Simple, But Not Always Easy

Words have not come easily lately.  Silence swallows ideas.  Only presence feels real.  Perhaps this presence communicates the love and care I feel for the people in my life, or perhaps some attempt to gather insights into words is needed.  I don’t really know, just as I don’t know if I can even capture in words the elusive essence of the simple joy of being.    It seems good to try to share.

I’ve always loved sharing thoughts and ideas with people.  I love the complexity, untangling perspectives in the midst of conversation.  It is more puzzling to share my wonder at the powerful impact of the Stillness that envelops me now.  It is more remarkable for what is missing than for what is there.  Peace is oddly indescribable and for that matter, uninteresting to write about.  It doesn’t need words, it just is.

I don’t think there is any way I could have imagined what it would be like if fear and anxiety left.  Like everyone I know, I assumed that struggle is absolutely necessary and even morally required.  How would anything ever improve if I didn’t fight with what is wrong? 

A radical shift in perspective made me think that the way things work is much simpler and much more mysterious.  Life is heart wrenchingly beautiful, just as it is.   Everything and everyone can be as they are and the creative movement that responds to life flows on a wave of love that I never would have believed possible.  Sadness didn’t leave, nor pain.  Everything flows and changes, sometimes easy, sometimes hard.  All the things I thought of as safe have proved illusory, all the things I thought I needed proved unnecessary, what I struggled to avoid has proved to be what I needed the most.  Nothing need be different than it is and yet everything still matters.   Instead of eliciting conflict, everything asks for absolute intimacy.

The future is riding this wave of what is and it is how we meet this moment that will create the next.  The “we” is not optional, we are not separate from each other and we cannot create alone, we are linked and move into the future inseparably as one.  I used to think that it was “just” an idea that we are “all one.”  I liked to think that if I worked hard enough and did it right, I could escape all the misery that afflicts my fellow beings.   Like so many others, I thought I could just figure it out and teach others how to do it. 

 

To actually feel this oneness is much more humbling.  Feeling my own pain, my own fear, my absolute vulnerability and feeling it echoed in every person around me brought an end to any illusion of control, to any idea of being great.   In fact, it brought an end to believing in any idea.  I know this sounds truly weird, but until you’ve experienced the end of your mind’s abilities, you can’t know that there is a way to know that is beyond mind.  You can’t know that this way of knowing is unimaginably trustworthy.

What is it that is so different?  The answer is so simple that it’s very hard to see and even harder to believe and there’s no way to know it except by living it.  There are two powerful points of awareness that occupy my attention now.  One is the simple awareness of my being, the fundamental aliveness pulsing through me and everything around me.  It is aliveness beyond the boundaries of my body; it is the fundamental sense of existing that I share with every living thing.  When I was totally occupied with my mind, I paid no attention to this primary sense of my aliveness.   The other point of awareness is the amazing stillness that all of life rests within.  Every thought, every sound is surrounded by silence, a palpable presence that grows stronger when I attend to it.

There has never been a moment in my life when this awareness wasn’t there.  I just didn’t understand its significance, its power or its beauty.  I’m positive it’s there for everyone, always.   It’s here now.   It reminds me of the ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz.  Dorothy had the means to go home the whole time; she just didn’t know how it worked.  Obviously if you’ve spent your entire life thinking that you’ve got to get somewhere else to be happy and at peace, it’s a little hard to believe that paying attention to such simple things can make a difference.  But we are addicted to our minds and our minds, while being wonderful useful tools, can’t make us happy, cannot bring us peace or teach us how to love.  Our essence, the essential part of our being, connects with a deeper level of wisdom and knowing, a wisdom calling to be known.

Oddly enough, the craziness of our lives might just be calling a few more of us to tap our heels together and go home.

Journey

I’ve been reading A Long Trek Home, by Erin McKittrick.  Erin is the daughter of a good friend and I’ve known her since she was a child.  On June 9, 2007 she and her husband, Hig, embarked on a yearlong 4000 mile trek by “boot, raft and ski” from Seattle to Unimak Island in the Aleutians.   After their trip, Erin wrote this book.

