To pay attention, that is our endless and proper work
24 May 2012 Leave a Comment
Instructions for living life. 
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. – Mary Oliver
Chet Raymo, in his book, Natural Prayers, says the idea of prayer that seems to make the most sense to him, as scientist and lover of nature, is paying rapt attention to the ‘exquisite detail of the World’ (capital letter mine)
I wonder. What are you paying attenion to?
This morning I am paying attention to the tulip poplars, covered in blossom, outside my bedroom window. Eight years ago, when I planted them, I imagined this day, when they’d be tall enough to be upstairs bedroom trees, when I’d lift the blind to delight in the fullness of their limbs, like a girl’s arms brimming as she returns from the meadow.
This morning their leaves are beaded with remnants of last evening’s shower, and the morning slant of the sun is divulging the secret of the webs that weave their stories across their branches. Some folks thought I was crazy when I planted them so close to the house, but I knew I wanted to be surrounded by these blossoms one day, sitting here at my desk, in my grown-up tree house of sorts.
I once had a dream that my pocket (it was a shirt-breast pocket, you know, the kind that sits right atop your heart) was bursting with purple and gold flowers. The dream came during a time when I was certain that my life contained nothing but sorrow and pain. But I had just met don, my current love, and we had gone out on a first date the night before. The next morning, he sent flowers to my workplace…they were purple and gold.
I have named our garden here, ‘flowers in my pocket’, and it is blooming abundantly this spring. I am filled each day with delight. I taste it on my lips, it overflows from my heart. Last evening, that gorgeous man stood in the dark of the garden, beneath the window where I write and serenaded me. How delightful is that!
These late spring mornings offer the potential dawns when birds might be heard singing before the drone of rush hour traffic drowns them out — these long days, when the sun rises before the people’s clocks tell them it is time to rise to the routine, to hurry along on automatic transmissions. Perhaps one of these mornings the birds just might surprise someone awake. It’s cool enough– and warm enough –that windows might be left open to hear the serenade.
The earth this morning is saturated, the grasses in the field behind the house heavy, the rampant growth of spring sagging under the weight of so much water. Even the sky looks heavy, full of water, the early morning layers of grays appear to be like so many waves stretched out to the horizon. Perhaps I might imagine those traffic sounds as crashing waves, bless the people on their journeys o’er the sea to make their fortunes in lands foreign to me.
Yesterday I emptied the worm compost tub, a winter’s worth of peelings and leftovers, then spent the afternoon picking through the castings (ok, that’s just a polite word for worm poop) for the red wrigglers so that I might return them to fresh bedding in the bin. There’s supposed to be an easier way to accomplish this -with a screen and a light- but it never really works that well for me, and I don’t mind spending a slow afternoon with them. Ok, I imagine there are folks for whom such a day is foreign, but I was rewarded with a wheelbarrow full of gold the same. Today I passed out spadesful to the hungry, who are waiting yet to blossom.
Last year, butternut squash plants sprouted under every flower and shrub. It seems the worms don’t eat the seeds. How smart is that?, that the decomposing plant parts are consumed and transformed into nutrient rich soil for the seeds that are left behind. I wonder what unexpected gifts I’ll find growing this season.
I expect that all of this rambling fits together somehow, but I’ll let you figure that out. This morning, I just don’t need to know. Yesterday, I read a description of prayer that was simply ‘pay attention’. This morning, that more than is enough for me.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
-mary oliver – in summer day
the blossoming
21 May 2012 Leave a Comment
for p
when i moved with my new husband to this place 8 years ago, and found myself somehow ensconced in the barren landscape of suburbia with its relentlessly domesticated and squared off monotony, i had no choice but to attempt to create the natural beauty for which i longed. being planted firmly in a parcel of earth that, like myself, had been stripped and reduced to an artificial image of beauty that allowed for little self-expression was an invitation for healing us both, and so I dug in.
from the beginning i knew on a soul-level that this was sacred work, sensed that giving life back to the earth would bring something to back to life in me. loving something enough to give it back itself is indeed soul work. it was what healed me, after all — being seen as sacred and blessed and beautiful breathed spirit back into my life.
of course, there were many lessons i hadn’t anticipated. along the way, i learned such things as the importance of feeding the soil, composting last year’s throw-aways to be used nourishment for this year’s growth. i learned that some things just will not thrive when planted in the wrong environment, despite those pithy quotes that suggest we should all ‘bloom where we are planted’ — but i also learned something of grace and second chances (and third and fourth ones). i learned that some things require many seasons of patience and belief despite all appearances. and i learned mostly that loving something thoroughly, enduringly, unconditionally allows it at last to blossom.
now that we are soon to be moving, some do not understand why i continue to plant new seeds, pull new weeds, offer support to new growths and trim old ones. of course, it could be explained away by my love of creating, my love of touching the earth, my relationship to beauty, my desire for healing…. that it is as much ‘who i am’ as it is ‘what i do’…. but that does not fully describe the shift in me lately. when i am out there working, it feels like a true labor of love. perhaps i am at last learning something about detached love…. an idea that had not sunken from a head-knowing to an embodied knowing quite this fully before. i could never really understand how one can truly love something and not be attached to it. isn’t that what love does?
