Singing a song of wholeness

Most of us understand that our bodies are made up of cells, and that those cells are constantly dying and regenerating. But did you realize that over the course of a year ALL of the cells in a hand die and are replaced by new cells?

And yet the hand looks the same. This hand, in the picture, a year later will still be Allan's hand; maybe a little older-looking, but still recognizable -- and still with the memory of how to play my guitar. How is this possible?

Scientists have learned that it's possible because each of the cells in Allan's hand contains not only the data about its own role but also a complete DNA imprint for Allan as a whole. Each of Allan's cells contains what Buckminster Fuller called "pattern integrity", also referred to by Rupert Sheldrake as a "morphic field;" a kind of social identity.

And it turns out that "when a cell's morphic field deteriorates, its awareness of the larger whole deteriorates. A cell that loses its social identity reverts to blind undifferentiated cell division, which can ultimately threaten the life of the larger organism. It is what we know as cancer."

This quotation is from a book I was reading yesterday about transformational change, called Presence. The authors of this book, led by Peter Senge and Otto Schwarmer of MIT, contend that those of us who deal with institutions persist in treating them as if they were mechanical in nature: if a part breaks, fix or replace it and it will be as good as new.

But in fact, they say, because institutions are made up of humans, they have this same organic quality of wholeness that humans have. Which to me would explain two things I know to be true: that institutions, organizations, and communities have what I would call "institutional memory;" and that when members of that community lose that sense that they are part of a whole, the effect can be cancerous.

It seems to me that there are positive and negative aspects of both of these features. For example, we as Americans carry an institutional memory of democratic principles -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And this is surely a good thing.

At the same time, you will note the use of the word "men" in that first sentence. It has taken centuries to bring this institution around to the thought that it is not just men but humans, male and female, who were created equal. And though we legislate that now, the institutional understanding has been very slow to die out.

...and the departure of that institutional memory can be traced, in part, to what I would call the positive effects of cancer: at some point some members of the community decided that their own objectives -- in this case, to consider males and females equal -- were more important than the established pattern. To effect change, they had to cut themselves off.

And yet I would also claim that the reason change has occurred over time is because new members, new cells -- our children, growing up in a world where we at least give lip service to the idea that women are equal -- come along with a slightly modified institutional memory.

But I did not start this post with the intent to write about feminism. What I really wanted to talk about here is community. I think that if we understand that institutions and organizations have this intriguing organic quality, then we also understand the importance of keeping the sense of community alive in its members. I would claim that to some extent it is an understanding of this that drives such activities as reciting the pledge of allegiance, memorizing the declaration of independence, and singing the Star-Spangled Banner at baseball games.

I also think that when we, for whatever reason, lose that sense of connection, of being part of something larger -- of which we have some communal understanding -- then the results can be cancerous.

We can blame Al-Qaeda all we want for the devastating attacks of 9/11. But I think the problem began when we as Americans began to lose the sense that ALL humans are created equal. Like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm, we began to believe that "some animals (in this case, American ones) are more equal than others." And in stepping apart, claiming so much for ourselves without thought for the needs of the rest of our world community, we created the seeds of the cancer that came back to claim us, and that even now is eating away at our economy.

So how do we heal? How can we regenerate the understanding of wholeness and community? Clearly some think it requires radical surgery: eradicate Al-Qaeda and all possible related threads, and life will get "back to normal." But I think the disease goes deeper than that, and that that particular cancer will continue to recur in different forms until we reach a new understanding of connectedness and wholeness that is all-inclusive. And as I write this I realize I have come full circle to the song of which I last wrote:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

Perhaps if artists, poets, and musicians continue to paint for us a vision of true wholeness, the repetition and recitation of that vision, singing that song of wholeness, will help to plant that understanding more deeply in our institutional memory.

A blessing for wholeness

This rather elaborate cherub from Naples served as a support for a carriage used to transport important religious personages through the town (I've carefully photoshopped out his private parts). I'm sure they thought of him as a sort of personal travel blessing, which is why I'm offering him here today.

I am still reading John O'Donohue, though I'm near the end of the book, and he is explaining the concept of blessing. I had never really thought about it in this way before, so I thought I'd share it with you:

Our longing for the eternal kindles our imagination to bless. Regardless of how we configure the eternal, the human heart continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of a life's journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.

