Brother Wind is rattling the bones of my house big time, howling and haunting. Something in my own little brain has some vertigo today so I feel blown about on the inside too. We really are just one field, human and nature, I notice; what is going on inside noticeably similar to what is going outside – very, very often. Brother Wind just gave me a metaphor for use in the essay I am writing too. I wish I could mention it here, but the journal won’t accept articles that have any bits of them published elsewhere, so I won’t risk it. I want to thank my Brother for the idea though, because it really illuminated something for me.
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Brother Wind
March 12, 2010Think Differently
March 11, 2010Einstein said that “You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created the problem.” I work with people regularly to help them move from one level of thinking to another – dreamwork, vision quests, oracular consultations, shamanic work are powerful movers for shifting thinking. And I observe that when thought shifts, everything shifts. What seemed intractable is suddenly malleable. Where someone felt powerless suddenly there is agency and direction. I am good at helping others with this, but I need to be helped with it myself. This seems to work the way dreams work; as Marie Louise von Franz said, you can’t interpret your own dream any more than you can see your own back. Dreams come from our unconscious, as do our patterns of thought. We need help from the outside to see.
I see this more and more in the work I do and in living my life. We need to help each other. We need to give ourselves permission to need help from others, and ask for it, and hope for it and accept it. And we need to offer help when we can, as ethically and gently and non-judgmentally and lovingly as we would want it ourselves.
In order to solve our personal and collective problems we need to move to new levels of thinking. And we need each other for that. We need each other.
Love and Imperfection
March 10, 2010It has been occurring to me in a wide variety of ways recently that one has to be able to accept a whole lot of what we think of as “imperfection” in order to keep the heart open. I loaned my friend some books by a certain author and told her that if she can overlook the terrible writing and just pay attention to the story, it can be delightful, page-turning reading. I notice myself thinking similar things while watching news and other shows. There are so many parts that can be hard to take – bad, tasteless, outrageous, unaware – if I were to let myself get disturbed by them all I wouldn’t be able to enjoy much of anything.
So it is with life and with each other, I am thinking. It is easier to shut down, reject and criticize than to keep the heart open, to love and embrace the wholeness of a person or experience. The notions of “critical discernment” can become an intellectual defense against the potential pain and difficulty of love; the head afflicting the powers of the heart. By nature, the heart embraces everything — like the mother who loves every single strength, quirk and flaw in her child because it takes all of that to make the person who he or she is. We have the capacity to love everything that way; to be discriminating and at the same time loving wildly everyone and everything just as they are, including ourselves. This requires different notions of “perfections” and “imperfections” than we are generally given. The head thinks in such terms; the heart does not.
Pregnant
March 9, 2010I spent the day with friends yesterday including my friend Karly, who will be giving birth to a little girl in the coming days. While at their home in Knoxville I heard birds singing – a sound I hadn’t heard yet up where I live on the mountain. Every chirp seemed to impart a visceral thrill. No song is more pure or beautiful, but I think it was the announcement of spring and summer that felt like a bodily release. This morning, on the mountain, I woke up to the sound again as if to affirm the credibility of the news.
Now I’m seeing Karly as a metaphor of the whole world! She’s in probably the most uncomfortable part of pregnancy, the last days. The baby is dropping, pelvic bones hurting, anticipation measured with patience. And in the woods just outside my home Iseem to feel the birds and the little shivering animals, trees and bushes all in breathless, uncomfortable anticipation – everything about two weeks away from exploding with new life.
We humans have been gestating too. Whatever this strange experience of winter has created in me is still forming. An article I am writing is at that uncomfortable place where everything I know how to say has been said, a set up for the next part which I don’t know how to say. The due date is in a week. And the friends I spent the day with yesterday are ready for the thaw so that John can get back into his not adequately heated workshop to renew his furniture building, and Lori, the photographer, is poised to capture on film the first spring flowers as they come up from below. The Oscars have been handed out, and the artists who won them are ready to give birth to a whole new post-Oscar career. My Mom is coming home from the hospital. I feel all of nature ready in anticipation to give birth to something new.
And as so often happens, Rilke’s writing for today aligns with these thoughts.
Allow your judgments their own undisturbed development, which, like any unfolding, must come from within and can by nothing be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birth. To allow each impression and each embryo of a feeling to complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, the not-knowing, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and humbly and patiently to await the dawning of a new clarity: that alone is the way of the artist – in understanding as in creating.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Here it all comes. Let’s be ready. It is exciting. Blessings be for the birth of all things.
Oscar and Buddha
March 8, 2010My favorite television night of the year is Oscar night. I love movies, and I love seeing the personalities who make the movies come out and interact. It is a chance to watch them be themselves rather than their characters. Last night I was particularly impressed with how genuine people seemed to be. I have been watching these shows most of my life and it seems to me people used to walk in with personas as finely crafted as their gowns – smile to the camera, don’t give away anything real or personal, pretend you don’t care who wins; and they often looked more like a deer caught in the headlights than an actual person. Now people seem more comfortable in their own skins, or if not then comfortable enough to say how nervous they are. Maybe we are growing up as a species, not so afraid to be honest and real.
