On Volcano Wisdom

a cyclical essay on transforming, returning, grief

doing is easy, begetting, fulfilling.

being is stillness, waiting ,receiving.

Image by Jon Kr

i am someone who loves doing nothing and yet i get fussy. any distance between me and my practice will do it. can’t make art i’m grouching - and the year has put a lock on the ability to make by my whim and will. i watch myself in this ‘struggle,’ transition, not building the next thing but waiting - slow. i question myself. i am losing luxury and the bratty part stands stubborn, arms crossed, hot. bratty in the face of grief. knowing what i want and need and not having it, the inner teen fumes. when i notice this adolescent - entitled, brooding - i play the sixpence none the richer music video and say

hey now hey now don’t dream its over.

it does something for me. i dream it begins. the next thing. the door i will open and the skylight i will stand beneath. there’s a slow building quality, like layers of sediment finally settling, the studio-rock is forming. here i am still learning, still integrating, cycling through old versions of my self. at the mouth of the volcano wondering what will emerge and from when.

photo by US Geological Survey from significant article 22 Photographs of the Kilauea Volcano Eruption, Hawaii 1969-1974

In 2022 I took a course on Caribbean herbalism to commune more with my ancestors and the plants of Boriken. This was where I learned about susto, a concept in South American and Caribbean medicine that describes a state of chronic somatic suffering (anxiety, chronic health, depression, insomnia, etc) that derives from witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event. Susto - meaning fright - results in an aspect of the soul that becomes trapped in time space.

There are herbs that can help retrieve the soul (I forget them - I am not great at online classes), and there are various rituals to retrieve it. Without the depth of it all I will tell you - I knew my soul had holes in it.

I sought a healer - a woman I worked with a few years before who maintains a family tradition of Shamanic healing, rooted in Taino and Arawak knowledge. She paused her practice for a while but is taking clients again, and I cannot recommend a better guide. Find her here. Now find us again in twenty-two. It’s 2022 and Koa leads me through two drum ceremonies - one to introduce myself to the earthly realm of the ancestors, and one to retrieve my sweet little soul shard. This is where I first encounter the volcanic realm; in seeking an entrance to the world of the ancestors, i find myself on a lava field, where i spot a cave leading into the caverns of a fire-breathing mountain. here i crawl through low channels following a being both crow and woman. bis abuela. in the later ceremony, i find my soul-shard in a golden flowing river -

but today we are with volcano, and through time i am within its influence. Past moments flash through my mind. I remember an elaborate project about the rock cycle I made in the eighth grade. We leaned in to the poetry of rock transforming yet unchanging. Endless cycles and synchronicities. Crystals forming perfectly in hermetic conditions. a thousand years of chance, and still. A solid and changing river.

Magma - blood of the earth. I remember a photo as a kid online - lava pouring into the ocean and steam at the interface of water and liquid rock. I was moved and I am now.

From National Geographic

“You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again ... what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

―Ursula K Le Guin, Dispossessed

captionphoto by US Geological Survey from significant article 22 Photographs of the Kilauea Volcano Eruption, Hawaii 1969-1974...

This morning my attention was pulled toward a teaching on the New Moon in Scorpio. I took notes on the phases of scorpio:

• phase one: the scorpion - reactive from the instinctive body, protective, threatened, stinging, teacher of boundaries. fear as a guardian of transformation. experiencing fear, we get mad. we fight, defend

• phase two: eagle/dragon/serpent - from crawling to flying - we obtain vision from above. recognizing patterns, awareness of energy, the lesson that control does not equal mastery. shadow-facing

• phase three: the phoenix - death comes as renewal, rebirth, when spirit is born from its own ashes

ultimately, nothing is ever lost. it changes.

i see in mirrors my scorpion, my dragon, my learning.

i learn slowly but i learn.

there is a grounding that occurs when communing with the spirit world, the earth itself, or rocks, or flowers. like a molten vein, spirit creates a channel that draws one back to center. when i notice my lack of stillness i know is follows the Big Grief of losing my grandmother. My herbalist - who is also a birthworker - says both giving birth and experiencing grief leaves us energetically split open, sometimes literally. In this openness we can be more receptive, sensitive, and overstimulated. Here is an an empty space and you can fill it with anything. In this space we might not reach for nourishment or discipline. We may not be still. We might scatter.

by Jon the Finn

And how couldn’t you help but shatter in the state of grief? Here you feel far away from your center, as of steam or smoke drifting off from its source. Leaving the body like a wisp, less whole or simply changed.

It is 2025 and I am discussing my hormone cycle with my herbalist. I was discussing volcanoes the last time we met. Are You still watching it? She asks - she means the Kilauea livestream, and yes, I am. Regularly, spending time with it like a friend. I said its so interesting that there are towns around active volcanos and the people there just accept that it could blow at any minute. She said, what a great metaphor for hormones. What feel like dormant entities erupting on predictable-or-not occasions, HEAT, HEAT you can’t quiet with water like you would a fire. So we witness.

So I witness: myself in all the losses - the studio and the matriarch. She says when a matriarch dies everyone steps up in the lineage - the mother moves on to elder, the maiden to mother.

When I hear this I meet my adolescence with more understanding.

Of course she wants to be seen in the loss. In the matrix of grief I have been fussing, pouting and going to my room, spending time online surfing the web as self soothing, perhaps a rejection of growing up.

A page, desperate to be a knight but afraid to indulge in the flow of focus, turns away from the road ahead.

i’ve changed before and i’ll change again and i’ll change and i’ll go on changing

photo by US Geological Survey from significant article 22 Photographs of the Kilauea Volcano Eruption, Hawaii 1969-1974

The earth is always integrating the new and the old, returning it all to liquid rock. And it comes back up it comes back it returns.

To Be Whole is to be part,
true voyage is return

- Ursula k Le Guin, The Dispossessed

AND so I will return to my self. Through cycles young & old & now and witnessing. It’s me again it’s me again it’s me again it’s me again.

Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō, the easternmost of Kilauea’s volcanic vents, spews molten lava on the Big Island of Hawaii. Jim Sugar for National Geographic

The volcano is a teacher of witnessing, integration, transition, return, our earthly power. of course ferocity - like tiger, like horse - a wild power that senses our fear. excitement.

I recall the entrance to the underworld.

Before my grandmother died I was sitting with the cards of Ithel Calquhoun’s deck The Taro of Color, seeking wisdom from the likes of The Lord of Abundance and The Princess of Cups; Princess of the Palace of Floods. I quit when I pulled the Three of Wands - the Lord of Established Strength. The three - the Empress - reflecting the joining of my grandmother with her own mother and her grandmother. My maternal matriarchs, the three points of a traingle - a mountain - and I’m looking up at them from the base of the molten castle. For some time I could only look and not enter.

Now I return. When one door closes another opens. Voyager.And I go on to seek volcano lessons, returning to my molten core. Not a maiden but a mother, my own mother, my own mother the matriarch

            or rather  
       
like a seed         like a stone
           
           I transform

  over and 

                        over

           and over