Transcript for On Clouds and Cosmic Law

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is the Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel and space. So a few announcements here right at the start. The first announcement is that I will be offering a year-long deep dive into mythic study starting in early November of 2024. A year-long deep dive into mythic study and animacy and ritual foundations called the mythic body. and this is of course I've offered a couple of times before and I'll be offering it again. It's a year-long journey and it's for students of the mythic students of the animate who want to better understand the ecstatic animate heart of myth and story who want to deepen their access to the imaginal core of human experience. and really specifically to explore foundational knowledge that is common to global ritual traditions and emit traditions in order to enhance their practice in their own traditions. Through mythic study, somatic practice, ritual repetition, nature immersion, threshold exploration, and shared story, we will recalibrate together and deepen our relationship with body, community, and cosmos together. It's a course that has deep relevance and deep applicability for body workers, for somatic instructors, for therapists, for depth psychologists, for psychedelic facilitators, for storytellers, for artists, for writers, for activists, for policymakers, for community builders, and sustainable systems thinkers, really for all knowledge seekers. So this course, again, we'll start in November of 2024. and applications are open starting May 1st. And if you'd like to be added to the mailing list, so that you'll receive announcements when the announcements come. Email the mythicbody at gmail.com and ask to be put on the mailing list for the course. It's a course that historically has filled up and there has been a waiting list. So if you're interested in the course and you want to spend time really diving deep in a day and age when a lot of our models of learning are not so deep. If you really want to dive deep, this is an opportunity to do so and I look forward to spending a year together. Second thing I want to say is just an encouragement that I give at the beginning of nearly every episode, just a reminder that this podcast runs on patronage. I'm able to do this full time to help bring this unique concoction of music and storytelling and sonic narrative to life because of the supportive patrons. So if you listen to the podcast and you feel like you're receiving something from listening to the podcast, then I ask that you consider becoming a patron. It costs as little as $6 a month and it's a great way to support the artistic vision of the podcast. And to open yourself up to a whole other realm and range of content offerings. Because there are a lot of discussions. At this point, there are a lot of discussions archived for patrons that cover a range of topics that I haven't yet gotten to on the podcast. So if this sounds intriguing and interesting, please consider becoming a patron. And you can find out more at patreon.com slash the Emerald podcast. Finally, there's something exciting in the works for podcast patrons and for everyone else also coming up that I wanted to talk about just a little bit. So as I think you can probably feel, as I think you probably know, the Emerald is dedicated to fostering and growing an animate vision at a time when such a vision is deeply necessary. And for me, this vision, the vision of the Emerald, even predating the podcast, has always been about community and about giving back. So I'm starting a granting program that's going to be run through the Patreon site. It's going to be small, at least at the beginning here, but it's going to be something and who knows what it may grow into. This means that there are going to be small grants available for patrons starting in 2024 to support your projects. This program is a partnership with the Fetsor Institute. Some of you may have heard of them. Fetsor has generously agreed to underwrite these grants because they share a vision of applying spiritual solutions to social problems and of centering the sacred in these times. You might recognize the name from some work they've done with the on-beying podcast. And I'm really grateful to them for connecting with me and conspiring together on this project. If you're interested in checking them out, the site is Fetsur.org. That's F-E-T-Z-E-R. And Fetsur is also going to be providing some much needed structural support for the Emerald, as I have entered the phase where I simply can't do it all alone. So it's nice to find others who are committed to community and movement building and Fetsor shares these values and it's really good to receive some help. What this granting program means for podcast patrons is that there are multiple small annual grants available for projects that are dedicated to keeping animacy alive. Right now, the grants will be in the $3,000 to $5,000 range, and there'll be two basic categories. One is for small-scale projects that are designed to keep traditional, spiritual, animate visions alive, and the other is for artists and innovators who are exploring themes of spirit and bringing the animate to life in new and innovative ways. So this is an invitation to use your creativity and dream a bit and possibly receive funding to help grow this vision. For example, under the first category, you might be an indigenous researcher documenting and reviving traditional ceremonial songs, or songline lore, or reassembling the animate pieces of medicine traditions, or documenting all the traditional names for water spirits in a particular geographic region. And in the second category, you might be a theater producer exploring how to reintroduce rituality to theater. This is about a spark, a spark of life and how to foster it and keep it alive. There'll be an intro video up on the Patreon site and more detail will be coming out soon on how to apply and all that good stuff. So I hope this excites you as much as it excites me and I'm looking forward to bringing it to life with you and you can find out more at patreon.com slash the Emerald podcast. So now on with our episode. Hi, everyone. So I'm taking a little bit of a breath. After that last episode on justice. That was a big one, right? Take a breath with me. Yes, let's feel the breath of life together. how it flows freely, how it gathers and disperses and gathers again in a movement as timeless and inevitable as the pulse of the tides as the movement of clouds we're here And we've all got different opinions. And we've all got differing thoughts of how it should be.