I like that thought, that offering a blessing is an invitation to wholeness. And so I offer you a blessing today, and wish you wholeness.

NOTE: All John O'Donohue quotations are from his wonderful book of blessings, To Bless the Space Between Us (© John O’Donohue. All rights reserved). To learn more about John O'Donohue, be sure to visit his website: www.johnodonohue.com

Beyond the net

"The real world is beyond our thoughts and ideas; we see it through the net of our desires, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer.  To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net.  It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes."
 -- Sri Nisargadatta, in Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart

Through this web of desire, we can see the divisions, and we can see the light.  But we can't seem to step back far enough to see the whole picture, and don't want to reach through and touch into that space of wholeness; it's much more comfortable to stay on this side and continue speaking our endless litany of "He is evil" and "She is bad" and "They done me wrong."

When will we come to sense the interconnectedness and the emptiness out of which all beings arise?  The more solidly we insist on grasping our identity, says Kornfield, the more solid our problems become.  As long as we continue to see ourselves as separate, not just from others, but from ourselves; as long as we ignore our blind spots, blame others for our own lack of vision, ignore or vilify our own weaknesses and torture ourselves with thoughts of rejection and misuse, the pattern will remain the same.

Wholeness will never be about rooting out impurities and imperfections.  Wholeness will emerge when we can learn to see the blessings that lie hidden beyond the stories we weave around our challenges and vulnerabilities; our weaknesses and our shame.

Sometimes I'm singing in a minor key...

Yesterday's post, about knowing we are loved, was actually written in response to the last thing I read before heading off to church yesterday.

It was the opening quote for the chapter entitled "No Enlightened Retirement" in  After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.  The quotation is attributed to Julian of Norwich, and it goes like this:

"If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me.  But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love."

The chapter, which is about the inevitable struggles of returning to daily life after any kind of spiritual high, has really been resonating with me; I find myself wanting to underline phrases on every page.  And when I read this section, a few pages into the chapter, I began to see why:

"When the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich says she knows of no lover of God who is kept safe from falling, she is voicing the understanding that to descend is also God's will.  Whether we understand this or not... the fall, the descent, and its subsequent humility can be seen as another form of blessing.

Whatever success we have is usually one-sided.  Then our less developed aspects, our shadows, come into the light.  These are more raw, less controlled aspects of ourselves.  There are certain truths we can learn only by descent, truths that bring wholeness and humility in surrender.  In times of our heart's greatest vulnerability, we come close to the selfless mystery of life.  We all need periods of fecund time, fallow time, of being drawn closer to the humus of the earth.  It is as though something in us slows down, calls us back.  And out of that time a deepened knowledge and beauty can emerge."

So, ruminating on this passage, and thinking about the contrast I've been encountering lately between who I long to be and how I've been behaving, I sat down and prepared to meditate.  And I sat for way longer than I normally do (our early riser is sleeping elsewhere today) and found a section of myself that is walled off with cement blocks, no entrance or exit, though I can see into it from above.  Inside that small circular space there lies, curled upon itself, a large bird, wounded and starving; almost skeletal -- which could explain something of my attitude toward food lately (always hungry, but it doesn't seem to feed me).

What's even more odd about this bird is that it appears to be a stork.  So it's somehow connected with what Kornfield calls "fecund time," and with Advent, with what needs to be birthed into the world, my role in that, or my perceived role...

And here's what I believe: something in EACH of us was born to fly -- something in you, something in me, something in the homeless man who sleeps in the parking lot, something in the crooked business executive who grants himself and his cronies huge bonuses after losing money for all the customers he serves... And for so many of us that something lies in various stages of woundedness and starvation, walled off and lost.

Christmas is about the promise that Someone Cares; that for each of us there is a Star watching over us, there are Wise Ones traveling infinite distances to bring us gifts and honor us, and there are Angels hovering, singing that which lies within us into life.  So I hope you have a chance to stop, to slow down and sit for a few minutes, sometime during this busy holiday season; to feel the lowly stable within you -- the waiting manger, the anxious parents and the straw beneath their feet, the warmth of the star and the animals around you, the genuine respect and affection of the Wise Ones -- and to hear the angels singing what needs to be born in you into wholeness.

