The Giver of Rocks

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.

Mother and Child

*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.    

New Year of the Trees

I have a wonderful fat little book called Earth Prayers, which contains earth-centered prayers from many different traditions. There's an index of special days throughout the year, connected with different prayers in the book.  This is how I came to learn about Tu Bishvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees, which takes place on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat.  Which happens to have been last weekend.

I found many detailed resources for this celebration online.  I think the thing I love about Judaism the most is its emphasis on elaborate, meaningful, home-based ritual.  I also love the fact that Jews celebrate four different New Years, in different seasons.  This makes so much sense to me - the year is a circle, which begins and ends anywhere and nowhere.  It's not a line from Point A to Point B.

I printed out a rather long booklet of the haggadah for the seder meal to be performed on the eve of this holiday.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get it together in time to actually go through the seder, but I did read through it, in the manner of Lectio Divina.  The symbolic gestures (even when only performed in the imagination) and Hebrew prayers are quite beautiful and affective.

This holiday has had an interesting evolution (which you can read about extensively if you explore the link for Tu Bishvat above) but one of its primary associations is with the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life.  In Kabbalistic wisdom, there are considered to be four worlds, corresponding to different levels of reality, from the physical to the purely spiritual.  The Tu Bishvat seder symbolically takes you through those four worlds (up the Tree) with the eating of different kinds of fruit and the drinking of wine.  Reading through the haggadah, I realized one would probably end up slightly drunk by the end of the meal, with the ritualistic drinking of four glasses of wine.  But I suppose the tradition is to make the meal a long, relaxed affair that could take hours.

All of this got me thinking about trees, and I started  looking through my library for anything interesting to read about them.  I pulled out a book I bought for homeschooling purposes called Keepers of the Earth.  It's an amazing resource for anyone teaching children (Dan, Jennifer - I sincerely hope you have this book).  Using traditional stories from various Native tribes, it teaches children about ecology and other sciences, as well as Native American culture and history.

I read the story in the section on trees, called "Manabozho and the Maple Trees."  This story is from the Anishinabe, in the Great Lakes region, which is also where I grew up.  The gist of it is that maple syrup used to come straight from the trees year-round, but people got lazy and started lying under the trees all the time with their mouths open.

So our hero, Manabozho, went up to the top of the trees and poured water into them, making the syrup thin and barely sweet, and the Great Spirit made it so that the sap only comes at the end of winter and the people have to work hard to turn it into syrup.

This story made me think back to my childhood in Toronto, when we would take school field trips to the maple farm in February, and watch the sap drip ever-so-slowly into metal buckets, and then go inside to see how they filled huge vats with sap and boiled it for ever so long to turn it into syrup.

And I realized that it's just perfect to have a New Year for trees just when the sap is beginning to flow.  And I also began to think about slowness.

Dan Gurney recently posted an article he and his wife wrote for their local newspaper, a plea for the people of his town to slow down when they're driving.  This post really humbled me because I'm almost always in a rush when I'm driving, and frequently get irritated with people on the road who drive under the speed limit.

And then, Lucy posted about slowing down enough to take good care of ourselves.  One of the things I want to develop this year is the ability to truly relax, not just every now and then, but as a more constant state of being.  Dan's and Lucy's posts, combined with contemplation of the slowness of the maple syrup-making process, made me realize that if I want to be more relaxed, I've got to learn to slow down.  Be patient.  That relaxation and patience are in fact two aspects of just slowing down.  And that paradoxically, this will lead to a quickening of body and spirit, increased energy, a less rushed sense of time.

The story of Manabozho has reminded me that being relaxed and slowing down doesn't mean lazing beneath a tree with syrup dripping into my mouth, but is a manner of working and spirited living, being an active participant in turning work into a sweet gift.

And when I begin to slip into my familiar sense of rush and tension, I need to call to mind the maple with its slow gift of sap, or the luxurious live oak with its lazy swaying moss, or my favorite - the slowest and most spirited of trees, the patient redwood.  I would marry a redwood if I could.

Ah, trees.  My favorite teachers.  Thank you for reminding me. 
Happy New Year, dear trees.

How surely gravity’s law
strong as an ocean current
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place
Only we, in our arrogance
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrender
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in God’s heart
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us
to fall
patiently to trust our heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

~Rilke

(Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

A Present for My Parents

  My mom at Christmastime.  Notice the clothespin reindeer necklace.

