The Presence of Spirit

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Deena Metzger. Deena is an award-winning novelist, poet, teacher, healer, and counselor. For more than four decades, she has taught, mentored, counseled, and visioned with writers, healers, medical practitioners, and visionaries, helping to bring forth a new culture in alignment with the natural world, indigenous knowledge, and new and ancient wisdom traditions.

She’s the author of the book Writing for Your Life, many novels, and other works—as well as the Sounds True audio program This Body, My Life, in which she shares the story of her recovery from breast cancer and a radical mastectomy, and her profound discovery that creativity and the imagination can heal.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Deena and I spoke about listening to the story our illness is telling us and her work with the ReVisioning Medical Alliance—an alliance that cultivates a dialogue between Western medical professionals and traditional medicine people. We also talked about her work to create what she calls a “literature of restoration”—a literature to overcome the dominant commercial and economic values of the world in order to value and restore what is life-giving. Finally, we talked about the concept of the “Fifth World”—a world in the making that Deena invites us to help create.

Here’s my conversation with the very poetic and heartfelt Deena Metzger:

Deena, you and I are now having this chance to speak together after over two decades!

Deena Metzger: [Laughs] This is wonderful!

TS: It was 20 years ago or so that we worked together to create a program with Sounds True called This Body, My Life. I just feel so lucky that our lives have circled back around together again.

DM: Well, I’m very glad for it as well.

TS: I want to go back to the period of time that we were in and the work that you were focused on at that time, which was on healing stories and how someone could work with an illness in such a way, through writing and storytelling, that they could turn what could be—and often is—a very difficult experience of illness into something that is therapeutic and healing.

I wonder, to begin with, if you could talk some about that. Perhaps someone’s listening right now who is suffering with an illness in some way. How might they approach that?

DM: Well, I’ve been thinking about that very deeply since then. That work came to me from my own experience in 1977, when I had breast cancer—and when I realized that I was in a story that illuminated the path of healing. That understanding, which we talked about in, I think ‘92, continued and deepened. One of the ways that it’s been realized is through what I’ve been calling “ReVisioning Medicine,” which has been to bring together physicians, medical people, and medicine people to see if we can help create, recreate, or restore medicine healing ways that do no harm.

One of the principles or activities in ReVisioning Medicine is really listening to the story that the illness is telling. That shifts the way one experiences illness—because instead of being completely and absolutely laid out and devastated by being ill, one can also listen for what the illness is telling us. Very often, it leads us in very particular ways to changing our lives and living differently so that we begin to live in a healing modality.

We heal accordingly. We try to listen to the illness and see what can be shifted in our environment or in our thinking or in our ways of relating, so that we are actually beginning to live as healing presences. And one of the first people to get healed by this is the person who is suffering. Sometimes there are dramatic results.

So that conversation [that] we had remains very central to the ways that I’ve been living.

TS: Deena, I’m curious if you could share with us from your own life experience and your own journey through cancer. What was the message that cancer brought to you, if you would say there’s a message in illness?

DM: The first message that came to me was before I knew that I had cancer, because I was working on a novel and I was asking a question: Why do so many women have cancer? Why now? Why so young?

Many answers came to me. The one that was most profound was that cancer was silence. Or that cancer came out of being silenced. I had had a dream in which I was silenced and I had been listening to the stories of many women—because I was teaching in three different educational institutions at that time—and I saw how many women had cancer suddenly and no one was talking about it.

Afterwards, when I would go and lecture—whether it was in hospitals or universities—about cancer and healing and I would say, “Cancer is silence.” I would see that recognition in particularly women’s eyes. They would tell the stories of being silenced or not being recognized for who they are or not being able to live the lives that they wanted and had hoped to live.

Interestingly enough, in my own journey, because I was always very outspoken, I wondered why this understanding had come to me. It took being in Tennessee last September at a ReVisioning Medicine council, when I realized that as outspoken as I had been, there was something that I always hesitated to talk about publicly. That was my deep sense of the existence of Spirit.

