A Backdrop and a Blanket, but not Boring

2015 is the fifth year in a row that I've chosen a word and color for the year, and I've finally come around to blue. I feel like I've kind of been putting off blue, because frankly I've always been a bit bored by it.  All my past yearly colors have stood out to me in some significant way, "popped" so to speak, and I've enjoyed researching and exploring their symbolic associations.  Blue doesn't inspire me in this way, and now I understand why: it's the backdrop.

This was uncannily brought home to me the night I made my collage for this year.  I gathered up all my materials, sat down at the dining table, and turned on Pandora on shuffle.  Believe it or not, the second song that played was "Blue Lips" by Regina Spektor.  (As a side note, this is why I generally prefer radio over playlists, and also one of the reasons I love collage; there is magic in randomness.)

Ms. Spektor sings that "all the gods and all the worlds/began colliding on a backdrop of blue," which is actually a poetically fitting description of the collage process. And indeed, as I sat there browsing through a (randomly chosen) stack of magazines, I found that the blue images I was picking were more for the backdrop rather than the collage's featured images.  Here is the final product (which I'm going to post more about in the near future, since there's a lot going on with it that I feel the need to discuss):

Another line of the Regina Spektor song says blue is "the color of our planet from far, far away."  As I sit here at my desk and look out the window, I realize that it's also the most ubiquitous color from the perspective of the planet's surface, at least my little portion of it, because of the sky, of course. (And here in northern New Mexico that sky is an intense and vivid blue more often than not.)  Perhaps it's this ubiquity that's influenced my previously unexamined feeling that blue is boring.  I've taken it for granted; it's just the backdrop.  But embracing it now, the blue blue sky feels more like a blanket enfolding and warming all of my life, keeping it safe and cozy, and walking out into the big wide world is so much easier with from this perspective.

This all ties in very well with my word for the year, which is "innocence." This word came to me like a breath of fresh air one day, and I immediately knew it was the right one for the year.  Throughout my life I've struggled with feelings of guilt, sometimes warranted and sometimes not.  In the past few years, I've made great strides in terms of growth and personal evolution, which has made the guilt issue that much more obvious as something that still needs to be healed.  And so, rather than try to make those feelings go away, I will spend this year consciously connecting with the quality of innocence, embracing it within myself.  One of my first lessons in this regard has been that in order to embody innocence, there must be a deep and childlike trust, a feeling of safety.  At this point, I still can't fully articulate why this is so, but on a visceral level, I've experienced it to be true. And feeling enfolded by the sky, this living blanket of blue, is currently doing more to develop in me the sense of safety, trust, and innocence than I could have ever imagined.

The overall effect, which is already profound only 17 days into the new year, is a level of peace and relaxation I've never known before, at least not on a consistent basis. Blue is elemental, associated not just with the sky, of course, but also with bodies of water, and I feel like I'm floating: surrounded, supported, and upheld.  Floating in the sky, or floating in the water, in trust I dive into the blue and am pleasantly surprised by the intensely vibrant tranquility it offers in response.

I realized just now (although this may not make sense to anyone else) that my blue year experience so far is comparable to listening to the Enigma song, "Return to Innocence," which is powerful not so much in its lyrics detailing the meaning as in its power to effect the felt experience of innocence. When I searched for this song on YouTube, I ended up watching what I suppose is the official video, which I'd never seen before.  It definitely adds a different dimension to the experience of the song:

Tikkun Olam by Kintsugi; but First, the Furnace and Flux

Sunday was the first anniversary of my brother's death, and as I began to write this post, something he once said popped into my head.  Commenting on my penchant for symbolism, he said something to the effect that I'm always trying to read meaning into things where there is none.

True enough; most of the content of this blog is a neon flashing case in point.  But my response to him then, as it would be now, was that basically, it doesn't matter if the meaning is "really there" or not; what matters, and what I enjoy, is creating that meaning, working - and playing - with it.  Symbology is fun.

Working and playing with gold as my color for the year has so far - pardon the pun - been quite rich.  Around the time that I realized 2013 was going to be gold, a Facebook friend posted about the Japanese art of kintsugi, which I had never heard of before.  It means "golden joinery" and is the practice of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold, thereby making the item more beautiful and valuable than it was originally.  

How glorious!  My metaphorically-oriented mind was off and running, and the first thing I thought of was the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, meaning repair of the world.  In Jewish spirituality, this is seen as humanity's responsibility.  

Tikkun olam by way of kintsugi; I love this concept.  But what would such a process entail?  Obviously, one needs to first have some gold.  It has to be extracted, refined, then ground to a powder and mixed with lacquer.  

As I delved more deeply into exploring the metaphorical meanings of these processes, it became clear to me that the reason gold is so valued is because it represents pure love, pure being.  If one wants to repair the world with it, one has to find it in oneself first.  And in order to do that, one has to first trust that it is actually there to be found, then actively look for it.

I realized at that point that I tend to deny the gold in myself because I recognize that it's not pure and so I discount it altogether.  But in exploring these metaphors, I began to understand that I must value the impure gold for it to be purified.  I must "extract" it by gathering it within myself from all the "veins" where I can find little bits of it. Interestingly, I discovered that just by turning my imaginative focus more to the image of gold, feelings of joy and love were increasing me.  (And by the way, I learned in my research that the human body does actually contain tiny amounts of gold.)  

The next step is purification.  Find and extract the the impure gold, then surrender it to a 2100-degree Fahrenheit furnace and add something called flux, which causes the impurities to separate and rise to the surface where they can be poured off. The funny thing about flux is that it consists of very ordinary substances, and can actually be as simple as 100% borax.  Boring old borax, available at any corner store. 

