From The End of You catalog:

The Luxuriant Prolific Undying is a journey beyond the narrow boundaries of everyday persona towards entanglement with the more-than-human world. The disembodied embark on a guided meditation while lying down under a suspended Red Alder root, or perched upon wood slabs in front of a Cedar root. Confront the impermanence of life by contemplating the perpetual cycles of death and resurrection through the intertwined mortality of all living things.

Cedar Mediation

Greetings

Human

We would like a word with you.

We’ve been waiting.

There are tales to tell.

It won’t take much of your time.

We know,

Time runs differently for you.

You move at such speed through your lives.

Fits and starts. Faster as you age.

Slow down with us.

Breathe.

Feel yourself connected to the ground.

Feel time, moving.

Every day the sun lengthens its time a bit more, lingering in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere

Birds, heading North on their flyway, stop on wires and trees.

They sing in the seasons. They sing in the time of day.

Breathe out, and in, and out

Your thoughts are as fluid as the oxygen you breathe.

Life swirls on this outer edge. We are all here together, from the underworld to the stratosphere

Satellites loop into view across the night sky and pale out, invisible, through the day

Just over the rise is the rim of the continent, and the edge of the Earth’s largest ocean

Trillions of gallons of its water pools into the Bay, encircling you.

Our planet is mostly ocean.

Quickly filling with melt ice, it licks the edge of the land and pulls it underwater.

Oh we know accelerations. We know planetary emergencies.

We remember the time before oxygen.

We remember the great asteroid and the darkening sky.

Each brought forth new worlds. New patterns.

Our creativity is legend.

But we also have all the patience in the world.

Our elemental origin is still untold

We might have ridden in on ice comets

We might have been packing spores

We might remember antimatter

We are opportunistic. We emerged.

We are the incorporation

And as for you, stardust creature,

you carry the oldest matter in the universe,

and still somehow, you seem the youngest among us

cleverness and folly, piss and vinegar

The deep sky, the rich soil, is enfolded into your bodies.

Through us, you are making the world.

The world is making you.

Watch your thoughts. What are they showing you?

Thoughts do not exist without bacteria, without trees or sun.

Notice how you think with all the others, with the rest of life

The life web thinks through your thoughts.

Your thoughts are the life web thinking itself

Another breath. Breathe.

You are free to stay.

You are free to go.

You will not forget us.

We will not forget you.

Alder Meditation

Welcome, human. Human being.

Yes. You.

Please, lie down under the roots of the tree.

Can you hear us?

Listen.

We have a story to share with you.

Close your eyes.

And breathe.

Pay attention

Feel the feeling of your lungs, expanding

Breathe slowly, deliberately.

This breath is one of 20,000 breaths today.

Each breath contains a billion trillion molecules of oxygen

shared with every being who has ever lived.

Since you were born,

this continuous exchange of inhales and exhales has never stopped.

The Earth’s atmosphere cycles through you.

Oxygen absorbs into your blood.

Air fills every vacuum,

seeps under doors, and into lungs,

flows over your skin.

Notice its temperature.

Notice its intensity.

Notice its lightness.

We welcome all of you, your human assembly.

Bacteria and fungi, mineral and water.

Even as you lie here,

You are absorbing others

Exchanging microscopic hitchhikers

At every point of contact.

These intimacies never let up.

Microbes are on a grand transit across your flesh.

They live whole lifetimes under your fingernails.

Their descendants live out generations inside your guts.

Where do you end, when your body is also other bodies?

Where do you begin?

Feel your spine adjusting against gravity.

It pulls evenly down, in towards the center of the Earth.

You are supported by the city’s concrete shell, and beneath that the soil, the bedrock, down towards the planet’s center, a heavy, molten core far below.

This is a second sun, heating the world from within.

Welcome to here.

Your pattern is unique

Despite a lifetime of change, you’re recognizable

Some know you merely by scent

Some know your face across great lengths of time.

Some know your deepest truths

Those humans who have shared your time, or your genes, or your thoughts, or your love, they know how you’re assembled, and how you’ve emerged.

Picture those others in your mind. The ones who love you.

Imagine them as they are, as patterns, collectives. Your life’s entanglements.

Whom do you choose to have with you?

Invite them in now. Thank them.

Here they are, sitting quietly, bringing their minds together with yours.

Now, sitting at your side, they rest their hands on you.

They are here, with us, present for your release.

We are with you. We await your change.

Imagine your systems slowing down.

Feel your body relaxing, muscles releasing

Feel yourself cooling down

Your pattern begins to loosen

Your exhalation begins to slow.

In, and out.

In, and out.

As your awareness ascends beyond your body

Your breath is drawn into the roots of trees.

As you fold into other patterns,

You disincorporate, back into us,

We welcome you home, every part of you.

We welcome the nutrients of your organic self

You are the living skin of Earth

Your body is also our bodies

We are made of the energy and matter of stars

Each of us is lit up

Our nervous systems, radiating with electricity

And all of us enlivened by water

We evaporate into air, swell upward into clouds, become rain.

We find our slow way downhill, and descend towards the ocean.

We soak underground and fill the sponge of soil

We sink deep into aquifers

We do all of this, and more

As rain, we welcome you. As ocean, we welcome you.

There is more water in the rivers in the sky than in the rivers on the land.

More water molecules in a cloud than stars in our galaxy.

None of it, none of us, holds one form forever.

Our every living atom joins other lives

Our body incorporates into the others. The living persists, never letting up.

Our collective breathing continues uninterrupted.

Death, playing the same trick of life,

Cycles the living and the dying

Our human matter merges with other life

Our human matters dissolve into memory

By simply adjusting our boundaries,

We are incorporated

We are

The incorporation

We are human, and tree, and fungus, and microbe.

Life animates every tree that has been cut, every forest that has been burned

Our bodies, decomposing, become food for the soil,

Reabsorbing

Regenerating

Now. Allow your awareness to descend back into your human body

Feel the return of air and water. As you inhale, feel the oxygen surge back into your bloodstream.

Return to the shape and pattern of your body. Feel your body, warming.

Your senses are an extension of ours. Your life, an extension of us.

We breathe, together.

Together, we make the world anew

Whether you remember, or not, we remember you