Though I have lived my life accordingly, and though I have written about it, to say to the world, “Spirit exists. I experience it. I try to guide people to what I call ‘the pathless path.’ I’m not talking about religion now. I’m talking about the real existence of Spirit and its benevolent activity in our lives.”

I just gave a talk for Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority, which I called “The Brief History of a Feminist Mind.” In that talk, I told various stories about the way Spirit had enacted itself in my life. Afterwards, a woman came up to me and she said, “That was a very courageous talk.” And I said, “Well, really? It could be many things, but why ‘courageous’?” And she said, “Well, because you talked about your experience of Spirit.”

So I look back now [that] we’re in 2014 to 1977, when I had cancer and I learned from Spirit that cancer was silence. I didn’t know where I had been silenced fully until last year.

TS: Deena, it’s so powerful for me to hear you say this. Really, that for many people coming out—if you will—coming out of the closet in terms of—you could call it love of God or Spirit being the most important thing moving through our lives. It really does require taking a public stance, often—in conversations, in terms of what’s really important to me. It’s interesting that something that seems like it wouldn’t be that threatening actually requires so much to step forward into it.

DM: Right. And then to—I’m going to say “admit”—to the ways that you have seen Spirit active. I have been the most fortunate of people because I can tell—I want to say—hundreds of stories of seeing Spirit active, meaning watching and experiencing things happen that could not have happened simply from human activity. And acknowledging that what we call “coincidence,” if it happens again and again and again, cannot be simply chance. There is some active principle.

Also, this is what indigenous people have always known. And that’s how we lived. We were silenced in part because the dominant culture has wanted to silence that wisdom that indigenous people carry. It’s why the women were burned at the stake. There’s a whole history of silencing.

TS: It’s interesting that what you discovered was that the way in which you had been willing to be silenced or that you were silenced by the culture had to do with speaking out for Spirit in the world. But it seems that each person, probably in their own way, has to investigate. Is it a question of being silenced? What is the message that they’re receiving from whatever illness they might be experiencing?

I’m wondering what advice do you have? What directions could you point people in to help them discover the message that illness might be bringing for them?

DM: I ask a fundamental question when I work with someone. It is: Why did this illness in particular come to me in particular at this time? To ask this question without entering into: “I brought this onto myself.” Because that is not the direction. It is that we’re all suffering. We’re all flawed. We’re all struggling to come to consciousness. Sometimes illness is the way that that happens.

If we can get out of blame and guilt, but actually bring curiosity to bear, then we can begin to explore it. One of the ways of exploring it is looking at the metaphor—really looking deeply into the metaphor of the illness. It’s not a direct line. It calls us to look at the story of our lives. It calls us to look at what dreams are coming to us [and] what experiences we’ve had that we didn’t create ourselves. It calls us, in a sense, to look at the unarticulated goodness that has surrounded us. Where might that carry us further?

I’m trying to think of a recent example of something. A woman came to us who was suffering a variety of illnesses. She was just taken down by those mysterious illnesses that seem to be abounding, which are sometimes called Lyme disease or Epstein-Barr. There are all kinds of names for: “We don’t really know what’s going on and what causes it.” They’re characterized by exhaustion and really not being able to function.

She happened to be very knowledgeable medically and in terms of natural medicine. She had investigated all the physical, biological pathways. Then, she told a story—just in terms of telling me the story of her life. She told a story of having been born on a Native American reservation. She lived there until she was three years old.

She said, “We left when I was three and somehow I was given these gifts when we left. I was given a pipe.” We talked about this. “I think it’s really interesting to be given a pipe. Do you know why you were given a pipe?” She said, “No, I have no idea.”

But as it turned out and as we talked, what was also going on for her at the time was that there was a discrepancy between the work that she was doing and the values within which she was following this work and, we could say, Native American values—all my relations, for example. She was in a competitive world and there were other values that contradict that or challenge that.