So in the last episode, I spoke of how tradition after tradition speaks of law, the law of the land. And how law is at the heart of animal tradition. And like I said in the episode, laws are heavy word, right? I might say words like law and order and you might start hearing this in your head. And in a modern culture where law tends to be associated with arbitrary rules handed down from above, with rigidities and regulations and with a history of commandments and boarding schools and Catholic nuns, smacking people with rulers, it's understandable that a conversation on law could seem removed from the animate heart of what this podcast is all about. Like, how did we get from universal adornment and speaking stones and transm mediumship and ecstatic ritual to law, right? I think it's fair to say that many people have a knee-jerk reaction to the word law. In this country, anyway, many of our cultural legends pride themselves on having fought the law, or stood up to the law. Our founding fathers were trying to get away from oppressive laws, right? Laws that impinge the inaliable rights and freedoms of the human being. There's an ongoing culture war about law here in the States. And there are a whole lot of people in that culture war that say less is more the fewer laws the better. So there's that vision of law law as arbitrary human rules law abstracted from natural systems law as basically a societal civilizational invention But that vision of law is a function of modern abstraction and separation. It's not reflective of what law traditionally is. And if we go too far down the road of seeing law as arbitrary. heavy burdensome as a set of confining human rules. We can forget something a whole lot deeper about law and how it's been traditionally understood. We can forget that law, for example, is the clouds. The movement of the cloud, how they gather and disperse, how they below and how they thunder. how they cascade in and out pouring of fertility of life. All of this movement in some visions is an expression of a great law. A law that plays itself out in seasonal cycles, in monsoon cycles, in lunar cycles, in continuities of flow. Do you feel me? What some call the law of the land? the law of the land. So it's not law as we might talk about law as, you know, the inevitable row of beige books on the shelves behind the lawyer's desk. Tradition and after tradition talks about the law of the land as something vibrant, alive, present in the waters, present in the spaciousness of the great dome of sky. The great sky does not obstruct the drifting of the white clouds, says shito. And that just might be a law. and in this great sky of existence there is space for all things to express unfold come to be and pass on to articulate in their particular shape and way to pass on like clouds on the plane pass on and pattern like clouds on the plane unfold and pattern like clouds on the plane I saw a spell of it like clouds on the plane. Cloud shadow drifting in time across the plane. So, law is the understanding that there's a great order to nature a pattern. There's a way that the cosmos unfolds and this law, this order of creation is expressed everywhere. The word cosmos itself means but it means order. But before we go thinking that that sounds boring or restrictive or impinging, remember that the or in order is the same or as in ornament, as in adorn. The sense is not of some rigid, soulless, impersonal order, like the universe is a big military academy, right? The sense is not of embroidery, of a repeated pattern. that this universe unfolds according to a pattern, a shining pattern, a reverberant pattern, a fractal pattern that is present in how waves move, and how galaxies unfold, how cultures organize, how institutions arise, how human undertakings gather and disperse, so that if you look at a map of nations over the past 800 years, and speed it up on time laps. What you see looks a whole lot like gathering and dispersing clouds. Gathering and dispersing and gathering again. This is the law of the cosmos. This is the law of the clouds. In the traditions of the Indian subcontinent, there's a word for the pattern that articulates and defines the very cosmos. The word is Urta, the pattern, the order of creation. And Urta, as those who take my courses now, is a word that I really like to talk about. Because Urta is related to the word order, and also related to the word, The universe, as scholar and author Bill Mahoney tells us, is artful, implicit in its artfulness as an underlying order, and implicit in the order is sublime artfulness. Not one without the other, in fact.

So the modern western mind often has to do some re-patterning around the word order. The modern mind in a state of PTSD from religious orders and marching orders and on and on rejects a lot of what we associate with order. The western mind makes a dichotomy between that which is restrictive. and that which is liberating, either it's free or it's ordered. So order and free expression, order and art can't possibly be the same thing. Yet art teams with symmetry unfolds from symmetry. All the free spontaneity of the music that transports us into liberated states unfolds from highly structured mathematical ratio. All music springs from a very distinct and prescribed mathematical order. There is order in the artfulness and artfulness in the order. Like the infinite carnival shapes of clouds that arise from a defined pattern of water and wind within a sky that holds space for it. An artful order and an ordered artfulness are inherent to creation. And it's all around us, right here. The order of the universe isn't some faraway law proclaimed by an absent god. The waters flow with the clouds gather and disperse with Urta. The river flows Urta, Dhanajankola quotes that evades saying, the years the path of Urta The gods themselves are born of Urta, and the sun is called the wheel of Urta. Urta is what holds everything together. Law, as the Orphicum to Law says, quote, is the order that places the star, gives earth and ocean their right place. Studies, nature's balance. The substrate of the universe, this artful order, this ephemeral, yet adamantine law. When we get past the associations with the word order, we can see a universe that very clearly unfolds in spirals, in fractals, in waves. It unfolds in a sea of vibrational responsiveness. as immediate as the sound of an echo, the ripple in a pond. Yes, it is shaping far away galaxies, but it's also right here, in the curve of an eyelash, in the branching of the placental tree. Which is why Urta has been translated as the cosmic order, and also the regular course of things. And when we start to talk about this pattern, this deeper pattern of creation, I've seen here how the Western mind wants to say, but what about chaos? What about pattern breakers? What about tricksters and disruptors and all that they bring? We'll get there. But first let's steep in this for a moment. There is inherent pattern to the universe. And that pattern can be seen in the wave dynamics of all that is. What we call randomness, windowberry says, is simply failure to see the larger pattern. The inherent pattern of creation. The way the cloud shadows move upon the plane. The suggestion that something might be inherent to the universe, that there might be a pattern inherent to creation, that there might actually be a there, like there might be a way things are beyond relativism, greats at the postmodernist mind. You're telling me that there's a pattern and that's just how it is. Well, what about my truth, your truth? What about it all depends on how you see it? Feel into this. Clouds gather. Clouds disperse. You feel that? Clouds gather. Clouds disperse. There's very little that your truth or my truth can do to alter that. We breathe in. We breathe out. This is the pattern. It's inherent. So let's say for the moment that law is definitive. Let's say that law is exactly as definitive as cloud. In that, its cycles are inevitable, tangible, real. But its actual play is whimsical, expressive, transparent, light. That's the law. The animate vision of our ancestors sees inherent in the patterns of creation. You're not going to find too many traditional cultures say that all this is a projection of your individual consciousness, or that all forces we encounter are subjective forces, or that it's all random. So even if you see all this as an ultimately non-dual expression of Shiva consciousness, you understand if you really grasp the Shiva-Shakti traditions, you understand that there are definitive patterns along which itself organizes. Laylines along which it vibrates. Mondalas have caused an effect along which it hums. It bends outward from source and definitive harmonic structure. This is what Mondalas, what yantras, are. Definitive and stable as the sky. A femurally patterned as cloud. Incidentally, creative as the artful order it is. The goddess is this geometry of creation in many traditions. She is this matrix of pattern in expression. She is the intricacy of the mandala pattern that says what goes up comes down. She is all of it. If you want to see the infinite creativity of the pattern of creation, look to the clouds and how they change shape. Now a feather. Now a weasel. Now a camel. Now a whale. Just ask.