as i am out there weeding, watering, trimming, i find myself feeling privileged to be offering this beauty as gift to another, equally privileged to have been given the opportunity to participate with this plot of earth in bringing forth such beauty, grateful for the gifts it has given to me in return. at other times, i consider that a new owner might wipe this slate clean, just as the beautiful sand mandalas are brushed or blown clean after the painstaking work/prayer of creating them. it is then that i realize that this work too has been prayer –deep prayer, transformative prayer—and that, as with all good prayer, it is i who have been changed in the process.
these past few last weeks, i have been making a practice of taking a morning prayer stroll through the gardens. i remember doing this many years ago in that other house, after coming back from walking the kids to the school bus, i’d amble about the gardens in the springtime, both quieted and entranced by what was coming up. the earth was offering its healing to me even then.
when you consider the wonder of it all, i have had so little to do with this creation of beauty! my small part at the tail end of millenia. my rudimentary organization of nature’s raw materials, seems trivial when i pause to ponder the intricate detail of even one small blossom on the tiniest flower in the garden and the mind-boggling organization of its strands of dna, whose segments of genes somehow express its particular shape, color, scent, pattern, season of bloom, etc. what makes this particular color of violet, for instance, in this cup-shaped blossom, which is lined up with dozens of other cup-shaped blossoms along the curve of a slender stem, which arises from palm shaped leaves that push up through the earth like spear points before finally opening their hands? multiply that particular wonder times millions to account for each blossom, leaf shape, stem, root structure, tree bark, energy gathering and transforming mechanism, ad infinitum in the garden, and i quickly realize how small a part in the creation of this beauty I have been.
can one ‘create’ beauty at all then? or does one simply make space for it to emerge…. allow it, see it, open to it, witness its unfolding, encourage its potential. perhaps we are like those angels, whispering ‘grow, grow’ over tiny blades of grass, loving something into becoming itself.
when i was a young woman i believed that my beauty would bring me love. now that i am an older one, i am realizing that it is my love that brings me beauty. i have poured my love upon this place like last week’s drenching rains. there is something terribly beautiful about water droplets on blossoms, about flowers laying over on the grass from the weight of so many droplets.
if it is as they say that all of our little deaths in life are practice and preparation for the final one, then this experience of letting go is showing me that i will no doubt be delighting in the beauty of this place, tasting it on my lips, with my final breath. i feel so blessed to taste the delight of Sophia as she was/is at dawn of creation. i am somehow ‘bound to beauty’, as She said to me in the dream.
perhaps delight itself is the ultimate creative act. if all of this is true –that loving something well, seeing its sacredness, witnessing its becoming, delighting in it allows it to blossom more fully — then what/who must be delighting in me and at my own blossoming that is encouraging this beauty in me? jus pondering this thought awakens something deep in me.
i have been noticing alot lately this tension that we humans seem to have between our deep yearnings for something more and our deeper awareness that all is already as it should be, that love is present always. i think though that this point of tension need not be an either/or place, but instead a place of creation, a place of great beauty, a place of deep delight, a connecting point between the human and the divine. i think it is possible to walk through the garden and see beauty everywhere and at the same time desire to bring forth something particular in a particular place that is not yet visible. i think it is possible to know that no matter where you walk you will see and know Love, and yet to decide to walk a particular path because it draws you…. not with the expectation that getting to that particular place will make you ‘happy’ or fulfilled at last, but because you know that Love will be there too, as it is here now. so why not walk in the direction of your particular delight if that might help to bring forth healing and beauty in this place?
i know it matters not specifically what i do with this one wild and precious life. in my own case, my need to be close to the earth, my need to be engaged in a creative life, and my desire to be an agent of healing and beauty in some way might be combined in myriad ways. i envision these particular needs and desires of mine as building blocks that might be put together in a wild assortment of ways to create a multitude of possible shapes of a life that might fulfill this blessed human need in me to manifest something meaningful. i imagine it rather like those strands of dna, made up of but a few basic building blocks, enfleshing the vast array of possibility surrounding me in the garden. no one particular expression is THE expression , but as a being made up of such creative stuff, it seems i have no choice but to be creative myself!
i find that thought delightful.
indra’s net
26 Apr 2012 1 Comment
A small spider alights in the strands of hair near my collar bone, meanders its way to my brow, traces the arch of my eye, my cheekbone, the curve of my ear. I close my eyes, imagine it is a lover, exploring the contours of my beauty. It’s remarkable the way that particular thought transforms my response. Instead of a reflexive jerk and a slap, I experience the gentle caress of miniscule legs, somewhere between a tickle and a whisper.
I wonder how many touches I recoil from reflexively, without pausing to consider that they may intend no harm. I’ve noticed how defensive I’ve become of late, unable to soften like this, to pause, release, and receive. Rather, I resist, tighten like a spring, react.