At one particular moment, I took a peace pipe and put it in her hands. It was like she was struck by lightning. She howled in anguish. Something came through her. Fortunately, there was a group of people here who witnessed this and could hold her while she just wailed. Afterwards, we said, “What happened?” And she said, “I don’t know, but it was like [I had] come home.”

Her path of feeling, in addition to everything else, defined the values that are really deep for her and live accordingly.

TS: I’m imagining, Deena, someone who might be listening and this is what’s coming to me: This person is listening and says, “If I really turn to what’s happening inside me in relationship to this illness and I start writing about it, I’m imagining tremendous venom coming out of the pen. How angry I am that I’m sick like this. How angry I am that the environment has these types of pollutants. I have so much anger. How is this going to be a healing story, so to speak, when I’m so angry?”

DM: Well, I think you said it, Tami. First there’s the anger. But what you said was, “I’m so angry because I’m ill. I’m so angry about the pollutants.” Then, we’re called to see what can we do and how can we live? Because we’re all colluding in those pollutants. So we’re killing ourselves.

After the anger, there’s consciousness. The anger may still be there, but we become conscious. When we become conscious, then we start living differently. And we live on behalf of our own lives, but we live on behalf of the Earth’s life as well. That connection with the Earth is essential, because we can be angry—and rightly so, and must be—about the pollutants of the earth, but we also begin to love the Earth then, when we understand her suffering.

These kinds of alliances on behalf of living differently—so that the life force begins to emerge again—makes all the difference. And sometimes it also boosts the immune system. Things happen in our bodies [that] surprise us. Those are also healing events. We not only get ill. We also get well. The body has a natural healing ability which we need to find and enhance. Very often, the medicines that we take undermine the immune system, for example, and undermine the healing possibilities of our bodies.

So, we begin looking for new medicines. And sometimes going out on the Earth, blessing the Earth, and weeping with her is the first essential medicine we have to take.

TS: You mentioned, Deena, this alliance that you’ve created called ReVisioning Medicine—bringing together indigenous medicine with Western medical ways. Can you tell us a little bit about what kinds of discoveries this alliance is making about how we can actually revision medicine in our world?

DM: Yes. I’d like to read you the questions that we’re asking. Because the way I’ve worked for my entire life is not to answer questions so much. I address them, but more importantly, to ask them.

TS: That’s something you and I have in common! Asking a lot of questions.

[Both laugh.]

DM: Right! Because then we walk in the world thinking about things.

The first question is: Can medical people also be medicine people?

[Second:] How can we restore the role of community as integral to healing? So that question has an answer in it. It says that community is a healing process, rather than going into a doctor’s office [where] you don’t know the doctor. He or she closes the door. You never learn anything about them. You have the most intimate and the most disconnected relationship at the same time. It’s quite different from having community involved in healing.

The third is: Can physicians and health practitioners serve the community in the best ways that medicine persons serve their tribes or indigenous communities?

Can we speak openly, honestly, and from the heart about the grief and vision we carry about medical ways and healing? Here we’re talking about iatrogenic events where it is the medical process itself [that] is making us ill.

Can we examine together what we want to change and what we must reject?

How do we determine the entire story of the illness or the affliction so that we can truly open the door to healing, which also implies wholeness? So that if I go to the doctor’s office and I’m talking about what’s wrong, he’s not going to know about my silence. He’s not going to know that there’s another value system that wants to be expressed through me and that not expressing it makes me ill. But that’s the whole story.

How can medical practices be informed by Spirit and Earth-centered practices?

There was a book many, many years ago called Healing from the War. It was written by a psychologist who was in Vietnam. What he found then, and what I think we’re still finding now, is that the healing for the veterans who came home—who were so distraught and agonized about having fought in Vietnam. The only healing he could find was to take them to the woods where they could tell their story.

There are various things that I come back to over and over again, no matter what I’m looking at. That the relationship with the Earth—the real honoring of the relationship with the Earth. The honoring of the old ways of knowing, which were Earth-centered and Spirit-centered. Alliances with old ways, alliances with the animals and the spirits. These are the healing ways.