I began reading Erin’s book with trepidation.  My favorite activities in earlier years were skiing when I lived in Colorado and hiking after I moved to California.  Walking in the wilderness was when I felt the most alive, the most connected.  I’m not able to do that anymore, it’s a trek to walk around my yard.  Would it be hard to read about something I used to love and can’t do anymore?

Erin’s book surprised and delighted me.  While the audacity of what they did is way beyond anything I could ever have done, the spirit is completely accessible and deeply appreciated.  It is the story of two people paying absolute attention to every small detail of a year of their lives.  Not all of the details are pleasant.  While there is a predictable amount of physical discomfort, Erin’s descriptions are never dramatized.   Each adventure, each challenge to be met and worked through is offered as just another step in the journey.  Some steps are easy and beautiful, some challenging, frightening, or wildly creative, but each one is only a step.  She maps a journey through incredible natural beauty mixed with sober descriptions of the impact of logging, mining, and eroding fisheries on the fragile coasts of Alaska and British Columbia.  It is a story not just about pristine nature, but also about the people who live and work along the shoreline. 

I don’t want to attempt to recap her story, it is best appreciated by reading her book, but I would like to share some of the personal revelations I had while reading it.  I’ve been on my own journey, a vastly different kind of journey, but one that is oddly supported and encouraged by what Erin and Hig share.  My journey involves navigating day after day of intense pain.   The same spirit of curiosity and endurance applies.  The same need to pay attention and savor absolutely every detail, engaging every moment so that no moment of beauty or connection with the animals and humans who I interact with is missed.  Even the moments of struggle and indecision add up to a powerful sense of engagement and richness. There is no time for fearful thoughts about potential disasters that lay ahead. The challenges and opportunities of this moment are all consuming.  Sharing this adventure with my long term partner, we work together, each doing what we can to serve the journey as a whole.

The landscape isn’t as grand or varied as the Alaskan wilderness, but savoring life’s simple details creates a feeling of wholeness and connectedness.   I move slower now so I have lots of time to notice the small things, to feel thankful for the never ending flow of beauty.   I can enjoy the sense of accomplishment I feel when I navigate yet another hard spot and come out on the other side able to laugh and feel love and gratitude for the guidance that got me through.   I meet the next moment with greater strength and resilience as I learn that it’s not too hard, I can do it.

My life has always had moments of beauty and moments when I paid close attention but a different quality emerges when all of life is met with presence.  There is no “time out.”  I used to be just biding time, getting through this moment so I could get to the next when I would really pay attention.  If every moment is challenging, then each must be met with total awareness.  The wonderful thing is that a beautiful life doesn’t come from everything being easy or exactly right, it comes from staying fully present with it just as it is.

It’s a bit of a stretch to compare the incredible trek Erin and Hig took with my own journey, but it gave me a great deal of pleasure to share their story and to allow their courage and endurance to flow into my life.  It makes each small step a little easier. 

Check out GroundTruthTrekking and A Long Trek Home by Erin McKittrick, published by The Mountaineers Books, Seattle, Washington.

Inner Sparks

Don read me an article from Scientific American  this morning called “Inner Sparks” which is an interview with Charles J. Limb, a surgeon and sax player  working at Johns Hopkins Medical Center studying human creativity by studying skilled musicians improvising music while having their brains scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.  The study highlights the parts of the brain that “light up” when improvising and the parts that “shut down.”  During improvisation the medial prefrontal cortex turns on and the lateral prefrontal cortex is inhibited.  The lateral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain involved in conscious self-monitoring, self-inhibition, and the evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of what you’re about to do.   The article highlights one of the reasons creative endeavors are so satisfying.  In the flow of creativity, we are not judging, condemning or questioning ourselves.

