Holding it together

This lovely ceramic statue sits in the yard beside the Orcas Island Pottery, and teaches me what I need to know about projection.

On my bad days she looks tense and anxious, like she's clutching herself, or protecting herself; barely holding it all together. I detect a frown betwen her eyebrows, and the carvings on her cheek look like cat scratches.

But on a good day, I look at her and see a tender maternal figure, serenely embracing the child within, humming a lullaby under her breath as she quietly imagines their future together.

This Rilke poem is for her, and for you:

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth --
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.

Illusions of darkness, illusions of light

When I was in college one of my closest friends had a well-thumbed copy of Rilke's famous Letters to a Young Poet. She quoted from it frequently -- probably as frequently as I recited to her from my own well-thumbed copy of Thoreau's Walden and so, for some reason, I have resisted acquiring ANYTHING by Rilke all these years. Silly, isn't it, how we allow these early prejudices to block whole realms of experience from us...

Anyway, for some reason -- I can't remember now why -- I recently acquired a copy of Rilke's Book of Hours, and this morning I opened it for the first time. What a marvel it is; the poetry is just wonderful, fresh and lively and full of surprises. My favorite surprise was this poem -- so refreshing, after all I've been reading and writing and hearing lately about darkness:

You, darkness, of whom I am born --

I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illumines
and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations -- just as they are.

It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.

We forget, sometimes, that we are born of the dark; that all creatures need the dark to refresh and renew. We get so caught up in looking for the light that we forget that the dark is always with us; that instead of being threatening and scary it could also be warm and nurturing and filled with love. We forget also that the light can create its own illusions, masking truth just as effectively as the night.

I thank Rilke for this lovely reminder that -- as the hymn says -- "the night and the day are both alike."

Suscipe me

"Suscipe me" -- "Accept me" -- these are the words a novice says upon entering a Benedictine community: "Accept me O Lord, as you have promised, and I shall live." That is part of the allure of faith, that somehow in the process of connecting with the divine we will find acceptance, and perhaps, having found divine acceptance, we will have the courage to accept ourselves.

Because many of us are like this lovely house on the canal in Burano: we've spent a fair amount of effort on our exterior, surrounded and decorated ourselves with beauty, but we only open ourselves enough to see out. We display to maximum advantage and create an illusion of openness, but never really let anyone see in for fear of what they might expect or find.

Suscipe me. Esther deWaal tells us that the Latin word comes from the verb sub-capere, to take underneath with the idea of supporting and raising; that in Roman usage it was the word for a father taking up a newborn infant from the ground, thus recognizing it as his own.

"Suscipe me conveys the full depth and warmth of that word. Accept me, receive me, support me, raise me up -- wonderful singing words that say everything that I want to say as a prayer for myself."

But it's not just a prayer, it's a promise. If I am to invite divine acceptance, I must also open myself to the divine presence. It will no longer be enough to just peer through the cracks: Suscipe me is a promise that I will throw open the shutters, raise the blinds, open the curtains, throw wide the doors and let the divine light shine within. Which means those things I've tucked away in the dark corners will be exposed to ME as well as to the divine. Though that may be awkward and painful at times, it does mean I'll have an opportunity for a good, thorough spring cleaning. And the good news is, I won't be working alone!

Thoughts on an empty cross

Growing up in the Presbyterian church, I was accustomed to rather simple liturgical surroundings. The pastor's black robe was like those worn by my parents in the choir; the panes of the stained glass windows were large and rectangular, often in pastel colors, rarely depicting anything. Communion was dried bread cut in stale squares and served with grape juice 4 times a year, and there was only one cross, usually behind the altar, and always empty.

Which meant that when, at the urging of the Episcopal priest who counseled me through my divorce, I finally agreed to try worshiping at an Episcopal church, the whole experience seemed garish, popish even, and very overwhelming. We were expected to juggle three books -- hymnal, bible, and prayerbook -- plus the bulletin and the leaflet of service music. Communion was served every Sunday, and included Real Alcohol (tasty! I'd never had port before) and a lot of unexplained kneeling and standing.

There were liturgical colors, which changed mysteriously with the seasons, and there were crosses everywhere -- in the stained glass windows, on the altar, carved into the pulpit -- and many of them had Jesus' body on them. It seemed almost vulgar, this emphasis on a dying man, depicted always as muscular, white, and brunette though surely no one could have known what he actually looked like.

But by that time I'd had not one but two conversion experiences, both of them specifically triggered by the disturbing fact of Jesus' death, so I could see that this sort of art might in fact serve as a grounding, an embodiment of faith, and a reminder that life isn't always smooth and pretty but can sometimes get quite edgy and painful. I was still uncomfortable with what looked like the glorification of death, but my own faith at that point was still fueled primarily by the fact that Jesus died for my sins, so it seemed appropriate to remind myself of that on a regular basis.