My life just takes me increasingly into experiences [that] sustain this understanding.

TS: In speaking about the connection that is possible—that we can feel with the natural world, with the Earth and with animals. I know that in the past decade, you’ve made several trips to Africa and have befriended the “elephant ambassador,” as you call this elephant. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about that experience and what your insight is about our relationship with animals and healing.

DM: I’d like to change the way you phrased it, if you don’t mind.

TS: Help me, Deena! Help me!

DM: [Laughs] He befriended me. And that is the point. I met an elephant and what I was clear about was that he had the intent. He was the active one. That changes everything, because I am no longer then the human being at the top of the scale. We’re out of hierarchy. I saw that an animal could come to meet me and communicate with me in ways that could only indicate his intent.

Now, had I only met this animal once, it would have been astonishing. I lived on that event for a long time. In fact, we have met four times. You may know that there’s no email protection or telephone [laughs] between a human in California and an elephant in the wild at Chobe National Park in Botswana.

But I’ve gone back there four times. Every time on the last day that I’m there—though I go overtime—the last hour that I can be in the park before I have to leave or the park will be closed and I won’t be able to get out. At the very same place. An elephant or the elephants come.

Something happens between us that I could not choreograph that leaves me the only logical understanding—that it is the elephant coming to us and Spirit’s activity. And we’re all in the field of Spirit.

TS: Now, just to be clear here: This is the same elephant that’s coming to visit you each trip you’ve made to Botswana that’s coming to visit you?

DM: Well, I don’t know, because the first time he came alone. The second time, [there] was a male elephant there and then he brought his—well, I have to say, his partner, his wife, the woman and the children—and introduced them, so to speak. Then through—well, it’s such a long story. I don’t want to diminish it.

Ultimately, he gave me undeniably the greatest gift that an elephant can give a human. That is, he threw a bone to me—an elephant bone. Because elephants have a very complex social system that is sustained to a great extent through their mourning rituals—by their relationship to their dead—so they can recognize the bones of one of their ancestors 20 years after the death. They will go over to it if they come [upon] those bones, and they will stroke it. You will quickly see who that bone belongs to by who comes out from the herd and meets it.

So he gave me this enormous gift. And the very last time that he came, there was a male, there was a female, [and] this time there was a herd and a baby and we were involved in a story with them. This is all on my website with photographs so that someone can go to the website and the story of my history with the one I call the Elephant Ambassador, whether it’s the same or a representation—another elephant—I don’t know. But it’s a male elephant who comes every time and seems to be significant to the herd.

The essay is called The Language of Relationship: Engagement with Elephants.

TS: You said, Deena, in the process of correcting me, that the Elephant Ambassador was the one who befriended you, who initiated this relationship with a particular—it sounds like—intent or message or sense of something needing to be communicated. What would you surmise is that message?

DM: I think the message is that animals are intelligent, that they have agency and intention, that we can live in alliance with them, and that that kind of alliance—that kind of respect and interaction—can restore the Earth and free us from this destructive trajectory that we’re on. I think there are—I not only think, I know that there are many other people on the planet who have different relationships with different animals. When all those stories come together, then this becomes clear.

I want to say I had an idea planted in my mind that I wanted to sit in council with the elephants when I went to Zimbabwe in 2000. I think it was 2000.

But I didn’t know what that meant. I had no idea what that meant or how to do that. Then this elephant came forward. Then I knew to go back to that place and see what would happen. And an elephant came forward again. And again. And again.

There are people who have these kinds of connections with lions, with leopards, with wolves—with every possible animal there could be. I was prepared to that many years ago when I entered into an astonishing—it seemed to me—dialogue with a squirrel, which went on for a very long time. But I never expected what happened with the elephants.