And now for some reason I'm hearing the words to that old spiritual, There is a Balm in Gilead:

Some times I feel discouraged,
And think my work’s in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my hope again.

There is a balm in Gilead, To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead, To heal the sin-sick soul.

If you cannot sing like angels,
If you can’t preach like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus,
And say He died for all.

There is a balm in Gilead, To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead, To heal the sin-sick soul.

From the shores of wholeness

You are not as alone as you feel.

There’s always something reaching out to you

from the shores of wholeness,

longing to connect you once again.

Awakening a sense of connection

I spent yesterday evening watching a reading of a new play -- Portugal -- by playwright Elizabeth Heffron,  and then spent this morning wandering through my younger daughter's Instagram photos (after she informed me she no longer bothers with Facebook and I should find her on Instagram).

And I was struck anew -- or perhaps reminded, but in such a powerful way -- of art's unique ability to convey the heart; the wholeness of things, in a way that words alone rarely do.

The actors in Portugal brought the plight -- and the humanness, the lives -- of the workers who are attempting to clean up the nuclear waste at Hanford to life in a way that books and news reports could never hope to achieve.  Perhaps it's just the work of my mirror neurons, but my heart awakened and responded to the tragic ache at the center of their lives in a way that might not have happened otherwise.

And my daughter's photographs... wow.  Even as a child, painting or drawing, she always had a way of filling up a page to its edges.  Her presence, too, fills a room.  And her photos have a unique way of capturing the wholeness, the grace of her subjects -- her artistic voice, to me at least, is so clear, and so extraordinary -- rather like Heffron's writing voice: this incredible ability to distill the essence of things. I find myself hoping that whatever career she eventually chooses, she finds a way to bring that vision into life: I believe we can all learn a lot, given the opportunity to see through her eyes.

So why this bird?  I guess because he and his mate have been tapping at my windows and chirping at my door for the last few days, trying to tell me something, but I'm not quite sure what that is.  (My cat, who is fortunately terrified of the Great Outdoors, is fascinated, no duh!) And somehow I am left with the sense that the Divine is everywhere, tapping at our windows, hammering (like the woodpecker) on our chimneys, constantly attempting to bring our attention to the world around us, the larger world of which we are an integral part, in which we play an integral role, which we affect by our very presence in it, and by our interactions with it.

He brings the gift of awareness rather forcibly into my life, and I have to trust that somehow, by listening to his insistent chirps and flutters, by stepping out onto the porch and talking with him, even if I don't understand the answers I get, I am brought into engagement with a larger way of being in the world; taken out of self-centeredness and into connection.

... and it's all good.

The path to wholeness

The path to wholeness may not always

prove to be this clear,

but the light at the end never wavers.

Division and wholeness

Yesterday morning I dropped off the art for the Picnic show, which opens at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery next Friday night.  I'm not all that excited about it, to be honest, but the light in some of the images is nice...

Boy, talk about damning with faint praise!  I'll share a couple of my favorites here later, but for now I'm posting an image I AM excited about: I painted this one yesterday, and it feels like I'm getting closer to what I'm trying to do.

The main indicator for that is that with this one, as with the young girl I painted a week or two ago, when I look at it there is an emotional response, a sort of heart surge of recognition.

After spending a little time with that, I decided to name this one Separation. I kept feeling like it was a particle of light spinning off from a body of light -- like a soul leaving the oneness to reside in a body.  The light patch on the right has a vaguely maternal feel to me, and the one on the left feels like she's being carried away, safely, but reaching back as if for a final embrace.  But then Christine from Mystic Meandering commented that she saw it more as emergence than separation -- and I like that, it feels right to me.  So now it's titled Emergence.

I know.  It's all a fantasy, and others might not see it that way.  That certainly wasn't what I intended to paint -- but then, I didn't intend ANYthing, I just painted and watched it grow... which is, I have to say, a really wonderful process, when it goes well.  I still don't seem to have much of a sense of control over it, but I'm starting to like what happens with the brushes and the colors more.