But as free as clouds are, there are definitive ways that they arise and those are all the pre-determination of patterns of sun and water and wind. So the order contains within it all the space for infinite expression that it needs for its own replenishment and renewal, all creative expressions, all tricksters and waves of rebellion, and the periodic smashing of social orders and the ritual refreshing of that order is ultimately ultimately part of the order itself. There's no music that you could sing, nothing that you could create. Eluvitar the one tells the rogue singer Melkor and Tolkien Silmerillion. There is nothing you could create that does not have its uttermost source in me. All this is held within the stability of what the Mongols called the Tengri, the eternal blue sky. Eternal, definitive, that's law. Ever replenishing, ever creative, ever expressive, that's law to So, even if you're really big on impermanence and emptiness, even if you've adopted the Heraclician view that the only thing stable is change, that doesn't mean that the universe is senseless, rudderless, anchorless, nothingness. Within the wave dynamics of creation, all things change, but the way that they change, the pulses and cycles along which they change, The bright invisible laws around which they spiral are inherent. Even the impermanence tradition still see inherent law to creation. Karma as the inherent law. Dharma as the inherent law. Love and kindness as an alignment to that law. There's a reason why even the most ardent emptiness practitioners still see an inherent difference between being a bully and being kind. Because there is, in fact, a there there. Everything is in flux, yes. Yet the calmer framework of the wave dynamics of cause and effect persists. and clouds arise from causes that precede them and return to earth when conditions are right for their return. See them, sinuous, ephemeral, spiraling along spiral dance paths forever. What were they like those skies? What were the skies like when you were young? They went on forever.

So, from an animate perspective, yes, there's inheritance. There's a way things are. There's an order to nature, a pattern. Hungarian philosopher Laslófoldenia says it like this, quote, this order is something that goes beyond every human intention and conception. It cannot be planned. Rather, it itself renders all plans possible. Just like the movement of the stars in the sky, or the passage of time, it can never be susceptible to influence. This order is cosmic to revolt against it would be as futile as revolting against the rhythms of birth and death. Native author Lee Miracle says, quote, natural law is when the earth comes up with something herself. and so we recognize it. When the clouds gather, it rains. Rain comes from the ocean and so on and so forth. Everything is dependent upon something else and draws from something else and feeds back into a greater cycle of interconnectivity. That's the law of the land. What we do to the web of life we do to ourselves, that's the law of the land. and the stars pummed with law, and the land sings with law, and when humans are attuned, they receive law directly from the land, and build their entire cultures around that law. I spoke with Yongar Elder Nolnan about law, and how it flows forth from nature, and how it determines everything. cycles of food and harvest and water use and even marriage among clients.

So in the aboriginal vision, as I'm coming to some infinitesimally small understanding of it, everything in this animal world, everything comes from and revolves around what is translated as law. Everything in creation unfolds according to a great law. and the role of the human being is to ensure that one's dance is in one's artworks. One's culture-building projects and one's relationships. One's ceremonies and offerings, one's food acquisition and water treatment and birthing practices and grieving practices and funerary rights and stories and songs are connected to that law and reinforced that law. Stories and songs, the ones that last, come through law and they point back to law. lore and lore, especially if you have an Australian accent, are very deeply linked. There are laws that come through the clouds, there are laws that come through the stars, laws that govern what foods ripen when and how humans are to use them, laws that govern water use and are interrelationality with streams. Quote, we know of a time when the animals and foods could speak. Each of those foods spoke a promise. They spoke a law. The law they spoke has to do with how we walk the land and how we treat others in accordance with the great harmonic pattern of all the days. These laws aren't so much your truth, my truth. These are embedded in the land and known across a thousand generations. And the cultures that decide oh it's all relative and I don't need to pay attention to the inherent nature of a place. I can just grace sheep on this land in which the soil and the river and the grasses share a very delicate inherent relationship. And it'll all be fine because my truth is that I get to grace sheep here and whoops, look the whole thing's a dust bowl now. These cultures don't last. So it's good to examine those truths, those laws. Because the land is the judge of whether you're truth or my truth or somebody else's truth prevail. And the land sings with all. There is a signal to the law of the land, such as Tyson Yokeporta, and the songs live in the land and transmit from land to people, and the stories and songs replenish and reawaken the land again. The stories that are passed on from generation to generation are stories of law, of ancestral lawmakers and lawbreakers, The story is sing of the delicate balance of the cosmos, a cosmos in which everything plays its part in the overarching pattern, and each has a part to play. So it is the Tibetan say. So if I heard some stories start and end like this, why? It's a reaffirmation of law. The story isn't about law. The story is law who is sounding. And stories aren't there to teach a nice little abstract moral. The story is meant to strike the reverberatory note with the law of the land, so the story and the land hung together. So have I heard? So have I heard it resolved in the reverberatory matrix of creation? So have I heard it whispered in the mossy creep band? So have I heard a past from mouth to ear for 10,000 generations? So have I glimpsed it in the unending spiral of stars? So have I seen it in the dance of whispers of cloud? So, as I say the words, clouds gather and clouds disperse. Clouds gather and clouds disperse. Clouds gather and disperse. So it is things start to move, you feel that. Because it resounds with law. Whereas, if I say something preposterous like clouds never move, or economies grow forever, those sentences don't reverberate in the same way. Because there's no law there. But if I say like she told said, if I say, look, the great sky does not even be the drifting white clouds. Look beloved. The great sky does not impede the drifting white clouds. Maybe that homes with a little more love. This law of the land isn't an abstract far away. It's near. It's here. It's in the breath. As present as wet, mist breathed by the mountain. As the little droplets of condensation on each hair pour of the body. In the dozens of Hawaiian words for cloud, mother pig and piglet clouds, macro cloud, continually growing cloud, shelter in cloud, long cloud, high cloud, cloud with the rainbow woven right in. Creation invites us to wake up to her flows and patterns, to align ourselves to her harmonies. If a particular wind bends the ferns towards the mountain, that's the wind that brings rain. A particular bird has a particular song for storms. We start to feel the pattern. We start to feel within how each part reflects the whole and each part reverberates with law. And as we ritually align to the cycles of law around us, the water is pouring with law. The clouds are reigning law. Knowledge of the pattern of creation and how to live within it streams in, which is maybe why the Azure Veda says that clouds are one of the sources of knowledge of cosmic law. Feeling to that. Clouds are one of the sources of knowledge of cosmic law. And in the Hawaiian tradition, there's a proverb that says, knowledge is built on cloud pillows. Knowledge is set up in the clouds that sometimes translate it. Is that just poetry? Is that just a metaphor? How is knowledge built on cloud pillows? There's a very practical piece to this, of course. Clouds tell us things about where we are and what's coming. Clouds deliver signs and omens, not abstractly, tangibly. So Polynesian wayfinder, way Davis tells us, would read the reflection on the underside of the clouds to know where they were and the vastness of the Pacific. Certain cloud formations form of certain atols and island groups. Certain seas around certain atols reflect in certain colors. Certain iridescence is along the underside of clouds. This is law. The particular silver green shine on the underside of that cloud and what it tells you about where you are and what's coming next. Clouds tell us a whole lot about the cycle of life because they are the cycle of life. Native sculptor Rose Bee Simpson told me once how when she was a kid she would go to the public dances at Santa Clara. And on those days those dance days she would look out across the vast New Mexico sky and see columns of clouds in the distance. Colums of cloud building over each pebble that was dancing on that day. And that's how she'd know that the dances were doing what they were supposed to do. That's how you know the rich wool is humming with law. I remember thirteen years old at Sonnylda Fanzo Pueblo, a dancer in many colors, a bundle of feathers against a billowing black cloud, a crack of thunder. A crack of holy thunder, the sky's bled open, mother. The sky's bled open, dear here. Clouds gather. Sometimes they disperse. But sometimes when the conditions are right, they keep gathering. They keep gathering, do you feel? They accumulate. They build. And the friction of that accumulation reaches a certain point, and then interruptures, and it rains. It rains with sacred and long. I watched as they ruptured things nearby. Ash black and palinus on mountainous clouds split and spew rain for two hours. Everywhere water, plants and rainwater, a riot of green on the earth. My lovers gone off to some foreign country, stopping wedded our doorway. I watched the clouds ruptured. Mirabytes songs to the clouds brim with longing. Longing without consummation is that endless cycle of gathering and dispersal seems to go on forever, and then finally the monsoon arrives. That longing is consummated and outpouring of rain, and life springs, a new. What came from that gush? That downpour from the splitting clouds, life. So the Hawaiian say that life is in the cloud. Great life, broad life, deep life, elevated life. Life is in the cloud. The cloud is the fertile outpouring of life.