Perhaps, then, I should value the ordinary circumstances of my daily life as the flux that catalyzes my purification.  Maybe I should also welcome the intensely challenging and painful things in life when they come because they are the fiery furnace, without which, the flux has no purpose and the gold remains impure.  And perhaps, when impurities rise to the surface, I can let them be poured off instead of clinging to them because I identify with them.  Then, with the pure gold that is left, I can repair what is broken - but only after it's ground to a powder, another wonderful metaphor for appreciating life's way of taking something that seems so solid and breaking it apart so it can become useful to the world.

I feel like all of this is happening simultaneously in me, but I can give my attention to one part of the process or another, depending on my need in the moment.  I am one piece of the broken world and the whole process is the repair.  Kintsugi, tikkun olam, the furnace, and the flux are one. 

Tamamizu Ichigen , (Japanese, 1662?-1722)
Edo period

Consuming Christmas

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love. --Hamilton Wright Mabie

The world is made of stories, and traditions and rituals are the ways we collectively enact those stories and keep them going. Most would agree that many of our collective stories are dysfunctional, but to say they are not "true" is to miss the point. There are no true stories: stories, like anything else in the world of the senses, can only point to truth, make space for an experience of truth.

The senses are the portal, as we are flesh and blood creatures in this world.  This is what has been given.  And that's why I love Christmas, because it is a shared feast for the senses.  We vary in what version of Christmas story we hold dear, but if we hold any of it dear at all, there are certain agreed upon symbols, colors, scents, etc.  Surrendering to the profusion of those, for me, is what makes Christmas magical, even though I am well beyond childhood.

Representing a progressive Christian point of view, Richard Rohr says:

Christmas is a celebration of God become flesh, of the sacred presence which shimmers through everything in this world.  The Incarnation is not an abstract theological principle, but an intimate flesh and blood invitation to celebrate the gifts of our senses and our bodies as portals to the divine. We are called to awaken to the holy birthing happening within us, not demanding our work, but our consent for this work to happen through us.  And yes, this is much harder than it sounds.

Thus, Advent and Christmas are for me a call to keen awareness of both light and dark within myself and in the world, and of my own power to bring forth light through surrender to the light that wants to come forth.   I find myself, at this time of year, both brimming with gratitude for the grace in my life - the abundance I have done nothing to deserve, as well as more aware of where there is want.

This is what happens to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.  His transformation occurs out of awareness of want, both within himself and others, and gratitude that he has the power to do something about it.  I recently read a commentary on Internet Movie Database which added a new dimension to my understanding of this:

The word "humbug" is misunderstood by many people, which is a pity since the word provides a key insight into Scrooge's hatred of Christmas. The word "humbug" describes deceitful efforts to fool people by pretending to a fake loftiness or false sincerity. So when Scrooge calls Christmas a humbug, he is claiming that people only pretend to charity and kindness in a scoundrel effort to delude him, each other, and themselves. In Scrooge's eyes, he is the one man honest enough to admit that no one really cares about anyone else, so for him, every wish for a Merry Christmas is one more deceitful effort to fool him and take advantage of him. This is a man who has turned to profit because he honestly believes everyone else will someday betray him or abandon him the moment he trusts them.

People today who call Christmas a humbug, although they no longer use that word, often do so because of the nasty consumerist nature of it all, with which I have no argument.  I would, however, point out, that consumption in and of itself is not a bad thing; it's what we do as creatures of flesh and blood.  A feast, by its very nature, is an excess of consumption, and serves the purpose of celebration.  Giving gifts and feasting both enact sharing of abundance in a way that stretches us; this, in my experience, is a healthy and valuable exercise occasionally.  As with anything, what makes it valuable is how consciously, conscientiously, and imaginatively we go about it.  It is in imagining and re-imagining what we already have that we create a better dream of life.

However, to me it's not so much about consuming as being consumed.  By immersing myself in the sensory overload of Christmas; by pouring out creatively, financially, and energetically, I realize surrender of ego a little bit more. I am the Yule log, each year learning a bit better to surrender to the flame and thus become one with it. 

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.

Backstory

As it turns out, I have given up church for Lent. 

Will I go back once Lent is over?  I don't know.  I have no idea what's going to happen next in any area of my life.  I'm out of control.  (I looked all over for it - I'm definitely out.)  Hurray!

Giving up attachment to stories.  Surrendering all goals except awakening, the paradox being that to awaken, even that goal must be surrendered.

Learning to say Yes to everything.  As someone very wise once pointed out, Yes is surrender.

I started out by giving up bitching for Lent.  That was the surface goal, but I recognized that to truly do this, I had to give up the negative thinking that leads to bitching in the first place, otherwise it would just be a sorry attempt at control.

When I announced my intention on my blog, Dan recommended Byron Katie and The Work.  I began to explore that website, then mentioned what I was discovering there to Jennifer, who suggested I also read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.  From there began an amazingly rapid process of unraveling:

To give up bitching I had to undo negative thinking.  To undo negative thinking I had to look at my beliefs, which led to examining the stories I tell myself, which led finally to seeing that all stories are untrue.  Even the good ones.

I came to the edge of this forest once before, a long time ago, but I wasn't ready to enter then.  There were still stories I wanted to believe, and I didn't understand that one doesn't come to Reality by denying the body (or the world) and its stories, but by fully entering into them with an alert and embracing yet questioning mind.

To see the world as illusion or Maya is not to blow it all off and sit in your head.  It's merely to perceive the deeper Reality that is the Source.  (I feel like A.A. Milne, using all these caps.)  That was one of my biggest stumbling blocks when I tried to come to this before, and I ultimately found myself lost.  That's when I turned to the Bible and church.