... and I finished this reading of A Hidden Wholeness this morning.  I say "this reading" because I know I'll be coming back to it in the fall, reading it more intentionally with a circle of friends; I look forward to that.  But I love that he finishes with a poem from Mary Oliver, and somehow the poem seems to connect with this image, so I'll close with its closing verses:

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Here's what Parker Palmer writes, after the poem, closing the book:

"As we embrace the simple fact of our mortality, we also embrace true self.  Knowing with new clarity that the gift of life is ours only for a while, we choose to live "divided no more" simply because it would be foolish not to.  As we live into that choice, we see with new clarity that all the life around us is "something precious to the earth," and we find more and more ways to honor the soul in ourselves and in every mortal creature."

The journey to wholeness

Always before us, there is a path beckoning, 

Calling us forward into health and connection; 

Inviting us deeper into the mystery. 

The way may be rocky, and muddy at times, 

But still we persist on the journey to wholeness.

Blessings in abundance

Having finished Kornfield's A Path With Heart, I've returned to Cynthia Bourgeault's newest work, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene.  And in my reading this morning Bourgeault asserts that the three key tenets of Jesus' teaching are Kenosis, Singleness, and Abundance.

Kenosis, she says, is self-emptying.  "Self-emptying is what brings [Jesus] into human form, and self-emptying is what leads him out, returning him to the mode of glory.  The full realization of Jesus's divine selfhood comes not through the concentration of being, but through a voluntary divestment of it."

Singleness is about oneness, wholeness.  "Breaking through the egoic mind's compulsive need to divide the perceptual field into paired opposites (inside and outside, male and female, subject and object, and so forth),  consciousness simply coincides with its source and looks at the world through a single lens of wholeness."

But it was her description of abundance that really sang to me this morning, and it is abundance that is called forth for me by these wonderful flowers, part of an arrangement we were given to take home after the wonderful wedding reception dinner we attended this past weekend. "Abundance surrounds and sustains us like the air we breathe; it is only our habitual self-protectiveness that prevents us from perceiving it.  Thus, the real problem with any constrictive motion (taking, defending, hoarding, clinging) is that it makes us spiritually blind, unable to see the dance of divine generosity that is always flowing towards us.


...Since this point is so fundamentally counter-intuitive for our anxiety-prone minds, little wonder that Jesus takes every occasion to hammer it home.  In virtually all his teachings the fundamental leitmotif is an "over-the-top" generosity that leaves its recipients not only satisfied but bedazzled.  Think of all those well-loved gospel stories -- the prodigal son, the good Samaritan, the loaves and fishes, the water turned into wine, the woman with the alabaster jar, the fishing nets cast in the Galilean Sea -- and you'll see what I mean.  It is not a question of "adequate," or "barely enough," but of a fullness "pressed down, shaken together, running over" (Luke 6:18).

I don't know about you, but ... well, even though it's hard to wrap my anxious brain around that, even hearing this passage softens some resistance in me.  "Of COURSE!" I think, just before I sink back into wariness, and just for that tiny moment, and, again, looking at the generous gift of these flowers, I can feel -- however briefly -- how wonderful it would be if I could truly let go of all the worries and just accept the incredible bounty that is my life.

Maybe I need to get back into gratitude practice: you know, the one where every night before you go to bed you write down 5 to 10 things you're grateful for today?  Maybe that would get me over this hump I seem to be stuck on...

More lessons from the Crossroad

After completing the last post (whose ending felt most inconclusive to me), I went downstairs to have lunch. As is my habit, I looked for something to read and picked up David Richo's book, Shadow Dance, which was recommended by a friend, and which I seem to be having trouble getting through.

I opened it to the page where I last stopped reading, and found, on that page and the following page, numerous additional insights into this photo, so I am re-posting the photo and will list the insights in the order that they appeared:

1. "Every person and thing is simultaneously everything and all." Which is, I believe, pretty much where I left off at the end of the last post: the horizontal isn't just my axis; it's an all-inclusive plane.

2. "The Self is the vehicle of an unconditional yes to the conditions of human existence with all its dust, and a yes to the the condition of human sanctity with all its grandeur." So, yes, we exist here on the road, with the dust, and at the same time in the vertical/holy/sanctified dimension.

3. "The Self is the Buddha nature, our essential wholeness that waits for full awakening. Our work is to take steps in that direction." To me this feels like standing where the photographer stands in this image, taking in the wholeness, the connectedness with what is around us, and at the same time the call to move forward onto the road ahead.

