chasing the moon
21 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
I had learned that Friday evening’s moonrise was to be a once-in-20-years occasion, when the full moon coincided with the closeness of the its elliptical orbit to create a moon-view that would appear to be 14% bigger to us than it does at its apogee. I’d checked the moonrise calendar for the time where I live, so that I could be in place to see it when it rose. I didn’t want to miss it. I wanted to capture that moment somehow.
Last week one day, while driving on a winding country road near my home, I’d noticed a tree along a fencerow out in the middle of a farmer’s fallow field. She stood with her arms stretched wide, two trunks really, as if to drink in the sky. Of course, I wanted to come back with my camera to capture her too.
So… why not kill two birds with one stone? I mean, wouldn’t it be magnificent if I could position myself to be at just the right place to catch the great moon being held in the crook of this amazing old tree, like two old women, who haven’t seen one another in decades, hugging each other.
So, my husband and I hopped into the car around 7:10pm to drive out that same country road to the field where I’d spotted the tree. There was no safe place to pull over, no berm here at all, so we turned the car around in the next lane we came to and drove back to the old graystone farmhouse. It was shortly after we’d turned back that we heard the thump, thump of the tire.
Oh dear.
Pulling into the farmer’s drive, next to the cows who’d wandered to the edge of the barnyard in curiosity and were now peering questioningly over the fence at us, I hopped out of the car and ran around to the driver’s side. No flat tire yet, I noted (maybe we’d just picked up a branch or something), before I ran around the back of the barn and out into the field toward the tree.
One thing I hadn’t considered was this. I really didn’t know exactly which way was east from where the tree stood. That country road was a winding one indeed, and as it turned out the two arms of my tree were almost lined up perfectly along an east- west axis, which meant that the moon would have to rise in the north or south if she were to land in her arms.
Probably not.
As I oriented myself, turning myself to face the east, directly opposite the most brilliant of the remaining shades of fushia, orange, and gold with which sunset had painted that evening, I was greeted by the lovely backside of the house and the barn, looming large directly on the horizon where the moon would surely be making her grand entrance any minute. So off I ran across the field again, this time running northeast to get clear of the farmhouse.
And there She was!, just peeking above the eastern horizon, an orange glow. I began snapping, knowing that the frames were ill-focused, with no time for a tripod and nary a spot to lean my self and my camera against out in the open field, searching for something to frame the image in…. a tree branch, the roof of a barn on the horizon. … but there was offered to me only some telephone wires strung up along the abandoned country road.
By this time the farmer had come out of his house, questioning my husband as had his cows, asking if there was a problem, so I headed back toward them. (have I mentioned how much I love this man yet?). The tire was still holding its own, but he wanted to get home quickly as he’d discoverd the head of a nail on his own inspection. Needless to say, he wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of driving to another vantage point around the corner, and didn’t want to stop the car again, though he did, for a moment, because he loves me.
Once in 20 years, after all!
And then we limped home, four-way flashers pronouncing our folly. Later that night, as we made our way to the grocery, for some cheese and crackers to go with our wine, I glanced over my shoulder and noted a lovely old tree along the street just north of my house. I could’ve walked here easily for my shot at the moon.
It makes me wonder how many times I go chasing after some imagined perfection when beauty is right in my own back yard. And I know that sounds trite, like something straight out of the Wizard of Oz, but for me it rings true. How often, of late, I’ve imagined that something out-there is waiting for me to show up, pondering the many directions my own life might lead and being unable to discern the one way I am being called to move. How many times I’ve found myself standing out there in that field, trying to orient my self, wanting the tree and the moon to align, while the backside of something else blocks my view. Always, always comes this same call to ‘look in my own backyard’, within.
Who am I?
I have learned that the phrase, ‘chasing the moon’, was the title of an old silent film about a man who is convinced he’s been given a slow-acting poison and has 30 days to live, and spends what is left of his life searching the globe for an antidote. I have learned it is also the title of a 1991 short about a woman who roams the streets of New York in an effort to escape memories of her abuse.
Yes. I am dying (so are you ) and the urge to live fully this ‘one wild and precious life’ is potent in me. Acceptance of the closeness of my death* and so choosing abundant life is perhaps the only true antidote. And Yes, I am wandering perhaps in an effort to escape and redeem what was lost. Running to and from at once.