From my wings are shaken, rope, shelly, and is owed to the clouds. The doves that waken the sweet buds, every one. For words worth, Martin Huiser says. Clouds represent, quote, Focundity, a reification of organic nature's ability to reproduce and replicate. In to the clouds words worth the magic clouds emerging from what he considers an originary region of becoming the fount of life invisible. So the clouds speak not only to the fertility that comes with rain, but to the infinite expressions that flow from source and return to source. to a universe that regenerates, re-expresses, replenishes in an infinite dance. The quote, just as clouds appear, long chenpa, the soaked chen master says, just as clouds appear, remain, and finally fade back into the southern sky. All phenomena arise within the expansive awareness. They dwell within awareness, and it like they sink back into it. So the cloud is an eternal recurrence. An infinite pulse of birthing and dying. Shelley sees in the cloud, quote, eternal recurrence or life eternal, although subject to continual change, the cloud in the poem with the eponymous title is Immortal. I change, but I cannot die. I silently laugh, said Shelley, at my own scene of tough. And out of the caverns of rain, like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb. I arise and unbuild it again. Clouds never die, says Tiknodhan. Law is as eternal and definitive and stable as the eternal, whimsical, replenishing dance of clouds. So yes, knowledge is built on the clouds. We start to understand source and movement from it and the return to it. We start to understand that journey mirrored in the pattern of breath, of thought, of feeling, of phases of life, in ritual, in birth, and death. We start to feel all phases of the cycle within us, the rising, the gathering, the accumulating, the bursting, the raining down again. We feel this regenerative law in us. In order for something to be born to crack open, to precipitate a certain amount of accumulation is necessary. So the top us of the sages, the heat, the spiritual potency, the reverberatory accumulation of energy builds over time like rising thunder cloud, like cumulus. This knowledge of gathering, accumulating, billowing, building, informs everything from why the inner sanctum of a temple is at womb space, free of wind or disturbance, so that energies can gather. To why rituals need a good container. To why practice is done in an enclosed space. Accumulation. If you want rain, you need accumulation. Gathering, gathering magic, gathering and accumulation. Do you feel law present in the wisdom of how clouds gather? I spoke about this in the intuitive episode. You ever feel that you had a profound experience, a potentially life-altering experience, but then you overshare it, you share it on social media and it's gone. Dispersal. Like clouds that never rain. It dispersed before and ever gathered, and because it dispersed, no, rain. This isn't a metaphor. This is how energy actually moves. So it is, as in the clouds, so here in me, dispersal can be important. It can be important to dispersed. Energy gets too thick in the ritual space. It's good to have practices of dispersal. But it's also good to have practices of gathering, of accumulation, of building, and holding, so that it can reign. Precipitation comes only if there's been sufficient accumulation. The outpouring we want, the creative outpouring, the nurtureance of all that we want to grow in our lives, only comes through constructing a container for accumulation. But then the clouds teach us accumulation is not meant for accumulation, sake alone. The cloud does not accumulate so that it can possess or hoard. It accumulates so that it can share. It can pour forth with life. As we come to know cycle, as we come to know the spiraling law of the land, we come to know ourselves. Clouds are the source of water. The mantra push-pom of the Ayurveda says, The one who knows this becomes established in themselves. Water is the source of clouds. The one who knows this becomes established in themselves. The one who knows the source of water becomes established in themselves. The monsoon is the source of water. The one who knows this becomes established in themselves. Water is the source of the monsoon. The one who knows this becomes established in themselves. The one who knows the source of water becomes established in themselves. How does the one who knows that clouds are the source of water become established in themselves? They know the pattern. And the pattern reinforces their relationality to all of it. Law is the larger pattern as it reflects in us. We feel it in us. And when it feels distant we sing it out and the world around us reverberates and that reverberation leads us home. Our song goes to the clouds as we walk to our homeland. Say the guy we were a group of women. I quoted this in the Trevor Hall episode and I'm going deeper into it now. The clouds collect the sound, they say, and later it will rain. Just feel into that, the clouds collect the sound, and later it will rain. Accumulation, gathering, gathering magic. In the ceremony we sing the song, and then another clan sings the song, they say. It gathers in and eventually it rains. As we walk, the sound of our walking goes up to the clouds. Our sounds, our voice, our footsteps, the sound of our existence are woven into the clouds. We are singing to the clouds and the chanting goes up, up, up, out of our mouths and up to the clouds. Like a vibration of our existence, they say, talking to the clouds, singing to the clouds, sending our song to the clouds, because when they hear the clouds gather, Knowing the cloud is there, knowing that we are always connected, that is our kinship, our pattern of interconnection, and our law. Law, the guy who group of women say, is the underlying rules and connections that bind us together, that tell us what to do. It's a respect. The law tells us that we are always connected even as we separate, even as the cloud. This is in the song's The law and the song spirals like the clouds that gather and separate, tell us to live life to its fullest. Life is precious and we must do what we have to do before we go, so that later when we're gone, others will respect us. The clouds tell us what to do, what does that mean? What does the movement of clouds have to do with respect and living kindly and walking well? There's an inextricable relationship between knowing the movements of nature, the pattern of law, and knowing what it means to walk through this world well. So that, as Padma Samavas says, our view is as vast as the sky, and our conduct is as fine as barley flour. The law translates from the dance of the cosmos to the dance of how we treat others. The experience of connecting to this world of great cycles. The rapturous connection to greater cycles takes us to the place of empathetic connection where we want to fulfill our custodial role, where we want to reinforce our deep connectivity to each other. Me to you and you to me. It doesn't matter if we disagree. We are whispers of cloud. Let us be held in the same sky together. Let us be held, you and I. There's a word in the Welfaree language. Say it, lengthen and corn in their book, law. The word, wala, that describes feelings of trust, ease, happiness, gladness, and satisfaction that flow when law is properly observed. And all things in creation are moving and working. The Hopi Express, the understanding of living in harmony with the law of nature, as, and you're going to have to forgive my pronunciation of some of these next words. The Hopi Express, it as Novoity. The Tlingit, referred to it as Shoga. Anishinabe, and Creep people call it Minobi Ma, to see you in, or a good life. which also translates as, inition of that co-activist, winonal, adduic, explains, to continuous rebirth. She goes on, quote, two tenants are essential to this paradigm, cyclical thinking, and reciprocal relations and responsibilities to the earth and all creation. Cyclical thinking, common to most indigenous or land-based cultures and values systems, is an understanding that the world flows in cycles. Within this understanding is the knowledge that what one does today will affect one in the future on the return. Reciprocal relations defines responsibility as a ways of relating between humans and the ecosystem. Simply stated the resources of the economic system, whether they be wild, rice, or air, are recognized as animate, and as such gifts from the creator. There must always be this reciprocity. So we have responsibility, not arbitrary human-imposed responsibilities, but responsibilities to the larger flow of the cosmos to align to a living matrix around us. To find balance within its great architectures, within its seasonal and cyclical flows. In the episode called inanimate objects aren't inanimate or objects, Rose and I talked about how waking up to an animate world isn't just about seeing fairies everywhere. It's about understanding that we're being watched. It's about understanding I am in a living vibrational matrix and everything I do matters. That's the order I've been born into. The order I've been born into is not actually a blank slate. It is a responsibility. Dets are owed. Relationships exist that we are entering into upon taking our very first breath. Relationships that may have been established generations and generations and even lifetimes before. So if someone asks me what it means to embrace an animate vision, I could talk about waking up to a living world. I could talk about nature spirits and ecstatic states and wonder and trance. And I do talk about these things, right? Or I could just as easily say that animacy is about law, order, and debt. Just to mess with postmodern minds and recovering religious minds and humanist minds, maybe I'll start doing that. What's animacy all about? beautiful soundscapes singing back to nature. No, it's about law, order, and debt. But, of course, to pay our debt to nature requires that we sing and that we dance. It requires art. Nature requires for us an artfulness of being. That's the beauty of the order. Roberto Colossus says, quote, existence all existence begins in debt to something else, having borrowed from something else. First and foremost, to life itself. Between Urna, debt, and Urta, cosmic order, there is a restless wavering. debt is borne out of order and given back to order, otherwise the balance would be upset and life could not continue. It's a process that takes place at every instant. The elaboration and exchange of a substance that can be called Anna, food. But incorporates within it the word, the gesture of offering, the yielding of the substance itself. But if there is no beginning, will there ever be an end? No, for every offering leaves a residue, and this residue sets off a further chain of acts. I take and I give back forever. I'm responsible in this sensitive vibrational matrix for what I put forth and what I claim as mine and what I kill and what I gather and what I break apart and what I join together and how I proliferate and what I create. And in this living web of cause and effect, excess as consequence, failure to offer back as consequence. This is right at the heart of animist understanding.