TS: What’s interesting to me, Deena, is [that] I’ve heard many people talk about inter-species communication and of course animal rights. But you’re really saying something quite profound here [and] I want to see if I’m understanding you correctly. It sounds to me that your view is that if we changed our relationship with animals and experienced ourselves as peers—if you will—with animals instead of superior to animals, that would be a leverage point or a gateway—if you will—to a radical change in how we live the entirety of our lives.

DM: I think so, because it’s such an awesome experience. And because if you open yourself up to it and try to understand it in the way it’s being presented rather than our ideas about things, then we’re back in again the way indigenous people have lived on the planet until recently when they’ve been sort of co-opted or brought into Western—or imperialist thinking would be more appropriate—through all the ways, violence, etc., etc.

All over the globe for tens of thousands of years, human beings lived in relationship with the animals. They saw the animals as animals. And they also recognized the animals’ spirit lives. We’re actually talking here about not only a relationship with a biological entity, but with a spiritual entity. That relationship restores our own spiritual lives.

So it’s all the pieces—Earth, Spirit, animal, connection, intimacy, respect, wonder, awe, beauty. They all come together. And when we live in those ways, we live differently. We don’t go and make atom bombs. That’s not a logical way of living. [Laughs]

TS: Deena, I saw on your website a reference calling you a “medicine woman.” I’m wondering if you’re comfortable being called a medicine woman, and if so, what that means to you.

DM: I’m not comfortable being called that. And yet sometimes I yield to it and may even use it or allow it to be there—because you saw it there—because I don’t have words other than that that reference to the old ways—for the way Spirit has educated me, and the gifts that I’ve been given.

A medicine person is someone that has the ability sometimes to enter into that reciprocal field in which healing can occur. There’s nothing that could honor me more than to be called that. My hope is that I use whatever that means continuously on behalf of the future—that the Earth and creation and the life force would be restored.

TS: This word—“restored”—I also saw in a description of your current work in the world: That you’re “committed to helping bring forth a literature of restoration.” I thought that was quite intriguing—a literature of restoration. What would that mean? What kind of literature is that?

DM: That means that when we write, we use language, rhythm, sound—everything—idea, story, to value what is life-giving in the largest whole of it. And not to be taken over by the economic and commercial values, which are so violent and very often despicable.

Sometimes it’s simple. In indigenous cultures and in women’s cultures or feminist cultures, the circle replaces the straight line. Actually, to sit in circle—to sit in council—to value the circle, is a radically different way of living. To some extent, for me, in my own writing—my writing is very often circular and very much, perhaps, present moment rather than going from one point to another. It’s not necessarily what happened, but it is that there’s a center to what I’m writing and that center is a magnet point that pulls the stories that need to be told to it.

In the way of this conversation. I can’t help it. I want to keep coming back to Spirit-centered, Earth-centered, indigenous ways, women’s ways, old ways. That’s the magnet point that I keep coming back to. That’s a different way of talking.

At least I think it is.

TS: Now, I also saw in some of your recent work, references to something called the “Fifth World” and a type of manifesto that you’ve written called, 19 Ways to the Fifth World. I’m curious if you can tell us a little bit about that. What’s the Fifth World and 19 ways?

DM: [Laughs] Well, there’s a concept in Native American and other indigenous cultures of the Fifth World, which is the next world. A real way of living that is not the Fourth World that we’re in that is both violent and corrupt, and disconnected from the Earth, and where we’re disconnected from each other.

The term “the Fifth World” not only comes from that, it comes from a beautiful poem by Joy Harjo about what it would be like in the Fifth World. It’s a kind world and it has the values of the old, old ways or the indigenous ways.

There was a kind of download that came to me. I don’t think of it as a manifesto. The way I think about it is that these 19 ways that were given are each ways that the dominant culture would actually not like us to value. Every time that we live according to one of these ways—and there are probably more—we step out of the dominant culture—the destructive ways of the dominant culture. And we enter into another way of living.

The first one is community—recognizing that living aligned with community is an essential way and it’s a means of transformation. In an alienated, competitive, violent culture, community is a medicine. Sitting in council, rather than having an argument [in which] someone dominates and wins or someone has more weapons and wins. To sit in council and address a question and try to get wise as, again, native people have done, indigenous people, Native Americans have done.

