Vision of Wholeness

I've been a practicing ceremony celebrant for over a year and a half now, and it's a more fulfilling vocation than I could have imagined.  It's really confirmed for me the value of ceremony and ritual as a tool for transformation, as well as celebration.

There's a place just outside of Taos on the Rio Grande that's become a "sacred spot" for me, where I've now done five ceremonies, beginning before I was even a celebrant when I scattered my brother's ashes there.  In a significant way, that was the beginning of my journey into celebrancy, although I didn't know it at the time.

Since then, I've performed two weddings there (both same sex), a baptism (the bride in the second wedding I ever did requested it), and a personal ceremony that was one of the most meaningful, important, transformative things I've ever done in my life.

It was a ceremony for forgiveness, healing, and closure with my ex.  He had begun a new relationship almost a year earlier, and I had a very hard time dealing with that.  Long story short - when I mentioned in my last post that I went through a period of utter misery, that's what it was about.  But I had to find a way to accept it, if for no other reason that we have a child together, and there was now a new mother-figure in her life.

That process began last fall, when I had a dream about my ex's new partner on what happened to be her birthday.  In the dream, we were talking across a table, and there was a palpable feeling of love and tenderness between us.  I woke up feeling the same way; in fact, it permanently changed the way I felt about her.  I felt compelled to reach out to her, and I sent her an email message, to which she responded with such openness and kindness that it moved me to tears.  It still took several months after that for us to connect in person, but when we did, I knew we had crossed a threshold into a much more pleasant and positive part of the journey.

Meanwhile, my ex and I decided to do the forgiveness ceremony.  I'd found a resource online for us to use called 6 Steps to Completing Relationships.  It entailed writing down resentments, apologies, things you forgive the other person for, things you're grateful to the person for, and things you appreciate about them and will miss; and then expressing all those things to each other.

It was an incredibly powerful thing to do this.  When we were done reading our lists, we burned them together and threw the ashes into the river.  We cried and hugged and knew without a doubt we had truly moved into a new way of relating with each other, a rebirth of a relationship that was not just about raising our daughter, but was based on a love and willingness to grow with each other, and that now included his new partner.  I felt expansive, clean, whole.  At peace.  Full of joy and acceptance.

Fast forward to the present.  He and his partner have been going through some really difficult stuff related to a health problem she's been having, and the other night he and I talked on the phone about it.  When I got off the phone, I was shaken up.  I felt the need to process the complex emotions I was having about all of it and to in some way focus healing intentions toward these emotions, and her, and him, and the whole situation.

I had a sudden urge to make a collage (which I haven't done since I made my 2014 collage last December).  My plan was to give it to my ex and his partner, and I would keep a photo of it for myself. I got out a bunch of magazines, put on my awesome Pandora shuffle, and sat down at my dining room table for the next few hours, staying up way past my bedtime.

During the whole process of making the collage, and especially when I stood back and gazed at the finished product, I felt that same sense of healing and wholeness and expansive warmth I had when I first connected with my ex's partner, and when my ex and I did our ceremony.  The feeling that we are all together, part of a great tribe on a momentous journey.

"Vision of Wholeness"

Vision Statement

I have been pondering vision.  This is largely because I got contact lenses a week ago, and because of who I got them from.  There's a vision care office in Taos called RealEyes, which, at my editor's suggestion,  I recently wrote about for my newspaper column.  You can read that here. From the inspiring conversation I had with Dr. Ratzlaff and his wife Fiona, I decided make them my eye care providers.

I wore contact lenses from the age of 14 until I was pregnant with my first child at 23.  Since your eyes change shape when you're pregnant, contacts became too uncomfortable, and I just never went back to them.  But now I'm ready for a change.  I'm tired of glasses, of the weight on my face, of the tiny little field of vision.  (And part of it is vanity, I'll admit, although glasses have sometimes afforded me the "sexy librarian" compliment.)

Dr. Ratzlaff told me things I've never heard from an eye doctor in the 33 years I've been wearing glasses.  One fascinating thing he told me was that with correction my eyes are much better than 20/20, which apparently is pretty unusual.  And then he said that with my current prescription I was actually overcorrected, which is not such a great thing.

So now I have contact lenses, and my prescription is slightly weaker, and it's like living in a different world.  I'm so used to being able to see at great distances that it's strange, for instance, to be driving and not be able to read all the faraway signs.  During my followup appointment, I found out that even with the weaker prescription, I still have 20/15 vision.  I had always thought that 20/20 equaled "perfect," but it turns out there is no such thing as perfect vision.

Because you always end up sacrificing something.

If you can see at great distances, you generally don't see as well close up, and vice versa.  So by having great distance vision with a stronger prescription, I was straining when reading and such, and ultimately weakening and stressing my eyes.

I can tell the difference now.  In the normal range of vision of say, a space the size of an average room, I can see much more clearly and my eyes feel more relaxed.  It's also very nice to not feel like I'm looking at things through a small window.  So in this sense, my world is bigger, more immediate.  (And things that are right in front of me appear almost startlingly larger.  I went shoe shopping the day I got my contacts, and they all looked too huge to possibly fit my feet, but then I'd pick up a pair and they'd be two sizes too small.)  But in terms of the world-at-large - well, it's less large, at least the sharp edges of it.

