On the origins of faith

I do apologize for stepping out of the spiritual realm and taking you along on a brief psycho-therapeutic journey, but ... well ... sometimes you can't do one without the other; Welwood, in fact, insists they're inseparable.

Anyway, further exploration into yesterday's dilemma has revealed some issues around loneliness and aloneness and going it alone that are both an integral aspect of growing up as an only child AND an integral part of my spiritual journey.  And those issues tend to surface around conflict.

We only children don't do conflict very well; I think it may be scarier for us than for the rest of the world, because our conflicts, when we're growing up, tend for the most part to be with our parents, people much larger and more powerful than we are.  Which means, if we do risk arguing or expressing anger, our punishment usually has to do with being left alone, sent to bed without our supper, or some variation on that theme.

Which, I suspect, has something to do with the origins of my faith: I have this sense that my awareness of God arose very early in life, as something to comfort me during times of abandonment.  There's more to it now, of course, but that, I think, is the root of my faith -- this sense of aloneness and abandonment, and the longing for someone to care for, feed, and comfort me.

Which, I suppose, turns it into a bit of a chicken and egg problem: did God appear in my life because God exists and watches over his/her children?  Or did I manufacture God as a way of coping?  I, of course, assume the former -- largely because that sense of Someone caring for me and walking with me has stayed with me over the years, sometimes as a felt sense and often in the form of surprising or startling coincidences. At this point, it almost doesn't matter if God pre-existed my longing; if that Source comes from without or within.  What matters is that faith exists, and sometimes surfaces, just as feelings of loneliness and abandonment exist and sometimes surface.  They're not always connected, but certainly some connection exists.

So, after exploring that for a bit this morning, it's intriguing to look more closely at this image that emerged yesterday afternoon.  It's a compilation of five separate images: one of city lights, two of the Seattle Center fountain, and two bar scenes.  So there's darkness, and loneliness -- two very separate individuals, each very much alone -- and, at the same time, lots of lights and a fountain.  And then there are those curious horses, galloping across the center stage, and that chemical overlay, which feels like something is draining out of the image...  And, oh, look -- isn't there a flag at half-mast up there?

Woof.  That's a lot going on.  But I think I'll just leave it at that, and not bother to interpret except to say I find hope in the balance of it, in the light and the colors, in the complexity of it and in the fountain.  Not everything has to be, or needs to be, or even will be resolved in one image, or in one argument, or in one therapy session or meditation.  Life's complicated, and yet the issues are often at heart very simple.  And I'm willing to live with that.

It's all good.

Lost in the jungle

I remember, when I was in my 20's, being told we humans only use about 2% of our brainpower.  I'm not quite certain how they arrived at that figure, or if that statement is still considered to be true.  But there are certainly days when it seems like my brain is some sort of impenetrable jungle, of which I only fully inhabit one very small corner; a cave, perhaps, or a hollow tree...

And if our own minds and motives are that challenging to decipher, how can we ever presume to understand someone else's mind or motives?  And yet often others' motives are far clearer and more obvious to us than our own, which tend to get shrouded in all kinds of protective camouflage...

I say this because ... well, just when I thought I had gotten comfortable with one resolution of a problem, it came up again and sent me off again into tizzy-land.  So clearly I haven't actually resolved things yet, I've just figured out another way to rationalize my behavior.

Sorry if that sounds a bit oblique.  But -- having read about some of the defense mechanisms we create for ourselves in Welwood's Toward a Psychology of Awakening this morning, and then having watched myself waste an entire meditation session brooding over how to challenge someone else's view of the world -- well, I can see I still have work to do.

Here's what Welwood has to say about my efforts to get in touch with my deeper understanding of myself:  "Of course, it is often hard to let ourselves feel our pain and disconnection.  As soon as we start to look at it, a story comes up, a distracting belief, thougt, or fantasy.  As soon as we ask ourselves, "What is this?  Why am I feeling so bad?" our mind steps in and says, "Oh, I know what it is.  It's x or y.  It's my hang-up with my mother.  It's my inferiority complex.  It's nothing serious, nothing worth giving any energy to.  Everyone has problems like these, don't indulge them."  Such stories are a major obstacle to healing because they keep us separate from our experience, stuck in contraction and rejection."