I will never be a skilled musician.  In addition to creativity, it takes musical skill, practice and focus.  But what fascinated me about this article is that I’ve experienced this cognitive shift in my own life, an increased urge to engage in creative activity and a very noticeable decrease in my level of inhibition.  It is definitely not a given that these two shifts result in a miraculous ability to create masterpieces, it may just be a superb opportunity to embarrass myself.   But, oddly enough, being embarrassed is no longer enough to inhibit sharing my enthusiasm for the amazing beauty of life and my excitement about the potential power of unconditional love.

It may be that the nerve damage which is creating pain has also damaged these parts of my brain, or it may be that the deep shifts in my psyche as the result of surrendering to the deepest part of my Self have shifted my perspective.  In any case, I’m willing to exchange ecstatic love for constricted struggling.  I suspect this willingness could be an embarrassment to those connected to me.

Possibly responding to the embarrassing “born again” quality of my enthusiasm, my daughter sent me an article this morning about Rick Perry.  The Texas governor officially proclaimed April 22 to April 24, 2011 as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.    It is an interesting example of how anything that smacks of the spiritual, especially for lovers of rationality, evokes a sense of separation from the practical.  While I certainly think praying for the wisdom to meet our lives with an inspired level of creativity can be concretely effective, the hard part of Governor Perry’s prayer is that he’s asking “for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”  Our normal way of life is what got us into this mess.  It will take looking from a decidedly “not normal” perspective to actually heal anything, let alone rebuild our communities.

This “not normal” perspective is the one beyond the limits of our rational minds.  Higher level creativity springs from wholeness of heart, mind and spirit.  The intuitive ability to perceive any situation and determine an effective response is heightened and the urge to respond with merely learned or habitual responses is inhibited.  It is a place that calls for authenticity, a demanding willingness to participate in life and to face each moment as fearlessly as we can.  It is recognizing that sometimes we will still create messes and we will still have to clean them up, hopefully having gained a higher level of clarity about what works and what doesn’t.

God isn’t going to fix it, but the creativity of the universe is ours for the asking if we have the courage to reach for it.  It means abandoning a lot of what we thought we knew, as well as our blind spots, our fear, and our sense of limitation.  It means opening to the kind of love Christ modeled but that hasn’t been tried yet by the rest of us.





Easter Morning

A few days ago I was in the kitchen sneaking a taste of dinner, exclaiming how delicious it was and my husband laughed and said that I had been saying that about everything.  He makes dinner nearly every night, it’s one of the things that it is hard for me to do.  I usually feel appreciative and am inclined not to find fault, but lately it is different and his comment made me realize that something really has shifted.  The entire world is suddenly beautiful, exquisitely, almost painfully beautiful.  Everywhere I look there is something so glorious; it is just calling out for love and appreciation.  Sometimes it is obvious, spring flowers riotously blooming in my yard, a beautiful song, or a lovely painting. 

Sometimes it is less obvious and more deeply mysterious.  Don had heard an NPR interview with one of the soldiers that appeared in Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s  award winning movie, “Restrepo”.   Tim’s death last Wednesday in Misrata, Libya while covering Gaddafi’s attack on rebel forces, seemed to call for a moment of witnessing, of seeing what had called him so strongly.  Saturday morning we spent watching “Restrepo”.  The movie ended.  We sat, tears streaming, feeling blessed by an opportunity to see and understand a reality we would rather not know.  The courage of both the photographers and the amazing men in the U.S. Army, who shared their courage, their fear, and their indomitable spirits so powerfully, evoked a wave of love and gratitude.  I don’t understand what the war in Afghanistan is about.  I need to spend some time attempting to understand.  The immense complexity was obvious in the film.  The incomprehension apparent in the faces of the Afghani elders coupled with the sheer impossibility of the military mission roused questions and didn’t attempt to answer them.