This morning I awoke to words in my head, remnants of the dream from which I’d awakened. ‘Let the rain fall soft upon your rooftop’. I rolled over and gazed out the window. The hard rains had ceased overnight.
Quite early, the sun just beginning to peer through the cover of trees on the horizon, I had some time before centering prayer and breakfast, so I lifted from the nightstand a book I’d brought with me. It was a book of prose, essays on nature by a new author I’ve recently appreciated. As I opened the book to the first essay, the words there seemingly leapt into my heart.
The author was pondering the nature of homing instincts — of wasps to the nest, snakes to ancestral dens, humans to the places they call home. The author’s mother had immigrated to the United States after World War 1 only with the firm assurance that she could return to her homeland, Yorkshire, every 4 years to visit. True to his word for the rest of thier lives, her father scraped and saved every penny for 3 years and then spent their entire savings every fourth year to take her mother back home. The author herself then emigrated with her husband from Cleveland to Oregon, but returned home ‘religiously’ each December to visit the home in which she grew up, to revisit the stories, smell the smells, touch the faces. Now the author’s daughter was preparing to leave the nest, for Greece. Together on a farewell camping trip along the river they have loved, the author wants to imprint upon her daughter one last time the sights and the sounds, the smells and the tastes, the feeling of home.
So she can find it again.
And then came these words on the page, the ones that drew me up short. Mother and daughter are ambling along the edge of the river when they begin singing in harmony, an Irish blessing. ‘May the rain fall softly on your fields’
My god.
All of this searching for home. Where will it be, what will it look like, how will it feel? And I am given the words of an old Irish blessing, blessing my rooftop. Blessing it softly no less.
We are an uprooted clan. I’ve so little sense of connection to ancestral family or homeland before me, I’m like a tree uprooted from the forest, transplanted in the middle of a field. I hold only some old photographs alongside my longing.
My children’s home likewise was uprooted. Divorce dislocates a family, like a shoulder knocked out of joint, which may heal but continues to ache for a lifetime. Particularly when it rains. At best, a tree grows crooked around that particular wound. Other times, it just leaves the family tree ungrounded, separated from a place to call home.
And so this feeling of broken longing. I take note of it each time I enter the woods. The feelings of deep connection I experience there—the profound sense of belonging, of home, of peace—bring up with them intense love for my children. Memories of times spent in the forest with them, camping, hiking, laughing.
We have no building, no rooftop, no hearth to offer shelter for the heart, save those woods and memories of family there.
For several years now, I have tried to recreate home for my grown children, carting them off to a summer vacation in the woods. It has seemed the best I could offer as substitute for holiday gatherings in the home they grew up in. Those imposed trips have not gone exactly as I have hoped; the woods are not home at all to their wives! So, I have released that dream, realizing I was trying to force something to grow, not organically from roots that have grown deep in a place, but as a transplanted species.
A few years ago, my children decided it might be best to start rotating homes for the holidays, for practical reasons. They have so many obligations, with divided families and in-laws to boot. At the time, I didn’t understand completely the inordinate grief I experienced at that. I suppose I’d hoped that this new home of mine would offer a substitute place for their hearts, but home has shifted for them. They have grown roots in the places they landed. Blessedly so.
Flashing back, memories of sitting across the table from the young couple who purchased our family home wash over me. Before driving to settlement that painful morning, I had walked through the empty rooms one last time listening to the sounds of a lifetime—beautiful and terrible— echo off the bare walls. Now, I pass the keys over cool, hard surface of the table, with soft words of blessing, hoping she will bring the gardens back to life. Later that morning, sitting in my parked car, up the street, I watch them unload the van, see little boys riding their wagons up and down the side walk, grateful that love has moved in. Weeping, I pull away.
Have my grandchildren come to know this new house of mine as home? How will it be to move to that house in the woods, to the place that feels like belonging, like true home to me? Will I feel uprooted again? Will my children’s hearts ever find their way there?
‘May the rain fall soft upon your rooftop’
Grief is a big piece of finally letting go, perhaps the beginning of it. As I cling to my longing for what has died, what can no longer be, I entomb myself. All those images of being entangled, entrapped, which have created such panic and despair in me, are strands of my grief at what has been lost. Of the five strands of grief, I imagine these particularly tenacious ones are of the guilt and self-blame variety. They limit my freedom, keep me ensnared. Keep her from rising at last.
I know that new life won’t come until I let the old one finally die, rest in peace. Hanging onto my guilt and self-blame keeps our old life hanging on to me in ugly ways. I must unpeel these strands, this inordinate sense of responsibility for causing a death, for creating such brokeness in my children’s lives. Recently, I’ve noted invitations opening — for release and redemption, for reclamation. Good memories, unsullied by pain, have been surfacing in the smell of a campfire or the melody of a song.
I gaze to my right as a gust of wind carries hundreds of maple seed helicopters winging through the air. They fly over my head, swirl round me, land in the grass at my feet. One of them drops squarely on this page in my journal. I notice it really is two seeds, joined to make wings.
