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

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. 

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 Epiphany Chronicles IV: The Intolerable Shirt of Flame

Morning of January 11

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

~T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

After much deliberation about the meaning of "integrity," and with Justin's permission, I've decided to go ahead and post this.  Because things are what they are, and the integrity of these chronicles requires it for completion.  And because I truly think of you as my friends.

Fact is, as they say, stranger than fiction.  In the biggest unexpected twist of these chronicles, especially since they were already mostly written when this happened, I experienced the following.

I went early to bring my beloved his mail from the box we share, and discovered him with another woman.  Please bear in mind that we live apart and with no commitment to monogamy.  But still.  I was devastated.

This was the day I started to run.

I returned to my house after this shocking epiphany, shaken to the core, physically vibrating. And said to myself, I'm done.

I'm done.

I'm done.

I fired the censor and wrote every outrage of my incensed heart, and it was not the black sludge, it was the guileless child incarnate at last, that neglected stranger welcomed in.

It's done.

I'm done.

And then I said to myself and to God:  Now what? What do I do with myself? I was still physically shaking. There was no way I could work like this or go pay bills or eat breakfast.

I had been thinking the night before that I'd like to start running. I had mentally plotted my course to and around the St. Francis church and then home a different way. Just like the Wise Men.

I've been reading The Way of the Beloved, and one of the recommended exercises for generating more love is to practice being grateful for “negative” things, to find something in them to be grateful for.

I am grateful for this heartbreaking epiphany because it impelled me to start running.

I walked down the street a bit, then broke into a run, crossed the board over the acequia into the little grove, through the grove, next to the graffittied adobe ruins, into the church parking lot. Something was going on at the church. A funeral. How fitting.

I ran a circle around the church, the hands of the saints reaching out to caress me through the adobe in which they forever live, back through the grove, stopped at a tree to stretch. My mind was graciously blank. The shaking was no longer trapped inside, but suspiring through my flesh.

Back out to the street, past my house, through the post office parking lot. I slowed to a walk down the highway, ran back into the church lot from this different direction. Around the courtyard again. Clare. Oh Clare, please pray for me. Mother of God, pray for me. Mama. And I'm not even Catholic. But it felt right and was medicine.

This running, this writing, are prayer and liberation.

Even in failure,

even in fear,

even in sorrow,

I have and am

- am because I have -

everything I need. 

The light shines

in the darkness,

and the darkness

has not,

will not,

can not

overcome it.

I have and am

my whole

light in the darkness

self.

Thank you.

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.

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 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.

The Grim Reaper of Angel Fire

I have a horrible confession to make.

Until last Friday, I hadn't been to the dentist in twenty-two years.

When I was growing up, I went every six months, because that's what you did in my white bread, middle class world.  My last parent-paid visit was when I was nineteen, and that was also when I got my first cavity and had it filled.

Out on my own, as a young idiot adult, I tried very hard to forget that I even had a body for a long time.  Then I started having babies and sort of was forced to remember.  But I had my first three kids at home, so was still on the trajectory of avoiding medical personnel as much as possible.

I still think we're too health-obsessed in this country, and we give medical entities way too much authority over our bodies.  But I've mellowed in my old age, and am not quite so radically against the medical establishment as I was in my twenties.  I've been meaning to go to the dentist for years, really I have, but somehow it kept getting pushed down my to-do list.

It was my oldest daughter who finally convinced me to go.  Another confession:  she made the appointment for me (and one for herself the same day), and called to remind me about it the day before.  I, of course, had completely blocked it out forgotten about it.

So off we went to Angel Fire, because the Taos dentists aren't taking new patients.  I'd never been to Angel Fire before, and it had snowed quite a bit the day before.  It was one of the most treacherous journeys I've made in a vehicle.  The road there is consistently narrow and winding, and the last stretch is the narrowest and most winding, up a steep mountain.  At one point, there was a "curve," actually a ninety-degree turn, without any warning at all until you're right up on it.

I have to admit, I was freaking out a wee bit, driving on a slick, unplowed road such as this.  I inched almost the entire way.  Thank God, at least, that no one was tailing me.  By the time we finally made it to the dentist's office, I was sweating bullets, had a nasty headache, and just wanted to take a nap.

We went in the office and were greeted by an undead receptionist with a massive head wound, and I suddenly realized it was the day before Halloween.  She was wearing scrubs splattered with fake blood; it was a good costume.  A little too good.