The film left me acutely aware of the change in how I see the world.  Everything calls for that heart opening response, evokes the desire to pour out love, to reach out and touch, to give whatever I can give.  There is not much I have – a smile, a laugh, a hug, shared tears.  So small, but it is all any of us really have.  It is only when we offer the small gifts that we have that the spirit much larger than us can move through us and into the world.  Mother Theresa knew this.  She looked out at the world around her, saw that there were people who needed what she had to give and she gave it.  It is all that any of us can do. 

Some of us face situations where what is before us is very large and if we really understood what was being asked of us, we wouldn’t even begin.  I think of Lincoln with the impossible task of the Presidency when the entire country was coming apart at the seams, I think of Martin Luther King, Jr. meeting with love the shocking level of hate endured by African-American citizens throughout our country.  I think of Gandhi.  I think of Barack Obama, willing to lead in a time when finding a path through seems impossible.  

These dramatic examples can erroneously shift our focus onto the people that history has framed so vividly for us to see, blinding us to awareness of the real power that makes the great things they did possible and the small things that each of us can do, great.  Riveting our attention on the outcome, we are blinded to the spirit that makes all things possible.   Our ability to contribute to the beauty all around us and to see our own beauty lies in looking deeper.  It lies in recognizing that all actions begin inside of us and carry forward into the world.  All great things and all the small ones that matter begin with what moves us forward.  It is possible to see and surrender to that force directly or to spend our lives wandering within the constricted confines of our minds.  Life acts through us, but usually we are tangled in our crusted beliefs, our fears and insatiable needs.  We can’t see the beauty, or give way to the force struggling to reach out through us.

This force:   God, Allah, Yahweh, Jah, Spirit in whatever name you clothe it, is not an idea, not a myth, but the power that pushes flowers up in our gardens in spring.  It is the power that moves every action we take.  Christ, Buddha, Muhammad and countless other great souls have tried to point out this force and move our hearts and minds to see and embrace it, to allow it to flow through our lives unimpeded by our fear.   Their teachings are meant to help us shed our unnecessary baggage and allow us to move through our lives sharing our hearts and minds with each other, creatively building a world.  They didn’t come to save us, but to teach us to save ourselves. 

Forty years ago I rode my bicycle, alone, before dawn out to the banks of an irrigation canal on the plains outside of Denver.  I was seventeen years old.  I carried my breakfast and a Bible and sat reading the story of Christ’s Resurrection as I watched the sunrise.  I was not a practicing Christian and I’m not sure what motivated my actions that day.   I felt Christ’s presence on that morning.  This Easter morning, forty years later, I again feel his presence  and I am humbled and awed.   He is not asking for our belief, he is asking us to see the world as he saw it, with infinite compassion and love.

Meeting Every Moment

We started taking our kids backpacking when they were five and two years old.  It was a lovely experience, so much so that we repeated it five or six times every summer until they were in college.  I used to think that it was the beauty and stillness of nature that brought out such wonderful qualities in the kids.  The hike in, never more than 3 or 4 miles, would always be a somewhat uncomfortable endeavor which we all endured because we knew that once we were “there” we’d all settle into a lovely blissful space where we enjoyed each other and spent hours doing small simple things.  We were never bored.  Even the hike out, which was the same trek as the one in, tended to be a bounding, happy affair, magically lacking all the effort it took to get there.

 I am just beginning to understand that, yes, nature is beautiful and quiet, but the quality that really changed these adventures was that I was totally present.  The kids were not merely responding to the change in venue, they were perfectly capable of that joy in the backyard, they were responding to the change in the quality of my presence.    In the woods I was totally willing to be present, letting go of the planning and effort it took to get there, and not yet worrying about what needed doing at home or at work when we got “back.”

I’ve had the opportunity to test this theory:   It is the quality of attention, not the external situation that determines the quality of my experience.  I have demyelination of the nerves in my brain and probably in my extremities as well.  The underlying infection that led to this condition has been treated, but the residual damage has meant three years of constant and intense burning pain that may never go away.  There is no known way to remedy the damage once done.  The only choice I have is in how I am going to respond.

