Lituya and Katmai
Alaska
U.S.A.
2014
He made it to the moon
He promised to wait
SHe did

The Other

Alive, the world embraces me and I am drawn into the mystery of myself.

Every movement reveals aspects I never knew.

A kaleidoscope of colors, sounds and scents forming patterns redolent with meaning, swirling, evaporating, dissolving into oneness before emerging,

Penetrating and poignant, vivid, unique and overarching.

The patterns form, coalesce and converge into clarity.

A brief flash as they slip through my grasp.

I am moved, I cannot resist.

Clarity gives way to confusion and the magnitude of what I do not understand sweeps over me.

I am dissolved, made new, changed yet again.

Silence

Sometimes I seek the silence, sinking into stillness, resting.

But at times the silence seeks me, pulling me into the depths,

Breathing subsides,  darkness demands my presence, compels my surrender.

I drown, drifting in the currents until I am released.

I am here, returned to this simple moment that just is,

Moved and held by wholeness,

Breathless in the beauty, humbled to the core.

Tulips Transcended

Silence waits with expectant hush for darkness to descend,

Transforming trios transcend the embrace of earth and water.

Curiosity and compassion conquer cowardice.

Stillness settles.

Home.

Circe climbs to the top; she stops.

I watch from the door, my feet on the floor

I open the door.

Slowly she climbs down and flows into me,

Briefly.

Mesmerized, she turns and climbs again. I watch and let go,

Now that I know how to be.

Life

Life is spirit playing with matter and energy to create form.  Trees, babies, songs, poems, dances, cities and gardens.  The only mistake we can make is to believe that anything could not be how it is.  As long as it is real, it is unlimited.  Why not make it beautiful?

Spirit can also be understood as the power of love.

Dancing Into Death and Hence Life

Rebecca's blog post today, Dancing to Completion, stirred my thoughts about dying and hence about living.  Last week as the release of toxins, triggered by the drug I am taking to clear them, stressed my heart enough to make breathing difficult, my pulse race and my legs swell, dying felt like a very real possibility.  It is interesting to face the reality of dying.  In the past such musings have been speculative.   When the reality feels immanent, the question deepens.

In the early days of the pain escalating, I was blessed to discover that there was peace and even joy if I stayed present, surrendering to the deepest part of me to sustain my well being.  I felt no fear of death.  In fact I was envious when someone else simply died; I felt the burden of being sentenced to a long life of endless pain.

This recent reflection convinced me that I am whole, there is nothing unfinished, nothing that I need to do.  But as I contemplated that I might suddenly  be released from the pain, the preciousness of life flamed up and sadness overwhelmed me.  The opportunity to love is worth whatever the price.  Life on this planet and all the beautiful beings who share it glowed with heart wrenching beauty.   I am choosing life and that choice feels eternal, whatever happens next.

Leonard Cohen's song "Going Home" captures the spirit of knowing "I do not have a burden", I have been burnished clean and the next steps I take will be "without the costume that I wore".

As I was finishing the draft of this piece an angel in the form of Sharon Stussman appeared at my door and introduced me to Ceres Community Project and now I know my physical stamina will be returning to me.  My life, every aspect of it, prepared me to help make this happen in Humboldt County.   

The opportunity to love just showed up.

Floating Free

The ship of my life foundered on the rocks

The heavy timbers groaned and gave way

Wreakage flowing to the sea

I float free, a leaf swirling, dancing in the current.

Again, Rebecca took the words and this time not only responded with a drawing, but with several.  The first tries were vivid bright colors, reflective of excitement and joy and while freedom can be that, they somehow felt too bright, too shiny.  When she sent me this one I knew she had understood perfectly and had captured the subtle sense that I hadn't quite acknowledged.  Seeing her drawing I understood that this freedom is very tender yet, the dance is only a slow swirl and depends on the water for movement.  My body has much healing to do and I must flow as I am taken.  How lovely to have a friend who can reveal my truth to me beyond what I can see myself.