I recently went to the doctor for the first time in a while and needed to have my ears flushed out.  While not painful, this was an extremely disturbing experience for me, although in a strange way it bordered on the mystical.  It made me realize that I've become a total wuss about having foreign objects and substances forced into my orifices.  So my already addled state created by the drive to Angel Fire was heightened by the nervousness I felt about having my mouth poked around in.  If you can't imagine the state I was in, here's a visual aid.

I look drugged, don't I?  Well, I wasn't.

When the dentist appeared dressed as the Grim Reaper, that was the last straw.

No.  The last straw was having the Grim Reaper poke an extremely sharp and pointy instrument around my incredibly sensitive gums to clean out twenty-two years worth of nastiness.

To be fair, he was very sweet and gentle (and tall and handsome).  He had ski equipment placed decoratively on his walls,

and provided a lovely view from the very comfortable reclining chair I was in. 

Plus, he has the coolest name ever:  Strider A. McCash (I wonder if the A is for Aragorn.) 

But he was too quiet.  And that instrument was too much like a tiny scythe.  I was too scared of him to ask for a photo.

And then there was the assistant.  She too was in costume, which was basically just an orange shirt and black pants and creepy black eye makeup.  She proceeded to tell me that this was her fifth day as a dental assistant, and that when she'd had her hysterectomy, she'd almost died of an infection because they left some kind of medical foreign object inside her.

Somehow I made it through all this, with my whole body tensed and my eyes squinched shut, and, lo and behold, it turned out that I have no new cavities.  I think Dr. McCash was a little disturbed that I've been such a dental delinquent and still have healthy teeth.  I may have detected a note of contempt when he told me, "Yeah, well, you're teeth actually look good."  He was probably also wondering what kind of freak takes pictures at the dentist's office.

The drive back was fine; all the snow had melted.  When I got home I inspected my teeth in the mirror.  They're so clean and shiny now!

And I swear - I'll go see the dentist again in six months, like a good girl.

Well, maybe in a year.  Next Halloween.

A Full Moon for Francis

The Prayer of St. Francis 

Lord make me a channel of thy peace;

that where there is hatred, I may bring love; 

that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness ; 

that where there is discord, I may bring harmony ; 

that where there is error, I may bring truth; 

that where there is doubt, I may bring faith; 

that where there is despair, I may bring hope; 

that where there are shadows, I may bring light; 

that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted; 

to understand, than to be understood ; 

to love, than to be loved.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. 

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. 

It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.  

Amen. 

Today is October 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi.  Last night, Sister Moon put on quite a show for him.  As I sat on my porch and gazed at her glorious fullness, I heard bells from the San Francisco de Asis church.  They rang for a long long time.  I suppose there was a mass celebrating St. Francis, and I'm sure they're doing it today too.

This blog will have to serve as my little tribute to Francis.  I just adore him.  Such a rabble-rouser, such a poet, so much compassion.  A great combination of qualities, if you ask me.

Nowadays, he's considered patron saint of the environment, because of his great love for all of creation.  I think the feast of St. Francis should be widely celebrated as a second annual Earth Day.  The rate things are going in this world, we could use at least two.

When I was in San Francisco for the first time, I had a major blonde moment (and I'm not even blonde).  I wandered into one of the cathedrals (don't remember which one) and was surprised that there was so much stuff in the gift shop about St. Francis, until I (DUH) put it together:  San Francisco = St. Francis.  (Believe it or not, I actually have a master's degree.)

Anyway, I bought this poster.  I'm pretty picky about art that I like enough to look at every day, but I love this and have it up in my bedroom:

Il Transito di san Francesco alla Porziuncola

(St. Francis Dying at Porziuncola)

by Gerardo Dottori

I never get tired of looking at it.  It' so vivid and meditative at the same time.

At the San Francisco de Asis church here, in addition to the statue of St. Francis that I mentioned in my previous post, there's also this little alcove about two feet high, built into the western well surrounding the church. 

 

I love that Francis is holding a dove here, since there are actual doves that live in the bell towers of the church.  I even managed to capture this photo of a dove and a pigeon hanging out:

I think it's pretty neat that there's so much animal and plant life at a church dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi.  It's like they know they're welcome there.  The Canticle of the Creatures is perpetually whispered on the breeze.

