When the world turns upside down

I was at a gathering of women this evening, and we discovered that almost all of us, though this gathering was on our west coast island, were originally from "the other coast" -- mostly from New England, New York, and New Jersey.

One of the women had been back visiting recently, and was remarking upon how much harder the East Coast has been hit by the current economic crisis, and we got to talking about how the loss of a job can give you an opportunity to re-invent yourself, something most of us transplants know a lot about, as most of us came out here because we were looking for work. Several of us had been through periods of unemployment and had found quite a bit of fulfillment in developing new roles for ourselves.

But then, inevitably, one woman chimed in to say that her husband had just lost his job, and that it's much harder to reinvent yourself at 60 than it was at 30. She is an event manager, and one of her tasks over the years has been managing job fairs. She told us of one she put on just last week, where in past years 60 to 70 employers showed up looking for employees. They had to seriously redesign the exhibit space this year, because only 30 employers planned to come... and on the day of the job fair, only 14 actually showed up. For men like her husband, who arrived in suits looking for work, there was nothing -- and in Washington state 1000 people are losing their jobs each week.

For many if not most of us it's clear the world is going to be turning upside down -- if it hasn't already begun to flip. And, as with this image, that's going to change the way we look at everything. Something as simple as an image of the sun reflected in a parking lot puddle can take on a pretty ominous cast when the world has been turned upside down. And here's what worries me: I think this could easily begin to make communications more difficult. We will need to be conscious about being less prickly and sensitive about what others say to us -- to try not to get upset or blow things out of proportion; to understand both that we are edgy and that others are edgy, and that can make communications flow less smoothly.

And at the same time we will need to make an effort to be a bit more kind and tender with one another, more sensitive to each other's needs, more helpful and encouraging. I suspect this will prove challenging -- it is always more difficult to be sensitive to others' stress when we are stressed ourselves -- but at times like these we are going to need to rely on one another and look out for each other more than we have in the past; to help keep each other going and pick each other up when we fall. I don't think it will be enough any more for each of us to sit and stew in our own little puddles: the water is rising, and it will soon become obvious we're all in this together. I do feel incredibly hopeful about our future together, but it's clear we'll need to find -- or rediscover -- new ways to share each other's burdens. And some days a listening ear may be all we have to offer.

Igniting the air with the music of blessing

Today I am reading Lawrence Freeman's thoughts on Spirit. And in talking about the passage (John 6:63) where Jesus says "The words which I have spoken to you are both spirit and life," Freeman says this:

"By saying that his words were spirit and life, Jesus opens a new way of understanding both his identity and the nature of spirit. In the theology of the Trinity the Holy Spirit means primal communication. She is the love exchanged between Father and Son in that communion which is Being itself and which we call God. Spirit is not only the bond of the Trinitarian communion but its very oneness....All relationship, sentient and insentient, is an expression of this primal relationship. The structure of all existence is thus essentially Trinitarian, dynamic and fluent. The Spirit is the relationship subsisting between all that exists and so holds all in being...Spirit is not only the I-Thou of relationship but the we as well."

I love this idea of Spirit as relationship, that space between; more than breath and air but the charge that sparkles between individuals, between individuals and nature, between individuals and God, between everything that is; that space between all particles that vibrates with such energy. And for some reason it feels like the sound of this lone trumpeter: the intention of her music informing the breath she blows through her instrument, that emerges as pure clear notes of song that then echo across the valleys and bounce off the hills and trees, igniting all the air around us with beauty, light and sound; connecting all that listens in a moment of oneness.

Subliminal messages

Today I find myself thinking again about that phrase "we become disciples of what we pay attention to."

A couple of days ago I took my daughter over to Bellevue to visit old friends of hers from her days in junior high. After dropping her off, I came back to Seattle and got into line for the 10 pm ferry, and decided to amuse myself by playing with the nightlights and my camera.

This morning I was looking over the images and was particularly struck with this one, with the way the camera obviously moved to get the swirls, but also stayed in place long enought to get the two neon signs. These night images tend to be a sort of boring yellowish color, so I began playing with the colors to see if I could make the image more appealing.

I've learned over the years that however irritating the original color set may be, it usually has more depth and richness than any of the alternatives you can get by uniformly shifting the hues. So I got the overall look of the image to where I wanted it, and then restored parts of it to their original color to get the color balance I wanted.

