What a beautiful mess this is...

Though I normally go to church on Sunday mornings, I elected instead today to take my worship time out with my camera; to go where it led me and see what there was to see: I just needed to spend some conscious time in the now.

There was a bit of a haze in the air, so I went down to Waterfront Park to see if the boats were calling to me today, but instead I ended up walking along the path beside the water, and found this luscious madrona tree.

As I continue building my comprehension of what it means to be One with the Divine, I cannot help but think this tree -- this image -- has something to teach me/us. There is the outer shell -- dry, gray, lifeless and broken, and yet, through its woundedness we see the glorious inner aliveness that flows through the tree, glowing, rich, connected, colorful, sinewy... And together they are one, whole inner and broken outer, arching over my path, providing shade in the summer and pleasing vistas throughout the year.

For my hymn this morning, I was given A Beautiful Mess, by Jason Mraz. Here's a sampling from the lyrics...

"You've got the best of both worlds:

... You are strong but you're needy, humble but you're greedy
Based on your body language and short cursive I've been reading
Your style is quite selective but your mind is rather reckless
Well, I guess it just suggests that this is just what happiness is

Hey, what a beautiful mess this is...

Although you were biased I love your advice:
Your comebacks they're quick and probably
Have to do with your insecurities
There's no shame in being crazy depending on how you take these
Words they're paraphrasing this relationship we're staging...

... And the kind and courteous is a life I've heard
But it's nice to say that we played in the dirt
'Cause here, here we are, here we are

Here we are, here we are
Here we are, here we are
Here we are, here we are
Here we are, we're still here

And what a beautiful mess this is
It's like taking a guess when the only answer is yes

And through timeless words and priceless pictures
We'll fly like birds not of this earth
And tides they turn and hearts disfigure
But that's no concern when we're wounded together
And we tore our dresses and stained our shirts
But it's nice today, oh, the wait was so worth it."

This life we lead... it's not tidy, or even remotely perfect; not always courteous or kind. But it's rich, and glorious, and we're still vibrantly, deliciously in the midst of it, wounds and all.

It's all good.

A Work in Progress -- Again

"When you give birth to that which is within yourself, what you bring forth will save you. If you possess nothing within, that absence will destroy you."
-- The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 70

Yesterday my husband and I paid a visit to the Collective Visions Gallery, to see the Third Annual Washington State Juried Art Competition (into which the photo you see here had been accepted). The work displayed in this exhibit is phenomenal, and, frankly, I think I was amazingly lucky to get in: my husband and I both agreed that mine was one of the least impressive entries in the show. And interestingly enough (every visitor gets to vote for their favorite piece) each of us voted for a photograph, despite the fact that there were works in lots of other media.

So what made those photographs special? Though the subjects were appealing, they weren't things I hadn't shot myself at one time or another. What gave each of them impact was the presentation: the size, the shape, the section of image chosen, and the way it was mounted. They had authority, an assurance to them, that was impressive. These photographers believed in their work.

My image, on the other hand, though I do like it, was presented in a very ordinary traditional way, inexpensively matted and framed, and its story got lost in the telling of it; sort of died, stillborn. So while I sat in meditation this morning, I found myself wrestling with this issue: what -- of all the things I do -- should I actually be investing myself in, pursuing whole-heartedly? What was I born to do, and why do I feel I'm not living into that potential?

So then I came to my computer and found the Thomas Logion above was my lesson for today. It seemed amazingly appropriate. And the meditation I had written for that Thomas logion went like this:

Initially, upon reading this meditation, I felt reassured. Yes, I thought, this creative spirit is still tunneling through, trying desperately to emerge into the light; it's just not there yet -- and that's okay. I liked thinking that "Observer aches with me and sees...a pattern of delight."

But then I thought about an email conversation I had yesterday with David Ord, of Namaste Press, whose blog, Compassionate Eye, I have been reading lately. We were talking about all the misunderstandings that get perpetrated when we persist in believing God is Other; some remote being in the sky, and David mentioned his book, Your Forgotten Self.

When I went to read about the book I saw that his premise was this: "If you are a follower of Jesus, you have a glorious hope. You expect, someday, to be like Jesus—to be the loving, joyful, peaceful person you see in him. In the meantime, along with millions who hold this hope, you live with feelings of inadequacy, if not defeat, in the present. What, then, of Jesus' promise that we can experience a magnificent life here and now? What about the "peace that passes understanding" and "joy unspeakable" he promised us in our everyday lives?

