An Extra-Spectral Year

This year has been something else.  I suspected it would be when I realized purple was going to be its color.  I've never been fond of this color; you might even say I'm porphyrophobic.   I've always associated purple with discomfort, with intensity, and also with death.  When I finished making my collage for the year and contemplated the finished product, I just knew it was going to be a fiercely disturbing year, and that there would be death in it.

Then, at the beginning of February, my younger brother Scott unexpectedly died.  And that was just the beginning.  There have been deaths and brushes with death on many different levels this year.  I could do about ten more posts on each of those experiences, but I'll spare you all that.

Really, the death theme started at the end of 2011, and that's partly how purple came to be my color for 2012.  I had been writing the weekly blog for a client's website.  Her product, called Life at Hand, is a system for recording and organizing personal information and vital documents, so a lot of what I was researching to blog about had to do with estate planning and other end-of-life stuff.  In the process of that research, I became more and more aware of (and disturbed by) how deeply in denial we are as a culture about all things death-related.  I began to feel an urgent sense to do something about that, but I knew not what.  All I knew is that death was going to be a focus for me for a while.

When Scott died, I took on the task of planning and leading his memorial.  At the time, I had been happily planning the Valentine's tea party I mentioned in my last post, inspired about the opportunity to create a celebration of my woman friends.  Now that enthusiasm went into creating a different kind of celebration altogether, a celebration of Scott's life.

But I had never done anything remotely like planning a memorial before, so I went into major research mode, and what I quickly discovered is that there is very little freely available on the Internet that is useful for such a task .  The poems and readings I found were mostly cheesy and/or bland, and I was horrified that several sites wanted to charge for the most basic resources.  For instance, one site I landed on wanted $30 for a funeral program template Word document.  After many, many hours of research I did finally find some good stuff, and managed to put it all together, but my sense that how death is approached in our culture needs to have the lid blown off it was amped up several levels.

It wasn't just because of the research, either.  It was because of Scott.

I had never had much of an opinion or feeling either way about the idea of connecting with people beyond the grave.  When people recount experiences of having felt the presence of a dead loved one, I've never really believed or disbelieved it.  But with Scott's death, that changed forever.

One day, shortly after his death, I was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop, talking about him.  Some amazing things had been happening among those he was connected to; a sense of community had formed over many miles among us.  His two ex-wives were connecting with each other, for instance.  And for me, who had been alienated from Scott for several years because his addictions and demons had made him an unsafe person for me to let into my life, I felt all of the walls I'd erected with him come down, and I simply loved him once again.  As I discussed all this with my friend in the cafe, I said, "I have no regrets; I'm at peace with all of this and I can tangibly feel that he is at peace too.  I just wish I could give him one good hug."  And as I said that, all of a sudden everything just lit up and became more alive, vibrant with warm good life; and his spirit, his essence - HE - was there hugging me, and it was infinitely more satisfying than any physical hug.

Eckhart Tolle says that when someone dies it's like a soap bubble bursting; the outer form of the bubble is gone, and what was inside that bubble is released.  That's as good an analogy as any I've heard to describe how this could be.

Can I prove that it was really Scott's essence there with me?  No, of course not.  But I know it on a level that trumps the puny "knowledge" of the rational mind.  Conveniently, there's a fitting metaphor here involving my color for the year: 

There is no such thing as the "wavelength of purple light" on the visible color spectrum; purple only exists as a combination, and is therefore referred to as "extra-spectral."  It wasn't even acknowledged on Newton's color wheel. However, as it says on Wikipedia, "The spectrum is often divided up into named colors, though any division is somewhat arbitrary: the spectrum is continuous."

Just as the color spectrum is continuous regardless of the divisions we impose upon it, so is the spectrum of life and death.  And whether you classify and divide the spectrum, whether you name the color or not and include it as part of a system you recognize, you know it when you see it, and that's all that matters. 

