That extra stretch...

I had to take my husband in for gum surgery yesterday (didn't happen, long story, he's fine). He was chuckling as he pulled into the parking space, and when we got out of the car he motioned me over to show me this plate on the car next to us.

I photographed it with my cell phone and sent it to a dentist friend (who was duly amused) and then thought, well, who knows, and took a shot with my camera as well.

This morning I was going through the images I managed to capture in the city yesterday before my camera battery died, and this one surfaced again. Funny, I thought, and moved it into my humor folder. And then I looked at it again and realized that just above the windshield wiper, barely visible, gray-on-gray, is the word "ATTITUDE."

OH! I get it! This isn't just funny dentist humor; there's also something telling us this needs to be a way of life; that just "being open to what comes" -- or to what is, for that matter -- isn't enough. We need to stretch that extra bit, to open WIDE, to risk that slight dislocation of the mental jaw that the snake does so easily in order to accommodate a broader understanding of the divine value that infuses all creation; to step, sometimes, out of our comfort zone and enfold ALL of humanity, not just SOME humanity, in the divine embrace of compassion.

I'm sorry -- it's the punny spirit of my father in me -- I just have to say this: That's the only way those gaping inner cavities in us are ever gonna get filled. (I know. OUCH!)

Stepping out with the goddess

Just before I left for my retreat last weekend I had coffee with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, and I found myself telling her about my driftwood goddess.

The driftwood goddess showed up on a beach not long after my mother died. It was a difficult time in my life (the loss of a parent always is) and I had been questioning everything about my faith and my church, rejecting the male, patriarchal God but not really able to see at the heart level if there was anything else there of value.

At that time in my life I understood, intellectually at least, that God was both male and female, and I had been carefully raising my girls with the appropriate language around that. But it wasn't until this piece of driftwood appeared at my feet that I was finally able to FEEL the divine feminine. One look at this delightful creature, whose pendulous boobs and open womb could also be bulging eyes and an open mouth, and I burst out laughing. "I get it!" I said aloud, and suddenly I felt enfolded in nurturing arms.

On hearing this story, my coffee friend told me I needed to bring the goddess with me on my retreat. "She's been sitting in that bowl in your living room for too long; she needs to get wet," she said. It seemed like an odd thing to say, but I thought, hey, what the heck, and brought the goddess with me to the cottage on the canal.

My first act, after unpacking, was to take her out to the beach. "Linda says you need to get wet, so here you go," and I put her in a little stream that flowed off the hillside and down to the water.

"But this is FRESH water, I want SALT water," she said. "Live with it," I replied, "If I put you at the water's edge you might float away. I don't want to lose you, and I'm not walking into salt water in my leather boots."

"So put on your Crocs," she replied.

"Look, next time we come out I'll wear my crocs, okay? Let's just do this," and I set her in the stream and looked around me. The beach at the cottage is not really a beach in the usual sense: instead of sand, it's covered with fist-sized rocks, which are in turn covered with barnacles -- all somewhat difficult to walk on. But there are oysters everywhere (too bad I'm allergic to shellfish, or I'd be in pig heaven), often stuck together in very interesting clusters.

The bed of an oyster shell is just the right shape to hold a piece of soap (we have oyster shell soap dishes in all our bathrooms) and, in fact, is also the perfect size to hold... the driftwood goddess. And so, as she bathed in the stream, I began to see that there were some intriguing clusters of shells on the beach, and that they might make potential thrones for the goddess. Maybe this would make it up to her for the fresh water, I thought, so I picked up two very promising throne candidates, one gray and one all shiny and white, and brought them back into the house with her.

The pretty white one didn't work all that well; it wouldn't stand up in a way that supported her to best advantage. But while the other one fit fairly well it still had some live oysters mixed in, which meant it would stink to high heaven when I got it home. Clearly our furniture shopping wasn't done.

The next day I went out again after the tide dropped. I didn't take the goddess with me this time, but I did find another throne. This one didn't work either, however; close, but no cigar. So on Sunday, after I finished loading up the car, I took the goddess back to the water. This time I found a little eddy in the salt water where I could safely leave her floating, face down, and I poked around the beach one last time.

And there, not too far from the little stream where she lay drinking it all in, I found the perfect throne; all white shells (no live oysters), balanced, quite stable, lacy and VERY showy, which was apparently what she wanted. This time, when I took her out of the water, she was happy, and she stayed damp all the way home; I guess salt water has more staying power than fresh. And, as you can see, she loved having her picture taken with her new throne.

Go figure.