I love my new husband so dearly, yet for so many months, since his retirement, with the anxiety of ‘what next’ and, more pressingly, ‘where’, I have grown hard. I notice myself recoil at his touch, physically, perhaps, but more pressingly, emotionally. His presence in my space feels constricting. I alternately fear he will hold me down – make me go; force me to stay–or to move. I fear leaving my children without a home. I fear never setting the trapped one inside of me free.
Have I reflexively slapped away a gentle, exploring touch, the touch of a spider, weaving a new story? Have I been flailing at the wrong strands, the ones I perceived were holding me under, entangling me? The strands that confine me are not spun by the persons I love, they are spun of the stories I tell of the burden of responsibility for pain. They are spun of self-blame.
These ones that come connected to me—children and lovers and friends– in this great web of life are a blessing. We hold and reflect one another. Some part of me knows that I am a blessing to them only if I am free to be who I am. Somehow, they need me to wear the blue dress. I suspect that only by being me can I hold my place in Indras net like a jeweled knot, radiating light, healing the tear, making our connections healthy and strong. In truth, I do harm when I feed those attached to me love laced with self-blame and fear. Such an ill-tied knot only spreads the disease of self-denial and judgment, codependency and constraint. The last thing I want for any of them is to feel responsible for holding me back.
This seed upon my page, landing so softly, capable of growing a new tree, comes attached to another. The other gives wings for flight.
May the rain fall soft upon it.
a visit with the hags
23 Mar 2012 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: nature, old hags, outdoors, sun dips
my back propped up against her for support, it is quiet at last. the bulldozer has turned off its incessant engine, all that scooping out of the sludge put to rest. what a lot of muck accumulates in the course of 30 years underwater!
nearing twilight, i sit now in the company of these wise old hags who stand vigil, their wet feet filtering the flow. i hadn’t realized that the reason she’d struggled so to surface was because her own young legs had been sucked into the mire. the bulldozer operator said a person would drown before she got free of that muck.
the water upstream from here is vibrant, young and wild. i visited it earlier today, followed its meandering course through boulder-strewn, moss-covered woodland. it will surely fill this carved out space with freshness.
i imagine a woman’s journey requires the influx of the girl from time to time, or always, to set the mired one free.
all this dredging has made me weary again, although the sky is clearing at last after days and nights of heavy cover. surprisingly cool, an evening breeze lifts the corner of the day’s humid blanket. godde, how i wish i were less inhibited. i’d strip and let it dry my clammy skin. but the grasses here would no doubt scrape my back. last year’s grasses, they are crackly and dry.
looking up, i notice the old one next to me is wrapped in vines like an old woman bedecked in strands of costume jewelry. i can almost envision her hat strewn with flowers and beads.
an owl startles the silence with his exclamation point. no doubt i am in his kitchen and it is time for his dinner (or breakfast whatever the case may be). a woodpecker drills over my left shoulder, seeking nourishment in dead wood, the peepers trill to my right, and the sun dips into the treetops like a cookie into milk before bed. the water continues to flow at my back, gurgling more loudly than it seems it should. we are all hungry it seems…….
last night, a ladybug found its way into my sleeve as i slept. an answer came quite clearly, though when i awakened it slipped right through my heart and back into the darkness. it seemed so certain! it suprises me that it would disappear so easily.
i wonder, can she smell me? this creature who come at twilight. i see her footprints in the mud. i know she comes to drink at night.
i drink at night too, thirst quenching dreams of eagles and girls, of blue gowns and fluorescent deep sea eggs. yet in the morning all that remains are these tracks in the mud. sometimes, I can identify the visitor, but more often there is no name i can give her. i know only that something drank deeply, then crawled back to sleep as i woke.
i yearn to meet her gaze some night, to see eye-to-eye the light flashing, the timid stillness.
how to reassure this creature inside of me that i intend her no harm?
cabbage whites
23 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
small white butterflies. again. dancing in the abandoned field behind my suburban home. twirling like my granddaughter in her tutu. you remind me of the girl in me, who delighted, chasing you.
oh, how I thrilled when one of you was yellow. you were the prize, the extra in the ordinary, the peanut in the box of crackerjack.
that was long before i was told you were a pest, and that the tiny trumpet-shaped blossoms that were your favorites were weeds. ah but those blossoms, so subtly pink, hid their color in secret so that only a butterfly–or girl who looked very closely– knew that they weren’t really white at all, and closed themselves entirely when plucked from the vine no matter how many times a girl tried to bring them inside to her mother.
where have you been all these years?
surely you’ve been here all along, though it seems to me your return is sudden and at once, with a riot, like those cicadas that rise from their earthy sleep once every 17 years, as they did that lovely summer when I was wed.
it seems you have been waiting just to jump out and surprise me as I round the corner to the garden. as i try to walk faster (they say it is good for my heart), you skip along beside me circling, circling like that little girl, tripping me each time with your beckoning, ‘see me, see me!!’
has it something to do with this spring of my 50th year, the one that came without winter, that has me out of doors in ways I haven’t been for so long?
you know what is good for my heart.
an apple a day
14 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: algonquin, apple a day, heart, nature, night, outdoors, spring peepers, stars, weary legs
Doubtfully, she glanced sideways at the apple, certain that nothing creative was going to flow from her womb this evening, though she’d been surprised to see the word ‘lovemaking’ there on the free-association list she’d brainstormed earlier in the week, while waiting. Each time she visited that particular room at the doctor’s office, she’d perched in the same blue chair, pulling it away from the blinds, into which it was always so carelessly shoved. There was something about the spacing of seats that called her to uncharacteristic order every time.