Saying Yes to the Impossible

Because my free time has been very limited over the past months, and because I am now writing for a living, I have been spending far more time on Facebook than on Blogger.  When I'm sitting at my computer, working on an article or a grant, I can flip over to Facebook for a five minute break, and happily, I've been able to keep up with some of my blogging friends this way.  One of those friends is Claire, of A Seat at the Table.  Today she has shared several wonderful ruminations on Advent and Christmas, which I have been so inspired by that I had to come blog about it, even though a huge pile of laundry, an unwritten article, and unbaked goodies await my attention.

One of the links she shared was a post called Annunciations All the Time, at dotMagis.  The author shares the poem, "Annunciation," by Denise Levertov (one of my favorite poets).  This poem deals with the idea that we are always being presented with things to say "yes" to the way Mary said yes to the angel.  And this brought me back to something I've been ruminating about this Advent, which is the part of Mary's 'yes' that included giving birth away from home, in a stable (or cave, as I hear is more accurate).

It seems to me that if an angel came to me and told me I was going to give birth to the son of God, saying yes would be a no-brainer.  But then if the time came to give birth and I found myself far from home and family, in a dirty stable, I'd be questioning if it really was God after all.  I'd be thinking, "This can't be right, this can't be the way such a one should be born."

Last year, I blogged about the messiness of Christmas.  This year, I am deeper in the messiness, not just of Christmas but of life.  How is it that my most cherished notions of the way things should be can be so far from reality?  It helps me to think of Mary in the stable, saying Yes.

Claire shared another poem by Denise Levertov, on her own blog today, and this one is about the importance of welcoming grief when it comes.  I can't help but put this together with my Mary rumination.  When we think of grief, we usually think of the big losses, of people we love dying, but there are so many little losses.  So many.  And some losses we experience as big even when they might not seem so to others.  I think again of Mary in the stable, of reconciling with the loss of an imagined experience of giving birth surrounded by the comfort and familiarity of home and loved ones.  For me, this would likely bring a sense of great loss, and I would grieve.  For Mary, it was the introduction to a life of losses around her son.  And for all of us with children, we know that the moment we give birth, we begin to lose them.

To allow grief is to say yes to the loss that has caused the grief, and then to open up a new and more abundant set of possibilities.  This is what I continue to learn at deeper and deeper levels, or actually, in more and more circumstances, even the ones that have seemed impossible to accept.

The third link Claire has shared today is to a post called The Christmas We Are Waiting For, by Sister Joan Chittister, and it reflects upon the Advent theme of waiting.  Chittister comments that Christ's birth was really about establishing a whole new order, which in many ways, disappointed those who were waiting for a Messiah.  She asks, "For what have we been waiting...For the restoration of the old order or for the creation of the new?"

The creation of the new may be very different from what I had imagined and thought right, and I will grieve the loss of the old, but doing so may be the only way to really let go of it and welcome true freedom, peace, and joy.

May we all be awake to the blessings of the season, in whatever messy form they come.

Bittersweet Harvest

Justin, Ben, and Harry in Mexico.  I met them shortly after this trip.

The house in Las Vegas, New Mexico that I moved into after I split up with my husband was next to a compound inhabited by three men:  Harry, Ben, and Justin, and I became very close to all of them.  In fact, Justin eventually became my partner and the father of my fourth child.  Harry was in his mid-sixties when I met him, but had the health and energy level of someone much younger.  He was a forest firefighter and a pilot, and had lived in many places and done many things.  At one point in his life he was a successful stock broker.  He was wise, funny, strong, and a great cook, famous for his amazing pots of beans. 

Two days before Eliana was born, he got up that morning, and something wasn't right.  We all thought he was drunk at first, but soon realized he had had a stroke.  We brought him to the hospital where he stayed for several days.  He and I were in there at the same time, I giving birth, and he beginning a slow process of death.

When he was released, he wasn't much better than when he went in.  The stroke had completely transformed him, he had turned into an old man overnight.  He was disoriented and couldn't do simple things for himself.  I would go visit him, and he'd have his glasses on upside down, or his shirt on inside out.  A few days after his return home, he reached into his woodstove and grabbed a smouldering log with his bare hand, severely burning it.  I became the tender of that wound, changing the dressing twice a day.  I was simultaneously caring for a newborn and a wounded old man, and it was hard.

