Time to roll away the shoulds...

Everywhere I look these days I seem to see instances of disagreement leading to division and demonization; it seems very much to be a signal aspect of the human condition.

But I suspect it's a bit like being pregnant: you know the phenomenon -- when you're pregnant, you see pregnant women everywhere, but when you're not pregnant they're apparently invisible?

What I'm trying to say is that my seeing of this disagreement/division/demonization is most likely a projection of what's going on in my own spirit.  When we finally see how parts of us -- the judging parts, also known as "the shoulds"-- seem to dominate our thinking and derail some of our best efforts, the temptation is to argue with them, to disengage, and to demonize.

But now I'm thinking it's not so different from the advice a dog whisperer gave me not long ago when I was complaining about my dog's overprotectiveness.  "That's his job," she said.  "You need to thank him for performing it well, and give him another job."

I'm coming to realize (thanks to therapy) that those shoulds, those parental voices that keep me stuck and insecure, are actually protecting some other extremely vulnerable part of me.  Which means, I suspect, that if I continue to attack them and hate and demonize and argue with them, they'll just get bigger and more defensive.

What I really need to do is appreciate them, work with them, let them know I'm grateful for their protection, and teach them to trust me enough to reveal what lies beneath; maybe even give them another job -- or, ultimately, pension them off.   Because the truth is -- if we're feeling trapped and victimized by our own self-defeating voices, it really is a cave of our own making, and (she said, moving into an Easter metaphor) it may be time to begin rolling away the stone.

And how do we roll away the stone?  By embracing it, wrapping our arms around it, and moving with it as a way of setting it aside so we can move into the deep rich parts of ourselves.  The stone is there to keep out the robbers and the bandits, but we can choose to offer to take over that job more consciously... And that's the trick, of course: it only works if we're conscious -- awake, aware, present, engaged.. and that's a hard promise to make.  No wonder the shoulds are working overtime: they just don't quite trust us to be as attentive in the moment...

When the spirit intercedes

This image is actually a further variation on yesterday's piece: I suspect it was strongly influenced by the fact that we had sunshine almost all day yesterday (for the first time in what seems like forever!)

The tide was low, the moon was magnificent, the tulips, daffodils, and cherry trees are all in bloom... somehow all those things together put me in a softer mood, and so the colors in this image are more like Easter eggs; more like the colors I surrounded myself with when my girls were just babies.

Somewhere recently I ran into a quiz that asked what are some things my brain seems to just know, and my answer was song lyrics, editing/proofreading, Bible verses, and color. 

It's not that I take pride in any of these things -- they're just a part of me, and have been ever since I can remember; the kind of knowledge you can't articulate -- it just sort of springs up when you least expect (or sometimes even want) it -- as if "the heart knows what it wants."

So there I was, yesterday, creating this image, and instead of a song lyric popping into my head (as often happens), it was instead a Bible verse: "The spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words."  (and, no, I never know what chapter and verse they are, it's just the words, almost always RSV or King James).

So I think perhaps the heart of this image is just that spirit interceding, with a longing for Easter, for the sense of freedom and rebirth that arises as new life finally begins again to emerge from the Earth and the long trial of Lenten introspection draws to a close.  It's a sigh: a sigh of anticipation, of release from a long dark winter, of hope for joy and light to come.  These are not colors I would necessarily choose to live with (though that dull purple in the background looks very like my bathroom and closet) but today... well... they just make my eyes feel good!

Diving into the pool of possibility

When I began working on this image yesterday, it was much darker, and harsher.  There was no netting over it, just the sense of a paintbrush coming down from the top, a finger coming up from the bottom, and a bright wash of paint spilling off to the left.

I called it creative tension, and it set me on edge just to look at it.  So when I came to it this morning, I wasn't at all sure it had a future.  But I kept thinking about the poem for yesterday in Coleman Barks' book, A Year With Rumi:

"There is a small green island
where one white cow lives alone, a meadow of an island.


The cow grazes till nightfall full and fat,
but during the night she panics and grows thin as a single hair.
What shall I eat tomorrow?  There is nothing left.
By dawn the grass has grown up again, waist-high.
The cow starts eating and by dark
the meadow is clipped short.


She is full of strength and energy, but she panics
in the dark as before and grows abnormally thin overnight.
The cow does this over and over,
and this is all she does.