Raining Poems

Words raining down
Echoing the essence of the moment,
Flowing on.

Rebecca Stauffer and I seem to have invented a new form of dance improvisation, I share words, she replies in images.

So Beautiful, it Hurts

Life is slow, luxuriously satisfying and easy.  I am blissful, content and joyful.  I am also in intense pain as my body tries to turn itself inside out with intense muscle spasms.  I find it impossibly funny that when everything in my life looks like it should be horrible, I’m finding delight in the fact that my new wheelchair can zoom and I haven’t moved this fast in years.  I hardly ever leave the house because I hurt too much.  I can barely carry on a conversation without writhing in pain and needing to take breaks to disappear into the ever soothing silence and yet I am at peace.  I have food, shelter, care, beauty and a fantastic love life.  There is immediacy, an invitation to stay present even more compelling than a great vacation.   There is a simplicity and beauty I would love to capture and share, like capturing a beautiful sunrise in a painting, but this beauty must be tasted, known from the inside out.  I can’t capture it in words or pictures and hand it to someone and expect them to understand.  We all have the capacity to taste an orange, but no amount of words or pictures can actually convey the experience of eating an orange, the burst of sweetness and tartness. 

One of the hardest things right now is being so happy and seeing so many others discontent and unhappy.   I have lots of time to surf the net and see how much the world revolves around fear.  Economics, entertainment and health care all revolve around fear.   It doesn't have to be this way.  It is not the truth, it is merely the distorted way we view the world.  We have the ability to creatively meet each moment with joy.  We can drop all the impediments to seeing and knowing that we worked so hard to build when we were utterly convinced our lives depended on the strength and attractiveness of the walls we meet the world with.  Inside we know, we just don’t believe we know and we don’t take the time to listen.  We believe what we need is outside of us and we must struggle to get it if it’s good and fight it off if it’s bad, but it is much more mysterious than that.  Is there another way?  Is it true that you actually do know?  It is only the curiosity to look that can take you there.  Can you face the truth of how you really feel and drop the real questions deep into your being and be still enough to hear the answers and brave enough to listen?

The Paradox of Presence

My life has simplified enormously.  As nearly all of the “normal” ways that people occupy their time become impossible for me to do, I have been left to explore a simpler range of options.  I’m not sure what I expected life to be like when I stopped working but the reality feels surprising.  It is not uncommon for damage to the central nervous system to produce severe muscle spasms and the options are exercise, drugs, or even surgery to sever the nerves.  But living that reality, figuring out what it means to navigate life’s simplest tasks like walking to the bathroom or making a cup of tea get a lot more complicated and require a surprising degree of creativity.   I can’t pretend it’s all bliss and ease, but it’s a lot more of that than I would have expected.  I actually feel a little guilty that I have this amazing freedom to do anything I want – no one is expecting me to do anything. 

I am completely free to do whatever the moment suggests.  I don’t have to struggle with what I should do; I just do what calls to be done.   Some of what calls are great books, movies, conversations with friends, sitting in Silence.  I also find myself becoming ever more curious to play with ways to ease my struggling body – what happens when I lean into the spasms, feel the movement and where it wants to go.  The idea of “exercising” in the sense of finding a “plan” of appropriate exercises and following it feels disconnected and abusive.  Instead a sense of dance arises and it makes more sense to respond with love and attention to each physical disturbance, feeling into what it is asking for, responding with respect and curiosity.   That could be anything from screaming in pain to struggling to figure out how to move my body from the bed to the bathroom when the muscles are so painfully locked that it is impossible to stand up.  It could also be playfully exploring the strength and persistence, the intense sensation of my body trying to unwind.  It feels good to explore the spaciousness surrounding the intensity, experimenting with unconventional movements that stretch a muscle contraction so that it moves out of constriction if only for a moment.  There isn't a need to “think” about what to do, all the actions arise out of the intense movement flowing through my body in unpredictable and ever changing patterns.