This evening she pulled over the other porch chair to prop up her weary legs and picked up her pen again. Though she’d intentionally flipped it off on her way, behind her the kitchen light switched on again, casting both shadows and light through the blinds at her back, on the other side of the glass.
The evening was so unseasonably warm. The entire winter had been so. Turning her pen’s attention to her great granddaughters, to whom she wrote to each evening, she wondered if their March evenings would request of them summer weight fabrics and cool drinks.
The sounds of the traffic distressed her, though she knew she could choose otherwise, as her yoga instructor had suggested, choose to stay out of judgment regarding what her senses brought into her awareness. She could choose to bless each motorcycle, tractor trailer, airplane, be grateful for them, but she wouldn’t. Not tonight, when their constant clamor drowned out the chirping spring peepers and overwhelmed any potential rustling of dry leaves being stirred by the breeze to rise from their turned-down winter beds.
That stubborn apple beckoned from behind the cooling mug of spicy vanilla chai tea, but with so much distracting noise, her eyes were instead drawn to the sky. Always somehow that sky offered her peace, but especially tonight in this place stripped of silence. There was quiet out there somewhere, she imagined, beyond the drone of traffic and the chaos of commotion. Her heart longed for such a place.
She would not write about the apple –full, round, smooth, organic, whole, bruised, juicy, dripping down her chin pleasure, fearless love-making – she would write about her heart, the way it longs for wild places, quiet places, intimate places. She would write about the way these tulip tree limbs, in all their gangly adolescent yearning, reach for that same dark sky, about the dark sky that silhouettes them so gracefully, adorning their skinny limbs with tiny jewels, appropriate for ones so young.
If she were in Algonquin, the sky tonight would surely be littered with jewels, like some overflowing treasure chest that she could scoop her eager hands into and draw up handfuls of preciousness. The loon would be punctuating the night air with its plaintive song and she would be lying on her back next to the lapping water, letting herself be filled.
But tonight, she would settle for Orion’s belt encircling the slender neck of Tulip Poplar, who just last year flowered for the first time, while Venus keeps watch from the west and the neighbor’s dog barks to be let in.
The apple invites her to take a juicy bite, to seal her lips around its fullness and slurp her sweetness into her hungry mouth. To let the precious drops flow down her chin to catch upon her outstretched tongue. She’s heard it’s good for her heart.
Her heart yearns for sweetness such as that, for such a flow as that, a flow that makes it pump a little stronger, a little faster. This inertia makes it weak. Her flow pools around her ankles, causing them to swell.
In the distance, a train passes through the neighboring town, not nearly the assault on her senses as the traffic had been earlier. It beckons her return from distant places. She notices that the earth has rolled again with her upon it. Orion has been taken off her slender neck, laid aside on the dark table of the sky. The dance has ended for the night.
Returning the chair to its place, she picks up the unbitten apple, carries it inside to the other side of the blinds, and shields her eyes from the light.
electricity! — part 2 of the journey to reframing, renaming, reclaiming a life
28 Feb 2012 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: losing consciousness, needle in a haystack, proverbial needle, soul friends, things of the spirit, utter darkness
Two nights ago, I was given a beautiful dream.
I am at a banquet, a gathering of soul-friends, when the speaker tells us the story of how, after the close of last month’s dinner, one of our group had died and been heroically brought back to life. I envision the dramatically unfolding scenario clearly, defibrillator paddles and all. I turn, amazed, to the woman seated next to me, who is the one who had died though she had spoken nothing of it. I ask her to tell me what it felt like.
She answers, ‘I was in a basement, completely devoid of all light. Not a linear, ordered, predictable basement, like our dry walled ones, more like the meandering cellar of a catacomb. Groping in utter darkness, my hands flailed at the emptiness. I was losing consciousness, below consciousness. It was like drowning. My fingers were searching the wall for the opening, landing only on cold, damp stone. In my hand I held the plug end of an electric cord. I needed to find the outlet… the outlet… the receptacle into which it would fit. It felt like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. I knew I was drowning, but I kept searching, methodically and desperately at once. Then, suddenly, I found it and it fit! At once, the room was flooded in light.
I was back! I was alive!”
Such is the way that a woman comes back to life. No tunnel of light she enters upon leaving, it is a flood of light upon her rebirth.
I awoke with a start, knowing instantly that this was a big dream. No need to write this one down, I knew it was etched in my soul. I could feel viscerally in my body the losing-consciousness-feeling of drowning, the determined effort, the power of her coming alive.