When I finished, it was time to name it and save it -- an important operation when you have as many images as I do. If you ever hope to find the image again, you need to name it something memorable and file it with other like images. I had already decided it would go in my "Playing With Light" folder. But what to name it? When in doubt, I name batches of pictures by subject and date -- seattle ferry dock lights March 09, for example -- but when I looked at this one the title was suddenly far more obvious than that: Pabst Blue Ribbons.

Now I just want to say that I rarely watch TV, and it's even rarer that I drink beer. And I haven't seen a Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer commercial since, well, probably high school. Which was a VERY long time ago! I'm not sure they even call it that any more; the sign in the picture just says Pabst, as far as I can tell. It wasn't until I had been working on the image for almost half an hour, had completed my work, and was ready to name it, that the blue ribbon connection leaped to mind. But what are the chances that it wasn't already there, informing my choices in some subconscious way? And how often do we operate at that subconscious level, making choices that are informed by something something we saw or heard long ago without even knowing it?

I am reminded of that Adele Davis phrase from the sixties: "You are what you eat." Our minds are huge repositories of information, constantly taking in data, drawing connections and making assumptions, often without our conscious assistance. We see this most clearly in our dreams, the way pieces of our days separate out and reform themselves into odd fantasies, some warm and fuzzy, some intriguing, some scary. (I still remember a dream I had long ago, from which I awakened knowing that the word "vanchocstraw" was the key to the universe. It was only days later that I realized that it was actually just the label on the side of a box of Neapolitan (vanilla/chocolate/strawberry) ice cream in our freezer.)

Clearly these subconscious connections happen far more than we realize. Which means that everything we see and hear has an opportunity to plant itself and grow in our brains. Remember how upset we got when it was announced that some advertisers were paying TV and movie producers to plant subliminal advertising in their productions? Why, then, would we consciously choose to expose our brains -- or those of our children -- to the constant violence and materialism of bad television, gossip magazines and the like? Aren't those messages just as powerful as the subliminal ones? (I say this while at the same time admitting that I have been reading my daughter's Twilight books. So do as I say, don't do as I do!)

I doubt most of you who read this blog spend much time watching violent TV shows or reading The National Enquirer; I even suspect that some of you choose not to read newspapers, watch the news, or listen to NPR for these same reasons. But the fact remains that whatever we pay attention to; whatever we choose to occupy our minds with, leaves its imprint. And until we become FULLY conscious -- which I'm beginning to suspect is a highly unlikely prospect -- our actions will continue to be formed at some level by those unconscious imprints.

The obvious moral of the story is this: Choose wisely. Surely the good things we see and hear and watch leave their own subconscious imprint as well. But perhaps there is a subsidiary moral as well: that those of us who are artists have an opportunity and a responsibility to impact those subconscious choices with our art. And if we work to enhance the impact of what we create, and we allow it to be informed by what we know of Divine Presence, then perhaps our work can in turn inspire subconscious awareness of the Divine in others. As Eckhart Tolle says, that is the function of all great art: to serve as a portal to the Sacred.

Hmm. Does that mean I shouldn't post this image?

The Three Stooges of Guilt

It being Lent and all, it's inevitable that at some point the three stooges -- Woulda, Coulda, and Shoulda -- are going to pop on stage and start performing tricks for you.

Today was apparently scheduled for their big show in my part of the world, and they crashed onto my set with a bang, letting my old friend Shoulda take the major role. In case you haven't met Shoulda before (though most everyone has), she likes to begin every sentence -- no matter how farfetched -- with her eponymous phrase "Ya Shoulda," as in "ya shoulda been tougher on your kids" or "ya shoulda ignored the whiny boyfriend and gone to Cambridge your junior year."

Shoulda is a hard act to forget; it feels like she's always dancing around backstage in my brain, and she loves to do those little impromptu appearances that make you want to get out the hook. But today someone had obviously given her permission to take out all the stops and let her rip, and she sang an aria so impressive that the encores are still echoing.

The problem is that, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, for my Lenten discipline, I signed up for a Joan Chittister course called "The Cry of the Prophet" through the Spirituality and Practice website. In this morning's readings for that course we were given a set of quotations from women prophets, and this one, from noted suffragette Jane Adams, really struck me:

"Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world."

You would think I might have learned this lesson from my first marriage: In that case I was extremely careful NOT to leave until I felt I had done ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to make it work -- which meant that, once gone, I never revisited that decision. Unfortunately, subsequent events convinced that I had perhaps been a bit too assiduous about staying til the bitter end, and so I became a little gun-shy, leaving bad situations, if not at the first sign of trouble, at least before my self-esteem got worn down to the nub. As a friend said recently at breakfast, discussing things he had learned from HIS first marriage, "I may have let the pendulum swing too far."

