Something about Mary

In my reading this morning, the 14th century monk who authored The Cloud of Unknowing addresses the tension between action and contemplation, between doing and being, between Martha -- taking care of the business of life -- and Mary -- sitting at the foot of the divine in worship and waiting.

In looking for an image that might illustrate this tension, I realized that most of us define who we are by what we do -- I am a hairdresser, or a fireman, or both; I am a gondolier, or a housewife; I am a writer, or a photographer, or an actor; a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, doctor, lawyer, or indian chief.

So to have defined myself as a contemplative photographer -- at least according to this monk -- is pretty much a contradiction in terms: a true contemplative would be immersed in contemplation, not out taking pictures. A true contemplative would be in prayer 24/7 (or "31", as they say in one popular TV show!) rather than attempting to eke out 20 minutes a day for contemplation.

And the fact is, I am -- despite this contemplative streak -- more active than contemplative. It's a struggle, always, to get myself to "just sit." That's one reason I do it first thing in the morning: I try to sneak in the time before the active me wakes up and gets going.

(and, just so you know, I failed this morning; the active me was fully awake by the time I went downstairs, thanks primarily to the time change and the end of daylight savings time.)

All of which may explain why I look at this Mary image, the blind, open-mouthed adoration, and the empty cup, and the Martha in me gets a little snarly; wants her to open her eyes, close her mouth, and get a life. There's just something about Mary that irritates me. It's odd: I know the contemplation feeds me, makes me healthier, and stronger; equips me to do whatever the day brings. Why then is it so hard to give myself permission to do that?

Perhaps the answer is that it is in the tension between the two impulses that growth happens: the one informs the other, and vice versa. And if the contemplative impulse to connect with the divine within and without forms the vertical axis in my life, and the compulsion to engage with the world forms the horizontal axis, then my job is to try not to stray too far from the intersection of the two.

Which, of course, is the lesson I had to learn all over again when my cat got sick last week: I had to give up both some contemplative time -- walking away from the retreat -- and some active time -- resigning from the play I was in -- in order to be fully present in the moment for Pippa. Which is to say, I guess -- it's all good; all part of the process.

An alien emotion

I knew I wanted to write about joy this morning, so I was going through all the images from my Italy trip, looking for a statue or a picture that communicated sheer unadulterated joy and gratitude.

Instead I came upon this poster for a maternity shop in Naples, which my husband insisted I photograph. And I thought, okay, why not? First of all because it's amusing, and my sense of humor doesn't get to vent all that often here.

And second of all because what this election is really about is the promise of a new beginning, and right now we are in the anticipation stage.

But what I realized as I looked at this is that what I am filled almost to bursting with is something that over the years has become, sadly, an alien emotion: Hope.

May all we long for come to pass.

I can't bear to watch

As we were driving home from the airport last night, a driver in front of us, in a left turn lane, elected to turn right across both lanes. Fortunately we were well behind him so we were not endangered by his foolishness, but we couldn't help remarking upon it.

I made some remark about stupid drivers -- I don't remember what I said -- but my husband's response was "I guess I'm not a very aggressive driver." It seemed odd to me, and a bit of a non-sequitur, not to mention patently untrue -- he does come from New Jersey, after all! So I questioned him: "What do you mean? You're certainly a more aggressive driver than I am."

To his credit, he was exhausted, having been up since 4 am our time, and had been traveling most of the day. "I guess that's not what I meant. I think I was trying to say I expect drivers to do foolish things, and I don't get angry about it."

"Ah," I said, "You don't do road rage."

"That's it," he agreed, "I don't do road rage."

Well of course not, I thought. One needs, I think, to be pretty angry, and/or have some fairly serious entitlement issues, to really do road rage right. And anger and entitlement are just not a part of his character.

Which, I think, makes him different from almost every candidate running for almost every office that's up for election today. It seems to me that these races have seen more negative advertising, more vitriol and venom and downright hatred than any election in my memory.

I can SEE running an aggressive campaign: aggressively championing human rights, or changes to tax laws, or an end to the war in Iraq. I can understand aggressive positioning of a candidate, spending whatever it takes to increase visibility and spread the message.

But the personal attacks and the blatant lies smack of pure self-absorbed rage, and they horrify me. It seems like every candidate is looking to depict his opponent as the personification of evil, and every candidate is determined to hold that evil up for all to see. And though I understand that it is Medusa, the classical symbol of hatred and rage, who was supposed to turn her beholders to stone, the fact is that at this point all these self-appointed Perseuses, so proudly displaying their wares, leave me stone cold as well: the only evil they successfully hold up is their own.

And if the people of this country who choose to buy into this nastiness end up outnumbering those who do not, then, well -- that's what our country has chosen.

