Moving Mountains

August 6, 2012

If you “have faith and doubt not”, says Jesus, you can tell this mountain to move and it will move. Have faith and doubt not. Damn, that one is tricky. Faith I have, I actually have loads of it. Doubting not, there’s the rub. What does it look like, really, to never doubt? Isn’t it only fools who never doubt? Maybe that is why I keep turning up The Fool card in the tarot recently. I need that Fool’s vision and courage. I’m trying to move mountains. Kind of literally.

Recently I have received some very generous and unexpected feedback, rather randomly, from people who have worked with me in retreat at my now-on-the-market center on the mountain. They are telling me how they have moved mountains in their lives since coming. Each expressed a clear sense that it was their experience here that gave them the needed strength and vision. I give at least 50% of the credit for these results to the location in these ancient and wondrous mountains. They just get under your skin and do something to you. All I have needed to do, mostly, is get you here.

Now I am moving into town, downtown, the heart of the urban environment. Can I move the mountain with me, so that what I do still carries the power? Can it be done? Shall it be done? Only if I have faith and doubt not. Doubt… not… and move this mountain. Lord God please help me with that one.

The Pink Goddess

July 23, 2012

I want to express my respect and fascination for the mythic imagination of a child, specifically my 5-year-old neighbor Hannah. She and her mother were over for a visit last night. Sitting on my porch watching the sunset over the mountains gorgeous, fluffy white clouds were in front of massive expansive very pink clouds. It was a spectacular show.

Hannah announced to us that the Pink Goddess was showing herself and that she had come to earth to talk to us, she has messages for us. I asked her what the messages were and she could only say that they are coming, they will be here soon. She said that the Pink Goddess has a brother named King Austen, her father’s name is Wood, and her mother’s name is Heart. As the sun set further and the scene changed, Hannah said that the Pink Goddess is now turning out her lights and her message will be here soon. She said Guards were then appearing to tell us about the planting, because we have flowers and we don’t know how to plant them.

In the same way that the great myths of the world reveal some of the deepest truths we know and their messages never stop informing and helping us to understand ourselves and the world, I believe mythic visions and wisdom continue to unfold. Children like Hannah need to be listened to. I’m taking notes.

This particular child has the advantage of growing up on the mountain, in a setting where nature is speaking to her uninterruptedly. She is unique in my experience. But I believe all children have access to greater awareness than we tend to realize. We must listen to them.

The Job Crisis: What if…?

July 10, 2012

Listening to the news stories and learning about the very scary and sad situation so many Americans find themselves in, without work or ways to support the lives they have always known; and considering the solutions that are being sought, such as encouraging 6th graders to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives so that they can begin training to make a decent livelihood, I wonder. I do not pretend to know anything about money or economics, that is not my area, but I have made a life-long study of human nature. What if, as Buckminster Fuller used to put it, instead of trying to make “cents”, we focus on what makes sense? Making sense, to Bucky, was to endeavor to discover what one person can do that will benefit the largest number of people, rather than just themselves or their families. To me that means discovering the thinking of the heart, rather than that of the head. Maybe thinking with the head is what has gotten us into this mess, and as Einstein says, “You can’t solve a problem at the same level of thinking that produced the problem.”

What if the 6th graders were asked to pay more attention to what is happening in their hearts? What is it that they feel called to do? What do they have a passion for? What will keep them inspired? What can they do that will make a difference in their communities? What can they do that will offer something of value – not just monetary value – to the world itself?

What if prosperity follows that rule instead of the rules involved in chasing a dollar? Our system is collapsing, maybe it is a good time to deeply re-evaluate the paradigm and assumptions under which we have been operating.

Love Letter

July 6, 2012

My life is a love letter to You.

Buddha’s Desk

July 3, 2012

What would Buddha’s desk look like? Would it look like mine? Oh my god, would Buddha know how to think about all of these things at once? This scattered, fractured, cacophony of tasks is all one thing. Illusion suggests that it is just too many and too much. Breathe, Buddha, breathe.

