So it turns out I'm not quite done with the San Francisco de Asis church after all. And it occurs to me that really, as long as I'm living in Taos, I will periodically find the time to stop by and sit by Clare and the hawkmoths.
Last Sunday, Eliana kept saying she wanted to go for a walk, so we went over there together, which is something we haven't done very often, and the last time she was still too little to walk by herself. But this time, we went side by side, and it was lovely. And when we walked through the grove that is no longer a grove, I noticed that the huge tarp they left there after enjarre last summer was still there. (To be honest, part of what I was looking forward to about this walk was seeing if the tarp was still there, because 70% of my thinking these days is about where to get building materials and equipment, and tarps are needed to protect earthbags from UV rays during the building process.) When I stretched it out and saw how big it really was, I realized I would need help folding it, so I called Graeme and he came to help me and then carried it back home.
Then Eliana and I proceeded on to the church, and I came across my second great find as we walked through the alley next to the gift shop. They often leave boxes of empty used glass 7-day candleholders out there, but this was the first time they seemed of any use. I've been researching making windows using old bottles and jars lodged in cob, so I was very excited to find these. Now I will have part of the church permanently built into my house.
Do you see the cross design? So cool!
Over at the church, there were quite a few visitors milling about the courtyard, and I found myself sitting at St. Francis' feet engrossed in a pleasant conversation with a couple from Dallas. Meanwhile, Eliana was running happily around the courtyard, picking up rocks and then running up to whoever was nearby and saying "Here's a rock for you." One couple was so delighted with this, they even included her in the photo they were posing for in front of the church doors.
It was a beautiful spring day, one of the first of the season, and I felt rich in my relationship with that place again, and blessed with the abundance of gifts of the day. A tarp, a box of candleholders, a daughter who's an exuberant giver of rocks. In my Lenten practice of giving up "stuff," it's these simple things that are coming to me in the new space I'm making. I think Francis and Clare would approve.
*I've been told this didn't post right the first time, so I'm trying it again. If you've already read it, sorry for the repeat.*
I'm not just the innocent that needs protecting, I'm the compassionate mother who weaves and wraps the blanket. I'm the child who is healing and the resurrected woman both.
That's one of the conclusions I came to in my Recovery post last Sunday. (Achtung: If you haven't read that post, this one is not going to make much sense.) This insight, while connected to the bat orphans, the Raccoon card, and the Inanna story I spoke of in that post, comes most deeply and directly out of these images from my 2011 collage:
This one is at the very top center of the collage.
This one is at the very bottom center.
When I chose the top image, it was because she was green and pretty; I felt drawn to her for no articulated reason. I chose the little girl at the bottom because she exuded innocence to me, she represented the return to childhood that I have been experiencing in various ways and want to continue nurturing. And she was pretty. I put her on the green apple because I'd already chosen the apple image (because it was green, and represented abundance) and needed somewhere to put it; they just fit well together.
It wasn't until a few days later that I thought to do some research on the top image. The little book I got her out of, A Gift of Happiness, had the picture labeled as Green Tara, but I didn't know anything about her at all. So I Googled her and found out some wonderful things, which I printed out in green ink, put in a green folder, and read through, underlining things that particularly interested me. What really caught my attention at that time was that she is known as "the Mother of Liberation," "the Mother of Mercy and Compassion," and she represents enlightened action. And it struck me how perfect it was that the mother is at the top of the collage and the child at the bottom, and that both images represent aspects of myself.
After the protection and fierceness themes came up, I went back and read my folder about Green Tara again, and lo and behold, this is what I read; it didn't really register the first time:
During our spiritual growth we need to turn to our Holy Mother, Tara, for refuge. She protects us from all internal and external dangers (http://kadampa.org/en/buddhism/tara-puja/)
Tara is a female Buddha, and Green is only one of her 21 manifestations, but is also the most popular. According to my source, "she is the fiercer form of Tara." In other words, she is fierce compassion, fierce blessing, fierce protection.
Wow.
Buddhism is not a religion of deity worship. It's more like a system of spiritual practices, although I'm no expert. But the existence of Tara goes back way far in both Hinduism and Buddhism, and it seems that she is primarily related to as a meditation deity. There is a mantra associated with her: om tare tuttare ture svaha, the reciting of which is said to "untangle knots of psychic energy," among other things.
According to Wikipedia, the Tara practice consists of meditating on the visual image of her in order to incorporate her qualities; in this sense she becomes an "indwelling deity," which is the same idea behind all good Christianity. But Buddhism takes it a step further, because by practicing this as a disciplined meditation, the practitioner eventually comes to see that Tara has "as much reality as any other phenomena apprehended through the mind." The result is "the realization of Ultimate Truth as a vast display of Emptiness and Luminosity" because "one dissolves the created deity form and at the same time also realizes how much of what we call the "self" is a creation of the mind, and has no long term substantial inherent existence."
