A gentle reminder

"Don't make yourself miserable

with what's to come

or not to come."

--Rumi, A Year with Rumi (April 18)

A friend sent me one of those list-of-question memes that goes around the internet. You know the type: when did you get up this morning, what did you have for breakfast, when's the last time you cried, what scares you...

It was that last one -- what scares you -- that threw me. Now granted, when I got the list it was the day after my return from my retreat, and I was exhausted, all resistance down. But I was appalled at my response to this question, which began as a list and threatened to stretch into a paragraph.

Wouldn't you think, having spent a week in silent communion with the Holy, having been continually reassured as to the rightness of life as it is, that I would have released all those fears? Or at least, having released them, could carry that sense of release back into everyday life?

Ah, yes; that is the test, isn't it -- can we carry what we learn when we are away back into the reality that is our particular gift. Having learned what celestial beings we are, can we continue in that grace when the washing machine breaks down, the plane is delayed, the boss yells at us or the kids are sick. And -- more importantly -- when we can't, when the challenges run away with us or drag us back into emotion and terror, can we continue to love and forgive ourselves, to feel the encircling acceptance and peace of Divine love?

I'm working on it. And that's enough for now -- to be a work in progress is a good thing. I will continue -- especially now that I've recovered from my travels and have some of my equanimity back -- to release that which troubles me and love what is.

The Rumi poems from yesterday and today -- like the one above, from the day before -- have a little insight to offer:

"When the Queen of Sheba came to Solomon,
she left behind her kingdom and her wealth,
the same way lovers leave their reputations
... but her filigreed throne
was her one attachment.

It was a large throne and difficult to transport,
because it could not be taken apart,
being as cunningly put together as the human body.

Solomon saw that her heart was open to him
and that the throne would soon be left behind.

Let her bring it, he said.
It will soon become a lesson to her.
She can look at that throne
and see how far she has come."

Yup. We all have our attachments, our fears and our stories. They may not be beautiful, or filigreed as thrones. But God says, "Let her bring it." Because these challenges we carry serve as a gentle reminder -- both of how far we have come, and of how far we still have to go. And it's all good.

The Divine Umbilical Cord

"I desire you
more than food or drink.
My body, my senses,
my mind
hunger for your taste
I can sense your presence in my heart
although you belong
to all the world.

I wait with silent passion
for one gesture,
one glance,
from you."

-- Rumi, The Love Poems of Rumi


I found the roots of these trees scattered along the edge of Lake Cowichan incredibly moving. And as I go over my notes from the retreat, I think I can see why.

As she was discussing the concept of Attention of the Heart, Cynthia Bourgeault suggested that it was not about keeping our attention ON ourselves as we pray, but IN ourselves; visceral; noticing all that passes through us as if we were watching from the 3rd chakra, the region below the heart.

There is, she said, a "divine umbilical cord" connecting us to where we really came from. And that yearning we feel, for connection, for intimacy, is the tether that holds us in that connection. It's not our yearning for God, but God's yearning for us, she told us; that same yearning that gave rise to us in the first place, that becomes us, that created us as a fully unique expression of Godness. And when we experience that yearning -- well, that yearning is actually the aching of the Infinite to be reunited with us, much as a mother yearns to be reunited with her child.

Having heard those words, it would be hard not to ache for the universe, and all creation; hard not to see in these roots, desperately reaching out to the water, a kind of exposed longing, the hunger and thirst for the infinitely nourishing grace that washes over us when we feel that connection.

It's so lovely, remembering being green...

"We began as a mineral.
We emerged into plant life
and into the animal state,
and then to being human.
And always we have forgotten
our former states,
except in early spring,
when we dimly recall
being green again."
-- Rumi, A Year with Rumi (April 13)

I came home at the end of a 10 hour journey to find some 290 emails awaiting my attention. Most were junk mail, of course, and easily discarded. But my dear blogger buddy, Kim, had sent pointers to a couple of her recent posts, with wonderful photos of birds. And whatever my original intent may have been for this morning, clearly the birds stayed on my brain. So here's a robin, remembering briefly what it was like to be green.

... which was really what my week of silence was about: remembering what it was like to be green, to be fresh, and new, and vitally alive, surrounded and held in a deep sense of being loved. Being with silence, I learned, can feel like pure intimacy; that sense of connection we long for so intensely can be felt at the deepest levels of being. To combine that with the central act of Centering Prayer -- letting go, releasing, returning -- allowed those of us who participated, some 60 seekers from British Columbia and beyond, to experience first-hand the truth of this statement, which I found in my retreat notes this morning: "Clear the space that was formerly occupied by your story, and everything you ever felt deprived of is right there."