“Over Nothingness the universe bends,” says Rilke. “Ah, the ball we dared to throw fills the hands differently on its return: it brings back the reality of its journey.”

Each of these scattered notes and papers represent a ball I have thrown that has come back. Fill my hands differently now, please. Bring back the reality of the journey. I want this to be one real thing.

Sweat Lodge

June 25, 2012

The last official Bridging Worlds Mountain Retreat Center event is about to begin. This is the quiet before the arrival, the spirits of the land and the ancestors are gathering now to welcome the guests, I feel it viscerally.

This event has been on the calendar for a year. A young woman who did a Vision Quest with me some years ago, and who came for a sweat lodge weekend with her then boyfriend some time after that, had the vision and foresight to ask for a 3-day event in which to gather their closest loved ones during this, the week before their wedding. The power has been building, and the poignancy of the timing could not have been anticipated except by the ancient ones.

The bride’s greatly loved grandmother died rather unexpectedly just a couple of weeks ago. Her son, the bride’s father, is grieving as are the bride and her brother. All of them are attending. The family had anticipated that their mother/grandmother might be celebrating at the wedding with them, but now find themselves in some shock and grief over her loss. I just read the bride and her father’s very well-written, heart wrenching reflections about this woman’s rich life and peaceful death that were spoken at the funeral.

So we will gather, listen to each other’s hearts, work on dreams, be held by love, land and ancestral spirits as we prepare for the ancient ceremony of the sweat lodge which we will enter tomorrow evening after a day of fasting and preparation. It is a beautiful miracle that this time to enter sacred space together was already planned. I know it will help the family process events and prepare for the power and joy of a wedding so long anticipated.

And, as it turns out, as these miracles go, today is the 1-year anniversary of the death of my own beloved mother, Kathryn Whitlow. I miss her deeply. The traditional year of mourning ends this day, so possibly a corner is being turned in the journey of our souls. The universe is so precise. Exquisite. I am grateful.

And as it turns out, my daughters left just yesterday after traveling long distances to help me go through the stuff of their childhood and our family life that had been moved from California into my barn 8 years ago, untouched and unprocessed until now. The cleansing and clearing has been enormous, we sat around a big bonfire in which we thoughtfully, conscientiously burned some of it. The spirits must have wanted that done before we sweat tomorrow.

Big blessings to our dear bride and groom. May we be aligned with all of the best intentions of spirit in these days. So far, so good.

Journeying Here to Here

June 19, 2012

I named my place on the mountain “Here” after the poem by David Wagoner called Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

I am not living “Here” anymore. Now I am living in town, not quite full time yet, but mostly. I believe I will call this new place “Here” as well. These last years I have lived the advice of this poem, standing among the bushes and trees on the mountain. Now I will live it among the buildings and streets of Asheville. Stand still. The building ahead and the street beside you are not lost. I must greet them as powerful strangers. They breathe, I will listen. Surely they will say “I have made this place around you, if you leave you may come back again saying Here.” I want to let them find me.

There is a terrain to be traveled in order to make a radical move toward the future. You don’t just go from Here to Here without making the journey across it, you cannot. You don’t have to know where the journey leads, but you do have to remember from where you have come or you will surely get lost. Unfinished emotional and psychological business will haunt the mind like a thousand demons, paralyzing movement and obfuscating the way forward until it is faced and cleared. It is a warrior’s quest. I know why it is hard to change.

One of the most humbling and exquisitely moving things I have learned in the crossing is the impossibility of doing it alone. I have learned that one plus one equals a million. Just one other mind or body to help think or do makes the impossible possible. Touches of heart that come from near and far, friends and strangers, are the manna that keeps a pilgrim from starving.

As Meister Eckhart says, if the only prayer you ever say is “Thank you,” that would suffice. It is the most constant prayer on my lips, day and night.