In adopting a biblical worldview, one of the greatest joys was in experiencing the earth and myself as Creation, as real.  (Now I'm thinking of The Velveteen Rabbit.)  Reading the Bible, especially some of the beautiful nature imagery in the Psalms, and shifting my worldview this way turned me into an environmentalist and a social activist, because I finally had permission to care, to love Creation and all of its creatures.  Before that, when I saw the world as illusion, as something to be transcended, I didn't see it at all let alone feel that I wanted to care for it.

And so I entered a new paradigm, one in which there was a true Presence and Creative Intelligence who loved the earth, who made it and continues to make it in every moment, and who - could it possibly be??? - loved me.  Forgave me.  A Being who I didn't have to keep trying to climb some endless ladder to get to, who was instead reaching down to me, just where I was with all of my flaws.  I spiritually relaxed for the first time in years, maybe ever.  I accepted the gift that I now saw was always being offered, and realized that this was all I'd ever had to do to be with God.  In Christianity, that gift comes in the form of Christ.

I had spent so much time and energy trying (and failing) to connect with a formless, distant God, that it was an immense relief to embrace the incarnate version.  So much more accessible.  The Son became for me the access point to the Divine and to my own incarnation, the intersection of the ineffable and the tangible.  This is one of the most important symbolic meanings of the cross for me.

It makes perfect sense to me that if there is a God that God would take the form of a human to be able to communicate in a language humans can hear and comprehend.

Now, as this most powerful and unexpected Lenten journey winds down toward Easter, I find myself considering anew the Resurrection.  There are those who never seem to get to that part of the story.  There are others who try to jump straight to it and miss the point of the way of the cross, which is about surrender, the ultimate Yes.  Without that Yes, resurrection is impossible.  However, the Yes can only happen because it sees the deeper Reality that makes resurrection not only possible but inevitable.

Asking if (or stating that) Jesus and the Resurrection really happened loses all importance when one comes to the point of view that nothing has ever really happened, no story is true except in the telling.  Anything with a beginning, middle, and end necessarily falls into the realm of illusion because the present moment is the only ultimately real thing, and the Being within it.

And so, as I contemplate the Jesus story during a time in which all stories are dissolving, what I see, the true beauty of this and any good story - which is any story rightly perceived - is that the point is to go beyond the story into the Yes, the surrender, the all-encompassing Now that is eternal reality.  In that Yes are both the crucifixion and the resurrection; in this one moment they occur simultaneously, and are seen for the stories they are. 

Gradual change occurs in an instant.  And now, all that's left is love.

A Sacrifice of Praise

Life is amazing.  Just when you think there's nothing left, no hope, no color, no meaning, you get a glorious surprise.  We say and we shape and we dance around everything, always trying to reconnect, always working, always penetrating, only to find that we actually did know the whole time what we knew.

I'm here to say that life is good.  Because it's life.  All the horror in the world is to show us the way beyond horror.  All the buttons our loved ones push are to show us the buttons so we can leave them alone.  All the brokenness points to the wholeness that has always and will always exist, and only exists.  Does this make any sense?  Why have a world like this?  It can seem a cruel joke, but the only ripe option is to trust.  To embrace the mystery.  To become the beloved.

I love and I love and I love.  There is nowhere else to go.  Every blooming thing is a gift, if I know how to unwrap it.  And thankfully, everyone and everything shows me how.  Hallelujah. 

The Epiphany Chronicles III: The Impossible Union of Spheres of Existence

Day of January 6

The Feast of the Epiphany

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time...

Music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.  These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union.

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future 

Are conquered, and reconciled.

~T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages"

I woke the morning after my nightmare refreshed and calm, with more energy and clarity than I'd had in a few days.  My goal for the day was to get caught up on my grantwriting work and do a house blessing, a traditional ritual for Epiphany.  But when I looked around my house, I realized neither of these things were going to get done unless I cleaned first.

  What was I going to do with all this stuff?

The house was chaos, most of it worse than this table.  But I was apprehensive about starting to clean because I knew once I started, it could go on all day.  If it hadn't been for the house blessing plan, I probably would have ignored it and worked instead, but there was no way I was going to bless a dirty house.  So I took a deep breath and plunged in.  I tidied and mirted (opposite of "trimmed") the Christmas tree and put away all the decorations and washed dishes and rearranged shelves and furniture and vacuumed and swept and blogged in between tasks.

I found a perfectly intact dead bee on top of a pile of stuff in the recycling bin.  What the heck was a bee doing out here in the middle of January?  At first I thought it was alive, it was so perfect.  If you're not acquainted with my connection to bees, read this.  Most people would probably not find much significance in a dead bee, but for me it was a definite message, an alert.  The last time a dead bee came to me so clearly, I was making a three-dimensional medicine shield collage and needed something for the center of it.  I walked outside barefoot and was stung by a bee I stepped on.  But amazingly, it wasn't crushed and it ended up in the center of my shield, just where it belonged.  It was the first and only time I've ever been stung by a bee.

The first time I checked my email that morning, there was a new post announced on The Website of Unknowing, called "Dark Epiphany."  Since I was processing the nightmare, I was very curious about this.  Turns out, it tied in perfectly with my "dark epiphany" of the night before.  Carl McColman, the author of that site, says, "struggling with the absence of God is a way of experiencing God’s presence. Call it a dark epiphany, perhaps. We fool ourselves if we think that God only shows up in the light."

This also ties in nicely with the comments some folks have left on my previous two posts in these chronicles. A dark epiphany is still an epiphany to be welcomed.