This immersion in pure presence, just being where I am is peaceful, easy and more loving than I could have imagined and I feel a flood of gratitude that I have been given the opportunity to explore this mysterious landscape.  Everything that I formerly worried about and spent my life working to take care of, like paying the bills, taking care of the house, running errands , working, are now being magically taken care of.  There is enough money; there are wonderful people who help me, most especially Don.  I could spend time worrying that I am causing trouble to them, but the reality is that there is such a sense of love and sharing that I can’t keep up the story of helpless victim imposing on others.  

There is a lot of mystery in this because I sense that I always had this choice.  Has there really ever been a moment when I was not just living in the present moment and doing what the moment called for?  Why should working with excruciatingly painful muscle spasms be easier than meeting the daily tasks that used to show up in my life?  Why does it seem easier instead of harder?  This is a very interesting question and I know that the relationship I have now with my life was always available to me but I didn't understand how to accept it.   I was busy being “responsible”, which is just a word that disguises a whole catalog of ways that I needed to prove that I was worthy, that I was right, that I could do all the things I was supposed to do so that I didn't need to depend on anyone else or impinge on them.  It was always a question of defending my right to be a separate person taking up space, making impacts that I struggled to keep beneficial or at least benign. 

Now when I can no longer do much for anyone, not even myself, and I regularly rely on others to help me, the joke is that all that trouble was deluded.  I am not separate.  I could no more choose not to impact those around me than I could choose not to breathe.  I have always relied on the benevolent actions of all the people in my life, but because I was so focused on my own capability, I had not the humility to recognize the extent of the gratitude that I owed to the wondrous munificence all around me.   I don’t need to prove myself anymore; I can cede the effort to the love that is the fundamental energy moving life.  It is in love that I meet the pain; it is in love that my needs are met and it is in love that I’m finally able to feel gratitude that I am truly free to feel at ease. 

Afternoon in the Hammock

As the reality of letting go of my business sinks in, I realize I am changing.  I knew my body needed something different and I’ve been doing that, typing from the keyboard on my lap in a hammock while I look at my hammock height screen on the table next to me, a truly unique arrangement.  I’ve been starting over, getting to know my physical body in the way I knew it as a very young child.  Instead of just working in spite of the pain, I’m now playing with it, seeing what happens when I move in a certain way, playing with different ways to sit, different pillows, different positions, the hammock!  My “office” now looks more like a five year old’s playroom.  Yoga props litter the floor and it has a very random feel.  But even more surprising than the physical shifts are the profound psychological shifts accompanying them.  

 

As I relax physically, I find myself releasing a sense of what I thought it meant to be responsible and beginning to see a new kind of responsibility emerging.  I helped people but as my physical difficulties increased, I stopped innovating and stuck to what I knew I could do well.  I felt useful, made money and had a chance to talk to a lot of wonderful people on a regular basis.   When it went away there was at first a sense of collapse,  just letting myself recognize how hard I had been “trying” to work “in spite of” the pain.  Until I let it go I couldn’t see how rigid I had to hold myself to do this.  The escalating pain made it clear that I must stop.  I’ve spent years watching what I could do in the world shrink and narrow.  Walking, cooking, cleaning, driving, and sleeping have all diminished.  But the odd thing about coming to the place where everything leaves is the bizarre sense of freedom and curiosity that arise out of that still point.  There is nothing that I have to do, so that means the only question is “what can I do?” 

Wild bursts of creativity begin to leap up, I feel an intense interest in all sorts of random topics and find absolute delight in watching late sunbeams while sipping tea and feel a pull to explore each moment to its fullest.   I find the list of things I could do filling up with different possibilities in every direction, even with my limitations.  But I am  no longer trying to live that diminished life, I am trying to live this one and in this one, there is only what I have, not what I don’t have.  I am no longer “trying.”   I am doing and delighting in, thankful for every wondrous opportunity that invades my day.  I am reading five different books, studying German online, doing yoga, meditating and being more profoundly aware of the world than I have ever been.

