Unexpected ripples

One of the women in my spirituality class yesterday mentioned the pleasure she finds in looking at circular ripples like these.

It made me think of this picture from the California Academy of Sciences, which I've been meaning to share with you; there is something very soothing about both the ripples and the colors of this aquarium shot.

But I also realized yesterday, in talking with my husband, that not all ripples are calming.  I was trying to explain to him how much I wish he would begin actively looking for work, and as I began to articulate the feeling it quickly became apparent that I'd tapped into some sort of volcano; that actually I've been upset for some time -- however much I've tried to stay calm and go with the flow -- by his procrastination in this area.

Once released, of course, it was hard to stem the tide of feelings; they were rippling out with a momentum of their own.  I never actually yelled, or burst into tears (though I felt myself on the edge of both), but I could feel how deeply distraught I've been about this situation, and, worse yet, how long it's been coloring my interactions with him, and how rude I've become to him.

Yes, I get that by ordinary standards these variations in my behavior are small, but I also realize I've not been liking myself all that much lately, precisely because of my reluctance to engage in meaningless chatter with him.  Apparently some part of me decided -- without actually checking with the rest of me -- that if he wasn't talking about his job hunt I wasn't interested in what he had to say.

It's pretty disturbing to see how unconscious I can be even when I'm making a deliberate effort to be more conscious.  Disturbing also to see how separate I can feel when I work so hard toward oneness.  Fortunately we are reading about acceptance in spirituality class, and this week's learning is to accept, not only the challenges life throws us, but also our own sometimes fishy responses.

And so I look at this image and long to slip into its depth and color; to accept that the ripples of feeling may not just be on the surface; may be bubbling up from a far deeper place than the reflections I've been sharing.  Nothing here is all that clear; there are lots of distortions, and will continue to be for a while.  And it's all good -- the striving, the procrastination, the attempts to hide and the overflow, the recognition and the distortion... it's all part of what is here, and what is now.  And every moment I spend getting to know it better, sinking into it, is time well spent.

Taking flight

One redeeming factor
of tears and rain
is the way they pool together
to reflect the light and the stars,
leaving behind
this soothing radiance;
a tender reminder
that there are other worlds than this,
other feelings to be experienced,
new lines to be drawn
between what is
and what could be.
Time,
now,
to dance in the puddles, my friend:
dawn is emerging
from the scattered darkness:
soon we'll be revving up our engines,
preparing for takeoff,
climbing beyond the clouds,
our wings brushed with color
by the new sun.


* * *

Coping with earthly limitations

With Thanksgiving over, Christmas begins to loom, and for some -- my guess is, women in particular -- it has the same sort of ominous, overwhelming quality of this incoming plane: that sense that something huge is speeding toward you, that if you don't move quickly you will be flattened; often accompanied by a sort of deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.

And I find, as I get older, that the least little glitch will take away my confidence that I can accomplish everything; will pretty much throw me under the wheels.

This year that glitch is classwork: though class is over, I have several final assignments, and though I know they'll probably be completed in the very near future, they are looming particularly large at the moment, and I'm wondering if I should decide NOT to produce calendars -- other than the family calendar -- this year.

So every year for the past 8 or 9 years I've been producing three different calendars each year: a family calendar, with photos from our annual Thanksgiving gathering; a Sandspit calendar, with pictures I've gathered from the neighborhood over the course of the year; and a Diane Walker calendar, with favorite images from this year's wanderings.

The family and Walker calendars are giveaways to families and friends; the Sandspit calendars I sell to neighbors, who have come to expect it.  And the fact is that all of them require a substantial investment of time and money -- both of which are pretty scarce this year.

If I were smart, I'd put them together earlier in the year -- and sometimes I manage to do that -- but this year, with school, I just figured I'd wait til all my other responsibilities were done.  So here I am, down to the wire, wondering what to let go...

