Trickster Treat:

Rushad Eggleston

Ten years ago I lived in the Hudson Valley and visited infrequently between then and now. Time away has made the changes sharp, stark, and strange: Now winters have tempered this land into a different zone classification. Now hurricanes come here. Now residents have reference of crashing trees, floods, and fire for the hurricane we expect tomorrow.

In this moment things are calm, just starting to be windy. People talk about stockpiling soup, water, batteries, and methods to continue life as usual in whatever weather may come.

The inevitability of change rises to the top of our awareness in this moment. We’re told this is the day before the change is coming and we brace ourselves with the things we believe we need and open up or close down to the unknown with different emotions.

Yet every day is full of hurricanes, full of change we can’t fully prepare for, change we may or may not want. We dissect the direction, the source, we create blame, we resist it or not. I’ve never been in storm like Hurricane Sandy, but it reminds me of what it means to be in the storms of change every day and the openness and presence it takes to live in it. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t.

Will you weather your storms? What does that mean to you?

Fallen leaves tell me about change and letting go, about things falling apart and falling together, about resistance and fear,

surrendering to cycles takes trust.

What is Fall feeling like for you?

It’s the season of the Lung.

Astrologer Dane Rudhyar beautifully writes about breathing and being in his book The Astrological Houses: The Spectrum of Individual Experience:

“- the act of breathing defines the first moment of individualized existence. At the moment of the first breath a valve in the heart closes, blood rushes into the lungs, and the two essential living rhythms of the human organism, the rhythm of the blood and that of the breathing, are established in a particular way.”

“To be born as a potential individual person is to breathe. It is for this reason that the yogi who aspires to merge [her] individuality with the universal Whole practices pranayama- literally, death of the breath. [She] willfully disindividualizes and depersonalizes [her] total being, or at least [her] consciousness.”

“To be, to breathe, to begin and always and forever to begin again, to meet and reveal the presence of God and the power of creative selfhood in every experience, to speak with authority in terms of one’s dharma: these are words. Meditating upon these words may lead the perceptive individual to the very source of his or her own being.”