    

I also watched this lovely video that my friend Kathy O’Leary drew my attention to, it echoes the magnitude of the shift.

Anita Moorjani 'Dying To Be Me' Interview by Renate McNay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jFN9XQeEn4

Solo Contact Improv

I have been navigating living with intense neurological pain for four years.  The journey has taken many turns and my relationship to the pain has slowly but profoundly shifted.  My first response was double strength Vicodin for a month when my doctor and I both thought the pain was a temporary response to antibiotics clearing a Lyme infection.  When the pain persisted and continued to escalate we did a few more tests to see if the pain was related to any skeletal problems.  I finally accepted that while the infection may have decreased, the gradual 20 year nerve damage was not to be dismissed so easily.  At first I did what any normal person would do, I let my mind run wild with visions of living for decades with intense pain that no one could substantially change.   I tried more neurologically appropriate pain medications, but they made me feel weird and had only a minimal impact on the pain.  At this point I was forced to accept the unacceptable, a miracle that only became possible when I disconnected from the fear tapes and relied on the deeper wiser place that 35 years of meditation had introduced me to.   I could at least love, laugh and enjoy the rest of my life, even when it hurt.  I became immensely grateful for every nuance of beauty and wonder.

Gradually I was able to be present with the pain.  I could stay in the room with it, listen to its story, and marvel at how deep in time the roots were buried.  I could feel the myriad people who shared the deep fear at the root of it, most powerfully my mother.   I could sit beside it and listen.   I could allow the pain to be there and I could function, not physically, but emotionally and intellectually.  I figured out how to continue my consulting business at home, and my husband gradually took over cooking, cleaning, shopping and everything else it takes to run a house.  I just struggled to do as much as I could without biting anyone's head off or messing anything up.  I was with the pain, yet still separate from it, not fully interacting with it, holding it gingerly, a bit afraid of moving because it made it hurt even more.  It was easier to hide out at my desk and be "useful."

More pain, accompanied by violent and persistent muscle spasms, began making it even harder to work and cope.   Muscles that have been atrophied for years were regaining muscle tone and the ability to move, but only in violent painful spasms.  Perhaps this escalation is a good thing, or at least could be.  After my mother died unexpectedly, something shifted.  She too had suffered physical pain and difficulty functioning and we shared many of the same issues, but she was not easily able to release the fear and needed to rely on pain medication to make her life endurable.   At last she is fearless and pain free and her love and support seem to reach out to me in a flood of momentum that encourages wading in deeper.

Separate is no longer good enough.  It suddenly feels imperative that I stop working and release the strong competent watcher who could continue to answer everyone's questions while my body bravely struggled on.  I need full access to my power and creativity instead of just plugging into what I know how to do.   I long to surrender to not knowing and give myself space to explore.    Now in the midst of the rapid dismantling of my 20 year consulting business a new relationship to my body is just beginning to emerge.  It seems to be an odd blend of yoga and solo contact improv. 

My daughter, Lauren, is a dancer and for the last several years she has been exploring contact improv.  When I sent her a draft of this piece with my fuzzy way to think about contact improv, she sent me a fantastic description, which is so good I’m adding it as an addendum for anyone curious about really understanding improv.  Her  description echoes my experience:   “…, the subtleties can become very loud--the slightest shift of weight or muscle tensing in one's dancing peers can inspire a whole, impulsive new spin of movement.  In this way, our 'state of being' can be broadcast into life, something bigger, evolving, and constantly feeding the next moment.  And then sometimes stillness settles.  It just does.  One can think about it and search for it, but it is most satisfying when you relinquish control and let the dance decide for itself. “

My body is calling my awareness into this sort of dance.  If I begin a yoga movement and encounter pain and resistance and stay fully present I can detect tiny openings, a slight pull to move in some direction.  The movement expands and picks up momentum, moves until it reaches its limit and settles back into stillness.   If I rest in the stillness, the sensation slowly builds into another movement which I follow.  Lauren’s clear descriptions sift in and expand my capacity to trust the movement and I marvel that both my mother and my daughter seem able to send me clarity and encouragement.  After an hour or so I' m profoundly tired and sore and head off to a hot bath with Epsom salts followed by a long period of deep silence.