Your Forgotten Self asserts that if you see Jesus as different from yourself, you have no hope of enjoying the fulfilling life he lived. It argues that, instead of being fundamentally different from us, Jesus was the embodiment of the essence of our humanity. In the view of Jesus' early followers, to be a believer is to see yourself as Jesus saw himself. To have faith is to become aware that you have already been "raised up" with Christ into a state of divine consciousness, and are at this moment blessed with "every spiritual blessing" the kingdom of heaven affords.

Your Forgotten Self invites you to see yourself with new eyes. When this happens, the power of the Christ floods into your everyday circumstances. You experience life as Jesus experienced it. You begin to live as Jesus in the present moment.

Letting that sink in for a bit, I begin to see that the meditation above actually operates out of the old worldview, that Observer is something separate and above. And, seeing that, I could begin to see that what is being birthed in me, in you, in each of us, is not some creative gift that needs to emerge and be displayed, but rather an understanding and appreciation of Who we really are; that Divine is not something other, but that it is us.

Once we have that understanding rooted in us, we can bring our gifts into the world with confidence and assurance, knowing Who we were born to be. Looking at my image in that show, and, later, watching the DVD of my performance in Peter Pan, I could see that, for all my bravado and faith, there is still something in me that doesn't believe, that holds back -- nay, SHRINKS back, in fear.

And what, I wonder, will it take to nurture that spirit into the light?

It's all part of the journey, I think: I keep being reminded of that Corinthians passage: "For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known."

I want to live in THEN. But living in then is really about living in NOW. And there's some part of me that seems to be having a sort of mid-life crisis, and worries that I won't live long enough to get to "then", that I will never fully realize that creative spirit that's being birthed in me BECAUSE IT'S TAKING SO LONG to get to NOW.

Sigh.

Clearly I had to rewrite the meditation. So I went to my image files, and what jumped out at me was a photograph of some graffiti found on a bunker wall on the south end of our island -- fabulous bright colors -- with the word NATIVE scrawled across it in black. Aha! I thought; what we're talking about here is nativity. And so I rewrote the meditation, with the result you see here.

And now to REALIZE that!

In the meantime, since I clearly can't THINK my way into presence, I'll have to trust that -- as David said to me yesterday, "When we stop trying, it happens."

His Master's Voice

"The true possession of God depends ... on an inward directing of the reason and intention toward God -- not on a constant contemplation in an unchanging manner; for it would be impossible for nature to preserve such an intention... 'You should be like men who are always watching and waiting for their master.' "

I read this line in Meister Eckhart this morning, and it reminded me immediately of the old RCA/Victrola logo of the dog standing beside the gramophone, ears cocked, listening for "His Master's Voice."

And somehow I found it reassuring -- this thought that though we may not always be HEARING the voice of the Divine, we might at least, like a hungry dog, be frequently reminded -- if only by our hunger pangs -- to listen, to watch, to reconnect. Somehow that seems easier for me to manage; more do-able.

Like a certain daughter of mine, I tend to have a low flashpoint (though I usually flame out fairly quickly). Though I'm better at containing the sparks these days, I have this unfortunate tendency to flare up, and then it takes me a while sometimes to pull away from the fire and think, oh, wait, where's the gift in this and what does it teach me about myself?

So it's reassuring to think that I do -- mostly, eventually -- remember to ask those questions, and that the asking brings me back to the feet of the master. It's a good sign, a sign that progress is being made. It's okay that I'm not perfect yet; having the intention, however slowly it might surface at times, is a good thing.

What's amusing to me this morning is that, thinking of this passage, I knew I wanted to use this image. But I still wanted to deal with the Thomas lesson first. And in the end I ended up writing and designing a completely new meditation for today's Logion. Why am I not surprised that it also required a new title -- and that that title turned out to be HUNGER?

Hmmm.

After writing this, I signed onto my email and found another Divine reassurance from Camille and Kabir Helminski, via the Spirituality and Practice Course on InterSpirituality:

"Sometimes, we are not capable of being compassionate, or forgiving. Sometimes we cannot do what we know is right. Rumi suggests a way of seeing our own incapacity with compassion. Sometimes, the Divine may lay upon us chains of incapacity. Why? From the Sufi point of view, that we may realize our utter dependence on the Divine and ask for forgiveness and help."

How lovely, to see our weaknesses from that perspective -- as further opportunities to throw ourselves into the arms of the Divine!

I'm so there...