Harry eventually got a little better in terms of greater clarity and ability to do for himself, but never again returned to the man he had been.  

I eventually left Las Vegas and did so with great relief to be ending a dark period of my life.  I had gone through a couple of years in which I suffered a major identity crisis, and allowed myself to be drawn into a downward spiral of reckless behavior.  This resulted in the loss of several friends, and even after I began rebuilding my life in a healthier direction, the views of certain people about me were set, so that I found myself trapped in the mirror, so to speak.  So after I left Las Vegas, I never looked back, I blocked it out of my consciousness as much as possible, and didn't go back to visit Harry or anyone else.

Last Wednesday, Harry killed himself with a rifle.  It had gotten to the point where there was discussion about putting him in a home.  That just wasn't going to happen.  I don't blame him, but it doesn't make it any easier.  It didn't make it easier to go to Las Vegas, or to walk in the room where it happened.  It didn't make it easier to clean brains off the wall, or to deal with the flood of memories that overtook me when I saw the white electric heater he had in there, that used to be my daughter's and was covered in exuberantly adolescent graffiti-like phrases she had written in black Sharpie.

Going to Las Vegas the other day was an intense opening to many things that I have been so closed to, so numb against.  Things related to my relationship with Justin, things that happened with my children while I was there, all the good and bad memories of living there, of who I was then.  And I realized to my shame that after Harry had his stroke, I detached from him because it was too hard to see how he'd changed, to suffer the loss of the amazing man he was.  I was always afraid I would betray the dismay I felt around him.  And honestly, after I left, it was as though I'd already written him off.  I kept expecting to hear that he'd died and I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did.  For a man like Harry, living in dependency on friends, doctors, pills, was no life at all.

I want to remember him as he was before the stroke, his gruff voice with that slight Texas drawl, the way he'd call you darlin'.  I see him driving down the road in his big black and red rescue Jeep, wearing one of those crisp white shirts he loved.  I remember how despite his ability to lead a team of firefighters, he was afraid of bugs.  How he mentored June Amber, my oldest daughter, during a difficult time for her.  But I also want to remember who he was after the stroke, and honor that person too.  Because he hung in there, he fought the good fight until the end. 

Today is Lammas, the pagan celebration of the first harvest, the harvest of the grain.  According to schooloftheseasons.com, it is a festival of regrets and farewells, and this is very fitting for me today, because I am experiencing a true regret, that I let my emotional difficulties  prevent me from staying in relationship with someone who was very dear to me and is now gone.

And yet, my overriding feeling is one of gratitude, that Harry lived and that he's free, that I have been brought full-circle to face and integrate my Las Vegas life and its people, to soften my heart and open to love in a place that has been cold and dark within me for several years.  To forgive myself and others.  To say a fond farewell - to Harry, to my regret, to past mistakes, both mine and others.'

One of the traditions associated with Lammas is baking bread, making good use of that which has been harvested.  So today, as I consider all that I am now reaping from my relationship with Harry, from my life in Las Vegas and all that I did there, all that I can now make good use of instead of regret, I will bake a loaf of bread in honor of Harry's life, and bring it to Las Vegas when I go for his memorial next weekend, to share with others who were connected to his life, and to mine.

Harry, Eliana, Justin, me, and June Amber in California, Summer '08

Graffiti and Roses

Today is the Summer Solstice, and what that immediately conjures in my mind is Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and a vague longing for romance and the ocean.

But I am single, and nowhere near the ocean.  I was hoping to visit the west coast this summer, but chose instead to put money into a writer's conference that will be happening here in Taos.  (Have I mentioned that I'm writing a book about my relationship with the San Francisco de Asis church?)  My heart right now is very much with the Gulf Coast, and so at this Solstice time of great light and life, I am permeated with the awareness of darkness and death.  I feel it in my own body.

Today is also Honoring Sacred Sites day, and so I send my light and life to the Gulf Coast, the sacred ocean.  And I turn, as I do every day, toward the San Francisco de Asis church, the sacred site right outside my door.