So, reading this, I found myself wondering yet again if I had made a mistake in leaving my last job: surely, if I had stayed in place, I would have had additional opportunities to make a significant difference in the world (there's Woulda, stepping onto the stage). I try to be an appreciative audience when these ladies take the stage, to stay in my seat and pay attention rather than walking out in a huff. But then, having put down the prophecy text, sitting there wondering why I had even bothered to sign up for that course, I picked up my daughter's Farid Ud-Din Attar poem and up cropped Shoulda, blazing forth like Ethel Merman in an even louder version of the same message.

"Weak woman in your faith... you should be there...
Is this devoted love? Shame on you all,
fair-weather friends who run when great men fall...
This was no friendship, to forsake your friend
To promise your support and at the end
Abandon him...
However hard the fight,
You should have fought for what was clearly right."

Ouch!

So I slammed that book shut as well and went to meditation wondering if I should consider going back to the old job now that I have more of the spiritual grounding it would take to do it right. And sitting there, thinking about what life might have been like had I stayed on the hard path, had I not stepped off into motherhood and island time, had I not discovered the joys of the contemplative life, I found myself thinking about Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken.

I soon realized, having chosen the road MORE traveled by, that it would be intriguing to go back and revisit the poem in reverse, from that perspective. And what I learned (as you can see from the resulting poem, which I published on my poetry site,) is that both roads still end in the same place, and together they inscribe the heart of the challenge so many women face, the duality of outside the home and inside the home that makes us wonder why it is so hard to serve both the world and our families.

I am grateful now to have been able to travel both those roads, and grateful for the choices I made, because going out there and wrestling with the demons is not the only way to make the world a better place. At some point, standing in the darkness that had begun to dominate my life in that job, I chose to take that long walk down the ramp to the ferry; chose instead of work to move into Island Time; to devote my life to kids and contemplation. And whether it was a more or less traveled road, it has certainly made a difference.

Disciples of the struggle

This morning, in Jesus the Teacher Within, I read this curious statement: "We are disciples of what we pay attention to." I just had to go back and reread that in order to type it in, because for some reason I keep thinking the quotation is "We ARE what we pay attention to" or maybe "We BELIEVE what we pay attention to." But to say that we are DISCIPLES of what we pay attention makes much more sense -- and is, at the same time, a scarier thought.

A dear friend called a day or two ago to say she was thinking of getting married -- for purely practical reasons -- to her long-term live-in boyfriend. "The problem is," she said, somewhat apologetically, "that I read all these romance novels, and I get how unrealistic they are, but still... I want more. I want this to be romantic, not just practical; I don't want to just go down to city hall and get it over with." And then, because I read those novels, too (though I usually give them up for Lent) we talked about why we read them, and how they skew our thinking.

And, of course, that's exactly why I give them up for Lent: it's because they create lots of charming illusions in my susceptible heart, about what a marriage can be like, and how a husband should act, about the sort of world we live in... and cultivate, though they are supposed to serve as an escape, a sense of longing for more, a sense of not enough. As with any other item or activity that we over-indulge as a way of coping with the various kinds of emptiness we struggle with -- over-eating, smoking, our children, drinking, shopping, television reality shows, working out, computer addiction, drugs, sex, gambling -- they create more problems than they solve and end up exacerbating the very emptiness we were trying to erase.

And part of the reason is that, in paying attention to these things, we become their disciples; we learn their false lessons, and they become our false gods. Some are obviously more harmful than others, but the fact remains that we do become disciples of whatever we pay attention to. But what if we are paying attention to things that are obviously connected to our faith? What if all our time is consumed by "good stuff" -- working on behalf of the environment, or volunteering in a homeless shelter, or working for the church, or, in my case, photographing and writing? Well then, we become disciples there, too. And sometimes the lessons we learn can be good ones.

But the trick about discipleship lies in the fact that it is more than just learning: it is spreading what we learn -- what the dictionary calls "spreading the doctrine of another." We get caught up in whatever it is that takes our attention, and it becomes the subject of our lives and conversations. We believe in it, we talk about it, we share it, and we get so caught up in it that we forget to listen to anything or anyone else. It begins to define us, and as it becomes inextricably linked with our ego we become increasingly inflexible, less and less open to whatever might call to us that doesn't fit into this definition we create for ourselves.