Yup.  Got me.  Time to take another look at this, strip away some of the spanish moss and fuzz around this stuff, see if I can figure out what's REALLY going on.  Because if I'm still making up stories around this, I've not yet gotten to the root of it.

Giving Way to Wonder

So here's the thing about living on an island: if your daughter's plane doesn't arrive until 11pm,  there's no way you can make the 11:15 ferry.  Which means you sit, first in traffic (Seattle has TWO stadiums right by the ferry dock, and I think both games must have ended around 11:30 last night), and then in the ferry line until 12:45 (hey, if we had missed that ferry we'd be stuck until the 2:10!), so when you finally get to bed it's around 2 am.  Which is 5 am if you just flew in from the East Coast.  So we got off to a bit of a late start this morning -- and I missed church, though I had really intended to go.

The good news (other than that, well, yeah, we get to live on an island, and it's a beautiful day, and I have both my girls home!) is that I had the house to myself for a nice long while in the morning, so I had a longer meditation than usual, and, ohmigosh, I realized (listening to the birds and the waves with my newly returned daughter's ecstatic ears) that I hear in colors.

I know.  It sounds weird, and probably is; my older daughter actually wrote a paper about this in high school, when we realized letters had colors for both of us: it's a condition called synaesthesia, and involves a mixing, a sort of cross-pollination of the senses.  but I'm not sure I've ever noticed before that sound, for me, is really (obviously somewhere below normal attention) a constant parade of shapes and colors.

Why this matters today is connected to that realization in the ferry line that I wrote of yesterday, and somehow related to two passages I read this morning in Welwood's Toward a Psychology of Awakening:

"The fix-it mentality only really works on the gross outer level of things.  When trying to repair a car or a pipe in the kitchen sink, it is appropriate to take a wrench and exert pressure against the hardened rust to get the nut to turn.  But approaching an inner problem in this way usually has the opposite effect, causing the problem to seize up all the more.  This is because the part of us we are trying to fix feels unacceptable or rejected, and therefore tightens up."

and then this: "Why is it so hard to just let our experience be what it is?  Why are we so uncomfortable with it?  What is this uneasiness we feel in relation to our own feelings and states of mind? The nature of our dis-ease is this: we continually judge, reject, and turn away from certain areas of our experience that cause us discomfort, pain, or anxiety.  This inner struggle keeps us inwardly divided, creating pressure and stress and cutting us off from the totality of who we are."

So -- after the release and acceptance I felt yesterday in acknowledging the inner conflict between who I am and who I think I'm supposed to be, today I just decided to relax into the space that created and see what rose up.  Which is when I realized (yes, this could have been me distracting myself!) that the sounds of the morning -- the refrigerator, the birds, the waves, my neighbor taking his boat out -- all have colors, and paint themselves across the surface of my mind, which becomes an ever-changing canvas.

Here I've been spending this time looking for images that have shapes I can paint into (like the one you saw yesterday), when, in fact, the shapes are already there, constantly shifting across the landscape of my mind as I listen.  So then I thought, ooh, what if I use existing pictures as a palette, and paint to music?  Doesn't that sound like fun?  Now, if I can only let go of the tendency to realism and just allow the shapes to emerge; doesn't that seem like a way to open access to parts of experience that may be lying dormant in me?  And then, because a picture needs both light and dark, I could invite my darker feelings to voice themselves, and wouldn't that ultimately mean that the picture that is my life might be more balanced?

Yes -- I know, I'm mixing metaphors here.  And this is probably pretty woo-woo.  But there's confusion and wonder here, which makes me think immediately of Logion Two in the Gospel of Thomas:

Yeshua says...

If you are searching, you must not stop until you find.
When you find, however, you will become troubled.
Your confusion will give way to wonder.
In wonder you will reign over all things.
Your sovereignty will be your rest.

I think it's important to stay with the process: to keep exploring, even when things seem odd or strange or scary; to "lean into it," as Pema Chodron says, so we can feel that giving way to wonder...

Somehow this seems like the perfect moment to share a wonderful poem sent to me by one of my readers: (Thank you, Spencer):

Meditatio

In the back’s low hollow sometimes
a weightless hand guides me, gentle pressure
so I tack soft as a sailboat. (Go there)

Soften the space between your eyes (smudge
of eucalyptus), the third eye
opens. There’s the wide vermilion sky

that cradled us before birth,
and the sun pours its golden sap
to preserve me like His precious insect.

