Enough

There was a wonderfully optimistic book that came out in the late 80's, entitled "Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow." 

I haven't actually seen signs that that's true for me, though I do know a few people who have found a lot of joy -- and enough money to live on -- by stepping off the treadmill of "normal" jobs.

But I am definitely doing what I love -- having enormous fun exploring a new art medium and writing poetry -- and, though money is tight, we have enough to live on for a while, so I suppose you could say it's coming true...

Maybe what really happens is this: when you're doing what you love, the money doesn't matter quite as much?  It would be lovely to have the affirmation money can bring; the sense that "I must be on the right track because people are willing to pay me to do this!"

But really -- when you're doing what you love, that external affirmation loses some of its impact.  Does this help all the people I know who have incredible gifts in the spiritual arena, but due to divorce and the current economy are barely scraping by?  No, not really -- it would be incredibly helpful if society rewarded spiritual directors and clergy and artists and church secretaries as lavishly as it rewards corporate executives.  It would be even MORE helpful if our current congress weren't so determined to add to the rewards of those who already have more than they need at the expense of those who are struggling.

But humans who are in positions of power have always done this; always leapt to the assumption that they have what they have because they have earned and deserve it.  And people of faith who struggle monetarily have probably always wondered why God isn't quicker to reward their faithfulness. 

I don't have answers to any of that.  I only know that I'm doing what I love, and I'm loving what I'm doing.  And the joy that brings -- for now, at least -- is enough.

Listening to the Deep

As you can see, I've been having enormous amounts of fun playing with this new series of images!  This one is somewhat improbably titled "Hedgehog Blues," partly because there's a sort of hedgehog shape to it, and partly because there's even a sort of hedgehog-like face there in the yellow on the right. 

It seemed determined to appear here this morning; and at first I thought that had something to do with the splits in it -- the widening crack at the bottom, and the colorless section in the middle -- which might echo the Thomas Merton quotation from Monday's poem, "What can we gain by sailing to the moon, if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?"

But the more I look at it, the more I see the section on the right as surface activity, the social self, and the section on the left as the rich well of being that comprises the True Self; the cracks then do indeed become "the abyss that separates us from ourselves."

... which resonates beautifully with my reading this morning in Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak.  First there is an excerpt from Vaclav Havel's speech to our own joint session of Congress:  "Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim.  For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.  Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better."

We must be willing to cross that abyss within ourselves; to look into the deep well of being that fuels so much of our thinking and actions.  "In the deeps," Palmer says, quoting Annie Dillard, "are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us.  But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field; our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here."

We have no choice but to go inward and downward; to cross the abyss and face into the hardest realities of our lives.  If we insist on always operating outward and upward, we will never discover that the shadows we are so determined to project on others are our own; that the enemy is within, that it is our determined deafness to our own inner entreaties for attention that keeps us from tapping into the rich well of joy that lies beneath.  We really, desperately, need to make time and create space to become more fully conscious, more present, more mindful, more aware.

"The spiritual traditions," says Palmer, "do not deny the reality of the outer world.  They simply claim that we help make that world by projecting our spirit on it, for better or for worse.  If our institutions are rigid, it is because our hearts fear change; if they set us in mindless competition with each other, it is because we value victory over all else; if they are heedless of human well-being, it is because something in us is heartless as well...Consciousness precedes being: consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world.  Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility -- and a source of profound hope for change.  It is the ground of our common call to leadership, the truth that makes leaders of us all."

If we cannot learn to venture into the space within; to be attentive to ourselves, to listen to our own thoughts and feelings, to dance on that unified field with the shadows of memory, then we will never be able to become fully compassionate beings: our own unexpressed longings will continue to fill our ears and drive us, and we will find ourselves unable to hear above the din of our own ignored and unintelligible hungers.

... which seems to tie in beautifully with Richard Rohr's prayer for today from Wondrous Encounters: 

"God of perfect freedom, open spaces inside of our minds, our hearts, and our memories, so we can just begin to be free.  Do not let us be hardened against any one of your creatures [including ourselves], so that we cannot hear and respect their truth."

From harrowing to spaciousness

I was reading again this morning about the spaciousness within and between our cells, and about how freeing it can be to allow ourselves to feel that.  "To experience your own spaciousness is to recognize the true nature of your soul, a felt sense that has nothing to do with personal history, ideas, behavior, or accomplishments...When you stop looking for something to fill the space, you can begin to see the space where you always are.  You can feel and embrace your own spacious nature." (from Byron Brown's Soul Without Shame)

It seemed to fit well with the sort of cellular look of this image I built yesterday -- the image had the feel of things opening up within, and of life flowing into and through the open spaces -- a bit like the crack from yesterday's post, the one that lets the light in.

But then I went back to Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, and he shared this lovely poem he'd written as he was emerging from a deep depression.  And somehow, though it's a different image, it also seems to tie in:

Harrowing


The plow has savaged this sweet field
Misshapen clods of earth kicked up
Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view
Last year's growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way
Turned over a whole history
Looking for the roots of what went wrong
Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.
Enough.  The job is done.
Whatever's been uprooted, let it be
Seedbed for the growing that's to come
I plowed to unearth last year's reasons --
The farmer plows to plant a greening season.

I think what lies at the root of my response to the poem, to the spaciousness, and to this image is a sense that spring, though winter hovers still, is finally on its way.  There was sun for a while this morning -- however briefly -- and the harrowing I've been doing internally seems to be settling down; I can begin to stand in my own internal field and feel the scent of the dogwoods and the cherry trees again.