I still hurt but I feel a flood of curiosity and excitement.  I am in my body, an amazing feeling like when I first learned to swim and could keep afloat and move.  I don't know where it's going,  I no longer remember what it's like to be without pain, but as I explore the burning fire I can perceive subtle differences where a movement has a flowing quality that is pleasing in comparison to the stuck contraction.    I begin to think that my brain and my muscles are struggling to reconnect to each other and need my conscious cooperation to rebuild the lost connections.  This may be a figment of my imagination, yet I am enveloped in a flood of enthusiasm that gives me momentum to get up and work with it again and again.  I am reminded of the earnest persistence my children showed when they learned to walk.  I am experimenting; I have nothing to lose, but I sense the possibility that I may have something to gain - another chance to walk again.

Contact Improvisation 

Lauren Ehnebuske Day sent me this fantastic description to help me in writing this, but it is also helping me trust the knowing inside myself that is capable of “following the flow.” 

Usually, CI happens with multiple people beginning to dance together with an awareness of one another and some kind of physical contact.  It is beautiful in that the more each dancer is centered and inspired in and of themselves, the easier and better the connection between the dancers becomes.  Ideally, each dancer could, theoretically, just be dancing by themselves--it is that fluid and easy.  If one dancer is just in a 'support role' mentality, there is a lot less for his or her partners to engage, and the partnership tends to fall off or take a lot of work.  That said, if one or more dancers is overly focused on themselves and not being present with his or her partners, the partnership is equally doomed.  The power is in simultaneous presence with oneself and the peers and/or world around one--the whole becoming something more powerful than any of the pieces.  Since it is improvisation, you never know where it is going.  You have to be fully present, able to respond with nearly no delay, yet also temper things with common sense about not hurting anyone or anything in the process or remembering choreographic intent.

To dance fully in CI takes all one’s faculties, mental/spiritual/physical.  Even a small shared rolling-point-of-contact* can be deeply engaging if one really pays attention.  (*Remember how in gymnastics I used to practice rolling a ball along my arms from one hand to the other?  Well, imagine that with another body instead of the ball, and that's an example of rolling-point-of-contact, though it can happen with any body surface).

There are multiple "camps" of CI.  Some say you can't use your hands, hoping to help people relate to one another in less familiar ways.  Some disciplines focus on a point of shared weight, which people can roll around between them (elbow to hip can roll into shoulder to thigh, for example) and idealize a dance where that point of contact is never broken, it just moves around.  The side of contact that I like to immerse myself in is more closely related to modern dance.  Literal touching is not necessarily constant as it is with the rolling-point-of-contact: the momentum of movement trumps it. The dancers are aware of one another's trajectories as well as their mass, and they can actually respond to the velocity as if touching, without touching.  They can carry it along, spin against it, go with it, and even bounce it back--all things that are more easily understood with a physical connection, but that can be quite tangible regardless of spatial contact among in-tune dancers.  Both main camps, rolling-point-of-contact and the dancier versions, rely on rotation to facilitate coming in and out of connection.  To come together, two dancers can spin like two gears, and when their paths are tangent, they have effectively eased together without going against either dancer's trajectory.  Also, all camps of contact rely to greater or lesser extents on improvisation--even a choreographed ballroom dance will likely involve in-the-moment responses to a partner's unanticipated weight shift.