Sitting in the chill and the damp of a cold British Columbia spring; waking to frost, and fog; stumbling through a communal shower and driving through the dark, dodging potholes and deer; clutching a ceramic mug of coffee and settling onto a hard plastic chair; pulling on an extra pair of socks and wrapping ourselves in blankets -- after all that, we settle into the space and the silence, the rhythm of the breathing, the pulse and whine of the tired refrigerator, the ticking of the heaters, and we hear, just outside the window, the morning chirp of the robins and feel the loving pull of the silence, drawing us back into that deep green peace of oneness. The stories we carry with us rise, and fall, and fade away, released again and again until at last we are wholly still, centered in the loving beat of our own devoted hearts.

It's so lovely, remembering being green.

Diving into the silence

This is another of my ferry floor creations. She looks like she's about to dive into a pool, doesn't she? But I didn't quite understand the significance of that until I realized -- oh, yes, it's another computer-free Sunday, so I should post this tonight. Hmm, shall I use the image I created today? And why did I call her "prepare to dive in"? What's the significance of that?

Silly question -- when I'm spending my weekend preparing for my week away. I'm preparing to dive in to a week of silence -- which means getting things tidied up and ready here, preparing answers to questions that might come up and anticipating needs for the coming week.

And, of course, I'm preparing for the trip itself -- reading the book, planning what to take, readying myself for the journey ahead: suiting up in preparation for a nice long dive into the deep pool of silence.

Will I be silent here as well? I'm not sure yet -- don't know if I'll have an internet connection, for one thing, though I will take my computer. And I don't know if I'll be moved to speak. What I do know is there will be none of these goddess torsos over the coming week, as I don't have this version of photoshop on my laptop. But I suspect there will be other things to photograph along the way, and other images to share.

So in case I can't sign on -- have a good week! Think of me in the silence, keep a moment of silence for yourself, and feel free to browse through some of my old posts if you're looking for something to read...

In the dropping of the blossoms

"Listen to me.
For one moment quit being sad.
Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms around you. God."
--Rumi, A Year with Rumi (April 10)

One of my small economies this past year has been to re-read books I already own rather than purchase new ones. So yesterday I found myself reading a rather peculiar paperback romance that I don't actually remember having read before -- though clearly I must have -- about a young woman in Regency times who finds that the man she has married is actually some sort of fairy prince. (Bride Enchanted, by Edith Layton)

The prince has an evil sister who seduces his new bride's younger brother, so together the newlyweds go to the fairy kingdom to see if they can rescue the brother. Layton describes the magical scene that greets her heroine in this way.

"Peonies, lilacs, daisies, irises, sunflowers and roses, apple blossoms, chrysanthemums, meadowsweet and speedwell, all in full bloom...But it didn't feel right to her...She was a country girl and she knew that pear and apple blossoms shouldn't be falling, dappling the grass with showers of pink and white with every breeze, and then being replaced with more blossoms, rather than the little hard green knobs that would become fruit... there ought to have been buds as well as wrinkled petals, to show how they grew and changed, and then withered and died.... Her main objection to this glorious land was that it was all perfectly beautiful. Real perfection was rare, elusive, and always transitory. That made it more beautiful. But this display was permanent, and so, to Eve, however beautiful, entirely artificial."

Having read that last night, I viewed this morning's Rumi quote with different eyes. Somehow, in this context, I didn't leap to the obvious conclusion, that the world around me is covered in blessings if I only watch and listen for them. Yes, that is a lovely thought, but it is also true that the blessings that are dropping their blossoms before us are in fact still on the tree, still very much with us, not wrinkling and fading and withering away.

We may be sad to see their obvious beauty falling, failing, dying. But in the loss of that beauty lies the promise of the blessing that grows beneath, in the hard green knobs that will become rich ripe fruit. Somehow Rumi's image conveys to me now the blessings in the transitoriness of life; the gift that lies hidden in each loss, the fruit that can only be born after the initial flowering has passed.

Life can be very difficult: death and disease, change, discomfort and loss come to us all. But so do the blessings that precede and follow, just as day precedes and follows night, just as the blossoms precede and follow the fruit. It's not an easy thought to hold. But perhaps it is the gift of Spring; this promise of rebirth, that even as the blossoms are falling new life is emerging.

The luminosity of silence

"You miss the garden,
because you want a small fig
from a random tree...
Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love."
-- Rumi, A Year with Rumi (April 9)

I am not -- unlike my older daughter -- particularly drawn to shiny things. But I do enjoy sleek curves of steel, both in sculpture and architecture, so when this image created itself yesterday from a pile of cleaning in plastic bags, I called my husband in and said, "Look, dear -- now I can be a SCULPTOR, too!"