What does this mean? Am I too groping in the dark, buried in the catacombs, drowning? Have I lost consciousness, conscious living? When was the last time (a ‘month’ ago) that I sat at that particular banquet table, feasting on things of the spirit? Do I hold the plug right here in my hand that will flood me in light, bring me alive? Where is that place of fit for me? Am I coming alive?!
If I listen intently, diligently seeking, will I intuitively know where to fit the plug? Was the reading of yesterday’s book a clue, a place where a light has come on, giving me permission to choose what is a right fit for me?
The word ‘outlet’ is curious to me. What else does outlet connote?
- A means of expression, of course, as in an outlet for creativity.
- A means of release or escape.
- In the case of the electrical outlet -a receptacle, a place of receiving.
- Again in the electrical outlet- a place where the masculine and feminine join, where being and doing are one.
- A place of great energy –ignition, passion, electricity and birth.
As I drew this image in my journal—the electric cord and the outlet—the memory of inserting my arm into the root of Birtha came rushing back to me. When I plunged my arm into the root of that tree, a surge of energy coursed through my body. It felt electric!
That was almost a month ago and I’ve been uncertain (or too timid to claim) what it meant for me. Somehow this all fits together, though clearly I am still in the dark. How is that a perfect fit? How am I to be a midwife, literally or metaphorically? Do my words or my companionship ease the passage for others? Am I being midwifed into being—these transformative waves of awareness pushing something new into life in me. Again I return to both/and, for always ’the work’ does its work in both directions.
The first book we read during our training (the woman in my dream was a teacher in that class) was Holy Listening, by Margaret Guenther. I recall that in it she refers to the sacred companion as midwife of the soul.
The dream of the little hermitage in the woods – the cold mountain woman dream – has come back full force to me. A consistently recurring image for me now for almost 10 years, it rushed back into the light clearly last week when I gave myself permission to reclaim my own dream – a place in the woods that would offer shelter, salves for healing the broken, and nourishment for the renewal of the weary. Carved out and guarded, like the space that my own pain created for me all those years ago, it would be a private place for hearing and healing and seeing more clearly… not just for me but for others. That which we bless ultimately blesses in return.
Might it not be a great place to create Beauty?
listening below the noise- part 1 of the journey to reframing, renaming, and reclaiming a life
28 Feb 2012 2 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: disembodied voice, groundhogs, placidity, spiritual quest, utter despair, writing desk
Last evening, I read a book, cover to cover, about the transformative power of silence. ‘Listening Below the Noise’ was written by a woman who heard the words ‘sit in silence’ in one of those disembodied voice moments, and so began a 17 year long odyssey into it. Every first and third Monday of each month, she has dedicated 24 hours to silence, no matter the season nor sundry external influences.
Surprisingly, hers was not undertaken as a spiritual practice, at least the author did not name it as such at first, though it ended there, of course. My own journey into silence began from ‘the other end’, as a spiritual quest for healing, for love, for God. I realize that, perhaps once I found it (the healing, love, God part), I abandoned my own vigilance of the practice, as the utter despair that drove me into its arms abated. Like a love affair that slides into placidity, where inattentiveness leads to forgetfulness, I lost my passion for the practice. Perhaps then this explains the sense of losing my self, which I’ve been experiencing.
I’ve known for some time, of course, that I’ve lost my space. It happened so gradually, so insidiously nibbled away at like so many other unattended things, that I didn’t notice until, all at once one day, it was gone.
All those years ago, during those healing times, my pain had carved and guarded that space. It had forged a small opening at first during early morning hours at the chapel and wee morning hours at my writing desk. When the kids were in school, my work schedule allowed for several days a week, home alone, and the space grew bigger. When I married a few years later and my need to work outside the home was relieved, the space expanded greatly. For 2 years, I had 9 months of weekdays, 7 hours a day to myself. These were the years when the autumn became such a metaphor of return to me. Along with the geese, the groundhogs, and the trees, I was relieved of the nest for at least a few hours, freed from constant production of shelter and fruit, given permission to go turn inward, to go underground, to rest and rejuvenate.
Then, when my daughter graduated from high school, that space began to contract. Hers has been a difficult fledgling – home for six months, then out for 4, back home for 4 then out for 11, home for 6, then back out for 30, home for 6, back out again now. More so than that particular back-and-forth, however, was the perpetual back-and-forth of countless phone calls per day. With the advent of the cell phone between my oldest child’s fledgling and this one’s, I was far too accessible. This time my not-working-outside-the-home closed in my space drastically. Her cellphone calls, along with her difficulties out there, grew exponentially. I imagine my accessibility was as harmful to her as it was to me, teaching neither of us to trust. As a result, I felt as if I was sent into a perpetual summer. My days, my silence, my focus became even more extraverted and fragmented, and, in the course, I lost something very valuable, buried again beneath the noise, the chaos, the rubble.