After practicing CI a while, the subtleties can become very loud--the slightest shift of weight or muscle tensing in one's dancing peers can inspire a whole, impulsive new spin of movement.  In this way, our 'state of being' can be broadcast into life, something bigger, evolving, constantly feeding the next moment.  And then sometimes stillness settles.  It just does.  One can think about it and search for it, but it is most satisfying when you relinquish control and let the dance decide for itself.  When everyone in a group of dancers is tuned in, the "oiji board effect" can be incredibly powerful.  There is something in muscles and movement that seems to have a mind of its own

An intermediary to contact improv is dancing with the surfaces of the built environment around us.  All dance has to interact with whatever surface is taking the gravity of the dancers (usually just the floor), but this relationship can definitely be exaggerated.  Sometimes it's fun to roll my back along the wall, for instance, or go upside down and walk my feet along the wall, or push off the back of the couch with my arms.  Although the opportunity to be present with our "partners" in this case does not seem to have the richness of engaging other animate objects, it can still involve a way of 'experiencing' I associate with CI: open, playful, accepting, responsive.

A lot of our lives are caught up in the mental constructs of "not hurting anyone" and "remembering our choreography."  The more these thought patterns dominate our brains, the less successful contact improvisation usually is and the less we can let in the powerful creative, "being" powers inside and among us.  When we have trained ourselves to instinctually not land on one another's knees or heads using what seems like muscle memory or brain stem thinking, then we are freer from the frontal lobe constructs (in which we live from day to day) while still being able to get along alright practically, and that's nice.  I am pretty sure that we can get further out of our minds as we usually know them by delving deeper into our presence with our partner(s).  When the flow is really happening, people don't get hurt.  If the flow is happening strongly and then one or more partners gets distracted and stops being present with the moment, bad things can happen instantly.  At the very least your partners will feel your loss and usually respond by being less creative.

At this point, you are already dancing.  You can mentally pull out, but you'll get hurt.  Follow the dance in its natural trajectory, whatever that may be, and you might be safer, more whole, and have more to offer the
world.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDOMzj3MqL0&feature=related

The Pursuit of Passion

Months ago, in posting a response to an article by Chris Dierkes in Beams and Struts, he suggested that I try writing about my experience with Savitri.  My love affair with this poem is somewhat mysterious and it had never occurred to me to attempt to articulate it.  I was surprised when I found words showing up.  Judging from the responses I've received from friends, it is not an easily accessible article.  While not intellectually complicated, it points to a way of viewing reality that is unfamiliar and rarely articulated.  The real power is in a place beyond words, so writing can only hint and if you don't recognize the experience it won't make sense.  But I would encourage anyone attempting to read it, to hold it loosely, to let it speak to something deeper and more mysterious, yet fundamentally accessible to all of us and don't worry if your mind understands.  My special thank you to Joyce Jonte for giving me permission to use her images.

http://www.beamsandstruts.com/articles/item/1020-the-pursuit-of-passion

Dumpster Diving

This post was inspired when thinking of my new friend, Rebecca Stauffer, and my nephew, Asa Taccone, I can feel them both pulled to follow the aliveness.

I was realizing this morning that my spiritual journey has resembled dumpster diving more than it has any sort of “path;” random digging for what I needed when I needed it.  I’ve dug through more ideas and perspectives than I can even count, occasionally hitting a jackpot where I spent a long time gleaning everything I could, such as the decade of being enraptured by Ken Wilbur and the last decade captivated by Sri Aurobindo’ s  poem, Savitri.  Today it dawned on me that this plebian and apparently random process has produced results that I don’t commonly see elsewhere and hence there may be some usefulness, or at least novelty, in sharing some of the conclusions I’ve come to. 