Math and Wildness and Beauty

June 11, 2012

In the midst of the wildness that is my life during a big move, a remarkable little mathematical equation emerged out of the chaos that I want to write about, like a still point in my turning world (reference to T.S. Eliot’s wonderful poem). There is too much to say in the turning at this point; I already feel the surges of writing that want flow from it when everything stops spinning. But for now, this amazing dream scenario.

One of the beauties of writing down and tracking dreams is to discover the synchronous timing of their occurrence, often demonstrating how precisely mathematical the whole mysterious fabric of the universe is, truly. I have a few astonishing stories to tell in this regard, this one being a good reminder, “re-mind-ing.” These events do reshape the mind.

The first event was on June 9, 1977.  On that day something in my world cracked open, I won’t go into lengthy details in this writing, and a big part of my future flowed through that crack. That evening I happened to go to a lecture that was surprisingly synchronistic in that it explained and spot on described what was happening to me. I remembered the date because when I wrote it all down the 6 and the 9 looked so beautiful together, round and flowing and mirroring each other upside down.

In future years, every so often a big dream or soulful occurrence took place, and I would notice the date – June 9th, 6 9. It always gave me pause, notifying me that the universe just is not random, it is exquisitely, mathematically designed.

In the early 90’s I developed a love for the writings of St. Therese of Lisieux, a young French nun whose depth of spirituality and ways of finding God in every tiny, simple thing inspired me very much. Her big love and bone honesty moved me. For years I read daily passages from her writings collected in a book called Just For Today; they nourished me each and every day. In one of her books I read that she had a mystical vision of Jesus on June 9th, and that she always privately considered that date as a personal holy day. June 9th! My private holy day too! What were the odds of this?

It has been years since I have given this much thought, time moves on. Two nights ago, my first night of sleeping in an actual bed in my new apartment in Asheville rather than a mat on the floor, I awakened in the middle of the night to write down a dream. In it, I was giving to a friend (who I have not seen in years) a gift that I had also given to my mother, in the dream. I had created it and had only given it to two people. It was a little book bound in beautiful red leather with gold lettering, and gold leaf pages. In the book was printed just one passage by St. Therese of Lisieux; a few words that to me said everything. I chose the passage and had this book bound, once creating it as a gift to give to my mother, as I said, and now again had created one as a gift for this friend. When I awakened I SO wished I could remember which passage was printed in that book!

In the morning I picked up my dream journal to write this dream down thinking how random it seemed to have had this dream in the midst of moving chaos. I cast about to figure out what the date was, having lost track of days of the weekd and dates completely. I looked it up then wrote June 9; it all came flooding back with great emotion.

The universe just is not random. The mystery of it thrills me.

Today, June 11, my Zen Calendar quotation is from Albert Einstein. “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” I love that he calls the mysterious an “emotion.”

Dreams are, indeed, true art and true science. And mysterious. Yet precise. And artful.

By the way, I gave birth to my 2nd beautiful daughter 26 years ago today. Happy birthday gorgeous Arlene.

Bridging Worlds in Downtown Asheville

June 3, 2012

The bridges expressed in the following chart summarize the Mission Statement I have been operating with since moving to the mountains of Western North Carolina 2004:

I will now be tending these bridges with care and passion, both inside the individual and collectively in the culture, from an urban environment, moving away from my nest in the wilderness.

This week I began work in a newly rented office space in the beautiful, historic Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville, 20 Battery Park Ave., Suite 500. This old timey building has marble staircases and elevators with those see-through doors that have to be run by elevator operators. My office is on the 5th floor with very tall windows that let in wonderful light and offer a view of downtown as well as vistas into the mountain ranges beyond, those lusty layers of smoky blue ridges that feed the soul. Town and mountain framed in the vision.

One of my friends who was encouraging me to finally make this move said, regarding my years of living alone in a remote place, “You’ve been on the longest damn vision quest that anyone has ever heard of!” Maybe it is true. The vision is still forming, but it appears to be the time to work with it from a different location and perspective. I’ve just spent time rewriting some of the pages of my website to reflect the move.