During the ceremonies as the winners, and therefore those who didn’t win, started to be revealed it occurred to me that moments like these force people to find their Buddha natures more than most other moments of their lives. They have to find that space to accept the win or the loss and carry it off as gracefully as possible. If they can’t find it, they will suffer and then be forced to find it to stop the suffering. And it seems to force everyone else to do it with them and for them, even those of us sitting at home watching; that is if we care at all about the people and outcomes. I think it is a wonderful exercise in discovering Buddha nature. I wish all of us well with grounding that going forward.
Redemption, Yes
March 7, 2010I believe the very first blog I wrote was about a question that kept posing itself in my mind all through the Christmas season, “Is redemption possible?” It seemed to be coming out of trying to finish grief over losses; like the teenage years of my precious, priceless younger daughter while I was a broken down wreck of a Mom due to divorce situations. It is hard not to wish you could have a do-over, but you can’t, those years are gone. But can all of that potential somehow be redeemed for both of us, or does one just grieve the loss and move on? I seem to remember hearing a big YES sometime in January and understanding that it applied to my question.
I had a dream last night that left me feeling so wonderful. I believe it is part of this contemplation. In the dream I have taken a trip – traveling back to the place and time of those excruciating years of my life. There I was, but I felt really whole, healthy, happy and strong. I was making some decisions for myself that I couldn’t possibly have made at the time – constructing a whole life that looked very different from what actually happened. Upon awakening an analogy occurred to me – that at that time, the events of my life were like a two ton truck trying to make it across a tiny, rickety little country bridge. Everything just collapsed into a big mess – the bridge, the truck, the bucolic little scene. I was the rickety bridge, I couldn’t hold things up. But now, in this dream, I felt like a great strong bridge. The events came through, I made insightful and brilliant decisions, I felt good, was creative and everything just moved on by. The dream scenes and my actions remain vivid to me, especially the feeling tone of them. I take little scrawly notes in middle of the night to remind myself of the dream. My scrawl says “Taking back my power, in retrospect.”
As I lay there this morning trying to wake up, musing on the dream, I realized that in my body I still feel a bit too identified with the rickety bridge. I knew the dream was telling me a different story – that I am stronger than I realize, the energy of all that is moving on through and by, and I’m in good shape. Redemption of all of the possibility, vitality and power is indeed possible. I feel it deep inside; I just need to get the feeling more into my cells so I don’t feel so shakey.
I am so grateful for this dream. I love dreams. I say this all of the time, but I can’t help myself.
Mother
March 6, 2010My Mom had a health incident and spent last night in the hospital. We think she’ll be ok. Lots of thoughts about mother and mothering have been up for me lately — even when watching the television or the news I seem to hear the word “mother” in a slightly elevated volume. The Olympians who so thoroughly adored their mother’s were constantly noted. I am privileged to be a mother, and no other role in my life holds more passion, energy and power for me. And I am privileged to be the daughter of a mother who cared more for her role as mother than for any other aspect of life.
Mother. To contemplate the primal, primary essence of mother and mothering is to breathe the deepest mystery. Every cell in every one of our bodies has mother in it, not just our physical bodies but emotional, psychological and spiritual bodies too. I feel so grateful that I love my Mother, and I really, really do.
Pilgrimage prayers
March 5, 2010I have never talked about this before, and I have some trepidation about doing so. I can’t quite believe that I haven’t, but I haven’t. It is maybe too sacred, too scary, yet here I am in strange blogosphere world ready to tell this story for the first time.
When my ex-husband and I were in our 30’s we were moved to travel on pilgrimages over the course of a few years. I was at the time an avid reader of the writings of mystics and longed to visit the places where my favorites had lived. At the top of my list was to go to Lisieux in France to where St. Therese of Lisieux had lived. For years I read passages from her writing every day and I still remember those readings as though I were nibbling the sweetest possible fruit. I also wanted to go to Lourdes, having read a 900 page biography of St. Bernadette two times in a row. I thirsted for something it offered to me. These two sites were visited in France, along with those of other saints and mystics that I loved. Afterward we went to numerous pilgrimage sites in Italy and then to Medjugorje, in Yugoslavia, where apparitions of Mary to some young visionaries were still taking place. On another trip we went to Spain to visit sites for St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius of Loyola, to Santiago de Compostella and the Black Madonna at Montseratt. We visited Fatima in Portugal. A year later we visited Nazareth, Jerusalem, the River Jordan, the Sea of Galilee.
Today I teach regularly at retreats and in group work, but I never mention any of this. Most people who know me now don’t know about this period of my life. I do not know the reason, it just is so. And it seems strange because I treasure every morsel of memory and experience from these pilgrimages. I must hide them in my heart like the most priceless of jewels, never wanting them to be stolen. But maybe they should be seen now and then.