Great Expectations

When I was 10, my parents took me to see Music Man, and it made a huge impression on me. My entertainment and exercise, in those days before we had a television (yes, we were slow adapters) was to roller skate around and around our basement floor in big sweeping circles, dodging the metal poles and singing loudly.

Before Music Man, the songs were all from Broadway shows; South Pacific was a big favorite. But with the advent of that handsome Professor Harold Hill I became a hopeless romantic -- or perhaps I should say, a hope-FULL romantic. Because my two favorite songs from the show were "My White Knight" ("What my heart could say, if it only knew how...") and the Wells Fargo Wagon ("Well it could be... something special... just for me!").

With music, the hunger in my heart for acceptance and recognition, for someone to "get" me, had found its voice, and I spent my days skating in endless circles howling out those songs, especially if one of the cute boys who cut our lawn was in the house to collect his money. But, looking at this picture, which I took on my journey down the Hood Canal last weekend, I see that at the heart of that longing lay my inability to connect with my mother. The expression on the face of that baby girl-- who is clearly not neglected, with her doll, her warm clothes and her pretty new boots -- of sheer longing for maternal attention tears at my heart. And there is the mother, staring resolutely ahead, lost in her own internal battles -- or so I project, as I look at this from the perspective of my own childhood.

Because that, of course, is how we all see: through the lenses of our own moods and experience, which color all the information we take in. Which is why a casual word from a friend can trigger a flood of recriminations; why a child's misstep can trigger frothing parental anger; why a troubled marriage can slowly dissolve, each partner unable to see past their own struggles to reach out to the tormented soul of the other.

How do your preconceptions color this picture? To me, the father, mother and son in this tableau all seem resigned to me; stoic, patient, waiting for the next stage in their lives. The good news is this: they're obviously waiting in the right place, and though the stagecoach may be late, it WILL come. Even the dog, who waits expectantly for the daily treat tossed to him by the driver, understands that it will eventually arrive.

Oho, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin' now
I don't know how I can ever wait to see
It could be somethin' for someone who is no relation
But it could be
somethin' special
just for me!

Woo-hoo! According to Jan, on her Yearning for God blog today is BLOGROLL AMNESTY DAY, where we promote blogs even smaller than our own. I'm not sure there actually ARE any blogs smaller than my own, but here are some not too much bigger than mine that I love and read regularly:

My friend Karen's blog, about dealing with life after the death of her 12-year-old daughter, Katie:
http://karengberger.blogspot.com/

My new blogger friend Kim's blog about faith and quilting:
http://kimquiltz.wordpress.com/

My new blogger friend Robin's beautiful artwork:
http://www.gramercydigitaldiary.blogspot.com/

And the blogs of Bob and Sue Cornelis, a husband and wife who are both artists, and very articulate about their work and faith:
http://bobcornelis.wordpress.com/
http://susancornelis.wordpress.com/

I feel honored to be on the same page with these wonderful folks, whose work truly feeds me.

PS: can you believe it? I've been doing this for over a year and I still have no clue how to do links! So I just type them in; hope that's okay. Karen, how did you get so smart so fast? (Folks, she wasn't even using email before she started blogging, and now she's a complete pro!).

Listening for that restless spirit

Reading, in Jesus the Teacher Within, about befriending Jesus as an aspect of befriending yourself, I decided to hunt down an image of that part of me that objects, gets hurt, cries for recognition, and runs off by herself.

And sure enough, here she is, perfect right down to the curly red hair (unlike my own, which is straight and brown). I took this shot at my daughter's high school graduation -- something in me sensed a kindred spirit, I suspect -- of someone's little sister, taking off in a spirit of rebellion and boredom (and no doubt loving the feel of the soft green grass under foot, something that won't happen now that they've covered the playing field with astro-turf).

What I've come to realize, over the past week or so, is that when this child in me objects noisily to something, it is not necessarily true that she is an egoic shadow voice needing to be stifled. It may actually be true that she is God's newly audible voice crying to be heard.

Sometimes, like a mother with a noisy child in church, I just want to strangle her. But then, there are other people outside of myself I occasionally feel like strangling, too. And with them, as with her, it is often true that the voice which I so don't want to hear from is actually the alien divine -- that aspect of the divine which I have not yet managed to recognize or internalize for myself -- needing to be acknowledged, heard or accepted.

It's not unlike my friend back east, who reports he has just taken another load of wood to be stacked. "Gotta be ready for 2010!" he says... and then, almost in the same sentence, he criticizes his wife for buying a second pair of some shoes she likes, for when the first pair wears out. "What if she loses a leg or something? Who knows what she'll need for shoes when these wear out?"