4. [When we take these steps] "the shifts occur in our consciousness that engender compassion because they actualize that potential of the Buddha nature. This is why when we are awakened from the slumber of ego, the first thing we say is: "May all beings benefit from my work and from my gifts." I love this: it's like suddenly getting that there are three dimensions, not two, and then saying "Hey, it's all connected, everything we do affects all of us." Well, duh!

5. "The compassion happens when and because we realize we all have this same enlightened nature, but some of us are so caught up in ego fear and desire that we miss our access to it." What I had forgotten is that by focusing on the vertical I was getting caught up in ego, focusing on MY connection to MY God.

6. "The Self, Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, is our essence, always and already whole." We are not two-dimensional beings, we are three-dimensional; to only see the two dimensions would always be to be less than whole.

7. "The purpose of spiritual practice is to display in our lifetime the timeless life of the Self, our Buddha consciousness. Existential work unveils the essential reality. This essential reality is described as a void or emptiness because it is empty of separate, self-standing existence... in this freedom from division is the access to awakening and to compassion." Yes! (and this might explain that big red X, and the no-turn sign) The purpose of spiritual practice is to choose to step forward, but not into the future, or some other separate vantage point. Rather we are called to step into the picture itself; to move from the sense of a separate observing ego, the photographer who stands apart and takes the picture, into the mystery at the intersection of the axes; to move into an experience of oneness, not just with God, but with all creation.

8. "The Self cannot be defined... it is a mystery...not something hard to understand becuase it is so complex, but rather that which is not graspable by the analytically, linearly limited ego that has the wherewithal only to solve problems. A problem is something to be solved; a mystery is something to become involved in. The deeper we reach into a mystery, the deeper it becomes, that is, the more mysterious. The reach takes letting go of ego, which is the point and aim of spiritual practice."

Ah. Amazing, isn't it, how these lessons have a way of falling into our path...

The existential GPS

I came across this charming gypsy wagon, hiding in an apple orchard, while driving on Orcas Island.  What is it that's so inviting about this?  Is it the lush curve of the magenta grillwork on the back, or the delicate flowers painted so painstakingly on the side, the dancing butterflies in the field of yellow, the colors?

Or could it be the sense of freedom and invitation inherent in its very definition -- a mobile life, staying when and where it suits you and moving on when you're ready to leave; the curious mix of adventure and safety -- wherever you are, you'll have your own things around you; you've created a life for yourself that is uniquely your own and yet still flexible...

I've been reading Parker Palmer's classic, A Hidden Wholeness, and this morning he's been describing what happens when a group of people explore a poem together.  The poem operates as a sort of Rorschach test, or a deck of Tarot cards: we project onto it the things we most need to explore or understand in our own lives.

And, as I noted yesterday, photographs can work the same way: it can actually be very rewarding to sit with a photo -- even better if you can do it with a friend or two -- and allow yourself to respond to it, to ask it questions, see what speaks to you, and explore the layers of meaning the photo and your responses have to offer.  Which, if you think about it, has really always been the way this blog works: the picture leaps onto the page, and then I listen for what it has to say to me -- or through me -- that morning.

So -- about this photo.  One of the responses it holds for me is a sense of longing for summer to begin.  I mean -- here we are, at the Solstice already, and still the sky and sea outside my window are gray.  Earlier in Hidden Wholeness, Palmer talks about framing the explorations of a circle of trust within the seasons.  Spring, he says, "is the season of surprise when we realize once again that despite our perennial doubts, winter's darkness yields to light, and winter's deaths give rise to new life.  So one metaphor for spring is "the flowering of paradox."  As spring's wonders arise from winter's hardships, we are invited to reflect on the many "both-ands" we must hold to live life fully and well -- and to become more confident that as creatures embedded in nature, we know in our bones how to hold them.

"The deeper our faith," he goes on to say, "the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.  If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope and love.  But in the spring we are reminded that human nature, like nature herself, can hold opposites together as paradoxes, resulting in a more capacious and generous life."