Because we really want the deep wisdom of the ages to speak to us of liberation. Freedom from debt, rather than responsibility and order. We really want to find world views and ideologies that reinforce our predilection towards individualist freedoms. So we extract pieces of animate traditions that seem to us to reinforce what we want to hear about freedom, says Fultany, quote, modernity perits ever more convulsively the slogans of freedom. Considered to be irreconcilable with any sort of concession towards the concept of any higher order. And this reflexive freedom impulse runs deep. But there's a simple truth here. Animate traditions aren't based on modernist notions of freedom. Animate traditions are utterly based on steeped in, replete with law. No one then directly tells me that adherence to law is how Aboriginal tradition has survived for 70,000 plus years, living in deep relationality with land. But that doesn't mean just hanging out being free on the land. It means that there are protocols around absolutely everything. And don't fear my friends. We're not talking about judiciary law. We're talking about something so much more luminescent, so much area, so much freer. We're talking about the clouds. We're talking about the stars. quote for tourist trade islanders the sun moon and stars form all law for navigation calendars weather prediction seasons food economics ceremonies and social structures This knowledge underlies all tourist-rate islander traditions as recorded and handed down through traditional songs, dances, and designs. Stars for many cultures are not just things for Jiminy Cricket to Wishapot, fanciful invitations to dream of how far you can go and how you're someday going to make it and marry that handsome prince and have a reality show. or whatever it is that we're taught to dream about these days to shoot for the stars, you know, in many traditions, stars are beings in a great web of intervening. And those beings have histories, and those histories are embedded in the fabric of the sky, and therefore the fabric of consciousness. And those stories run the full spectrum of the experience of being. The stars are stories. They echo and reverberate brightly with the consequences of violence, with the struggle to transform, with the value of selfless giving. They echo with birth story and death story. They echo the tales of tricksters, stories of excess and stories of balance, and the stars reinforce both the inarguable fact of a greater pattern, and what happens to those who fear from it. The constellation Orion in multiple traditions serves as a big reminder of what not to do, how not to overstep. Nature emanates story in that story reverberates with responsibility. Responsibility not as a dry abstract burden. but responsibility is the very flow of life. Quote, everything in law and life requires constant effort and work from good governance and decision-making among leaders to maintaining harmony within your own family and peace within society. The Southern Cross is a permanent reminder, like an incorn, say, that we must always strive through our observance of law to achieve and sustain this balance. Imagine looking at the sky and seeing not only the invitation to hope and dream of faraway things, but to feel tangibly once in their connection. And in that interconnection is a great responsibility, but it is a responsibility that is never tackled alone. Alone. What's that? Alone. Ever seen that single cloud that lone cloud? Is it alone? Or is it a punctuation mark of a great conspiracy of forces? Is it a singular expression of interconnection? Just like you and I. Just like you and I believe it. Interconnection, everything is offering to something else. Everything arises from something else. From Tic Nod Han, if you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in the sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no rain. Without rain the trees cannot grow and without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud's not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper enter R. Interbeing is a word that is not in the dictionary yet. He says, but if we combine the prefix inter with the verb to be, we have a new verb, inter be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper so we can say that the cloud and the paper inter are. Everything is in relation to everything else. Everything is adoring everything else. Everything goes in debt to everything else and receives back from everything else. For the gods, says colosso, must also sacrifice. Must also perform ritual acts in the day of Ayajana, the cosmic offering place. Since the gods, two have ancestors, four bearers, the gods before the circulation of substance. is not limited to earth or to the intermediate space between earth and sky, but pervades the whole cosmos, as far as the celestial ocean that can be recognized as the Milky Way. See the Milky Way, that cloud chain of offering fires. Every fire up there, a song, every fire up there, a sacrifice. See the clouds, those are offering clouds. Look around you, every place you see marks a place in offering.