All of that was the set up to tell the following story. I have experienced that special prayers, spoken at special spots on pilgrimage have a special potency. The prayer I have been thinking of a lot lately and want to tell about occurred in Rome in front of Bernini’s exquisite sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy at the cathedral of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Teresa of Avila writes in her autobiography of an experience she had that changed her forever – a vision of an angel who pierced her heart with a sword of fire. That was the moment when she felt God truly entered her heart, and she referenced this experience for the rest of her life. It was both agony and ecstasy for her. There I was, a young pilgrim having read and cherished this story for years, kneeling before a gorgeous marble statue of the angel piercing Theresa’s heart while she swooned. I thought as I stared at it, “I want my heart to be pierced like that,” but I also was very, very aware that a person has to be extremely careful of what she prays for. So I said my prayer of desire, while also asking please for mercy, please not to give me something tragic or unendurable if at all possible. But I wanted God to enter my heart like that.
There is a Sufi prayer that I have loved and have framed in calligraphy on my wall, “Shatter my heart to make room for an infinite love.” This framed piece was a gift from a friend who knew I loved the prayer. Both the gift and the pilgrimage prayer in Avila came in a time of relative innocence, before the outbreak of the destruction of life as I had known it. My heart was not just broken, not just pierced, but it was shattered. And all of these many years since the shattering I have remembered what I prayed for. And I have not regretted those prayers for one moment. And I feel humbled and grateful for the grace of answered prayers.
Lobotomy!
March 4, 2010I approached my dreamwork session today with some fear and trepidation. I had a recent dream that has been very disturbing to think about and I really couldn’t find it’s meaning myself. In the dream a doctor ordered a lobotomy for me. There was no arguing with this authority in the dream, his word was it. I’m having a lobotomy. Two friends tried to help me get in and out of the hospital in an effort to fake out the staff so that I can pretend that I have it while actually avoiding it. The whole hospital seems enormously busy and impervious to me, so I think I’m getting by with it. Somehow though I get injected in the center of my forehead with an orange liquidy substance. I don’t see or experience it happening in the dream. I just know it happened and can see it from the inside.
This winter has been making me feel like I’m losing my mind, so I wondered if the dream was a final diagnosis. The mind is gone. She lost it. She used to be a nice, kind of smart girl, but look what’s left. What a pity (a phrase my Mom used to use.) A very, very pity (a phrase my baby daughter used to use imitating her Grandma.)
My friend was brilliant in helping with the dream however. Like a good doctor, he probed me with question after question until we hit on the spots where we could detect meaning. As it came out, I realized the doctor is Old Man Winter. He’s the authority, one that cannot be argued with. He and his staff are busy and apparently impervious to me. On his orders my vision is changed, an old way of seeing the world is removed. The orange liquid was the best part of the dream. When my dreamworker friend asked me about it I described it as the bright orange color of fire, but it was cool. Cool liquid fire. The center of my forehead was injected with this very vital color and substance, and now I’ll never see the world the same again.
I really thought my friend was genius when he picked up on who the two friends were who were trying to help me fake out the staff. Just yesterday I was working on an article in which I discuss Carl Jung’s Answer to Job. My friend had no idea of this, of course, but said that the two dream friends reminded him of Job’s friends. In Job’s story he has two friends who try to be helpful but actually end up just interfering with the larger plan and are useless. It is such an archetypal story. Suddenly I am reminded also of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and how basically useless they are to Hamlet also.
I never thought I might imagine a lobotomy as a good thing, even in a dream. I am so relieved. I love dreams.
The authority of experience
March 3, 2010I was reminded today in a conversation with a dear friend of a value that I learned at an early age from Buckminster Fuller. He said he felt the world would be a different place if people depended “always and only on their own experience”. Bucky even re-wrote whole systems of mathematics and geometry because he found that the systems he was being taught didn’t match his experience. As he looked into it he discovered faulty conclusions made long ago on top of which had been built more mathematical systems which then of course would be false.
Reflecting on this I thought of conflicts and prejudices that continue for generation after generation. An Irish friend recently wrote about growing up Catholic in Ireland, internalizing the idea that Protestants were the “enemy”, even though he never even met a Protestant until he was in his teens. He was writing of the immense sadness he felt for his people, and all of us, that such animosities get carried along without even the simplest efforts toward dialogue and mutual understanding.
Similarly I remember hearing in high school that so-and-so was a “slut” and not realizing until more than a decade later that maybe, probably, this wasn’t even remotely true. So-and-so might have just innocently kissed someone behind the barn, and had to wear that label indefinitely because of it. It is shocking to realize how much of our own thinking gets built around assumptions unconsciously created and then just as unconsciously perpetuated and defended as if they were “truths.”
I remember reading in Jung’s writing once that if another man has a vision of a burning bush, what is that to him (Jung)? So the other fellow talks to God, but how do we know that what God supposedly said to that fellow is true for us? The early Celtic Christians were taught to value the authority of personal experience over anything a priest or anyone else said. Only when Rome came in and imposed their own “truths” were these people forced to defer authority to someone else or die.
Which brings me back to what I learned from Bucky Fuller. What if every one of us worked hard to discern whether our opinions or assumptions are based upon personal, direct experience or upon hearsay or solidarity with a group? What might happen if we did this? It might actually cause a lot of chaos, but also might give birth to a lot more consciousness as well. Consciousness is a high value, I believe, in this world that too often runs on automatic, unexamined life. I would like to see this experiment happen. I re-commit to the project myself.
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