-- Mary Karr in "Sinners Welcome"

Enough, now; I shall go make waffles, and see what the day brings...

I don't walk on water

Yesterday was my last class at Antioch; one more paper and I'll be done -- hurray!  Not that school hasn't been lovely, or an incredible learning experience, but it will be a pleasure to have my free time back.  And -- of course -- there's the fact that learning experiences by definition can be challenging, though not necessarily in the ways we expect.  Yesterday, for example, I felt this surge of frustration at one point, and it looked like I was going to have to say something to the person who I felt was creating the problem for me.

Fortunately the moment passed, and I didn't have to end my day with an angry confrontation, but there was enough emotion around it that I thought later, sitting in the ferry line with nothing else to do, that it might be good to take a closer look.  And when I did, taking the time to get to the root of all those surging feelings, I realized (surprise, surprise!) that she wasn't the problem at all: I was.

The clarity I found can be traced directly to something I read yesterday in A.H. Almaas's book, Elements of the Real:
"When we are children, the functions of nourishment, care, protection, release of tension, and comfort are provided by the parents -- particularly by the mother... As the personality of the child develops, the child becomes more independent of the mother, but this is accomplished by introjecting the mother, recreating her inside.

...The mother inside you is not a physical thing; you have her emotionally in your unconscious.  You behave like her, and you seek out people like her.  You feel the way she felt, or you find people who treat you the way she treated you...  Even those who deny they want mother ... continue to unconsciously seek the negative mother while consciously feeling the opposite.

... Even when you are by yourself... you are still relating to your mother -- the mother inside you.  You relate to your superego which is always beating you up.  Why is your superego beating you up?  Because it makes you feel that your mother is around.  When you were a child, your mother was always judging you.  So every time you feel like a little kid, your internal mother comes and beats you up.  Then you feel secure.  You might complain, but you feel secure."

The person I resented was only blocking me from being something my mother wanted me to be.  And I had been allowing her to do that because my true self didn't see a need to be that something -- and then my internal mother was disappointed in me for not being that, so she was beating up on me.  Which means -- like any other child under attack -- I pointed the blame finger outside.

I know; it's complicated.  But I can't begin to tell you how freeing this realization was -- and how grateful I am that  I didn't "speak my truth" (or what I thought was the truth in the moment).  Add to that the fact that my learnings confirmed something I've suspected for some time now, and set me free of yet another "should" I've been carrying around... well, I'm feeling pretty light-hearted this morning!  Of course it helps that the sun is finally out, the weather is finally warming up, and my daughter will be home tonight for the first time since February...

So yay!  Life is good!  Hope you're having a good day, too.

Everything belongs

"How much more simply life could evolve if we'd but focus our attention on the obvious situation confronting us, looking always for our direction from within the situation's elements.  How little point there is in worrying about what may come, and yet we expend incalculable amounts of energy in just such activity. "
  -- The Promise of a New Day

"It is a dualistic fixation, the tension between 'me' -- as self -- and 'my thoughts' -- as other -- that makes thinking problematic, tormenting, 'sticky,' like the tar baby to which Brer Rabbit becomes affixed by trying to push it away.  Thoughts become thick, solid, and heavy only when we react to them."  --Welwood,  Toward a Psychology of Awakening

For some reason these quotes, which I read this morning, seemed related to this image, which I've been struggling with for two days now.  There was this huge yellow-green mass on the right, and I kept trying to push it out of the picture -- kind of the elephant-in-the-living-room sort of a feeling.  But in the end, when I decided to give up and take it with me into an earlier version of the image, it turned out there was a lot less of it than I thought; I'd created it with some sort of overlay somewhere in the process, and all it did was add some drama.

So I like to think the black streaks -- those tarbaby bits -- are embracing and accepting that problematic piece, which is another bit of advice from today's reading in Promise of a New Day:

"Everything in the world has something to say to us: rocks, garbage, even our disappointments and failures.  For everything belongs to the vast pulsating pattern that is the earth.  Nothing that exists does not belong; if we find this or that piece of the pattern troublesome, it's because we haven't perceived its contribution to the whole..."

So -- what's troubling you today?  What are you worrying about; what are you pushing away?  What does that troublesome thought have to offer you -- and how can you embrace it?