And yes -- I get that, that if we cut off feeling our lows, we inevitably cut off our ability to feel the highs as well.  But even though Summer is almost here, some part of me is still waiting for Spring.  Like the gypsy wagon, that sense of promise and possibility is beckoning, but it's also hidden, stagnant, grounded; stuck, going nowhere.  There's no strong light source, and barely any shadows.  I don't seem to see any windows, and  I'm not altogether sure it's big enough to hold either my height or my weight.  Something in me is feeling dark, cramped, and crowded; longing to break free...

So now I almost wish I hadn't asked!  But we just have to trust our existential GPS: it's all good.  Like this image, which my dear friend Teresa posted on facebook earlier this week --

A Hidden Wholeness

That which is barely seen, or only faintly visible

is nonetheless real:

there is a hidden wholeness to everything:

just wait for the light to change,

and all will be revealed.

Invitation to wholeness

The world lies waiting before you,

an open invitation to wholeness and completion.

It is what it is

Tomorrow I'll be in class all day, and then Tuesday morning my daughter and I will fly off to Vermont for a week.  Some part of me is eagerly looking forward to a week away -- especially since we'll be staying with some very dear friends -- but another part of me is feeling a bit overwhelmed by all that has to happen between now and the time we leave.

But then, I always get a bit anxious before a trip.  It's not that I'm afraid of flying, it's more the complexity of the departure -- the rushing, and the logistics... I'm usually fine once I'm on the plane. 

But there's some other part of me this year that's watching me gear up for this and feeling very critical: why are you so worried? it says.  Your life is so much easier than the lives of so many of your friends right now; you should just be rejoicing in your good fortune!

Shoulds.  We all have them, we all hear them, and they are often terribly overwhelming.  I asked one of my classmates yesterday -- who in a coaching session had sailed to an island of shoulds -- how she could use her creative powers to cope with all those shoulds.  "I think I'd just burn the whole island to the ground," she said. And then she added, "But then I'd probably just create more shoulds."

And that's the kicker, of course: wherever they come from, we are often the ones who allow our shoulds to continue populating -- and it's hard to know which ones to keep and which ones just need to be burned out.  So what ARE the shoulds, anyway?  I think they are the voices inside that keep expecting us to be good at everything; to be perfect, in fact.  And of course Jack Kornfield has something to say about that this morning in A Path With Heart:

"We fragment our life and divide ourselves from it when we hold on to ideals of perfection.  In ancient China, the Third Zen patriarch taught that "True enlightenment and wholeness arise when we are without anxiety about nonperfection."  The body is not perfect, the mind is not perfect, our feelings and relationships will certainly not be perfect.  Yet to be without anxiety about nonperfection, to understand that, as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross puts it, "I'm not okay, you're not okay, and that's okay," brings wholeness and true joy, an ability to enter all the compartments of our life, to feel every feeling, to live in our body, and to know a true freedom. ...The purity that we long for is not found in perfecting the world.  True purity is found in the heart that can touch all things, enfold all things, and include all things in its compassion."

So as some part of me anxiously watches another part of me gear up for the trip, and yet another part of me sneers at the anxious part, I will just try to hold them all lightly in a loving embrace, and expand that embrace to include all my friends who are struggling today.  Sometimes life is just difficult, and sometimes some part of us is just determined to make it seem difficult.  But really, well -- it just is what it is, and you just have to let it flow.

East Coast vs West

As I was sifting through images this morning, this was the one that called to me; the one that made my heart swell.  As usual, I suspect it's something about the light... And the fact that it calls to mind memories of wonderful visits with my friends in Vermont.  When I look at this picture I can almost feel the warmth and humidity of an early morning sun in June; almost hear the crickets chirping in the fields... and echoes of my childhood. 

I grew up in the south, midwest, and east, surrounded by deciduous trees.  And though we have deciduous trees in the Northwest, they are gravely outnumbered by cedar and fir, which don't filter sunlight in the same splotchy sort of way.

We also don't get as many sunny days, and though you might think there's a lot of humidity here, living on the water with all the rain -- well, it's not true.  Not that it's dry, exactly, it's just sort of... perfect.  It's very easy to breathe here.

I actually don't know if we have crickets, but I'm not sure I've heard them here.  We do get tree frogs -- and the sound they make is sweet and high, like that of the crickets -- but it's not quite the same.