 I didn’t always believe that and I jokingly tell people that I know all about how to make pain worse, but I haven’t yet figured out how to make it better.  Struggling through this time when all I wanted was for my life to be different, I was finally forced to surrender to how it actually is.  Reaching my limit, I was graced with an awareness that is more than adequate to cope with pain.  In this reality, living a beautiful and happy life, even with pain, is not only possible, it’s inevitable. 

When I speak about simply enjoying what is, it is with the recognition that “what is” is always infused with unconditional love.   The deep Silence that characterizes this love is a rich and connected place.  We are not separate from each other or from what is happening in the world around us.   Aware actions are moved by love and they carry with them an unmistakable and powerful force far beyond what we could ever do alone.

 It is no wonder that every culture in the world has struggled to articulate a description of this force.  We, in the hubris of our intellectual superiority, have often judged such stories as merely myth and rejected them as expressions of a simpler time.  The truth that propelled the writing of those stories is still a living, breathing reality.   Its expression in our time may take a very different form, but it will be rooted in the same infinite and eternal reality.  We will not really know it unless we are willing to actually meet it in every moment of our lives. 

Radically Different

I didn’t always understand how powerful it is to allow life to be as it is.  I grew up in a time where it was a civic responsibility to protest:  The Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and environmental recklessness.  But the duty to protest doesn’t stop there.  As life flows on and our bodies begin to collapse, our lovers fail to meet our needs, or our kids just aren’t grateful for all we did, we still protest.  When all our actions appear to change nothing in a fundamental way, when there is still war, hunger, injustice and environmental degradation, we protest even more.

Life offered me another way to see this.  It has not been easy to learn this and even harder to describe this shift.  My mind now rests in Silence much of the time.  The movement to act rises up out of the stillness and moves into my life, sometimes in emphatic response to something someone says, sometimes like a flower growing slowly out of the earth and very gradually blossoming.   From this place of stillness, I can look back through my life and see the voice of my deep Self guiding me.  When it showed up, the voice was always buried amid a million other voices, a cacophony of suggestions, longings or fear, pulling, pushing.   But from this clear place, I can look back and see the true voice and recognize the nudges that came from love calling me back to my true nature – they stand out with a different quality.  They always lead to deeper love and more effective actions.

I came to know that when that “feeling” came, I needed to follow it.  One time that stands out as particularly miraculous was feeling compelled to learn the art of sculpture.  I talked a local fire arts group into offering a figure sculpture class.  We had live models and a teacher from the local university.  Normally somewhat self conscious about my lack of art skills, I took to it immediately.  I practiced out of class constantly, forcing my husband to pose until he couldn’t stand it anymore.  What was so deeply satisfying to me was the quality of love that would arise from the quality of attention that I had to pay to a model in order to create a replica of their form.  In this moment of paying absolute attention to every detail of their shape, I fell in love with them.

Beauty is not dependent on outside attitudes or definitions, but on the quality of my attention.  I finally ran out of live models and had my husband take 10 photos of me from 10 different directions.  I used the photos to make a sculpture of myself.  The same feeling of love rose up and I felt a love and acceptance for my body that I’d never experienced before.  About a year later, I spontaneously lost 40 pounds and “resculptured” my body with love instead of judgment.  The joy came not from looking different, though that was nice, but from being released from the cruelty of my own judgment, not just about my appearance, but about my physical difficulties and the restrictions they entailed.

Everyone has this voice.  It may be near the surface or deeply buried.  In this time when the world is so desperately calling out for real change, it is imperative that we respond to the challenges facing us with a different level of love and wisdom than can be generated from our current level of mind.  In the deep Silence, oneness is no longer an idea, but a palpable, living reality.  Any action arising from this place of deep connection is taken from love and how it moves out into the world is radically different.  A radically different world demands us to be radically different.  Not easy, but it is our only hope.