Right now I am in my mountain nest listening to only wind and birds, seeing only forest, mountains and sky. Reflecting. Soon I will be living full-time in my little apartment not far from downtown, working in the center of it all.

I named my work Bridging Worlds after a magnificent dream I had while sleeping in my bed in California, before any idea to move to North Carolina had occurred. In the dream my car stalled, then stopped for good at the side of a gravel road in the forest. I got out, stretched and looked around. I saw a big stone and grassy bridge nearby. On the other side of it was my house in the woods. I started across the bridge alone. Then one or two people joined me, then dozens, then hundreds maybe, lots and lots of people. We all broke into song and started dancing – singing and dancing as we crossed the bridge together.

Some weeks or months later I found a house in the woods in these mountains and knew it was mine. Moving from urban Los Angeles into such a spot, reflecting on this dream, the name for Bridging Worlds arrived.

And now I move back the other direction. Who wants to sing and dance on the bridge with me?

From Hafiz:

There is only one reason
We have followed God into this world:

To encourage laughter, freedom, dance
And love.

Let a noble cry inside of you speak to me
Saying,

“Hafiz,
Don’t just sit there on the moon tonight
Doing nothing  –

Help unfurl my heart into the Friend’s Mind,
Help, Old Man, to heal my wounded wings!”

Dreamtime’s Deep Messaging System

May 21, 2012

Sitting in the quiet of my mountain home this morning with birds, sky, forest and power of mountain keeping me company, I am readying myself for a full-time move into town. Even for the most basic decisions that have to be made, like how to consolidate the supplies accumulated in two bathrooms with big medicine cabinets and banks of drawers to hold things into one tiny bathroom with an itty-bitty medicine cabinet and nothing else to put a thing on or in, I keep having to stop and go deep into myself to understand what this requires of me, how to imagine and think about it. It feels like I am walking a tight rope and that even one not-coming-from-the-right-place decision could throw off my balance and send me plunging. I know how to climb back up from plunges, but I’d rather not have to spend energy that way, not now.

A mantra that is sounding within me over and over again, maybe several times an hour without my conscious thought having to pull it in, is “Take no thought for the morrow…  (for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.)”  Those first six words are the ones that keep repeating, the meaning of the rest comes with them. These are words attributed to Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount. I heard them in a dream some weeks ago, like an angel speaking to me. I believe I wrote a blog about it at the time.

When wisdom is spoken in a dream like this, it comes from a very different level of integration than words we hear with our cognitive apparatus, what we gather with ego’s thoughtfulness. The conscious mind can barely conceive of the depths of the wisdom referenced. It is not advice delivered from outside but knowing revealed from inside, from vast interior spaces of universe and Self. The meaning unfolds. At first I thought the saying was referring to money worries. Whew, I thought. Then I began to see that it was comforting me about the many unknowns of my move, helping me to take things one day at a time. Then it seemed to be talking about energy, will I have energy for all of this?

A dream thought like this answers a million questions at once, every second of every day. When something comes in a dream, cherish it and rely on it.

More recently I awakened hearing myself say, “I refuse to be afraid.” One can say that to one’s self with daytime consciousness and it will have power and effectiveness. But when you find yourself saying it in a dream, you know it is coming from another level of self-awareness and commitment. Since the dream, I hear myself meaning and intending that message when all of the temptations to fear arise, from mental and physical disturbances to the uncountable and unnameable questions of life and career that are with me now. The waking mind is only a shadow of the power of what comes in dreams. Again, cherish and trust that power.

Dreams speak in images and symbols that will not be locked down or confined in meaning, that reinterpret and reapply themselves endlessly. Conscious, waking life seems to thrive on certainties, the Dreamtime on endless possibility. I am trying to recover from the need for certainty, as life keeps taking that away. The dreaming is hugely potent medicine for the journey. I offer my sincerest respect and gratitude.