That same night, on the eve of spring equinox, with the supermoon full in the predawn sky outside my bedroom window, I dreamt I was dancing, and oh what a dance it was. My partner was potent, a burly, muscular, powerful sort, who held me as firmly in his gaze as he did in his embrace, and moved me assuredly from room to room (of my life?). Except it was not really at all as if he were leading and I following, for there was no separation, no hesitation, no doubt, no call and response, rather one voice and one movement. We were so close it was as if we were one body; my leg moved in total concert with his. The feeling I had of that line where our bodies met was like that of the curved line connecting yin and yang, no space in between. We were, like the earth on this night, held in complete balance. Like the super full moon, nothing in shadow.
There was a lustiness to our dance that was not really sexual perse, but powerful in its attraction nonetheless. How shall I describe it?….intense….imperative……intent….. inward… . It was as if he and I were alone, though there was a room full of observers. .. so focused were his eyes on me, mine transfixed by him.
It turns out that we were in a contest and were named the winners (this is the second dream of the night in which I have been named such) though there were definitely other dancers more skilled than me. One woman even danced with the same partner as me, yet their dance was altogether different than ours, more animated, energetic, sassy, alive! I guess it would be fair to say that their dance was extraverted to the same degree as ours was introverted. We had not been dancing at all to the crowd, nor really even been aware it was there, but they were showing their stuff! There was both space and light between them, they touched only at their fingertips as he spun her. I envied her freedom , her expressiveness, her vibrancy. I felt she was a far better dancer than me and thought it unfair that she and the partner did not win. They were that good together.
Of course, all of these characters live in me, though I feel more embodied and present in the one, I can observe the others with appreciation and joy. I am surprised by this masculine energy in me, this single-minded and directed focus that knows where it wants to go and is unafraid to move me assuredly and powerfully. His is not at all a ‘chasing the moon’ kind of energy. He is centered and certain, lusty and potent at once. I would like to surrender a little to him in me, not in a letting go of my self kind of way, but in the fully equal bearing kind of way I felt in the dream, allowing his focus to direct my expansive enchantment with life…. the beauty over here, curiosity over there, wonder over here… that is my more feminine self. I’d like to trust fully, as I did in the dream, in his robust certainty , let him come forth to move in concert with me. I know intuitively that he and I are indeed two halves of the whole. We need not chase after the moon, we ARE the moon.
At the same time, I have to wonder why in both dreams I was chosen the winner over this other woman in me, when I admire her gifts of dance so much more than my own. Am I wanting to be something I am not and not seeing my own gifts in the mirror? Or is she telling me that when I move into the dance ‘out there’ my connection to my deeper self may necessarily feel less close…. just a fingertip connection perhaps….but that doesn’t mean at all that I will lose touch? ……Or will I lose?
And of course, I recognize that this is more balancing of opposites and dualities that seems to be happening in me. 
More of the same lesson in both/and that seems to be coming over and over again. One more mandorla to dance. Balancing the introvert and the extrovert in me, the inner and outer, the feminine and masculine, the Oneness and uniqueness, spirit and soul, all-is-beauty awareness with a singular focus, abundance with simplicity. For now it seems clear I am called to narrow my focus, to be close, as it were, and feel the steps that are mine to dance, and trust that this attentiveness will be received by the other as gift.
Now, if I can just figure out what that means in real life?
breathing in and out
13 Mar 2011 1 Comment
Ok, a little balance here .
For all my naysaying last week about the addictive and time/soul-stealing qualities of the internet for me, I can also say this- I have found true healing and forged real relationships here.
- In the 10 year e-letter writing relationship I have with a friend in Michigan, who for a time knew me more intimately than anyone else ever had in my life, though we had met face-to-face only once.
- In the relationship I forged with a woman, who has become a dear soul-friend to me, which began 8 years ago as an email spiritual direction relationship.
- In the great blessing in my life I find reading the blog and facebook presence of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who stirs something awake in my soul with something so ‘present and now’ each time I read her .
- In the great online articles I have been led to by friends, which have opened my eyes to some new wonder or deepening resonance.
- In being witnessed to life through years of e-letter sharing with friends.