Taos is a tourist town, and each summer a theme is chosen to center activities and events around.  Last year it was "The Summer of Love," and the focus was on Taos' strong and enduring hippie culture.  Dennis Hopper came for the opening of his art show.  This year the theme is "Return to Sacred Places."  In fact, the newspaper held an essay contest for Taos residents around this theme, and I got an honorable mention for my essay about the church.

Because of this theme, there has been a lot of focus on the St. Francis church, with talks given and three art shows around town.  I missed the talk that was given at the public library on June 5, but was lucky enough to catch it on the radio the other night.  The thing that most struck me in this talk, given by David Maes, who is a lifelong resident of Ranchos de Taos and member of the church, was in his introduction.  He spoke of how the church belongs to anyone who experiences its sacredness, and how even the air around the church feels holy and refreshing.

I did not participate in enjarre, the annual remudding, which is now over.  There is a variety of reasons for that, but one of the most unexpected ones was the sense of loss I've been experiencing over the cutting down of trees in the grove by the church.  It left a bad taste in my mouth and made me want to stay away from the church altogether.  It was several days after seeing all the stumps before I could go back, and when I did, the stumps had all been overturned so that the whole space resembles a twisted wasteland.

The next time I went, a few days after that, I discovered that the entrance to the grove between the gift shop and rectory was now defined with edging and filled with gravel.

I have to admit I'm having trouble with these changes.  A little bit of wildness has been tamed.  I don't think the birds are happy about it either.  The doves have been completely silent and the crows have sounded so angry lately.  They've been congregating and having screechfests in my yard.  I know I've mentioned the birdlife at the church before but I want to give you a clearer picture of this.  It's really only been in the past month or two that I've realized how central the church is to the bird communities of Ranchos de Taos.  There are more birds in this part of Taos than any other, and what I finally realized is that the church is their crossroads, their center.  They fly back and forth, in and out from that hub.  Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems like there's been less bird traffic since enjarre began.

And I can't help but wonder how St. Francis would feel about all this.  One of the things he was famous for was going around and restoring rundown churches, but I wonder how far he took that, balanced against his intense reverence for Mother Earth and her creatures.  Sigh.  Well, what's done is done, and there is nothing for me to do but accept and integrate these changes, and continue to simply observe them.  One thing I do like is the new sign that marks the entrance to the grove from the church side:

The grove is still in flux.  Orange fencing surrounds the area near the adobe ruins that borders the grove, and certain spaces are marked out in a way that suggest something is planned.  Perhaps I've never mentioned the ruins before.  It's hard to give you the scope of it with my simple camera, but here's a try:

It's not the Parthenon, but there is still something sacred in this to me, even or perhaps especially in the graffiti.  There is a sacredness in the way we leave our artful marks on things.  I love the way recent generations have come up with ways to do this even in urban landscapes.  Graffiti, skateboarding, and parkour are all ways to use and add to the mundane and manmade in elevated ways, turning the utilitarian into the artful, for the sheer joy of it.  (I must mention here that I love the concept of Tess' blog, Sacred Graffiti; I highly recommend you visit there.)

After some inquiry at the gift shop, I discovered that the activity around the ruins is because an archaeology group is doing excavation.  When the church was first built, it was surrounded by a fort, and the buildings later became private residences, many of which are still occupied.  Since those buildings hold a lot of history, it makes sense that an archaeology group would be interested in the ruins. 

On the other side of the ruins is the church lot, a deep contrast in its manicured beauty.  Now that things have calmed down a bit over there, I've been able to settle in and enjoy it again. Today, a man was revarnishing the benches in the courtyard.

I love to see the seasonal changes over there.  The flowers that the hawkmoths come to aren't blooming yet, but the rose bushes are in full bloom, something I missed last year because I didn't start walking to the church until after the blossoms had faded.

Clare, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and their roses.  Notice the ruins in the background.

