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. 

Setting Scraps of Light on Fire

Scraps of light through the adobe ruins next to the grove

Today is my one year blogoversary.  It is this and only this that has finally gotten me to sit down and write a post.  I have missed blogging and think about it almost every day, but my life has become so full of other things that I haven't had the inspiration.  To find some, I walked over to the church today, but there were too many people around so I ended up in the grove, where I sat and wrote this post by hand.   I have found myself sitting in the grove more often lately than in the church courtyard.  It's green again, although the mass graves of trees are still untended.

So much has happened since I last posted, that I don't know where to begin.  Should I tell you about my busy life?  The immense sense of loss and sadness I've been feeling?  Should I talk about how disconnected I've become from my writing?  

Or maybe I should try to be more positive, and tell you about my discoveries about bats, or the white cat I keep seeing, or my lemon tree dream.  But all these things are moments that have passed, inspirations that have faded in the face of too much work.

I'm not happy.  I know I need to just accept the way my life is right now, surrender to it.  Believe me, I'm working on that moment by moment, but there is a very sad little girl inside me who wants to come out and play.  And I don't know what to tell her to make her stop banging on the door.

And I realize how much I miss you all, my blogging friends.  It's not only the writing that I miss, it's the community, the support.  I feel very alone in my life these days, very much like I'm carrying a heavy burden by myself.  Stumbling and faltering under it.

But life goes on, and I just keep taking the next step.  At times I have glimpses of all this as a journey of significance, but mostly it just feels like stumbling in the dark.  I get tired of trying to hang onto the scraps of light that are tossed me.  I get mad at God for not giving me more, and then I'm ashamed for feeling that way.

And that's why I need - NEED - to write about those scraps, because it's the only way for me to hold onto them as guides, as reminders of the greater journey, the better story.  I need to tell you about last week when I had both a butterfly and a dragonfly on my finger in the same day.  They were both trapped in my house at different points, and I freed them.  

I need to tell you about dreaming of a sugarlaced lemon tree so glorious that gazing up into it was like eating the sun.

I need to tell you about the lessons bats have been trying to teach me about surrender and rebirth, about echolocation, in which bats navigate in the dark by using their voices to create sounds that reverberate off objects - the ability to see with the ears, to hear with the voice.  Because by telling you, I have a greater chance of really learning the lessons, internalizing and integrating them.  I too hear with my voice.  I learn by teaching.

And now, just by writing all this, I feel lighter, happier, inspired, free.  It occurs to me that this post follows a similar structure to some of the biblical psalms that start out with a lament and end with praise because by writing the lament the psalmist has seen the joy again.

Now I see that the writing I haven't been doing had hardened around me like ice, that scraps of light left unshared leave me cold, and once that happens, I have to write into the cold to break through it.

The fire must be tended or it dies out.  The fire must be fed, and for me that means writing it. 

Self-Trotter

I'm losing my religion.  No, I'm not talking about Christianity.  That's a religion I could never "lose" because it's written into my soul.  My understanding and expression of it can and does deepen and change and grow, but what is essential in it cannot be lost, because, in the words of A Course in Miracles, "Nothing real can be threatened."

What I'm losing is the religion of "I need a partner to be complete," which is probably the most popular religion in the world, with the most convincing propaganda.  "Can't live without you," "You complete me," "You are my everything," are just a portion of its liturgy.

This process began several months ago with a short but powerful dream.  I was driving to my sort-of-sometimes-partner's house with the familiar feeling of anticipation and anxiety.  I need to see him.  What if he's not there?  What if he's with a woman?  It was nighttime, and there was a massive thunderstorm going on.  I could barely see the dirt road that leads to his place, and feared I would drive off the side into the ditch.  I was forced to slow down almost to the point of stopping, but was determined to go on.  I had to get there.  But all of a sudden, there was a huge flash of lightning that encompassed the whole scene.  I found myself enveloped and completely stopped by blinding light.  And in that moment, I just surrendered to it.  I gave up.  It was as though a voice deep inside me was saying, Stop this nonsense.  You are already here.  This light is what you want, and you are in it.  BE in it.  And I became very still and felt something akin to ecstasy in that living, permeating light.  I woke up.

The significance  and experience of this dream was so incredibly simple and obvious, so powerful, that it has remained prominent in my mind even though I didn't write it down and it was months ago.  But it's only now that I'm really starting to live its message, to truly be in that light without trying to get anywhere else.

And this has left me in a strange new space that keeps unfolding.  Until the other day, I couldn't say anything about it, but thanks to some blogging and other friends, I've found some words for it.  One thing I see now is that it's not even relationships I've been addicted to, but THINKING about relationships.  Since kindergarten, there's always been some boy on my mind.  Always.  And I get it now, that the need is to define myself against someone else.  Do I exist if you don't?  Hmmm.  I've realized that the only times I wasn't thinking about a boy, I was thinking about someone who might be mad at me, or someone I'm mad at.  It's about conflict, distance.  Needing to define my own existence as apart from, NOT together with someone else's, as it might appear.  Pure ego crap, to put it bluntly.