So it is amusing to realize that now, years later, though I still worship in an Episcopal Church, it has no stained glass and no crucifix. And though there are many crosses, both placed about and embedded into the church's architecture, they speak more to the resurrection, to that moment when human and divine reunite rather than to the moment of painful separation. And as I prepare for my spirituality class this morning by re-reading Freeman's take on the Resurrection in Jesus the Teacher Within, I see that these more austere surroundings are a good match for the faith I am carrying into the autumn of my life.

Because my faith itself has died and been resurrected. And it is no longer Jesus' death on the cross or my awareness of my own undeserving sinfulness that lies at the root of my belief system, but rather a sense of a loving divine presence in my life, a presence best symbolized by the intersection between horizontal and vertical that lies at the center of the cross. As the hymn composed by St. Patrick puts it:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

When we shift our focus from the man on the cross to the resurrected Christ, we are no longer isolated and alone, wallowing in our sinfulness and dependent upon this single horrific event for redemption. We are instead drawn into a loving awareness of the divine presence which moves in and through not just us but also through those around us, enfolding all of creation in a compassionate and unifying embrace.

At least, that's how I feel about it now, today, when I'm standing at the Episcopal end of my personal spirituality spectrum. The Buddhist in me gets pretty uncomfortable about the word "Christ" and immediately wants to change St. Patrick's words to something a little less "churchy." It likes the idea of the compassionate oneness, though, so it has decided to let me get away with this sort of preachily religious post. I'm still working on reconciling these two parts of me; can you tell?

Balancing light and dark

This morning I have been reading, in Esther deWaal's book Living with Contradiction, about the importance of the contradictions in our lives, about the ways that the tension between death and resurrection, dark and light, success and failure, health and disease -- all those opposites we face as we move through our journeys -- produces growth.

I know that as an artist as well; not just the use of dark and light areas to enhance the overall impact of an image, but also the importance of risking failure, of trying new things and exploring new directions, of taking what looks like failure and seeing through it to the promise of success it holds.

There's a classic story that comes to mind of the resourceful photographer Farrell Eaves, who dropped his digital camera in a pond while shooting on a photography workshop. Instead of giving up, he strapped the camera to his windshield wipers for a couple of days, driving through the Southwest's wind and sun to dry it out. When the camera was dry again he fired it up to discover that it now added amazing psychedelic colors to everything he shot. This enterprising gentleman not only kept shooting with his camera, he even published a book displaying the results of his work.

After I finished the chapter I was reading in deWaal's book, I opened John O'Donohue's To Bless the Space Between Us, and here's the poem of blessing that appeared:

The will of color loves how light spreads
Through its diffusions, making textures subtle;
Clothing a landscape in concealment
For color to keep its mysteries
Hidden from the unready eye.

But the light that comes after rain
Is always fierce and clear,
And illuminates the face of everything
Through the transparency of rain.

Despite the initial darkening,
This is the light that failure casts.
Beholden no more to the promise
Of what dream and work would bring,
It shows where roots have withered
And where the source has gone dry.
The light of failure has no mercy
On the affections of the heart;
It emerges from beyond the personal,
A wiry, forthright light that likes to see crevices
Open in the shell of a controlled life.

Though cruel now,
it serves a deeper kindness,
Wise to the larger call of growth.
It invites us to humility
And the painstaking work of acceptance

So that one day we may look back
In recognition and appreciation
At the disappointment we now endure.

And now, from this perspective, I look back at the failures in my life -- with jobs, with my children, my first marriage; framed photographs that languish in my office unpurchased; classes and workshops taken with nothing to show for them -- and resolve to try something new today, to risk again, to push my limits and explore. Because each of those "failures" has brought some new gift into my life -- an awareness, a new direction, a discovery or revelation -- and though some of those stories are not yet complete I can see that the tension they hold is pushing me to growth.

Through the eyes of love

Years ago, when I was in my 20's, I read As We Are Now, May Sarton's magnificent story of life in a troubled nursing home, and not long after that I reviewed Jill Paton Walsh's Unleaving, an extraordinary story for young people, written about a home on the beach from the perspective of a young girl visiting her grandmother, and from the same woman being visited by her own granddaughter many years later.

Both books had a significant impact on me, and I thought for a while that I might want to work with the elderly some day. But life has a way of carrying us off into other places, and it wasn't until years later, on a photo assignment for the paper I had once edited, that I found myself photographing people who were being cared for in a church daycare center for elderly dementia patients. Charlie, the man pictured here, was from that photo assignment. The experience of photographing them and interacting with them was quite moving, so when I got a call a couple of weeks ago to do a presentation on photography for a local retirement center, I immediately said yes.

I designed a presentation that would show them lots of photographs of familiar places around the island, and then, at the tail end of the presentation, I showed them some of the fun things you can do with photoshop to make an ordinary picture extraordinary. I closed the presentation with a series of before and after portraits that had been photoshopped to make their subjects look younger, and then offered to take photos of each of the participants and bring them photoshopped copies.

I had a lovely time with the folks who came to the presentation -- they were all intelligent and engaged and engaging -- and I have been greatly enjoying my time this weekend working with their photographs. It feels to me like I am looking THROUGH these pictures to the person who lies behind them, in much the same way Walsh and Sarton saw through their elderly characters to the life and spirit that lay beneath. And though some of the work involves smoothing away the wrinkles and sharpening the jawlines -- the obvious things -- I am also restoring teeth, taking away the clouds from their eyes, and, for the women at least, restyling their hair a bit to frame their faces better.