All of this makes wonderful paradoxical mysterious sense to me, because as soon as I knew she was the compassionate protective Mother, I began imagining a story about her and the Child of my collage. The Child knows she is protected: she doesn't have to look up to make sure the Mother's still there. She is protected by her innocence and trust. She knows she is safe and loved, and so she is going about her business, making her daisy chain, her creative offering. She is aware of all that is around her and yet completely focused on her task. The Child IS the "enlightened action" Green Tara gives birth and form to.
The Child's face is hidden, yet her essence is not. We see the Mother's face instead, the Child's source. We see what the Child is doing, which is playful, beautiful, and innocent, and is made possible by the Mother's protection.
In my Recovery post, I used the metaphor of a blanket for maintaining warmth, but the Mother and Child in my collage are warm without a blanket; the Mother is in fact partially naked. This points to the time when the blanket will no longer be necessary, when the Sun itself will be my warmth. But now it is winter, and I will continue to wrap myself close for the time being.
Which brings me to Brigid, whose holiday, Imbolc, is February 1 and/or 2, depending on your source. She is connected with fire and water, poetry, and healing. She is another fierce Mother, and is a goddess (or saint if you'd rather) who I've felt connected to for a long time.
One of the traditions associated with celebrating Imbolc is to make a pledge for the coming year. Because her day affirms the promise of spring to come, the planting of seeds is a symbolic sealing of the pledge. But because this day also marks mid-winter, the blessing and lighting of candles is part of it too. To me, this recognizes that there is a season and movement to everything - a time to bundle up and withdraw and a time to dance naked in the sun, so to speak.
When I lit my room with many candles on Imbolc night and meditated on what my pledge would be, I sat before my collage until it became clear. In choosing "bless" as my word for the year, I had only thought in terms of giving blessing - blessing as enlightened action, I suppose - but in gazing at the Mother and Child, I suddenly understood that it must also be about opening to receive, gratefully, the blessings of my life. And so the pledge I made is to both give and receive Life's blessings.
The Mother blesses the Child and the Child blesses the Mother; they dissolve into one another, into pure Being.
God has to work on your soul “in secret,” according to the saints and mystics. If God gave you any idea of what God was doing, which is always radical surgery, you would do one of two things: you would try to stop it, or you would try to engineer it and take control of the process. God has to operate in darkness to get the job done. ~Richard Rohr
I chose the word bless as my word for the year because of a book that friend, author, and fellow blogger, Jonna-Lynn gave me. This book is called The Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World and was written by a man named Pierre Pradervand. The premise of the book truly is simple; it's the idea of practicing blessing any- and everyone who (literally or mentally) crosses your path (including yourself). And in terms of freeing the mind from negative and obsessive thoughts about the self and others, it really works. For it to work, however, the blessings must be sincere, they must come from the heart, and this of course is the hard part. But I've discovered that if I am the least little bit willing, and can muster up just one simple blessing-thought, it quickly blossoms into more.
With this blessing practice combined with green as my color for the year, which is the color related to the heart chakra, I already feel enfolded in an intense gentleness, energized by a vibrant airiness, circulated by a lush bright flow.
And yet, there is something else going on too, something I've been having great difficulty putting my finger on. When I tried to write about the feelings I've been having in my journal the other day, I kept seeing the image of cutting up a chicken, and thinking of the word "unhinged," and a Bible verse came to me, Hebrews 4:12: "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart." This is the best description of what's been happening within me that I have found so far.
I have been slowly replacing the word "God" in my vocabulary with "Being." Eckhart Tolle points out in The Power of Now that for many people, "God" as a word has become too tired and overused (and even abused) to truly point to what it points to anymore, which is far more mysterious than anyone can fathom. The word "Being" however, is very open-ended; an atheist could probably use it comfortably, and it points to the great mystery of sentient presence, whatever you believe its origins to be.
My point in saying all this, is that for me, "the word of God" is any manifestation of Being that I pay close attention to, which is to say, anything at all. By this process of blessing and by simply practicing presence in the moment as I have for several months now, things have become loosened within me, and lately I have this sense of being unhinged. When negative thoughts try to take over my mind these days, I experience it far more intensely in my body than I ever used to. Specifically, I feel it as a trembling and weakness and acute anxiety in the area of my heart. However, it's also much easier for me to recognize and move out of such negativity. Moving into blessing is one way to do that, putting my attention on how I feel inside my body is another. Sometimes all I need to do is breathe.