So now here I am, no longer a slave to those thoughts.  Now how do I define myself?  Well, I haven't been.  Which is why I've had nothing to say.  I've been deconstructed, I have no walls to bounce off, just free floating.  And I'm very aware that no matter what I say, I'm just making up stories, none of which are ultimately true.  And yet, as Kate put it in a comment on my last post, writing is the way to "know my insides."  The stories are not true, but can contain truth, as it much as truth CAN be contained.  And even more to the point, they construct meaning, a way of understanding.  Language has its limits, but can, at its best, point to truth.    

Jennifer and I had a conversation the other day about the limits of language, and how some words are just not adequate for what they describe.  The specific word in question was "recovery."  I don't think this word does justice to what it defines.  As Jennifer said, it implies a mask, a re-covering.  Once your light is uncovered, why re-cover it?  The word we agreed was better is "remembering," as in remembering who you really are, as in re-membering.  Sorting out and recreating the members of your being.  This is what's happening to me now.

I'm amazed at how quickly after re-entering the blogosphere, I gained inspiration and understanding through my blogging friends.  On Claire's blog the other day, she posted a quote about "inner geography," a term I immediately resonated with.  It gave me the language, the analogy to begin describing where I am.  It's as though I'm standing on the mountaintop of my inner geography for the first time in my life, exhausted and exhilarated from the climb, totally, gloriously alone, surveying my whole landscape.  But it all looks strange and unfamiliar from this vantage point, and I feel detached from it - I'm not IN it, consumed by it anymore.

The paradoxical beauty of this is that when I'm outdoors now, when I'm sitting in the grove by the church, for instance, I am oh so much more fully IN the grass, the sky, the birdsong, the breeze.

In Claire's post, she discussed an upcoming trip she's taking.  That woman is always going somewhere new in the world, and I admitted my envy of her being a globe-trotter.  She came back and said that I was a "self-trotter."  Yes.  I am traveling the world of myself, which is the world.  I'm in it, and it's everywhere in me.  Hallelujah.  As Rumi said, "To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes."  Hallelujah indeed.

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.

Arising

Today is St. Patrick's Day,
and
I have no ritual, no essay. 

What was his story again?
Something green, about snakes
and the Christ.  The only interest
this holy day holds for me
now is the Breastplate, the invocation.

I arise today
Through the strength of Heaven 

My stories are dissolving, fading out,
like the last scene of a movie
when the landscape goes
out of focus until all is golden light
filling the screen. 

Light of the Sun

My stories are riding into the sunset,
they are getting married, and I am
giving them away,
they are dying in their sleep
of old age.

Radiance of Moon

I am turning
to poetry.

Splendor of Fire

The question has been posed:
Your desert island book?
For me, a very large anthology
of sacred poetry spanning
all times and places.

Speed of Lightning

My back is to St. Francis and my stories
go down with the sun behind him.
I am facing Sister Clare, and even she
has nothing to tell
but Shine.

Swiftness of Wind

All the stories are a trick of mirrors
and light.  Forget the mirror -
who needs it, when you have the source?

Depth of Sea

I have told the story of why
I joined the church,
of the horrors of self-made religion,
wrong-headedness and failure, the need
for cleansing.  Yes.
But this is only the part
that happens in front
of the audience, there is
also the backstage,
the fear of glimpses
of utter reality, absolute freedom
and emptiness, which sitting
in a church soothed for a while.
Four walls, a safe structure,
a place to lick wounds,
a well-lit path at the edge
of a forest that can never stop
inviting.

Stability of Earth

Now
I see the forest and the trees
as I stand among them
with no exposition,
no tale of bread crumbs, bears, or witches
to frighten, console, or instruct,
with in fact nothing
but an endless poem
that both does and does not
need me to get itself heard.

Firmness of Rock

Happiness is a Warm Tortilla

It's 11:22 -  no, wait -11:23 pm as I begin this post.  I had turned off my computer and was going to be a good girl and go to bed, when, blam! Inspiration hit.  As I was jotting down notes so I'd remember what I wanted to say in the morning, the voice of Annie Dillard spoke into my ear, forcing me to pause with my pencil in midair.  In her book, The Writing Life, she says, "One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. . . The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now."

So here I am, spending it now.  Thanks, Annie.

My last post diddled around with definitions of happiness, but left me feeling, well, unspent.  And there have been so many posts I've read lately discussing happiness that my inspiration is to continue on this thread, this cross-pollination, this interlacing.

I've thought a lot about happiness in the past few years.  For a long time, I despised the word.  I thought happiness was for stupid people.  In my early days as a college student, I took a class where instead of taking roll, Dr. Dorman would ask us a question.  One day she asked, "Would you rather be happy but dull, or brilliant but tormented"?  That was easy, because I already WAS brilliant but tormented, and damn proud of it.

A few years ago I made friends with a man while we were both doing master's degrees in English at the same university.  We had many brilliant conversations ( however, hardly any were tormented), and we were in total agreement about happiness just being a dumb concept.  Ironically, some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in his company.  

Then I fell in love with a man who is naturally happy, and values it.  Slowly, through my relationship with him, and simply wising up, I've come to an appreciation of happiness as something worthy of my attention.