That’s a very different way of living. Looking at story as a living event that teaches us how to walk is another way to recognize that Spirit exists and live accordingly and to step out of, “You must believe this,” to the pathless path—where we listen to Spirit and try to evaluate how we’re being led, really, for own sakes and all our relations.

Maybe that’s the very core of the 19 ways that is that incredible wisdom from the Lakota Sioux people. If we only followed that, I think everything would change all together. That is mitakuye oyasin—all our relations. If you recognize that every vital being is related to you and you live accordingly, everything shifts.

There are these kinds of ways that came through me. It’s not a manifesto; it’s an invitation. A desperate invitation on behalf of the future.

TS: I’m curious, if someone perhaps is listening to this who lives in an urban environment, in the midst of a busy city, and they’re hearing you talk about connecting with the Earth and the world and these indigenous ways. They might feel terribly disconnected. “How do I relate to what Deena’s talking about?”

DM: How about: “How can I relate?” To start out with really asking that question with the possibility that one might be able to. That is, of course, the essential thing: How do we do it when we’ve created an urban world?

There are pragmatic answers. One of them these days is roof gardens—roof vegetable gardens [for] growing our food on top of our houses. Turning our lawns into vegetable gardens. Planting fruit trees where people can just walk down the street and pick an orange, in a certain climate, instead of having that tree fenced in.

When you plant, animals come. So, making space for it.

A friend called the animal control people and said, “There’s a raccoon in my backyard!” And the animal control people said, “Yes, it’s a wild animal. It has a right to be there.” “Oh, OK.”

So instead of saying, “Oh my God, I’ve got to do something about it. How do I live with a raccoon? How do I live with coyotes?” How can they be gifts?

In the way that we have populated the world, we’re going to have to ask that question. How can we live in a real relationship with the animals where their habitat and our habitat interact and we allow everyone their lives?

TS: Deena, a couple of times you’ve mentioned the power of community—community in healing and community as a way to this Fifth World. I’m curious if you can give us some ideas as to how people might be able to generate more community in their life. You mentioned how it’s the antidote to the kind of alienation so many people feel.

DM: [There are] so many ways. Say you’re a dreamer—and you’re a sacred dreamer [laughs] because no one is really listening to your dreams. Maybe every Thursday night you open your house and you say, “Let’s tell dreams.”

In the old ways, people came together and told dreams because they wanted to find out how to live. We can do that again. And we need to do that.

Or we just open the house and we say, “We’ve got a problem in the community. Let’s get together regularly—the young people [and] the old people—and have some food and sit in council.” For me, council and community are interrelated. We keep asking the question: How do we work this out? How do we do this together? What can we offer each other?

The ways are multiple as long as we don’t ask how we get paid for it—how we make money. That’s not the issue. The issue is: How do we solve problems together without thinking of personal financial gain or cost?

TS: Can you tell us a little bit about the Daré circles that you’ve been participating in and how that might be a type of community model that people might be inspired by?

DM: When I met the ambassador for the first time, I came back and spoke to [the] people that I was gathering with. I was teaching a class at the time that was essentially entitled, “How Can We Be Healers in the 21st Century?” This was early on.

I told them about having met the elephant and about the social organization of the elephants and their community ways of living. They are really advanced in terms of their social organization. Then I also told them about having been with a Shona healer who had community gatherings. Actually, people just came to his house. They called it Daré, [which] means “council” in the Shona language. They came for healing.

So I told them about it and one woman in the group said, “Why don’t we do it?” And I said, “Well, OK.”

We had a meeting in April. It must have been 1999. We designated the first Sunday after the new moon for that meeting. We invited Spirit and we sat in council. We addressed a question, told our dreams, did some healing work with each other, and listened to each others’ stories.