Having now spent half my life on each coast, I can't really say one coast is better than the other: each has its own unique and marvelous advantages; each its trials and tribulations.  So, given an affinity for both, how do we choose to live?  We could spend our time here missing the crickets, the autumn leaves, and the seemingly bottomless supply of sunshine while complaining about the gray and the rain.  Or we could spend our time there missing the lap of the waves, the height of the trees, the scent of salt air and the snow on the mountains while complaining about the heat and humidity, the bugs, and the bitter cold of the winters.

Or we could spend our time -- wherever we are -- rejoicing in what is and smiling at the memories of what was, allowing the counterpoint of light and dark in images and memories and weather to fill our hearts with a tender song of longing and then just -- let it go.

My husband saw a great bumper sticker in the Safeway parking lot earlier this week: "Just say no to negativity!" We were both amused by it, and thinking about it later, it's clear the humor lies in the negativity of the statement.  On the other hand, "Say yes to joy!" would be way too Pollyanna-ish for us former East-Coasters to comfortably place on our car.  Somehow, as in this image, there needs to be a balance, a harmony of deep dark bass notes and the light high song of the crickets.  It's the wholeness of the picture, like the wholeness of experience, that feeds us.

Beyond the boundaries

To see beyond the boundaries that divide us 

To the wholeness that lies beyond 

 And all around us:

 That is the greatest challenge, and it calls us 

Every day to new, magnificent, horizons.

Convicted of fixing

This handsome gentleman was preening himself in our backyard yesterday afternoon when I went upstairs to open some windows.  He kept an eye on me as I raised the shades but soon returned to a careful grooming of his feathers; such a beauty!

Yesterday my blogsister Maureen sent me a link to an article about how the naming of colors "has messed with our brains." So as I watched the heron I tried not to name him; to just see him for the magnificent stranger that he is without putting him into a box of assumptions, just to see what that might be like.

And then, this morning, in Parker Palmer's book, A Hidden Wholeness, I was reading about his conviction that "fixing, saving, advising, and setting each other straight" has to be excluded from a circle of trust if we are to create an environment in which our souls might learn from their deepest wisdom. 

Fixing, it seems, is like naming: it puts things in a safe box so we can move on.  If, as I also learned recently, the brain develops habits as a way of not working so hard, this is one of the habits that does much to create distance, as it interferes directly with the connection and compassion we so long for and need to feel.

I know this.  I also know I struggle with this sometimes: it's hard, when someone's grappling with something I think I understand, not to share what I've learned from my own grappling.  But what I hadn't realized -- at least consciously, though I suspect I understood it already at some deeper level -- is why this response is so strong in me.

"In the face of our deepest questions -- the kind we are invited to explore in circles of trust -- our habit of advising each other reveals its shadow side.  If the shadow could speak its logic, I think it would say something like this: 'If you take my advice, you will surely solve your problem.  If you take my advice but fail to solve your problem, you did not try hard enough.  If you fail to take my advice, I did the best I could.  So I am covered.  No matter how things come out, I no longer need to worry about you or your vexing problem.' The shadow behind the 'fixes' we offer for issues that we cannot fix is, ironically, the desire to hold each other at bay... 

"The best service I can render when you speak to me about such a struggle is to hold you faithfully in a space where you can listen to your inner teacher.  But holding you that way takes time, energy, and patience.  As the minutes tick by, with no outward sign that anything is happening for you, I start feeling anxious, useless, and foolish, and I start thinking about all the other things I have to do.  Instead of keeping the space between us open for you to hear your soul, I fill it up with advice, not so much to meet your needs as to assuage my anxiety and get on with my life.  Then I can disengage from you, a person with a troublesome problem, while saying to myself, 'I tried to help.'  I walk away feeling virtuous.  You are left feeling unseen and unheard."

In the language we used to use back in my born-again charismatic christian phase, I felt "convicted" by this.  Seriously.  So to everyone -- especially my children -- I've ever short-changed by trying to "fix" you and get on with my important life -- my deepest apologies. 

Why cast blame?

Which do we find more beautiful: 

The reflections water casts on the boat? 

Or the reflections cast by the boat upon the water? 

And why be forced to choose? 

Isn’t it the wholeness of the scene 

That has the most impact? 