Then, a little later, I read Rebecca's Epiphany post on Whatever else my life is....it is also this dazzling darkness.  She says:

Having the aha moment or the great epiphany can be very exciting. Having all of the puzzle pieces fall into place after a long discernment or just receiving the grace of an understanding from seemingly nowhere can be a spiritual and emotional thrill. But, it seems to me that most of my epiphanies have brought with them an invitation to change and to transform. They come for my benefit and for the benefit of the world, and so I am asked to act. That action usually requires courage, integrity and discipline.

I cleaned some more, pondering all of this. During my next break, through investigating the blog of one of other commenters on "Dark Epiphany," I clicked a link called The Bee Goddess, where I read that in ancient Crete, " the bee signified the life that comes from death." Discussing a golden seal found buried with the dead in that culture, the author describes the image on it: "The bee goddess, the figure in the center descending to earth among snakes and lilies, is being worshipped by her priestesses, who, characteristically, take the same form as she does, all raising their ‘hands’ in the typical gesture of epiphany." Snakes and lilies; this spoke to me. Would it be over the top to mention that my name, Susan, means "lily?" And that lilies symbolize forgiveness and purity?

And then I remembered a small piece of what I had read in my daily prayer book, Celtic Benedictions, the night before the dream.  I went back and looked at it.  Just before going to sleep, I had prayed this with the words of the book:

Let me learn of you in the soil of my soul, O Christ,
and your journey through death to birth.
Let me learn of you in my soul this night
and the journey of letting go...

...Set free my dreams of the unknown.
Safeguard this time of resting, O God,
enfold me in the darkness of the night.

Astonishing.  My dreams of the unknown were certainly set free, just not in the way I would have chosen.  I was definitely enfolded in the darkness of the night.  I was also “safeguarded”, but again, not in a way I would expect, or normally associate with that word.  And after I went back to sleep that night, my rest was deep and whole.

This is when I got the overwhelming sense that my epiphany experiences thus far were asking to be written and shared.  It was an uncomfortable thought, and was definitely an action requiring "courage, integrity and discipline." It was becoming more and more apparent to me that there was real significance to my experiences over the past couple of days.  But what was I going to do with all this stuff? How to create the impossible union of spheres of existence?

I began to process all of it in earnest.  As outwardly I cleaned and organized my house, I inwardly ordered my mind and heart.  I mused about the meaning of Epiphany.

I've mentioned before that one of the big appeals of religion for me is entering into the narratives of my tradition, Christianity. The Epiphany narrative is of the Three Wise Men following the star and coming to see the Christ-child. I've heard that they didn't actually get there until Jesus was two and the family was living in a house, which I kind of like. I am amused by the image of Jesus as a toddler, fondling a chunk of gold and then trying to smash it on the floor, or flinging frankincense around the room with gleeful abandon.

At any rate, the rationale of the house blessing follows from this story. This ritual, which I'd been planning for days, now seemed even more important and meaningful after my experience of the previous night.

It was mid-afternoon before I got to a satisfactory stopping point with the cleaning (no, it is never "finished"), and prepared for the house blessing.  I used a ritual from the book To Dance With God, by Gertrud Mueller.  There's a little bit of liturgy to recite, and then you're supposed to go around the house with incense, or sprinkling holy water in every room while consciously blessing that space.  Then you're supposed to take a piece of chalk that you've blessed and write above the main entrances of the house, the year and the initials of the three wise men (Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar) like this:

20 + C + M + B + 10

It seemed a little weird to me, this last part, but what the heck.  I didn't have a piece of chalk so I used an orange colored pencil. Very lightly.

I visited each room with a sage smudge stick a soul-friend of mine made for me and which I'd never used, and wafted the smoke with the large wild turkey feather I found last fall in the grove by the St. Francis church.  Then I carried a silver bowl of water that I keep by my bed to enhance my dreams, and sprinkled some in every room.  I finished by ringing a little bell in each room.  Maybe all of this sounds goofy to you, but it felt great.  My house felt so clean and calm and clear and fresh at the end of it all.  I was really really glad I'd spent the day this way.  And I began more and more to see that dream as a gift.

I also anointed myself with frankincense essential oil, a fitting gesture, I thought, for an Epiphany celebration.  But what struck me was that I REALLY like the way it smells.  And it's the same smell that it was 2000-odd years ago when it was offered as a gift by the wise men. Through a little research I discovered that "the mythical Phoenix bird was thought to build its funeral pyre out of frankincense and myrrh". Also, that  it was used in pagan purification ceremonies in many cultures. Purification. Yes.

Now it was time for the kids to come home, and to get ready for the Epiphany service that my church was holding that evening.

When I entered the quiet, candlelit church, the atmosphere of peace resonated with the clean quiet of my heart. My mind was not quite as clear. I was holding the big question at bay, Should I, can I, continue with Justin? The Applebees fiasco was still with me, asking me to see the reality – that despite our best intentions, we harm each other in a way that shuts us both down. And no matter how much progress we seem to make, these instances set us back to square one. I wasn't exactly fighting this recognition, but laying it aside for the moment, letting these unfolding experiences work on me and bring me the answers deeper than intellect or willful resolve.

The pastor, Wayne, was dressed in a simple white robe with a cord of rope around his waist, not what he usually wears. The service was simple and prayerful. Wayne played a song on his guitar and sang – things I had never witnessed him do. 

 

The scripture was from Isaiah 60:

 Arise, shine! For your light has come,

and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth,

and thick darkness the peoples;

but the Lord will arise upon you,

and his glory will appear over you...

I felt tears welling up and looked down at my lap, lest someone notice. And then Wayne read:

Lift up your eyes and look around;

they all gather together, they come to you...