Art as evangelism

"Without its tail, the kite would fly off in the lightest breeze.  The tail serves as a rudder, to steady the kite and allow it to be directed.  Every force needs a counter-force to channel it effectively...

Our minds and our bodies aren't two different things.  They're made of the same stuff.  They make up one being.  We can never say where one leaves off and the other begins, nor can we say that one weighs down the other.

We can say, though, that we contain within ourselves all sorts of contradictions, checks, and counter-forces.  This makes life interesting.  Looked at positively, it means that we can understand any human possibility because we contain them all."

This is actually yesterday's reading from The Promise of a New Day, but, given that I spent some time this morning counterbalancing the birds in this image, it seemed somehow relevant.

So much of this work (I know: to you painters this is old hat, but for a photographer the challenge of building an image of parts is definitely new territory) is about responses and awareness.  When I completed this one yesterday, there was only one vertical bar, and the two birds on the right were facing the same way.

But when I came to it this morning, that felt unbalanced, and the large bird on the right was too close to the edge, so I just kept moving things around (that's the luxury of doing this on the computer -- so many opportunities to undo and redo) until it "felt right." But what does "felt right" mean?  And what does it feel like?

That's where meditation comes in handy: if I take the time to just sit, to watch what rises up -- where it takes me, how it feels, how it resolves, how it shifts -- then over time there emerges a subtle awareness of balance; moments when all the different "contradictions, checks, and counter-forces" have a sort of equal claim on attention, and there's this openness and acceptance that arises to both hold them all and be them all, so the distinctions between them are lost. 

And though I don't think about it at the time, looking at it objectively after the fact I can see the authors of this piece are right: the dissolution of those internal distinctions allows me to comprehend the dissolution of external distinctions as well.  Which doesn't mean I'm good at that -- it just means I can imagine another way of being in the world that embraces more of the" contradictions, checks, and counter-forces" that fly into awareness; that understands their importance and value to the total picture.

So if I know that feeling -- however briefly -- inside myself, and can imagine it outside myself, then the image becomes an intermediary; a place to both practice finding balance and to proclaim its possibility.

Hmm.  Art as evangelism -- but for faith, and hope (that oneness and acceptance and balance are achievable), rather than for a specific religious stance or story.

I like it!

From "sorry" to "thank you"

We've all heard it said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  But a gallery owner once said -- when I expressed reservations about a technique I was using at the time -- "You know the difference between amateurs and professionals, don't you?  Amateurs borrow ideas from other artists.  Professionals steal them."

It was good for a laugh, I guess, but it definitely made me uncomfortable.  And I mention it today because I spent a lot of time on this image yesterday.  It actually started life as a painting in a gallery, and I really really liked it.  So I took a picture.

Looking at the picture later, it occurred to me that it would be fun to substitute my own textures and colors for the blocks of color in the painting.  So I did that, and I really liked the results.  But it still seemed to have the composition of the original painting.  So I tried changing that.  I tried rotating it and flipping it, but it still worked best in this configuration.

I tried lengthening it, I tried squashing it, I tried warping it... and still, this was the way it looked best.  So I thinned some black lines and thickened others, overlaid an image of cracks on mud and called it a day.  So here it is, and I really do like it a lot -- especially the colors and textures.  But the incontrovertible fact is that the composition isn't mine.  And for me, it's really the composition that makes the image.  So, in a way, this picture feels like a violation of a trust.  And I don't even know the original artist's name.

What I do know, though, is that that's a method of teaching, used both in art and in writing.  You have the student copy a great master, on the theory that they learn style and technique and that serves to inform the development of their own style and technique.  So what did I learn from this?  That I really like the strong contrast of the black sections.  That I'm still hooked on the Rule of Thirds.  And that I can take textures and colors from one work, place them in another, and get depth by changing the shading.

So it's all good -- but I still feel like I should apologize to the artist.  And that reminds me of an important lesson I learned a couple of years ago: if you're the sort of person (and I am) who says "I'm sorry" WAY too often, so much so that your family starts objecting, learn to rephrase it.  Next time you catch yourself in the act of apologizing, try saying "Thank you" instead.  Not "I'm sorry I'm late," but "Thank you for waiting."  Changing the statement has a way of evening out the playing field.

So as one artist to another, even though I don't know his or her name, I will just say, "Thank you for sharing your beautiful composition with me."