I’ve frequently expressed this sense of loss to my husband, tried to explain to him what I was feeling, how my creative self was being buried alive. He didn’t completely understand why it was that I required lengths of uninterrupted quiet in order to have the time to go down to retrieve those jewels, nor how it was that with so many interruptions demanding me to surface, I could never quite reach them, nor why after time I stopped diving.
And so, the internet became a distraction, and like all good distractions from pain, an addiction, supplying a virtual sense of connection, temporarily alleviatng my yearning for a real one. No longer looking within for the treasure, the searches became external, following one bunny trail after another. One ironic benefit of my newly retired husband’s being home all day is that he takes the computer for hours on end!, blessedly forcing me to withdraw, and to reenter the sacred realms of my soul.
What this book offered was affirmation of my need to go there. What it also provided was a way of reframing my old friend, silence, as an intentionally chosen and boundaried space. I realize that boundaries are so vital right now to the regaining and renaming of myself. Boundaries are what a virgin innately has –even physically this is so with the placement of the hymen over her opening – and what a mother has not. All sense of separation between self and other is blurred in motherhood. When the child wakes, you are awake, when the child needs to eat, you make food. Reorganizing myself again during this next stage of life requires redrawing the lines… 32 years and five children have etched those lines fairly deep. But no longer is my shape to be drawn by the needs and demands of another. No longer is my focus to be diffuse, my life-giving energy to be funneled into another for fuel.
Silence, solitude, space – the 3 S’s have been the great themes of my writing over these past several years. It seems I do have a right to proclaim my need for all three. Though it was difficult at times for the author of the book to stand by her own resolve, it proved to be of such great value, a value she could not begin to foresee when she began her journey. Perhaps it was a pearl of great price, for I suspect that the fourth S is sacrifice. Something must be relinquished in order to make that space.
Perhaps the first thing to go is my ego. Like the author, who realized how much she had been living from hers, as she heard the echo of her unuttered words and realized how often she had spoken out of her false self – responding with ‘fixing’ words, sharing her ‘wisdom’, controlling fallout and judgments, believing in the urgency of her immediate response – I too realize that much of what holds me is the false belief that I am necessary for another’s survival.
As I ponder my own sense of calling, my own voice’s message seems to be speaking not the words ‘sit in silence’ per say, but something more along the lines of ‘retreat to the woods’. I wonder as I write this if, as the call to silence of the last decade for me began in a place of pain and led to a place of gift, this call to retreat (which, like silencing, has its own dual meanings, including one that connotes surrender) might also lead to unknown gifts. This profound sense of call to a place of retreat in the forest to create a house of healing may be as much for myself, I suspect, as for those who might come to stay.
There are other clear similarities between the author’s call and my own. Clear-cut boundaries, for one. Action that is counter to what the culture tells me is normal or even right for another. (My desire may seem eccentric to some, but Clarissa reminds me that my eccentricities are where my gifts lie). Other resonances between her call and my own – it being misunderstood, its necessity for a creative life, its need for solitude, for time, for inaccessibility, the need to let go of the desire to control, to fix, to care take, to manage what others think or how they judge, its soul-saving elements, and its trusting in what my instincts are telling me.
What are my instincts telling me?
Are instincts related to desires?
Can I begin to name this as a calling rather than a yearning?
How does that change it, give it more power or credence, for me?
Years ago I did indeed have my own disembodied voice dream, words given to me that woke me from my sleep. ‘You are bound to beauty’.
Practically speaking, how exactly does one live into the call of “being bound to beauty”? I have imagined it in so many ways through the years…
- seeking and seeing Beauty as a way of prayer,
- choosing to live in a place- – metaphorically or literally—of great Beauty,
- noticing Beauty,
- naming Beauty,
- creating Beauty,
- capturing Beauty for others to see,
- Being Beauty.
Mostly I have not imagined it as a call at all but rather a naming of ‘what is’, a calling me back to the truth that my life –that Life itself– is inescapably Beautiful.
No, I’m not exactly sure that I’ve fully lived into that calling. Perhaps I set it aside along with the 3 S’s. Perhaps living into it is a perpetual process. And perhaps it has been at work in me beneath my awareness all this time. This morning when I looked in the mirror, after taking down my braid, I saw beauty there that I haven’t for such a long time. So much transformation is taking place in my life right now, so much new awareness, so much revelation. It seems to be coming in great waves, as does the labor of all birthings.
I am being formed into something new.
sand hill crone
24 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: authentic life, authentic self, bentwood rockers, crone, earth dam, sandhill crane, steep banks
Sand hill crane, Lake Duffy, photo @ PennLive.com
I have hiked some distance, perhaps a mile, from where I parked the car to this spot, stopping for a short visit along the way near the remains of an old ice dam that once formed the lake It has been good to watch the lake’s evolution, or should I say devolution, over these past few years. No longer needed for the making of ice, the stone and earth dam was allowed to deteriorate, the water to flow, and the lake to revert to a wetland. Several new duck boxes, their freshly cut pine boards in bleached contrast to the late winter browns of the native habitat, have been erected in anticipation of winged ones who now regularly call this place home for the summer. This afternoon there were few signs of life yet. I’d heard that a stray sandhill crane had found her way there for a few weeks. Much colder than I anticipated, I was forced to leave my perch, to get up and move. Maybe she decided the same.