Then you shall see and be radiant;

your heart shall thrill and rejoice.

I was moved to my toes. I lifted my eyes and saw quiet love. Wayne began speaking, what he spoke of was not the gifts of the wise men, or the brilliance of the star, but of Herod. For those of you not familiar with the story, when the wise men come at last into Jerusalem, they go to King Herod to inquire of the whereabouts of the “new king” that has been born. Herod, afraid of this potential threat to his authority, tells them that once they find this child, they should report back to him. Once he knows where the child is, his plan is to kill him. The Wise Men, being wise, realize the malicious intent in Herod, and return to their homeland “by a different way,” to avoid Herod.

Something that has struck me since that night is that the Wise Men were strangers to the land, aliens, and must have seemed especially so when they showed up at Mary and Joseph's doorstep. But they were welcomed, just as I must welcome the strangers in my own soul.

What Wayne preached about was Herod's fear, how everything he is reported in the Bible to have done was out of fear. How even in the joy of the nativity story, there is the backdrop of shadows and death. How we all live against this backdrop. Darkness creates fear in the human heart, he said, using the example of a child wanting to leave the lights on at night because the monsters grow larger in the dark. But, he said, fear also creates darkness, it works the other way too. And yet, there is this glorious light beyond all light, that is real, and all we have to do is find the courage to lift our eyes to behold it. All we have to do is trust it, and then there it is. 

And there it was. 

And here it is.

No simple answers, only “hints followed by guesses,” but in the weeping, in the lifting of eyes, the impossible union beheld.

 

Found In Translation

I'm a research junkie and a total word nerd.  In the icebreaker game of a discussion group once, I had to pick an adjective to describe myself that started with the same letter as my name.  Just call me "Searching Susan."  I once took an online I.Q. test that titled me "Word Warrior" based on my score.   

When I was in graduate school, I spent an absurd amount of time researching and writing about one of the earliest Old English poems, "The Dream of the Rood."  Two semesters' worth of research and writing, actually.  I could have turned it into a thesis, as one of my professors kept suggesting.  When I first started the project, I was supposed to do a lexical analysis of the piece for my History of the English Language class.  I was trying to show that there were Celtic as well as Anglo-Saxon influences on the poem.  So I got an Old English dictionary and eventually ended up doing my own translation of the whole 256 lines.  Yes, you read that right - two HUNDRED and fifty-six.

The Ruthwell Cross,

on which part of "The Dream of the Rood" is inscribed in runes.

Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Photo by Peter Mattock

on Flickr

What I discovered was that certain words had multiple senses to them, and that none of the available translations emphasized this.  Granted, it's a difficult thing to do, but I, being the word nerd warrior that I am, took on the task.  It was immensely rewarding to find ways to unfold levels and layers of meaning.  And I was able to support my claims of Celtic influence pretty darn well this way.

More recently, I've read a couple of books by Neil Douglas-Klotz, in which he translates various words of Jesus into the Aramaic that Jesus would have been speaking in when he lived, and from there into English.  The result is quite poetic and illuminated.  For instance, here's his translation of the Lord's Prayer:

O, Birther of the Cosmos, focus your light within us -- make it useful
Create your reign of unity now
Your one desire then acts with ours,
As in all light,
So in all forms,
Grant us what we need each day in bread and insight:
Loose the cords of mistakes binding us,
As we release the strands we hold of other's guilt.
Don't let surface things delude us,
But free us from what holds us back.
From you is born all ruling will,
The power and the life to do,
The song that beautifies all,
From age to age it renews.
I affirm this with my whole being.

When I first started studying the Bible with a Strong's Concordance handy, you can probably imagine how ecstatic I was.  I would spend whole afternoons looking up every word in a single verse, and feel like I was digging up ancient treasure.  Word archaeology.

I wrote two full pages in my notebook about the name "Jesus."  I don't remember the whole rabbit trail now, but the general gist was that it means "open, wide, and free."  At least that was what I took from it.

I began to see an analogy between words and computer icons.  The way you can click on something and it opens up a whole new world that you couldn't have imagined when you were just looking at the icon.

 

Why is she going off about all this? you might well ask.  Well, the other day, I was doing my evening prayer with the book a friend gave me for Christmas, Celtic Benedictions, by J. Philip Newell.  This radiant little book of morning and evening prayer is decorated throughout with images from the 7th century Lindisfarne Gospels.  Anyway, I looked up the verse featured that evening:  "I commune with my heart in the night, I meditate and search my spirit" (Psalm 77:6). 

In my New Revised Standard Version Bible there was a note about "I commune," an alternate translation of it, which I read as "My music spirit searches." I found this odd, but poetic and inspiring.  It took me a minute to realize that because of how these notes are laid out on the page, I was actually reading it wrong.  The alternate translation for "I commune" was simply "My music," and for "search my spirit," it was "my spirit searches."  So the verse would then read, "My music is with my heart in the night; I meditate and my spirit searches."  The New International Version actually translates this verse as "I remembered my songs in the night.  My heart mused and my spirit inquired."

Maybe all of this doesn't excite you like it does me, but it's this kind of stuff that brings the Bible alive for me.  For some, it's this very thing that confirms their rejection of the Bible as scripture, but for me, it emphasizes poetic truth as what's valuable over hard fact.  There's grace and mystery in it, not fixed formulaic answers. 

Much has been made of what gets lost in translation, but I'm here to say that a lot can be found.  I research and explore this way because it's fun, and makes me feel like I'm peering into a divine kaleidoscope.  My music spirit searches, and finds communion in and with the words.        

Treasures of Darkness: Part III

Violence is not merely killing another.  
It is violence when we use a sharp word, 
when we make a gesture to brush away a person, 
when we obey because there is fear.

