in ink on paper, patterns of primeval I have just come to recognize as my own.

Hiraeth

The cords in his neck strained

against the pulse, then

softened as the deer came over him.

Ferns unfurled in waves across the forest floor

as they opened like the ocean to rain

breaking on an edge that never really

existed at all.

Somewhere in the future a buck

watches its mate bound

over a toxic river,

cars funneling down a highway

of blind lights.

A song comes on the radio

and the drivers weep

for what they’ve lost

by not remembering.

The buck left behind

leaps into the lights.

Without remembering

the river parts

and goes on

forgetting the water

it’s lost,

the tears

we should be crying,

the beauty of the deer

mid-leap-

the loss.

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Kō aloha lā ea,

Concentrate on love by way of the light,

Jen

Photo by Eran Menashri on Unsplash

Note: I have chosen to assume you understand terms or concepts I use like fern medicine, patriarchy, capitalism, masculine and feminine, aloha mā in order not to bog the letters down with repetition. If at any point you would like me to clarify my definition of any terms, especially if they differ from your own, please message me in the comments and I will do so. Thank you for reading!