Which may be why, when I read the lyrics to this old Woody Guthrie song in my readings this morning from 365 Nirvana, I immediately rose from the table and went to Youtube looking to get the sound of the music. Because when I'm feeling overwhelmed, it's awfully appealing to think that something major could shift, and I could step outside these earthly limitations:

This Morning I Am Born Again

This morning I was born again and a light shines on my land
I no longer look for heaven in your deathly distant land
I do not want your pearly gates don’t want your streets of gold
This morning I was born again and a light shines on my soul

This morning I was born again, I was born again complete
I stood up above my troubles and I stand on my two feet
My hand it feels unlimited, my body feels like the sky
I feel at home in the universe where yonder planets fly

This morning I was born again, my past is dead and gone
This great eternal moment is my great eternal dawn
Each drop of blood within me, each breath of life I breathe
Is united with these mountains and the mountains with the seas

I feel the sun upon me, it’s rays crawl through my skin
I breathe the life of Jesus and old John Henry in
I give myself, my heart, my soul to give some friend a hand
This morning I was born again, I am in the promised land

This morning I was born again and a light shines on my land
I no longer look for heaven in your deathly distant land
I do not want your pearly gates don’t want your streets of gold
And I do not want your mansion for my heart is never cold.

If you'd like to hear what this sounds like, you can listen to the Slaid Cleaves version here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjlI_P6ua-0&feature=related

...and if, like me, you're feeling a bit overwhelmed by the demands of the season, I wish you this sensation -- if only for a moment: to stand above your troubles, and on your own two feet; to feel your hand unlimited, your body like the sky, and at home in this sweet universe where all these planets fly.

Another learning experience

Though I still have some homework assignments to complete, yesterday was the last class for this quarter, and I'm sad to say it ended on an unpleasant note for some of the people in my table group.

We'd volunteered to facilitate the closing piece of the day's activities, so we had a phone meeting to plan that, and decided to invite our classmates to share the treasures they were bringing away from our journey together.

And then, as part of the day's exercises, we were asked to design another facilitation: we were given an extra long lunch break, and were expected to use that to plan out a meeting which would happen as soon as the break ended.

As we began visualizing how the meeting might go, things started getting very sticky, and it soon came out that one of our group's members felt that the last phone conversation had been controlling and non-inclusive.  The news came as a shock to the rest of us, and our attempts to plan the additional facilitation were severely handicapped as a result.

In the end, both facilitations went reasonably well, but two of the women were unable to resolve their differences in the time we had, and I think both were left with a bitter taste in their mouths.  It was sad, because I care about and respect them both: if they had been able to work together I know we would have been able to create some really terrific work.

Which brings me back to my biggest concern about the schooling I am getting: it's all very well to talk of cooperation and collaboration, but in the real world -- even in the mini-real world the classroom has come to symbolize -- it can be extraordinarily difficult for people to look beyond their preconceived notions and childhood experiences and see how much each person has to offer the whole.

Sigh.

However much we long to reach out and embrace the whole of humanity, there will always be scars, snags and glitches -- our own, as well as others -- that make our efforts less than smooth.  But if you step back from the whole picture; well, even if the whole thing isn't perfect, it carries within it the seeds of perfection, and conveys, even in the worst of times, a clear understanding that the Creator had an idea of perfection.  And if the lumps and bumps we encounter along the way get in the way of that, well... it's all good, and all a learning experience.

Making me dizzy

I spent most of Thursday at Antioch: they were having a craft sale, and I thought it might be fun to participate and sell some of my matted prints and cards.

But there weren't all that many people on campus Thursday, and while the Tibetan scarves to the left of me did well, my photos proved to be of little interest to the few people who wandered by.

So I spent most of the day sitting by the moldy fountain with my head in a book, drank too much coffee (and a Coke: BIG mistake) and awoke in the middle of the night with a terrific dizzy spell: a result, I suspect, of the bend in my neck while reading, the heat of the lobby, the excess of sugar and the mold in the fountain.

But I had to give a two hour presentation in the morning (I'd been up til almost midnight working on it, and had to be up at 5 to shower in time to catch the early ferry for a morning meeting before class.  So I drank a ton of water, wolfed down some Sudafed (which pretty much guaranteed I wouldn't sleep any more) and then compounded the problem by drinking coffee before heading to the ferry so I could stay awake long enough to present.

Oy.  The presentation went amazingly well, but I spent the day in an uncomfortable fog, drank WAY too much water before remembering you need electrolytes to go with that or the dizziness becomes self-replicating...  So I'm still in a bit of trouble this morning, though I've had two glasses of salt water and a couple of bananas to try to replace the lost electrolytes.