- In the deeply healing relationship I have forged with myself all of these years of e-journaling.
- In the thoughtfulness with which I sit down to write these posts.
The written word, for me, as I’ve mentioned often, is the place where soul comes out to speak, the place where I feel most authentic, and often the place where I have found Godde. I suppose in some ways it need not matter ‘how’ those words are written or read as much as it does the quality of presence, the quality of my humanity and the depth of my spirit, which I bring to the writing or the reading. Maybe what makes me human is still less about ‘how’ my brain processes and more about ‘why’ it does.
Sure, sometimes I get led astray, but always I learn a little something along the way, usually picked up on the way back as I reflect upon where I’ve been, seeing more clearly the beauty in what looked strange and fearful on the way out. And sometimes I lose touch with that Something-Deeper that walks with me. I forget … for a moment or a month… the true depths of my love affair with life, my faith in humanity, and my trust in Something Deeper. (As if I could ever forget the Love that inhabits all.)
Then I hear the call back home. I’ve wandered too far, the fascination with some scientific discourse has led me from curiosity to wonder and awe and right into fear and despair. (maybe that’s what those ‘fear god’ passages are all about anyway) . Ah but perhaps that is no straight line out and back after all!, rather a spiral where wonder is not so very far away from despair at all.
I get lost for a moment, for instance, and I lament that we are losing our humanity, believing for that moment that our brains are all that make us who we are, all that make us human, and that there is not something deeper, some spark, some intelligence, some presence, or some other place(s) within us where spirit resides, and as if our very humanity does not also reside deeply in Something More-than. Why, only a few years ago, hearing similar stories, I felt great hope, felt greatly relieved that we would finally be freed from the tyranny of needing to hold all that knowledge in our brains and we’d become human beings again at last, applying our deepest humanity to all that knowledge. It was so clear to me then that how we process knowledge has little to do with our humanity.
At other times it may be the desire for justice, or following the political power trail, that draws me into a similar spiral where at one point I can’t see God at all and the next moment i am tripping right over Her. Not that the terrain has changed one bit, but that my eyes have. (O god of brains and brawn, help me to see you.)
As I grow, and grow more human, I necessarily step out of my self, stretching me as I go. Sometimes I leave God behind, back in the center of the circle that is everywhere, and then call Her to come join me there. Of course, it is She who has been stretching me, there all along waiting for me to include this in Her too.
I remember once hearing Huston Smith explain that asking our brains to explain god is like asking a dog to explain mathematics. Using the only ways of knowing we have at our disposal (our brains or our noses respectively), it is likely impossible that we will be able to discern something beyond them. That kind of knowing comes from some other place in us, or outside of us entirely.
I only know this. There is no despair, and there is, and always She is there.
Turning myself off (or endless summer)
09 Mar 2011 1 Comment
A few years ago I read a compelling description of myself in the book , Goddesses in Everywoman, Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives, by Jean Shinoda Bolen. It was one of those ‘killing me softly’ moments, one of those ‘double-take in the mirror’ moments, one of those ‘jump-out-of-your-seat-shout-aha!-and-call-your-best-friend-about-it’ moments. To this day, her portrayal of me continues to inform me, deepen me, and persistently call me home, as any good archetype will do.
Basically the portrayal goes something like this. (paraphrased from pages 133-135)
“A woman with diffuse awareness has an attitude of acceptance, an awareness of the unity of life, and a readiness for relationship. (note to self, remember this part, Vicki). However, for a woman with diffuse awareness, making the shift to focused consciousness is not easy.
The consciousness of diffuse awareness is analogous to the light from a living room lamp, which illuminates and casts a warm glow on everything within its radius. It is a generalized attentiveness that allows a person to notice feeling nuances (uh huh), a receptivity to emotional tone in a situation (mmhmm), an awareness of background sounds as well as whatever is the center of attention (duh). It is this awareness that allows a woman to notice her child’s whimper through the din of conversation, or know instantly her spouse’s emotional state when walking in the door. This receptive, whole, gestalt consciousness is in contrast to the more focused attention that concentrates on one element to the exclusion of all else.