It's so hard to see our own "stuff" in others' objectionable behaviors. But it's almost always there, needing to be heard and loved. The louder and more irritating the voice becomes, the more surely the melody behind that insistent squealing is a dance tune just for you. Sometimes, even if it hurts your ears, you need to make time to listen.

Befriending the beast at the center of it all

I'm not quite sure why, but today seems to need an extra blog post. So here it is. I'll begin with the quote Kim sent me this morning:

This is from The Artist's Way, Week 8: Recovering a Sense of Strength:

"Every end is a beginning. We know that. But we tend to forget it as we move through grief. Struck by a loss, we focus, understandably, on what we leave behind, the lost dream of the work's successful fruition and its buoyant reception.

"We need to focus on what lies ahead. This can be tricky. We may not know what lies ahead. And, if the present hurts this badly, we tend to view the future as impending pain.

"Gain disguised as loss" is a potent artist's tool. To acquire it, simply, brutally, ask: "How can this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?" The answers will surprise and liberate you. The trick is to metabolize pain as energy. The key to doing that is to know, to trust, and to act as if a silver lining exists if you are only willing to look at the work differently or to walk through a different door, one that you may have balked at."

And here's a related quote from Care of the Soul; I found it this morning while re-reading my journals from my time on Shaw Island:

"My responsibility to myself, to a friend, or to a patient in therapy is observing and respecting what the soul presents. I won't try to take things away in the name of health. It's remarkable how often people think they will be better off without the things that bother them. "I need to get rid of this tendency of mine," a person will say. "Help me get rid of these feelings of inferiority and my smoking and my bad marriage." If , as a therapist, I did what I was told, I'd be taking things away from people all day long. But I don't try to eradicate problems. I try not to imagine my role to be that of exterminator. Rather, I try to give what is problematical back to the person in a way that shows its necessity, even its value.

"We all tend to divide experience into two parts, usually the good and the bad. But there may be all kinds of suspicious things going on in this splitting. We may simply have never considered the value in certain things that we reject. Or by branding certain experiences negative we may be protecting ourselves from some unknown fears. We are all filled with biases and ideas that have snuck into us without our knowing it. Much soul can be lost in such splitting, so that care of the soul can go a long way simply by recovering some of this material that has been cut off.

"Problems and obstacles offer a chance for reflection that otherwise would be precluded by the swift routine of life. As we stop to consider what is happening to us and what we're made of, the soul ferments, to use an alchemical word. Change takes place, but not according to plan or as the result of intentional intervention... a muscled, strong-willed pursuit of change can actually stand in the way of substantive transformation...

"Care of the soul appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees that every fall into ignorance and confusion is an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel.

"I often think of this paradox as I sit with someone with tears in her eyes, searching for some way to deal with a death, a divorce, or a depression. It is a beast, this thing that stirs in the core of her being, but it is also the star of her innermost nature. We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that, in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlook the star."

When Mary Poppins ages...

As women, many of us learn all too early how vulnerable we are, and how dangerous the world can be. But what do we do with that knowledge? Is it possible to be defended and open at the same time?

I caught sight of this statue while driving home from my retreat on the Hood Canal yesterday, and thought how much she resembles a persona I tend to think of as "The Church Lady." We've all met these women, or at least read of them, or seen them on TV: fiercely upright and righteous, fiercely protective of the way things were or "should be." And, at least according to Nathaniel Hawthorne, this outwardly forbidding and stuffy character often masks some sort of inner depravity; she is as vigilant in stuffing down her own sinful impulses as she is in spotting them in others.

I know, also, that she forms a part of my own character, one of the many archetypes that lurk in there, occasionally leaping to the foreground in defense of some long-held (and usually specious) belief. She is the un-generous one, who operates out of scarcity, keeping what might be needed someday rather than sharing with someone who needs it now. She is the one who keeps both the whining and the wildness under wraps. And, of course, she is also protecting all that is most deeply vulnerable within me.

But it's very hard to love her, particularly as hers is the face we dread to see in our own, looking in the mirror as we age: those drooping jowls, those increasingly squinty eyes, the mouth which droops at the corners -- the natural effects of the loosening skin and gravity that accompany age -- all seem to signify years of repression, anger, and rigidity.

I know that part of coming to self-knowledge is learning to love all the parts of your self, including your shadow. But I confess that this one is definitely a challenge... Perhaps I just need to remember that she willingly opens that umbrella she carries for the unseen child at her side, and that the hand which clutches the purse will also willingly dole out a penny for candy. And when she bends down to help the little ones, her face will crease into a lovely and tender smile.