The dividing of soul and spirit mentioned in the verse above I read as the division of the temporal and the eternal, the self that uses mind to operate in the world, and the selfless spirit that is the eternal witness. According to these definitions, I can say that by practicing watching my self/soul, I have become more aware of the spirit, the one who watches. All of these words are inedequate; I have no way to really explain this. I'm always relieved when I find a metaphor to express such things, and yesterday morning as I sat in meditation with these deeply disturbing physical/emotional sensations, I finally landed on a metaphor that fits, and the moment I did, I felt centered and calm: Pruning. Green surgery.
Back in June, I discussed pruning as metaphor in a post called The Ruthless Gardener, but back then, the pruning was about outer situations and relationships; now it's more intimate. It's about thought processes, cherished mental habits and beliefs, and so on.
Somehow, by envisioning limbs being cut off a tree, I came to peace with the loss of control I've been feeling. Which has resulted from a greater and greater recognition of the illusion of any such control, that the thought-habits the mind cherishes are its always futile attempt to make control real and grasp it forever.
Yikes! That's way too convoluted. Let's try this instead:
The spirit prunes the soul; Being prunes everything that interferes with Itself.
I could start anywhere, because the collage of images I am contemplating has no beginning. Or it has many beginnings.
But because I must start somewhere, I'll do it with the point in time just before the collage was made, which was the day before New Year's Eve 2010. I already knew my word for 2011 was bless, and the color was green, and so I decided to make a collage that reflected these guides. Last year was my first to use a guiding word and color, and it was a wonderful experience to go through the year with those polestars. This year, I have taken it a step further, by creating a guiding image, or rather, a combination of guiding images, which I know I will be contemplating the connections among all year long. And this thrills and composes me in a way I cannot describe.
As I said in my last post, I make collages usually with some kind of general intention or theme, but the specific images often continue to surprise me with meanings I did not see when I chose them, meanings that deepen and radiate with time. I finished my collage the morning of New Year's Eve, and in the few short days into this fresh green year, I have already been amazed at what it has revealed to me. So amazed, in fact, that I had to make a mind map to start tracking the connections.
I would so love to see this in an interactive 3D version. Oh wait - that's the world.
I did something like this last year too, and then attempted to discuss all the connections in one post. Okay, it was two, plus an addendum and a poem. I won't bombard you in this post with excited ramblings about how all the things in my mind map connect. In fact, I won't even begin to discuss them. However, be forewarned that I will likely be posting throughout the year about these and other connections I have yet to even see. I just have a feeling it's going to be that way.
It truly is all connected, folks. And I find no greater joy than in seeing and sharing that, one blooming thing at a time.
So wow. After months of being mostly absent from the blogosphere, this will be my third post in the past week or so. Why? Because a) my van has been in the shop for two weeks and I've been mostly housebound, b) teaching for the semester is over and I'm on break from grantwriting this week, and last but most certainly not least c) I'm actually inspired to write again. (Well, let me clarify that: I'm inspired to write my OWN stuff again. Since I write a weekly column now, most of my writing juice goes to that and I find little left for my personal writing. Not that I'm complaining; I LOVE writing my column.)
This is the third year in a row that I've felt a strong sense of inspiration and magic in the post-Christmas season. Last year, my immersion in the blogging community greatly enhanced that. For one thing, I was turned on to the idea of picking a word for the year to reflect on, and that evolved into also picking a color. (Although it really felt like the color picked me.)
Now I'm coming to the end of my orange year of "quiet love" (yes - I picked two words instead of one). I have discovered that for 2011 my word will be "bless," and the color will be green, and I'm so excited to begin this new journey that I've been consciously restraining myself from jumping ahead too fast. I want to properly finish the old year before I throw myself completely into the new. I want to make sure I've really learned the year's lessons, integrated its spirit, before I march off on a new adventure. And so I'm reflecting more on the orange nature of the past year than I have in a while, letting the orange seep into my soul and steep there for these last few days of 2010. It's been wonderful to be able to go back to old blog posts and track my path. I clicked on "orange" in my labels section and went back and read those posts, and am gratified to see that the directions I felt led by my orange ruminations bore fruit.
For instance, I wrote the following in one of those posts: "What happens when the second chakra [whose color is orange] is too open (overly emotionally reactive, too absorptive of others' emotions) and too closed (shut down, apathetic, cold) both fit me. I go back and forth between these states." Well, I'm thrilled to report that this year has found me finally balanced in this regard.
I also wrote: "I need to be able to feel the people around me without drowning in it or shutting myself down when it's all too much. I need a vibrancy and vitality that flows out of me and doesn't just get stuck in my head." I have actually learned this year to tap into such a flowing vibrancy and vitality within myself, which is exactly what has gotten me unstuck out of my head and brought balance between being too open and too closed.
Hallelujah!
May your old year end in peace and your new one begin with inspiration!
The orange flower lights June Amber gave me for my birthday this past year