She never thinks, This meadow has never failed 
to grow back.  Why should I be afraid every night
that it won't.  The cow is the bodily soul.
The island field is this world where that that grows
lean with fear and fat with blessing, lean and fat.


White cow, don't make yourself miserable
with what's to come, or not to come."

And then I read Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak this morning, and he says, "Even in writing this essay, I have had to struggle with the scarcity assumption.  It is easy to stare at the blank page and despair of ever having another idea, another image, another illustration.  It is easy to look back at what one has written and say, 'That's not very good, but I'd better keep it, because nothing better will come along.'  It is difficult to trust that the pool of possibilities is bottomless, that one can keep diving in and finding more."

I decided to trust that the possibilities were bottomless.  And so I kept working with it, bringing more and more light into it, softening the edges, until I arrived at something I could love.  And I do love it -- all the more for the work that went into it, and the struggle, and the promise: that in all we do there is this marvelous potential for wonder -- we just need to stay open to possibility, to lighten, and to soften; to blur the boundaries between us and not-us and allow the light to flow through...

On finding our way home: a walk into Art Angst

I'm reading this morning, in Soul Without Shame, about self-betrayal: the inner judge's efforts to keep you from your essential self.  It's pretty murky stuff, and hard to really put your finger on. 

But reading about it helps me realize that I've been experiencing some attacks:  I've been having so much fun playing with this series of images that I haven't been putting out my usual soothing pieces (I'm thinking of one I shot last night, in a friend's garden).  And some part of me worries that I will lose my readers if I don't get back to showing you "pretty pictures."

This new series is fun, certainly, but it doesn't have the clarity of my usual work: the colors are satisfying, but the end result is busy and confusing, and some part of me thinks that's not okay; wants everything clear and nice.  But I'm not sure that's what's driving the concern.  I think that what's driving the concern is something a little deeper; something that sees that clarity and niceness as my job, my responsibility.  Or -- maybe it's just the gallery's lukewarm response to this work: they're not excited about it, so it won't sell, so it has no value, so why stick with it...

... as in, it's not enough for me to be enjoying it and having fun: I must have a marketable result at the end in order to justify the time spent playing.  Ah.  Now I see what derails me when I go to art classes and workshops: the pressure to produce something beautiful and saleable undermines the urge to experiment, so when I'm NOT seeing immediate "good" results I get all panicky. 

And can you see?  That's me feeling I'm not good enough as I am; something in me feels I have to justify my existence and earn approval.

Oy.

This makes me really grateful for my friend Max's words to me last night after our Contemplative Worship Service.  We'd been talking about what we pray for, and I had mentioned that I'd been longing for -- and not feeling -- a sense of connection with the Divine.

He sat me down and told me he'd been in a Bible study earlier in the week where they were looking at the passage about "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."  He wanted to share two insights that had emerged from the session. 

First of all, he said, if you are yoked, you are not alone: there is someone else pulling with you.

Okay, I thought, good to know, and I sat there imagining that I don't have to do it all myself, that there is a fellow being who pulls when I don't have the strength.  Of course, my brain kicks in and says "Who is that?  Jesus?  The Holy Spirit? What?  I need some definitions here!"

Second of all, he said, if you are yoked, someone else has the reins.  You don't have to provide guidance; it's being provided for you.

There was, at first, a huge sense of relief in hearing that.  But my brain still kept getting hung up on "who are you yoked with?"

But does it really matter?  Isn't the message here that I don't have to know where this is going?  I just need to take it a step at a time.  If this is what I want to do -- feel called to do -- right now, in this moment, isn't that enough?  When will I learn to trust that instinct without second-guessing it?  And weren't those Goddesses I was working on last winter a lovely example of the good stuff that comes with just following my instincts?  I did them, and then they were done, and then together we created a lovely book, and that's the end of it...

And there it is: my father's voice, saying, "You always were a maven: you get all excited about doing one thing, you do it for a while, and then you're done.  You never stick with anything."

You always.  You never.  That box others create for us.  And then we can spend our whole lives trying to break out of the box.  It reminds me of the story of the turtle (have I told you this one before?)  My boyfriend and I were out canoeing, and we caught a turtle, which I brought back to my dorm room, thinking I could keep it as a pet.  I had a lovely box set up for it, with all kinds of stuff I thought it would like to nest in.  But the turtle kept me awake all night, making a slow circuit around the room, bumping against the walls, trying to find a way out, a way back home.  It couldn't rest because this was not its native environment.