And why would we be surprised? We are the same country who chose GW Bush twice; we are the same country who went to war in Iraq; we are the same country whose economy has gone to hell in a handbasket primarily due to our own relentless greed; we are the same country whose food supply has grown huge, yet at the same time fattening and nutritionless thanks to our desperate quest for more, bigger, sooner.

The way Perseus managed to kill Medusa was by looking at her reflection in the mirror of his shield. I suspect that the only way we will be able to destroy this greedy, hateful aspect of our national psyche will be to see it mirrored in our ads and our choices. I'd like to think that could happen now, before the election, that the country will rise up in disgust and declare an end to all this. And I think that those of us who dare to hope Obama might win are daring to hope that that sort of massive change, a shift in direction from self-absorption to compassion, could be possible.

But the fact is that it's also possible that the majority of the country needs four more years of this nastiness to really learn its lesson. And frankly the thought of watching this process, of waiting for the decisions at the end of the day, and of that possible outcome turns me to stone. I am petrified. And I can hardly bear to look.

Watching Nemo mourn

Our daughters grew up with an orange cat named Puck. Puck was very territorial, and so when our older daughter asked (as she often did) to get a kitten, the response was always "Not while Puck is alive."

So when he died, knowing my daughter had her heart set on a black and white cat, I went to the animal shelter and brought home a very sweet black and white kitten with an AMAZINGLY loud purr. I would have taken my daughter with me, but she was still grieving for Puck, and was resisting, so I took matters into my own hands.

But Katherine took one look at Pippa and said, "That's not the one," and so, three days later, we found ourselves back at the animal shelter looking for a cat for Katherine. I was totally in favor of having two kittens -- I'd always felt Puck would have been happier with a playmate -- and I looked forward to watching them play together.

Well Katherine found her black and white -- a darling tuxedo cat who seemed incredibly affectionate -- but then she found another little gray-striped kitten whose perfect little face enchanted her, and she just couldn't seem to choose between the two. So eventually we gave in and took them both, which is why, for the last four years, we have had three cats.

By this time we also had a dog, an adorable but extremely possessive Polish Sheepdog named Captain Mnemonic (Nemo for short). And the exercise of protecting the new kittens from the dog became all-consuming. So we turned our rec room into the kittens' home, thinking we would gradually introduce the dog to each of them in turn.

But for whatever reason -- perhaps because Pippa came first, or because she was "mine", or because the two girls were always busy with the other two kittens -- for a while it was only Pippa who would be brought out into the hall to meet Nemo. I would sit on the window seat with Pippa on my lap, and Nemo would jump up next to me and snuffle and nudge her, trying to get her off my lap, and she would purr that incredibly loud purr of hers.

And though Nemo is still very possessive, and barely tolerates the other cats, he fell in love with Pippa, and she decided he was her mother. They would seek each other out, and she would weave her tail back and forth in front of his face, and he would do this odd little nibbling thing up and down her back until they would both settle down, paw to paw, face to face, and nap.

Which means, of course, that Nemo is now bereft. It's not that he keeps looking for Pippa (though last night I caught him in the pantry, sniffing the pillow she used to sleep on); he seems to have accepted, for the most part, that she is gone. But he is very sad, and I suspect he thinks I am somehow responsible for the loss of his friend. And the fact that my husband (his other chief playmate) has been gone for the last three days has only exacerbated his sadness.

As I watch Nemo mourn, I am reminded again, as I was while nursing Pippa, of how important these lives are that touch ours. And if I've learned anything from this experience, I hope that it is not just to take, but to MAKE the time to nurture those connections that are important to us.

Furnishing the pit

A friend sent me a great Anne Lamott quote yesterday:

"Natalie used to tell my mother you had to get out of the pit as soon as you noticed you'd gone into it, or else you'd start furnishing it."

I knew as soon as I saw this that I wanted to offer it here. But at the time I was just thinking about depression, and the way some of us get way too comfortable in that space, and turn it into a home.

But this morning I was reading The Cloud of Unknowing, and it described a facet of meditation that perfectly matches this concept. I remember once being taught a kind of meditation in which each thought should be treated as a bubble: just let it rise to the surface and pop; don't engage with it.

But of course SOME thoughts seem far more noble than other thoughts, and when they appear we are tempted to think that they are messages from God, and we should follow wherever they lead rather than just let them go.

The problem is, they are still thoughts, our thoughts, being offered up by our brain, in the context of our well-established thinking patterns, and we have to let even these noble thoughts pass away. Otherwise they become tunnels, leading us ever deeper into the pit-that-is-not-God.