A woman’s behavior is necessarily modified and often reinforced by her children to keep her in this state of diffuse awareness. What often happens is that when she is with her children she must be in a receptive and unfocused state of mind, yet even when she changes modes to concentrate intently on one thing, she is interrupted and brought back to a focus outside of herself. For instance, when engaged in mindless activities such as cleaning or laundry or even light reading, her children may be content playing in the next room, but as soon as she decides to take advantage of some quiet time to focus inward, in study or journaling for example, her children (and husband for that matter) seem to show up somehow needing her.. Trying to focus in the midst of continual interruption is frustrating. The net effect is to discourage focused consciousness, thus modifying her behavior . For a woman with diffuse awareness, this same thing is true with older children, lovers, spouses, friends, and co-workers too.
The thing is, she has ‘turned the light off’ and tuned them out and they feel it when her scanning-for-details, attentive-to-them mental state is replaced by focused attention. Even a supportive partner may feel insecure and anxious when that warm light is turned off. For relationship-oriented women one inevitable source of friction, when she decides to do something that requires her undivided attention— anything that tunes loved ones out to focus on some concern of her own — , is the constant intrusions and interruptions. (my note here. that friction is not only between her and her loved one, but also present within herself) . She herself often has trouble concentrating on her work, for the receptive, diffuse state of mind that allows a woman to attend to others also allows them to distract her easily. She is aware of the state of their presence through her empathetic connections even when they are not with her.”
For a woman like me, whose boundaries were practically nonexistent to begin with, the experience of 30 years of mothering did a phenomenal job of reinforcing those thin boundaries between myself and the other. And certainly, there is something good about that (remembering that ‘note to self’ above). I do not want to lose that quality in me that helps me to feel what my loved ones are feeling. I do not want to lose my sense of interconnectedness. After all, empathy is at the heart of compassion. I expect I will always walk that thin line between caring for and taking care of, feeling for and feeling responsible for.. and often fall over the edge. I have long since known that being aware of the place in me from which my actions and addictions arise is vital (read life-giving). Am I flowing from a groundedness in love, from a deep place where compassion for myself and compassion for the other are one, or am I reacting from a place of fear? Fear of abandonment– of being rejected, misunderstood, unloved–is the place in me where I fall down every time. Relationships are obviously very important to me, my actions speak that loudly.
What I am noticing today in a fresh way is this. Cell phone and computer technology with all of its relational features …. text messaging, email, facebook, blogs…. acts the same way in modifying a person’s ability to focus attentively on one thing. Wham! for those of us with diffuse awareness. Combine that with the little dopamine rush that researchers have noted in the brains of persons as they are opening a text, or an email, or checking in to facebook (regardless of whether their hoped-for message is there) and it seems to me you’ve got the ingredients for the desert dryness of an endless summer.
Perhaps I should explain. For probably 25 years or so of my life, I’d been aware of the distracted and numb, empty feeling I experienced by the end of a summer of a constant need to be ‘on’, with five children home from school and no longer taking the naps that at least had offered some ‘down’ time when they were younger. I’d find myself staying up later and later to catch some time to myself after the oldest went to bed. In later years I came to lament that as a loss of contact with the depths of myself, in which I’d found Love and creativity, and in which I could refuel and ground myself in soulful living. I’m convinced that some of my love affair over the years with autumn had to do with its open invitation, and spaciousness offered, to turn inward, to move deeper, to focus my thoughts and my creativity, to live wholly, unfragmented for long hours each day. The cool weather seasons were life-savers to me, pulling me down to my depths, beneath the surface, where I could breathe deeply.
In recent years though I’ve noted an incessant, nagging year-round lack in my ability to swim down and stay at those life-giving depths. I’ve written about it here on this blog… alot. Once upon a time the structure of my life circumstances and the cycle of the seasons created at least some built-in external boundaries for me in those days before cell phones and the internet. Carving out space for solitude is even more difficult now, because I am the one who must do the carving, creating the internal boundaries in which I can say yes to those things that bring me life. What has changed, ironically, is my accessibility (as well as the accessibility of those around me!). No one it seems ‘turns off the light’ anymore ( and gosh I am wondering here if the beginning of technological intrusions into the life of our psyche began with the invention of the lightbulb) Whereas once I was ‘on’ for a house full of children, now I am ‘on’ to the phone ringing (sometimes both the cell phone and house phone at once! ), emails, text messages, and facebook posts, blogs, online articles, not to mention things i choose more consciously like committee meetings, yoga classes, grandbabysittting and invitations to meet with friends, old and new…. still scanning my environment, responding to the other (even if it is an inanimate ‘other’, the perfect blank screen onto which my needs for connection and fulfillment are projected), still struggling to balance my need for meaningful relationships with my need for relationship with my deeper self, still interrupted to the point where it feels fruitless to even bother trying to go there. And so I haven’t yet successfully navigated those waters from mother to crone at all, if I simply carry my ingrained mothering habits into a new terrain and ignore the invitation to love and to live from a new place in me.