Every place marks a place of sacrifice. Every place is the place where one is sacrificed or body on the altar of immediacy. Every place lifts you up and takes you in and reinforces responsibility as much as it opens a path to freedom. So, story embedded in the stars, in the land and water and clouds. charts a path for human beings through a world of forces and distractions and dangers and a thousand ways to go astray. Story reminds us we're no better than anyone else, and tells of what happens in culture after culture for all time when someone starts thinking they are. Story makes you live right as Keith Basso recounts in wisdom sits in places. Nolan then obspeaks about how somatically embedded law is in Aboriginal tradition. This is deeper than simply growing up with a respect for nature, so deeply embedded the law of the land. That to violate law for many was somatically untenable.

And you die. Oh, that's a strong one. Hold it for a moment. And then let it disperse like cloud. Maybe it'll gather when the time is right for it to gather. If you've heard a story and that story made you bow your head before the waterfall, or before the high wind swept peaks, then that story was humming with law. Story infuses us with respect, not an abstract respect, but an embedded felt respect for a world of great forces. So steeped in law, our Aboriginal children says no. that from a very early age, they're taught to be profoundly aware of their own shadow.

And that can sound different for us in the western world, right? Different wave, childrearing, and just feel for a moment. What? Deeper, somatic, embedded reminder of the fact that actions have consequence? That what you do matters? Could there be, then, growing up physically aware of where you are throwing shade? Seems like a lot of folks these days never grew up learning that there are consequences to throwing shade. No, what I mean?

So, law travels through fine feeder roots, connects us literally, atomically and anatomically to the world around us. Law is how the baby knows to reach for the mother's breast. Where is that knowing? Is it genetic knowing? Yes, for genes themselves are spiraling ladders that unfurl around. Law is in the matrix fractal tree of the placenta. I've seen the holy architecture that drives the newborn still wet to its mother. I've seen the law that drives that, and the only possible way to respond is with. quote, the need for people to approach life with underlying respect and humility as the ceremony's teach is essential for the proper functioning of society as in keeping with ancestral law. ceremonial participation starts from infancy because babies are said to crawl with law and dancing in public ceremonies is encouraged as soon as a toddler can walk. ceremonial participation, what is law without ceremony, without ritual, without sacred enactment? How can law seep into bones? How can the seriousness of responsibility and the deep alleviation of individual burden possibly be embodied without ceremony? Why would we care about the law of the land? if it's something happening out there to everyone else. We've got to feel it in our bellies in the deepest part of our bones. Oh, feel the living lawn in the belly and in the bones. There's no way to feel what law is without ceremony. There's no way. Law is danced. Law is sung. It's impossible to extract law from its spiritual root. The sweat of our ritual spaces should rain back down upon us. We should feel it. Steam should rise from the friction of prayer spaces. Steam should rise, no steam, no rain. We have to exhaust ourselves until our heads are bowed, and we pass the night into the dawn together. And we rise to the world of hummingbirds. We can have all the abstract conversations we want about ecological law. And unless it's been somatically enacted, embedded, felt, rich, really reinforced through ceremony, it won't stick. I'll say it very plainly. Climate science won't stick without ritual embodied enactment. So that word, Urta, that we are exploring before, that is, etymologically related to art and order, is also related to the word ritual. Ritual is the path back to the artful order of creation, to the patterned artfulness of creation. Art, order, ritual.