Fully alive, the pull to act has a particular flavor; it is juicier, more vibrant, and more vivid than everything surrounding it.   For me, keenly feeling the inadequacy of all the ways I knew how to act and frustrated with the cultural conventions pulling at me, I was compelled to struggle to find a way to authentically navigate marriage, parenting and working.   I needed to figure out what it meant to really love.   I grasped at every hand hold I could find that felt real and alive, even if I didn’t understand why or how it could help.   This journey wasn’t easy or painless but it was convincing and it led me to deeply trust the reality I am embedded in and to feel at home and at ease.

 I suspect the pull of the real has different flavors for different people, as it should.  Yet there is something absolutely universal in the pulse of aliveness.  If you follow it through its myriad paths it leads you home, to the authentic, the important, the deeply satisfying.  But the goal is not some hypothetical wonderland; it is to the ever changing, effervescent manifestation of the most unique part of you.  From that place, life connects seamlessly with everything that is and the journey takes on a lovely lilting perfection.

There are tricks.  We think we need to run from pain, to protect ourselves, to move away from anything that hurts or that deeply challenges us.  We think we need to move toward what feels more familiar, more comfortable, more at ease, satiated at least for a moment.  But if you really pay attention, life sparkles more vividly when you dive in, when you allow yourself to meet each moment as it is.  Some moments are simple and beautiful, some moments are painful and scary, some are oddly empty or boring, some are heartbreaking, some are sad, some are joyful, and some are exhilarating.  But each moment holds a treasure when you can meet it as it is, as you are.  There is nothing to change, nothing to fix, nothing to do but to ride the real where it takes you, to let it pull you into the open free spaces where what is begging to manifest is calling, pulling, inviting.

Often the path is not clear and there are moments when the wave crashes over you, darkness and no way to breathe.   It is these moments where you must kick for the surface, push your head up into the light and air and take a deep breath.  There are other moments when you are locked in a closet and it’s too dark to see the door and you have to listen deeply to the silence until you hear the hint being whispered in your ear, the hint that tells you which way to go, what rope being dangled in front of you is the one that is important for you to pull yourself up with.

At other times, the dance moves at a dizzying pace all around you and your head is spinning so fast you can no longer think.  The center calls and you can feel for the still point from which all the spinning comes, the still point where it can all rush by you, but you are solid, you are still, you are held in the embrace of the whole.

The wonder is that if we struggle through all the layers of fog and confusion and come to the place that is uniquely home, we are all at the exact same place, we can smile, relax, drink a cup of tea and laugh together about how something so simple could have ever looked so hard.

The Courage to Love

I woke up this morning thinking about Dr. King.  His words, either reading them or listening to him speak, can still move me to tears over 40 years later.  He served us all.  His willingness to feel the pain and suffering of his congregation, his community, both African-American and white, changed our hearts and minds.  He was able to instill both the courage to protest and the courage to hope.  The willingness to actually feel pain appears to have the magical ability to generate love.  Dr. King’s power came from his ability to call us all back to love.  This means for some of us that we had to face our own darkness, our bigotry and narrow-mindedness, our reluctance to allow ourselves to truly witness our neighbor’s pain.  It meant for others the courage to face powerlessness, despair or shame.  For all of us, he epitomized what it meant to hope, to dare to believe in human dignity.

It occurs to me that both white guilt and African-American struggles with self-esteem come from our inability to really feel this pain, to drink this cup to the bitter dregs.  We want to hide behind analysis and concepts rather than endure the wrenching reality of feeling our own pain.  We were willing to go part way with Dr. King but we hold back from truly allowing our hearts to break and until we do, until we can allow the immensity of this pain to be felt as a living, breathing reality in our bodies and our souls, we have kept it locked away from the power of our love.

Ideas are a wonderful way to make sense of things, but they can also buffer us from actually feeling.  Ideas can move us to anger or action, but they cannot move us to love.  It is only the courage to surrender fully, to actually feel the pain in our stomach, the tightening in our chest, our deeply held tears that has any hope of releasing and allowing us to access the real power of our hearts.  Love is not an idea – it is a vibrant power, the only real force for change that we’ve ever had.

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.