Little did I know that my, “OK, why not?” was going to change my entire life. We meet at my house on the first Sunday after the new moon. We never know who is coming, though there’s a core group that holds it. We invite Spirit. We do healing work. We tell stories. We listen to dreams.

We listen to dreams before we sit in council, because very often the dreams tell us what the question is going to be. Because when you listen to each others’ dreams over time, the dreams change—particularly if you don’t listen psychologically, but you listen in the old ways, imagining that the dreams have come to us maybe to teach us how to live.

So the dreams change and they inform us. We follow them. We begin to live by them.

It’s not an easy thing to do. It’s taken a lot of work, care, and thoughtfulness to create Daré. We will be celebrating the 15th year in April. And there are Darés all over. There’s a very successful Daré in Oakland. There’s a very successful Daré—meaning ongoing, vital, alive—in Cape Cod. There have been Darés in various places. They come and go. Sometimes they stop for a while, then they come back.

It’s the community coming together with deep respect for whoever walks in the door. Very often as we gather, I say, “Whoever has come in is an angel.” Our task is to find out who that person really is.

The usual ways in which we evaluate people: What do you do? How much money do you earn? Where did you go to school? Etc., etc. None of that is there. It’s really: Who are you really? What are you thinking? What are you carrying? How are you hurting? How can we help each other?

Very different questions. It’s extraordinary. By meeting in this way regularly, we are all changed. I’m a very different person than I was 15 years ago and so are the people who come.

TS: Deena, I just have two final questions for you.

DM: [Laughs]

TS: Here’s the first one: I was reading on your website about the appearances of rainbows in your life. You offered this phrase: “the rainbow as a covenant.” It reminded me of some different really important times in my life when I’ve seen rainbows. I thought that was so beautiful. “Rainbow as covenant.” I’d love to hear what you mean by that phrase.

DM: It goes all the way back to the Old Testament. After the flood, a rainbow appeared. The Divine said, “I will not do this again.” The covenant is reciprocal. The idea was—in the way the story is told—that the humans would change their ways and the Divine recognized that. This emergence of the presence—of such beauty—was a way of recognizing that new lives were going to begin.

We’ve sort of violated that. That’s why James Baldwin said, “The fire, next time.” We see that happening. We’re setting [audio briefly cuts out] the Earth again and again and again in a thousand different ways. Not that we’re going to be punished, but we’re doing it.

When I’m working on something or thinking about something or I’m involved with something and I see a rainbow, it often feels like Spirit is saying, “OK. Here’s a covenant. We are in alliance now.”

I’m glad you’ve had that experience. It would be interesting to go back and see what you were deeply involved in within that moment, Tami. Maybe Spirit was speaking to you and saying, “Yes, I’m here. And we’re here together.”

TS: OK, Deena. And finally, here you are at 77 years of age. Looking at the amount of work you’ve created in the past two decades and talking with you today, I’m so impressed at how passionate and engaged you seem in life. How vital. How much you seem to be turned on by living.

I’m curious to know where you think that sense of being so engaged, vital, and interested in life comes from, here at 77 years of age.

DM: Oh, well, it took 77 years to get here! [Laughs] I feel the presence of Spirit and I see beauty and I love this Earth and I can’t bear the pain of its suffering, so I am committed. I would like to feel when I leave the planet that things will be different for the future. That the forests will be restored. The elephants aren’t being poached. The wolves will roam. People will be joyous in the old ways because they’re connected again.

It doesn’t ever stop—that passion—but it’s connected with the ongoing sense of the presence of the rainbow as a covenant.

TS: I’ve been speaking with Deena Metzger. With Sounds True, Deena has created an audio program called This Body, My Life. She’s also featured in an audio collection called Cancer as a Turning Point.

Deena, I am so happy I had this chance to reconnect with you and to find out some of the things that are important for you right now. To hear you taking such a strong stand for the presence of Spirit and its importance in your life is beautiful and inspiring to me. So, thank you.

DM: Thank you very much, Tami, for this opportunity to speak with you and everyone. Bless you.

TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.

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