I’ve often walked past this particular sink where I now sit, been drawn to it so many times, frequently snapping photographs, which never seemed to capture what I saw through my own lenses, from the trail. Today I decided to leave the tamed tracks behind, to bushwack a bit, in order to visit more closely. Strangely, its much warmer here. Perhaps these steep banks protect me from the subtle but chilling breezes, or perhaps the wind has simply stepped back at dusk’s approach.
I sit on a great moss-covered rock, next to the old fallen trees, reddened by the stripping of bark and rotting of pulp, which span the ravine, . The earth is red here too, maybe from so many fallen before them. The silt in the stream bed is red. The rock is red.
As my eyes wander upstream, I am surprised by a culvert I’d never noticed before, so close to the main trail, but completely hidden from view from above. Beautifully crafted of the same red rock, it is a remnant of old railroading days no doubt. Even more startling are those 2 bentwood rockers, faded from seasons, gazing down at me from atop. Others have cherished this spot. I must be near to someone’s property, though there is no structure in sight and my vision reaches quite far through the leafless landscape.
Suddenly, I am aware of how noisy it is here – planes overhead, traffic nearby, and some incessant rumbling over the ridge – highway, farm machinery, or industry, I cannot say. The trickle of water alone soothes me, water that flows when ice is no longer need, water that, over time, breaks down manmade dams, water that is granted underground passageways, water that carries red earth to some unseen delta, water that causes the earth itself to sink and trees to collapse, creating a place of warmth and great beauty……
I am so fearful of these changing landscapes of mine. Fearful of repercussions. Fearful of potential grief, fearful of loneliness, fearful of unhappiness. I wonder if I am compromising again and then I wonder if I even know what I want well enough to know when I am being compromised. Change is so frightening, I expect most of us wait for it to happen TO us. To embrace it, to be its active agent – not codependently its accomplice, nor passively its victim, nor passive-aggressively its agent, but to freely choose it – is more frightening than I’d imagined it would be.
Courage, conviction, energy, passion and trust all are required, but love is vital. Again, I must return to center, to heart – to desire. What IS the desire that draws me, not forces me but is also not something that I force. Let the time to push come naturally as it will with all births. I must return often to dwell in this place of quieter hope and deeper desire. This is the place from which will flow my strength, my passion, my energy to create a new life.
Desire, of course, leads to the creation of new life every time! Of course, maybe that’s what I’m truly afraid of! How do I prevent this new lifeform from swallowing me up, taking on a life of its own, being stolen from me or, conversely, drowning me? How do I attend to my desire without losing my self? I suspect the answer to these is to keep my self, and my heartful intent, fully IN it. Perhaps the desire is in truth to find my self. May this birth be one that comes from such a desire.
Have the previous births in my life been at all about being sensitive to my own desire, or were they simply more of the same taking-care-of/sensitivity to the expectations and needs of the other at my own expense. Oh, perhaps there is no such thing as pure desire and uncompromised love. So many births, very good births, have come from far less pure exchanges of energy – along the whole spectrum from apathy to violence. Seeds are carried and fall on fertile soil as much by accident as by intent.
My virginal self wasn’t filled with desire to have sex, she was filled with desire to be loved, and, taking care of the needs of another, her physical body got her the love she desired so desperately, at least that’s what she’d thought. So young, that’s why she had been so confused about contraception, about barriers/boundaries of any kind. Contraception made it about sex in her mind, took her completely out of her desire for love(-making). Her insistent desire for pure union was wise, though naive and misdirected. Union of body AND soul, of outer and inner, is what she desired though she sold out for something far less.
Some say the crone is the second coming of the virgin (virgin meaning a woman WHOLE unto herself, her integrity intact), except with the added wisdom of experience–fuller consiousness, clearer seeing, and knowing herself and her giftedness. Clarissa understands the crone as akin to a hardened off tree, her wisdom grown solid to protect the soft heartwood, creating an intact boundary within and from which life-giving nourishment might flow. I’m wondering if this directs the course of the flow – like a culvert built below the surface of an ice dam above left to crumble – so the harmful flows out and the goodness flows in, but also so the goodness flows out to the branches and fruits while keeping enough nourishment for self inside. I like to imagine that trickle at work within me, slowly, steadily carving a place of beauty and depth for all of those years when something atop was frozen and flat, homogenous and tamed.
Perhaps the direction of flow from this new place of desire is not about need-to-be-loved-and-accepted, but longing to live and to love fully, authentically, in a place of union between my inner self and my outward expression. Perhaps listening deeply to this quiet place–here, beneath the noise– will make it possible to hold space for my own ‘deep gladness’ without being flooded by the world’s great need, while still offering a naturally flowing, rich nourishment.
Perhaps this is the way a life becomes a habitat.
ash wednesday
22 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
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