I have read that we are re-wiring our brains, that the ability to focus was perhaps a blip on the evolutionary radar anyway, that we are losing the ability for deep reading (full focus on long thoughtfully written works… like books! ) and reflective thought. I have read that we are re-enforcing more primitive parts of our brains, those parts that once upon a time couldn’t afford to focus at the exclusion of one’s surroundings or else you’d be dinner for something in those surroundings. I have read that the dopamine rush of random reward creates in us an addiction to keep checking back in, and answering that phone, again and again. I have read that the etiquette rules of text messaging make it rude to choose to ‘turn off’ .
But it seems I’ve been waiting for such a long time to ‘turn off “ and tune in. This was supposed to be my time to live deeply, to create meaningfully, to live authentically. And it seems I can no longer give the ‘other’ blame if I don’t follow that call of soul. I am clearly seeing that this is my work, my stuff to own… and to love. The choice is really mine to recognize why I am compelled turn the light on, and then to consciously and lovingly choose turn ‘it’ off for ‘goodness’ sake. The choice is mine to turn inward and listen to my own deep wisdom, to follow that wholly and live according to what find there. The choice is mine to live fully immersed in Life, in Creativity, in Reflection, in Beauty, in Poetry, in Gratitude, in Joy, in Empathy, in Love, in the Presence… Incarnate .
and in relationship.
In balance. Yes, I’d like to think I can live in both of these worlds. …Inner and Outer. Yin and Yang. Summer and Winter. Ebb and Flow. Connection and Solitude. Sleep and Wakefulness…. that even in this my heart need not be divided. I don’t tend to like either/or edicts (a symptom of that ‘awareness of unity’ from above) but I can recognize when I am being controlled versus freely choosing, feeling distracted versus feeling fully present. I do know something of what compulsive, addictive behavior feels like. I do know the bloated sluggish feeling of taking in too much of a good thing. It is time for me to take a look at what is behind my own mindless addictions and compulsions, my own inabilities to say ‘no’ and so to say ‘yes’… what I am avoiding, what I am filling, what I am afraid of finding, what am I afraid of losing? what am I looking for?
It is time for me to turn off the light and be mind-full. Reclaim the seasons for me.
ps.
maybe its not the internet or writing for you. maybe its not your children or food or the phone that you run to. maybe its work, or television, or fitness or sex. maybe its alcohol or drugs. maybe you wouldn’t even call it a compulsion or an addiction…. to things like intimacy or responsibility or security or positive regard. but what is it for you that keeps you trapped, distracted, unfree. gerald may would say that any of these attachments ‘uses up’ our desire, are attempts to assert control even as we are being controlled by them, and substitute for our deeper longing for an awareness and meaning. thomas keating and cynthia bourgeault would invite us to welcome ourselves when we notice ourselves to be caught in those places.
i’m hoping to look searchingly and gracefully at these desert places in me this lent. how about you?
* for more on how the internet is changing our brains se http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
one thing necessary
08 Mar 2011 1 Comment
Christine Valters Paintner of Abbey of the Arts wrote a good piece on the Lenten journey of Truth telling, which I found to resonate alot with my own journey of late, and which also seems to me to be in line with the beginning of any journey into compassion.
Here is an excerpt
“Each one of us carries grief, sorrow that has perhaps gone unexpressed or been stifled or numbed. Each of us has been touched by pain and suffering at some time. (our own or others, and isn’t this the core of compassion?~me) Yet we live in a culture that tells us to move on, to get over it, or to shop or drink our way through sorrow. Or to fill our moments with the chatter of TV and radio and laptops and ipods so that we never have to face the silent desert of our hearts. It is the same kind of attitude that forces us to answer “fine” when others ask how we are and we really aren’t. Even our churches often try to move us too quickly to a place of hope without fully experiencing the sorrow that pierces us.”
