What the Iron Remembers
Do you believe it is possible to evolve by conscious choice — through collaboration with all of creation, and a consent to be a part of it, to let the universe happen through you?
I remember what the stardust remembers. What the iron and the red rocks remember.
I’m writing to you from a place in the South of France, where the red rocks and the blue water show me the beginning of creation. The cliffs are red for the same reason our blood is red. The stone around me right now is made with iron oxide — rust, the slow marriage of iron and air and water. And the blood moving through my hand as I write is red because of stardust too, held at the center of every cell that carries us forward: this ancient code of stardust. It’s also the first pigment from the first artists. It’s the same origin. All of us forged in the heart of a dying star, long before Earth ever became our home.
In the Stardust Lineage we talk about iron in a ceremonial way, because it’s true — we actually are stardust and water. This is not a metaphor. This is a lineage. A lineage of remembering, of chosen evolution. The iron in the rock, the iron in the rivers, the iron in the waters, the iron in this ocean, the iron in our blood, the iron in the pigment we paint with — it is all made from stars that scattered when they evolved, and it gathers around us right now.
I’ve been sitting with this question while at the edge of this water: can we truly evolve, and can we do it in time? Not about fixing, not about keeping up, but to become people we haven’t been yet. There are so many demonstrations of this ability to change.
The other day, when I was swimming in the water, I could see a tiny moth. It was dying. I lifted my finger under it, and it plastered itself onto my finger — well, it didn’t, but the wetness did. And I looked at the opalescence of the wings as I waited what seemed like an eternity, watching it, and gently blew on its wings, hoping that it wasn’t dead. It was so still for so long. And then eventually one of the four wings lifted up and fluttered back down, stuck again — and then it came again, and then down. And I kept saying to it: don’t struggle too hard, save your energy, you’ll dry soon. I didn’t want it to be in the direct heat, which we’re having a heat wave here, so I kept putting it in the shade and blowing gently. And eventually all four wings — and it lifted off.
So I’m thinking about moths. I’m thinking about a small moth in England, which was pale and speckled, and once wore the color of lichen so the birds could not find it on the bark. That was its survival. But then when the factories came and the soot fell, the pale ones showed against the blackened trees — and so, generation by generation, the moths turned dark to match the trees in order to survive. This is the story that we’ve heard before. But here’s the part that most of us don’t hear: when England cleaned up the air, and the soot stopped falling, and the lichen was able to return, the moths turned pale again. And there was healing.
Maybe you know the story like I do about Yellowstone, where the wolves were killed off and gone for nearly 70 years. And then in 1995 they were brought home — obviously not the same ones, but descendants — and the land, which had forgotten the wolves, began to remember. The elk moved differently, and the willows returned to the riverbanks, and the beavers came back to build, and the birds began to sing, and the branches grew again. The scientists still argue about how much was the wolves and how much was everything moving at once, and we are right to question it. But the teaching underneath it is not something that many of us dispute, and we already know it: when we return one of the core missing presences inside of a wounded system, then the whole begins to remember its wholeness again. Restoration is possible.
Think of this story. Off the coast of Indonesia live the Bajau. They were the sea nomads, and they have dived for their food for thousands of years. In 2018 a scientist named Melissa Ilardo found that their bodies changed to meet the water. Listen to this: their spleens grew larger, and a deeper reservoir of oxygen-rich blood began to be able to be spent in a single breath. The sea requested the change, and the body answered. It is written in the blood, and passed on to the children. So wherever humans learn, our children learn, and the earth learns. It may take hundreds of years, or thousands of years, but we continue to evolve and to grow.
And one more story of a kind of evolution. On a small island called Daphne Major, two scientists named Peter and Rosemary Grant — a couple — watched the finches that Darwin so loved to speak about. They watched as a great drought came and only the hardest seeds remained, and the birds with the stronger, deeper beaks were the ones who lived to raise their young. And the next generation was born changed — not over eons, but in a single turning of a year. Evolution is not just the slow work of the ages. Sometimes it happens inside of one lifetime, one season, one hard year.
So I know that we will not change our colors, and we will not grow a larger spleen quickly enough. And in these climate times — I don’t really know what to call it, but we’re experiencing it right now — through floods, fires, famines. You see it all around you. The evolution moves across generations, and no single person can make the species change. Like Suhoya Sellers used to say, it’s a real bitch being the 69th monkey.