When I spoke with native activist and author Jose Baredo, he emphasized how much ceremony is tied in with law. There isn't law without some type of spiritual practice that reinforces law. But a lot of conversations on law want to leave out the ceremonial part. So in the past few years, right, indigenous law has entered into the discussion of global environmental law. and indigenous law and indigenous thinking are being used as a framework for discussions on environmental and social justice and some circles. And this is a good start. I'm totally in favor of it. But it also misses something. Law, as I understand it, is more than a template for how to treat watersheds and to restrict salmon overfishing into approach ecology in terms of its material ethical relationality. At its heart, law is the acknowledgement and embodied enactment of the breath of life. That is the architecture of the world. The acknowledgement that spirit moves everything, infuses everything, and I have to enact that in me too. So if you just take the material ecological applicability and you leave out the whole spirit part, you miss the heart of the law of the cosmos. and as usual, modernity wants to adopt everything but the core thing, because the core thing is animacy. Natural law says Stephen Wall defines the relationship between humans, between humans and non-human entities, and with spiritual forces. Spiritual forces, which can only be interacted with rich, really, and ceremonially. So the term natural law is popular these days, right? But once it's abstracted from place and ritual, abstracted from the body and from the breath of life, people can take natural law to mean whatever they want. Here's where we're at with what sometimes is called natural law. The left seemingly wants to adopt the ecological and material part and leave out the spirit and ceremonial part. The spiritual but not religious crowd sometimes seems to want the free spirited part without any of the structure. The political right wants to claim spirit as theirs, and own a vision of natural law that is totally removed from its roots. Natural law as the law of the jungle. the law of the open market, libertarianism, permission to do whatever we want free from accountability. And let's just say no traditional understanding I know of has ever viewed the law of nature that way.

Yeah, traditional cultures don't tend to be particularly libertarian. I mean, I've actually got a couple of native friends who are now libertarians, so they might be loading up their rifles right now. But traditionally, I'm talking, it's a free for all doesn't tend to be the ancestral worldview. So what if natural law was more than climate science? More than the God given right to do whatever we want whenever we want, or the reason that festival dude won't wear a condom. Natural law is a deeper understanding of how the land actually works. The movement of nature is the ultimate determiner of truth. Not your truth, my truth, but what actually lasts. What actually harmonizes with the way the living land unfolds over time. And natural law is the ceremonial enactment of that understanding. The enactment of law itself until humans and land reverberate as one thing. Through this barometer, we can start to understand what laws, what human laws are upheld by the land, and what laws do not pass the actual test of cause and effect. Remember how Nietzsche said, let's take the idols one by one and shake them and see if they ring. Let's see if the laws ring, and if the land rings in response. Like, does the land ring in response when I say everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness? As it says in the Declaration of Independence, why would anyone want to spend that much time pursuing happiness? Persuing and happiness sound like two different things to me? That law speaks of a culture that really exhausts itself, pursuing happiness so frantically like that. That law doesn't bring Does a law that allows billion dollar corporations to exist free from accountability in a universe of debt ring along with the law of the land? How about a law that permits want an environmental devastation? Tyson Yoke Porta quotes, Auntie Mary Graham, a combumary woman who has done a whole lot of work on law, as saying, quote, settler law is incomplete because it's possible even commonplace to commit immoral and unethical acts of destruction that are not illegal. If one can devastate a forest, relocate and kill its residents and all that is legal, and there's seen to be no debt incurred then that law bears no resemblance to how nature functions. So natural law is the alignment of law to the actual land. And the alignment of the lawmakers ceremonially to that living pulse of law. For how can our lawmakers hope to get anything done if there are no offerings first? If there is no ritual If there are no gratitude spoken aloud, no circle of sweat, pouring and pounding feet. Those laws are doomed to disperse before they ever reign. Do our forms of governance acknowledge, spirit, to the acknowledge of living world? Are they anchored in ceremony? Here's what Jose Marano says about the interweaving of the law of nature, the community and ceremony.

Appreciation and gratitude, recognition of death and offering. Recognition of the great law of the world that is sung and danced together and that then makes its way into the community and how we treat one another and how we embody interconnectivity. This perhaps is what binds human beings together. It's what makes life life. It's what human beings are.

Great speakers all of them. Yes, one orange lion stood up before the United Nations in 1977. He said this, I do not see a delegation for the forefooted. I see no seat for the Eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior. But we are, after all, a mere part of creation. and we must consider to understand where we are. And we stand somewhere between the mountain and the ant, somewhere and only there as part and parcel of creation. And 15 years later, he said this. It seems to me that we are living in a time of prophecy, a time of definitions and decisions. We are the generation with the responsibilities and the option to choose the path of life for the future of our children, or the life and path that defies the laws of regeneration. Natural law, he says, will prevail. The law of the seed and regeneration. We need the courage to change our values to the regeneration of our families. The life that surrounds us, we must join hands with the rest of creation and speak of common sense, responsibility, brotherhood and peace. We must understand that the law is the seed, and only as true partners can we survive. The law is the seed, the law of regeneration, feel into that. Growth, death, regeneration within the balance of all things, so that all things we plan must be in alignment to this great law, or it will eventually be balanced so that it is. So, let us take the empty laws and shake them and see if they ring. Does any vision of governance, any vision of success that does not account for the whole living web ring with law? When Stephen Pinker says things have never been better, you know, the worldview that because life expectancy is up, even though it's not. And your chance of being murdered is less than it was in England in 1640. That things are better than they've ever been. Does the land ring in response? For me, I feel a lot of ancestors silently shaking their heads. You can't talk of the success of any given part of the system without talking about the whole system. You can't talk about success without looking at the interconnected web of ceremony and art and community. Without looking at if deaths are being paid and offerings made, if the sweat of the ritual is rising up to form rain. If the people are being replenished and not falling victim to cynicism, not plagued by anxious isolation, is there levity in the hearts of the people? Are the people becoming cynical? Are they morose and downtrodden? This is serious stuff. It's not Bowie can write a hypothetical book about how if we just use reason and trust the market, everything's going to work out great. It's serious stuff. If we want the whole system to function, we're going to have to shift the discussion from what we get to do to how to manage relationships and curb excess and offer back in order to preserve and overall balance. Because that great balance will curb excess one way or another, with or without our cooperation. And so we're going to have to talk about spirit, about ritual, about ceremony, about how law is embodied and enacted. Law is serious. There's no escaping law. Law is the thing that chains Prometheus to the rock. All of us Prometheus is to our own rocks. The Eagles eat our livers, they feed, they fly away, they gather again, the feast is timeless. Here upon this rock, of cause and effect, and law is serious. How do you talk about the most serious thing there is and convey that it is lighter than air? that it is the clouds, it is the freedom within the song, that it offers a great unburdening. But that unburdening is not exactly what we're used to calling freedom. That unburdening happens through an even deeper connectivity. How do you convey that the lightest, the most cloud-like you will ever feel, is in a highly structured ritual designed to remind you of your responsibility, Even as it dissolves you into the sparkling luminous web of life. How do you convey that law is eternal? And binding is inescapable as birth and death. And yet, translucent has moved beyond. As light as when you take that backpack off at last. May we be unburdened, beloved, May we be unburdened as clouds bare no burden but to form, together, to coalesce, to deepen, to split open and to breathe. For when the heart at last is weighed, as the Egyptians say, it will be against a feather. When the heart is weighed against a feather, how will my heart be? When your heart at last is weighed against a feather, how will your heart be? How do you convey without having felt it in return? That when we talk about law, we're talking about the most binding thing there is and the most spacious thing there is. About the thing that is most binding and most freeing at once. Do we talk of the breath? How you can feel in your next breath all the layers and gradations of freedom and then feel how you have no choice but to breathe. How do you convey that you and I are precisely as free as one note of music in the midst of an intricately structured symphony? So this guy says to the clouds you will have all the space you could ever want to express, but you will also be eternally bound to be What do we do in this vast, a femoral world, this shining web of intercontivity? Same again, dance again, do the ritual again. Water evaporates again. It rains down again. This is how we reverberate within the law of the living land around us. This is how we renew replenishing. and we do it over and over again because that's how the alchemy happened. That's how it rains.