And that's the heart of it: it's a definition WE create, it's ego. It does not evolve naturally out of an ongoing, attentive, relationship with the divine, it is something WE have chosen. God may have put us there in the first place, but as soon as we begin to feel a sense of ownership and try to make it our own, it becomes... well... an idol. And whenever we find ourselves stuck worshiping something that is not God things can begin to go a little haywire. We stop listening, we start arguing with anything that pulls us away from the idol, whatever it may be, and we lose our sense of balance.

Which is why this whole tradition has grown up around giving things up for Lent. We are not giving them up because we are bad people. We are giving them up as a way of moving our attention back to the Source, as a way of removing the obstacles that distract us from a constant, ongoing relationship the divine, as a way of revealing the extent to which we have been pulled out into the ego and away from the true Self.

We are none of us perfect, and we are rarely as balanced and attuned as we would like to be. But if we understand the need to return to the Source, then we will make a continual effort to draw our attention back to Center. And in the friction of that constant struggle to resist those other pulls and respond to the Divine, there can be much growth and learning -- because, if that is where we put our attention, we will become, if not disciples of the Divine, at least disciples of the struggle to return to the Divine. And that has a great deal to teach us.

The slippery slope

On our drive (and ferry ride) home from the airport yesterday, my daughter and I were discussing the challenges of being a religion major in times of economic strife. Four years into a five-year college experience (she spent last year learning Mandarin in Taiwan), she's growing understandably impatient with her studies, and wonders what the point is of a college education, citing story after story of folks who, by her age, have "done something" without benefit of degree.

And, of course, she wonders what a degree in religion can possibly bring in the way of employment. But then she told me of a lecture she'd attended, in which the expert had spoken of the importance of cross-cultural understandings. Her generation, of course, is growing up in a completely different world from mine, and though they are less likely to memorize history dates and poems because the internet is becoming their external memory drive, they are also less restricted in terms of cultural identity and information and can choose to bury -- and surround -- themselves in specific interest areas.

But those whose backgrounds and interests diverge -- say, for example, a middle-class American with an interest in Japanese and Chinese language, religion, and culture -- have a unique opportunity to build bridges between what they are born to and what they have come to love. Like Karen Armstrong, Thomas Merton, Cynthia Bourgeault and the growing numbers of wise ones who see beyond the barriers of individual cultures and religions, they can bring their awareness of our underlying connectedness across the borders that separate us while still holding an understanding of the unique and separate value of each cultural and personal identity.

To hold those two together -- uniqueness and oneness -- is every bit as challenging as continuing to slog through the academic muck when it appears the world is winning a race you haven't even had time to enter yet. To stay the course always grows hard as you near the end of the tunnel, but she's tough; I know she'll see it through. For some reason Rudyard Kipling's poem, If , comes into my head, and now I find myself wondering: if our children never memorize poems like these, what will remind them that such poems even exist, that others who have gone before have grappled with similar challenges and pressed forward?

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Creation

It was raining when I left for church this morning, but by the time I arrived at Grace the flakes of snow were thick and fat, sticking to the ground and covering the road with slush.

It was hard to stay focused on the service today; the back wall of the church is essentially a wall of glass looking out over the woods, and as I watched the steady fall of snow I kept thinking, "This is my body, broken for you" and seeing the blessings piling up.

Waiting to shake Bill's hand on the way out, I caught sight of two deer, eyeing us all from the wide circle of grass and trees that defines the inner center of the parking spaces. We called a greeting, and they leaped off to the left, but when I went to my car they were standing there, waiting for me. I greeted them again; they turned and strolled into the woods.

This morning's psalm seemed to describe the starquilt image I'd created last night for today's poetry blog, and the Gospel lesson was one I'd remembered discussing earlier in the week -- was that a dream? The song Ann played during communion also had echoes of an earlier encounter; everything was feeling connected, as if I were floating in a lacy web.

I'd overheard my husband last night saying how much he missed New England, so after driving home through the snow (which turned to rain again before I reached my house) I insisted he come out with me for coffee, so he could have a taste of the New England beauty that surrounds us here today. (This local landmark, Frog Rock, sits right at the corner where the rain began to turn to snow). And he said our girls had called again, on their way to the airport in Vermont, and that there it is sunny and warm; quite the contrast.

And now, as I settle back down at my computer to work on a series of fog images for an upcoming show, I hear the foghorns blowing across the sound; outside my window there is only white, as far as I can see. On the way out of church I chose at random a word for my week from the collection of folded papers in the Lenten wordbasket. And this week's word is what it's all about:

Creation.