There's a term I learned in class this quarter: FFE, or Far From Equilibrium.  It perfectly describes my mental state as I struggle to get the liquid in my inner ears back in balance.  But in Systems Theory it is believed that complex systems evolve far from equilibrium at the edge of chaos. They evolve at a critical state built up by a history of irreversible and unexpected events.  In other words, it is precisely at the point where things get horribly complicated and confusing that growth and evolution happen.

I find this theory enormously reassuring; don't you?  Not as it reflects my current state of disequilibrium, which I suspect is less efficacious (wow, where did THOSE vocabulary word surface from?) but with regard to the challenges humans and human organizations face.  If we could simply trust that nature has been designed in such a way that the unexpected and inconvenient and difficult are all signs of impending evolution, well, it would be a lot easier to stay calm in a crisis, don't you think? 

This just feels like one of those places where science and religion are beginning to overlap -- and I find that very exciting.  When my brain is working.  When I'm not reeling with dizziness.  But maybe it's that overlap that's making me dizzy!  Maybe I should just look at my dizziness as a sort of tipping point; if I get TOO dizzy, I'll just tip over!  the question is -- into what?  It would be so nice if I could just tip over into Now...

What emerges from the silence

A friend of mine, recently widowed, elected to fly to England to spend time with her family there, and this morning I received a note from her saying they've gotten 15 inches of snow in the last 24 hours, and it's still falling.  She's not at all sure she'll be able to get to the airport, and she's deeply concerned that by the time she DOES make it British Air will have gone on strike.

So she's tearing her hair out a bit at the forced inactivity, and wondering (as she often has in the path) why on EARTH I would ever choose to go on a silent retreat!

So it's intriguing to me that I heard from her right after reading this passage from David Steindl-Rast in this morning's readings from 365 Nirvana:

"Monasticism's central message, expressed through the chant, is the supreme importance of time and how we relate to it: how we caretake and respond to the present moment, to what is before us now.


The message of the hours is to live daily with the real rhythms of the day; to live responsively, consciously, and intentionally directing our lives from within, not being swept along by the demands of the clock, by external agendas, by mere reactions to whatever happens.  By living in the real rhythms, we ourselves become more real.  We learn to listen to the music of the moment, to hear its sweet implorings, its sober directives.  We learn to dance a little in our hearts, to open our inner gates a crack more, to hearken to the music of silence, the divine life breath of the universe."

Reading this, I feel an incredible longing to set aside the time-based demands of my life, to stop trying always to move forward, to relax into what is now and just listen to the music of the moment.  Those who are called to monasticism do that for all of us, but we who are not called in that way need to make time for those moments as well.  And I suspect it is the longing for that peace that keeps me wary of returning to fulltime employment.  Perhaps the time has come to just acknowledge that this period of my life may call for simply that; that now is a time for stopping and listening, for seeing what emerges from the silence.

Basking in the now

"It's no use to seek truth,
just let false views cease.
Don't abide in duality
and take care not to seek,
for as soon as there is yes and no,
the mind is lost in confusion."
   --Seng Ts'an, in 365 Nirvana

One of the many attractions of the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco is their rain forest biosphere.  As you near the top of the rain forest, there are lots of lovely butterflies.

This was the only butterfly I was able to successfully capture with my camera, and I remember feeling a bit disappointed at the time because the butterfly and the flower were the same color.  But that very feature makes it a perfect illustration for today's quotation, "Don't abide in duality." 

Why, after all, do I need to distinguish between the butterfly and the flower? Why, for that matter, do I need to distinguish between myself and the butterfly?  Or between myself and anything?  And as I ponder this, I realize I've always been a seeker, and that very act of seeking really does divide the world into yes and no.  Because as long as we're seeking, everything we see and do is being evaluated: "Will this bring me closer?  Is this what I'm looking for?" -- which is, essentially, continually dividing the world into acceptable/good and not acceptable/bad.  If we're looking for something better, the implication will always be that now is not good enough.

Which is sad -- because now is truly wonderful.  And can I stop here and appreciate that?  Drop my shoulders, stop planning for what comes next, and just breathe?  And if not, why not?  Why is that so hard?  What dreadful fate would befall me if I were to release that search and bask in the Now?