I began to think about the difference between happiness and joy.  As I discussed in a previous post, joy is something I have experienced as non-dependent on circumstance.  It can break in anywhere, anytime.  It's of the moment and of eternity (which I define as the opposite of time).

Happiness, to me, has to do with favorable circumstances, and a span of time.  It's very human. And because of all these things, it's connected to stories.  Happiness is a story we tell ourselves.  At Diamonds and Toads recently, Kate asked her readers if they believe in "happily ever after."  I responded basically that, in terms of relationships, because they embody stories, one can indeed live happily ever after, but not every day.  It's an overarching quality of happiness that infuses the story, even when the particular chapter involves conflict.  It's just like being "in love." You're not going to always feel "in love," but you always do love the person, even when you experience negative feelings toward them for a moment, or a week. 

When I first formulated my definitions of happiness and joy, they lent themselves to a hierarchy:  Joy was more "real" and "valuable" than happiness.  While I no longer despised the concept of happiness, it still didn't seem very important to me .  It seemed false BECAUSE it was dependent on a story for its existence.

But as I discussed in my last post, I've begun to believe in happy stories, which has happened because I finally saw that I was telling myself stories all the time and they were pretty miserable and seemed very real.  It began to dawn on me that I might not be able to escape telling myself stories, but I could change their content.  If I can't grasp Ultimate Reality every moment of my life, I can at least tell myself a happy story to fill in the time.

But now, my rigid definitions of happiness and joy are starting to blur at the edges and meld into each other.  And that's just fine with me.

If I was back in Dr. Dorman's class again, answering that question, I'd say, "How could you possibly be dull if you're truly happy?  What good is brilliance if it doesn't know how to find happiness?"

The Other Shoe Has Been Placed Gently On The Floor

I've been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves.  One of the reasons I claim Christianity as my primary discipline and path is because it is steeped in narrative, and I believe humans need stories we can live inside as much as we need water and air.  Yet what attracts me to Buddhism is its focus on dropping judgment and being ultimately present in the now, which implies letting stories go.

I used to be very sure of the truth of the stories I told myself.  There was a time when I didn't even realize that's what I was doing, but just blindly accepted, without any hint of a question, that the things I believed were fact.

Nothing will slap you out of that illusion faster than a truly intimate relationship.

I won't bore you with all the details of my evolution, but I will say that where I find myself now, in my current relationship with my beloved, is that I hold different stories at different times, depending on my state of mind and heart.  This has been very confusing to me:  Which story is true?

Is it the one where I'm the evil queen holding the beautiful bird captive for my own narcissistic pleasure?  Is it the one where I'm the innocent princess being rescued by a knight in shining armor - or an innocent princess being tricked by a monster dressed up like a knight?  Or the one where we're both lost children trying to find our way out of the forest?  It goes on like this ad nauseum, and the only times I even think in these terms is when I'm feeling fearful and negative, so all the stories are - guess what? - fearful and negative.  The truth is, there's a little of all of them in my relationship, but what this relationship is defined by is a deep and abiding love and commitment to mutual growth.  What more could I ask for?

The story that I choose to put my energy of belief into is the one that's going to define how the relationship plays out.  But then again, how much control do I really have?

What if I choose the most beautiful story I can imagine might be true and I still get screwed?

It's these very questions I was contemplating when I came across one of Kate's recent posts at New Life.  She makes a reference to the expression "waiting for the other shoe to drop," about how happiness always seems tainted by latent dread of it ending.

In pondering that, I thought about The Sententious Vaunter's post, a hodgepodge of cool stuff, which includes a fairly simple recipe for happiness:  Deliberately choose things to be around you that you enjoy, and then enjoy them.  This way of happiness, however, also depends on not waiting for that shoe.  Enjoyment without attachment.

I started wondering where this shoe-dropping expression came from.  So I looked it up.

Apparently it came from some vaudeville act involving a guy coming home to his upstairs apartment late at night and taking off his shoes. He drops the first one and realizes it's pretty loud, so he places the other one gently on the floor.

Eventually the guy downstairs shouts, "Would you hurry up and drop the other one so I can stop waiting for it and go back to sleep?"

What if we could just assume that the shoe is already on the floor?  How could it do anything but make life better?  Duh.  So I've resolved to let myself believe the story that my deepest heart is already writing.  Because there's really nothing to lose.  Except fearful projections.

I've been deeply studying a book called Dreaming the Council Ways for over a year.  In the chapter I'm reading now, the author, Ohky Simine Forest, talks about how we attract what we fear, and the power of being decided.   This is where I'm coming from with all of this.  The point is not to attach to yet another illusion and live in wishful thinking, but to be decided about how I'm going narrate and interpret my story.  To let there be one author with a singular vision, instead of passing the pen around to a host of writers who aren't even sure what they have to say.

I was just talking to my very wise twelve-year-old son about this post, and he said, "What if the shoes were stilettos?"  And then, "What if you got so used to that guy coming in and dropping his shoes that you couldn't go to sleep without it?"

Yes.  So.  If you've got to wait for it - at least picture an elegant stiletto.