Jon Carlson's Legacy
July 27, 1966 - November 16, 2022 and beyond

This we know: whether a moment, a season, a lifetime—all will come to an end. Both grief and praise acknowledge the ephemeral quality of all that is sacred in life – all that we have nourished, all that has nourished us. Grief and praise are mutually co-arising and co-creative; each takes its turn in expression while the other waits quietly below the surface. They dance and trade places in rhythmic measure throughout the course of our lives. Grief and praise spring from the same source; from our longing for the sacred, our devotion to a life which we know someday will be released. So too, anything worthy of praise, anything we have praised well and truly, will call forth our grief when we are parted from it. What is praised deeply can be surrendered to grief’s unabashed and ecstatic waves of tears and tremors. Moving fully through grief, we emerge exhausted and tranquil to find ourselves awestruck by the beauty of life, and the humility of our own realized mortality. The act of grieving is not the same as sorrow. Sorrow is something that we house within ourselves. It rests heavily on our lungs, strangles the breath of our inspiration and, before long, weighs down our very soul. Grief bound too tightly to an event or a person will turn to sorrow; grief unexpressed will do the same. When not fully expressed, sorrow nests in the dark and forgotten hollows of our body. Coming to rest there long enough it will precipitate into cynicism, sarcasm, bitterness, and eventually becomes violence - either towards ourselves or others. When projected outwards, it takes shape in various types of assault, or in less obvious forms such as neglect, dream stealing, shaming, forced poverty, or contempt. Experienced inwardly, it may manifest as shame, self-reproach, workaholism and other addictions. Much later on, on the physical level, un-metabolized sorrow may take shape as serious illness. Grief longs to be heard. It celebrates life through breath, sigh, moan and lamentation. Grieving cannot be conjured, or cajoled into being. It is brought to life by opening to what we hold as sacred. Once unleashed, grief comes alive. It rises and falls in salty waves, returning with some regularity, though unlike the tides, not so predictably. And grief is not always characterized solely by tears. It may contain bouts of laughter and even song. Unlike the eyes of sorrow that stare inward towards lightless depths, the eyes of grief turn outward and shine. Similarly, Praise is not the same as gratitude. Gratitude, while beautiful in its own right, is something that one owns, clutching it tightly like a small nugget of gold – easy to talk about, but careful not to leave it exposed for too long lest others be too allured by its luster. Praise on the other hand is something that one gives in honor of the sacred. True praise commands no envy because it celebrates what all know is true. Praise does not judge, evaluate or condone. It sings to the grandeur and mystery of the Sacred. Praise is something that one gives in honor of the sacred. Praise is the heart song of beauty made manifest through the language of poetry, and prayer, and graceful movements that celebrate that which is holy, lavishing it with reverence, art, and offerings of love. Praise is also specific. It has accountability and focus. Praise goes somewhere intentional, and it must arrive intact. We cannot praise what we take for granted. To take that which we feel we are “given grant to” is to wrongfully assume both constancy and ownership. Further, it is privilege, license, convenience and all other forms of entitlement that drown praise before it can surface and give breath in honor of life-giving beauty. For the uninitiated, both grief and praise need courage to find their voice, for it is no small act to openly grieve in a culture that sees it as a “negative” emotion, and as such, to be avoided in our eternal pursuit of happiness and “positivity,”or at least pleasant distraction. And if heartfelt praise, expressed in clear and certain tenor, is met with rolled eyes, or downward gazes of shame or embarrassment, we must not despair. We need not believe that the practice of praise should be relegated to the ordained. Showing outward praise cannot be blasphemy. Grief and praise also share no company with self-pity or narcissism. We embrace grief and praise as our own. We pay tribute to something greater than just the self, and which can never be fully claimed as ours: such as the sun, the ecstasy of eros, or a deceased loved one. Ultimately, grief and praise belong to us all, bound as we are to one another, to the earth and to the lineage we all share. And so what we grieve is never really ours to begin with – it is love that is leased, stewarded and finally returned to source. We cannot grieve that which we do not know we have lost, and yet, we share a deep-seated ancestral memory of experiences that we have not actually lived. From this stems a powerful but unexpressed grief. We experience this grief but often have nothing to attach it to. Instead it metastasizes into nameless sorrow, anxiety, depression, or deep loneliness. Subsequently, we come to believe it is our personal failing. Though in actuality, we, both individually and collectively, are experiencing an overflow of grief deferred to us from our ancestors. Sadly, in this time, without the nurturance and kinship of tribe that our indigenous soul so deeply longs for, there is no ritual container to hold our grieving. It is the act of grieving, especially together, that is the healing emancipation from sorrow’s weight. Grieving is our pathway out of sorrow! And so too, praise becomes the elated cry of joy, the celebration of everything we most deeply love and the companion of our grief. When expressed fully, grieving and praise together complete the cycle of renewal, union and dissolution with the Sacred. Grief Leads To Praise. Praise Nourishes And Loves Life. Life And Love Come To End… So We Must Grieve, And In So Doing, We Keep Our Promise To The Great Turning Of Life… So let us grieve together, let us praise together and come to rest together in the fullness of our loving, returned at last to the source that made us. By Jon Carlson Edited by Kerissa Fuccillo Battle