I knew I wanted to share it with you, but had no idea what I wanted to say about it until I read these wonderful lines in Robert Sardello's Silence this morning:

"The dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence outshines all brilliance with the intensity of its dark luminosity. Silence shines within us like the reflected image of the sun on a lake. We live within the depths of it, and it glows from our being. It is a liquefying power, an interiorizing power, a liberating power that frees us from the sterile hardness of dead, institutionalized forms, and brings renewal to the world. We are merely the carriers, the transporters of this great mystery, having dipped into it in the depths of contemplation. We bring from the depths some of this mysterious fluidity and offer it to the world. We are graced with the mantle of Silence and dissolve in its diffused brilliance. It opens the door to our heart."

Throughout my meditation this morning, I kept thinking of those lines, "dark luminosity," and "mysterious fluidity." They seem to me to describe this image, and its appeal for me. But they also convey the cool clearness I get in meditation at its best, when I can still the monkey mind and luxuriate in the silence. What's sad, of course, is that despite the allure of the silence, the monkey mind is painfully seductive, rather like Rumi's fig tree in the garden: I keep getting drawn back into my daily concerns, lured by the illusions of taste and smell and color and feeling. Why can I not be more consistently drawn into silence, "by the stronger pull of what I really love"?

Ah, well -- perhaps this image is here to serve as a reminder of what I really love. As I look at it more, it seems almost like some sort of druidic figure, beckoning me into the silence, and, thinking of that, I realize how much I'm looking forward to my upcoming retreat. What a treat it will be, to spend a few days feasting on pure silence!

The body as a sacred vessel

"For some, the body is far from feeling like a sacred vessel. It is more like a repository for accumulated shame and abuse. Some people suffered overt abuse in childhood; others are wounded from the culture's distorted images of perfection -- ideals of thinness and eternal youth for women, and bulk and invulnerability for men. The poison of self-hate, born of unattainable cultural standards, flows in many men's and women's bodies. Some of us are so afraid to delve into the secrets trapped within the body's memory that we float through life, quite unable to enjoy the strength and earthiness of our human form."

-- Elizabeth Lesser, The Seeker's Guide

This is the most recent edition of my goddess/torso series. (I will have to figure out what to call these things, won't I! I suppose I am waiting for them to come to completion so I can see what the overall impact is...) And looking at her brought to mind this passage, which I read yesterday in The Seeker's Guide. What's interesting to me is that this passage lies within the passage I quoted two days ago -- between the first and second halves of it -- and I honestly did not even see it the first time through. Now doesn't THAT sound like a Freudian slip! Maybe that's what I should call this image...

So here I am, with no preconceived notions, walking through this with you to see what I can discover about what it has to tell us. The first thing I notice is that the torso itself has a very victorian feel to it; something about the shape of the bust -- no definition between the boobs -- and the narrow laced-in feeling of the waist. Add to that the sense of chains encircling the breast and hips, and there's a very confining aspect to this one -- which may be why the quote above came to mind.

Our images of ourselves and our bodies are very much constrained by societal demands and expectations. I can't know what that means for you, but I know how it has affected me and my daughters: I grew up thin, flat, and narrow-hipped in a German community where girls developed early and ripely, and though today that body I had would be considered model-lovely, I only knew it as lacking. (And now, of course, with the curves that weight and child-bearing have brought, I find myself longing for a return to that earlier slimness.)

My slim, curvaceous daughter refuses to wear shorts because she is embarrassed by her pale legs, and my less-curvy daughter, though she is less embarrassed to show her body, constantly compares it to her sister's and finds it lacking, whining -- as I once did -- that she "looks like a boy." I ache for them both, because, to me, they are both achingly beautiful, and I wish they could see that.

I also see, looking at this picture, that the background seems to circle around the torso, and is also strangely broken: perhaps this is a way of saying that as long as our self-image revolves around our body image -- and what is projected onto it by society -- we will remain broken -- or at least, I will. And I think, to some extent, that stays true: even as, in aging, I grow more accustomed to -- or comfortable with -- myself, I still find I'm very self-conscious, often worrying about how people react to me, how they see me, and what they project onto me. And I still dress with an eye to hiding my imperfections -- I don't wear shorts, either -- no matter HOW hot it gets!

And then, when I look at those two little handles that sit in the crack at either side of the waist, they look a bit like the pop-tops on a soup can, and I find I want to break the whole thing open; to find out what would happen if I were able, not only to release these expectations, but also to make them less central to my self-image. If I pop open the hard crust that lies beneath, what will appear? Or what if I grab those two rings at the top, and peel the image away? What will be revealed?

Taking one last look, I see an almost Christ-like figure, arms outstretched, rising from the center of the chest, between the rings -- or is it holding on to the rings? And looking at that, I come to see the whole as a gift, all of it -- the constraints and the brokenness, the distortions and the insecurities, the old and the new, the thin and the fat, the flat and the curves, the whole centrifugal whirl of it -- a gift, one of many, which gives me another path of discovery, another light to illuminate the wholeness of being. However flawed, we remain a sacred vessel: God/Christ/Divinity is always there, even in our brokenness and confusion and self-doubt; we have only to pay attention to see.