I'm thinking about the pruning metaphor again in terms of manmade changes versus "natural" ones.  I once had a student who wrote an astonishing paper using Emerson's ideas about nature to back up the claim that everything humans do is natural.  Is the grove-clearing and throwing down of gravel as natural and beautiful as any seasonal change of the flora?  My instinctive resistance to this idea is based on the fear that if we believe that, it gives us license to do all kinds of real damage, just the way that verses from Genesis about mankind having "dominion" over Creation have been used to justify all sort of horrible nonsense.  And yet, partially thanks to that student's paper, and also Byron Katie's teachings, I can't help but wonder:  If we consciously saw things in this way would it not ultimately give us a greater, not a lesser, awareness and sense of responsibility in our interactions with the natural world?  In fact, we would no longer see ourselves as being separate enough to have "interactions with" the natural world, but would know ourselves to be part of the organic whole.

I don't know.  If I've learned anything in my four decades here on Earth, it's that it's a long road from ideology to integration.  But on this Solstice day of honoring sacred sites, it feels like an appropriate rumination.  Graffiti and roses, skateboarding and birdflight, excavation and pollination, pruning, enjarre, restoration, decomposition - my former student would say these things are equal to each other, equally natural.  What has always appealed most to me about the St. Francis church, which is the most sacred place in the world to me, is the dance among nature, culture, spirituality, religion, art, tradition.  And the paradoxes in all of it, the paradox in my relationship to it as an intimate outsider.

What better way to honor the seasonal changes of nature and sacred sites both "natural" and manmade than to perceive ourselves as fully integrated with and responsible for them the way we are responsible for our own selves?  This is also National Prayer Day, and the only prayer I have is for this, and then to rest in the holy paradoxes, the mysteries to be integrated within and beyond our ideologies.   

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.

Alone With Love

Ash Wednesday is almost upon me.  The first day of Lent.  A day to begin forty days of fasting.  What for?  What is the purpose of this?  Self-deprivation.  It's no fun.  I face Lent each year with a kind of dread.  Why do this to myself?

Today is Mardi Gras, the feast before the fast. I don't feel inspired about what I'm giving up this year.  I don't feel ready.  I've dedicated this year to quiet love, and I'm giving up bitching for Lent.  I'm giving up negative expression, but more than that, deeper than that, my goal is to give up negative thought.  So what should my "feast" be?  A bitchfest, no doubt.  Which, come to think of it, puts me in the great biblical tradition of people like Job, who mightily complained to God when things didn't go his way.  

There are so many things I can bitch about from traffic to the uncertainty I feel in my own heart.  But what I really want to focus on is the unfairness of the blindness it seems I'm doomed to wander through life with.  The inevitable pain and sorrow, the intolerable length of time it takes for any real healing to occur, despite my unending attempts to focus on this healing.  The fact that all I've wanted for years is a true partner in life, someone to raise my children and build a home with, and that I still don't have that, and it's increasingly looking like I never will.  One of my children has already grown up and moved out and another one will in a year.  I'm on my own.

Despite knowing what holds me back from the kind of love and partnership I want, I find myself unable to make the changes that would allow this.  At least not fast enough.  And the irony is that these very issues are the ones my last potential partner could least deal with because of his issues, which in turn were the last I could deal with.

Why is life this way?  It's a mystery, a paradox, and very often I find beauty and comfort in this, but, honestly, sometimes IT JUST SUCKS.

And at times like this, it becomes completely obvious that it's all about death.  The destination is the grave for the body and the refiner's fire for the ego.  I can go kicking and screaming, or I can go willingly.  But seriously - who is going to go to the fire and the grave without a little kicking and screaming?  Does it even really matter?

Of course it does.  The grace with or without which I submit to these things makes all the difference in the world.  And I know this, but sometimes it's still impossible to find that grace, to live it.

I look and look for the love that will make me whole, but death reminds me, the fire shows me, that there is no other option but to find it in myself.  The wellspring of love is within me, and I will be comforted and healed by it there, or not at all.  I am alone with love, or I am just alone. 

So this is the purpose of Lent.  To deprive myself of external things that only seem to give me what I want and need, in order to be less distracted from the true source of love.