Hmm.  I always thought the point of that story was that humans are always pushing boundaries.  But maybe it was really that there is something in us that knows when we are not in our authentic space; that keeps trying to find a way out of the boxes we -- and society -- construct for ourselves. 

In which case, I can be doubly thankful for Max's insights: how nice to think I can stop beating my head (or my shell) against the walls and just trust that I will be guided home.

Funny.  This image looks a lot like that turtle's home to me.  Guess I'll just keep going with this.

The lonely seed

Hmm.  The theme today seems to be seeds.  Our contemplative worship group is meeting tonight, and as part of the service we'll be inviting people to think about what is looking to bloom in them.  And then this morning I read this wonderful piece in Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak:

"Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline...Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn?  It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring -- and scatters them with amazing abandon...


...as I explore autumn's paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of metaphor.  In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances -- on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of a work  And yet if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come... how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I needed to know.


...In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites.  They are held together in the paradox of hidden wholeness...a mysterious unity at the heart of reality.


But in a culture that prefers the ease of either-or thinking to the complexities of paradox, we have a hard time holding opposites together.  We want light without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter...When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off."

Reading that, and then looking at this image which somehow evolved over the course of last night and this morning, I see that there is a seed at the top that looks lonely and isolated and dark.  But just below the surface all kinds of light and life are bubbling up, even focused on the seed, ready to use it as a vehicle to spring forth from the darkness.

And somehow I also see in that lonely seed Jesus on his donkey, heading into Jerusalem, hearing all the noise and color and jubilation and yet knowing that for all of that to bear fruit the husk will need to be broken open.  Yes, new life is coming, but there needs to be a dying first -- and in that dying all the seeds that could possibly be scattered, more abundance than we can imagine, will be sown for life to come.

Who's driving?

The course I took on Metaphor last term did an amazing job of opening my eyes to the prevalence of metaphor in our daily lives, in our language, in our society, and in our views of the world.  But of course, once a class is done, we have a way of setting our learnings aside and either returning to previous thought patterns or giving our energy to whatever it is we're learning next. 

So it was fun to reopen the question of metaphor this morning, when I read what Parker Palmer had to say about it in Let Your Life Speak.  

"If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives.  But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture -- it comes from manufacturing.  We do not believe that we "grow" our lives -- we believe that we "make" them.  Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.


I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, "How does a baby grow?"  But an American child will ask, "How do you make a baby?"  From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that ... we can make whatever kind of life we want, whenever we want it."

"Transformation is difficult," he goes on to say, "so it is good to know that there is comfort as well as challenge in the metaphor of life as a cycle of seasons.  Illumined by that image, we see that we are not alone in the universe.  We are participants in a vast communion of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth.  We can, and we must -- if we want our sciences to be humane, our institutions to be sustaining, our healings to be deep, our lives to be true."

So how does this relate to this image that emerged yesterday?  I'm thinking that it is our illusion that we are in charge that is driving the most difficult and challenging aspects of life on this planet -- war, hunger, poverty, pollution, the growing water shortages...  And perhaps the most important message of the recent earthquake and tsunami is that, in fact, we are NOT in charge.  Perhaps if we could fully grasp that concept, stop the car, step away from this constant push to move forward, and awaken within us a sense of responsibility for and union with the rest of creation, we could begin to alleviate all that suffering and find our way to humanity, sustainability, healing and truth...

Failure's siren song

Mild panic last night, when I sat down to play with more of these images and hit a series of fails.  It's not all that amusing, actually, when that fail voice kicks in.  I'm sure you've heard it; its song goes something like this:

Okay, kiddo;
you've blown it now --
foolish of you,
to have assumed you'd finally found something
you might actually be good at,
because really
that was just a fluke
and you don't actually have
any gifts, or any vision at all;
more like one of those monkeys
who just happened to get lucky
and type up a Shakespeare play...

It was, therefore, reassuring, to try again this morning and find there might still be something there...

The good thing (and there's always a good thing) is that the failure voice can keep you humble, and grateful; can remind you of the blessings in each gift, and the fragility of all our expectations.

The bad thing is that it can so quickly derail you.  But I'm made of tougher stuff now; I don't cave at the first recitation...

A friend sent me this marvelous example of failure's siren song: enjoy! (Warning; some offensive language ahead)