The foundational discipline of the jazz musicians is what liberated their musical vision. The embodied repetition of scales and patterns is what liberates John Coltrane to ride a path of melodic progressions, to ride tensions right to the place of resolution, right to the source. Few have the artist needs to wander, like cloud, yet wander rhythmically. Few have the artfulness needs order, and the order needs artfulness. And then our songs can sing with law. With the law that says I am eternally bound, and yet eternally free, eternally bound, and yet eternally free. You feel what I mean? I'm free. And the last thing I am is free. And I'm free. And the last thing I am is free. You feel how those words start to harm a little. Stay with me on this journey, it's simple, feel it echo. I was free as cloud. And no, I was not free. I was free as cloud. And I was anything but free. I was free as clown. And I was anything but free. I was free as clown. And I was anything but free. Do you feel the simple home of law there? For the law perhaps is simple. Everything in the universe, Jose says, likes to be appreciated. If we want to reverberate with the law of the land, step outside in the morning and say, thank you to the world. And after a while, the wind will start talking to you.

All this talk of freedom and law, it arises at this person. It feels tangible for a moment present and clear. And then we try to grasp for it and it's a femoral. Where did it go? So the after maybe you think back and you can't quite please them. What was he saying again? Something about the clouds. Something about the ongoing dance ball that Oh, what was it this life? It was something about the most serious things. Our responsibility before creation. About the only path that ultimately is. Something about who we are and how we treat the world. That's right. It was something about disallying this. Something about being good to each other, to your memory. Something about giving back. It was something about gathering clouds. Do you feel? It was something about holding space for each other. Even if we disappear. It was something about the law of creation. It was something about rain. Something about kindness. It was something about rain. Something about loving each other. Something about rain. Something about loving each other. Something about rain. It was something about loving each other. Something about a drenching. It was something about loving each other. Something about loving each other. Something about an all-pervading dream. It was something about loving each other. It was something about rain. It was something about loving each other. Again.

First of all, special thanks to my guests, Nungar, Elder, Noel, Nanop, native elder, activist, and author Jose Baredo. He's the author of Indian roots of American democracy, and the editor of Thinking in Indian, the John Moha creator, among many other books. William Mahoney, the author of the Artful Universe, and exquisite love, both books are highly recommended. This episode featured the Megrag, the Song of the Clouds, performed by a Nevedita Guntry. Thank you so much, Nevedita. He also sang a version of the mantra Pushpum from the Azure Veda. Special thanks to Maria Stark for some ethereal cloud like singing on this episode. You can find Maria's music anywhere you find music and her new album, Weightless is worth listening to. Many thanks to Lorraine Kultour also for doing some research on this episode, and to Andy Aquarius for playing harp. As usual, this episode contains reverence to many books, movies, stories, etc. These include the long-running TV series Law and Order, the Declaration of Independence, the magic of the Orphic Kims by Tamer Lucid. the Silmarillion by J.R. Tolkien. Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and thanks to Travis Puntarelli for voicing some characters for us. The book, Dusty F ski reads Hagle and Siberia and bursts into tears by Laslo Fodany. A highly recommended critique of the age of reason, and I've always just wanted to say that title on the podcast. So there you go. The writings of Lee Maracle, a wish-fulfilling jam guidance on the meaning of being at ease with illusion by Rob Zhang Long Chenpa, translated by Michael Xi. Write story wrong story by Tyson Yunkipurda. Shobagan Zobutsu Kojoji, the matter of going beyond Buddha by A. A. H. Dogan, an article called Are We Destroying the Natural World by Shohaku Okumura Roshe for the Dogan Institute. The heart of understanding by Tick-Naut Han, The way Finder's Wade Davis, Camel Weasler-Wale, Cloud Symbolism in English Literary Text by Martin Hoiser, the Yajurveda, and in particular the Monterep Pushpom, the offering of the flowers. Songs spirals by the gay Wu group of women, Tuku Urgin Rinpoche's commentary on Padma Sambava, the book Arder by Roberto Colasso. Traditional ecological knowledge and environmental futures were known a lidook. Wisdom sits in places by Keith Basso. American Indian tribal governance by Stephen Wall. Fargo, season five, starring John Hamm and Jennifer Jason Lee. Or in Lyons addresses to the non-governmental organizations of the United Nations in 1977 and 1992. The song, Break in the Clouds. by elephant revival. The song Saltarello by Dead Condance. Tamanwit Natural Law, a presentation by Barbara Harper and Stuart Harris, Hawaiian Proverbs and poetical saying by MK Pekui, the poems of Mirabai, and of course the song Little Fluffy Clouds by the Orb.