~Jiddu Krishnamurti

I ended my previous post with the perhaps controversial notion that we can be violent and compassionate at the same time.  In exploring this idea, I found an interesting discussion thread on the website, Martial Development, about the relationship between violence and compassion.  Steven Smith, a World Taiji Boxing Association instructor, says:

Both compassion and violence are innate. Well, when I imagine the need to pluck a poor carrot from the garden, I consider it violent. So — that’s what I mean — we have an innate propensity to eat and nurture ourselves, and to do so requires violence. Much of our violence is shielded from awareness, true; but actions that support life (even you –vegans) requires violence, destruction, consumption (pick the term).

Compassion, of course, is innate as well: without it how could I listen softly to my friend’s words or offer a soothing touch? When we temper our violence with compassion, we learn to walk softly. We find those fine lines, that razor’s edge, to travel into the deeper recesses of awareness and attention.

Existing as a human, or, even more so, being a martial artist while believing that you do not practice violence is both great denial and a great way to prepare to get hurt.

He also makes a distinction I find useful.  He talks about the overuse and emotionally loaded quality of the word "violence," and replaces it with "ruthlessness" for the purpose of the discussion.  He says that compassion arises when "you simply experience your own inner softness, your tenderness. From personal experiences of tenderness we may, nevertheless, execute ruthless acts."  He then gives the example of "a great bodyworker" who "will impress, with deep-tissue realignment, the meaning of ruthless compassion."

Is it truly possible to have compassion toward one to whom you do violence?  Can you deliberately be ruthless to a friend?  Again, it comes down to definitions and deeper understandings.  Cruelty and friendship, abuse and friendship - certainly not.  But part of friendship - one of the hardest parts - is promoting accountability.  It may sometimes be necessary to forcefully cross a boundary set by a friend in order to hold them accountable.

In the post that inspired this series, Rebecca posed the question:  Will we evolve out of the need for violence?  I don't see us evolving out of the need to eat just yet.  Nor do I see the need for occasional ruthlessness disappearing, as long as human nature is what it is.  What I do think we could evolve out of is cruelty, whether deliberate or because of unmindfulness.  And compassion is the key.

But what exactly is compassion and how do we practice it? One of the ways I've been approaching this topic is through considering The Charter for Compassion, which I've come across twice recently, at A Mindful Heart and MIND SIEVE. Rather than summarize it here, I strongly recommend you go check it out, if you haven't already.

Compassion means, at its root, to "suffer with."  Karen Armstrong, author of The Charter for Compassion, says that one aspect of practicing compassion is "the breaking down of the ego that makes you go beyond doing the things that you like or feel comfortable doing."  (Another kind of violence?)  As Dan Gurney pointed out in response to one of my recent posts, the Dalai Lama has said that compassion is the path to happiness.  Another paradox, a mystery.  How will allowing myself to suffer with someone make me or them happy?  But anyone who has tried it knows that it does indeed work that way, maybe not in that exact moment, but in the lingering effects of practicing it on an ongoing basis.

However, practicing compassion can also have very immediate and profound effects.  I've personally experienced the power of compassion and forgiveness to alter an extreme situation.  When I was seven months pregnant and living alone, I came home from work one night to watch movies with some friends.  After my friends left, I got into bed and was reading when I heard a noise in the closet.  I got up to see what it was, and as I opened the closet door, an unknown black man jumped out at me and tied my hands behind my back, knocking off my glasses in the process.  He then blindfolded me.  In the confusion of what was happening, my first thought was that it was my brother playing a joke on me.  He was supposed to come over that night but hadn't shown up.  Once I realized what was actually happening, my response was terror, and I screamed.

But then an amazing thing happened that transformed the experience entirely.  I had been studying A Course in Miracles, which is a year-long set of daily practices designed to promote spiritual awakening, "removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence."  One of its primary principles is that "nothing real can be threatened" and "nothing unreal exists."  Forgiveness and the laying down of defenses are the aims of the daily practice.  Since I had just finished the course a couple of weeks earlier, my response to being raped by this attacker was vastly different than it might have been.  I moved deeper than my fear and applied the precepts of the course, consciously applying forgiveness, compassion, and the faith that I would not be harmed because I had internalized the lesson of the course in which "attack [is] seen as misperception calling for remedy through gentleness and love. Defenses are laid down because where there is no attack there is no need for them. Our brothers' needs become our own, because they are taking the journey with us as we go to God."

I kept silently telling this man, "You are my brother and I forgive you."  I also repeated to myself other lessons of the course, such as, "I can be hurt by nothing but my thoughts."  And I experienced peace as long as I kept myself in the moment with these thoughts.  No pain was inflicted on me, and after the man left, I managed to get my hands free and ran down the street to a friend's house, where I called 911.  The man had stolen my car, and the police caught him driving back down my street a little later.  They chased him, he hit a fire hydrant, got out of the car, tried to climb over a chain link fence, and stabbed himself in the penis with a piece of the fence.  They had to take him to the hospital before they took him to jail.  As far as I know, he's still in jail.  It turns out that he had also raped a couple of other women in the neighborhood. 

When the rape crisis people came to talk to me that night, they were amazed at how calm I was.  They had never seen anything like it.  I can honestly say that it was as though my year of doing A Course in Miracles had been training for that very night.

This was an extreme situation that required that kind of preparation, but it was an enhancement of a natural compassion that I seem to have been born with.  It has never been difficult for me to empathize with another's plight, no matter how shocking, pathetic, debased, or personally threatening the situation might appear to most.