"The thought will want nothing better than that you should listen to it; for in the end it will increase its chattering more and more until it brings you lower down to the recollection of his Passion. There it will let you see the wonderful kindness of God; it looks for nothing better than that you should listen to it. For soon after that it will let you see your former wretched state of life; and perhaps as you see and think upon it, the thought will bring to your mind some place in which you used to live. And so at the end, before you are even aware of it, your concentration is gone, scattered about you know not where. The cause of this dissipation is that in the beginning you deliberately listened to the thought, answered it, took it to yourself, and let it continue unheeded."

But, of course, there is another far more obvious level where this furnishing activity takes place: in our own actual homes. I thought of this today because a friend came to visit earlier this week, and was enjoying my meditation chair (which is actually a rocker). She had gone through a major downsizing -- by choice -- a few years ago, and when she moved into her new apartment after selling all her furniture she had nothing but her clothes, her kitchen utensils, and a single folding lawn chair.

"It was heaven," she said. "I'd get up in the morning, and feed myself, and then there was nothing to do, nothing to take care of. I felt so free." And then she confessed that when she left me she was heading into town to look at a couch... and maybe she'd look for a rocker, because she liked mine so much.

The fact is that everything we acquire in life, whether in our heads, our hearts, or our homes, requires tending. And the question we need to keep asking ourselves is just this: Is that really how I want to spend my time?

I had a conversation with another friend last week who has been very depressed about the state of our economy. The depression seems to have spread to all areas of his life, and I somewhat flippantly remarked that he needed to work on his gratitude levels.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Oh just at the end of the day, or the beginning -- whatever works for you -- write down five things you're grateful for."

"Oh," he said. "I'd never be able to find the time to do that."

I suspect he may be too busy furnishing his pit...

Even their nets

"Oh, my God," exclaimed one of the women on our trip when we passed this wall, "Even their NETS are beautiful!"

I would love to live a life
so saturated
with the color of divine purpose
that my job --
even if I were a fisherman,
even on a cloudy day,
even in pouring rain
when my bright yellow slicker
(grayed with years
of diesel fuel, mud, and fish slime)
drips damply into my black rubber boots --
that even then,
my job and my life
would sing with this intensity.

A Halloween Gift

I spent most of yesterday afternoon hanging a new exhibit at our local theater. They've just finished a run of Macbeth, and next month's program features an orchestra performance called The Music of Shakespeare and a play called Saving Juliet (about a teen playing in Romeo and Juliet on Broadway), so my exhibit is appropriately entitled Shakespeare's Italy, and each image is accompanied by a quote from one of Shakespeare's plays.

We've had a spectacularly gorgeous fall on Bainbridge this year, and I keep meaning to take pictures but Pippa's death has left me feeling rather out-of-sorts and it's been difficult to feel much enthusiasm for my camera. When I left the house shortly after noon to take the photos in to hang, I thought about bringing the camera, but the only memory card with any space on it was still plugged in to my computer, and I was running late, so I just left without it.

As is usual when I leave my camera behind, there were some beautiful scenes just begging to be photographed as I drove into town, but I was so tired by the time I finished hanging the show that I just wanted to go home and collapse. So I went home and had an orange, sat and read for a while, and kept thinking about the images I wanted to shoot. The sky was darkening, both preparing for the rain we have this morning and moving in to evening, but eventually I gave in to the impulse, put the memory card and a new battery into the camera, and went back into town.

After shooting the specific things I'd seen -- a stand of brightly colored trees beside the fire station; some late-blooming cosmos against the gray wall of the shoe repair shop; the bright red maples of the Safeway parking lot -- I decided to pop down to Waterfront Park for old times' sake.

For the first few years I lived on the island, I did most of my shooting at Waterfront Park. There's a public dock there, and the folks who live on boats in the bay or in the marinas across from the park tend to row into town to pick up supplies and leave their boats tethered at the dock.

The boats come in all shapes and sizes, but are mostly working dinghies, canoes and kayaks, and I love to photograph their sturdy practical shapes reflected in the calm waters of early morning.

There's often a lot of activity at the dock in the evening (which is why I tend not to shoot then), and yesterday was no exception. But the water was calm, the rain was still only intermittent, and to my delight there was an unfamiliar boat there: a bright orange canoe.

It was a perfect Halloween gift, all black and orange -- the bright canoe with its woven seat and wooden paddles; the water, darkly reflecting the looming clouds and littered with orange maple leaves; the mysterious black shadows cast by the boats and their masts and lines, wavering as the big weekender boats from Seattle made their way into the marinas -- and so I share it with you this morning, along with a reminder that we're really celebrating All Saints Day. So think of the loved ones you have lost, hold them in your prayers, and don't forget to pick up some candy for your trick-or-treaters.

Happy Halloween!