The older I get, the more I realize what wonderful parents I have.  Sometimes I read or hear of other people's childhood horrors, and it really drives home for me how blessed my childhood actually was.

I was adopted at 13 months old by Michael and Joyce Carpenter; I was their first child.  My biological mother was nineteen and single when I was born. I know a few other bits and pieces that the adoption agency provided, but this was back in the days of closed adoptions, so it's not much.  Apparently, she was a bit of a flake (something I may have inherited), because she left town without signing my release papers, and they couldn't track her down to get them signed until I was six months old.

People have often asked me if I'd like to find my biological mother.  I've thought about it, but don't have a driving urge to do so.  I think this is largely because for me, my adoptive parents ARE my parents.

There was never a time when I didn't know I was adopted.  I remember the book my parents used to read to me about an adopted family.  They would hold me on their laps and tell me I was special because I was CHOSEN.  I never felt weird about being adopted; it was just a natural part of who I was.

Mom, Dad, my brother Scott, and me.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been in a childlike mode lately, and this includes thinking about my childhood, especially our Christmases.  At the Quiet Day I attended last weekend, one of the participants talked about how sad she used to get at Christmas because of the way her family was, and it made me realize that a big part of why I get happy at Christmas is because of the wonderful childhood memories I have of past holidays.

My favorite Christmas picture ever.

This makes me feel very grateful toward my parents, and in turn, has led me to consider all the many things I have to be grateful to them for.  They have supported and nurtured me in so many ways over the years.

My parents always told me that I was intelligent and could be anything I wanted to be. They offered me the opportunity to participate in all kinds of lessons and activities:  figure skating, ballet, acrobatics, Brownies, squash, tennis, swimming.  They sent me to summer horse camp every year.  My parents observed my love of writing at a young age and encouraged me in it.  They surprised me by getting some of my poems published in our neighborhood newspaper, The Willowdale Mirror, when I was in second or third grade.  And now, almost four decades later, they are avid readers of my blog.

My father is originally from Birmingham, England, and he's got the dry wit to prove it.  He's excellent at crossword puzzles and he's a passionate gardener of both flowers, and fruits and vegetables.  He's happiest when he's out in the garden with sweat dripping down his face.  He's also an amazing tennis player.  He could have been a professional, and even played against Arthur Ashe once, in the Davis cup.  In my parents' house, there is a series of photos taken by a Toronto newspaper of him playing in a tournament.  But he chose not to pursue professional tennis, primarily because he wanted to always be sure he could provide for his family.  He used to love to play board games with my brother and me, and he read to me every night before bed.
 

 Dad reading to my oldest daughter, June Amber.

 My mother is the kind of person who makes friends in the grocery line, and can network and get things organized and done more competently than most people I've known.   When I was obsessed with the band, KISS, she called for tickets, and even though they were officially sold out, she somehow managed to get us great seats by being friendly with the ticket agent.  Then she actually took me to the concert.  (If you know anything about the band, you'll understand why this was no small thing for a woman whose favorite musicians were John Denver and the Kingston Trio.)  She never worked when I was young, because she wanted to be home with her kids, and she baked some kind of amazing dessert almost every night.  (Mom - I NEED your recipe for Lemon Pudding Cake!  I tried to make it the other night and it failed miserably.)  She used to hand-sew my Halloween costumes, throw elaborate themed birthday parties for me, and take me to all kinds of museums and gardens and parades.

Mom and me at the tennis club.

When I was a teenager, I thought my parents were boring and stuck in their ways.  This attitude lasted longer than I care to admit.  But I now realize that it was their practicality and commitment to domestic sustainability that has allowed me to grow and flourish in my own less conventional ways.

I can't even begin to tell you how much financial support my parents have given me.  As a single mother with four children and an inconsistent ex-husband, I've turned to them many times for help, and they've ALWAYS provided it, no questions asked.  This help has allowed me not only to survive, but to live according to my deepest values of being available to my children, and pursuing creative endeavors that don't necessarily pay as well as a "real job" - establishing myself in the ways I feel called to rather than being forced to work exclusively at a job for which I'm not suited.

There is no way on earth I can possibly pay my parents back for all they've done and continue to do for me and my children, which is why I'm writing this post.  Because what I CAN do is write, and it is largely their support that has allowed me to pursue this essential part of myself.  For this I have the deepest gratitude, and I want the whole blooming world to know it.  

 My beautiful parents.

Merry Christmas, 

Mom and Dad!

I love you both

more than you know.