Noticing the Quiet, Sane Insistence of Love

Sitting at the end of some kind of journey, like one of those heroines in a kid’s adventure story.  She stumbles from one mishap to the next, totally clueless.  In the end, it turns out the crazy journey was a quest and she eventually bursts through.

This hasn’t been a journey in space.  It has taken time.  The odd thing is that the only real movement has been in my mind.  Looking back through all those years from this moment, I’m actually back where I started from, but somehow I couldn’t see it then.  Now I know, in every fiber of my being that unconditional love is absolutely real, it is the fabric of the entire universe.  It is true, it is everywhere and it is now.  All doubt is gone, all need to struggle, to seek, to find, grasp, or avoid has drifted away like fog on a sunny morning.  Silence, peace, absolute safety and love, every moment.

I wanted to sit and try to remember what I saw before and try to understand how it is that life managed to massage my mind into seeing what it so desperately couldn’t see.  From this perspective, I look back through my life and the pull and push of love is so blatantly obvious that I can only wonder at how such a simple reality could appear so complex, troubled and insane.   It is obvious that I can’t really see what I used to see.  Once the mind opens and sees, it can’t completely choose not to see.  I can never really capture the craziness.  But it probably doesn’t matter because anyone reading this probably knows only too well the inside of a tortured mind.

I could go back and slog painfully through as much as I can remember, but there doesn’t seem to be much point in that.  Everyone knows the feeling of endless struggle, the sense of never knowing enough, being good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, or safe enough.  But looking back, I see the thread of sanity, the little cords sent through my tangled mind that pulled my attention to where it needed to go, that led me to try to know more, to seek for solutions when I couldn’t see any.  The part of me that did know and reached through to the parts that didn’t – that called all the pieces back into wholeness, where everything is one and it all makes sense.

We live in an amazing time where anything we really need to know is available.  Every meaningful endeavor that humanity has ever engaged in has left traces that can be picked up and followed.  Books, teachers, art, music, ideas, systems – enough ideas and images to spin any mind.  At every moment, there is something calling your attention and awareness, some image or idea seeking entry to your mind.  It may be formal, like the schooling we all went through as children, the college education we sought later, the informal self-help we try in desperation when we are in pain.  We learn new ways to move, to explore, fine tuning our body’s skills, our mind’s skills, our interpersonal skills, and our ability to make a living. 

Forward through this maze appears a random tumble struggling to grasp and hold what we long for, pushing away and avoiding all that we feel holding us back, blocking our way.  The world’s absolute confusion, the enormity of the pain and suffering all around us, the never ending examples of the insane choices we make in dealing with each other and the planet, loom daunting and insurmountable.

Noticing the quiet, sane insistence of love in such madness is not easy, but it is the only way.  What does it look like when it shows up in tiny tendrils in the midst of confusion?  It appears in infinite ways - unique for each of us, pushing, pulling, and then hiding in all the places we don't want to look.  We need only invite it in.

January 10, 2011 - A New Job

I got laid off from my job yesterday.  The boss came in and said, “You know, you’re hurting yourself working this way.  You’re in pain and you keep pushing.  It isn’t good for you and it doesn’t work this way.”

But today I was offered a new job.  I think this one must be a better fit.  I showed up for work, I don’t even know what the job is, but oddly enough I felt perfectly prepared, like I’d done everything I needed to do to get ready.   I’ve never felt this way before.  I was always a bit worried that I didn’t know enough, wasn’t good enough, had some hidden faults that were bound to come up and ruin my work.  But now I feel only absolute confidence, clarity and strength, resting in a bubbling pool of joy.

It appears that all I’m asked to do is to show up and let the delicious vibration moving through my being tell me what to do.  There is nothing to know, nothing I need to plan or understand, just to allow all that I am to flow into that vibration.  I watch in wonder.  “What is this work and what is it we’re building?”  I guess I’ll wait and see.

On top of the new job, my husband seems to have left.  Where once there was this person that I watched, waiting to see which way I should move, feeling my way around his fears and desires, there is only empty space and all that looks back at me is love.