This is not a complaint.  My point is that it's fascinating to see from yet another perspective, another angle, how relative and subjective the experience of being alive in the world is.  To confirm to myself yet again how on the one hand, the least little shifts in circumstances can have a great effect, and on the other, how it makes no difference at all to how I feel at the deepest level.  Does being able to clearly see my legs while I'm shaving them in the bathtub make my experience of taking a bath better?  Yes and no.

The real question is, does being able to see my body clearly make me inhabit it more fully?  Does clearer vision make me more present?  Does improving my physical vision make my spiritual vision clearer?  I don't necessarily have any articulate answers, but these are the questions I'm holding at the moment.  This is the adventure I'm on.

One of the things that Dr. Ratzlaff eagerly talked about during our interview, and that totally sold me on him, was how the eyes are an extension of the brain.  When he later did my eye exam, he commented on the saying, "The eyes are the window of the soul."  It's true not only on a metaphorical level, but in the sense that when the pupil is dilated and the doctor shines a light into it, he can see the blood vessels in the eye; he's literally seeing into the person.  He pointed out that this is the only time you can look directly at blood vessels without cutting a person open.  I had never thought about it that way.

Because I'm a grant writer, I'm also now thinking about the meaning of a "vision statement."  And because I'm a poet, I'm thinking about how that would apply metaphorically to my life.  Do I have a personal vision statement to make and stick to?

According to Wikipedia, a vision statement "defines the desired or intended future state of an organization or enterprise in terms of its fundamental objective and/or strategic direction. Vision is a long term view, sometimes describing how the organization would like the world in which it operates to be. For example a charity working with the poor might have a vision statement which read "A world without poverty."

My immediate response when I ask myself what my vision statement would be is "To see and love what is."  Which is never about the future.  It's a goal in terms of "distance" of depth, not of time or space.  My "desired or intended future" is to be fully, deeply in the present.  My "fundamental objective" is to not be attached to objectives.  My "strategic direction" is within.  The world in which I'd like to operate could be described as "beautiful, interesting, kind, and intimate."  And when I am fully, deeply present, seeing and loving what is, that is the world I get.  So.

I also need to tell you the green colander story, without which this post would not be complete.  Without further ado:

The Green Colander Story

The colander I had before the green one was, frankly, crap.  It was too big, and it had slots that were too big, so that whenever you drained spaghetti in it, half of the noodles slipped through into the sink.

So I told the universe that I needed a new colander, and found this cute little green one at a thrift store for a dollar.  It was perfect.  And I loved that it was green.

And then one day I went to pull it out of the cabinet to drain some potatoes for mashing, and it was gone.  I looked everywhere for it, even out in the yard, thinking my three-year-old may have absconded with it, but alas, it was nowhere to be found.  For two or three weeks, every time I had to use that other big stupid colander, I'd ask whoever was around, "Are you SURE you didn't do something with that green colander?"  And they'd all say no.  Because why in the world would anyone make off with a colander?

Until one day, while I was searching in the refrigerator for something, I noticed the overripe apples a friend had brought me.  I had rinsed them and put them in the fridge, planning to eventually make applesauce in the crockpot.  And there they still were, right in the middle of the middle shelf of the fridge, two or three weeks later, right where I'd left and totally forgotten about them.  In my beloved green colander.

Sheesh.

I doubt there is a need for me to point out the significance of this story.  But you can believe I've been pondering it ever since.  Although I still haven't made applesauce.  

Easy Runner

I went for what has become my usual morning run a little late this morning, and when I came out of the grove into the church lot, there were quite a lot of cars and people, and it looked like a funeral.  Turns out it was Dennis Hopper's, which I began to suspect by the eclectic nature of the crowd.

I tried to stay to the perimeter of the parking lot to be respectful, but as I ran past a parked car with an open door, I couldn't help but notice that a man was sitting there in his underwear putting on dress pants.  Anyhoo.

I definitely felt a pang when I heard that Hopper had died, since True Romance, one of my very favorite movies, features him.  In fact, there is a truly brilliant scene between him and Christopher Walken which I feel is one of the best scenes in any movie, ever.  I'm glad for the grace that allowed me to brush up against his funeral and, however briefly and incompletely, honor his life with the expression of my own through running, something I'm completely stoked to finally be doing.  I've realized that I'm a person of passion and intensity and if I don't give that energy a release in vigorous physical activity, it's going to assert itself in less healthy ways. 

So I like that this new passion of mine connected me in some tiny way to Dennis Hopper's life and death.  He was known for being "difficult," an "enfant terrible" - things I have been seen as often myself.  He walked a self-destructive path for many years, but eventually emerged out of that, and overall his life can be perceived as a wild adventure, a kind of trail-blazing, and an amazingly diverse expression of creative genius.  That inspires me.

And in many ways, Hopper embodied the spirit of Taos, which is itself a sort of enfant terrible.  I love that his funeral was at the San Francisco de Asis church, which strikes me as a wonderful meshing of the frontier-like wildness, noble tradition, profuse creativity, and eclectic spirituality that is Taos.

As I write this now, I hear the bells at the church announcing the end of services.  I also just re-watched on YouTube the scene that I mentioned, and I'll leave you with that. Some of you may not want to watch it as it's pretty intense in terms of violence and profanity.  But if you can get past those things, it's definitely worth seeing, as Hopper's character stands up against the mafia in a brilliant way to defend his son, and becomes sort of a Christ figure in the process.