But there is one thing I want to bring your attention to today: a bridge between the moth, the wolves, the spleens, and the finches — and meditation. Meditation and movement, connected with the neuroplasticity of the brain. Every time we turn our attention and move from beta to alpha to theta, we’re rewiring the living tissue in our brain. New pathways are forming and strengthening, and other ones that are no longer needed become more dormant. The scientists call it neuroplasticity. Here, we call it practice, and Intentional Creativity. This is not poetry — well, sometimes it is — but it’s the architecture of our minds and bodies changing.
Here, in our lineage, what our grandmothers lived did not stay only with them. It came with us — through their hunger, through their famines, through the colonization, through their fear, their survival marked us, and we carry it in our blood and in our bones. A dimming or a raising of certain gene expressions, a hidden language — what I sometimes call a mother tongue. We are not just the sum of what we’re ending up with. We are actually able to make change. We can elevate neuroplasticity.
There’s a state the body can enter, a threshold that is called theta. We move out of beta and the busy body, in through alpha, and then into these long, slow waves of theta, which is four to eight beats a second. This happens in meditation, and in movement, and in Intentional Creativity. It’s that liminal space before the delta. It’s a doorway state. It’s receptive, and it happens when we practice self-expression.
So the invitation today, and every day with us here, is to lengthen our breaths, to feel the connection — the red thread flowing between us — to feel the iron in our blood flowing, and know that it carries ancient codes. It’s the same iron that reddens these ancient cliffs where I’m standing. It’s the iron born in a star that died so long ago, that gives its life to us. We work with it — even the most toxic things, we work with to evolve. We are made from the oldest things that there are, and they are in us.
So right in this moment, right between us, there’s this moment of quickening. Of choosing. Of choosing to go into these imaginal, mythic states where the story shifts, and the body shifts, and the brain expands. And the invitation is to go here four times a day, to practice moving into theta. In our community we do that through the Stardust Lineage meditation, and also through going to our canvas, going to our page, going to the dance floor — that we consciously choose to engage with theta four times.
What if you could do this from this moment forward? I need something different to evolve than the tools and pills that are provided. I don’t know what it is yet, but the first answer I got as I floated in the waters yesterday was: go into theta four times every single day, so your body remembers the movement, and the neuroplasticity, and the magic. Intentional Creativity is the key. It is the key to bring us into theta. We practice getting there, and give our body a break from the stress pattern. Going into theta creates a pattern interrupt of the stress.
And that’s the invitation. Let’s pattern-interrupt the stress and the fear. Choose to consciously evolve and collaborate. And let’s continue to do it as a community, as we’ve been doing it for over 30 years.
Sources & Gratitude
With gratitude to the scientists whose careful work lets these stories be told as truth and not only beauty!! Love these stories so much. They give me hope.
The peppered moths of England — Cook, L.M. (2003), “The Rise and Fall of the Carbonaria Form of the Peppered Moth,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 78(4); and Cook, Grant, Saccheri & Mallet (2012), “Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus,” Biology Letters 8(4).
The wolves of Yellowstone — Ripple, W.J. & Beschta, R.L. (2012), “Trophic cascades in Yellowstone: The first 15 years after wolf reintroduction,” Biological Conservation 145. The ongoing scientific debate is honored in Marshall, Hobbs & Cooper (2013), Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280.
The Bajau sea nomads — Ilardo, M.A. et al. (2018), “Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads,” Cell 173(3).
Darwin’s finches on Daphne Major — Boag, P.T. & Grant, P.R. (1981), “Intense Natural Selection in a Population of Darwin’s Finches (Geospizinae) in the Galápagos,” Science 214(4516); and Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch(1994).
Iron, stardust, and the first pigment — the first red pigment was ochre, which is hematite, iron oxide, the very same iron: Henshilwood, C.S. et al. (2011), “A 100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa,” Science 334. On iron forged in dying stars: Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler & Hoyle (1957), “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” Reviews of Modern Physics.
The lineage we carry — Heijmans, B.T. et al. (2008), “Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal exposure to famine in humans,” PNAS 105(44), on the Dutch Hunger Winter.
The theta threshold — Aftanas, L.I. & Golocheikine, S.A. (2001), Neuroscience Letters 310(1); and Lagopoulos, J. et al. (2009), “Increased Theta and Alpha EEG Activity During Non directive Meditation,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 15(11).