Have you noticed that Great Nature is rattling? Can you sense the frayed fabric of the culture’s unraveling? Can you feel the edifice of progress becoming increasingly hollow? In quiet moments, can you sense in your bones that the mania for growth of all kinds is rapidly consuming ever-more beings - plant, animal, rock, water, mountain, in its over-extending reach? Looking deeply into the modus operandi of all civilized cultures, it is clear that their primary agenda is one of Acquisition. Indeed, civilized humans have been “on the take” for quite some time now. The world is now awash in the consequences. Despite this fact, most of the purveyors of extraction are still doing their best not to notice that the ship is taking on water. Learning the nature and particulars of limits and consequences is the truest litmus test for each and every generation. These form the metric by which future generations will discern whether their forebearers were willing to proceed in a manner that bore them in mind. For the love of GAIA and for the sake of all the lives to come, what are you willing to do in the name of healing this scarred and scorched Earth? Would you let go of some comfort for the sake of simple shelter? Would you be willing to trade some Privilege for Inclusion? Inclusion in the unsteady ramble of a shared culture. Not just human culture, but a full cultural immersion in the beautiful particulars of the place that holds you in the folds of its hillocks and valleys. The place where the water you drink, that which you are made of, still ebbs in gentle tumult towards mother ocean. Would you trade some of the mania for traveling and consuming the latest transformative experience in the name of “personal growth” for a kind of depth – a deeply lived relationship with those that nourish and sustain us? Would you relinquish your acquisitive desire, with all of its trembling urgency for satiety, for the sake of learning and living close to your longing? For allowing some of that desire for more to slip gently through your grasping fingers, leaving your hands free to lovingly care for what is sacred and beautiful in this moment? Would you learn the skill of beholding – that way of honoring, of holding what you see with deep respect for all the many ways it has come to be what it is? All this, instead of taking a look? Could you let go of the fixation on the future, on progress, even on transcendence, in order to deepen your commitment to service in this time and place? Can you relinquish some hard won certainty in the name of crafting a well wrought sense of wonder? Can you let go of the attachment to framing circumstances in a solely positive or negative light just because these might suit your mood and worldview? Can you instead, become a faithful witness to events as they unfold, holding all the gravitas and nuance without premature recourse to labeling it? Could you cultivate and curate a kind of noble and tender grieving; both as a skill and a practice, all underwritten by an emergent acknowledgement of that which is sacred and has passed beyond your reach? To let it have its way with you for a while and, in this way, allow it to nurture your love of life and all that is sacred around us? Can enough on the table or in the bank be as good as a feast? For the true feast has already been gathered. The bounty is contained within the myriad mysteries that perch just outside of our narrow gaze. It is the secret poesis, that mysterious unfurling of creation perpetually emerging at the edge of our senses. All this contained within ordinary moments of grace, such that even our simplest of days are laced with holiness. Could you be in one place long enough to be claimed by it? Could you listen well enough, feel deeply enough, look closely enough to know this? Could you avail yourself of the practice of stewardship to that place that nourishes your soul and feeds your body, such that you leave a legacy of fertility for those to come in a time beyond your own? Are you willing to tread lightly on this living Earth GAIA, to open your awareness to the real limits and consequences of being a human living in the Anthropocene, and have that be fodder for the deepening of your humanity? Could you embrace Love as an ongoing practice, rather than a feeling, or a thing to obtain? And at the end of the arc of your days, can you give yourself unto dying, not with defeat, resignation, or resentment, but with an honoring of its mandate, and a loving obligation to feed those to come – both through your manner of dying and with the sustenance that your body will provide? So May it Be… ~ Written by Jon Carlson, 2019, 2022 ~

In these times, biologists have come to see that trees may know the weather a year or even many years in advance. In the time of our ancestors, when the trees were gods of the land, very little escaped their attention, be it ancient, present, or prescient. The trees, in their woody, wisened ways, were woven within the wood-wide-web. And in so doing, spoke to all beings. In their ruminations and foresight, and most especially in their awareness of the needs of the myriad beings of their locale, they modeled the reciprocity necessary for life to be sustained, supported and served through the fullness of their life cycle, which in equal measure included their living and their dying. Through this lived relationship, they were able to come to know the particulars of the sustenance entrusted to them. And in this way they would come to know their time of dying in advance. With an allegiance to the greater fecundity of the forest, decisions would be made. In selfishness, the time of dying could be forestalled for months, even years, if the objective was solely to reach new heights. In contrast, rather than waiting, the choice was always clear to gather their vital force the very next spring and prepare the most abundant florid, flourish of fruit. In so doing, with help of winged and legged creatures, their bounty of seeds were cast far and wide. The grief of their dying was made manifest in flowering beauty and nourishment. Amazingly, that’s the way they keep their promise to the procession of life. In this way I have chosen to proceed in the manner of the trees, knowing my time, rather than waiting, so that the last flourish of my living may be cast into the world as blossom, fruit and seed in devotion to the source that made me.