As in any relationship, isn’t the beauty in it — 

Or the darkness —

 Compounded by and greater than 

The individual contributions?

From Should to Will

Yesterday I was working on a piece about the sacrament of Baptism, studying a statement by Bishop Schori and reviewing the Baptismal Covenant, and I was reminded of a children's sermon I gave on the subject years ago.

The sermon was based on two pairs of boots: a lovely leather pair that had been permanently damaged by walking through a heavily salted snowy parking lot, and a pair of shiny green rubber rainboots. In my sermon I basically said that Baptism was a lot like getting a pair of rubber boots; kind of a guarantee that whatever messes we create in life can be washed off, and we can be restored to a kind of shiny original wholeness.

This morning I was reading about what Chogyam Trungpa, in his book Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior, calls Great Eastern Sun. Great Eastern Sun is a way of being in the world which assumes the innate goodness and purity of things, and "because we appreciate the world, we don't make a mess in it. We take care of our bodies, we take care of our minds, and we take care of our world. The world around us is regarded as very sacred, so we have to constantly serve our world and clean it up... our entire physical and psychological existence and the world that we know -- our sky, our earth, our houses, everything we have -- was and is originally clean. But then, we begin to smear the situation with our conflicting emotions. Still, fundamentally speaking, our existence is all good, and it is all launderable. That is what we mean by basic goodness: the pure ground that is always there, waiting to be cleaned by us. We can always return to that primordial ground."

In her statement on Baptism, Bishop Schori says that baptism is about death and rebirth; a washing away of old identities that is not limited to one place and time. "This water," she says, "is meant to roll on like a river of blessing, bringing peace to the warring and healing to the nations." And reading that, I see that as a people we Christians have a tendency to think Baptism ends with putting on the rubber boots; that it's all about us, and the fact that we are saved no matter what sins we commit. Because we know we're "launderable" --the mud will wash off -- we don't bother doing it on a daily basis, assuming we'll get around to it eventually -- maybe on our deathbeds?

We forget about the river of blessing; about the responsibilities we assume as part of that gift to carry it out into the world. We forget that baptism is meant to keep restoring and renewing us so that we can continually be working toward peace, righteousness and compassion. And without that understanding, we can get stuck in what Trungpa calls Setting Sun thinking: "you have a giant vision, which you can't consume, and you end up throwing most of it away... we just get rid of anything unpleasant...we forget about the leftovers or the greasy spoons and plates. We leave the job of cleaning up to somebody else."

It's almost as if, having been given the new boots, we no longer feel we need to take care of them. But that's really not the case. Ultimately Baptism needs to be about balance; it is a stepping out and a return, a determination to give and a willingness to restore and be restored. And thinking about this, I realize my own life has been out of balance lately; that there's been too much stepping out and not enough return. And what I mean by that is not what you might think, that I've been giving and giving and not taking the time to feed myself, but rather that I've been getting caught in these giant visions which I can't quite consume.

It's a bit like that old phrase: her eyes were too big for her stomach. I've taken on so many projects that I can't finish them all and I haven't time to clean up after myself. The Buddhists understand the importance of being present: of being aware and conscious of what we're doing as we're doing it. If we get too busy, if our plate is too full, we run into a couple of problems: we're not really THERE when we're trying to do our good works, whatever they may be, which means we're not giving anything our best efforts.

And the detritus, the leftovers of all those good works, has a way of piling up around us and getting in the way. In my rush to fill my time with the fun stuff, or the good stuff, I forget (or avoid) making time for the cleanup and restoration.

Which leaves me with a messy office, a messy kitchen, and a messy life -- all of which mean I'm not functioning at my optimal capacity. You could say it's all good, that it's all in the service of creativity or generosity, but the fact is every project has its leavings, and I should be tidying up as I go; washing the boots every day instead of waiting until they're so muddy that I'm leaving traces wherever I go.

Yes, I know, it's a "should." But so are all those promises we make when we renew our Baptismal Covenant: promises to avoid sin and repent; to engage in worship, communion, fellowship and education; to proclaim the Good News by word and example; to seek and serve Christ in all persons; to strive for justice and peace. Those are all things we should do. But that's not what we say when we recite the covenant. We don't say "I should." We say, "I will, with God's help."

Time to turn those "should"s into "will"s.