However, I also fail at compassion on a regular basis, especially with those closest to me.  I get irritated too easily when life is chaotic, not flowing pleasantly.  And because I have four children, this happens fairly often.  Like, daily.  My response is often a pulling away at best, or snapping at them at worst. These actions are relatively mild, but are still decidedly not compassionate, kind, or loving.

This post series has been extremely challenging for me.  It has turned me inside out and now I'm showing all of this to you.  Aside from the emotional difficulty, there is also the problem that for every judgment I can make on this topic, three or four other, often contradictory ones come to mind.  Which is why I keep coming back to this same point:  I don't really think it's about answering these questions once and for all.  I think it's about integration, befriending shadows.  It's about being willing to break out of comfortable truisms, easy dualities, and elitist moralities, and, resting in mystery, embrace a mindful unknowingness.  It's about starting, moving, and ending in a place of compassion.

Through writing these posts, I've come to a definition of compassion that for me is deeper and more useful, which is simply "friendship."  When I'm not sure how to show compassion, if I ask myself "How can I be a friend in this circumstance?" I'm much clearer about what to do.  This is not just because the action required becomes more obvious, but because I'm starting from a place of heart and authenticity, tapping into the source of love within myself.  As O'Donohue says in Anam Cara, "If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative, and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us."  Friends are the easiest people to love, so it's natural that thinking in terms of friendship is an easier way to open the door to that source.

Which brings me to the last thing I want to say.  Anam Cara means "soul friend," and the whole book is about different manifestations of spiritual friendship with various aspects of ourselves, the earth, and other human beings.  Finding this book at such a time has been a great blessing for me, an unexpected and perfect gift of grace.  Reading it has made me aware of, among other things, the amazing gift of the "soul friends" I've made through blogging.  There is a tendency to view the relationships we form through the internet as less "real" than those we have in the physical world, but as O'Donohue says, there are no "limitations of space or time on the soul." 

One of the purposes and distinctions of soul friendship is that "the superficial lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are."  A soul friend is one with whom you experience a sense of "recognition and belonging," and "to whom you confess with a full heart."  These quotes wonderfully describe the experience I've had with friends I've made through blogging. 

So all I am left with at the end of this lengthy discussion is deep gratitude to my soul friends in the blogosphere who have both inspired me to explore these issues and also made me feel safe enough to do so publicly.  These are the greatest treasures of all.

Full of Hot Air

On the morning of my youngest's second birthday party, I rose early because I have a bad habit of rushing around at the last minute to get ready for parties, and I was determined to do it differently this time.  Also, I needed to go do laundry.

So I packed up my laundry baskets and headed out.  I'd gotten a couple of blocks down the road when I saw the balloons.  I'd forgotten today was the Balloon Fiesta.  I promptly turned around and fetched my camera.  I tried to take pictures while I was driving, but that didn't work so well, so I pulled into the bank parking lot and got out of the van.  Several others had done the same thing.

 

 

 

I climbed back into the van and headed over to the Free Box, which is a fenced area next to the Taos Recycling Center, where people can drop off or pick up whatever they want.  It's where I found the camera that I've used to take all the photos on my blog.

I've always been a big thrift store shopper.  It's the treasure hunter in me.  And also an expression of my belief in recycling.  Most of the clothes I own are secondhand, and when I've occasionally shopped for new clothes, I don't find things I like as much as I do at thrift stores.

The Free Box takes secondhand shopping to a whole new level, especially in the sense of serendipity.  One of the things I love about thrift stores is the way I'll put something I need or want out there to the universe, and then find that exact thing.  The Free Box is even more like that.

I found my camera, for instance, right when I was starting a blog.  All my life, I'd avoided photography like the plague.  Before digital cameras, I had issues with using a camera because of having to press it up against my glasses and squinch one of my eyes shut.  It was uncomfortable and awkward, and my photos were always off center.  Digital cameras intimidated me because they were so technical.

I've also had a philosophical problem with photography.  In all honesty, I held some latent contempt for those who go around photographing everything as a way to record experiences instead of actually having them.    Wendell Berry has a great poem about this, called "The Vacation."  There are definitely people who are too busy taking pictures to see.

But a camera came to me, out of the free flow of the world, and because it was free, I wasn't afraid of it.  I started playing with it, and discovered that photography actually helps me see better.  I pay attention more closely now, notice what is worth noticing.

Which is just about anything from the right distance and angle, and in the right light.   

 The antenna thingy on top of my house, for instance,

or puddles in the courtyard of the St. Francis church.

So now I'm to the point where I have to turn around and get my camera so I can photograph hot air balloons.

I felt slightly guilty, though, because I needed to drop off some things at the Free Box and then get to the laundromat so I'd make it back home in plenty of time to get ready for Eliana's party.

However, I couldn't resist taking one more photo at the Free Box.

And then one more on the way out.

And then, what was I going to do while I waited for the clothes to wash, but amuse myself somehow?

 I also visited the nearby Farmer's Market while the clothes were drying.

It's red chile ristra time.

At home, my kids had been decorating for the party,

so I was greeted by more balloons.

 

 

The party went great, Eliana had a wonderful time, and even the cake I baked came out pretty good.  I made it from a mix because, although I'm good at other kinds of baking, I suck at cakes from scratch.  But it was a really fancy yummy mix called Mam Papaul's - six bucks at Albertson's.   

It was a great day.

Naked in the Town Square

And before him no creature is hidden, 

but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one 

to whom we must render an account. 

~Hebrews 4:13

Unio Mystica
A. Andrew Gonzalez

You're a song
Written by the hands of God...

Underneath your clothes

There's an endless story

~Shakira 

         

I mentioned in an earlier post that St. Francis once stripped naked in the town square.  This scene in the movie, Brother Sun, Sister Moon is worth watching, even if it is a bit corny.  Well, ok - a lot corny.