And while I'm feeling sorry for myself because I'm not in Louisiana for Mardi Gras, and try to find the Mardi Gras Mambo on YouTube to cheer myself up, instead I find something that reminds me in more than one way of how little I truly have to bitch about:

The Color of Quiet Love

On the heels of yesterday's post, I read this Rumi poem in The Essential Rumi, which I bought recently at my favorite thrift/consignment store, Pieces.

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side.  Die,
and be quiet.  Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.

~Rumi
(translated by Coleman Barks

in The Essential Rumi)

I love the way it ties in with quiet love, the exploration of color, slowing down, and the deathlike experience of winter that so many people seem to be having right now. The line "become the sky" reminded me of one of my favorite songs, "I Am The Highway," by Audioslave.  This video oddly but beautifully combines the song with clips from the movie, Into the Wild, which happens to be one of my favorite movies:

Treasures of Darkness: Part II

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, 

than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence. 

~Gandhi

What is violence?  And what do we do with it?

Dictionary.com's first definition of the word "violence" is "swift and intense force,"  as in "a violent storm."  This kind of violence is natural, and unavoidable.

The second definition is "rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment."  This sounds more like the kind of violence most people agree is inappropriate in most situations.

The American Heritage Dictionary lists as its first definition:  "Physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing: crimes of violence."  This sounds even more like the kind of violence we want to avoid or overcome.

What is the difference between this kind and the "natural" kind but human intention? 

Is violence just

anything

that wounds?

Blake said, Colors are

the wounds of light.

Everything

is wounded, even

light is broken.

This violence is

essential

to the world.

This is beauty.

When my heart is

hard and dull and dry, it wants

to be broken,

a violent grace;

my heart must be

broken open,

because it cannot break

itself.

This is beauty.

While I was working on this post, I came across a very interesting chart of the "Levels of Human Development," in the magazine What Is Enlightenment?  According to this chart, the "Integral" phase that humanity is beginning to enter will be defined by "new, higher forms of integral or holistic thinking."  One of the people held up as an "exemplary leader" at this level is Teilhard de Chardin.  The philosophy he may best be known for is that of the Omega Point, the belief that humanity is evolving into union with the divine.

I had already been thinking about him in relation to this discussion, because of his reaction to being involved in World War I. For him, being on the front lines led him into an exalted, mystical experience, reducing life to its essences, and paradoxically inspiring his faith in the spiritual evolution of humanity.

Another strange and wonderful thing that happened while I was contemplating all of this occurred at the library. I was browsing in my favorite section, the 291s, and a book called Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, caught my eye. I opened it randomly and read the following, in a section whose heading was “Contradictions as Treasures”:

We need to rediscover contradiction as a creative force within the soul...that disavows mere linear progress in order to awaken all the aggregate energies of an experience. It is the turbulence and conflict of their inner conversation that brings an integrity of transfiguration...There is a secret light and vital energy in contradiction...If you remain faithful to this energy, you will gradually come to participate in a harmony that lies deeper than any contradiction. This will give you new courage to engage the depth, danger, and darkness of your life.

John O'Donohue, the author of this beautiful writing, then goes on to say that we need to reconsider what we judge as negative, that morality is often “the enemy of growth” because of the rigid judgments associated with it, and that we need “a new way of understanding and integrating the negative,” by befriending it.

Author Barbara Kingsolver, in her essay, “Be Careful What You Let In The Front Door,” discusses receiving two letters addressing the violence in her novels in the same week One of these letters was from a woman who had been abused as a child, and couldn't read past a certain point in one of Kingsolver's novels because of the violence done to one of the characters. The other letter was from a nun, praising her for “daring to hold up a mirror of the horrible devastation our country has visited upon Nicaragua” in her novel, Animal Dreams. These letters led Kingsolver into deep contemplation. She comes to no ultimate conclusion, but says, “I don't know whether my convictions about art...that contains violence will ever be allowed to settle into a comfortable position. They have been revising themselves for a long, long time, roaming restlessly over the options, continually exhorted by the ghosts that bless and curse.”