What is truly glorious about the Canticle (also known as the Canticle of the Sun) is that he wrote it on his deathbed.  Apparently, he was lying there, tempted to feel sorry for himself, questioning the fairness of his pain and infirmities.  But in that darkness he chose gratitude - for the opportunity to soon leave the world and move on to the next, but also for the world itself, and all he had loved in it.

I think this is very similar to the way the book of Job ends.  I've always thought that God's speech to Job is about loving the creation as the answer to suffering.  It's like God is saying the way to deal with suffering is to be amazed, to realize how little we actually know and understand, but then go out into the creation and see and know and love the creatures, and by extension, the Creator.

Francis, I think, knew this best of all.

The Canticle of the Creatures

Most High, all-powerful, all-good Lord,
All praise is Yours, all glory, honor and blessings.
To you alone, Most High, do they belong;
 no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your Name.

 We praise You, Lord, for all Your creatures,
especially for Brother Sun,
who is the day through whom You give us light.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
of You Most High, he bears your likeness.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars,
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.

We praise You, Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air,
 fair and stormy, all weather's moods,
by which You cherish all that You have made.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Water,
so useful, humble, precious and pure.

We praise You, Lord, for Brother Fire,
through whom You light the night.
 He is beautiful, playful, robust, and strong.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Earth,
 who sustains us
with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs.

We praise You, Lord, for those who pardon,
for love of You bear sickness and trial.
Blessed are those who endure in peace,
by You Most High, they will be crowned.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Death,
from whom no-one living can escape.
Woe to those who die in their sins!
Blessed are those that She finds doing Your Will.
No second death can do them harm.  

We praise and bless You, Lord, and give You thanks,
and serve You in all humility.

 

The School of Joy

According to many Native traditions, hummingbird medicine encompasses joy, which my recent experiences confirm.  The best part is that I've realized I can access joy whenever I want.  Actually, I've discovered this then almost immediately lost it several times in my life, but it's finally sinking in.  The first time was at a party when I was in college.  I was utterly miserable, had partaken of at least two mood-altering substances that seemed to sort of cancel each other out, and was frozen to a couch in sensory and emotional overload.  All I could do was watch everyone having a good time and feel incredibly self-conscious, even though no one was looking at me.  Then I suddenly noticed that underneath all that angst and anxiety was a feeling of pure joy that I could listen to instead of the clamoring of critical voices in my head.  The ability to do this only lasted moments, but it was enough to make an impression, one that I've returned to over and over.

The next significant milestone in this lifelong lesson was when I was about ten years into a miserable marriage, and kept praying for relief.  I wanted God to either change my husband, take away my pain, or show me a way out of the marriage.  This one particular day, I was balled up on the floor, wretched, emotionally starved.  I felt like an empty cold bathtub.  I kept praying the same tired prayer to be taken out of the pain.  Something shifted; I stopped desperately straining to look up and out, and found myself embraced from the inside.  The pain was still there; in fact, it was intensified in a way, but I relaxed into it, stopped desperately treading water and floated, and discovered that there was a gentle warm current of comfort just right there, in the center of the suffering.

What's happening lately is not as dramatic as all that, but that's why it's more effective I think.  Joining with that current is just becoming habit.  A few months ago I read this little book by Pema Chodron:

The subject of the book is Tonglen practice, which is a very simple discipline of breathing in the bad and breathing out the good:  embracing all your angst and anxiety and then breathing out peace.  It was nice to discover that my experiences in this realm have a basis in Buddhist teachings.  Reading about this practice there in a book, put so simply, I was surprised and confirmed.  It struck me as such a reversal of pop spirituality, where you're taught to breathe out the negative and take in the good.  In this sense, Tonglen seems very Christian to me.  It's what Jesus would do.   In fact, it's essentially what he was getting at when he told the Pharisees that it's not what you take into the body that makes you sick, it's what you put out.  And then the whole taking-on-the-sins-of-world thing - well, I don't suppose that requires much explanation.

So I've been doing this Tonglen practice.  Badly, irregularly.  But it works anyway.  And ever since I started seeing and contemplating hummingbirds, I've been hearing this little voice in me that tells me daily that I'm happy.  Not the whole livelong day.  Not yet and maybe never.  But it's enough.  There have been numerous occasions when I could have followed my lethal mind down its dark familiar rabbit hole, but instead I listened to the hummingbird voice, the whirring hum of iridescent wings, erasing my scrawling brain like a whiteboard.  And dare I say it - this way of being is becoming second nature.