I've been pondering the meaning of nakedness, especially the way that St. Francis used it.  He was making a statement against materialism and superficiality, but more, he was expressing his movement toward a deeper reality.

Since I started this blogging business, I've sometimes felt like I'm naked in the town square.  While this can be uncomfortable, it's also freeing.  I feel more like myself.  I feel more of myself.

The epithets that I started this post with remind me that nakedness is the default state.  We're always naked underneath our clothes.  I've been realizing that the key to feeling free in nakedness lies in the last part of that bible verse - asking myself, To whom must I render an account?  Why am I rendering an account? 

In other words, whose judgment of my nakedness should I really be concerned about?  If I worry about the judgment of my readers, I will find myself in fear, but if I hold my purpose to a higher authority, to the expression of something authentic and spiritually valuable, then I am paradoxically freed to simply let it move through me.

I'm pleasantly surprised that this is how it works.  I feel as though the universe is rewarding me for my efforts, especially in the sense that the more I focus in my writing on the connectedness I see in the whole blooming  world, the more ubiquitous that connectedness becomes, and the more illuminated I find these connections to be.

While I've been pondering this nakedness theme, on Sunday I went to the Presbyterian church I attend, and the sermon was about this very issue.  The verse from Hebrews was one of the texts for the day.  A couple of verses later it talks about "approaching the throne of grace with boldness," which spoke very clearly to my recent experiences.

I used to be extremely arrogant.  I genuinely thought I was smarter and more enlightened than everyone else.  I eventually went through a life-shatteringly humbling process, which has resulted in my being very cautious about falling into arrogance again.  But balanced with that caution must be a recognition of my gifts, and a proper use of them, and this does require boldness.  It just means giving credit where credit is due - which for me means to the Creator, and to other people and creatures and places  that are my collaborators, my cross-pollinators.

(There's a lovely post by Delwyn on this metaphor of cross-pollination, here.  What she says in that post expresses my blog's whole reason for being.  And the fact that someone else said it, a new friend I've connected with through this medium, beautifully illustrates the principle we're both addressing.)

So what is this "throne of grace" that we're encouraged to boldly approach?  Dictionary.com defines grace in several ways.  Here are the first three:

• elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action.
• a pleasing or attractive quality or endowment.
• favor or good will.

In theology, it means:

• the freely given, unmerited, favor and love of God. 
• the influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them.
• a virtue or excellence of divine origin.
  

I think the common thread between the theological and "regular" definitions of grace has to do with the concept of "freely given."  When we experience a moment of grace, there's something surprising about it, it feels like a gift out of nowhere.  If a throne is "the chair or seat occupied by a sovereign," we can think of that sovereign as grace itself.  Approaching this throne, it seems, means being naked.  To receive moments of grace, we must be open to them, not trying to control every little detail of existence, not clothed in fear or worry or narcissism.

Another way of saying this is that we have to be like children - unselfconscious, free of guile, and in a sense, unquestioning of the value of what we have to share.  Kids will run up to you and excitedly tell you what they just discovered or played with or thought about without ever worrying if you're going to be bored or judgmental.

To be naked is to be uninhibitedly enthusiastic in expressing what interests you.  And if you say it wrong or incompletely, or not everyone gets it or cares to get it - oh well; they're not the ones to whom you must render an account.  It's only the source of grace within you that is entitled to such rendering.

I got to test all this out last Sunday.  I left church, pondering all these things, and as I was turning onto my street, I saw this sign.

     

I had not heard anything about this event, and was very curious.  I went in my house, changed my shoes, grabbed my camera, and headed over to San Francisco de Asis.  Alas, the parking lot was empty and the church was locked.  But I could hear drumming coming from somewhere, so I walked back through the little grove, out to the street, and looked up and down.

I followed the drumming, passing a few other pedestrians on the way, until I came to the end of the street, where the church school is.   I knew I was now in the right place.

As I walked into the parking lot, passing a long line of mostly kids waiting to drive go-carts around a winding course marked by orange cones, it hit me that I was probably the only non-Hispanic person present.  Not only that, but I was still dressed in the red sweater and colorful skirt I'd worn to church, while everyone else was wearing  jeans.  I felt grossly out of place.  I might as well have been naked.

The culture surrounding the San Francisco de Asis church has existed for over two hundred years and is of a very close-knit, traditional, New Mexican Catholic flavor.  I've rarely felt like such an outsider as I did as I walked through the bazaar.

It was a small, simple affair.  There was food both in the gym and lined up in booths outside - tameles, frito pies, roasted corn, burgers, snow cones.  In the gym, along one wall, was a long table set up with religious figurines, prayer cards, rosaries and some artwork and books with the San Francisco church as the subject.  The rest of the gym was being used for bingo and raffle winner announcements. There were standard fair-type games going on outside, and also a performance area set up in the parking lot.

I wandered around for a bit, wishing I 'd brought some money to spend on food or a poster of the church.  I thought more than once about leaving. The drumming had stopped, but there was another act about to begin, so I figured I'd at least see what it was.  As it turns out, I got to witness an amazing performance by a dance group.  I'm not sure "performance" is even the right word, because they introduced their danzas by saying that each one is a prayer.

After the performance, I approached the dancers and asked if I could post the photos I'd taken of them on my blog.  They took my contact info and said they'd get back to me by the end of the week.   So once I hear from them, I'll share more about this experience in another post, either with or without photos.

But for now, I will just say that I'm very glad I stayed to watch the danzas, because I found myself so caught up in the grace of them, I forgot to feel naked.