Twelve years later, in her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she offers an excellent discussion of actual violence, in the context of killing the animals her family raises to eat on their small farm. She says, “It's not without thought and gratitude that I slaughter my animals, it is a hard thing to do.” And she offers the following quote from Kahlil Gibran:

When you kill a beast, say to him in your heart:
By the same power that slays you, I too am slain, and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivers you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.

The meaning embodied in this message is what rescues the acceptance of paradox from fence-sitting, integration of the dark side from alignment with it.  Because to have this kind of identification with the object of your violence is to have compassion.  And for me, choosing a position on an issue only has value if it is an expression of compassion.

I hope you'll join me as I explore the relationship between violence and compassion in the third and last post of this series.

The Thin Days of Autumn

I'm having one of the best autumns of my life.  This is largely because of where I live these days and because the weather has been so perfect.  The proverbial cool, crisp days have been accentuated by loads of sunshine and multi-colored falling leaves.  I was pleasantly startled the first day that I walked to the San Francisco church and the side of the road was blanketed with yellow.

That's the thing about autumn - it's always a surprise.  I'm used to the green of summer, and then all of a sudden everything's ablaze, blowing and falling, and the whole quality of light and air changes.  In this part of the world, many people use woodstoves to heat their homes, so the smells change too.  Last week, walking home from the church, I encountered a symphony of scent within a fifty-foot span - pinon wood smoke, somebody's dinner cooking, the faint smell of diesel from the highway, falling leaves, and that delicious indescribable wet grass aroma.

And yet, I've also been feeling what I can only call bereft.  This word, bereft, keeps floating back to me, trying to fill the space it describes.  It's funny, but the loss I'm feeling is mostly of illusion, comforting fantasies I've carried with me since childhood, but now are gone, or going.  They were heavy.  And noisy.  There's so much more room for beauty and real joy now.  But beauty and joy are light as a feather; in a strange way, they don't fill the space. 

There are other little losses, too.  When I first saw that the flowers lining the church walkway had been mowed down, I was saddened.  The hummingbird hawk moths would have nothing to come to now, even if they hadn't already left.  Part of what originally drew me to the church is gone.

Except for the baby's breath, Clare's garden has wilted and browned like old lettuce.

But the day I took these photos, I also noticed that the rosebush next to the courtyard wall was in full bloom, and I didn't remember ever having seen it bloom before.  I don't think I even realized it was a rosebush.

I was sore tempted to pick one, so I shot one instead.

The bush had four or five blossoms on it, and they smelled just divine, but the next day, someone had cut them all.  I wonder who got them.  Oh well - they're all dead by now, anyway.

I've had to orient myself to these changes, adjust my expectations and purpose for walking to the church.  I've had to let go of attachments, and ultimately, embrace the dying process.

The association of fall with death is inevitable, the paradox being that it's also the harvest, when a profusion of nourishing life fills the fields, the farmer's markets, kitchens.  Pumpkins are ripe, and it's time for pie.  Apples are falling off the tree faster than I can catch them.  I have an excuse to fill my house with the scents of cinnamon, allspice, and ginger. I find myself wanting to bake more, not just because of everything that's in season, but because autumn brings out the nesting instinct in me, to begin that withdrawal into a warm, family-filled house; to prepare for the holidays that will soon be coming down the pike in grand procession.  I want to light candles and have a reason to turn the oven on.

Oh, I know, some of you are gagging right now.  So I'll get off this subject and talk about death again, how's that?

The first holiday of the season, of course, is Halloween, a night associated with all things macabre and mortuous.  Traditionally, this night is considered to be a "thin" or liminal time, when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is more transparent and easier to penetrate.  In pagan spirituality, this night is the beginning of Samhain, a word that has ancient Celtic origins.  In Gaelic folklore, Samhain was the celebration of the final harvest, and may have become associated with death and horror partly because it was the time when the livestock was slaughtered en masse to be preserved as winter sustenance.

Halloween has always been an intense time for me.  Many significant events in my life have occurred on or around Halloween.   When I was nine or ten, I fell while ice skating and went unconscious from a concussion.  When I woke up in the hospital, I couldn't remember what had happened.  The second day in the hospital was Halloween, and because I wanted to trick-or-treat so badly, I pretended I could remember and made up a story about how I'd fallen.  I knew I'd been skating, so I just said I'd been doing a sit spin and lost my balance.  (What really happened came back to me a few days later.  I had to pee but was too lazy, so I was skating sloppily, and caught the back of one blade on the front of the other.)