I have learned, over the years, that when you love someone -- whether it's a friend or a mate -- over a long time, you barely register their aging process: you continue to see them as they were when you first knew them. Or perhaps it is just that who they are, these people that you love, eventually becomes an entity in itself, completely apart from their bodies. I like to think, in working with the photos I took at the retirement center, that I am looking with the eyes of love, and that what I see behind the rheumy eyes and age spots is the person within.

That's something I found it difficult to do with my own parents, although they did not live to the age of these folks, and I wonder if my own children will be able to do it with me.

I hope so.

The problem with Valentine's Day

My younger daughter is home on break, and we spent yesterday on a pilgrimage to Forks and LaPush Washington, in honor of her current fascination with Twilight and the romantic (?) world of vampires.

The subject of Valentine's Day came up frequently in the conversation, and from all sorts of angles; it surfaced again later in the evening when I was at the theater with two newly divorced friends, and again even later on the way home in the company of my daughter and one of our gay friends.

In a lot of ways Valentine's Day is like Christmas -- for a (thankfully not so extended as Christmas) period of time we are bombarded with images of "true love" as our society imagines it to be; a sort of romanticized fantasy of what relationship is REALLY all about. And it's just as hard on Valentine's Day as it is at Christmas to withstand that bombardment without at some point becoming painfully conscious that your life is NOT what all those images and stories seem to imply it should be; that each of us has needs for love that are not being met.

It is hardest, of course, for those who are "between relationships:" the relentless parade of loving couples and romantic gestures only remind them of what they lost, or never had, and may never have or have again; of the promises not kept and the hopes and dreams that have shriveled from lack of nourishment.

But those who are in loving relationships can find it challenging as well, either because their mates don't live up to expectations, or show love in traditional ways, or because other challenges and losses in their lives are overwhelming and draining their awareness of love: loss of a parent, child, job or home, health or transportation, or just the struggle of daily existence can make it hard to see and appreciate the love we do have. Love, in some ways, is like art in the marketplace, or marketing in the business world: the first casualty in times of stress. And then things can look dark indeed.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to have rich spiritual lives can take a great deal of comfort from the sense of love and fulfillment that arises in the course of our spritual practice. But even then there is a longing that lies not far beneath the surface, tears that pool at the corners of our eyes, hope that reaches upward for the divine as this tree strains toward the light. We just have to trust that somehow, in the tension of that -- the pooled longing, the straining, and the hope -- we will find blessings and growth to feed us and the compassion to reach out in love to all the others around us who hunger.


...and now, since my friend Karen tagged me, and in honor of the Soul Journal Valentine's Day Blog Party, here is my husband meme -- before which, I just have to say, THANKS HONEY FOR THE ROSES AND CHOCOLATES! (yum, dark chocolate truffles, my favorite!)(and a special thanks to Ali for encouraging him to honor the day):

1)Husband's Name: Christian

2)How long have you been married? In July it will be TWENTY-FIVE YEARS!!! Yay!

3)How long did you date? A year and a half.

4)How old is he? 57

5)Who eats more sweets? He does, no question, though I do need my chocolate...

6)Who is the better singer? I am. He can't carry a tune, even with a bucket, and he knows it.

7)Who is smarter? We each have our areas of excellence and lesser achievement. He's more a math and science kind of dude, I'm more into humanities and religion. He reads more non-fiction; I read more fiction. He's a walking encyclopedia about history and politics but I can figure out how things work and fix them. It's all good, we completely complement each other's areas of expertise.

8)Who does the laundry? I do, but he does the dishes and is a better cook (I wish he cooked more often!) Fortunately the kids -- when they're home -- do their own. And I never have to iron!

9)Who pays the bills? He earns the money; I write the checks.

10)Who sleeps on the right side of the bed? We used to switch every year but now he sleeps on my right side unless we're traveling, in which case he gets the side that has the lamp.

11)Who mows the lawn? Nobody has to mow -- it's all dune grass!

12)Who cooks dinner? I do, about 3 times a week. The rest of the time is leftovers, or we go out, or he cooks.

13)Who drives? He prefers to, but occasionally I get fed up with his driving style and take over. Because he commutes by motorcycle, he has a tendency to speed, and to stop and turn rather suddenly; I think he forgets he has a huge car to drag around the corner...

14)Who is the first to say they are wrong? Whichever one of us is wrong. We share the burden... but I have to say, we can count the arguments on just a hand or two; we rub together awfully well.

15)Who kissed who first? I think he claims this one, cuz he liked me before I liked him. It took me a while to figure out how terrific he was.

16)Who asked who out first? Again -- he pursued for a while before I caught up...

17)Who wears the pants? Hard to say -- this is a terrifically egalitarian relationship. I guess it depends on what the issue is -- maybe we each have one leg in? Hmm. Sounds like fun!