The cracks at the root of being

A dear friend wrote, after yesterday's post, to say that it reminded her of that Leonard Cohen song, Anthem.  It seemed important to follow up on that, given that just before I got her note the song had played on the radio -- first time I'd ever heard it...

"The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again, I heard them say;
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be. 


Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."

It's Lent -- and it's not pretty

And so today begins the last countdown, the last Sunday before Palm Sunday.  These are the dark days of Lent, and it's no wonder this odd photo called to me this morning.  Because it's not pretty.

By now most of us have forgotten or betrayed the promises we made at the beginning of Lent, and all that's left of our fine visions of ourselves and what we might be capable of are the dry bones of broken intentions.  And it's not pretty.

We cannot bear to open our hearts to God, and all we hear when we try to quiet our restless souls is the litany of penitence: all the ways we have not loved, all the ways we have not served, all the false judgments, uncharitable thoughts, self-indulgences and waste, temper, envy, impatience...  It's serious burnout -- and it's not pretty.

And into the ashes I walk this morning, thirsting for insight and longing for hope.  It comes, in a way, but in unexpected guises.  The first is in the words of Parker Palmer, from Let Your Life Speak.  It's an indictment of sorts, but a kind one:  the trouble, he says, is that those broken promises result from our attempts to be noble, trying to give something we don't have to begin with.

"When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless -- a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for.  That kind of giving is not only loveless but faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to to the other except through me... 

Though usually regarded as the result to trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess.. Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place."

I get a little more clarification of this from Martha Beck's book, Finding Your Own North Star.  She's talking about the social self -- the one that makes all those promises and holds out all those high ideals -- and the essential self, the one that knows exactly who we are, what we're capable of, and what we were born to do.  And she reminds us of the terrible twos: that time in our lives when we learn the power of the word NO.

"We call this behavioral stage the "terrible twos" because our job is to socialize children, and socialization does not work well when individuals run around screaming 'no' all the time.  In fact, socialization basically consists of learning to say 'yes' to all cultural demands, whether you want to or not.... and if you were forced to say 'yes' when you meant 'no' time after time, you stopped even feeling your inner resistance.  Your social self no longer knows what you want; it's fully focused on forcing you to fit in."

But the good news is that "your essential self cannot be corrupted.  It knows from 'no,' honey, and it will fight you like a trapped tiger -- or a trapped two-year-old -- every time you make a decision that takes you farther from your North Star."  Beck then lists all the ways our essential selves have of derailing contracts our social selves have made that are actually not consistent with our true path: energy decline, sickness, forgetting, making stupid mistakes, social faux pas, fight or flight, addiction, depression...

Sound familiar?  What's your essential self's way of saying no?  And have you been embarrassed by that lately?

I think the message in all this is that we just have to sit with it.  We have to walk into this picture, and look at ourselves, stripped of all the promises and good behaviors, and understand that it's not that we're bad.  We've just gotten off track.  And until we can hear that, see that, feel that, and see through to the good essential-self bones that lie at the heart of being, we've little hope of getting back to that which nourishes and feeds us, puts meat on the bones of our good intentions and clothes us in righteousness and purpose.

Really.  You just have to stop and take stock.  No, it may not be pretty.  But they're good bones -- really they are.  We just have to see them for what they are.  Only then can we begin to put our lives back together and move forward.

Yup.  It's Lent.

And it's not pretty.

Depths of possibility

This photograph is actually the wall of an abandoned house on Shaw, superimposed over a photo of the edge of our lagoon.  I love the suggestion of marshes and fishes, those little eddies of light in the middle section of the picture...

Why bother to explain?  Perhaps becausee we humans are so desperate to know what we are looking at.  Yes, we like surprises -- good ones, anyway -- but generally speaking we prefer to know exactly what we're getting into, what we're seeing, what we're hearing...

It 's fun to solve a puzzle -- we like the challenge -- but no one wants it to be too difficult.  No one wants to feel like a failure. And yet those of us who are reluctant to fail are often also reluctant to experiment -- and so, refusing to risk failure, we get stuck in one mode of being and never get to see the richness and depth of possibility that surrounds us.

When will we come to realize that it is our failures that so often tend to be the most productive lessons?  And when will we finally accept that failure is a necessary -- even desirable -- part of the gifts life has to offer?

Embracing the child within

No, tonight's sunset didn't look this good; this photo was taken a couple of days ago.  But it does convey a certain lightness of being, which is what I'm feeling after a day in class.

Even though I still have my daughter's cold, it was a joy to be back in school, re-connecting with old friends and making new ones.

The day also started off well: I was reading (in the latest issue of Shambhala Sun) an article about our inner wounded child, written by Thich Nhat Hahn.  He believes that if we feel anger rising within us, or some other destructive or constrictive emotion, we have only to also call forth mindfulness of that emotion.  Mindfulness, he says, is not there to suppress or fight against the emotion, but "to recognize and take care of it -- like a big brother helping a younger brother... so the energy is recognized and embraced tenderly by the energy of mindfulness."

Because mindfulness and the troublesome emotion are both part of us, in embracing the emotion we are embracing nonduality; refusing to demonize parts of ourselves.  In embracing the emotion, we are also embracing the wounded child from whom the emotion spills; "the energy of mindfulness is the salve that will recognize and heal the child within."

It's truly amazing how freeing these practices are when we take them to heart... It really helps me realize how much of the suffering in our lives is our own creation.

The beauty, though -- well, that's God's great gift to us...