Do you know what it is you do to keep yourself away from experiencing… yourself?
Often it is something good, even very good… like food or phonecalls with loved ones or reading online blogs 
… that has grown too big and so controls us, or that we easily continue to follow because we feel comfortable there. Seems we can use almost anything to avoid or to cover up, anything to fill the cup of our lives with so much stuff that we can’t see what may be lying there at the bottom of it, waiting for us to pay attention. Or we stuff it so full that it breaks all together and we spill out all over the place … frazzled and unfocussed …. and so can carry nothing to its depths, nor really even offer a drink.
Consider giving that thing up this lent… that thing that fills your time and seeps away your creative energy, that thing that distracts you from paying attention to what lies deeper…. at least whatever small piece of it you can ( baby steps on the journey often take us farther than giant strides that are too big for us to keep up without falling down ). Take a day a week, or a time of day that you intentionally withdraw from that thing…. not because it is so terrible, or ‘sinful’, evil or bad, but because it takes you away from being most fully yourself, more fully awake to your deeper self, more fully human. Let go of that thing that prevents you from hearing the cries or the longings of your soul and so keeps you from discovering compassion for yourself.
“If we don’t have self-compassion, we are not going to have a lot of compassion for others.” –Janet Ruffing
I think for me that ‘one thing’ (gosh there are many, ugh) is my constant availability via technology of one sort or the other (cell phones and laptops), the ease of constantly ‘checking in’ that inevitably leads me astray (like hantzel and gretl’s crumbs to the witch’s castle), pulls me up short from deeper creative places in me, and is far too easy to turn to when i’m not wanting to go inside to be with the desert or the fear or the pain, and so, ironically, also keeps me from visiting more often the beauty that lies there. Conversely these same technologies can keep me trapped inside their walls rather than stepping outside myself to engage in the ‘real’ world that awaits right in front of me, in my partner, my friend, or my backyard.
Certainly I learn of many life-giving ideas (like this Charter for Compassion, for instance) and discover and nurture many meaningful connections online or on the phone, but somehow more often my experience feels unconscious to me, as if I am not fully present and choice-full, as if I am drifting along at its mercy. (who is the slave? which is the master?). It feels unboundaried, spilling and filling uncontrollably, when I am desiring to live my life with more intention… choosing the ‘yeses’ that will bring a creative fullness to my life and keep me loving from a place of deeper compassion. And too often, of late, I find myself drifting into that ’left’ or ’right’ place of what’s-wrong-with-the-world information out there, which is more grounded in fear than it is anchored in love, more reactionary than it is listening deeply. I’d like live from a quieter place beneath all of that, a place from which I can flow Love.
So… what is that ‘one thing’ for you?
all is well, vicki
red-winged blackbirds
02 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
If someone asks you about it, say
it is like this
sudden pause, rounding the bend
into the startling drumbeat, of
hundreds of coal colored wings,
encircling delight with splashes of fire
Say, it is like this
dark speck in the flock, One rising and falling,
swaying and flapping like the bedsheets on yesterday’s line
you ran through with equal enchantment
that long ago late winter day.
Say, it is like this
chasing of song deep, into the wood
’cause you’d glimpsed that Sound-maker once
wading in muck with eyes fixed on beauty
feeling fertile and feral and fresh
Say, it is like this
joy twirling cacophony, one moment
sheer swift silence, the next
as madonnas dark reveal- lift-and-
vanish over the distant horizon
Say, it is like this
intake of breath when winter’s brisk bites your face
this basking in sun’s warmth, breathe out
as you traverse this vast space where
sky meets the earth
dancing.
listen to Crosby, Stills and Nash, singing Blackbird here (thanks myrna:)
(*redwinged blackbirds are said to be associated with the Dark Mother and primal feminine energies. they have ties to the creative forces of Nature. they nest in swamps and marshes, usually just a few feet from Water, reflecting a tie to Water and her birthing energies. they can represent the need to go back into the Great Womb of life in order to bring forth new expressions of energy.)
Recent Comments