On the threshold of the invisible

I've never (to my knowledge) actually seen a muskrat, though I could, of course, google them to see what they look like. But as I was coming back from walking the dog on the beach a couple of days ago, I was greeted by this log, and somehow I just wanted to call it "Muskrat Log," after that old Captain and Tenille song.

What has always fascinated me about driftwood is the way so many different kinds of shapes and colors, ideas and expressions, seemed to reveal themselves in the logs. It was in my early efforts to capture that aspect of nature, I suspect, that I first discovered the joy of being present, paying attention to my surroundings; it was also the beginning of my love affair with the camera, which not only allowed me to pay attention, but also gave me feedback on what I was actually seeing -- because lots of times I didn't see what the logs were telling me until after the photos came back from the developer.

So this morning, when I was reading John O'Donohue's book, Eternal Echoes, and the section heading was "the invisible world is all around us," I couldn't help thinking of the driftwood; of the sense that it contained within it all the patterns of the world, and had the potential to be so much more than it appeared to be at first glance. But when I read further, I came to see that that invisible potential lives in -- and inspires -- us as well.

"Within us and around us there is an invisible world; this is where each of us comes from...When you cross over from the invisible into this physical world, you bring with you a sense of belonging to the invisible that you can never lose or finally cancel...You know your real life is happening here. Yet your longing for the invisible is never stilled. There is always some magnet that draws your eyes to the horizon or invites you to explore behind things and seek out the concealed depths...

This tension infuses your life with longing. Now you belong fully neither to the visible nor to the invisible. This is precisely what kindles and rekindles all your longing and your hunger to belong. You are both artist and pilgrim of the threshold...the invisible remains the great background which invests your every gesture and action with possibility and pathos. The artistic imagination brings this out."

That infinite potential lives within each of us; that longing to be part of that larger world that lies beyond the obvious. And it expresses itself, not only in what we create, but in what we project onto the lives around us -- which, of course, is both how we fall into love and how we fall out of it; how we fall into situations and later extricate ourselves: so much of what we see and do is colored by the invisible thought processes and longings that happen within us.

So then I went to the Thomas reading for this morning. And it, too, addresses the invisible. But it touches a different aspect of the invisible: that part of you that can't be touched, that is invulnerable and triumphant, even in the midst of persecution. And reading of that, I think of my blogging friend, Louise, whose indomitable spirit survived such a hideously abusive relationship; and of the stories emerging from Haiti, of the extraordinary faith and courage of these survivors who have lost so much.

It's a poignant reminder that there is much more to life than the either the simple comforts and pleasures or the painful challenges we face in the here and now.

Good to know.

I think it started with the shoes...

"People who seek peace in external things -- be it in places or ways of life or people or activities or solitude or poverty or degradation -- however great such a thing may be or whatever it may be, still it is all nothing and it gives no peace...People ought never to think too much about what they could do, but they ought to think about what they could be: if you are just, then your works, too, are just."
-- Meister Eckhart

On Sunday night I was fortunate enough to attend a contemplative worship service. There's a sizeable community of folks on this island (I am reminded again of how lucky I am to live here) who have studied under Cynthia Bourgeault and Lynn Bauman and Richard Rohr, and around once a month a group of us gather for contemplative worship --i.e., a service that includes time for quiet meditation.

In honor of the new year, a piece of this Sunday's service was devoted to letting go: we were given small pieces of paper and pencils, invited to write down whatever we wanted to release, and then there was a period during which we could rise, walk over to the fireplace, and toss in our papers.

I wrote down four things, behaviors that -- to me -- indicate that I'm not nearly as God-filled or enlightened as I would like to be. I wanted to release some of the ways I treat others that don't really seem to flow out of anything other than ego. So I was particularly struck by this passage I read in Meister Eckhart this morning: it's so clear that the signs of faith are not in what we do -- however spiritual that might appear -- but in what fills us; in who -- and how -- we love.

So then I went to put up this morning's passage from the Gospel of Thomas. It's Logion 67, and it goes like this:

Yeshua says: If you come to know all, and yet you yourself are lacking, you have missed everything.

This was a little weird, coming on top of the Eckhart passage. Somehow I felt like all this stuff was connected -- particularly so since the last dream I had before waking this morning was that I was on my way to a doctor's appointment, wearing a shiny new pair of shoes. For some reason I had to remove the shoes when entering the building, and then I set them down to greet some old friends. When I bent to pick up the shoes, they weren't there, and I found myself holding a mismatched pair of children's shoes. I kept tracing and re-tracing my steps, looking for my shoes, and completely missed the doctor's appointment.