A few years later on Halloween, when I was fourteen, my family moved from Toronto, where I'd spent my childhood, to Baton Rouge.  I had to miss my best friend's costume party and spend Halloween in a strange place where I didn't know anyone.

Then, when I was twenty-four, I got married in a cemetery at twilight on Halloween.  My husband had introduced me to Clive Barker and the peculiar joys of the horror genre.  On one of our first dates we went to see the Barker movie, Nightbreed, which I was surprised to find that I thoroughly enjoyed.  From that point, I read all of Clive Barker's books, starting with The Books of Blood.  I was also working in a New Age bookstore and spending my long days there reading neo-pagan spellbooks and the diary of a woman who claimed to be a partial incarnation of the Angel of Death.  So the cemetery wedding was the next logical step, I suppose.  After the wedding, we painted our faces with fake blood and went out to a haunted house, where he won me a matching glow-in-the-dark skull necklace and bracelet, now lost.

My husband and I divorced after a few years, and I went through a transformative spiritual rebirth that eventually led me to join the Presbyterian church where he worked as a sexton.  Long story short, we got remarried in the church, but this time we did it on November 1, All Saints' Day.  However, we didn't actually sign the papers until November 2, All Souls' Day, so we considered our anniversary to span all three of those days.

Do you know the difference between All Saints and All Souls?  If you're Catholic, you probably do.  All Saints' Day commemorates those who have died and gone to heaven, and All Souls' is for those who've died but aren't in heaven yet.  Most mainstream Protestant denominations tend to give a nod to All Saints but ignore All Souls, presumably because of a lack of belief in Purgatory, where Catholics believe certain souls are purified before entering heaven.

Here in New Mexico, we have the Day of the Dead, El Dia de Los Muertos, a colorful, noisy, and light-heartedly creepy version of All Saints/All Souls involving parties on gravesites, and things like candy skulls and pan de muerte (the bread of the dead). 

While all of these holidays have a distinctly Catholic flavor, as with most Christian holidays a little digging uncovers those pagan roots.  The Day of the Dead, for instance, traces back to ancient Aztec practices.  In the pagan worldview, all things spiritual or otherworldly are firmly linked to something practical and this-worldly.  And so the Christian remembrance of those who have passed on comes from an earlier observance of this world's connection to the otherworld, at a time of the year when the natural world appears to die.

So what ever happened to that husband? you might ask  Another long story - but we got divorced again a few years later.  And while we rarely see each other now, there's an underlying understanding and forgiveness between us that divorce has made possible.

When I started this post, I wasn't expecting to be discussing my ex-husband, but it strikes me now as fitting.  And it's downright perfect that our ex-anniversary falls on the thin days of autumn, because while our marriage is very much over - dead, if you will - it was real with a capital R.   Our divorce is a necessary veil that allows me to continue my journey in this world without him as a partner, but at certain times, I see that perhaps in the otherworld, the eternal world, our marriage will always be.  Maybe this is what is meant by "What God joins let no one put asunder."  Maybe it's not a command but a statement of fact.

What dies yet lives.  The time of gathering in the harvest, preserving it to hold onto for the lean months to come, is also a time of letting go, unfastening, releasing.  Fruit falls - a perpetuation of life in the spreading of seeds.  Trees drop their leaves and appear to die, but the sap still flows unseen.  What lived once in our hearts lives still, no matter how long and deep the winter.        

My mom was telling me the other day about Bright Star, the recent movie about John Keats.  I haven't seen it, but our conversation made me think of Keats' concept, "Negative Capability," which he defined as "the ability to rest in mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason."

Yup.  That's what it takes when considering conundrums like how to hold on and let go at the same time, and how illusion can have weight and substance while joy and beauty do not.  Negative Capability is one of my primary aims in life, and surely necessary for appreciating these thin days of autumn.