There are lots of ways I could interpret this dream, but the first and most obvious was that my obsession with my own stuff was keeping me from healing. In the end, after mulling over the dream, the Logion, and the Eckhart piece, I drafted a completely new meditation for the Logion, drawing a parallel between the knowledge we collect and the stuff we buy or wear as just one more manifestation of ego. The new meditation reads like this:

I see that you have clothed yourself
in all manner of righteousness:
that you read all the right books,
and say all the right things;
that you know exactly
what appearances to cultivate
to look as if you belong in my court.

This knowledge you have is useless
if you yourself are empty
of compassion,
of gratitude,
of tenderness and forgiveness.

I’m not interested in seeing what you know.
I’m interested in seeing how you love.

I love how it all flows together; love also that there's still so much for me to learn. But I'm still struggling a bit with finding compassion for myself, for all the ways I don't yet live into my beliefs and knowledge. It's okay. It will come, in its own good time..

Mirroring Peace

"Let me not forget that, for me as for everyone, the whole world of experience is my own, is within me, is a reflection of my own self. I am like a baby, playing with its own reflection in the mirror, getting alternately frightened and delighted by my own expressions reflected back."

Sri Ramakrishna, as quoted in today's lesson from Spirituality and Practice's ecourse on Interspiritual Wisdom.

I had originally intended to post an Eckhart Tolle quotation here, but this one, which arrived in my email this morning, seemed to be a more easily illustrated aspect of the same subject, i.e., what we bring to our dealings with difficult people and situations. (The photo is from the Piazza San Marco in Venice; it was only when I opened the file today, some 3 years after the picture was taken, that I discovered that intriguing face in the circle on the left...).

There seems to be a certain synchronicity going on, since I opened my Thomas meditation for this morning to discover I'd written the following poem for today's Thomas passage:

If change is the only reliable constant,
then it would make sense to assume
that those whom today’s society rejects
may be the darlings of tomorrow;
that today’s eurotrash
may be tomorrow’s valuable antique.

If you could imagine
that this were to be true,
how would you treat me differently?
Wouldn’t it be amusing,
if there were a lesson in me
meant just for you?

Given that my morning started with this Tolle quote, everything seemed to fit together, so I'll share the Tolle quote with you and go on about my day, trying to stay open to my own contributions and expectations in the world around me. I don't know why this stuff is all coming together like this, but I'm willing to watch and listen for the lessons to be learned; how about you?

"If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. Then out of your alertness would come a response. Who you are (consciousness), not who you think you are (a small me) would be responding. It would be powerful and effective and would make no person or situation into an enemy." (from Oneness With All Life)

I think that last line would be a fabulous mantra, worthy of a bumper sticker, and bears repeating: Make no person or situation into an enemy. Tolle says it another way a page or two later:

How do you know this is the experience you need?

Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.

Amen.

When the spirit moves you...

Well, as you can see here, I had another spirit visitation yesterday -- which is to say, I got the urge to make another spirit doll. This one started out as a leaf, but somehow she seemed to need arms -- into which I put wire, thinking that would be the only way to keep them uplifted -- and then she wanted beads... So interesting to watch this play out!

I began by making the face, determined to make it more realistic than the face of the previous doll. I've not really done this before, and my only tools were a pencil, its eraser, and my fingernails: I definitely have a renewed respect for all the sculptors of the world! But eventually she seemed to sort of stabilize, and so I fired her up.

So then I tried to photograph her in the dying afternoon light -- which meant I couldn't quite get the colors right, though I tried lots of different settings and placements. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm a better dollmaker than a photographer! But then, indoor light was never my strong point...

I had intended that she would have both her arms up, sort of dancing and triumphant (she seems to think she should be called Aphrodite, spirit of growth and change) but when I accidentally moved one of her arms to adjust a strand of hair I realized she had lots of different possible positions.What I didn't realize -- until I looked at the photos this morning -- is that she almost becomes different people in those different positions. Which tells you a lot about the importance of body language, eh? But I love that her mood can change depending on what we need her to be.

And what I love even more is that in that second position, when she looks like she's cradling a child, she bears a very strong resemblance to the image that came to me after my mother died -- the first time I was able to see God as female. I remember I was on Shaw Island at the time, and I had this sense of being tenderly cradled in the arms of a giant native woman.

So there you go: another surprising synchronicity. May your day be full of gifts, and may you feel cradled in the arms of the Divine.